Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

So I was on Twitter the other day, Mike.

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Yeah.

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Which, to be honest with you, I'm not there a lot lately.

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Probably a good thing.

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Depending on who you are, yes.

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I do still get some emails from people who are upset that I'm not there as much, and I just ignore those.

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So if you're one of those people, I'm sorry.

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It's not changing.

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But I hopped on and I just...

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Timing on how it all played out.

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I noticed a tweet that you had put out that was introducing something that we had done November?

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When do we do this?

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Was it before that?

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November, somewhere in there.

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It was a while ago.

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And I got pretty excited.

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And we didn't do this.

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This was not us.

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No.

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Although I did go back through my email and recognized that they had tried to reach me probably ten different times to make sure that it was okay, but eventually they just went ahead with everything anyways.

00:00:54

I'm okay with that though.

00:00:57

So what we're alluding to is that the Bookworm shirts are back, baby.

00:01:00

Woo-hoo!

00:01:01

Yeah, so Cotton Bureau used to do it where you had to do the campaigns and you had to sell enough of them, and then once you sold enough of them, they would go to print.

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That's the way the original campaign was set up.

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But I don't know what they did internally with their systems, but they figured out a way it seems like where it's cost effective for them to just print them on demand.

00:01:19

Sure.

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So basically, unless people opt out, they're taking all of the old designs, and instead of requesting them to come back, and then they contact the author saying, "Hey, you've got 50 people who want a Bookworm shirt, you should really consider bringing this back."

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They just take all the old campaigns and they make them active so people can buy the shirts and then Bookworm, or I'm sorry, Cotton Bureau is going to ship them directly.

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And so we don't really, we aren't really involved in it.

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We don't really have to promote it, and it's always live.

00:01:45

Nice.

00:01:46

No, and probably not, you're not going to get the bookmarks with the shirts or the stickers.

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Like we did the first time around because I didn't send a bunch more bookmarks of stickers to Cotton Bureau.

00:01:58

Sure.

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But you can get the shirts and the sweatshirt, which I happen to be wearing right now.

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It is the copious sweatshirt I have ever owned, so I highly recommend the sweatshirt.

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Yeah, I have to admit that whenever I throw a sweatshirt on, which I don't know, I'm not one of these people that wear sweatshirts a lot.

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I think I own three total, and my go-to is always the Bookworm.

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And it's not necessarily because it's Bookworm, it's because that is the most comfortable sweatshirt I own.

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Exactly.

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I love that thing.

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My wife always tries to steal it.

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[laughter]

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Now I can buy her her fire one.

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[laughter]

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Nice.

00:02:43

So I guess that would be the commercial here.

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If you missed out on the first round and you feel left out, you have your chance.

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Bookworm shirts are back.

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So we'll get a link in the show notes, click the link, and there you go.

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Go pick it up.

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Absolutely.

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All right, follow up.

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Yes.

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You've got a couple things here, and then I've got a couple.

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Yep.

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Mine are, of course, general and vague.

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And you can't really hold me accountable to them, but we can go through those first, I guess.

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Okay.

00:03:12

Go for it.

00:03:13

So, well, actually, let's go with a specific one first.

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Okay.

00:03:17

So I did say I wanted to revamp my time blocking with a couple different time blocks, and then also specific time to review my goals.

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And I have done this, but not the way I originally intended it when I said this as an action item.

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But that's kind of par for the course for me.

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I get an idea, and then I start to implement it, and I'm like, actually, this isn't the way that this should go, and then I modify it.

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But I did identify my one thing as writing.

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I went through and figured out what are my goals for the quarter, and basically the one thing that I need to do for all of them is to write consistently.

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And I've done this before.

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I did it when I was writing my book, and that made me even more mad that I had let this have it slip.

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That'd be nice.

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Because this is the thing that drives everything that I do.

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I'm either writing scripts or I'm putting together show notes, or I'm writing newsletter articles or blog posts, things.

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So, it was very easy to see that the writing habit was the thing that needed to be created.

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And what I have done is I have time blocked that as my one thing, and I try to do that first thing in the morning.

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Sometimes there's stuff that pops up, and I have to deal with it.

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And I think as we're recording this, it is the prodcon virtual conference that Francesco De Lecio put on.

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And so myself, Mike Vardy, Stacey Harmon, and a bunch of other people submitted these 20 minute talks.

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And I had given Francesco a coupon code for conference attendees, and he published it on the page, but he published the wrong one.

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He published the one that I had given him for 100% off instead of the one for the conference attendees for 25% off.

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Well, it was a single use coupon, so one person got it for free.

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But, you know, I woke up to that, and so dealt with that today before I did my writing.

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But other than that, I have been writing first thing for a couple of hours, and I thought it would take a while to get into the habit where I would actually be able to last two hours of writing.

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But that really hasn't been the case.

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It's come fairly easy.

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And so that's the big habit I'm tracking. I've got one at the end of the week for when I am doing my weekly review.

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So that's a separate thing now. It's not just, hey, Friday afternoon sometime. Like, there's a time block for that.

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And along with that is the reviewing the goals. Plus, the way that I plan my day, I've got that template that I fill out.

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I actually side note on that. I made a PDF version, put it in good notes.

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And now whenever I want to create a new one, I just create another page. It fills in the template.

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Nice.

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And I just have to fill it out with my apple pencil. And then it's OCR'd, so I can go back and search for it if I wanted to later.

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So I definitely like that way of doing it. Well done.

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But on that template, I write out my three goals for the quarter every single day.

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So that is a way of reviewing them. And then the other ones, which are the hard ones, Think Big about faith-based productivity.

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I struggle with this so much. I am trying to think big.

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And I was, we were talking before we hopped on the mic here.

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I was just at the Focus Course Live in Kansas City with Sean Blanc. Met some really cool people there.

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The couple people who were honestly really excited about the whole idea of faith-based productivity.

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But I have to confess, as I'm talking to them and they're getting excited about it, I'm kind of in the back of my head wondering,

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why are these so excited?

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So I know I need to continue to do this. I really think this is one of those things where if you force yourself to do this long enough,

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eventually you start to believe it kind of a fake it till you make it sort of a thing.

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And so along with like Thinking Big, it's also a confessing big. Like I've been telling my wife I want to sell thousand copies of this when I officially launch it.

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First time you say that you're like thousand copies. Like there's no way you're going to sell thousand copies.

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But the more you say it, the more you believe that it's possible. I'm just very not very far on that journey yet.

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So I've got a lot of ground to go yet in terms of the faith-for-faith-based productivity.

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You could pull a grant cardone and shoot for ten thousand.

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I could. I probably should. All right. Change accepted.

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That wasn't really easy to hit when you're shooting for ten.

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Yeah, that's true. That's true. All right. See, this is why we do Bookworm.

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So you can correct my perspective.

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Okay, sure.

00:07:41

I appreciate that. And the other one is ask the question, who can I help succeed?

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I feel like this one I've done pretty well on. I've met a few people or talked to a few people who I don't know.

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It's kind of weird for me to even acknowledge this. But like I've talked before on the podcast,

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there are people like Sean Block, for example, David Sparks, who now they would say like we're friends.

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But when I first met them, they were my internet heroes. So I've had people approach me and say like,

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I don't know, you can just see like they're kind of starry. I and they can't believe they're talking to you sort of a thing.

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And when I see that, I've been trying to go out of my way to find out more about who they are and how I can help them.

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And it's not always like I'm going to promote this thing that you're doing.

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And that's going to become a huge side business because I don't have that kind of clout or reach not yet.

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Anyways, I'm not John Gruber status. I can't shut people down with a positive comment on something new.

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But I'd like to get to that point. And so I've ever since I had this action item,

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I've kind of like taken this to the next level in my interactions with people.

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And there are probably people who I've talked to said, well, I met you and you acted like a jerk.

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But that is probably very true. But I, it's only because I didn't recognize it at the time, I guess.

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And that's really the purpose of these kind of action items for me is to kind of locate myself and see,

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because I'm not perfect. I'm going to mess up. I know I'm not going to do this with every person that I meet.

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But my goal is to, and I have noticed that in the last couple of weeks that I have been more intentional about this

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and I have noticed at least a couple successes. So I consider that a win.

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Well done. Yeah, I think you need to think bigger and write more.

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Working on it.

00:09:30

All right, well, I got a couple of them here. And one of those is asking the question, what is my one thing?

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Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, which it was the first of the year, new years when we were going through this.

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So it was pretty good timing from that stance. So I did ask that question and worked through it.

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I have like a long time listeners of the show know that Joe's life has been very chaotic lately,

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like over the last year, maybe a little bit longer than that.

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So I'm pulling this whole yearly theme process, trying to figure out what that needed to be.

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So for me, I'm shooting for like my one thing this year is stability. Like I'm just trying to stabilize my work environment, my health.

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There's a bunch of stuff that's been going on around, like just from a DIY stance around the house that I need to just simplify, offload, etc, etc.

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So that's kind of what I'm shooting for. Like that's my one thing for the year of 2019.

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And then I've used that as a way to break down, like at the beginning of January, of course, I also did that for the monthly piece.

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I also have it set up such that on a weekly basis as part of my weekly review, I'm doing that.

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And then I also do it daily. So I have got all the structures in place to where I'm doing that.

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But I'm not like you, Mike, because my next one was to time block the one thing that I'm going to be doing for the day.

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I can't do two hours. Like I just can't work in such doesn't allow me to do that level of things.

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But I also have to keep in mind like I'm doing one thing at the corporation I'm now working for.

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And I'm doing one thing for myself as well. So I try to do my one thing for myself before I go in, which means I've got somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes to do it.

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And then I do it again once I'm at the office and doing it for the company. And again, that's about a 30 minute deal for them.

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So if you want to count that, maybe it's an hour, but it's doing two things, not one. So maybe I'm cheating. I don't know. Works for me. So I'm going to run with it.

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But that's what I've been doing. I've time blocked the whole weekly review thing for quite a while. Right now it's Sunday afternoons.

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So I have been doing it. It's been pretty successful so far. Very cool. I consider that legit, by the way.

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Take what you've got to work with is the advice that I always give people. And if you don't have a whole hour for something, feel free to break it up.

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I don't consider it cheating, I guess. That's what I'm trying to say. Thanks.

00:12:16

Alright, should we talk about today's book? Yes. And today's book was my choice. And I selected Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

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Tagline is the power of thinking without thinking. And the best way that I have found to explain this to people when they see me reading this is that everyone has a first impression, like those first two seconds.

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When you notice someone or something or you're seeing a piece of art or tasting something, everybody has an instant reaction to it that two seconds, this entire book is about those two seconds.

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Yep. That's the cleanest way I've found to explain it. Do you think that's fair? That is fair, although the roller coaster ride that this book takes you on, because you start off, and even I went back and listened to the first episode or the last episode.

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And you mentioned you were 30 pages into this and you were excited to talk about it. The first 30 pages, I had the same feeling, and then at the end of it, I'm like, "I don't really want to talk about this."

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Yes. So it's like at the beginning, he's talking about how powerful these initial impressions can be, and he uses some examples of how great they can be.

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And then he basically says they can also get you killed, so you really need to be careful with them. And it even ends in the last chapter with the blind tests and how basically, if you want to make good decisions, you really should just override those.

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It's like, "What? That's exactly the opposite of what you said at the beginning." So I left this book with more questions than answers, I think.

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But it was interesting, and he tells some great stories. Yeah, I'm confused by this book.

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That's exactly what I was going to say when I was thinking about this. I'm like, "If I were to sum this up to Joe, what did this book do to me?" And he made me confused.

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Yes. So when I finished this book, I set it down, and I set out loud. It's like, "Thanks for that, Gladwell." I don't know what you just did to me.

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I don't... There are parts of this that I absolutely loved. There are parts of this where his logic I felt didn't hold up. There were parts of this that I hated. Not because I felt it was wrong, but just because I didn't like it.

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Like, I didn't like his result. There were some pieces I didn't like it because I felt it was wrong. So this will be an interesting journey to go through this. At the same time, I was talking to another friend about this.

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This is my first Malcolm Gladwell book. I've not read any of his others. One of my reactions after having finished this was that one of Gladwell is very good at selling books.

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I feel like that's pretty obvious given a lot of people know his name. He has kind of a following. Well, not kind of. He does have a following. He has quite a few very successful books.

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They're usually hitting top charts in some degree. He's also very polarizing, it seems. So some people seem to love it. Some people hate it. I'm very confused by it, but I know that because he's good at selling books,

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he knows that by creating a polarizing book, it generates a lot of buzz, which means he sells more. So maybe that's the angle. I don't know.

00:15:48

Well, I think I couldn't get out of my head the whole time. I think maybe his goal for writing books is different than a lot of the people who write the books that we read for Bookworm.

00:16:01

Because I read this book and I felt like I understood the topic a lot better than when I had gone in. Oh, sure. I even found myself in a couple of conversations,

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like bringing up different things that he had talked about in the book. But neither of us have any action items from this. Correct.

00:16:20

So is that good or is that bad? From a Bookworm perspective, I would argue that maybe you could view it as bad. I mean, we want to read these books because we want there to be some sort of change in our life. But I can totally see how not causing people to make any changes and just presenting information in an entertaining way, which Malcolm Gladwell is very good at. That probably sells more books because you get done. You don't have to do anything and you're like, "Wow, I feel like I know a whole lot more." But you and I take it a level deeper and I'm like, "Okay, I'll do it."

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And I'm like, "Okay, so we may know more, but what are we going to do with what we know about now?" And that part is lacking from this, I felt.

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Although I guess maybe an argument could be made because there's a whole big section here and we're going to get into some of these. But the stereotypes and the prejudices thing,

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if you really understood that and you were able to uncover your own prejudices, that maybe is the big takeaway from this book and maybe that's reason enough to read it.

00:17:16

That's fair. That's fair. So we've limited ourselves this week. We've talked about it in the past of how bookworms sometimes gets a little long.

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We're going to try to limit that a little bit today. So just heads up listeners. We're aware. We're going to work on some things today.

00:17:33

So anyway, we're going to jump right in here. We've got what is this? Six talking points across six chapters that we're going to work through.

00:17:40

The first of which is the theory of thin slices. What are thin slices, Mike?

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Thin slices are basically the small pieces of information that you get when you initially see something or respond to something that happens.

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That's kind of my own definition here. But basically the idea behind thin slicing is that you can, if you learn to do it correctly,

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it's kind of like an automated, accelerated version of what one of the stories he talks about is this guy named Gottman. What's his first name? Is it David Gottman?

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Where he studies these different relationships and he looks for all these different visual cues and he can predict whether a couple is going to get a divorce or not.

00:18:27

Basically, the takeaway from this section is that the thin slices that he gets initially are almost as accurate as all of the hours of study that he does.

00:18:36

John Gottman. So John Gottman. Okay. And the idea or the takeaway, the application at this point in the book, the first chapter is kind of like trust your gut because your initial feeling when you see something or you hear something and you're like,

00:18:53

"I'm not sure if that's right. It probably isn't right." But then later on he goes on to tell you how that's actually garbage.

00:19:00

Yes. Thanks a lot, Malcolm. Yeah, spoiler alert. But the thing that the experiment that he did, he actually called it the love lab.

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And what he did is he videotaped these couples for short periods. I think it was like an hour. And then after an hour he could predict with 95% accuracy whether they would still be married in 15 years.

00:19:20

But he was 90% accurate when he observed them just for 15 minutes based on their heart rate, their movements, etc. while he watched them talk to each other.

00:19:29

Which is kind of fascinating. I was reading through that study. I was like, "Okay, this is really interesting. Here's a couple."

00:19:36

Because he told this whole case study of a specific couple that was being evaluated. And everyone who was new to the study watched this couple basically argue over a dog that they owned.

00:19:53

The husband didn't want the dog. The wife loved the dog. But it wasn't an all argument. They were basically having a discussion and he was saying one thing she was saying another.

00:20:02

And then he was looking for the minute expressions and responses that they had. Right. Which as an outsider when you're seeing this interaction,

00:20:11

well, it's pretty obvious he doesn't want the dog. She does. But they're agreeing to disagree on this. That was kind of the reaction it seemed like most people had.

00:20:21

And yet when the results on that came in, they're saying, and I don't remember the stat, but they had a pretty high percentage of a chance that they would be divorced in two years time.

00:20:32

Yep. Exactly. Really? The fact that he could predict stuff like that. Because this is a totally cordial interaction that's going on right here.

00:20:42

Like he said, agreeing to disagree. You wouldn't think that the way that they're agreeing to disagree could give any sort of indication as to whether they will still be married in 15 years. But he's able to predict based on that small snippet,

00:20:55

thin slicing that interaction that they have with 95% accuracy. That's pretty crazy. Right. Right. So. And there's different things that they look for. I mean, they have a whole system with like 20 different emotions that they code for.

00:21:11

And these videos. But what I thought was interesting about this is that there tends to be two different modes for people. He calls them positive sentiment override and negative sentiment override.

00:21:23

And they're basically my version of explaining this would be whether you think good of the other person or bad of the other person because you can only judge other people by their actions, but we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions.

00:21:38

So do you give the other person the benefit of the doubt? Like that would be the difference between positive or negative positive would say, oh, they didn't mean to do that negative would be like, oh, they totally meant to do this to me.

00:21:47

I guess that resonates with me because if I'm honest with myself, that's probably my default. Probably a lot of people's default if we're not not careful.

00:21:55

And the margin for the ratio for a marriage to survive, he said, of positive to negative emotions must be about five to one. And that really got me thinking.

00:22:07

I don't know how I'm going to quantify this, but it would be interesting to know what the ratio is in my own marriage. Is that an action item?

00:22:14

No, because I have no idea how it's going to happen. I have trouble journaling at the end of the day. You know, like, I was at the, I got so mad at myself and I caught myself and I was like, oh, I'm not going to do that.

00:22:24

And I caught myself and I did it the next morning, but I was at this focus course live event and it was an amazing day. And I get back and I didn't even think to fill out my journaling template until the next morning.

00:22:34

I'm like, this is totally the thing that I want in my journal when I go back. Like, I almost missed it. There's no way, like every single moment of the day.

00:22:44

I'm, oh, that's a negative. Oh, that's a positive. Like there's no way I'll be able to keep track of that.

00:22:48

Nice. No, I feel like it would be interesting to know that ratio in your own marriage. Right. But I'm also a little bit terrified to know that. And I, again, I don't have any idea how I would quantify that sort of thing.

00:23:04

So I am not, I'm not going to attempt that. It was one of those. This is good to know that this is a thing. Maybe that's, this is coming from like the positive side of the book. I think it's like, you know, it's really good to know that that happens.

00:23:20

Or that that exists and try to focus on the positive side over the negative. But, yep, trying to quantify it when you're untrained in that. That's going to be too much.

00:23:31

Yeah, I think the big thing to keep an eye out for is the, if you, and I think you can just kind of feel this out is the number of like truly negative experiences.

00:23:44

Because he also says that once relationships start going down, 94% will continue going down. And so that's kind of what he's looking for. I think when he's thin slicing these people who are talking and interacting for an hour in his office,

00:23:58

is he's looking for those negative sentiment overrides. And if he sees those, that's like the first red flag. Like, if you don't get this turned around right now, then this is going to end in disaster.

00:24:11

Which is kind of nice to know ahead of time, frankly. Yep. I would think anyway.

00:24:15

He also talks about the four horsemen as it pertains to the death of relationships, I guess, for lack of a better term.

00:24:25

And he calls them defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. And he says that contempt is the most important one.

00:24:34

And that's interesting that you can even gather contempt from just small glances. But I do believe that that's possible.

00:24:42

Sure. I also thought it was interesting because he makes an observation that generally women are more critical and men usually stonewall.

00:24:51

And so our tendencies are towards different negative responses or negative activities.

00:25:02

But we need to recognize, and this is basic stuff, right? We're not the same.

00:25:08

But recognizing that I'm more prone to just walk away from things and she's more prone to criticize things,

00:25:16

that's going to help because if I know the reason that she's saying this is not because she's really critical about something that I do,

00:25:25

but this is just kind of the default for her. Or if she understands that he really isn't choosing not to listen to me,

00:25:31

but this is just the default for him. It's easier to give the other person the benefit of the doubt, at least in theory.

00:25:38

So the next piece here is the lock door, which I think is an interesting way to term this.

00:25:49

So what he's referring to is that there are some times when your unconscious brain can pick up on patterns and things that are happening.

00:25:59

But if asked, your conscious mind can't explain it. So they did a demonstration on this, which was to help me out Mike here.

00:26:12

They had a deck of blue cards and a deck of red cards. And depending on which one you drew from,

00:26:19

you could either have better results as far as rewards.

00:26:23

And sometimes you would have detriments to a tally that was being held.

00:26:28

And I think it was the blue deck had more of the negatives than the red deck.

00:26:34

And unconsciously people would start to choose from the red deck over the blue deck because they picked up on the fact that there was better cards in the red versus the blue.

00:26:46

But if they asked people at certain points, if there was a pattern, they would tell you no, even though the math showed that they were favoring one deck over the other.

00:26:57

So that's what he's referring to as the lock door. Like there is a piece of your brain that can pick up on things faster than what you can describe.

00:27:04

Yeah. And to be honest, I didn't really take a whole lot of notes for this section. Maybe I didn't like this section. I don't know.

00:27:11

But the one story that stood out to me from this section, kind of the same point was this tennis coach, Vic Braden, who I have heard of before.

00:27:19

I played tennis in high school and college, actually.

00:27:22

Yeah. So tennis comes up. You perk up. You got to think for these tennis stories.

00:27:28

It's interesting because I don't really play a whole lot anymore.

00:27:31

But it's interesting to me because I understand the game of tennis and it's a totally mental game.

00:27:37

What determines whether somebody wins or loses in tennis is almost never their physical ability.

00:27:43

Unless you're Serena Williams and you're so much better than the rest of the competition.

00:27:48

That's just not even fair.

00:27:50

But Vic Braden was this world famous tennis coach and he found himself being able to predict when players were going to double fault, which almost never happens in a match.

00:28:00

But what Vic Braden was doing is he was watching people play and they would go an entire match without double faulting.

00:28:06

And then as soon as they tossed the ball before the racket even hit the ball, he would find himself saying, "Oh no, they're going to double fault."

00:28:14

And he'd be right most of the time.

00:28:16

And he couldn't figure out how he was able to know that.

00:28:19

He went back and looked at all the videos and he was looking for little things here and there that might be tells and he couldn't find anything.

00:28:25

And that I think is fascinating because like I said tennis is such a mental game.

00:28:30

And it's almost like he's able to see inside these guys heads.

00:28:35

He doesn't know how he's doing it.

00:28:38

So there could be a whole book written on that topic and I'd be fascinated.

00:28:42

But the cards thing didn't really do it for me.

00:28:45

There were some interesting things to this though.

00:28:49

One thing I thought was interesting was the storytelling problem he talks about and this probably pertains to the card story more because if you were to ask someone why you pick him from one of these decks instead of the other, they wouldn't really know why.

00:29:03

But the storytelling problem he says is when we're too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

00:29:10

So you asked someone why you pick it from the red deck versus the blue deck or vice versa.

00:29:15

They would be able to spin up a story or a narrative to support their choice, but it wouldn't be based on anything factual.

00:29:23

And I don't think I have a problem with this, but I see it in other people and it drives me nuts whenever it's like, oh I don't like this because of X, Y and Z and I'm like, that's total garbage.

00:29:36

You're just making that up, so I don't want to do that myself, but I don't know.

00:29:41

Maybe I do, maybe my wife listens to this, she'll call me out on this.

00:29:45

I'm sure I do.

00:29:46

Yeah, I'm sure we all do it to some degree, but I mean like stupid stuff, like I don't like these pizza toppings, like what?

00:29:53

Okay, fine, but like just say you don't like them then don't try to say well it's the texture.

00:29:57

I don't know, that's a really lame example.

00:30:06

But my point is that like we have these preferences and they can be totally mundane.

00:30:12

They don't really matter to anybody else but us and we can be like so anti whatever and we can spin up this story to support our position and we really don't know why.

00:30:23

That's kind of crazy to me.

00:30:27

It's the classic people don't really know what they want or what their opinions are.

00:30:32

We think we know, but at the end of the day it's really beyond us.

00:30:38

When we try to put into words why we're doing things, it's not as simple as it sounds.

00:30:43

Yes. Then there's the whole idea from this section of priming which that kind of reminded me of the target guy from the power of habit because he's, Malcolm Gladwell is basically saying in this section that you can influence people's behaviors by putting them in the right mindset.

00:31:03

Immediately I went to the target ads and manipulating people's buying habits.

00:31:09

You can prime people's decisions, how they're going to thin slice things by putting them in the right mindset.

00:31:17

The example that they use from this was they like a positive or negative interaction and then they had somebody wait outside the door and they were going to cap it at 10 minutes and they figured no one would wait more than a minute or two.

00:31:31

There were people who were framed or primed with the positive interaction first actually waited the whole 10 minutes and then they're like, "Okay, we have to stop this now because we don't know how long you would have ended up standing here."

00:31:43

That's pretty crazy.

00:31:45

But then what was the other one? They had another one where they had people filling out a test of words and the words were all that revolved around an elderly person and they had kind of primed them to be in the mindset of an elderly person and they left the room walking slower.

00:32:05

They could statistically show the people who played the word games with elderly based words walked slower when they left.

00:32:16

That's no, that can't happen.

00:32:21

Exactly.

00:32:22

So go back to my initial action item of thinking big with faith-based productivity. As we're talking about this, I'm convicted because I'm recognizing that by not thinking bigger, not speaking bigger, the words that I am speaking are influencing my behavior.

00:32:40

Even if you were to tell me you're doing stuff different, I'd say, "No, there's absolutely no way. I'm doing the things I'm supposed to do."

00:32:46

Not true if you're not priming yourself. That's a really powerful idea, I think, is priming yourself because you can create your own confessions, you can review your own goals.

00:32:58

If you incorporated that into your morning routine, then that can override a lot of the junk that maybe you have to deal with by the time you go to the office.

00:33:08

You're missing an opportunity if you do have to put yourself in that environment all day. Why not hit the ground running and prime yourself and not wait for somebody else to patch on the back and be like, "Hey, let's go."

00:33:20

So chapter three, the Warren Harding error.

00:33:24

This is the interesting one.

00:33:28

Warren Harding was one of our previous presidents. We made a mistake with him.

00:33:36

Yeah, so I don't know that much about history. I'm going to take Malcolm Gladwell's word for it, but he says that Warren Harding looked like a president but looked like a good president but was actually a terrible president.

00:33:51

The point that he makes here is that people saw how handsome this guy was, how distinguished looking he was, and they jumped to the immediate conclusion that he was a man of courage, intelligence, and integrity, which of course he wasn't.

00:34:03

Again, Malcolm Gladwell is saying this. I don't know nothing about Warren Harding, to be honest, but he's basically saying at this point that this is the dark side of rapid cognition or thin slicing.

00:34:15

And this also gets into the idea of the implicit association tests. These are tests that measure how quickly you can make associations like names that are sorted into male or female categories.

00:34:27

So if I were to say Justin, you would say male, if I said Jennifer, you would say female, okay, but it gets harder when you add additional items like family and career.

00:34:37

And there are computerized versions of these tests, and he gave you the URL to go through these. Did you go through any of them?

00:34:43

I didn't. I looked it over and I didn't want to. I was scared to, but I did two of them. Okay, because I saw it and I debated it pretty hard and really considered doing it.

00:34:58

And then I convinced myself I didn't have time for it.

00:35:03

Yeah, well, that probably is a more comfortable answer. So the idea behind these tests, because there's a whole bunch of them. There's probably 12 different ones that deal with race and good or bad, because remember you're combining different terms.

00:35:21

Okay, so African American versus European American, and then also mixing up a good versus bad. And what it does is it when it combines these things, it'll say like African American or good European American or bad.

00:35:35

And then you get these things, which you know are either good or bad, are in the pictures which are either African American or European American, and you throw them into the right categories, but remember their group together.

00:35:46

And then they switch them. So then you do like African American or bad. And then on the other side, you've got European American or good.

00:35:54

And it's scary how quickly you, like based on how quickly you can associate things, that kind of locates your natural prejudices.

00:36:04

Okay, so I did that one and I also did the male or female and family or career, career one. And my results were a slight, because there's different degrees of, I think slight is like the one away from the center, and then moderate is too away and then extreme is like three away.

00:36:27

So my results were a slight bias for European American towards good. And then a moderate bias towards male and career.

00:36:41

So meaning you're associating vice versa, you know female with family and African American with bad. That's the one that really like, I didn't like the one with that it turned out like, yeah, I don't like having to associate bad with anything here.

00:36:56

But I took it just because I was interested in the results, but also in these tests, and we'll put the link in the show notes that people want to take these.

00:37:04

I think there's a couple things to point out here. One, it is interesting to see what your natural prejudices are, because everyone will say, oh, I'm not prejudiced.

00:37:13

I'm not racist, but you do have to, you do have to locate yourself. And this is one of the ways that you can do that through this test.

00:37:20

I do think though, they ask a whole bunch of qualifying questions at the end. And I kind of think they skew the results based on what you put there.

00:37:30

So like the male female career family one, for example, they were asking me not only like what my race is and what sex I identify as, but they're asking like, who was your primary caregiver?

00:37:44

How much money do you make? Like, why does that matter? Shouldn't the results be the results? So when I say that I am a, I'm a male, making X number of dollars in my primary caregiver when I was growing up was my mom, is that shifting the results?

00:37:59

I kind of think it is behind the scenes. And I'm not sure I agree with that part of it.

00:38:03

Or is that just so that they can collect, like they're collecting data for a broader study to see how many people are moderately skewed or severely skewed? Like, are they running more results on you as a result?

00:38:16

Could be, but based on the responses, I can keep track of the numbers that I got wrong. I can't measure how quickly I'm responding to these things, obviously.

00:38:28

But it felt like I was pretty even. Okay. And they're saying I have a moderate bias. So that didn't really line up when I took the test. I could be completely wrong. I'm not the researcher at Harvard.

00:38:39

Sounds like you just don't want those results. Why don't? Everybody wants to believe that they don't have any prejudices, right? Right. But you do. And that's, that's what this is going to show you.

00:38:51

I'm not taking this test. I don't want to know.

00:38:57

The other thing with this, though, is this has a very real effect in the world, whether you want to believe that it does or not.

00:39:06

So I'm not personally in the position where I'm going to hire somebody and I'm not going to default to a European American male versus an African American female based on my my prejudices. Okay. But that happens all the time.

00:39:23

And if you were asked the people who are making the hiring decisions, they would say, Oh, no, I'm not prejudiced. But you really don't know based on what you think is what it comes down to.

00:39:36

Like you have to dig a little bit deeper to really understand how this stuff stuff works. Going back to the last chapter, the locked door, like some of this stuff is a mystery.

00:39:44

And it's worth figuring out as much as we can figure out what are the factors that are going to color our perspective or our decisions and then try to put in safeguards to circumvent those.

00:39:57

Just as an example, he mentioned that there are quite a few people who are under six feet. I think the average height was something like five, seven.

00:40:10

Maybe that's wrong, but it was lower than the average height of the average CEO. He says that very few CEOs are under six foot. So what that shows is that for the business world, there is a prejudice towards height.

00:40:24

And in fact, one of the studies he cites shows that an inch of height is worth $789 per year in extra salary.

00:40:32

And he says that it's possible to overcome these, but their statistics show that not a lot of people do. In fact, they looked at like the list of the top CEOs.

00:40:43

And they found one example, Kenneth Chanault, I think is how you say it, the American Express CEO, who is both shorter than average and African American.

00:40:53

So this is still a very real thing. And as a privileged white guy on a podcast, I have to recognize this and do my part to help other people overcome it, even though I don't know exactly what that is.

00:41:05

Yeah, that particular round of data that he was throwing out there, I had a lot of questions that he skipped over.

00:41:16

It's like, well, okay, a lot of these big companies have a tendency to have white male board of directors. So wouldn't that mean that they'd have a tendency like their prejudice would be towards wanting a white male in those positions?

00:41:29

And that's history currently. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. It's just the way it is right now, which means that it may not necessarily be height because when he even he said this in a couple points, like statistically,

00:41:45

white males are taller, just in general. So that would mean that if you have the prejudice towards white males as CEOs, naturally, they're going to be taller.

00:41:56

So just saying that it's based on height and then leaving it at that is where I had the issue with that, because I feel like there's a lot more involved than just that.

00:42:05

He just singled out that piece. That sort of thing is where I started to have some questions. Again, I'm not saying he's wrong.

00:42:15

He just didn't answer my questions in the book.

00:42:18

When I read that section, I kind of read it a little bit different because he talks about race and sex first.

00:42:24

Right.

00:42:25

And he makes the argument at the end of that section, unless just assume for the sake of argument, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but let's just assume for the sake of argument, there are not very many people who are in the case of the argument.

00:42:34

There are not very many females in upper management. He makes the argument that that could be because of the pipeline.

00:42:43

In order to put females in upper management, they have to be females who are qualified to take those upper management roles.

00:42:49

If they haven't historically been in those positions to be promoted, then maybe that's not an example of a prejudice of promoting people from one level to the upper levels.

00:42:57

But he's basically saying, "You can't make that argument the way I read it. You can't make that argument with height because there are short people everywhere."

00:43:04

There has never been a shortage of short people in these positions, but the ones who end up making it to the top are the ones who are taller.

00:43:12

Yeah, and that may be fair. Again, I just had questions that weren't answered.

00:43:18

That's the thing with this book. There are no answers. There's just a whole bunch of extra questions you can ask.

00:43:24

I don't understand any of this. I better just let somebody else do.

00:43:29

Yeah. Thanks, Gladwell.

00:43:33

Very interesting section, though.

00:43:36

Yeah, it was interesting.

00:43:38

There is another story in here which I absolutely loved of Bob Golomb, I believe is how you say his name.

00:43:45

He was the most successful car salesman, sounded like ever.

00:43:51

The reason that he was so successful is because he recognized that you can't judge who was going to buy a car based on their appearance.

00:43:59

They even told a story of this guy who walked in in his overalls, muddy boots from the farm.

00:44:05

Now he delivers a car every six months or something to his farm. He doesn't even come in. He just says, "I want another car."

00:44:11

That's the type of person that he, Malcolm Gladwell, makes the argument like if you were to go buy your prejudices, you would totally write this guy off and you wouldn't even approach him about buying a car.

00:44:22

This guy has been really successful because he's been able to override those prejudices.

00:44:29

Way to go, car salesman.

00:44:31

Good job, Bob.

00:44:33

All right, Paul Van Reiper's big victory. Raise your hand if you've heard of the Millennium Challenge, the, what would you call it, War Games that the US put on it?

00:44:47

It was the most expensive War Games that we're ever done.

00:44:50

And frankly, this is one of the stories in the book that I absolutely loved.

00:44:58

I was fascinated by this. So the story is, so in War Games, at least US War Games, they always had the blue team and the red team.

00:45:10

Blue teams, the good guys, red teams, the bad guys. That's Joe's dumb down version of what's going on here.

00:45:17

In these War Games, they had the red team pretending, you know, it's theater.

00:45:26

They are pretending that there is a rogue general who has the backing of all the religious leaders in the country that they are fighting against.

00:45:38

So the blue team's job is to overtake this rogue general. Paul Van Reiper is called on to be the general, to be that rogue general.

00:45:48

And Paul Van Reiper, I'm going to fail at knowing his entire history because I'm not a military buff.

00:45:57

I don't, and I'm not one that's good with all of those terms. I wish I was, but I'm not.

00:46:03

But suffice it to say that he's very good at what he does. He has excelled through the ranks over many decades and has done amazing.

00:46:14

And he has learned that in War, you can't rely on one way of doing things. You have to have multiple ways of doing things.

00:46:23

And you also have to trust your instincts. That's the key here because during the Millennium Challenge,

00:46:31

the blue team was supplied with computers galore and data galore.

00:46:39

Everything they needed. All the bells and whistles. And they had it set up to where they could predict, theoretically,

00:46:48

what the enemy was going to do and what all of their options were.

00:46:53

So the idea is that if you give the team full access to any and all intel,

00:47:01

they would be able to completely demolish the enemy with zero complaints.

00:47:08

Yep. And all of the military resources too.

00:47:11

Yep. Every branch all working together.

00:47:13

So overwhelming force plus all of this information, like there's no way that they stand a chance, right?

00:47:21

And it was fully expected that blue team was just going to completely destroy red team.

00:47:27

Now, I've set this up in such a way. You know the outcome already.

00:47:30

Well, the name of the chapter. Paul Van Riper is big victory, right?

00:47:33

I know. I know. Paul Van Riper as the Rogue General, and I'm not going to go into some of these details completely.

00:47:42

But one of the first things the blue team did was take out the main communication line on the red team.

00:47:50

Well, then the red team starts acting in unison even though the blue team has no idea what they're talking about.

00:47:56

Well, it turned out Paul Van Riper started using light signals and sending people on couriers, like with motorcycles,

00:48:02

to communicate with other areas. It's like, well, you can't intercept that.

00:48:08

Unless you physically caught the guy, you're not going to intercept that.

00:48:12

So he was just used to that because of the war, the theaters that he had participated in and war in the past.

00:48:21

So he just fell back on that immediately and was planning on it and relied on instinct and managed to overwhelm the Navy

00:48:32

and destroyed half of their destroyers in the period of a six-hour timeframe, which is just nuts to me.

00:48:42

They were completely overwhelmed. The blue team was 10 to 1 resources, maybe even more than that.

00:48:50

And yet the red team beats them.

00:48:53

Let me jump in with a few more details.

00:48:56

So basically the blue team thought when they knocked out the communications that there was nothing the red team could do anymore.

00:49:03

And then the thing that caught the blue team off guard and the reason that they won the battle and the Navy was eliminated

00:49:12

was that because they assumed the red team could do nothing, they were completely unprepared when they attacked first.

00:49:20

So Paul Van Riper did something unpredictable and it caused complete chaos for the blue team.

00:49:25

Now the part of this that kind of made me mad is that after the red team took over and beat the blue team pretty soundly,

00:49:36

they decided to rewind the clock and not allow the red team, Paul Van Riper, to go out of line, which...

00:49:48

Yeah, they changed the rules.

00:49:50

Yeah, they changed all the rules, which meant that Paul was unable to...

00:49:55

He basically wasn't allowed to operate off of his own instinct and had to play by the blue team rules,

00:50:01

which was so weird to me because the whole point was that Paul Van Riper was a rogue general.

00:50:07

Yeah, and then they celebrated when the blue team won.

00:50:10

Yeah, because of course the blue team wins when you play by the blue team rules.

00:50:14

And then that's what everyone heard about and that was the big to do. This is a huge success.

00:50:20

But he was a rogue general that you didn't let go rogue.

00:50:24

Yeah, exactly. And this is...

00:50:26

Come on!

00:50:27

And this sounds so stupid because everybody knows in real life,

00:50:34

like you don't get to choose which rules the enemy is going to abide by.

00:50:38

Right!

00:50:39

And I don't know, like for a war simulation specifically, it seems to me,

00:50:47

I don't know that much about this stuff, either, that you would want to plan for the worst case scenario.

00:50:54

Like what's the absolute worst thing the enemy can do to us and then work around that?

00:50:58

But basically they're like, "Okay, we want a simulation of a real war,

00:51:03

but you can't do this, that or the other thing that we know is going to

00:51:07

highlight our weaknesses. So, okay, then I guess you're going to win and then you celebrate when you win."

00:51:14

Like, that just doesn't make any sense. That'd be like, you know,

00:51:17

"I'm going to play basketball with my 11-year-old, but I'm taller, I'm faster, I'm stronger."

00:51:24

And then like, "I rub his face in it when I beat him." No!

00:51:28

That's kind of the picture that I got from this.

00:51:31

Which I wasn't happy about, but no, that's what it is.

00:51:36

There was a really interesting section in here, which I had trouble reconciling how this tied into Paul van Reiber.

00:51:42

But I really like the section on the improv comedy.

00:51:44

I guess that the connection is that you can improve high-speed cognition through training and rehearsal.

00:51:56

But they talk about improv comedy and they talk about it being governed by a set of rules that makes it easy for the participants to communicate.

00:52:04

And one example of this is that for a lot of improv, your character must accept what happens to them.

00:52:11

And he even gives a couple of examples where there's this improv scene and then this one person responds,

00:52:17

they're acting out as a, they're acting like a doctor, and then the other person says, "You may not do that doctor."

00:52:22

And then like, the scene ends because they broke the rule, where you just have to roll with whatever the other person said.

00:52:27

And then they show another example of how people just roll with this stuff and that's what creates these funny situations

00:52:34

and what allows improv comedians to just roll with things so fast.

00:52:37

Have you ever been to an improv comedy routine?

00:52:41

Yeah, so when we were in college, my wife and I went to college together.

00:52:45

They had a, I'm drawing a blank on the name, but it was a run-off of whose line is it anyway.

00:52:53

It was the title of it.

00:52:54

I'm, again, I can't think of it, but it happened.

00:52:57

I think it was every other week throughout the four years we were in college and we went to as many of those as we possibly could.

00:53:04

Yeah, I only went to a couple, but I remember the first time I went to one being terrified that they were going to pick me out of the audience

00:53:13

and I was going to have to do this stuff because that's not how I think at all.

00:53:17

But now that I understand these rules, I'm like, "Man, I think maybe I could do this."

00:53:21

Yeah.

00:53:22

Yeah.

00:53:23

Maybe podcasting helps with that too because you really don't know what you're saying, so you've got to roll with things.

00:53:28

But it's funny how you podcast for a while and then you learn how to just keep talking whether you have time to or not.

00:53:37

Right, right.

00:53:38

But I thought that was really interesting and it was kind of like a behind-the-scenes look, I guess, at it.

00:53:44

And I look back at the improv comedy that I had seen previously and I saw it in like a different light.

00:53:50

I remember when I watched them the first time, I was like, "I could never do that sort of thing."

00:53:54

And after reading this section, I'm like, "Hey, I want to give that a shot."

00:53:57

Yeah.

00:53:58

Not that I'm going to go to an improv comedy club anytime soon.

00:54:00

Great.

00:54:01

Me either.

00:54:02

The clubs, I've been to a couple comedy clubs, but those aren't the ones that I've been to.

00:54:11

They're not the type that they would pull someone out of the audience.

00:54:14

They may interact with a specific person in the audience, but they wouldn't pull you out.

00:54:18

Even the improv pieces, they don't pull you out of the audience to go do it.

00:54:22

They were always, "These are the folks performing and you are the audience."

00:54:26

And they maintain that invisible wall.

00:54:29

Sure.

00:54:30

So those are the ones that I've been a part of.

00:54:31

Yeah, maybe I'm just projecting that they were going to pull me up there, but I remember being terrified about that.

00:54:36

They're going to ask me to come up with something on the spot.

00:54:39

Maybe it's just like an idea, you know, and I was like, "Don't call me."

00:54:42

Yeah.

00:54:43

Yeah.

00:54:44

I'm, I guess maybe I'm not as terrified of that because I'm pretty good at just making stuff up on the spot.

00:54:51

Like we went to, we did an escape room with our small group from church.

00:54:55

Was that a week ago?

00:54:57

And we got done with the challenge.

00:54:59

We didn't get out.

00:55:00

I found out it's one of the, the room that we did was one of, if not the most difficult room in the Twin Cities area to escape from.

00:55:09

They only have a 20% success rate out of that room.

00:55:13

So it's, it's marketed as, this is one of the hardest.

00:55:16

I was like, "Well, this isn't fair because I've never done one of these.

00:55:19

Like three-fourths of the group had never done one."

00:55:21

We did get out just 30 seconds late, which means that we technically didn't get out, but we did solve it all just not in time.

00:55:28

Anyway, that's, that's me trying to justify why we didn't actually get out.

00:55:36

So.

00:55:37

Got a thin slice.

00:55:38

There was another story in this section, which I thought was interesting, but I didn't, again, really understand how this tied into Paul van Riper's big victory about the Cook County Hospital, which has traditionally served the poorest and the neediest patients in Chicago.

00:55:52

And they talked about how it's difficult for doctors to diagnose heart problems from an ECG, which is interesting to me because that's one of the big benefits that Apple's touting with the Apple Watch is like it can tell you when your heart rate is irregular and then you go in and you,

00:56:07

you check it and they can confirm it.

00:56:10

He says that somewhere between two to eight percent of the time in American hospitals, a patient who is actually having a genuine heart attack get sent home.

00:56:19

And I was like, "What? How does that happen?"

00:56:22

But then they go on to tell the story of Lee Goldman and they put together this decision tree to accurately diagnose heart conditions, which reminded me a lot of like the checklist manifesto,

00:56:32

which would accurately predict 95% of the time, whether someone was having a heart attack, whereas the doctors traditionally guessed it right, 76 to 89% of the time.

00:56:42

So the percentages were greater if you just followed the decision tree rather than trying to thin slice while the person is sitting in your office, even if they are having a heart attack, which is crazy to me.

00:56:53

But I don't understand the whole medical side of this, I guess.

00:56:56

Yeah, I don't know either, but it seemed to work. That was the interesting part.

00:57:00

Yep.

00:57:01

Which brings us to Kena's dilemma. Did you know Kena before this?

00:57:06

I did not, and I have to confess, I did not go listen to Kena's music, although now that we're talking about Kena's music, I would have had something to say about it.

00:57:14

Apparently it's amazing.

00:57:16

Apparently Fred Durst says so.

00:57:19

The story of Kena is that he, right?

00:57:25

I believe.

00:57:26

I think so.

00:57:27

As a musician from Virginia Beach, and there's a lot of key people in the music industry who said this guy is amazing.

00:57:33

They would have a record company guy listen to it, and like, "Oh yeah, this music is great."

00:57:38

And then they played a small section of it for Fred Durst.

00:57:42

The aforementioned Fred Durst, lead singer of Limp Biscuit, which, whatever.

00:57:46

And he's like, "Yeah, this guy's going to be amazing."

00:57:49

But then what they found was that when they did the traditional marketing stuff to figure out which of the songs are going to be the hit songs, I think we learned about that in the power of habit, right?

00:58:00

Yes.

00:58:01

Would you do it?

00:58:02

I believe so.

00:58:03

Okay.

00:58:03

So they were doing all of this stuff to predict which songs would be the hit songs and basically none of them were.

00:58:10

So then you've got these two things that are battling against each other.

00:58:14

You've got these people who are thin slicing, Kenan, the people who know what they're talking about, and they're saying, "This guy is amazing, but then you've got all of this market data," which is saying, "This guy is not amazing.

00:58:24

We don't even like this guy."

00:58:26

So what do you do with that?

00:58:28

And the interesting part of this to me is not the Kenan scenario, but the Pepsi Challenge and then also the Herman Miller-Aron chair.

00:58:36

I have one of these chairs.

00:58:37

Do you?

00:58:38

I do.

00:58:39

I'm sitting at it right now.

00:58:40

So what was your first impression of this chair when you saw it?

00:58:43

When I saw it or when I sat in it?

00:58:45

Both, but I'm interested in specifically when you saw it, because that's what they talk about in the book.

00:58:50

Yeah.

00:58:51

When I saw it, I'm trying to recall, because that's been a while ago, because I've had this.

00:58:58

Did you say this chair is radical and ugly?

00:59:00

No.

00:59:01

It was more along the lines of, "I hope that..."

00:59:06

No.

00:59:07

It's been a while, Mike.

00:59:11

I think, and memories sometimes are not always correct, but I think I was being pretty utilitarian with it and knew enough about it to know that it was supposed to help me with posture and sitting well.

00:59:23

Okay.

00:59:24

And thought of it more as a way of protecting myself long term.

00:59:28

I think that was my first reaction.

00:59:31

The reason I ask is because they had this chair which was designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf, and when they designed it, it was pretty radical.

00:59:40

There wasn't any fabric or upholstery, and it was designed to be extremely comfortable, even though it looked not at all like any of the other chairs that were out there.

00:59:48

And they did these tests, and people rated it on a scale of 1 to 10, how aesthetically beautiful it is, I guess.

00:59:57

And when it was first designed, it was like 1 out of 10, and now it gets an 8 out of 10.

01:00:03

So over time, people have changed their opinion about the look of this chair, but really from the very beginning, it was designed to be extremely comfortable.

01:00:12

And basically, the story from this is that these guys designed this, and all of the market data was saying that this is not going to be successful, and they went ahead with it anyways, and it turns out after some time that everybody loves this chair.

01:00:26

Right.

01:00:27

And I have not sat in one, so I can't speak to that, but you seem to think it's pretty awesome.

01:00:31

You can visit, you can sit in mine.

01:00:33

I like it a lot.

01:00:34

I know that where I'm working right now, corporate scenario, they provide "yes, how a reason to use that."

01:00:41

So quote-unquote, they use really nice ergonomic chairs, and I sit in those, and I can feel that it's not great, but that's because I'm spoiled by the one I'm sitting in right now.

01:00:57

I really, really like it.

01:00:59

Nice.

01:01:00

Definitely biased.

01:01:01

I don't even have a chair in my office.

01:01:04

I have one of these big inflatable ball things.

01:01:07

It's not like one of the exercise balls.

01:01:09

It's designed to be something that you sit on, and you throw it onto your desk when you're not using it, but I stand for everything.

01:01:16

So...

01:01:17

Sure.

01:01:18

And is that record this?

01:01:19

Awesome.

01:01:20

So I have no opinions on the chairs.

01:01:22

This is one of those things that I've always wanted to get, but have never felt compelled to spend that much money on them.

01:01:29

Yeah, they are not cheap.

01:01:31

So I'll let you convince me otherwise.

01:01:33

Well, and I'll also be honest, I am not the one who purchased this.

01:01:37

So a previous employer purchased this as part of a home office build at the time, and they didn't want to deal with the process of getting it back afterwards, so they just told me to keep it.

01:01:48

So I kept it.

01:01:49

Nice.

01:01:50

I was not going to argue that one at all.

01:01:52

I just said, "Okay."

01:01:53

And walked away.

01:01:54

We'll just leave that there.

01:01:56

Yeah.

01:01:57

One of the stories in this chapter that was very interesting to me was that of the Pepsi Challenge.

01:02:03

Yes.

01:02:04

Alright, listeners, raise your hand if you've heard of Pepsi Challenge.

01:02:07

I don't know why I'm having you raise your hand today.

01:02:10

That's kind of weird.

01:02:11

The Pepsi Challenge, if you don't know what this is, Pepsi did a huge campaign.

01:02:17

How long's it been?

01:02:18

15 years ago?

01:02:19

I don't remember.

01:02:20

It was a long time.

01:02:21

It's been a while.

01:02:22

I think they, at one point I think I saw they were trying to bring them back here three or four years ago, but maybe they still do them.

01:02:29

I don't know.

01:02:30

But the premise of it is that they would do blind tests between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and to see what do people prefer.

01:02:39

And hands down, Pepsi wins those challenges.

01:02:45

Legitimately, statistically, Pepsi wins those challenges even when it's done by third parties, even when it's done by Coca-Cola themselves.

01:02:54

The story in the book is from Coca-Cola's perspective because Coca-Cola saw these.

01:03:01

We have a problem.

01:03:03

Obviously, it's a pretty good marketing campaign.

01:03:06

Coca-Cola went through this whole process of trying to figure out why people like Pepsi more than Coca-Cola as a result of these challenges.

01:03:18

They redid their whole formula, which is like their secret sauce.

01:03:23

They redid the formula that is Coca-Cola and gave it a new name, the new Coke.

01:03:30

I remember that.

01:03:31

Yeah.

01:03:32

I remember seeing it.

01:03:34

I remember having some relatives who were big Coke fans who absolutely hated it, which was the norm per this story.

01:03:41

Everybody hated the new Coke.

01:03:44

Sales of everything dropped as a result.

01:03:48

They finally conceded and brought the old Coke back, and then sales went right back to where they were previously.

01:03:54

Thankfully.

01:03:55

So the question there is, what happened?

01:03:59

Yep.

01:04:00

What is going on?

01:04:01

I don't know why is Pepsi winning these, but whenever you get rid of the Coke flavor and make it more like Pepsi, people throw a fit.

01:04:11

Well, it turns out that whenever you do a taste test, like what they do in the Pepsi challenge, you're only getting one small taste.

01:04:20

And generally speaking, when you taste things, humans lean towards the one that is sweeter.

01:04:26

Yep.

01:04:27

We like the ones that have more sugar in them.

01:04:29

That's our tendency.

01:04:30

So when they do a taste test, of course, Pepsi wins.

01:04:34

But a taste test is very different than sitting down and drinking the whole can of soda.

01:04:40

And what they realized was if someone sat down to drink the whole can of soda, at least the Coke fans always prefer the full can of Coke, even though they would prefer Pepsi in the taste test, they would still prefer the Coke when they drink the whole can.

01:04:55

Because it's a different experience.

01:04:59

A sampling is different than the full experience there.

01:05:03

Yep.

01:05:04

Okay.

01:05:05

They didn't realize it till it was too late though.

01:05:07

Yeah.

01:05:08

Because they reinvented the whole company and they thought this is a slam dunk.

01:05:12

This is going to be a sure thing because they were doing their own taste test.

01:05:16

And this is exactly what people want.

01:05:18

But like you said, there was a difference between drinking a taste of it and drinking the whole can.

01:05:23

And by the way, when I read that, I felt a little bit validated.

01:05:27

I've always kind of thought that like you really can't tell the difference.

01:05:30

But I have held that my preference has always been Coke because it hasn't been as sweet.

01:05:37

And I'm hearing the story.

01:05:39

I'm recognizing now that no one's been giving me little cups of soda to drink and choose which one is best.

01:05:44

I've been doing it can by can.

01:05:45

So I'm like, oh yeah, that makes sense.

01:05:47

I just have I've stayed away from soda in general for a long time because my grandfather used to keep cans of Coke around all the time.

01:05:56

He kept it in grain trucks.

01:05:58

The grain trucks we had the batteries on him would sometimes get build up around the poles.

01:06:02

So where the cables connect to the batteries themselves.

01:06:05

And what we would do is because my grandfather didn't drink Coke.

01:06:10

He didn't drink soda, pop whatever you want to call it.

01:06:12

He didn't drink it at all.

01:06:13

He only kept that around because he would take the Coke and if you pour Coke over the poles on the battery when there's build up on them, it would eat away all that build up.

01:06:24

When you see that happening, it's really hard to drink Coke after watching that happen or having done it.

01:06:29

Right, right.

01:06:30

Yeah.

01:06:31

So I think I'm trying to remember when I was introduced that.

01:06:35

I was probably nine when I was introduced to that.

01:06:38

And I've been a consumer of soda in the past.

01:06:44

I haven't in many years now.

01:06:46

Yeah, I don't drink soda anymore either.

01:06:48

I do drink coffee though, which actually leads to one other point from this section.

01:06:53

He says that we tend to come up with plausible sounding reasons why we don't like something, then adjust our true preferences to be in line with that explanation.

01:07:02

But he also says that experts don't have this problem because they are taught a very specific vocabulary.

01:07:10

This fascinates me because I have a brother specifically who is very, very deep into the coffee world.

01:07:20

So if you think I'm a coffee snob on a scale of one to ten, I'm a seven.

01:07:24

He's an eleven.

01:07:26

But I do have right next to my desk here the SCAA coffee tasters flavor wheel framed and hanging on my office wall.

01:07:35

Nice.

01:07:36

So coffee is one of those things where I kind of know what I like and what I don't like.

01:07:43

I really can't explain it that well.

01:07:46

But what the coffee tasters flavor wheel basically does is it gives people like me the terminology to use to explain why we like or don't like.

01:07:55

Things.

01:07:56

And this is like I said, very much a deep rabbit hole.

01:08:03

And if you don't feel the need to go down it, then don't.

01:08:07

Just ignorance is bliss in this case.

01:08:10

I did some research by the way with that SCAA I looked up like because they will give coffees different scores.

01:08:18

Okay.

01:08:25

So I tend to be the type of person who I just like the pour over coffee.

01:08:29

And as long as the beans are good, like I like that coffee, but I really don't care for African versus South American, Central America, whatever.

01:08:40

There are definitely people who can like pick that stuff out.

01:08:42

And they're cupping, they call it, which isn't even the brewed coffee.

01:08:52

They use fragrance aroma, flavor, acidity, body, balance, sweetness, uniformity, cleanness.

01:09:00

And I don't really care about any of that stuff.

01:09:03

But I did find another article where they had people do this coffee snobs, do this cupping process with like grocery store coffee.

01:09:14

And it was interesting because they, one person's like, I can't do this anymore and they walked away from the experiment.

01:09:22

One person said about Maxwell House specifically, this is what death tastes like.

01:09:28

But coffee, for me, like this was an example of what he's talking about where when you understand a little bit of the terminology, maybe this can help you overcome some of this stuff in terms of like changing your preferences based on what you think is implausible sounding reason.

01:09:47

This is kind of what I was alluding to at the beginning.

01:09:49

Like I hear people with these reasons why they don't like something.

01:09:52

Like that makes no sense. Like you're just making that up and then you've changed your preference because you've convinced yourself that this thing isn't good.

01:09:59

You know, so anyways, seven seconds in the Bronx.

01:10:04

This, I hated this chapter.

01:10:07

Well, I liked and hated this chapter.

01:10:10

It's a very sad story about Amadeus Diallo, who moved to Wheeler Avenue in the Bronx because he was an immigrant looking for a cheap place to live.

01:10:21

That was close to a subway and he was outside his front door late one night and was shot by four police officers when they mistakenly thought that he was pulling a gun on them.

01:10:32

And since this has been written, we've probably heard lots of stories like this.

01:10:39

And the question that Malcolm Gladwell poses is what caused these four police officers to shoot this one guy who was unarmed.

01:10:50

And like what was the thought process there that led them to that point?

01:10:55

And so he gets into kind of the science behind how your brain can get hijacked and the mistakes and the decisions that you can make along the way.

01:11:06

Yeah, I think this is especially interesting given today's culture and the way that we've seen things or the way that things have been going on because that, I mean, the main thing, and a lot of people know this, like the media, because of social media and the prevalence of media,

01:11:24

it means that we're aware of things that we normally wouldn't have been made aware of because it's so easy to propagate that.

01:11:31

This particular book was written in 2005, so it was not written in that environment.

01:11:38

So it's interesting to me that the story of Amadeus is one that I'm sure some people knew, but in today's climate, I didn't know about this.

01:11:50

In 2005, yes, it would have found its way to a lot of places, but it probably wouldn't have made it across the entire US.

01:12:00

Yep, exactly.

01:12:01

Whereas if something like that happens today, instantly, within a matter of 12 hours, the vast majority of the US probably knows about it.

01:12:09

Yep.

01:12:10

So I throw that out there because I don't think that...

01:12:18

I don't even know how to say that.

01:12:20

I don't know whether or not the prevalence of this sort of thing has gone up or gone down.

01:12:25

I feel like it's hard to know simply because you can't go off of the number of times that you hear about it in the media versus what you used to hear.

01:12:35

Because what we used to hear was much less.

01:12:39

Things were likely happening more than what we realized.

01:12:43

Which is why I talked to a number of folks about random things, hacking that happens.

01:12:49

My password got stolen.

01:12:56

I feel like that has probably happened just as many times in the past since the age of the internet, but we're just aware of it more now.

01:13:01

Yeah.

01:13:02

It just happens the same amount.

01:13:04

Maybe it happens more.

01:13:06

I don't know.

01:13:07

It seems like, from my perspective, being somebody who works in tech, to me, it seems like it happens about the same amount as it always has.

01:13:14

It's just in the media more.

01:13:15

It's in the news more.

01:13:16

Right.

01:13:17

So with something like this, and I'm not trying to downplay the story on Amadeus.

01:13:22

It's just the environment that I'm coming at this from.

01:13:26

It's sad to see it because people jump to conclusions and it's hard from a police officer's stance to make snap judgments.

01:13:39

And sometimes they feel like they need to make snap judgments when really they don't.

01:13:44

But it's hard for them to know that.

01:13:46

I have a handful of friends who are police officers, none of which have been in this scenario where they're looking for people that are suspicious and made an inaccurate judgment.

01:13:59

I don't have any friends who have done that.

01:14:02

But the ones that I've talked to, they all are concerned about it.

01:14:08

And they definitely are interested in having the conversation of how do you prevent that snap judgment being wrong.

01:14:16

Yep.

01:14:17

And even some, the example that they've brought up to me a handful of times is drunk drivers versus diabetics.

01:14:25

Because if someone's low on blood sugar, a lot of times they act and looked like they're drunk.

01:14:32

Like that's the way that they are. And it's only in recent years that that's becoming more common knowledge amongst the general public.

01:14:41

So now police officers are aware of that.

01:14:44

So because of the awareness, those snap judgments don't happen as much towards just assuming they're drunk.

01:14:52

And then there's actually an issue here health wise because they're not getting the blood sugar they need.

01:14:56

So anyway, that's a long ramble here. But I think that there is potentially more of an awareness around this happening.

01:15:06

But I also am not 100% certain what you do about it.

01:15:10

This is where I started to, I shouldn't say started, but I really had some complaints with Gladwell because he doesn't really offer any advice other than don't trust yourself.

01:15:20

But you told me at the beginning to trust myself.

01:15:25

Right.

01:15:26

So I didn't know what to do with this. I felt like this chapter was good to know, but I also felt like it undermined everything he had talked about leading up to that.

01:15:36

Yeah, well, the stakes are the highest in this story. It's life or death. And he's basically unpacking the two different extreme views of what would happen in a situation like this.

01:15:51

So some people would say it was a simple mistake. Some people would say this is blatant racism.

01:15:57

He's saying that it's somewhere in between because we have these prejudices that maybe we don't realize, but they are there.

01:16:05

And then also when we find ourselves in this situation where we're stressed out, then we're not in our right mind.

01:16:15

He shares a story that 90% of police officers will never ever fire their gun, but the ones that do all exhibit the same characteristics of extreme stress, extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminish sound, and the sense that time is slowing down.

01:16:32

Okay, so when you're faced with a life-threatening situation, or you think you're faced with a life-threatening situation, your mind drastically limits the range and the amount of information that you have to deal with.

01:16:44

And so what happens in a situation like this is that your body goes from zero to 100. In fact, he even had a story in here about somebody who studied the ideal state for performing well under stress.

01:16:58

And I think it was Dave Grossman. He said it's basically from 115 beats per minute to 145 beats per minute. At 145 beats per minute, your complex motor skills start breaking down.

01:17:08

At 175, your cognitive processing breaks down. The blood is withdrawn from the outer muscle layer and it's concentrated in a core muscle mass. It's kind of like natural armor.

01:17:18

And he makes the point that the four major race riots that he calls out in this book in the past century have been caused by what cops did after a chase.

01:17:28

And he shows that it's the chase that gets their heart rate up, and then at that point you can't trust anything that you are seeing, because you only seeing hearing sensing certain things which are going to confirm your biases.

01:17:43

And so the police in this situation made a couple of fatal mistakes. According to Malcolm Gladwell, they asked themselves, "What's this guy doing here?" Turns out he was just getting some air.

01:17:51

Then they asked, "How brazen is this guy that he didn't run at the side of the police?" And then they assumed that he was dangerous by the way that he was moving.

01:18:00

And if you think about the police officers being in this stressful state and not in their right mind to make these right decisions, you can see how they interpret the things that he does and make the conclusions that they do.

01:18:13

And does that justify the fact that they shot the guy? No, it doesn't. But at least you can understand how it got there.

01:18:20

And this is also why I think it's interesting right now there's all this push for the body cameras and maybe those are good to have.

01:18:29

But I kind of think after reading this section that it's not going to solve the problem.

01:18:33

At that moment, when your heart rate is through the roof, you're not even capable of thinking, "Oh, this is going to be documented. I better not pull the trigger."

01:18:45

When you're forced to make that split-second decision, then that's when you're vulnerable to being guided by your stereotypes and prejudices and you're not looking for those micro-expressions and you're not able to read people's faces,

01:18:56

which also interestingly in this section he says that that's something that autistic people have trouble doing. He calls it "mindblind."

01:19:03

So when you think about that, when I read it anyways, I went back to that situation.

01:19:11

Because I've worked with a family business that has produced software for autistic students specifically in special education.

01:19:19

And so I kind of understand a little bit about that.

01:19:22

And when I read that part, I was like, "That was kind of a light bulb moment for me." Because it's like, "Oh, okay."

01:19:28

So when you read the story about the police officers and the guy standing there, you kind of think to yourself initially, like, "Can't you see in his eyes?"

01:19:36

You know, that he's scared. But when your heart rates through the roof, essentially it's like not being able to do that just like an autistic person can't do that.

01:19:44

And he uses a story of Peter and how he can't see people's expressions in a movie that he's watching.

01:19:49

And so it completely changes with the outcome of the movie.

01:19:52

Like what the characters are saying, the emotions and stuff like that.

01:19:55

Because he can only see what's happening and what they're saying, but he can't read their faces.

01:20:02

So I don't know. Like this is a really complex situation and there really aren't any simple answers.

01:20:09

But I did find it interesting to understand how all of this stuff, like scientifically in your brain, how it breaks down.

01:20:19

And I don't know what the answer is to this either.

01:20:22

He kind of throws out one thing at the end. He says that the two officer teams typically have less complaints.

01:20:28

Or two officer teams typically have more complaints filed against it.

01:20:32

Because when police officers are by themselves, they tend to slow things down.

01:20:35

When they're with somebody else, they tend to speed things up.

01:20:38

So the takeaway for me anyways, reading through this section, is to always try to slow things down.

01:20:43

And obviously you're not going to be able to do that.

01:20:45

I am interested though, did you talk to the friends that you have that are police officers about this two officer teams versus single officer teams?

01:20:52

And what was their preference response to that sort of thing?

01:20:57

That would be interesting to hear.

01:20:59

Yeah, I know that, and I don't know the specifics, obviously, but the ones that I know, one of those gentlemen, he has been the leader of a SWAT team on and off over the last couple decades.

01:21:16

Which, you know, if you want a high stress scenario.

01:21:19

Their thing is if you show up on the scene and there's potential danger, they don't interact at all.

01:21:26

That's pretty common, is they need at least one other person there.

01:21:29

And they don't engage a person unless they have to, unless someone else is there.

01:21:36

Which, I'm not sure how that would play out given what Gladwell is proposing here.

01:21:40

Because if two people speed things up, they're going to slow it down until they can get a second opinion there.

01:21:46

If they can.

01:21:48

But that might be a different scenario than someone is moving quickly and there's two of them there, which means it's going to accelerate.

01:21:58

I don't know. I don't know what the answer is there.

01:22:01

You know, maybe we're not any better than Gladwell here. He didn't propose really any answers either.

01:22:05

So, maybe it's because he doesn't know.

01:22:07

Right.

01:22:08

And we don't know either. Maybe there's not a clean answer there.

01:22:11

But, yeah, these guys, like, obviously I know them.

01:22:16

So, I have a tendency to lean towards what they tell me.

01:22:20

So, maybe there's a strong bias there as well.

01:22:23

But I also know that they will tell you there are a lot of guys that do it wrong.

01:22:27

Sure.

01:22:28

That are in the forces across the U.S.

01:22:31

Like, there are a lot of people who genuinely are in the police force to do harm.

01:22:36

Which is sad.

01:22:37

And those are the gentlemen that they, you know, those are the guys that my friends would like to get out of the force.

01:22:44

Well, this just in, people suck.

01:22:46

Yeah.

01:22:47

Yep.

01:22:48

So, again, I don't know what the answer is. I'm not smart enough.

01:22:51

I don't know that world well enough to propose anything or have an opinion on it.

01:22:56

I just know that per the story of Amadeus and what we've seen over the last few years, like, it does happen.

01:23:04

Should it happen? No.

01:23:07

How do you solve it? I don't have an answer.

01:23:09

I wish I did.

01:23:10

There are no answers to this sort of thing.

01:23:13

I think the answer is just try to slow things down whenever you can.

01:23:19

That's my big takeaway from this section.

01:23:22

Not an action item because I'm not looking for those moments of conflict where my heart is racing

01:23:27

and I'm going to do something stupid so I can practice calming and slowing things down.

01:23:32

Great.

01:23:33

But, yeah.

01:23:35

But that's the thing here is like, you hear this story and it resonates because you hear stuff all the time

01:23:41

now via social media and you think to yourself, this is terrible.

01:23:46

This has to stop.

01:23:47

Yes, it does have to stop.

01:23:49

But the truth is that we're all in situations, not life or death situations, but mind reading failures like this happen all the time.

01:23:57

So, you can take away from this section, I believe, the fact that I'm going to try and do better in this area.

01:24:06

This is probably the one area where I did feel like there is a solid takeaway for me here.

01:24:12

Not action item worthy, but at least like, how is this going to affect me?

01:24:16

I'm going to try to take things a little bit slower, even though I'm not a police officer.

01:24:21

Alright, action items, we know there are none.

01:24:27

None.

01:24:28

Style and rating?

01:24:29

Style and rating.

01:24:30

Well, I will say it's an entertaining read.

01:24:33

You know, it's pretty easy to sit down and read this book.

01:24:37

So, from a style stance, I really liked it.

01:24:40

The stories are definitely engaging.

01:24:42

I had quite a few qualms with things that were left out or left unanswered, seemingly intentionally.

01:24:48

So, that left me with somewhat of a bad taste of my mouth thinking I was being played as I was reading this, which is kind of unfortunate.

01:24:57

I struggle with this one.

01:25:01

I'm going to put it at 3.5.

01:25:06

It didn't strike me.

01:25:09

It's kind of an interesting meandering journey.

01:25:12

It's kind of interesting to know about, but this is not...

01:25:17

I'm not going to recommend this to anybody.

01:25:19

I don't think.

01:25:21

Yeah.

01:25:22

Yeah, I'm going to leave it there.

01:25:25

So, I took lots of notes in this book, but what is interesting to me is that I'm looking through my mind-note file right now.

01:25:34

I don't see a single page number, and I also don't see a single quote.

01:25:40

That is the first time that has ever happened.

01:25:43

So, all that to say, like, I think this is a good book.

01:25:46

It's not the kind of thing I would typically pick for Bookworm.

01:25:51

I also think that because there's nothing specific that I took away from this, this is a great candidate for an audiobook.

01:26:00

I tend to listen to audiobooks when they're biographies or like creativity ink, but not productivity books where I want to know the specifics and I want to have a record of it.

01:26:09

I want to go back and reference it later.

01:26:11

There's not a whole lot from this that I want to go back and reference later because there wasn't any specific things that I latched onto and like, this is what I want to implement.

01:26:19

But it is a very entertaining read.

01:26:21

Knock 'em Gladwell is a phenomenal writer and a really good storyteller.

01:26:25

And so, if you were to just listen to this as a story, I think you probably walk away from this thinking this book is amazing.

01:26:33

Oh, sure.

01:26:34

But that's not the approach that I had when I went into it.

01:26:37

So, through the Bookworm lens, again, no action items from this, that's kind of crazy.

01:26:42

But it's totally, you get it if you've gone through and read this book.

01:26:48

So, I'm going to give this three stars in the Bookworm context.

01:26:53

If you were looking for an audiobook, I would say this is probably four and a half.

01:26:59

Don't average those out.

01:27:00

Just put the three for the rating for Bookworm.

01:27:02

But I do want to say that this is a very good book.

01:27:07

It is not something I'm going to necessarily recommend that people go through for the content.

01:27:13

But if you're looking for something that is not just going to be mindless entertainment, going back to the Dotsie collect that Chris Bailey talks about hyperfocus, you could do a lot worse than Blink.

01:27:23

I really do like Knock 'em Gladwell's style.

01:27:25

Sure.

01:27:26

I don't like it in terms of distilling things down and giving people solid action items on how to apply stuff to their lives because you're left with a bunch of questions.

01:27:35

Sometimes that is the goal.

01:27:37

That's good.

01:27:38

In the Bookworm context, I think people want answers.

01:27:43

But it is valuable to stop sometimes and ask the questions and Milk 'em Gladwell definitely gets you to do that.

01:27:48

Right.

01:27:49

Let's put this one on the shelf.

01:27:51

What's next?

01:27:52

Next is the Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin, which was a Bookworm Club recommendation.

01:27:59

And I've not read anything by Gretchen Rubin, but I see her name pop up all the time, so I'm excited to dive into this one.

01:28:05

Have you looked at what my selection is?

01:28:08

I have.

01:28:09

Yeah, I'm excited about this.

01:28:10

All right.

01:28:11

So this is also a recommendation.

01:28:13

And I only know that because I just looked.

01:28:15

I picked it before I even looked.

01:28:17

So I'm sorry.

01:28:18

Whoever posted this on the recommendations.

01:28:20

I would like to go through Atomic Habits by James Clear.

01:28:24

I picked this up not too long ago.

01:28:26

I have not read it yet.

01:28:27

I know you have Mike.

01:28:28

I keep hearing about it that it's the de facto book that we should go through about habits.

01:28:33

I'm in the middle of changing a lot of my habits because of diet and stuff right now.

01:28:37

So I know we did the power of habit not too long ago.

01:28:41

So that's still kind of in the back of my mind.

01:28:45

So I'd like to compare this one to it.

01:28:48

So here we are.

01:28:49

Good.

01:28:50

I've found myself multiple times talking about atomic habits and holding back because in the

01:28:57

back of my mind, I'm thinking, we're going to do this one for bookworm at some point.

01:29:02

So be able to get it all off my chest.

01:29:05

Yeah, the time is coming there.

01:29:07

I don't have a gap book this time around.

01:29:10

It's been crazy for me.

01:29:11

So fail there.

01:29:13

I do have one which is a newer book by Chris Hogan.

01:29:17

He's a Dave Ramsey celebrity.

01:29:21

He's the big football player with the voice of God.

01:29:25

His book is Everyday Millionaires.

01:29:27

Seriously, if you ever heard this guy talk, he's like, "Wow, he's got a radio voice."

01:29:31

Yes, he does.

01:29:32

So maybe get this one on audio book.

01:29:36

Nice.

01:29:37

Basic idea here and what's really kind of interesting about this book, like Dave Ramsey would tell

01:29:41

you anybody can become a millionaire, right?

01:29:43

All you got to do is develop the right financial habits.

01:29:46

This book by Chris Hogan, he actually did a ton of research and interviewed something like

01:29:51

10,000 millionaires.

01:29:52

So there's a lot of stories and a lot of statistics in this book.

01:29:57

But I just started it.

01:29:58

Nice.

01:29:59

Well, he has a lot of me know how it goes.

01:30:01

I've read a few books on millionaires.

01:30:03

So curious your take on that one because I've not read that one.

01:30:06

In line with thinking bigger.

01:30:08

All right.

01:30:10

So if you want to recommend a book, you can do so via the bookworm club or also through

01:30:15

the site, which is bookworm.fm.

01:30:17

And if you go to bookworm.fm/list, you will see a list of all of the books that we have

01:30:22

covered as well as a list of some books.

01:30:25

I believe that we plan to cover, although I have to admit the last couple of times I've

01:30:29

published something, I haven't updated that list.

01:30:31

So it might be, might be out of date.

01:30:33

Hashtag Mike fail.

01:30:34

Yep.

01:30:35

Sorry guys.

01:30:36

We do have chapter markers now.

01:30:37

Whoo hoo.

01:30:38

Chapter markers.

01:30:39

Well, if I've had this question a handful of times, how do we support bookworm?

01:30:43

There's three ways.

01:30:44

One, leave us an iTunes review.

01:30:47

Link in the show notes.

01:30:48

Go out, click the button, tell us what you think of the show.

01:30:50

We do read those.

01:30:51

So we've tweaked the show a few times based on those.

01:30:54

So let us know.

01:30:55

Two, you can join the club club.bookworm.fm.

01:30:58

There's a bunch of conversations going on there about the episodes themselves, but that's

01:31:02

also where you leave book recommendations.

01:31:05

Number three, the links in the show notes for the books are affiliate links through Amazon.

01:31:12

So clicking on those, we do get a kickback from that.

01:31:15

So that's one great way that you can support the show if you're looking for a financial

01:31:20

way in some form to do that.

01:31:22

Clicking those links, buying your books through those links does support us in this process.

01:31:26

I want to share real quick a review that came in recently.

01:31:30

This is from the momster eight.

01:31:32

Says, so glad I found this.

01:31:34

I love reading.

01:31:35

I appreciate the depth in which Mike and Joe discussed the books.

01:31:37

I've read many of the books and sometimes I don't always finish the book or will gloss

01:31:41

over things.

01:31:42

But we're listening to the podcast has helped me go deeper and appreciate the books even

01:31:45

more.

01:31:46

Thank you for your service to the reading community.

01:31:47

So thank you, momster for the review.

01:31:50

I want to throw out one more plug to for the review because I want to take down KCRW.

01:31:54

So come on people, join the revolution.

01:31:56

Buy a bookworm t-shirt if you want.

01:31:58

And if you're reading along, pick up the four tendencies by Gretchen Rubin and we will talk

01:32:02

to you all in a couple of weeks.