Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

So I am liking the area that you set up in the club Joe for posting our action items.

00:00:06

I feel like that's going to add a ton of accountability.

00:00:08

Yeah, I know it's been fun for me at least.

00:00:11

You were super slow in getting yours out there.

00:00:13

I felt like you just didn't want to talk about them right away.

00:00:15

I was.

00:00:16

Well, we were talking a little bit before we hit record about my crazy day, but it's

00:00:21

actually been a couple of crazy weeks because I was working on this video project which

00:00:25

ended up being way bigger than I originally anticipated and the deadline didn't move because

00:00:31

it coincides with an app release.

00:00:34

So I literally worked like 12 hour days, 13 days in a row, I think, to get that out the

00:00:41

door and didn't even think about the core more action items until after that happened.

00:00:45

Sorry, everybody.

00:00:46

That would be a mic fail.

00:00:48

Yep, but they are up there now and I think it's cool to see some of the conversation that's

00:00:54

happening in some of those.

00:00:56

There's a lot of back and forth on your exercise habit, for example.

00:00:59

Yes, yes.

00:01:00

So actually, do you want to talk about that one first?

00:01:03

I know it's not in the exact order we've gotten the outline, but since I brought it up.

00:01:07

Yeah, no, that's cool.

00:01:09

Because I think it was like the day that the episode released, I went up and put my action

00:01:17

items on the club and I had the two which was building an exercise habit and building

00:01:23

a journaling habit.

00:01:24

And I've been trying to, you know, every four or five days or so, three days, sometimes

00:01:28

every day, just kind of depends.

00:01:30

It's just posting updates on what's going on with me and those.

00:01:35

And it's been kind of fun to get some feedback.

00:01:38

I can tell there's a couple of you that really want me to spend a lot of money on a cycling

00:01:41

bike right now.

00:01:43

That's the peloton.

00:01:44

It's just not going to happen.

00:01:46

So it's just not.

00:01:50

It's the classic, everybody, it's really easy to spend somebody else's money, but I'm not

00:01:54

going to.

00:01:55

Sorry.

00:01:56

It does look cool though.

00:01:57

I get it, but I'm just not going to put it in the middle of my living room and say,

00:02:00

"Amazing."

00:02:01

No, just not going to do it.

00:02:02

Put it in the middle of your master suite slash office.

00:02:05

Sure, sure.

00:02:07

That would go over real well, I'm sure.

00:02:10

In fact, you could ride it while you're podcasting next episode.

00:02:14

Do you think it would make noise?

00:02:16

Probably.

00:02:17

Okay.

00:02:18

That's my sump pump today.

00:02:19

If you hear the big loud shh-shh-shh-shh.

00:02:21

It's a sump pump sitting.

00:02:25

Not too far from me, because lots of snow, when it warms up, equals lots of water, which

00:02:29

means trying to keep water out of the house.

00:02:32

Yeah.

00:02:33

It quit running a little bit earlier, so I think we're okay.

00:02:34

Anyway, I posted about the exercise thing.

00:02:37

My wife and I have been doing yoga every other night, about three times a week.

00:02:43

That has proven to be super helpful and is working really well as far as the exercise

00:02:47

piece goes.

00:02:48

I cannot tell you that I ever thought I would be somebody who does yoga.

00:02:55

I have no idea why.

00:02:56

It's just never crossed my mind.

00:02:58

It's never been a thing that I've been interested in.

00:03:02

And yet here I am.

00:03:04

Well, you and Brett Terps for both.

00:03:06

I remember talking to him at Max Talk last year and he was getting into it.

00:03:11

My wife saw some of the stuff that he was posting and the poses he was doing and stuff.

00:03:16

She's into yoga.

00:03:17

I'm really not.

00:03:18

I'm really interested in doing yoga.

00:03:19

I understand the value of it.

00:03:20

I probably will at some point.

00:03:22

It's probably going to be an action item for one of these episodes.

00:03:24

In fact, I did have one a long time ago to try it.

00:03:28

But anyway, she saw Brett and she's like, "He's really good."

00:03:32

Yeah.

00:03:33

Well.

00:03:34

So maybe you and Brett can do yoga to get it.

00:03:36

I don't know how close you guys are in Frozen Tundra over there.

00:03:39

I don't know.

00:03:40

He's a couple hours away from me.

00:03:41

So not likely to happen, but yeah, still interesting.

00:03:45

I will say it's been fascinating to see how that particular practice has destroyed my meditation

00:03:51

habit altogether.

00:03:52

So funny.

00:03:55

It rendered my meditation habit completely useless, it seems.

00:04:00

That one fell off.

00:04:02

Whoops.

00:04:03

I don't know.

00:04:04

But that's been kind of a fun one to see building.

00:04:08

So my wife and I do it together.

00:04:10

So it was a little bit of the accountability there.

00:04:12

The journaling habit, I have had a handful of nights when I have not done it, but for

00:04:17

the bulk of the time I am every night, I probably need to post an update on that one on the

00:04:22

club.

00:04:23

But that one, not anything like groundbreaking out of it other than the habit does exist.

00:04:29

And it seems to help me with reflecting on what happened that day.

00:04:32

So that one's going journaling, in my opinion, is kind of like a complimentary book and maybe

00:04:38

to meditation where that really makes a difference.

00:04:43

For me, I can see in the long run when I consistently do that.

00:04:48

And it's been a battle for me back and forth over the years to maintain that habit.

00:04:53

I do have an action item of using a habit tracker, which is going to help in all areas.

00:04:58

That one included.

00:04:59

But for me, that's the one where I notice it if I don't journal every night, like after

00:05:04

three or four days, I start to recognize that I'm way more stressed out and everything's

00:05:08

a much bigger deal than it needs to be.

00:05:11

And so I don't know why doing it at the end of the day for me really moves the needle as

00:05:16

opposed to a lot of people do the meditation at the beginning of the day.

00:05:19

And that really makes a difference that they can see.

00:05:22

I didn't really see that from the meditation piece, but I definitely see it from the journaling

00:05:26

habit.

00:05:27

Yeah.

00:05:28

I think most nights, whenever I've done yoga, I end up journaling afterwards.

00:05:34

Oddly enough, I think I end up journaling longer during those times.

00:05:41

Not sure if there's any correlation there, but it is what it is.

00:05:45

You have a fancy pen and a paper notebook that you use for this, right?

00:05:49

Totally.

00:05:50

Okay.

00:05:51

So how long do you typically journal?

00:05:52

What's your process look like?

00:05:53

Do you have a concept you answered?

00:05:55

Do you just morning pages in the evening sort of thing?

00:05:59

No, not exactly that.

00:06:00

But I know that whenever I sit down, like I've got the fancy pen, I've got the journal, but

00:06:08

I don't know.

00:06:10

I guess I just I sit down after like I've got everything set out for the next day, all my

00:06:16

coffee gear, breakfast, blah, blah, blah.

00:06:20

And then I'm sitting down to because I did the whole habit buckling thing where I've got

00:06:26

one habit and I just buckled this on to the end of it.

00:06:29

So it just becomes part of that flow.

00:06:31

So thank you, James Clear, for that particular process by making that shift to putting it

00:06:40

at that time.

00:06:41

I just grabbed my lake term notebook and then I've got the fountain pen that I just sat

00:06:46

down with it.

00:06:47

But really all I'm trying to do is figure out how do I feel about how the day went.

00:06:53

Seems like I've got enough moving and going on right now that there's usually one point

00:06:58

that I'm either worried about, stressed about or trying to make a decision about that, whatever

00:07:05

that thing is from the day or sometimes it's a couple things.

00:07:09

I'll sit down and write those.

00:07:11

I had a couple nights where it was one sentence.

00:07:13

I had a couple nights where it was probably a couple paragraphs.

00:07:16

It just kind of depends on what's on my mind because I'm just trying to get that out of

00:07:20

my head.

00:07:21

Otherwise, sleep eludes me and it helps me to get some of that out of my brain so that

00:07:28

I can settle down.

00:07:29

So not rocket science, not anything specific, but pretty fluid.

00:07:34

Gotcha.

00:07:35

Well, that's the thing with all of this personal growth, self improvement stuff is I think

00:07:40

people have a negative view towards it because they think that the people who are saying

00:07:46

this stuff think that this is revolutionary stuff and it's they've discovered the secret

00:07:51

of life, but none of it is complicated.

00:07:54

No, no.

00:07:56

It's actually pretty simple if you think about it, which is why I really appreciated atomic

00:08:00

habits by James Clear because literally it all comes down to your habits.

00:08:03

You do the right things every day.

00:08:04

You get the right results.

00:08:05

You get the wrong things every day.

00:08:06

You get the wrong results.

00:08:07

Right.

00:08:08

Right.

00:08:09

Totally.

00:08:10

And then it's constantly adjust and repair.

00:08:12

So you hear us talk about it and I feel like on this podcast, we try to do anyways a decent

00:08:18

job of not portraying ourselves as the experts and we've got this all figured out.

00:08:23

But the truth is that if you do hear that in the productivity space that those people

00:08:28

mess up just like everybody else does and they're constantly rebooting their habits and

00:08:34

figuring things out and making adjustments and nobody's mastered this stuff, even though

00:08:40

it's not complicated.

00:08:41

Yeah.

00:08:42

If you ever want proof that we don't know what we're doing, just look at how many times

00:08:44

I've tried the meditation habit.

00:08:47

Proof right there.

00:08:49

Yeah.

00:08:50

All right.

00:08:51

What do you got?

00:08:52

So my, uh, my action items here, I had an action item to reevaluate my habits and also

00:08:57

to use a habit tracker.

00:08:59

I kind of combine these because I am using a habit tracker.

00:09:02

I'm using productive, which is the best one that I've found for a lot of people.

00:09:08

I even wrote a review of it for the sweet setup.

00:09:11

Not too long ago.

00:09:13

Even though at the time I was experimenting with a different one, a habitica, which is

00:09:19

kind of like a social thing, but it completely stopped working for me the other day.

00:09:23

And that was kind of the thing that got me away from using something.

00:09:26

And I kind of just let it sit for quite a while.

00:09:29

And then when we did the James Clear book, I recognized that, oh yeah, I really do need

00:09:33

that, that piece back.

00:09:35

So I am proud to say that I'm using productive and it is going well.

00:09:40

It also, one of the unexpected benefits of doing this is like the journaling habit, for

00:09:44

example, I do that fairly consistently.

00:09:47

So in my mind, I'm a legend and I do it every single night, right?

00:09:51

But productive tells me, no, you missed it last night.

00:09:55

So yeah, that's helpful.

00:09:58

So the stuff I put in here, the stuff in my morning routine, which I mentioned, I've

00:10:02

kind of simplified.

00:10:03

So it's reading my Bible, praying and stretching.

00:10:06

I've got a couple of things that I do anytime during the day.

00:10:09

A lot of them are fitness related.

00:10:10

And one of the cool things about productive is you can say, I want to do this so many

00:10:13

times in a week.

00:10:14

So I've got hit the gym three times a week, go for a run two times a week.

00:10:19

And then cycling is something that I need to do for my knee based on the physical therapy

00:10:23

that I did.

00:10:24

So I have that for once a week, adds up to six times a week.

00:10:27

Sure.

00:10:28

I've also got a habit which I have set to anytime during the day, but only during work

00:10:33

days.

00:10:34

So Monday through Friday of writing.

00:10:36

So this is going to inspire me to write every single day, which is tied to all of the goals

00:10:41

that I want to achieve for my 12 week year.

00:10:44

And then I've got two in the evening, which is read and journal.

00:10:49

And like I said, for the most part, I do pretty good with these.

00:10:52

Although I was really mad at myself to recognize that I forgot journal last night and I broke

00:10:57

my streak.

00:10:58

So I guess the app is doing what it's supposed to.

00:11:02

Nice.

00:11:03

Yeah.

00:11:04

No, as long as it works, like I've tried these trackers before, but it just doesn't seem

00:11:09

to trip my trigger for whatever reason.

00:11:12

Yeah.

00:11:13

And I think if you, if you have a lot of habits that are fairly firmly ingrained and those

00:11:18

are fine, productive also has a cool feature, which will help you stack one additional habit

00:11:25

on top of it, which is called a boost mode.

00:11:28

And it's kind of like a do style nagging reminder for a specific habit.

00:11:33

So if journaling is a thing that you really want to add to all the habits that you are

00:11:37

in the, that you hit all the time, you can say, boost this one.

00:11:42

And then when you set an alarm for 7 p.m. for example, to remind you to journal, it will

00:11:48

keep reminding you over and over and over again until you do it.

00:11:51

And you can customize how often the intervals are and how much it's going to, it's going

00:11:55

to bother you.

00:11:56

But really it's just going to annoy the heck out of you until you finally, finally do what

00:12:00

you said you were going to do.

00:12:01

And I think that's a really cool mechanism for stacking these habits.

00:12:06

Sure.

00:12:07

Cool.

00:12:08

So yeah, I'm happy with productive at the moment.

00:12:10

I'm sure something new and shiny will appear in the future and I'll take a look at it.

00:12:14

But it's working for now.

00:12:16

Shint over and call it good.

00:12:18

Yep.

00:12:19

Another one I had was to add questions to my personal retreat of what habits do I want

00:12:24

to add and remove.

00:12:26

And you commented in the club that this seems really easy and you should have done it by

00:12:29

now.

00:12:30

And I said, yes, I have done it for me, but I also have a course about this.

00:12:36

And I feel like a hypocrite if I add it and don't include it in the course.

00:12:41

So I've got a list of things that I want to update in the personal retreat course.

00:12:46

Chris Upchurch, who is somebody that I met actually at the Mac Power User's Live event

00:12:51

in Chicago, had asked me to update the workbook with all the prompts from the videos.

00:12:56

So that's on the list and then adding this to the list.

00:12:59

That's going to be there as well.

00:13:00

And there's a couple other things that I've been kicking around, changes that I want to

00:13:02

make.

00:13:03

Sure.

00:13:04

I don't know if that's worth tracking on a bookworm.

00:13:07

That's not going to happen in the immediate future because I've got a bunch of stuff that

00:13:11

I need to ship.

00:13:13

But that's why I say that one is not finished yet.

00:13:16

Sure.

00:13:17

Cool.

00:13:18

The other one I've got is to consider the question, how can I rewrite the rules in my

00:13:22

favor?

00:13:23

As I listened back to the episode that we did last time, I mentioned that I think I'm

00:13:27

kind of doing this already.

00:13:28

I realized after I've thought about this, I really am doing this.

00:13:31

But one of the additional ways that I want to do this to a greater degree is with faith-based

00:13:38

productivity.

00:13:39

So I mentioned this is kind of like the center of all the things that I care about.

00:13:45

But as I've been thinking about that course and the impact that I want to have, it occurred

00:13:50

to me that there's another angle to this which I hadn't really considered.

00:13:56

Like I kind of considered it, but I feel like I have more clarity because of this question,

00:14:00

which is these in-person workshops.

00:14:03

So I went to the Focus Course Live by Sean Blonk and he basically taught the entire Focus

00:14:08

Course in a single day.

00:14:09

And I thought that was a really cool way to do it.

00:14:11

And that kind of planted a seed.

00:14:14

And then as I thought about this question, I was thinking to myself, you know, my life

00:14:17

theme, I want to help people connect to their calling, discover their destiny, live a life

00:14:20

they were created for.

00:14:22

How can I do that more effectively on a greater scale?

00:14:25

And I kind of got this picture of like a church, for example, brings me in and I teach a one-day

00:14:30

workshop is a way to offset the cost of me coming in and teaching in person, which has

00:14:37

a whole bunch of added benefits for me that go above and beyond listening to a podcast

00:14:42

or even the video course.

00:14:44

For me, that's one of the things I love about public speaking is I can make eye contact with

00:14:48

somebody and I feel like I can make a bigger impact.

00:14:51

But also the course is a cool way to support that.

00:14:54

So I'm not just an inspirational speaker who comes and jacks everybody up and then leaves

00:14:59

and nothing actually changes.

00:15:01

So to offset the cost of bringing me in, everybody gets access to the course.

00:15:04

Now you've got a system that you can use to support it after I leave.

00:15:09

And I kind of got, as I was thinking about this picture of like pastors of small churches

00:15:15

specifically, they have a tough job because they have to coordinate a volunteer army.

00:15:22

You're not paying any of those people to do things, but you've got this vision for your

00:15:26

church and you've got to get everybody on board with that vision and then plugged into

00:15:30

the right places so that the church can accomplish its mission, right?

00:15:35

That can be tough and wouldn't it be great if everybody in your church really connected

00:15:41

with the gifts and the anointings that they have, like the way that they're wired and

00:15:45

they can flow in those things and they're excited about being plugged in the spot that

00:15:49

they are, like how much more of an impact could your local church have in that scenario.

00:15:54

So that's kind of the outcome from this particular action item and I'm sure there's going to

00:15:59

be more from this, but I like this one.

00:16:01

I think this is maybe something that I need to add to my personal retreat as well, but

00:16:06

I don't want to make that formal.

00:16:07

Sure.

00:16:08

No, it sounds like an interesting like that question.

00:16:12

How can I rewrite the rules in my favor?

00:16:14

I could see that being a very good one to come back to regularly.

00:16:18

Like I was trying to think through, would this make sense to put into like one of my

00:16:21

normal reviews?

00:16:24

Maybe I don't know.

00:16:25

I may not personally.

00:16:27

I feel like I come at that very differently, but I could see how if you hadn't considered

00:16:32

this before, it could be very helpful.

00:16:33

Yeah, I think that is one of those clarifying questions maybe where it constantly refines

00:16:41

your vision and I don't think you can do that enough.

00:16:44

Obviously you have limited time.

00:16:46

So at some point you got to quit asking the question and start doing the work, but I think

00:16:51

there's value from it as long as you keep considering it.

00:16:54

The other thing that we've got here under follow up, which is something new and this

00:16:59

kind of just happened because I tweeted a, or sent you a screenshot of the overcast terms,

00:17:08

I guess I was digging around in the settings the other day and I found this section for

00:17:11

podcasters on how you can implement the little button to support your shows, like Relays

00:17:16

got those where you can go to the overcast screen and you can tap on the little money

00:17:22

icon in the bottom and that takes you to the membership page and if you want to pay a couple

00:17:26

bucks a month, you can support your favorite shows.

00:17:30

So I sent that to you and then what was it, a couple hours later?

00:17:34

You're like, I've got this set up.

00:17:36

I was like, okay, here you go, that's all done, got it.

00:17:41

I got that covered because this is, you know, this whole topic and I suppose for the listeners,

00:17:47

you should probably know, Mike and I talk a lot about ways that we can continue to, I

00:17:55

hate the term, but monetize bookworm in a way that would allow us to continue doing

00:18:00

it because it does take a significant amount of time.

00:18:03

Let me put it a different way, keep bookworm alive because with your corporate job, like

00:18:08

we've had to really juggle some things in order to make this work.

00:18:13

We've recorded on Saturdays and Sundays, which is a thing at one point, I was like,

00:18:16

I'm never going to do that.

00:18:19

And it's also why this episode is going out late because we had a weekend scheduling recorded

00:18:25

and then some health stuff came up.

00:18:27

Totally understand.

00:18:28

Like you got to do what you got to do.

00:18:29

But that's the problem with the quote unquote passion projects.

00:18:35

Like you got to pay the bills.

00:18:37

And so at some point we got to consider like what do we get from the effort that we put

00:18:43

into bookworm and is it a project we want to keep doing?

00:18:46

And both you and I are totally committed to keeping this thing going as long as we possibly

00:18:52

can.

00:18:53

But also I know you've mentioned before too, like the financial consideration, the return

00:18:59

on the investment is something that weighs into the equation.

00:19:02

So we've been thinking about that for a long time, not just, well, how do we profit off

00:19:08

of bookworm?

00:19:09

But how do we make this something that is sustainable without doing it in a sleazy,

00:19:16

scummy way?

00:19:18

Because we don't like some of the traditional options that are out there.

00:19:21

You specifically, I know you mentioned you're not a fan of ads.

00:19:24

Yeah, no, this is because how many podcasts do we listen to that everybody has ads on

00:19:31

them?

00:19:32

It's how it like it's the economy of podcasts.

00:19:34

Like that's how podcasters make their money off of the show.

00:19:40

I personally just don't like ads period.

00:19:43

I even run on my own VPN that blocks ads like that's just the way that I do that.

00:19:50

I just I don't like the process at all.

00:19:52

And we've talked about it.

00:19:53

So many times we've had conversations with people about bringing ads onto the show, but

00:19:58

it's it's never worked out.

00:19:59

I'm kind of glad it's never worked out.

00:20:03

So when Mike texted me and was like, you know, is there a way for us to set up kind

00:20:07

of a membership of sorts for bookworms?

00:20:11

Like, yes, absolutely.

00:20:12

Let's let's try that path.

00:20:14

So dear listener, what we're trying to do and what we're doing in experiment here is

00:20:21

looking for ways to bring support to the show that allows us to keep ads off of it.

00:20:27

Like that's that's the process that we're working our way through.

00:20:32

So the mechanism by which we're doing this is through the Bookworm Club, you can get to

00:20:38

the membership page via bookworm.fm/membership.

00:20:43

And that'll take you to the sign up page for it.

00:20:45

You have to have an account on the club before you can go through that process.

00:20:49

But once you do and once you sign up to become a member of the of the membership side of

00:20:55

this, we're granting you access to a members only area of the club.

00:21:02

But you also get the really cool little badge.

00:21:03

If you've been to the club, you see how Mike and I have the little Bookworm logo next to

00:21:07

our avatars, you'll get that as well.

00:21:10

So those are the two things as kind of perks, if you will, for those as a part of the membership

00:21:16

who will become a member of Bookworm in that way.

00:21:19

So that's that's what we're starting with.

00:21:21

We have lots of ideas on what we're hoping to bring to members only area.

00:21:26

You know, we've we've talked about a bunch of different things.

00:21:29

I would be very interested in, you know, if you have thoughts on what should be a part

00:21:33

of that and you do sign up, let us know when that member's only area.

00:21:37

That's that's an area that we're wanting to start with to try to help us keep ads off

00:21:41

the show.

00:21:42

Like that's that's our a current experiment with it.

00:21:45

So if that sounds appealing to you, bookworm.fm/membership, that'll get you started in that process.

00:21:52

Yeah.

00:21:53

And I don't want to make any specific promises, but some of the stuff that we've kicked the

00:21:56

kicked around just to give people some ideas are like a private feed for the gap books

00:22:02

that we do, which would probably not be a full on Bookworm episode.

00:22:06

But we would talk about some of the other stuff that we read that isn't officially part

00:22:10

of Bookworm.

00:22:11

I've got lots of stickers, lots of bookmarks that I could send people.

00:22:16

I'll say.

00:22:17

Yeah.

00:22:18

So we do want to hear like what would what would make membership more more worth it for

00:22:22

you, but for anybody who does want to wait to support the show for five bucks a month,

00:22:27

we welcome any support that you would want to want to give us.

00:22:30

And we really appreciate everybody who who listens to the show, not just the people who

00:22:34

leave the reviews and who post on the club.

00:22:37

The Libsyn stats show that the show is growing and we're thankful for everybody who listens,

00:22:42

whether you decide to support us financially or not.

00:22:44

There you go.

00:22:45

Support the show, Bookworm.fm/membership.

00:22:46

Ready to take go.

00:22:48

All right.

00:22:49

So that always feels weird asking for money.

00:22:52

Let's move on to the book.

00:22:53

Okay.

00:22:54

I'm sure.

00:22:55

And you know, it's kind of fun to bring that up because we're talking about trying not

00:23:00

to have ads on the show, which brings us to today's book, which is perfectly suited for

00:23:04

that.

00:23:05

Yes.

00:23:06

I have to talk about digital minimalism by Cal Newport.

00:23:10

And it is no secret that I love Cal Newport's writing.

00:23:14

So good.

00:23:15

They can't ignore you was maybe one of the more impactful books that I've read as I

00:23:19

think back over all the books that I read over the last several years and like what

00:23:24

I've applied from them.

00:23:26

I realized that I got a lot from that one.

00:23:28

I absolutely loved Deep Work and digital minimalism is the newest book by Cal and it's a little

00:23:34

bit different than some of the other ones.

00:23:36

In some ways, it's a natural extension of the Deep Work concept.

00:23:40

But in a lot of ways, it feels like a very different type of book.

00:23:46

He's kind of getting into territory where he knows he's going to take some people off.

00:23:50

And I feel like it affects his writing style a little bit.

00:23:54

I explained this book to a few different people.

00:23:58

And the way that I came at this mic was that I originally when I picked this up was very

00:24:04

skeptical because I knew exactly what was going to be in this book.

00:24:08

Get off social media, drop your email.

00:24:12

You just expect that.

00:24:14

That is exactly what he was setting out to do.

00:24:19

Kind of.

00:24:20

Yeah.

00:24:21

He does it in a different way than I expected though.

00:24:23

Yeah.

00:24:24

But the flip side of this is that that's what I expected.

00:24:27

And I expected the entire book to be about the things that we do every day on our devices

00:24:33

that we shouldn't be doing and how we should be cutting back on those.

00:24:37

But that was really only a piece of the puzzle.

00:24:40

That was only maybe half the book, maybe a little less than half the book.

00:24:46

It's definitely a theme that comes through the whole thing.

00:24:50

But the part that I did not expect was his whole philosophy on what should you be doing

00:24:58

instead.

00:24:59

Yeah.

00:25:00

Like that side of it, I was just completely caught off guard by.

00:25:02

That was not a piece of this I was expecting at all.

00:25:05

So he has this laid out in two different sections.

00:25:09

One, Foundations, two practices.

00:25:11

I thought it was kind of, you know, we rail on books because they always have three parts.

00:25:16

And he gives us one with two and then it felt weird.

00:25:19

Yeah.

00:25:20

The MindNote file for this looks really weird because it's just two colors.

00:25:25

Yeah.

00:25:26

So anyway, I thought that was kind of odd that this is the thing I bring up all the time.

00:25:29

Why are they always in three parts?

00:25:30

And then we get one that's not in three parts in it.

00:25:33

Yeah.

00:25:34

So yeah, that one I felt weird about.

00:25:37

But I did like that he had this whole second half of the book that wasn't based on drop

00:25:44

things.

00:25:45

It was very fascinating to me.

00:25:47

So it was more about how do you build a lifestyle as opposed to get off your phone.

00:25:53

Yeah, exactly.

00:25:54

And that's what I want to call out here at the beginning because people probably look

00:25:59

at the title and maybe they heard the introduction to the book and they're like, oh, I already

00:26:03

know what this is about.

00:26:05

I don't need to hear some researcher telling me how bad it is that I'm on my phone all

00:26:08

the time.

00:26:09

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

00:26:10

I've heard this all before.

00:26:12

You really haven't.

00:26:13

It's done in a way.

00:26:14

The beginning of the book, by the way, there is a lot of that because the foundations part,

00:26:19

the first chapter is called a Lopsided Arms Race.

00:26:22

And it's really all about the problem.

00:26:25

But after that, he basically moves on to state his position and what he thinks you should

00:26:31

do.

00:26:32

And then the whole second part of the book kind of gets into the nitty gritty details.

00:26:37

And I would argue that you don't have to go all out and do the digital declutter that

00:26:42

he talks about.

00:26:43

We'll get to that.

00:26:44

That's chapter three.

00:26:45

But there are pieces of this that anybody can apply.

00:26:48

And I feel like after you read this, even somebody who hears this stuff and has studied

00:26:52

this stuff, even researched this stuff, not to the degree that Cal has, but I've read

00:26:56

a lot of the articles and was familiar with a lot of the studies that he mentioned and

00:27:00

stuff like that.

00:27:02

Even someone who has heard this stuff before, he leaves you with a lot of actionable stuff.

00:27:07

Like, oh, that's a great idea.

00:27:09

I'm going to apply that.

00:27:10

I'm not going to go all in with everything that he says.

00:27:13

But although I do think there would be some benefit if you decided to do that too.

00:27:18

But anyways, we'll get to that.

00:27:20

That's chapter three.

00:27:21

Let's start with chapter one, the lopsided arms race.

00:27:23

This is kind of where he talks about the problem that we're facing.

00:27:27

And there's a couple of things here that I wanted to call out.

00:27:30

Number one, he makes an argument about the launch of the iPhone being the tipping point

00:27:35

for this stuff, which I have totally thought this, but he articulated it way better than

00:27:40

I did.

00:27:41

So do you remember the speech or the keynote that Steve Jobs gave when he introduced the

00:27:47

iPhone?

00:27:48

He introduced three new devices.

00:27:51

Yes.

00:27:52

The iPod, the phone, and the internet communicator.

00:27:55

And there was it like the 10th anniversary of the launch of the iPhone not too long ago

00:27:59

or the 10th anniversary of his death or something like that.

00:28:02

But people were replaying that keynote because it's kind of widely considered in the Apple

00:28:06

community his best keynote ever.

00:28:09

And if you think about it, it was really impactful and it was really well done.

00:28:13

But what struck me as I was listening to that stuff, even before I read digital minimalism,

00:28:18

is like, wow, they really underestimated the internet communicator part of that.

00:28:23

Yeah.

00:28:24

It's like, this is a little add on thing.

00:28:25

They listed it third and no one knew what this was going to be.

00:28:29

There was no app store at launch and wow, have things really grown since that point.

00:28:36

Yeah.

00:28:37

No kidding.

00:28:38

Because they originally released that with the intent to control what you could do with

00:28:42

it.

00:28:43

And because that's how phones worked at the time is you had certain apps that were only

00:28:48

built by the creators of that device.

00:28:51

And Apple followed suit on that.

00:28:53

They, you know, they had the apps that were on the phone that they built, but you couldn't

00:28:59

put anything else on it originally.

00:29:03

And if it had stayed that way, I don't know that we would have quite the problem that

00:29:09

he refers to in the book.

00:29:11

If we stayed that way, we'd have the minimal phone, which is still on Kickstarter.

00:29:14

Yeah, the light phone.

00:29:16

Yeah.

00:29:17

But I think that once they opened it up to other developers, which at this point, there

00:29:21

would have been so much pressure for that that they would eventually cave to it.

00:29:27

And now it's become a major revenue source for them.

00:29:30

Yeah.

00:29:31

But like from a business stance, that makes perfect sense.

00:29:34

Like I could easily see making that decision.

00:29:37

But it has led to quite the process that we have today.

00:29:43

And that's actually a conversation that I had recently with somebody is where is the

00:29:49

line between what is bad for somebody and they should know this and they should have

00:29:57

some self control versus what is the company's responsibility if they're preying on this

00:30:02

stuff.

00:30:03

Now one of the quotes in this book is by Bill Maher, he says, "Philip Morris, just one under

00:30:08

your lungs, the App Store wants your soul."

00:30:12

Which is maybe a little bit sensationalized, but as you read this, you start to think like,

00:30:17

"Well, maybe not so much."

00:30:20

He mentions an interview that Anderson Cooper did with Tristan Harris, who is a former

00:30:25

Google engineer who presented a talk at Google titled "A Call to Minimize Distraction and

00:30:31

Respect User's Attention."

00:30:33

This talk is still on the internet.

00:30:34

I went and looked through the whole thing.

00:30:36

Did you look at this at all?

00:30:38

Are you familiar with this?

00:30:39

I did not go through it after seeing.

00:30:42

I had watched that a while back.

00:30:44

So here's the thing.

00:30:48

With all of this, all the stuff we're getting ready to talk about when it involves the tech

00:30:52

industry and attention, I work in that industry.

00:30:57

So I'm very aware of and have been for a number of years now of the things that are being

00:31:03

done on these devices.

00:31:06

So a lot of that was not new to me.

00:31:09

It was very interesting to see how Cal Newport pulled it together.

00:31:12

In this particular case, I think it's probably a couple of years ago, maybe, that I watched

00:31:16

this.

00:31:17

Mike, it's been a while.

00:31:18

I had never heard of it and I went through the slide.

00:31:23

I didn't see the presentation he did, but I did find the original slides on the internet.

00:31:28

So I flipped through them and I was like, "Wow, this holds up really well."

00:31:33

He really nailed it.

00:31:35

Basically what he was saying is that as Google, they were uniquely positioned as one of the

00:31:41

top tech companies to put a stake in the ground and say, "We are going to be the company that

00:31:50

cares for our consumer."

00:31:52

And the way we're going to do that is we're not going to prey on their attention, which

00:31:58

it's kind of funny.

00:31:59

Google, they make their money.

00:32:02

They're in business now because of your personal day.

00:32:06

But that didn't start out that way.

00:32:08

He made this presentation and at the time, he was actually given a new title at Google

00:32:14

by the then CEO Larry Page as product philosopher.

00:32:19

But he left after a while because it ended up being not anything real.

00:32:24

It was just a title and he wasn't able to make any positive change.

00:32:28

Which again, I get, Google's got investors who are concerned about how much money can

00:32:34

you make and this stuff is really, really valuable.

00:32:36

So on one level or one angle, you can't really blame them for doing that on the other side.

00:32:42

When you recognize how much the profiting off of your personal data feels really sleazy

00:32:48

and scummy and you feel taken advantage of.

00:32:51

And that's the thing with this whole concept of digital minimalism is I don't think people

00:32:56

realize how valuable what they're giving to these companies is.

00:33:04

And it's not a fair exchange.

00:33:07

Gmail is, if you were to pay for it, five bucks a month and people just assume, "Well,

00:33:13

I'm going to use the personal one for free and I know they're going to use my data, but

00:33:17

that's okay because the service that I get back is worth it to me."

00:33:21

The amount of data that they're collecting from you and the amount of money that they're

00:33:24

profiting off of it is worth way more than what you are getting.

00:33:30

And I think if there was one mindset shift that people should understand from reading

00:33:35

this book, it would be just that.

00:33:38

So you can decide for yourself what habits you want to change, eliminate, whatever.

00:33:45

But just recognize how valuable your attention and your information is.

00:33:50

And don't just give it blindly away because it really is a valuable asset that you should

00:33:54

be protecting.

00:33:55

Yep.

00:33:56

There's a reason I run a VPN.

00:34:02

Yep.

00:34:03

Yeah.

00:34:04

I try to limit as much as I can from companies like Google.

00:34:12

And so much like I'm a big DuckDuckGo user.

00:34:15

Me too.

00:34:16

I've used DuckDuckGo for last probably year and a half, two years, almost entirely.

00:34:23

On that topic real quick, I got a shout out Brett Terpshoe just published as we record

00:34:27

this, the ultimate guide to DuckDuckGo.

00:34:29

Oh, right.

00:34:30

I think I saw that.

00:34:31

Show notes.

00:34:32

Yeah.

00:34:33

So anyway, that sort of thing, it's crazy if you dig into, and he goes into Facebook left

00:34:41

and right in this book.

00:34:43

Yep.

00:34:44

You know, between Facebook and Google and Twitter and all these social media and attention

00:34:50

companies, like how many websites do you go to today?

00:34:54

And you almost can't read them because of the ads and such on them.

00:34:58

It's just ridiculous.

00:34:59

Yes.

00:35:00

Just as an example, I pulled up, I'm not going to tell you what the website is.

00:35:04

I pulled up a specific website that I know is cluttered with tons and tons of ads and

00:35:09

timed it.

00:35:10

And I had a thing on my computer that would time how long it took to load the webpage,

00:35:15

ran it, and it took somewhere around 22 seconds to load the whole thing.

00:35:21

It got a lot of it up pretty quick, but then it continued to download more and more ads

00:35:26

as you sat there.

00:35:29

I turned on my VPN for it, which blocks a lot of that sort of thing, and it loaded the

00:35:35

entire site in three seconds.

00:35:38

So, okay.

00:35:40

What?

00:35:42

And then you start scrolling through it and it's like three-fourths of the page is just

00:35:45

blank because those are where all the ads are.

00:35:48

It's just all gone.

00:35:50

Okay.

00:35:52

Well, this is the economy of the internet is selling people's attention.

00:35:58

Like that is the way that it operates.

00:36:00

And I think this is the bulk of what Cal Newport is getting at is this is the problem with

00:36:06

the way that things operate on the interwebs.

00:36:09

It's just the way that things work.

00:36:10

Yeah.

00:36:11

And the addiction that stems from it is really the thing that people should be aware of.

00:36:18

So we don't need to go too deep into this, but I did find it interesting that he defines

00:36:23

what an addiction is as a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or

00:36:28

in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly

00:36:33

pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.

00:36:36

And he also shared that the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse said that growing

00:36:40

evidence suggests that behavioral addictions resub-- substance addictions in many domains.

00:36:45

So behavioral addictions is totally where the social media stuff fits in.

00:36:49

And there's a couple of forces that are really driving this.

00:36:52

One is the intermittent positive reinforcement where you're not sure if you're going to get

00:36:57

a whole bunch of likes or a whole bunch of, I don't know, like what else is out there?

00:37:02

I guess Twitter switched to likes too now, so it's not favorites, but--

00:37:06

Likes are everywhere.

00:37:07

Likes are everywhere, which is one of my action items is to never like again.

00:37:11

But I'll look it into that a little bit.

00:37:15

And then the other thing is the drive for social approval.

00:37:17

So the thing here is like when someone tags you, the thought process is, "Oh, they were

00:37:22

thinking of me."

00:37:23

But these two things combined cause you or compel you to keep going back there, but also

00:37:29

they never live up to the expectations that you have when you're craving this stuff.

00:37:34

So it's kind of a recipe for disaster.

00:37:37

The solution he proposes is digital minimalism, which is the second chapter here.

00:37:44

And he defines this as a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on

00:37:50

a number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you

00:37:55

value and then you happily miss out on everything else.

00:37:58

And I think this is a really cool idea, regardless of the degree to which you implement this.

00:38:03

Which this whole concept of digital minimalism, if you play off of-- and he has all kinds of

00:38:09

these deals in the problem area of the book of where they bring in psychologists and a

00:38:19

bunch of people to help build apps and tools to be addictive.

00:38:23

They don't intend it to be an addiction, but they will refer to-- they try to build in

00:38:29

mechanisms to where you don't know when the benefit is going to come.

00:38:32

You don't know when you're going to get the new notification.

00:38:34

So you got to check it all the time because then you get that little hit when you get

00:38:37

it.

00:38:38

Those are specifically engineered and designed to help bring you back more and more and more,

00:38:43

because every time you open up Facebook, they make money.

00:38:46

And in order to help combat that, the concept of digital minimalism is exactly what you

00:38:54

would think.

00:38:55

It is similar to the more broader term minimalism, where you only have tools and things that

00:39:05

provide value and they are usable in many different ways.

00:39:09

So you don't have access.

00:39:12

That being applied to your digital life can have some pretty broad ramifications.

00:39:19

And I think probably the one piece of this, Mike, that I thought was super helpful because

00:39:24

I'm very guilty of this.

00:39:25

I don't have an action item technically on this, but we have a tendency with digital

00:39:32

tools or apps, services, whatever you want to call them, that if there's any benefit

00:39:39

whatsoever that I could get from something, we adopt it.

00:39:44

As opposed to saying, is that a benefit I should have or can't get elsewhere?

00:39:49

The any benefit approach.

00:39:50

Yep, any benefit approach.

00:39:52

So if it's possible that I could have anything good out of Twitter, I should have it.

00:39:58

Period.

00:39:59

Not considering all of the negativity that comes with Twitter and the potential for worry

00:40:03

and the potential for bullying and all of that that can come with Twitter, Facebook the

00:40:09

same.

00:40:11

We don't consider that side of it and just say, okay, if there's a single good point

00:40:16

I can get from it, we adopt it, which is the absolute wrong mentality to have with that

00:40:22

because you don't necessarily need all of those things because it is possible that having

00:40:29

the thing, the social media or whatever it is, iPad, having that thing could bring you

00:40:37

potentially more harmful things and spend more time on things you shouldn't be doing

00:40:41

to begin with.

00:40:42

Yeah.

00:40:43

So, yes.

00:40:44

Okay, I'll quit ranting now.

00:40:47

And that's the thing from this section is to identify what costs and benefits are associated

00:40:56

with the different platforms that you're using because you don't just sign up for something

00:41:01

because it provides you a benefit.

00:41:04

You need to kind of do like a net cost analysis with all these things, which is one of the

00:41:10

action items that I have is to list the benefits that I get from the platforms that I use.

00:41:14

And I already know, I haven't gone through this completely, but I already know that there's

00:41:17

a couple things that are not going to be there anymore because if I'm honest with myself,

00:41:22

you know, I hang around there because I do get an occasional benefit from them, but they're

00:41:28

not providing a level of benefit enough for me to consistently go back to that well.

00:41:34

And one of the things, this isn't actually an action item for me, but I did write it down

00:41:38

in my outline is as I curb the social media use, how do I replace that with something better?

00:41:47

And one of the things that I think provides better, deeper interactions than a lot of

00:41:52

social media stuff is the discourse forums.

00:41:56

So the club for bookworm, for example, I have that in the discourse app and along with a

00:42:01

couple other, a couple other forums, like the MacPower users, one that you, you set up.

00:42:07

So there's a, the focus forum on there, but I've also got the club.

00:42:09

It's in the same app, you know, so it's, it's easy to go there and chime in and have conversations

00:42:14

with people who are way nicer than the general social media public.

00:42:21

And so like that's the place that I should be looking to have those meaningful interactions,

00:42:26

not Twitter necessarily.

00:42:28

And by the way, I'm not, I'm not Twitter is not the thing that I am going to be giving

00:42:32

up.

00:42:33

It is going to come off of my phone, by the way.

00:42:35

But yeah, all social media is going to come off of my phone as one of the action items

00:42:39

from here, but I'm not really to go, not ready to go all in with the digital declutter that

00:42:43

he talks about in the next chapter.

00:42:45

So I think I thought was fascinating about the whole digital minimalism concept, because

00:42:50

essentially what he's talking about with this section is only using tools that are necessary

00:42:58

for you to do what you find meaningful or that provide value to you or your community.

00:43:06

And I was fascinated to see how he started to talk about the Amish and the Mennonite communities.

00:43:12

Yeah.

00:43:13

That dumbfounded me because I grew up in an area where there was a fairly large like two

00:43:23

or three Amish communities and then a little bit further away from us.

00:43:26

There was three or four Mennonite communities.

00:43:29

So I had a lot of interactions with these communities and know quite a bit about how

00:43:36

they they do things.

00:43:37

So going through this and having him expound on how those communities make decisions on

00:43:44

what technology they will and won't use was one really interesting to learn about, but

00:43:50

two kind of dumbstruck me that it was in this book.

00:43:56

So yeah, you're actually making that correlation.

00:43:58

Like that is actually what you're saying.

00:44:01

Now he's not telling you go become Amish.

00:44:03

Like he's not making that call, but he's at least making a plea that you should have

00:44:10

the mentality of adopting technology that they go through.

00:44:13

So I thought it was interesting.

00:44:14

Yeah.

00:44:15

And I think I think this totally fits.

00:44:16

I had no idea what this process looked like.

00:44:19

So I found this the section really interesting and enlightening.

00:44:23

So he mentions that generally when new technology comes out, usually there is somebody in the

00:44:30

Amish community specifically.

00:44:31

I think he mentioned that there's a bishop and so they go to the bishop and they ask

00:44:35

if they can go look at this thing and usually they say yes.

00:44:38

And then the whole community is going to watch this one early adopter intently to see what

00:44:43

impact the technology is going to have.

00:44:46

So they're not just subscribing to the any benefit approach.

00:44:49

They're weighing is the net here positive or is it negative?

00:44:53

And if it's negative, then it's prohibited.

00:44:55

But if it's positive, usually it's adopted.

00:44:58

And then there's another piece here with I think he's I don't know how to pronounce this,

00:45:02

the Amish rum springer.

00:45:03

Is that how you say this?

00:45:05

Yes.

00:45:06

Which happens when an Amish youth turns 16.

00:45:09

I had no idea this this was a thing.

00:45:11

So they actually when they turn 16, they're allowed to leave and see what the outside

00:45:14

world is like before they decide to accept baptism into the Amish church.

00:45:19

So go explore, go see everything that the world has to offer.

00:45:23

And then if you want, you can come back.

00:45:26

What was astounding to me is that 80 to 90% decide to come back.

00:45:31

So it's not something where it's like, this is what we've always done.

00:45:34

This is the way my parents brought me up.

00:45:35

And so I'm stuck here because I've never experienced anything else.

00:45:38

Like they are told as a rite of passage, go experience something else.

00:45:42

Go experience the world.

00:45:43

And then if you decide to come back, you know, that great, but if you decide it's not for

00:45:48

you, then fine.

00:45:49

But I had no idea that it was going to be up to 90% would decide to come back.

00:45:53

That number seemed really high to me.

00:45:55

And I get it when you when you consider when you couple that with the process that they

00:46:00

use for adopting the technologies and weighing the overall positive versus negative.

00:46:05

I mean, it makes a lot of sense.

00:46:08

Yeah.

00:46:09

I'm not ready to become Amish.

00:46:10

That's not going to be an actual item.

00:46:11

But well, I can say like growing up in these areas and when I was in high school, there

00:46:15

were quite a few of the Amish kids that would come, you know, they got to drive.

00:46:21

They got to do a lot of these things that they didn't normally get to do.

00:46:24

So I hung out with a number of them that were on their rum spring.

00:46:27

So it was it was kind of cool to meet and get to know some of them.

00:46:31

But I can't think of one that didn't go back that I think all of them that I knew went

00:46:38

back and were a part of still to this day or part of that Amish community.

00:46:42

So yeah, I don't know.

00:46:45

I get it.

00:46:46

I think I get it anyway.

00:46:49

So but it's it's a fascinating process for sure.

00:46:52

And yep.

00:46:54

He, you know, as he expands on the digital minimalism concept of only adopting technology

00:47:01

that would be helpful to you and not adopting something just because it might be good for

00:47:06

you.

00:47:08

He does step you through this digitally clutter process of helping you see which ones you

00:47:15

should or shouldn't have in your life.

00:47:18

And it's a pretty severe process.

00:47:23

So just to try to explain what the digital declutter is.

00:47:28

It's a 30 day process one month.

00:47:31

Pick February if you can in that month.

00:47:34

I think that's what Sean Blanc did by the way.

00:47:36

Yes, he cheated.

00:47:37

Totally cheated in that one month period.

00:47:42

Your goal is to cut out absolutely everything that's unnecessary from a technology stance.

00:47:49

If it's not vital to you doing your job or it eliminates a connection point to somebody

00:47:57

you have to stay connected to get rid of it for 30 days.

00:48:02

Yeah, he defines optional as wouldn't harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation

00:48:07

of your personal or professional life.

00:48:09

There you go.

00:48:10

So using that definition, you eliminate everything out for one month.

00:48:16

When you're done, here's the theory.

00:48:20

After having done that one month period, you'll have the clarity to make clean decisions

00:48:27

about which technologies you should or shouldn't have in your life.

00:48:31

But you can't make those decisions until after you've had time without them because at this

00:48:36

point, we've spent so much time with them that we don't know what it's like to be without

00:48:41

it.

00:48:42

So you can't make clean decisions on what you should or shouldn't have because you don't

00:48:48

know the alternative to what you currently have.

00:48:51

Yep.

00:48:52

And then an important piece in step number two, actually, he says during this 30 day break,

00:48:57

explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.

00:49:02

So he mentions lots of people finished books during their digital declutter.

00:49:07

And I think this is an important piece because if you don't fill that void with something

00:49:11

else, you will instantly go back to that stuff at the end of the 30 days.

00:49:15

And his whole point is after the 30 days, you need to reintroduce the optional technologies

00:49:20

into your life starting from a blank slate, which is something I'm kind of nervous about

00:49:25

because I have started a digitally declutter, Mike.

00:49:29

I, about 10 days ago, I started it because that's when I got to that point in the book.

00:49:34

And so I'm a third of the way through it at the moment.

00:49:37

March is my month.

00:49:38

I think somewhere in there.

00:49:40

I think it was maybe it was two weeks ago.

00:49:42

I think it was March 1st.

00:49:43

I don't know.

00:49:44

Somewhere in there.

00:49:46

So I am doing this.

00:49:48

And I can tell you that my view of things is already changing.

00:49:55

And in a way that I was not expecting because one of the things that he mentions in here

00:50:01

is like you have to go back and figure out what it is you like to do in the blank space.

00:50:06

How long have I been talking about how like trying to minimize how much time I spend on

00:50:11

the screen because I work on them all the time?

00:50:12

Like this is something I've talked about for a long time.

00:50:16

And yet when I started doing this, I figured out that I spent a lot of my gaps on my phone

00:50:23

without knowing it, which I'm not happy to say.

00:50:28

But here we are.

00:50:31

And through the process of like at this particular moment, I don't even know where my phone at

00:50:36

is somewhere.

00:50:37

No, I think it's up on my night stand upstairs.

00:50:40

So because I'm separating from that, like I'm trying to make sure like I have set times

00:50:47

in the day where I'll go catch up on text messages because there are a number of people

00:50:51

that's my only way to talk to them.

00:50:54

And one of those being my mother and there's some health issues with my grandparents right

00:51:00

now.

00:51:01

So there's that.

00:51:03

So that particular piece I'm trying to stay at least somewhat informed on.

00:51:07

But for the most part, I've cut a lot of things out.

00:51:10

So you were talking about like the Discourse app on your phone.

00:51:15

Like I build those sites.

00:51:19

So guess how many I had in there?

00:51:21

I don't know.

00:51:22

It was like 24 or so Discourse instances that were inside that app, but I deleted it.

00:51:27

I had slack on my phone.

00:51:28

I got rid of that, pulled email off of it, all the social media stuff.

00:51:33

There's a handful of things that I normally would just check once in a while, but probably

00:51:38

the one that I pulled off my phone that caught a few people off guard when I explained this

00:51:43

to him was I pulled drafts off my phone.

00:51:46

What?

00:51:47

I know, right?

00:51:48

And that it hurt when I did it.

00:51:53

Like, okay, hit the little X button, hit delete, cry for a few minutes and set your

00:52:01

phone down.

00:52:02

Like that's what I saved the crying didn't actually cry over that.

00:52:07

So I love you, Greg, but I had to do it because what I found was and it's kind of funny too,

00:52:16

because I've talked about this in the past where I've had this habit of before I would

00:52:21

sleep my phone, I would tap the drafts icon and the doc so that drafts was open the moment

00:52:26

I unlocked my phone so that I could type notes into it really quick.

00:52:31

But I deleted drafts off, but I still have that muscle memory.

00:52:34

So I had to make sure there was nothing in that spot in the doc, otherwise I would keep

00:52:37

launching whatever it was there.

00:52:39

But here's why I did that because at this point, like, what is wrong with you, Joe?

00:52:45

Having my phone be my note taking mechanism meant that I was required to keep my phone

00:52:52

with me all the time.

00:52:53

Sure.

00:52:54

And it required me to always get onto my phone to make those notes.

00:52:59

And it's too easy to just swipe up and tap something else really quick and check it while

00:53:05

I'm there.

00:53:06

So I had to get rid of that process.

00:53:08

So now I'm like focused on my note cards that I keep in my pocket.

00:53:12

I've gone through more note cards the last week and a half, two weeks than I ever thought

00:53:16

I would.

00:53:17

You're hipster PDA.

00:53:19

And I think that's for the better.

00:53:22

At the moment I'm saying it's definitely for the better, but that was a tough one.

00:53:27

Wow.

00:53:28

Kudos to you.

00:53:29

Scary.

00:53:30

Yeah.

00:53:31

I don't know.

00:53:33

Maybe it's just me being a wimp, but I am not ready to go all in with the digitally

00:53:37

clutter yet.

00:53:44

I get the idea and this probably some level of justification, but as he's going through

00:53:46

like all the things that people did during their digital declutter whenever they felt

00:53:51

the compulsion to go check their phones, a lot of that stuff I'm already doing and prioritizing.

00:53:59

And could I do it a little bit better?

00:54:00

Yes, absolutely.

00:54:01

Which is why I'm definitely going to take some things off of my phone.

00:54:06

But I want to view not like hit the reset button and don't touch your optional technology

00:54:13

for 30 days, but just reconsider everything and put the stuff that has a net positive value

00:54:21

on there and eliminate basically everything that causes me to just consume.

00:54:28

And if I'm going to create something that's fine, but the endless feeds have got to go.

00:54:35

And the notifications and all that stuff.

00:54:38

So there's still some stuff that's going to be there, but a lot of it is going to be

00:54:44

eliminated as I transform what that device is used for.

00:54:49

And that was not a thing that I was thinking about.

00:54:50

If you wanted to take notes and drafts still, there is a Mac app.

00:54:54

You can use other things for that role.

00:54:57

You don't have to default to the phone and that may be another approach for someone who

00:55:02

is like me not ready to go all in with this yet is like, well, I want to eliminate this

00:55:08

behavior.

00:55:09

I recognize this is a bad thing.

00:55:11

So what are the obstacles that I can put in my way to force me to do it some other way

00:55:16

or some other place?

00:55:18

I think that's definitely worth considering.

00:55:22

But yeah, I'm not ready to just delete all the things.

00:55:27

And yeah, like I don't even as I was thinking about this.

00:55:31

I don't even know what I consider an optional technology.

00:55:34

I think how you use it determines whether it's optional or not.

00:55:38

So Twitter to check it on my phone is optional, but being able to post Twitter as I launch

00:55:45

faith based productivity, I would say is not optional.

00:55:48

So as I was thinking about that with the different services and things, it just made

00:55:52

it more complicated for me.

00:55:54

Like, okay, well, I'm just going to reevaluate all the things and how I use them as opposed

00:55:57

to going all in with the digital declutter.

00:56:00

When he talks about the digital declutter, the way that I am wired, I read this and I

00:56:04

feel like if I'm going to do this at all, I've got to do it to the T.

00:56:07

And if I don't follow the exact letter of the process that he outlines, then I'm doing

00:56:12

it wrong and there's no point in doing it.

00:56:14

Well, I will say like to that point, like he, okay, so in the book, he recommends writing

00:56:21

out your rules that you're going to follow during this declutter.

00:56:26

But what I found, Mike, was that whenever I started this, like what I'm doing right

00:56:30

now is very different than what I did when I started.

00:56:32

Okay.

00:56:33

And that was because I cut what I thought was all the optional stuff out.

00:56:38

And then after about two days, I realized, oh wait, there's still more that I need to

00:56:42

cut out of this because this is optional too.

00:56:45

And oh, no, that's optional too, that I thought were necessary whenever I first set

00:56:52

it up, so it had to change because there was no way for me to really know all of those

00:56:57

details.

00:56:58

And it's messy for me because I work on the computer.

00:57:00

Like that's my job.

00:57:02

Yeah.

00:57:03

So that's, that's kind of the difficult side of that.

00:57:07

But I don't know that, I don't know that I would say you have to follow his rules to

00:57:12

the letter to get the value out of it because I'm not sure I'm following it to the letter,

00:57:17

but I can already tell you it's been a huge benefit so far.

00:57:20

Yeah.

00:57:21

So here I will definitely do some 30 day something or other down the road, but wait

00:57:28

until February, wait until, yeah, I can save two days.

00:57:32

Wait a year to save two days.

00:57:35

Yeah.

00:57:36

I'm not going to wait a year to start applying the stuff that he talks about though, which

00:57:39

is really kind of the next section.

00:57:40

He has four different chapters which talk about kind of different individual things

00:57:45

that you can do.

00:57:46

This is where I really got a lot of value out of the book is talking about these different

00:57:52

concepts and figuring out how I can apply these.

00:57:55

That's kind of the approach that I take with every book that we read honestly is I'm going

00:57:59

to grab something out of here, but I'm not going to necessarily believe everything that

00:58:03

this guy or this lady is telling me to do.

00:58:07

I'm not going to go follow all of their simple five step systems to, to success, but I am

00:58:14

going to, I am going to steal something and make a positive change and make a new, new

00:58:19

habit, new neural net, you know, but.

00:58:22

Yeah.

00:58:23

And this, this section, I'll put it this way.

00:58:27

If you go down the digital declutter path, you're going to realize you have a lot of

00:58:32

extra time that you didn't realize you had.

00:58:34

Sure.

00:58:35

That's, that's been my experience and I'm picky about how much I use screens and before this.

00:58:41

And I've realized there's a lot more time that I didn't realize I was losing.

00:58:47

And the trick here is that he knows that.

00:58:52

So he helps you figure out what to do with that space.

00:58:54

And this is where I say like he helps you build the lifestyle side of it.

00:58:58

Yeah, that's a, that's a good way to frame it.

00:59:00

This first chapter in the new section, by the way, is titled spend time alone.

00:59:04

And one of the notes that I put under here is hooray for personal retreats.

00:59:08

I don't know if that's just confirmation bias because I wrote the course on it, but did

00:59:15

your mind go there as he's talking about Lincoln and the soldiers home and stuff like

00:59:18

that?

00:59:19

Not for a personal retreat.

00:59:21

I was more trying to figure out how do I, how can I do this every day?

00:59:24

Like, yeah.

00:59:26

So just a couple of excerpts here.

00:59:28

He mentions on page 91, there's a quote, but just to frame that a little bit.

00:59:33

Abraham Lincoln basically would retreat from the White House where he was constantly under

00:59:37

pressure to make those decisions.

00:59:40

And he would record his ideas when he got to this place, which is now called the, the

00:59:45

soldiers home, that he would record his ideas on scraps of paper.

00:59:48

He would sometimes store those in the lining of his hat as he would walk around the grounds

00:59:52

of this, I guess it was like a farm back in the day.

00:59:56

Now I think it's like in Washington, DC, but, and it was here that he wrote the initial

01:00:00

draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

01:00:02

So on page 91, he says, Lincoln's time alone with his thoughts played a crucial role in

01:00:06

his ability to navigate a demanding wartime presidency.

01:00:09

We can therefore say with only a mild hyperbole that on a certain sense, solitude helped save

01:00:14

the nation.

01:00:17

And I really like this.

01:00:18

I think that this is a great idea.

01:00:20

He talks about solitude deprivation on page 92.

01:00:23

He says, everyone benefits from regular doses of solitude and equally important.

01:00:27

Anyone who avoids the state for an extended period of time will suffer.

01:00:31

He talks about the different benefits of solitude, how Martin Luther King's, Martin Luther King,

01:00:36

Jr's defining moment came from a moment of solitude.

01:00:41

And I think that this is just a bunch of evidence for why a personal retreat is so important.

01:00:48

Whether or not you follow the framework that I put together, it doesn't even matter.

01:00:52

Just the fact that you get alone with your thoughts and you let your brain unravel these

01:00:56

things and you see things the way they really are.

01:00:58

Because in the busyness of the day to day, there's no way you're seeing your situation

01:01:04

clearly.

01:01:05

So we've talked about this before.

01:01:08

I work corporate.

01:01:09

So I've got to commute every morning and evening right now.

01:01:12

I still work from home once in a while, which is how we're recording this one today.

01:01:16

But with that, I have that time and it's a pretty decent commute.

01:01:21

It's 35, 40 minutes one way.

01:01:24

I don't turn anything on.

01:01:25

Everybody talks about like, that's what I get my podcast listened to.

01:01:28

It's like, I'm not going to lie.

01:01:30

I have not caught up on podcasts in a while.

01:01:33

Is that weird?

01:01:34

Maybe.

01:01:35

While I listen to enough for both of us.

01:01:38

Okay, there you go.

01:01:39

So you can make up for me that way.

01:01:41

I don't feel like a hypocrite.

01:01:43

But I try to leave that space empty just because it's the only time I have to truly

01:01:49

just think through things.

01:01:52

I've done that for a long time.

01:01:53

I think I tried one day to listen to things and I just found that I was tuning it out

01:01:58

a lot because I kept trying to think through other stuff while it was going on and then

01:02:02

I had to go back it up and listen to it again because I wasn't focused on it.

01:02:06

That's just not worth it.

01:02:07

So I just leave things off and sit in the silence both ways.

01:02:11

Serves us a nice reflecting point.

01:02:14

So it's kind of the time alone.

01:02:16

But in the book, he talks about a number of ways to do this.

01:02:19

He talks about exercising with nothing in your ears.

01:02:24

He talks about going for long walks, just sitting and staring at things.

01:02:31

You're classic.

01:02:32

How do you spend time alone scenarios?

01:02:35

He does spell out kind of why it's helpful.

01:02:38

Some of the science behind it to some degree.

01:02:40

I thought it was interesting, but that part wasn't like, didn't trip my trigger of any

01:02:44

kind.

01:02:45

But he's ultimately making the point of get off on your own for a while.

01:02:51

Don't fill all the gaps with all the technology.

01:02:55

Get away from your screen.

01:02:56

If you're doing your declutter, you're going to have this time and you're going to be

01:02:59

trying to figure out what to do with it, go for a walk.

01:03:02

That's the point that he's trying to make.

01:03:04

Yep.

01:03:05

No, I totally get it.

01:03:06

And he mentioned in deep work, I think the productive meditation where you go for a walk

01:03:09

and you don't bring a podcast or anything.

01:03:11

You just think about the problem that you're trying to solve.

01:03:13

And I've used that and it definitely works.

01:03:15

So I understand what he's getting at.

01:03:18

One of the practices that he mentions in this section, which by the way, that's one

01:03:21

thing I like about each of these chapters, is he ends it with these different practices

01:03:24

and things that you can do.

01:03:25

So essentially action items.

01:03:28

One of the practices is to write letters to yourself.

01:03:31

And he talks about how there's benefit from thinking by writing.

01:03:36

Kind of along the lines of the morning pages, he didn't say that specifically, but that's

01:03:40

where my brain went.

01:03:42

And that really was the point where I reconciled in my own head, whether it's justification

01:03:50

or not, that the digital declutter was not completely necessary for me because you can

01:03:56

totally do this using a digital device.

01:03:59

You can get all of the benefit, I believe, from writing out your thoughts on a keyboard

01:04:07

as opposed to to analog.

01:04:08

And I know that you would probably find something in there to say like, Oh, an analog is better.

01:04:13

And maybe maybe you're right to a certain degree, but I think the 80 20 here, though,

01:04:19

is in how you use the device.

01:04:22

So if you eliminate all notifications from your smartphone and you only use it to process

01:04:30

and think by writing, I think that that's kind of what he's talking about here.

01:04:37

Now the problem is that almost nobody is going to be able to do that.

01:04:41

And maybe actually there is nobody that's able to do that completely.

01:04:45

And that's the problem is that when you use your technology, you open the door to all

01:04:50

the other things.

01:04:52

And one of the things that a couple things actually I wanted to call it from this section,

01:04:56

which really just kind of shocked me.

01:04:58

And I totally agree with this part.

01:04:59

He says there's two pivotal points in the loss of solitude.

01:05:02

One is the iPod and the other is the smartphone because the iPod allowed you to be distracted

01:05:07

for long periods of time instead of only temporary interruptions.

01:05:10

But there were still some barriers to using it in specific situations.

01:05:14

You had the earbuds in your ear pods in your ears.

01:05:19

And sometimes you just couldn't do that.

01:05:22

You were in a situation, you were at work, whatever.

01:05:24

That was going to be rude.

01:05:25

And so you would have to take them out.

01:05:27

But the smartphone took that barrier away because now to be interrupted, you just need

01:05:32

a glance.

01:05:33

You don't need to put in your earbuds.

01:05:35

And I think that's an important distinction.

01:05:38

Now if you can eliminate all the things that are going to cause you to glance at your phone

01:05:41

though, that kind of changes the narrative around that device.

01:05:46

Problem is like I said, no one does this.

01:05:48

He shares a statistic from the 2015 Common Sense Media Study which showed that teenagers,

01:05:54

which he called the iGen, that's the generation after the millennials, they spend nine hours

01:06:00

per day on their phone.

01:06:04

And he also mentions that you can basically track the spike in anxiety, depression and

01:06:10

suicide rates to the release of the smartphone.

01:06:13

And I totally agree with that.

01:06:15

Like if you're that connected to your device, there's obviously something wrong there.

01:06:21

And I know at this point, I probably sound like the old man because I'm not part of that

01:06:26

generation.

01:06:27

I fall into the-

01:06:28

- Oh my.

01:06:29

- Yeah, well that's the thing is like I have to recognize that bias as I come to this and

01:06:33

I say I'm not that bad.

01:06:36

Everybody needs to recognize that because the technology that is around when you are growing

01:06:41

up, that's kind of normalized.

01:06:43

And everything else that comes after that, you do have that negative, somewhat negative

01:06:48

view towards.

01:06:49

I think that's just natural.

01:06:51

And so I do recognize that there's a little bit of a conflict of interest I guess maybe

01:06:58

because I'm part of this generation that views like nine hours regardless of the benefit

01:07:02

from the nine hours as a weird thing.

01:07:05

But Cal Newport is basically saying that there is a negative outcome associated with

01:07:11

those nine hours and the fact that it is negative plus they're spending nine hours

01:07:14

on this.

01:07:15

Like this is the thing that's leading to these skyrocketing, anxiety, depression and

01:07:18

suicide rates.

01:07:19

And I think there is some truth to that.

01:07:21

But I do have to call that out as a disclaimer that consider the source.

01:07:24

I'm the millennial.

01:07:25

I'm not the person who's part of this who's saying, you know, I'm going to rebel against

01:07:29

this because this is not who I am.

01:07:32

That's not who I am anyways.

01:07:34

Does that make sense?

01:07:35

- Yes.

01:07:36

Two things here.

01:07:37

One, I would challenge you to do a digital declutter and do all of your writing on paper

01:07:42

during that time.

01:07:44

I'd say that because my job is to type things on a keyboard and I type on that keyboard

01:07:53

all day long.

01:07:55

And it's what I do.

01:07:56

And if I spell out ideas via keyboard, they are not as good as the ideas I get on paper.

01:08:03

I know that from doing like my idea generation on paper for probably the last two years.

01:08:10

I know that if I try to do some form of writing on the keyboard where I'm generating something

01:08:16

new or trying to help myself understand something, it's better off on paper.

01:08:22

Just personal experience here.

01:08:24

That's one.

01:08:27

He does talk a lot about this eigen with how they don't have any absence at all.

01:08:33

There are no buffers at all because every time is filled with your phone.

01:08:39

That's the point that I think he attributes to the anxiety levels and the increase in

01:08:43

all the disorders and such.

01:08:46

So I think what ultimately he's getting in this section is spend time alone, be okay

01:08:54

with nothing going on, not having the consumption of something going on at all times.

01:09:01

Get away from it.

01:09:02

It's okay.

01:09:03

It'll be scary at first.

01:09:04

I trust me.

01:09:05

It will be.

01:09:06

But it'll be all right.

01:09:07

Yeah.

01:09:08

So responding to the digital declutter thing, I think you're probably right in terms of

01:09:10

idea generation.

01:09:12

The thing that is holding me back is that I can't understand in my own head anyways,

01:09:19

an easy bridge between the things that I would write analog and how do I publish that

01:09:25

to the web in some way, shape or form?

01:09:27

Because that's where most of my writing ends up.

01:09:30

And if I could figure that out, I would be much more apt.

01:09:33

I'm not going to commit verbally to doing the digital declutter.

01:09:39

That is the big roadblock that I don't see a way around.

01:09:43

I used to do that.

01:09:45

I used to write all my articles on paper.

01:09:48

I don't write articles much anymore.

01:09:50

I say much.

01:09:51

I haven't written an article in a long time.

01:09:53

I used to do that and I would just dictate it into my computer.

01:09:58

So I would just read it.

01:09:59

I may have to give that a shot, but I still don't think that that's going to get me where

01:10:04

I would need to be.

01:10:05

It takes longer.

01:10:06

It's going to take longer.

01:10:07

And literally everything that I write is going to end up in some digital place eventually,

01:10:12

like the show notes for today's episode.

01:10:14

I did that on my phone while I was at the bike or on the bike at the gym the other day.

01:10:19

And so again, I've reconsidered how I'm using that device.

01:10:22

I'm not just consuming stuff.

01:10:23

I'm creating at that point.

01:10:25

I'm looking at my mind node and I'm bringing in things that I want to talk about.

01:10:29

But if I were to do that by hand, number one, I can't do it there.

01:10:33

And then number two, I have to recreate it all.

01:10:36

And that just seems like way more work than it's worth to me at the moment anyways.

01:10:41

Yeah, I think things like that, I would probably still type them in digitally.

01:10:46

I think when I am talking about doing things via paper or a whiteboard, it's when it's

01:10:53

only for your own use.

01:10:56

I've started keeping my book notes in my notebook.

01:11:00

And then when I'm done with them, I'm transcribing them.

01:11:03

But that's the only thing I'm transcribing is my book notes.

01:11:07

Because as far as I can tell, that's the only thing I actually want in digital format,

01:11:11

everything else, I'm totally cool with it just being gone.

01:11:16

That's fine.

01:11:17

You know, things like my journal entries and such, it's not digital.

01:11:20

It's all on paper.

01:11:21

I just throw the notebook on the shelf when I'm done with it.

01:11:23

Yeah.

01:11:24

That's what I do.

01:11:25

I'm still going to search that.

01:11:28

That's my view.

01:11:29

So when you hear me tout using analog tools for things, it's typically whenever you're

01:11:36

trying to do things for yourself, not when you're trying to create things for the broader

01:11:40

world.

01:11:41

Sure.

01:11:42

Yeah.

01:11:43

And I do do that occasionally.

01:11:45

Like before we left for our family vacation, I mentioned I was working a lot hours and I

01:11:51

was completely overwhelmed at one point.

01:11:53

I'm like, okay, I just need to make a list.

01:11:55

Yeah.

01:11:56

Of everything that I need to do.

01:11:57

So I covered my entire whiteboard with tasks that I had to do in the next week.

01:12:01

And I'm at the top of the title, you know, before Florida.

01:12:05

And I just checked things off one by one.

01:12:07

And every day I could see my progress on the whiteboard.

01:12:09

Like, yep, that felt really good.

01:12:11

And I was able to get everything done that I needed to get done.

01:12:14

But it's not the way I'm going to manage my tasks by default.

01:12:18

Yeah.

01:12:19

So I don't know.

01:12:20

I deploy it tactically.

01:12:22

No, I get it.

01:12:24

Anyways, we better move on if we want to keep this under $3.

01:12:28

The next section here is don't click the like button.

01:12:30

Yep.

01:12:31

Don't click like.

01:12:32

This is one of my action items.

01:12:33

Never click like again.

01:12:37

This section really impacted me because when you think about what a like is, it really

01:12:47

isn't anything.

01:12:49

It feels this dopamine rush for the person who gets the notification when you click it.

01:12:57

But it's almost like taking the easy way out in terms of responding to something that

01:13:03

somebody does.

01:13:05

It's like, if my kids were to come and say, Hey, check out this thing that I made.

01:13:11

And oh, yeah, that's cool.

01:13:13

And I totally brushed them off as opposed to, Oh, wow, I really like what you did with this

01:13:17

specific thing.

01:13:18

But that's the difference in the quality of the interaction between talking to somebody

01:13:23

about something and responding to something that they posted with a like, in my opinion.

01:13:29

And so once I had that revelation, I was like, I never want to interact with anybody

01:13:36

on that superficial level ever again.

01:13:40

I would rather them not see my name on their Instagram post.

01:13:46

And so it says like 47 other people like this post or whatever.

01:13:49

My name is missing.

01:13:52

And whenever I do interact with that person, go deeper and have it be more impactful.

01:13:58

That's kind of the thing I want to strive for is every interaction that I have with

01:14:05

someone, how do I make it meaningful?

01:14:08

How do I not just go through the motions and do the bare minimum?

01:14:13

But how do I make people feel good when they are done talking to me?

01:14:19

And I don't know exactly what that's going to look like.

01:14:23

I just know what it doesn't look like.

01:14:24

And that's clicking the like button.

01:14:28

Yeah, I totally understand this section.

01:14:32

Because what he's getting at is how if I click the like button, it boosts maybe the

01:14:37

ego, maybe potentially of the other person who's getting it because they got something

01:14:42

with likes on it.

01:14:43

But it doesn't actually convey any true meaning.

01:14:46

Like you're eliminating a lot of the difficult conversations that can go with things or the

01:14:51

beneficial side of praise in some way.

01:14:55

I kind of I'm hesitant to say I would never click like again to go as far as you are, Mike.

01:15:02

Because here's why.

01:15:04

There are a lot of areas, especially in discourse forums where clicking the like button is a

01:15:09

a nod to say got it.

01:15:12

Like I'm not saying.

01:15:14

Okay.

01:15:15

So yeah, I'm glad you called that out because I think you're right.

01:15:17

I maybe shouldn't have phrased it that way.

01:15:20

Never click like on social media platforms.

01:15:22

So specifically I'm talking about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

01:15:27

I don't even know what else might appear.

01:15:28

Yeah.

01:15:29

So discourse, for example, I'll go through and all like comments.

01:15:34

And usually it's a way just to say, like you said, I recognize this.

01:15:39

Like in the focused forum, for example, I mentioned that I want to help some of our listeners

01:15:45

get connected and start their own mastermind groups.

01:15:48

So I'm going to host a zoom meeting for people and just introduce them and walk them through

01:15:52

the process.

01:15:53

Okay.

01:15:54

There's a whole bunch of people in there that are saying, Hey, I'm interested.

01:15:56

I'm interested.

01:15:57

I'm interested.

01:15:58

I don't need to reply to every single one of those people who's saying I'm interested.

01:16:01

Right.

01:16:02

But I click the little hard icon to show that I I saw.

01:16:04

Yep.

01:16:05

And if on Twitter, for example, I have it set up so that my, my likes actually get pulled

01:16:09

into my, you know, insta paper feed.

01:16:12

So that's one of the ways that I collect links for, for the newsletter and things like

01:16:16

that.

01:16:17

But not with the intention of, I see you and here's my response and have it be totally

01:16:24

superficial and fake and shallow.

01:16:28

No, I, I win as far on discourse forums, there's a way you can turn off the notifications.

01:16:33

If you get a like and I did do that because then like it doesn't become the two way streets,

01:16:40

just a one way street for me.

01:16:42

So, you know, the big ones are the discourse meta forums.

01:16:47

No need to explain what those are, but it's where a lot of my business comes from.

01:16:53

With that, I, I disabled likes for the notifications that come to me on there.

01:17:00

I still like other people's things because again, it's a way to say, Hey, I saw this.

01:17:05

Got it.

01:17:06

I'm good to go.

01:17:08

But I will say that reading this section made me contemplate and I put it as an action item

01:17:12

with a question mark because I'm not sure I want to do this, but it made me think about

01:17:17

the process of building, building a plugin for discourse that removes likes altogether.

01:17:24

Okay.

01:17:25

Could you build a plugin that you bolt on top of a forum and it removes the like functional

01:17:32

all in its entirety?

01:17:34

Like, so it's a thing I'm thinking about.

01:17:36

I don't know that that's actually worthwhile, but it's, it's of interest to me.

01:17:41

Yeah.

01:17:42

Well, the thing for me, and I think the general, like the larger principle here is not to settle

01:17:49

for a connection and to look to replace those with conversation because he makes the point

01:17:55

in this section that conversation is better than, than connection.

01:18:00

And that's, that's really what I want to strive for is the conversation, the dialogue.

01:18:04

Yep.

01:18:05

And I think that was the main point he was trying to make in this section.

01:18:08

It's, it's fascinating.

01:18:09

He gives you the history of the like button, how, where it came from from Facebook.

01:18:12

Yeah.

01:18:13

That's pretty crazy.

01:18:14

It's had how they have used that as a way to try to get you to come back more often.

01:18:21

Like that's, and that's his reasoning for why you shouldn't be claiming the like button.

01:18:26

But I thought that part was interesting, but yeah.

01:18:29

All right.

01:18:30

We better move on.

01:18:31

Next section is to reclaim leisure.

01:18:36

And this is an interesting section.

01:18:39

He starts this chapter out by talking about financial independence because when you are

01:18:45

financially independent, you naturally have more leisure time.

01:18:48

And he talks about how there are a bunch of people kind of inspired by his buddy, Mr.

01:18:54

Money Mustache, who are completely minimizing their cost of living so that they can become

01:19:00

financially independent as soon as possible.

01:19:03

And then they've got more options.

01:19:06

And the goal here being that large amounts of leisure time are often filled with more

01:19:13

strenuous activity.

01:19:14

And that's the stuff that's really good for you is this active leisure.

01:19:19

This section prompted me to start a list.

01:19:23

Like he talks about like knowing what your types of leisure are, like the ones that you

01:19:27

enjoy doing.

01:19:29

And I, I realized that I have a lot of like hobbies and things I like to do.

01:19:35

But I've never like nailed down which ones I like the most and tried to figure out which

01:19:40

ones work in different seasons, which ones provide a form of exercise.

01:19:45

Like can I plan this out in some way to where I can incorporate more leisure into life.

01:19:52

So I've been starting that list.

01:19:54

It's one of my actions is to continue building that.

01:19:57

I suppose I'll put it on the club.

01:19:59

Like I don't need to go through it here, but I can put that list up there on the club

01:20:02

for the action item for it.

01:20:03

But it's, it's an interesting process to go through and nail down which way, what forms

01:20:08

of leisure do you like doing?

01:20:10

Because then you have a base to pull from when you do your digital declutter mic because

01:20:14

I know you're going to do one.

01:20:16

Once you do this and you figure out that you've got free time, what are you going to do with

01:20:20

it?

01:20:21

Yes, spend time alone, but you can only like, you don't want to spend four hours alone

01:20:25

every day, especially when you have kids.

01:20:28

So that would lead me to.

01:20:30

That would be possible if you've got young kids.

01:20:32

Yeah.

01:20:33

And I'm going to do that too.

01:20:35

What types?

01:20:36

That sounds wonderful.

01:20:37

A couple days a week, I'll bear with that.

01:20:42

What are the things I like to do, you know?

01:20:45

And can I plan those into my week and take advantage of them?

01:20:48

Yeah.

01:20:49

That's, that's my main goal there.

01:20:50

One of the things he talks about in this section, which makes me wish that you lived

01:20:53

closer is this whole idea of group socializing and board games.

01:20:56

He mentions that board games specifically are a great leisure activity because they

01:21:00

promote social interaction.

01:21:03

And he actually calls it supercharged socializing because the interactions that happen when you

01:21:08

play a board game are of a higher intensity than those that are typically in pollite

01:21:14

society.

01:21:15

And you can see this other places as well, like exercise groups, like CrossFit, for example.

01:21:20

And really the thing that makes this work is that it requires you to spend time with the

01:21:25

other people in person and the activities provide some sort of structure for the interaction.

01:21:30

I think this is a really cool idea.

01:21:33

I don't know a whole lot of people near me who I would want to sit down and play board

01:21:40

games with, but I do love board games.

01:21:42

We've got a whole closet full of them.

01:21:43

I don't have as many as some people.

01:21:47

I think Josh has probably got hundreds, but I'm not at that level.

01:21:51

But I think this is a really cool idea, like to sit down with somebody and say, okay, we're

01:21:56

going to play this game.

01:21:58

And the fact that you're playing the game, that providing the structure for all of the

01:22:04

beneficial social stuff to happen, that's pretty amazing to me as I read this chapter.

01:22:10

That's something as simple as a board game could do all that.

01:22:13

Yeah, it's a fascinating section.

01:22:15

One of the pieces of that whole area that stood out to me was building structured social

01:22:21

instances.

01:22:23

Sometimes we think about social scenarios where we don't really want structure on them because

01:22:30

you want to be able to let it be fluid.

01:22:31

But that's actually the opposite.

01:22:33

It tends to hamper that.

01:22:36

Whereas if you have a structured scenario, it tends to increase your connection points

01:22:44

to other people.

01:22:46

One of the areas that he points this out is with Ben Franklin, who had a club that he

01:22:54

put together and they were required to write essays and all these different things.

01:22:58

They were supposed to come with points to debate.

01:23:01

It sounded like a really cool group, but it had a very tight structure to it.

01:23:07

It thrived and it took off.

01:23:10

When I read that, I was like, this sounds a lot like Toastmasters.

01:23:13

Without some of the political agenda that some groups have now.

01:23:18

Yeah.

01:23:19

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

01:23:20

I thought that that process of building in a formal way of socializing could have a pretty

01:23:27

big impact.

01:23:28

I don't know.

01:23:29

I could see how building those in to regular schedules would be beneficial, but it was

01:23:36

an interesting point.

01:23:37

Well, we should definitely play board games when we are at max stack this summer.

01:23:42

Board game time.

01:23:43

All right.

01:23:44

Should we move on to the last chapter?

01:23:48

Join the attention resistance.

01:23:49

Yeah, this is like the motivating thing.

01:23:51

Yeah, exactly.

01:23:53

This one is interesting.

01:23:54

This is a, well, I've said that by every chapter, I think, but this is an interesting

01:23:58

way to end the book, I would say.

01:24:01

He's basically putting out the call to embrace his ideas of the digital declutter and digital

01:24:08

minimalism more so specifically.

01:24:11

He shares a couple of ideas here, which I want to call out.

01:24:16

First is this New York son story, which was the first penny press, the idea being here

01:24:23

that they were going to make it cheap.

01:24:26

So everybody would read it and it was launched by Benjamin Day in the 1830s.

01:24:31

They wanted to gather a huge crowd and then sell their attention to advertisers.

01:24:36

So nothing is new.

01:24:38

This has been going on for hundreds of years.

01:24:41

But it was interesting to see that this is the strategy that is being used online right

01:24:45

now.

01:24:46

I mean, my brother is, he works for a startup in San Francisco and almost all startups have

01:24:55

the goal of attracting as much attention as they can so that they can raise more funding

01:25:01

before they run out of money.

01:25:03

It's just interesting to see like there's an entire sector of the economy that like

01:25:11

they're all operating this way.

01:25:15

Like that just shows you how much more valuable this stuff is than you realize.

01:25:20

Yeah, there's billions and billions of dollars poured into it.

01:25:24

Yep, yep, exactly.

01:25:27

He also talks about Facebook's folly, which is really interesting.

01:25:31

I think this is a really good argument too, by the way.

01:25:33

Do you remember this part?

01:25:34

Yes, but I'll let you explain it.

01:25:35

Okay, I was going to shut up because I've been talking a lot.

01:25:39

So Facebook's folly, there was a paper put out by a couple of people and this is part

01:25:46

of like a social good thing for Facebook to discuss difficult issues.

01:25:52

And one of the things that they talked about was basically to answer the question, is social

01:25:58

media bad for us?

01:26:00

It was an article written by David Ginsberg and Moira Burke.

01:26:03

If I can find it, I'll put it in the show notes.

01:26:06

And basically what they were saying is that the technology, whether it's good or bad,

01:26:15

depends on how you use it, which contradicts Facebook's positioning as a foundational technology.

01:26:25

So prior to this paper, Kel Newport is arguing, Facebook was saying, we are great and we're

01:26:33

going to allow you to connect with all these other people in your life that you wouldn't

01:26:36

have been able to connect with otherwise.

01:26:39

So there's a huge benefit to using Facebook and David Ginsberg and Moira Burke were basically

01:26:44

saying that, well, there may be a benefit, there may not be a benefit.

01:26:48

It really depends on how you use it.

01:26:52

So that kind of presents the idea that you shouldn't just use Facebook because it'd be

01:26:58

weird if you didn't.

01:26:59

That's kind of the idea behind the foundational technology is that everybody uses this.

01:27:05

And the article encourages people to think about how they are using the service, which

01:27:11

again is kind of contradictory to everything that Facebook was based off of where it's just

01:27:15

used the service because it's good.

01:27:17

In fact, back at the beginning, I'm not sure if we mentioned this, but there was a quote

01:27:21

by one of the people who started Facebook trying to find out my note, Oh, Sean Parker,

01:27:32

the thought process is how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention

01:27:36

as possible?

01:27:38

So if you are now embracing the idea that every moment that you spend with the service

01:27:43

is not intrinsically good, then you've kind of introduced a new thought paradigm.

01:27:50

Like these ideas are conflicting with each other.

01:27:53

And I can see where that might be a dangerous idea to present, especially as an official

01:27:59

Facebook view as you really should be considering how you use this service when everything that

01:28:04

they're engineering behind the service is to get you use it as much as you can.

01:28:09

Like at some point you have to say, this is where the line is.

01:28:14

And it's probably a lot sooner than a lot of people realize.

01:28:18

Correct.

01:28:19

Yeah.

01:28:20

I think this whole section, one of the pieces of that that I found it very interesting was

01:28:32

that they made the point that the people who build Facebook would not be able to build

01:28:38

Facebook if they were using Facebook the way that they want people to use Facebook.

01:28:43

Exactly.

01:28:44

You just described it way better than I did.

01:28:46

You should have introduced this.

01:28:48

Like that's the whole point here.

01:28:52

If you were using this the way that they want you to use it, you wouldn't be able to build

01:28:57

the tool that they built.

01:28:59

Because you wouldn't have the time or the headspace to pull it off.

01:29:04

To me, that's alarming.

01:29:07

If that's what they're after, they're basically trying to squash competition.

01:29:13

I don't think that's their intent, but it ends up happening.

01:29:17

That's what they're after.

01:29:19

So I joined the attention resistance that whole chapter.

01:29:23

It's about explaining how we need to reclaim our intent with technology and limit the amount

01:29:34

of attention we give to these devices.

01:29:38

Not to say you can't use them at all.

01:29:41

Cal Newport is a computer scientist after all.

01:29:45

Keep that in mind.

01:29:49

I'll also say the people who work with this stuff pay attention to how they use it because

01:29:55

it's very little.

01:29:58

The people who work with it and build it, they're the ones who are going to use it the least

01:30:02

and have the most intention with it.

01:30:04

Pay attention to what they do, follow suit.

01:30:08

That's a lot of what I took from this book.

01:30:10

Yeah, and this is again, this section enabled me with my idea to not embrace the complete

01:30:16

digital declutter.

01:30:18

He talks about in the practices here using social media like a professional.

01:30:23

He shares a lot of experiences with this lady who had reached out to him after deep

01:30:29

work.

01:30:30

It was basically a reader that he got connected with.

01:30:32

I thought it was cool that he included a whole bunch of her stuff in this book.

01:30:37

He calls it "Thresholding."

01:30:40

This I think is a...

01:30:41

This spoke to me specifically because this is what I want to do with my social media.

01:30:45

I don't just want to consume stuff.

01:30:47

I want to use it like a professional.

01:30:49

I want to use it to gather news and things that I need for what I'm going to create.

01:30:55

I want to use it to get my message out there, but I don't want to get sucked into the rabbit

01:31:02

hole of the endless feeds.

01:31:04

I think that if that's the only thing that you got from this book, it's still really,

01:31:08

really valuable.

01:31:09

I did have another thing from this section though, which is part of my action items.

01:31:15

That is to figure out my own low information diet.

01:31:21

Don't just assume that I need to subscribe to all these different things, but kind of

01:31:25

curate them more aggressively and say, "For my tech news, I'm going to look at these sites

01:31:30

rather than...

01:31:32

Right now, I've got a whole bunch of them that are plugged into my RSS feed.

01:31:37

I probably don't need to be subscribed to all of those because when something happens,

01:31:42

they basically all say the same thing."

01:31:45

Pick my favorite one, for example.

01:31:47

I want to really think about this and think about, "How am I going to get the information

01:31:52

that I want, that the news that I want to read?"

01:31:56

Then cut out everything else that is just going to be contributing to the noise.

01:32:01

I feel like that's going to alleviate a lot of the mental burden of trying to keep up

01:32:06

with things.

01:32:07

I don't know exactly what this is going to look like, but in the back of my head right

01:32:10

now, I feel like the amount of things that I'm going to have to check is going to be reduced

01:32:19

by 200%.

01:32:21

It's going to be a third of what I'm going through now, is my initial thoughts on this.

01:32:28

There's a lot in this book that you could talk about for a long time.

01:32:31

We could all talk about it for a long time.

01:32:33

We've been talking about it for a long time.

01:32:35

We have.

01:32:36

What do you say we go to action items here?

01:32:39

Let's do it.

01:32:41

I've got four, number one, to list the benefits that I get from the platforms that I am going

01:32:47

to use.

01:32:49

Number two, to delete all social media from my phone.

01:32:53

It doesn't mean that I am not going to be on Twitter.

01:32:56

It's the one social media network that I've decided I'm going to still hang out on, but

01:33:00

I'm not going to check it from my phone.

01:33:01

I'm going to be doing it from my iPad and from my Mac specifically.

01:33:06

I've also got NeverClick Like again, which you convinced me.

01:33:09

I maybe need to rephrase that a little bit, but for social media in terms of the interaction,

01:33:15

of interacting with somebody else, that is not going to be a mechanism that I use anymore.

01:33:20

I'm going to try to replace that with conversation.

01:33:23

If I like something somebody posts, I'm going to send them a text message and say, "Hey,

01:33:26

I really like this."

01:33:27

By the way, I did that the other day.

01:33:28

I was listening to Sean West's podcast and they were talking about hustle.

01:33:33

I texted Sean and I said, "Hey, I really love your recent podcast episode."

01:33:38

He gets that message and that means a lot more than, "Oh, Mike Schmitt's hearted my

01:33:42

tweet," or whatever.

01:33:44

Just as an example.

01:33:46

Then the last one, I just mentioned figure out my own low information diet, just curate

01:33:50

the number of places that I'm looking for things.

01:33:53

Reduce that number.

01:33:54

It's a lot there.

01:33:55

I've got two and a half.

01:33:57

You have one that's half done.

01:33:59

Yeah.

01:34:00

First one, I am doing a digital declutter.

01:34:02

Down that path, I'll make the action item for that the day this releases and we'll talk

01:34:07

more about it on the Bookworm Club, some of the details I'm doing.

01:34:11

There's some things like, I remove notifications on messages on my phone.

01:34:16

Just a bunch of little details that I've come up with, not even having a task list on

01:34:22

my phone anymore.

01:34:23

There's lots of little details.

01:34:25

I'll spell that out and try to keep people updated about it as the month goes on because

01:34:31

it's interesting.

01:34:34

I've also got a list of leisure activities that I've been slowly building.

01:34:39

I'll put that on the club as well as to what those are.

01:34:43

Just a fun list that I can pull from whenever I'm setting up my week.

01:34:47

What days am I going to do?

01:34:48

I have to plan out what I'm going to do for leisure time because it does exist whether

01:34:53

I realize it or not.

01:34:55

But I haven't been intentional with it.

01:34:57

I would like to be intentional with it.

01:34:59

Then the half is, I need to figure out if it's worth building a plugin for discourse

01:35:03

to remove likes.

01:35:04

I don't know what that would look like.

01:35:07

I have a feeling it's more complicated than I think.

01:35:11

Here we are.

01:35:12

Here we are.

01:35:14

All right.

01:35:16

So, style and rating.

01:35:18

Should I go first?

01:35:20

Cheer buck.

01:35:21

All right.

01:35:22

I really am struggling with what exactly I want to rate this.

01:35:27

I've gone back and forth quite a bit in my head even while we've recorded this.

01:35:32

I think I'm in a land on 4.0.

01:35:37

That is because I really like Cal Newport's style.

01:35:42

I could read his books all day every day.

01:35:46

This one though I didn't enjoy as much as the other Cal Newport books that I've read.

01:35:52

I know that's kind of a lofty standard to live up to.

01:35:55

I mentioned so good that they can't ignore you.

01:35:57

Has ended up being one of the most impactful books that I've ever read.

01:36:00

I absolutely loved Deep Work.

01:36:03

This one does kind of feel like old man yells a cloud.

01:36:08

But I think that there's a lot of truth to everything that he says.

01:36:13

But it is, I just could not completely disconnect from that idea as I read it.

01:36:20

Maybe you're able to.

01:36:21

Maybe you're not.

01:36:22

I think that this book is going to draw some very strong reactions from people who are

01:36:27

both foreign against it.

01:36:29

Which doesn't really say anything positively or negatively about the book, I would argue.

01:36:36

I do think that there's a lot of value in reading this.

01:36:40

I think that everybody should read it.

01:36:42

I think you will walk away with a better understanding of what is happening to you as you use your

01:36:48

digital devices and then you will be more informed so you can decide whether you are

01:36:53

okay with that or you're not okay with that and make the proper adjustments.

01:36:58

I also, I get why he did it, but I wasn't a huge fan of the digital declutter coming

01:37:05

in the first section.

01:37:08

It felt kind of weird and anticlimactic to me at that point.

01:37:12

Maybe that's because I had the reaction that I did where it's like, "Oh, I don't think I'm

01:37:15

ready to do that quite yet."

01:37:18

But I kind of feel like if you had waited until the end and then said, "You really should

01:37:22

do a digital declutter."

01:37:24

Maybe he would have got me on board.

01:37:26

I think the positioning of it just felt kind of weird.

01:37:29

But overall, it's a great typical Cal Newport book and I would recommend it to everyone.

01:37:36

So I came into this book very skeptical.

01:37:39

I just want to point that out that I intended.

01:37:43

I rated this before I started.

01:37:44

I even have it in my notes.

01:37:45

I rated this a 2.5 before I started.

01:37:49

And as I read it, I think I would disagree with you on the layout.

01:37:55

I liked that he started with the digital declutter up front because it really sets things up for

01:38:00

the rest of the book as far as like, you're going to create a lot of empty space and what

01:38:06

do you do with it?

01:38:07

Sure.

01:38:08

To me, it felt like that made a lot of sense.

01:38:10

So I understand why he did that.

01:38:11

But I also get your point, it seems anti-climactic.

01:38:14

I get your point.

01:38:15

I just didn't feel that way.

01:38:17

Cal has a very easy reading.

01:38:21

He's easy to read.

01:38:22

He says a great writing style, I think.

01:38:24

Comparing this to the only other book I've read from him is Deep Work.

01:38:29

And I vastly prefer this one to Deep Work as somebody who works in the tech industry and

01:38:35

has been around it for a while and goes pretty deep with some of those things.

01:38:39

I feel like he nailed it on the head.

01:38:41

Like, he really did well with this.

01:38:44

Again, I was not expecting what I got out of this.

01:38:48

I was expecting to come out of this with no action items, was expecting to rate it pretty

01:38:52

low just because we've heard this, it's cranky old man thing going on.

01:38:59

That's what I expected.

01:39:00

It was not that at all.

01:39:02

I was completely shocked and excited about the fact that he gave me basically a lifestyle

01:39:08

process to build off of.

01:39:11

I think if you work in the tech industry or you are anywhere near tangentially related

01:39:17

to that sector, this is a must read.

01:39:21

I think if you have a smartphone, it's probably a must read because I feel like it gives you

01:39:26

a base to work with.

01:39:28

I am going to put this at a five home, Mike.

01:39:31

I feel like this is one that I really, really suggest for most people.

01:39:37

If you're someone who uses a basic phone and have forever, this is probably not going

01:39:42

to be for you.

01:39:44

But the bulk of people, this is something you need to read.

01:39:46

I do think this is something people need to jump into.

01:39:50

As somebody who works in that industry and have read a lot of books around this, to me,

01:39:57

this is by far the best one that I've run across.

01:40:00

So kudos to Cal Newport for covering a hard topic.

01:40:03

Fair enough.

01:40:04

And to be honest, I didn't mention what I was going back and forth with.

01:40:08

I was ironing on the low side.

01:40:11

I'm trying to decide whether I want to rate this a 4-0 or a 4-5.

01:40:14

You already did this.

01:40:16

Come on.

01:40:17

I know.

01:40:18

But I just want to say, I'm not that far away from you even though we're a whole point

01:40:22

away.

01:40:23

I totally agree with everything that you said.

01:40:25

Sure.

01:40:26

I understand where you're coming from.

01:40:27

I just think that this isn't Cal Newport's best book either.

01:40:30

But it's the other influencing factor with my score.

01:40:34

But yeah, great book.

01:40:36

Definitely recommend that people read it.

01:40:38

We've got a couple other books that are going to be coming up.

01:40:40

The next one is Your Pick.

01:40:41

Yeah.

01:40:42

So this one's mentioned in some of the early chapters of digital minimalism, Drunk Tank

01:40:47

Pink by Adam Alter.

01:40:50

Alter?

01:40:51

Alter?

01:40:52

Something like that.

01:40:53

Drunk Tank Pink.

01:40:54

One, I really like the title of this book.

01:40:56

And I will say I'm probably half to two-thirds of the way through it.

01:40:59

This thing's messing with my head.

01:41:01

Yeah.

01:41:02

It's messing with me.

01:41:04

It'll be a fun episode next time.

01:41:06

All right.

01:41:07

And the one after that is inspired by the Bookworm Club.

01:41:11

And that is Extreme Ownership by Jaco Willink, who is a former US Navy Seal.

01:41:18

I don't know much about this book, but I've seen it come up several places and been recommended

01:41:24

several times.

01:41:25

And then when I saw that there were a bunch of votes for it in the Bookworm Club, that's

01:41:30

the one.

01:41:31

Sure.

01:41:32

Sure.

01:41:33

I did have a gap book this time, Mike.

01:41:34

Nice.

01:41:35

Ben Carson's One Nation.

01:41:39

So Ben Carson, if you don't know him, was one of the potential presidential candidates

01:41:45

running against Donald Trump on the Republican side of the fence.

01:41:49

So he wrote a book called One Nation based on a sermon he gave at...

01:41:57

I'm drawing a blank on where it was.

01:41:58

But anyway, he gave a sermon and it struck a lot of people and he wrote a whole book

01:42:02

around the topic.

01:42:03

So...

01:42:04

Nice.

01:42:05

Interesting book.

01:42:06

I also am reading a gap book, which is pretty long, but so far it's pretty good.

01:42:11

And that is The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack.

01:42:15

And I'm about a third of the way through it.

01:42:18

If I were to condense it down right now, it would basically be tell everybody everything,

01:42:24

over-communicate.

01:42:26

But they basically have a lot of examples of how they used it in their businesses and

01:42:31

how it completely turned things around.

01:42:34

And for anybody who is in business, I think this is a good read.

01:42:39

Interesting.

01:42:40

Maybe we'll talk about these more on our super secret members only podcast feed at some

01:42:45

point.

01:42:46

That doesn't exist yet.

01:42:47

Sure.

01:42:48

Right.

01:42:49

Fun times.

01:42:50

Well, if you have a book you would like to hear us go through on Bookworm Club.Bookworm.fm,

01:42:56

click the recommend button and it adds it to the list.

01:43:00

People keep forgetting.

01:43:01

Make sure you vote for it.

01:43:02

Yes.

01:43:03

Once you create it, click the vote button.

01:43:05

I've seen quite a few here and there of recommendations that have zero votes that should

01:43:09

never happen.

01:43:10

If you're going to recommend it, vote for it.

01:43:12

Just going to say that.

01:43:13

You can also see the full list of recommendations out there.

01:43:16

You can see the full list of the books that we've covered.

01:43:20

So go check out the club.

01:43:23

That's where all of those are showing up.

01:43:25

If you want to support the show, there's a couple ways that you can do that now.

01:43:30

First way, you can join the revolution and take down KCRW by leaving us an iTunes rating

01:43:36

and review like Bennett 0415 who says best podcasts, hands down, I love what you guys

01:43:42

are doing.

01:43:43

I value your expertise so much.

01:43:44

I was a better reader.

01:43:45

My comprehension is terrible.

01:43:46

It's always been a struggle, but you inspire me to never give up even when I'm going on

01:43:50

60.

01:43:51

Thanks guys.

01:43:52

And I would say that maybe giving us expertise is a little bit of lofty praise, but thanks

01:43:59

for the five star review.

01:44:00

We really appreciate it.

01:44:02

I also want to point out forgot to put this in the notes, but I shared with you, Joe,

01:44:08

that if you search for Bookworm in overcast, at least for me, it is the first return.

01:44:14

So I don't know if just iTunes isn't updating.

01:44:17

Maybe the battle has already been won.

01:44:19

But please give us a review.

01:44:22

Tell us what you like, don't like, what we can do better.

01:44:25

And then also you can join the Bookworm Club and you can share your action items there

01:44:28

as well.

01:44:29

I mentioned at the beginning, really encouraged by the conversation that's happening around

01:44:34

those and hopefully it encourages other people to take action on the stuff that they're

01:44:38

hearing and this isn't just information, but it actually produces some action for you.

01:44:44

And as we mentioned at the beginning, we are going to be creating a way for people to support

01:44:49

the show financially.

01:44:51

If you want to do that, you can become a member.

01:44:53

You can click the button in overcast and it'll take you to the sign up page.

01:44:57

Otherwise it is Bookworm.fm/membership.

01:45:02

And then the links on the Bookworm.fm page, those are Amazon affiliate links.

01:45:07

So if you decide that you're going to read along and you want to purchase a book, if

01:45:11

you use one of those links, that helps us out as well.

01:45:13

Whoo-toot!

01:45:14

Fun times, excited about all this.

01:45:16

For next time, Trump Tank Pink by Adam Alter.

01:45:20

Pick that up and we'll go through it next time.