Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

Welcome back, Mike.

00:00:01

Hey, thanks.

00:00:02

It's been a while.

00:00:03

Well, actually, by the time this episode releases, it'll probably be back on schedule.

00:00:09

But...

00:00:09

Sure, you want to say that publicly?

00:00:11

[laughter]

00:00:12

I do.

00:00:12

I do.

00:00:13

I'm committed to making this thing work.

00:00:15

For one thing, we launched in the last episode the Premium Membership for the club.

00:00:21

And we've had a handful of people who have signed up for that already.

00:00:24

And as we're recording this, it's not even been 24 hours since we launched that,

00:00:28

which I know you mentioned before, that people signed up quicker than you thought they would.

00:00:33

So I just want to give a shout out to everybody who did sign up.

00:00:36

Thank you so much for supporting the show.

00:00:39

And for people who might be interested in that sort of thing, we're still adding stuff to the membership.

00:00:43

But kind of what we've landed on for now is that there's going to be a special Premium section of the Bookworm Club,

00:00:51

which is going to have a bunch of extra stuff in it.

00:00:53

Right now, it's got all of my book notes.

00:00:57

So the entire archive of all of the mind maps that I've been making, I think I uploaded like 42 of them yesterday.

00:01:03

It's a lot.

00:01:05

It is a lot.

00:01:05

It's like, it's all these like, holy buckets, there's a lot in here.

00:01:08

There is a lot there.

00:01:09

So if you want to go back and look through all of those, and it's not just the ones that we've covered for the episodes,

00:01:14

it's all of my gapbook stuff that anything, basically, that has a lot of information in it, I upload it.

00:01:19

Some of them, I didn't really take a whole lot of notes.

00:01:21

So I didn't upload those.

00:01:23

But there's a ton of stuff in there.

00:01:25

I also created a 4K desktop wallpaper, which has the Bookworm logo on top of like this reverse radial gradient sort of a thing.

00:01:35

It's pretty subtle and I think it looks pretty sweet.

00:01:38

But I'm curious to get your thoughts on it.

00:01:41

I'm kind of a wallpaper snob of sorts.

00:01:46

So when I saw this, like, oh my, you're doing a wallpaper.

00:01:51

But I hadn't seen it yet.

00:01:53

And I'm one that typically has really dark colored backgrounds.

00:01:59

So when I did see this, like, oh, I can actually get behind that one.

00:02:03

Like, I'm picky with this sort of thing.

00:02:05

So I did use it.

00:02:06

So I'm using it now.

00:02:07

Yeah, it's pretty subtle.

00:02:10

It's, I think it looks pretty good.

00:02:12

Obviously I'm biased and I'm not a graphic designer.

00:02:14

By the way, inside baseball, the easiest way to make a radial gradient like that that looks good

00:02:22

is in keynote.

00:02:23

Oh, interesting.

00:02:25

So literally what I did is I created a keynote slide, which was 4K by 2K and then exported as an image.

00:02:33

Well done, Mike.

00:02:34

But yeah, it looks pretty cool.

00:02:36

So there's that.

00:02:37

What else did we put in there?

00:02:39

Oh, and then there's like the little badge on the Bookworm Club.

00:02:43

So you get the same little Bookworm logo thing that you and I have as co-host when you are in the club.

00:02:49

It's kind of like a little status symbol sort of a thing.

00:02:52

And the other thing, which is not to be overstated, our undying gratitude is how I labeled it up

00:02:59

in the sales page.

00:03:01

But really, like, I'm blown away that people are willing to contribute a couple bucks a month

00:03:05

to help us keep the show going.

00:03:07

Because there were a lot of people.

00:03:08

I went through some things.

00:03:09

You went through some things.

00:03:10

We had to reschedule before I went on vacation.

00:03:12

I went on vacation.

00:03:13

I got sick when I got back.

00:03:15

So there were a handful of people who were saying basically,

00:03:18

"Is the show still live?"

00:03:20

I don't want to see Bookworm go.

00:03:22

And that kind of accelerated the whole, "Well, how do we make this thing sustainable?"

00:03:25

Because we really were in the middle of, "Okay, we got to just put out the--"

00:03:30

I was anyways.

00:03:31

I got to just put out the fires and do the urgent things.

00:03:33

So how does this fit in there?

00:03:37

And for people to put money behind the show really means a lot--

00:03:42

I'm speaking for you, Joe-- but it really means a lot to both you and I.

00:03:45

And so I want to say thank you to everyone who did that.

00:03:49

Thank you to everybody else who listens to the show and left a review.

00:03:52

And all the other ways that you can support the show.

00:03:54

But a special thanks to the people who are willing to chip in a little bit every month

00:03:59

to help keep the show going.

00:04:00

That really means a lot.

00:04:01

Yeah.

00:04:01

I continue to be amazed by the people who have conversations with us on the club.

00:04:08

And that do go through the process of leaving reviews.

00:04:11

These are things that I'm not great at.

00:04:12

So it always just completely surprises me whenever people start to engage with that sort of thing.

00:04:20

And then support us financially even on top of that.

00:04:23

So just blown away by the generosity there.

00:04:26

Thank you to the listeners who continue to do that and continue to send in things like

00:04:32

recommendations and interact with us on the club and on social media.

00:04:36

Like it's kind of fun.

00:04:36

It's kind of cool to see the connection that happens there.

00:04:39

So it's a lot of fun for me to make those connections with the folks who listen on the

00:04:45

other side of the microphone.

00:04:47

You and I get to talk on this side of the mic all the time.

00:04:49

But it's very different coming from folks on the other end of the

00:04:53

on the other end of all the cords and cables and stuff.

00:04:55

So thank you team.

00:04:57

Yes.

00:04:58

Thank you very much.

00:04:58

Thank you also to everybody who has bought a bookworm shirt.

00:05:02

We haven't mentioned this in a little while, but there is a Cotton Bureau campaign which

00:05:06

is basically eternally open.

00:05:09

So if you want to buy a bookworm shirt, you can do that.

00:05:13

There's t-shirts and sweatshirts there.

00:05:15

That doesn't make us a whole lot of money, but we do get a couple of bucks every time we

00:05:21

get a sale through there.

00:05:22

And the shirts are really nice.

00:05:24

I've lost track of the number of Cotton Bureau shirts that I've bought in over the years.

00:05:29

I just bought one for for drafts.

00:05:31

Oh, nice.

00:05:31

Which is super comfy and I love drafts.

00:05:35

I use it every single day.

00:05:36

So happy to support Greg Pierce, the developer.

00:05:39

And so if you wanted to if you wanted to get your own bookworm shirt, you can do that.

00:05:43

We'll have a link in the the show notes.

00:05:45

But enough of the self promotion stuff.

00:05:47

Let's get into our action items here.

00:05:49

Yeah.

00:05:49

And I'm just quick.

00:05:50

No, I'm wearing my sweatshirt right now.

00:05:52

Of course you are.

00:05:54

Yep.

00:05:55

Love this thing.

00:05:55

It's because we're recording on a Saturday and I don't dress up on Saturdays.

00:06:00

So here we are.

00:06:00

That's it.

00:06:01

Okay.

00:06:02

Follow up.

00:06:03

I am wrapping up my digital declutter today, Mike.

00:06:06

Yeah.

00:06:06

And I so tomorrow is Sunday.

00:06:09

I don't know how this is going to go because tomorrow is kind of my first day

00:06:14

like to to be done with that and slowly start inter theoretically slowly start introducing

00:06:21

things.

00:06:21

But it's Sunday.

00:06:22

I normally don't do a whole lot with computers and stuff on Sundays.

00:06:26

I'm like, okay.

00:06:26

Maybe I'm just gonna make it a 31 day just to make sure it's like Monday before I come back

00:06:32

into things.

00:06:32

Overachiever.

00:06:35

It's mostly because I don't want to just, you know, goof off on my phone whenever

00:06:40

I'm coming back from like when it's after church on Sunday.

00:06:44

Like I just don't want to do that.

00:06:45

So.

00:06:46

Yep.

00:06:46

Anyway, it's been an interesting process.

00:06:49

It's been fascinating to see the number of times when I would have just been spending time on my

00:06:55

phone or doing things on my computer that I probably shouldn't be, you know, goofing off

00:07:00

and doing research on things that don't matter.

00:07:03

Like things like that.

00:07:05

I've been cutting out quite a bit, but kind of a, the other half of this,

00:07:11

one of my other action items was to list out leisure activities.

00:07:14

And I'll drop these into the club.

00:07:16

But I haven't.

00:07:18

I haven't found myself reaching outside of that, but I've been, you know, pulling things from that

00:07:24

list of things that I enjoy doing to try to fill some of the time that I'm now regaining.

00:07:30

And I didn't realize I was regaining.

00:07:31

It's been a very enlightening process.

00:07:33

I know you don't like the idea of a digital declutter, but I think it would be very helpful for it.

00:07:37

So.

00:07:37

As somebody who works in the tech industry and heavily so, this was an enlightening experience.

00:07:44

Nice.

00:07:45

Well, I have a little bit of an update here.

00:07:48

I've not done a digital declutter, but since we spoke last, David and I interviewed Shahid Ahmed

00:07:55

for the Focused podcast because I was actually on vacation.

00:08:00

And in the relay Slack channel, Shahid had mentioned that he read

00:08:04

digital minimalism by Cal Newport and the general channel.

00:08:08

So we started chatting and I was like, so did you do the digital declutter thing?

00:08:13

Because Shahid is a video game developer.

00:08:14

Right.

00:08:15

And he said, yeah, I did it and I love it.

00:08:19

And I went from an iPhone 10 to an iPhone SE and he eliminated all sorts of crazy stuff.

00:08:26

All of his phone from it.

00:08:27

We recorded that episode.

00:08:29

It'll be live by the time this publishes.

00:08:31

So we'll put a link in the show notes.

00:08:33

It was a really cool conversation and he's moving the needle for me.

00:08:41

He basically, he's a definition that I really liked of infinity pools as opposed to like the

00:08:47

endless feeds.

00:08:48

Because he called out that like he needed to order some screwdrivers to fix something.

00:08:52

And so he went into the Amazon app and then he realized that he just kept looking at stuff on

00:08:56

Amazon.

00:08:56

He's like, oh, that's an infinity pool delete.

00:08:59

Yeah.

00:09:00

You know, those things that you don't typically think of.

00:09:02

And so I have my own action items that we'll get to here in a second.

00:09:07

I have not done the digital declutter, but Shahid made a very compelling case for it.

00:09:12

I think you should do it.

00:09:13

Just saying.

00:09:15

We'll see.

00:09:16

It's helpful.

00:09:17

So, so yes, I am wrapping that up soon.

00:09:21

Next time we record.

00:09:22

I may have some, you know, some interesting feedback on that.

00:09:26

The only other action item I had here was to experiment with the concept of building a

00:09:30

plugin for discourse forums that removes the functionality to like posts in their entirety.

00:09:38

Decided against this.

00:09:40

Mostly because I have no market for it.

00:09:43

Yeah.

00:09:44

And it would be a fairly significant amount of work.

00:09:48

Sure.

00:09:49

So research complete answer is no.

00:09:52

If someone wants to sponsor it, it'll become a yes.

00:09:54

However, Joe will not be sponsoring that out of his own foot.

00:09:57

So here we are.

00:09:59

All right.

00:10:00

So I've got four different action items.

00:10:04

The first one is to list the benefits that I get from the platforms that I use.

00:10:10

And then the second one kind of related to that is to delete all social media off of my phone.

00:10:16

So I did this and making the list really was the thing that got me to keep Instagram off of my

00:10:25

phone.

00:10:25

Instagram is one of those things that like I'll delete it and then I'll end up re-installing it

00:10:30

because I like Instagram.

00:10:33

It seems friendlier than a lot of the other social media platforms that are out there.

00:10:38

Yeah.

00:10:38

But it's also iPhone or mobile only.

00:10:41

So you can't run it except in a stupid looking blown up window.

00:10:46

On your iPad.

00:10:47

So that's the thing that's always made it not be gone for long on my phone before.

00:10:54

But recognizing that I really don't get a whole lot out of Instagram,

00:10:58

that's one of those infinity pools or endless feeds that typically I just end up looking at

00:11:02

stuff instead of posting things.

00:11:04

Right.

00:11:04

So yeah, Twitter is off of my phone.

00:11:07

Instagram is off of my phone.

00:11:08

I still check Twitter on my iPad, but having it on my iPad instead of my phone has kind of

00:11:13

transformed the way that I use it. So instead of pulling it out to check it periodically,

00:11:17

I basically end up looking at it once or twice a day.

00:11:21

And it does make things a little bit more inconvenient, which is why I think I forgot.

00:11:27

As I'm talking right now, I realize I forgot to tweet that I published the episode yesterday

00:11:32

because I normally would just pull out my phone and do that.

00:11:36

Yeah.

00:11:36

And I don't have that anymore.

00:11:38

So I kind of have to create new muscle memory there, have to get my iPad out of my bag

00:11:43

if I'm going to do that.

00:11:44

But sure.

00:11:45

But yeah, it's been been positive.

00:11:48

A miniature version of all the digital declutter benefits that you were mentioning.

00:11:51

I'm sure you're saying like, just go all in with this because it's this time's,

00:11:55

you know, whatever exponential, but.

00:11:57

Yep.

00:11:58

Because that's just one small aspect of it.

00:12:00

Yep.

00:12:01

Good start though.

00:12:02

Yep.

00:12:03

I also have one here.

00:12:04

Never click like again.

00:12:05

I did this once.

00:12:07

And as soon as I did it, I'm like, dang it.

00:12:09

Ah, that's what I would never do this.

00:12:11

I would never do this.

00:12:12

I would never do this.

00:12:14

Yeah.

00:12:14

But I think like, I think the, the action item has served its purpose where it's broken

00:12:20

the habit of doing that sort of thing.

00:12:22

So literally I have done it once.

00:12:25

And when I did it, like I said, I had that immediate reaction like,

00:12:28

ah, I said I was never going to do this again.

00:12:30

And then I just left it.

00:12:33

I didn't unlike it, whatever.

00:12:35

Yeah.

00:12:35

So I guess my question there is, so you're not liking things.

00:12:38

Have you replaced that like the sentiment intention there?

00:12:43

Like what you intended to say by liking something?

00:12:45

Did you replace it with like a post and reply to a phone call?

00:12:50

Like did you replace it with something?

00:12:51

Or did you just skip by that altogether?

00:12:54

Well, not necessarily.

00:12:55

I mentioned in the last episode that I do do that occasionally with stuff that friends will post.

00:13:02

But I found that the like specifically for me was triggered by Instagram.

00:13:08

So by removing Instagram, I have basically removed the temptation to hit the like button.

00:13:13

Sure.

00:13:13

Interesting.

00:13:15

I just, I don't know.

00:13:16

Like it seems more natural to say, yeah, I like this picture rather than to leave a comment

00:13:22

on Instagram.

00:13:23

Instagram comments, I'm sure it works the same way as every other social media platform,

00:13:28

whatever, but it just feels weird when you leave them.

00:13:30

Like, I'm not sure if this person's actually going to see this.

00:13:33

Yeah.

00:13:34

So that was something that I recognized that's just been ingrained in me that I hit the little

00:13:40

hard icon.

00:13:41

And now that Instagram is not there, I don't really do that.

00:13:44

So that was by the way, though, the one time that I hit it was before Instagram was permanently

00:13:49

going off my phone.

00:13:50

That's kind of the thing that got me to go along with it for sure.

00:13:53

Okay, seriously, this is the thing that's causing this other action item to fail.

00:13:58

Yeah.

00:13:58

This is gotta go.

00:13:58

It's interesting how probably all of your action items here

00:14:04

can all be summed up to some degree with Instagram.

00:14:08

Like yeah, fighting Instagram.

00:14:11

Interesting.

00:14:12

Well, not the last one.

00:14:13

The last one was figure out my own own low information diet as Cal put it.

00:14:19

And I really like this idea.

00:14:20

I have not stumbled onto what exactly this looks like for me yet.

00:14:24

I was hoping that Apple News Plus would fit this bill because I would look at the Wall Street

00:14:31

Journal and probably nothing else except that they don't give you the full Wall Street Journal.

00:14:36

And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that they're trying to get you to look at instead.

00:14:40

Right.

00:14:40

Just the way that it's laid out, I didn't like it at all.

00:14:42

You can't just go read like today's episode of the Wall Street Journal.

00:14:46

It presents all the information in that endless feed type format,

00:14:50

which completely made it a non-starter for me,

00:14:54

even though they've got a whole bunch of other magazines as I was looking through them.

00:14:57

I'm like, well, this one looks cool.

00:14:59

That one I would read occasionally.

00:15:00

And then I'm like, wait a minute.

00:15:01

This isn't stuff that I'm reading right now.

00:15:03

I had no desire to read this stuff before I looked at it.

00:15:06

Like why would I create more information for myself to consume?

00:15:10

So I signed up for they give you like a free month after the to check it out.

00:15:17

I signed up for it, realized the Wall Street Journal wasn't there in any navigatable form

00:15:22

and instantly unsubscribed.

00:15:25

Yeah.

00:15:25

So the same day, and I know that once you unsubscribe, your access is turned off.

00:15:31

So people will say, oh, just set a task or an alarm, whatever, to unsubscribe before the month is up.

00:15:35

And I was like, nope, not even going to go there.

00:15:37

Right.

00:15:37

Just going to get rid of this.

00:15:38

So I still had to figure out what my low information diet looks like,

00:15:42

though when you just have RSS to stay on top of, at least the way my RSS is set up,

00:15:48

it's a lot more manageable than trying to keep up with that, plus the Twitter feeds,

00:15:52

plus Instagram, all the other things.

00:15:54

Keep it simple.

00:15:55

Yeah.

00:15:56

Yep.

00:15:56

So I still want to go through and call a bunch of things out, curate it,

00:16:00

because I do see a lot of like repeat stories and stuff like that.

00:16:05

I recognize because I follow, you know, John Gruber and Federico Vitticci and Steven Hackett

00:16:10

and Jason Snow and all these people who are basically saying the same thing.

00:16:14

And then when somebody has a really good article, they all link to it anyway.

00:16:17

Right.

00:16:17

Right.

00:16:18

Right.

00:16:18

So that is the next step that I haven't finished yet.

00:16:21

Fair enough.

00:16:21

Well, good luck with that.

00:16:23

I don't think the news thing is going to cut it.

00:16:26

I don't have any interest in it because there's so much stuff that's in that that I don't want

00:16:30

to read or won't read.

00:16:33

So yeah, not worth it.

00:16:35

But I also confession, I get the paper version of the Wall Street Journal.

00:16:39

So that's where I get most of mine.

00:16:42

Well, maybe that's what I got to do, but it's so expensive.

00:16:48

Yeah.

00:16:48

I've been so close to subscribing a bunch of times because I do like the information

00:16:53

that is in the Wall Street Journal.

00:16:55

And if I were to just read that every day, I feel like I would be

00:16:58

very well informed of the things that I want to keep up with

00:17:02

and wouldn't necessarily be made sad by all the political commenting.

00:17:06

Right.

00:17:07

So it's kind of the ideal source for these things, but it is so dang expensive, even for just

00:17:13

the digital one.

00:17:14

So when Apple News was launched in $10 a month and it includes Wall Street Journal,

00:17:19

I got to check this out because that's like half of just the discounted

00:17:23

digital subscription.

00:17:24

Right.

00:17:24

But you're still talking about $120 a year.

00:17:26

Yeah.

00:17:27

Yeah.

00:17:28

Well, I think the digital subscription was like $38 a month or something after the initial

00:17:33

period goes off.

00:17:34

Sure.

00:17:34

$38 a month for digital.

00:17:36

Give me a break.

00:17:37

And then we talked about that in one of those books that we covered.

00:17:40

Which one was that?

00:17:41

Was that the predictably irrational that used that example from the economist?

00:17:46

Yep.

00:17:47

Yep.

00:17:47

Yep.

00:17:47

Yep.

00:17:48

Well, yes.

00:17:51

All of these action items come from Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

00:17:56

And a couple of books that Cal talked about in Digital Minimalism, one of which the one you

00:18:03

just mentioned, predictably irrational by Dan O'Reilly.

00:18:07

But Dan O'Reilly actually wrote a quote for the one we're going to go through today,

00:18:12

Drunk Tank Pink, which was also mentioned in Digital Minimalism.

00:18:15

Dan O'Reilly wrote, "Alter's book will change the way you look at our world."

00:18:21

I think it's a fair assessment having read this.

00:18:23

So Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter.

00:18:26

And he's also the author of another book called Irresistible.

00:18:31

But the tagline on this one today is Drunk Tank Pink and other unexpected forces that shape

00:18:39

how we think, feel, and behave.

00:18:41

And Mike and I were talking a little bit before we hit the little red record button.

00:18:46

And this might be an interesting book to go through because it's super fast-paced.

00:18:52

There's a lot of little tiny stories that are just one after another, tons and tons of research.

00:18:57

Mainly the reason I picked it was because I thought the title was really cool.

00:19:03

Because like Drunk Tank Pink, what?

00:19:07

So such a weird title.

00:19:10

As soon as I read the story about it, it made perfect sense.

00:19:12

But it was just fascinating to me.

00:19:16

But this book basically goes through a lot of different aspects of our daily life.

00:19:24

And then tries to explain, and successfully so, in many cases,

00:19:28

tries to explain why they impact us the way they do.

00:19:31

Why does the color pink affect us a certain way?

00:19:36

Why does this color do this?

00:19:38

Why does this symbol do that?

00:19:40

When you're around other people, this happens.

00:19:42

Just a lot of that stuff.

00:19:44

I just found it very fascinating.

00:19:46

So I think this will be an interesting book to go through today.

00:19:48

Yeah, side note, you mentioned that Dan O'Reilly had the quote on the back.

00:19:56

And I noticed that when I was about halfway through this book,

00:20:00

and I was like, "Ah, that explains a lot."

00:20:04

Yep.

00:20:07

So we'll get into the specifics here.

00:20:10

But I guess spoiler alert, just like, predictably irrational, I believe,

00:20:15

neither of us have action items associated with this.

00:20:18

Yes.

00:20:18

This is a lot of information and kind of bugs me from a bookworm perspective,

00:20:23

because it's like, "Okay, I know this stuff, but what's the takeaway here?

00:20:28

Like, how am I going to do anything with what I just invested with reading this?"

00:20:34

And there probably is some stuff that's going to stick with me,

00:20:37

and I'll recognize like, "Hey, this is happening and shaping my interpretation of these events that

00:20:43

are happening in front of me, but I am not optimistic that this is going to have any sort of long-term

00:20:52

effect on the way that I live with my life."

00:20:55

Yeah.

00:20:55

Which is kind of frustrating, to be honest.

00:20:58

Yeah, this is one of these books that it's not really geared towards driving you to do something

00:21:07

about it, not necessarily.

00:21:09

He does call something out in like the last paragraph of the book, or maybe was it the last sentence,

00:21:15

that I kind of wish he had, you know, expanded on a little bit more.

00:21:21

Let me see if I can get this.

00:21:24

Yeah, right here.

00:21:25

So let me just read this last little bit to you.

00:21:27

So no matter where you go, drunk tank, pink, and other cues will follow.

00:21:33

And having read this book, you'll be in a much better place to identify them,

00:21:36

recognize how they'll affect you, and harness to overcome them to maximize your health, wisdom,

00:21:41

wealth, and well-being.

00:21:43

And to me, you know, he's basically calling out, like, "You're going to identify these things

00:21:50

because of this," but it doesn't even tell you what to do about it, which I'm not sure was his

00:21:55

intent.

00:21:55

No.

00:21:56

So I have a hard time faulting him for that.

00:22:00

I think that has to do more with a personality of, or a preference for the intent of the book.

00:22:06

Which his did not align with what we normally request of authors.

00:22:11

So with that, like, I have a hard time faulting him for it, but at the same time, I'm with you.

00:22:16

I was like, "Yes, I don't have any action items here."

00:22:18

But I have a lot of things that I'm aware of that I normally wasn't, or previously wasn't,

00:22:25

aware of.

00:22:25

So in that regard, I feel like I have a lot.

00:22:28

But as far as what do you physically do with it?

00:22:31

Maybe talk to people about it?

00:22:34

I don't know.

00:22:34

What's about it?

00:22:35

Right.

00:22:36

Well, the other piece to this, and we'll get into some of the specifics here, but a lot of this stuff,

00:22:43

I feel like, was fairly common sense.

00:22:47

Like, look people in the eyes, sort of a thing.

00:22:52

And that stuff, it's kind of like, "Well, okay, do I really need a reminder for that sort of thing?"

00:23:00

The rest of this stuff that was new, I feel like there's no way I'm going to

00:23:07

recall that in a moment's notice when I need it, other than if I were to go back and look through

00:23:13

this outline.

00:23:14

The most powerful story I thought in the whole book was that first section about

00:23:19

"Drunk Take Pink."

00:23:21

And then from there, I feel like it went downhill.

00:23:25

Yeah.

00:23:27

So, "Drunk Take Pink" is a really cool idea. Let's start there.

00:23:31

You want to explain this?

00:23:32

Yeah. So "Drunk Tank Pink," this is a part of what was it, the prologue?

00:23:37

I think so.

00:23:38

I think it was.

00:23:39

Yeah.

00:23:40

So there was an experiment done when was this.

00:23:45

It was a paper that came out in 1979.

00:23:48

And the author of that paper was Professor Alexander Shoss.

00:23:53

And it was a simple experiment that they did.

00:23:56

There was about 150 men that were a part of it.

00:24:00

They took two large pieces of colored cardboard in a lab.

00:24:05

And they had people come in and they had some men stare at these two colors of cardboard.

00:24:13

One was blue.

00:24:14

It was like a deep blue color.

00:24:16

The other, it was bright pink.

00:24:18

So for half of the men in the experiment, they stared at the blue color.

00:24:23

For the other half, they stared at the pink color.

00:24:26

After a minute of this, the researcher asked the men to put their arms straight out in front of them.

00:24:34

And he would put pressure down on their arms just to see what kind of strength they had in that.

00:24:41

So once he had done that, and then after they'd recovered their strength,

00:24:46

the researcher wrote some things down and then repeated the experiment

00:24:50

with them staring at the other color of the cardboard.

00:24:55

The part that was interesting was that those after having stared at the pink cardboard,

00:25:03

it didn't matter if you did it first or second, but they had less strength

00:25:09

after staring at the pink as opposed to the blue.

00:25:16

It was just weird to me.

00:25:17

All you're doing is looking at a color.

00:25:20

Why does your strength change because you're looking at a color?

00:25:23

But this is apparently something that was repeatable.

00:25:27

They did do it at a second experiment.

00:25:30

Only they used some more accurate ways of measuring the strength and confirmed it.

00:25:34

And this ended up being a thing that some different organizations

00:25:40

read the study, decided to do some larger scale experiments and started to paint like prison cells

00:25:48

pink.

00:25:48

You know, that's where some of the drunk tank pink name comes from.

00:25:53

Throw in somebody in the drunk tank, well paint the drunk tank pink,

00:25:56

and it settles people down.

00:25:59

It's so much so that some police stations when they did this were reporting that incidents of

00:26:06

violence were ceasing altogether or dropping very significantly.

00:26:12

All because they painted the cell pink, thus drunk tank pink.

00:26:18

I thought this was a fascinating story.

00:26:19

Yeah.

00:26:20

And it kind of made me stop like whoa, hold up, what's going on here.

00:26:24

So it's kind of an interesting one.

00:26:26

Yeah, like I said, this is the strongest story in the entire book, in my opinion.

00:26:32

But just to add a few more details to what you were sharing, one of the things that they did

00:26:38

after the initial study, there were two officers at the US Naval Correctional Center in Seattle.

00:26:43

I believe they were Gene Baker and Ron Miller, and they painted one of their cells this pink color,

00:26:49

and that is that pacified new inmates where no violent incidents had occurred in the seven-month

00:26:55

trial period.

00:26:56

You kind of alluded to that.

00:26:58

And then from there, the smaller jails, they started throwing the violent drunks in these

00:27:02

pink painted cells, and that's where they got the name drunk tank pink.

00:27:05

But they saw the application of this in a lot of other places as well.

00:27:10

They mentioned that United Way employees would receive two to three times the amount of donations

00:27:17

when they wore pink.

00:27:18

And there were a couple of universities, University of Colorado and the University of Iowa,

00:27:23

that painted visitor locker rooms pink to try to pacify their opponents until

00:27:28

the conferences said, "No, you can't do that."

00:27:31

Yeah, I thought that was genius.

00:27:33

That is brilliant.

00:27:35

As soon as I heard that story, I'm like, "Oh man, that makes so much sense.

00:27:40

I can't believe everybody didn't try to do that."

00:27:42

Right.

00:27:43

But yeah, this story was awesome.

00:27:46

And then from there, I guess I've been trying to figure out for a while why I liked this story

00:27:53

so much and not so much a lot of the other stories that they mentioned.

00:27:56

I feel like it has to do with the amount of impact that it had.

00:28:03

Because they went from having a whole bunch of violent incidents to zero violent

00:28:08

incidents during this seven month trial period I mentioned at the US Naval Correctional Center in

00:28:12

Seattle.

00:28:13

So that's pretty drastic.

00:28:14

And the rest of them, there's usually percentage statistics that go along with them.

00:28:21

Like if you do this, then you see a 10% increase, which is obviously a lot.

00:28:24

And I'm just like, "No, it's not."

00:28:26

It feels a lot less impactful.

00:28:30

And I think it has a lot to do with just the scope of the change that was

00:28:35

implemented from the concepts that he's talking about.

00:28:38

And this one is so strong that everything else feels pretty weak by comparison.

00:28:43

Yeah, I think I would agree with you that this particular story was one that stood out to me

00:28:49

way more than any of the others.

00:28:51

So much so that, and we'll get into the outline here, there's a lot, a lot of stories here,

00:28:56

but not a lot of them stood out to me.

00:28:58

Having just finished reading this very recently, I don't have a lot of the stories and the studies

00:29:05

that I could just readily recall and repeat to you.

00:29:09

There's not a lot of those, partially because it was such a huge influx of them.

00:29:12

But I think this is my speculation.

00:29:17

I think that particular story struck me similar to the way it did you, partially because

00:29:22

it was the first story we read that involved things that we normally think of that don't

00:29:30

have any impact on us, but actually have a big impact on us.

00:29:33

Yep.

00:29:34

Like that seemed like this story broke that barrier when none of the rest of the stories did,

00:29:40

because that had already been broken down.

00:29:43

So maybe that's why it had that impact.

00:29:45

It could also be that I'm speculating that just because now I don't trust anything because of this

00:29:50

book.

00:29:50

So everybody's trying to impose something on me now.

00:29:55

So, well, let's get into some of these other stories, and I feel like as we compare them

00:30:01

that the listeners can decide for themselves, but I feel like that the proof is in the pudding here.

00:30:07

So after this introduction section, which talks about drunk tank pink,

00:30:13

the rest of the book is broken into three different sections.

00:30:16

Hey, three parts.

00:30:16

Whoa, never seen that before.

00:30:18

Part one is the world within us.

00:30:20

Part two is the world between us, and part three is the world around us.

00:30:26

And each one of these sections has three different chapters.

00:30:30

So the first section, the world within us, let's start here.

00:30:35

There's three chapters here, which talk about names, labels, and symbols.

00:30:41

Now, in the names section, when I started this chapter, I was really looking forward to this,

00:30:45

because I personally believe based on my belief system, that names are very important.

00:30:54

And if you study Christianity and Judaism, the names that they gave people when they were born,

00:31:00

that was kind of like a proclamation of who they were going to be.

00:31:04

Okay.

00:31:05

And my wife and I kind of believe that as well.

00:31:07

So the beginning of this chapter, the chapter is called names,

00:31:11

the birth of nominative determinism.

00:31:13

I thought this was going to be totally in line with like the other stuff that I've

00:31:18

read and the importance of names and stuff like that.

00:31:20

But that's not really what you find here.

00:31:23

You find a story about this guy who was born to Vietchislav and Marina,

00:31:28

and his name is ready for this.

00:31:31

Yeah, good luck.

00:31:31

All right.

00:31:32

Right. B-O-H-D-V-F-260602.

00:31:38

And it stands for biological object human descendant of Veronus,

00:31:43

and I don't even know how to pronounce these.

00:31:45

V-O-R-O-N-I-S and F-R-O-L-O-V-A-S, which I believe were the last names of the parents.

00:31:52

Born on June 26, 2002.

00:31:54

What in the world?

00:31:59

And the reason they give behind this is that they wanted to escape the implicit

00:32:03

meaning of the name that they would give their son on page nine.

00:32:05

They have a quote that says, "This will make life easier.

00:32:07

My son will be void of his father's legacy."

00:32:10

But I have so many issues with this in particular.

00:32:16

But even with that, like you still have to refer to him as something.

00:32:20

Exactly.

00:32:21

And you're not going to say, "Hey, B-O-H-D-V-F-260260202."

00:32:26

Whatever it is.

00:32:27

You're not going to yell at your kid that way.

00:32:29

It's just not going to happen.

00:32:31

So they call him "Botch."

00:32:32

When I saw him, wait, is that because you botched his name?

00:32:37

Like, is that why you did that?

00:32:39

But yeah, I thought this was just a challenge.

00:32:43

Well, here's a crazy idea.

00:32:44

How about you take ownership of the legacy that you're going to leave your son and make it a good one?

00:32:50

Sure.

00:32:52

Yeah.

00:32:53

That's my goal.

00:32:55

Like, why this just bothers me?

00:32:59

Why do we assume that they should not want to be associated with anything that their parents did?

00:33:09

I feel like with some situations, and they share a little bit of the backstory,

00:33:15

I believe that this guy's dad was not something that he was proud of, basically.

00:33:24

He wanted to move away from that, but you don't have to change your name in order to say,

00:33:31

the buck stops here.

00:33:33

You can make choices and chart your own course without resorting to naming your kids

00:33:40

a bunch of random numbers and letters.

00:33:42

But this is just the beginning of the weirdness in this chapter because the other story,

00:33:49

which again, like this is the type of thing he uses to make his points,

00:33:52

and I was just scratching my head like, "Huh?"

00:33:55

He said a 1979 study found that 38% of the top 200 brand names began with a K or a C sound.

00:34:04

Okay, I guess maybe that's interesting.

00:34:08

And 93% had the K sound somewhere in their names.

00:34:11

So kind of the connection that he's making here is the power of the K sound and the power of the

00:34:18

brand. And I was like, "Huh?"

00:34:21

Like, just because you named something, and just as an example, a local company here at Kimberly

00:34:29

Clark, that totally fits his description here. Or maybe it's just an easy name to say, and that's

00:34:34

what people think of when they need to go by diapers.

00:34:37

And seriously, we don't need to look too much into this stuff, I think.

00:34:41

And I feel like we're trying to make all these connections that aren't really there with a lot

00:34:46

of these stories that he tells.

00:34:47

So I don't know about that particular piece of it, but one, the big beef I had with the whole book,

00:34:56

okay? He gives study after study after study.

00:34:59

No problem with that. He gives tons and tons of examples, shows how correlations with things like

00:35:06

a cuss sound in a name. Like, I run a business called Pro Course, so we have that in our name.

00:35:12

Which you obviously picked that because you wanted your brand to be successful, right?

00:35:16

I only picked it because we work on discourse. So I was trying to do professional discourse.

00:35:22

So Pro Course, that's why that's where it came from. I don't think I've ever said that publicly.

00:35:28

That's where it came from.

00:35:28

So if you would have called it Pro Software, you would be at least 20% less successful than you

00:35:33

are right now. Totally. Completely. That's exactly the way it would work.

00:35:38

My beef with all of the studies and everything is that a lot of times he would refer to,

00:35:46

we had 40 people come in and do this. Or we had 50 people. We had 25 people. We took a small

00:35:52

sample of this class. That's a real, like, I'm a contract data analyst right now.

00:35:59

Data matters to me. And those are tiny, tiny numbers.

00:36:06

Yes.

00:36:06

So if I have a big beef, it's like what you're talking about here to some degree. It's that

00:36:13

they are making some pretty big arching claims when the pool and the information and the research

00:36:21

and the science behind it is kind of flaky to me.

00:36:26

Small sample sizes and small findings. If you've got 40 people and you see an 8% increase,

00:36:35

you cannot make a connection there. There's not enough there.

00:36:38

Yeah. I think it would, like, the 8% piece, I'm not sure I would say that because it depends

00:36:44

on what you're talking about. Sometimes 8% is huge. Sometimes it's tiny. That's just my take on it.

00:36:51

I think it depends on what we're talking about. But with all of the studies, sometimes they would

00:36:58

talk about there were 15,000 people a part of this or they reviewed 100,000 data points from the

00:37:05

MLB. They would refer to that like those I get. But when you're talking about, we looked at the

00:37:12

last 15 games of this sports team. Well, that's one season. That season may have been weird.

00:37:19

So I had a hard time with some of that. I don't think I would argue that they saw the changes

00:37:26

or saw the differences. Those are statistical differences that they're talking about.

00:37:31

So yes, given that particular study, I would agree that that change or that thing was there.

00:37:37

Do the names matter? Well, in the sample they chose. Yeah. Does the cuss sound make a difference

00:37:45

and help companies be successful? Maybe? Possibly. I'll at least think about it next time.

00:37:54

Maybe that's a thing that's there. But I feel like you're going to do with that.

00:37:59

Yeah. Maybe I'll pay attention to it when I name things in the future, possibly.

00:38:04

Just because, and I've seen this a number of times, they run across companies that don't have a

00:38:09

hard continent like that in their name. And they're kind of harder names to say and make sure that

00:38:16

you're saying them clearly. So something like Pro Course, it's very clear what we're talking about.

00:38:21

There's not really any piece of that that's hard to grasp. So I don't know. I don't know how I feel

00:38:28

about some of that, Mike. There's definitely pieces of it that I'm like,

00:38:31

maybe that's what you're getting at, but you're kind of grasping at straws in some cases.

00:38:35

Well, just to give you another example, going into the next chapter on labels and the impact that

00:38:43

this had on me, so he's sharing all of these numbers from all of these different studies.

00:38:47

I basically took notes on the studies and stopped writing down the numbers because I thought they

00:38:51

were meaningless. Oh, so yeah. He mentions the Quardy, for example. And I know you're a Devorak fan.

00:38:57

Yep. Right. So Quardy is the keyboard layout that is predominant in probably every keyboard that

00:39:03

you would see that's not custom. And it was originally created to keep the typewriters from

00:39:09

jamming. So they spaced out the keys that people use most frequently so they didn't come from the

00:39:14

same section of the typewriter and didn't jam. But he talks about the layout for this and

00:39:22

how people prefer right-handed words. And I was like, what? So those would be words that have

00:39:31

the letters on the right side of the keyboard. So U-I-O-J-K-L-M-N-P.

00:39:38

Yeah, I was just like, wait, what are those? Because I'm looking down at my keyboard. I was like,

00:39:42

wait, those letters aren't there. What's on the-- Where's-- I don't have a Quardy keyboard in front of me.

00:39:46

Well, yeah, I've got a Quardy keyboard. So I have a frame of reference. But when he said that, I was

00:39:52

like, that's garbage. There's no way I prefer right-handed words. If anything, you're talking about the

00:40:00

hard consonant sounds, like the cuff from the C or even the Quardy. That's with a Q.

00:40:07

So people should prefer the left-handed words. And kind of the connection that he made is like,

00:40:13

well, most people are right-handed. So they like those words that they type with the right hand

00:40:15

better kind of subconsciously. And I was like, number one, if this is true, there is absolutely

00:40:20

no application that is going to come from this. And number two, I don't think it is true.

00:40:24

Based on your small sample sizes. That particular one, I thought was kind of odd because

00:40:34

I type Dvorak. So that doesn't make any sense. But my other question to him that I was asking,

00:40:41

but he didn't answer. Though I have been a long time ago, I had an action item to make contact or

00:40:47

email, send a letter or something to the authors. I've been doing that for a while, by the way.

00:40:52

So I have that as a particular point that I wanted to email Adam about. Because I wondered if

00:40:59

it wasn't necessarily that people are right-handed. Therefore, they prefer right-handed words as much

00:41:04

as they're more dominant in their right hand. So it's easier to type with their right hand.

00:41:09

So it wasn't a matter of preference for words as much as just a muscle memory on that particular

00:41:15

hand is more sophisticated, maybe. I don't know. I don't know.

00:41:19

People are so bad at typing that they just go to the path of least resistance.

00:41:23

That's kind of what your theory is.

00:41:26

Yep. It's just easier that way. But I will say Dvorak is superior.

00:41:33

Yeah. Well, maybe that's going to be an action item for me at some point just to give that a shot,

00:41:40

but it is not going to be this day.

00:41:41

All right. So side note, if you ever do that, you have to commit and you're just going to have

00:41:48

to deal with it for about a year. I'm going to try this for a couple of weeks decision.

00:41:54

Like you got to try this for nine to 12 months before you're going to be able to make a decision

00:41:59

one way or the other. That's not a short term experiment.

00:42:03

So we'll stick a pin in that one.

00:42:05

Surprise. It's worth pinning.

00:42:07

Yeah. Well, I'm just because I know it's going to come up again.

00:42:12

I have been curious about that. I did a keyboard experiment at one point for when I was working

00:42:18

with Asian efficiency with a blank keyboard. The thought process being that no key markings

00:42:27

would force me to become a touch typist and my words per minute would go up. And that is,

00:42:31

in fact, what had happened because I charted my progress over a series of like three weeks.

00:42:36

But yeah, I'm not currently conducting experiments on myself. So fair enough.

00:42:43

There were a couple interesting sections in this chapter, though. I thought there was a section

00:42:48

on colors and labels and they mentioned that Russians have separate words for light blue and

00:42:53

dark blue. Oh, it's fast. That actually makes it easier for them to distinguish between things

00:42:58

in a test because they have different labels attached to them. I thought that was really

00:43:02

interesting. And then he kind of applies that to how labels can be arbitrary going into like

00:43:08

race and skin color. He mentions Tiger Woods told Oprah one time that he was

00:43:15

"cablin Asian" which was interesting. It's a combination of Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian.

00:43:22

And there was a story in here about Jane Elliott's third grade classroom, which I thought was

00:43:29

really interesting because she had a student ask her why Martin Luther King Jr. had gotten shot.

00:43:36

So she did this experiment so everyone in the class could feel discrimination.

00:43:42

What she did is she told the blue-eyed students that they were superior to the brown-eyed students

00:43:46

and they had to wear paper armbands and they couldn't drink from certain water fountains.

00:43:51

And then those groups acted according to the position that they were given. And then on the

00:43:56

following Monday she had them reverse the roles, told the brown-eyed students that they were superior

00:43:59

to the blue-eyed students. By the time the experiment was over, both sides felt terrible and they were

00:44:04

hugging and demonstrating about this experiment. And basically nobody wanted to ever have just

00:44:11

have that discrimination applied to them or come from them ever again.

00:44:15

That was a really cool experiment. I did too. It's like that's interesting. Like, huh, why is that?

00:44:23

That's kind of an odd thing. To me it was kind of an odd thing to choose eye color.

00:44:28

Because my immediate thing was to pick something like hair color just because it's more prominent

00:44:33

and easier to see. But regardless, the experiment stands and I think the kids definitely got the

00:44:40

point from the way it sounds. Yeah, definitely. There was another study in this section.

00:44:46

I believe it was an older one like 1964 where they applied the label of bloomer at random to kids.

00:44:54

And then the people who got that label, their IQ actually increased and they outperformed their

00:45:01

peers simply because they had gotten this label of bloomer by 10 to 15 IQ points.

00:45:06

Which is interesting because IQ is one of those things that you typically feel like you're born

00:45:12

with this. I mentioned emotional intelligence on this podcast probably way too much. But that's

00:45:17

kind of one of the distinguishing factors in the emotional intelligence world is that emotional

00:45:22

intelligence can be developed unlike your IQ. So it doesn't matter where you start basically,

00:45:28

as long as you have a growth mindset and you're looking to improve, you can develop those skills.

00:45:32

But basically, this study is saying that IQ can be impacted too simply by a label and the perspective

00:45:39

that you apply to yourself. So interesting. Now, I do want to say there's one more section in this

00:45:46

first part about symbols. But the names and labels piece, for whatever reason, when I finish reading

00:45:54

those two sections, I tend to pause between chapters when I'm reading. And it occurred to me that

00:46:01

this is something that Apple takes advantage of heavily. And I'm not sure a lot of people catch it,

00:46:07

but they're very particular with the way they name things. I think everybody knows that.

00:46:11

They're pretty particular with the way that they label things. And sometimes whenever they

00:46:16

do those two things, they get a lot of ridicule. Like, why are you calling this the iPad Air? It

00:46:22

should be the three. Like, come on. But that's really important because of the way that your mind

00:46:28

thinks about it, whether you intend to think about it that way or not. Like all of the terminology

00:46:33

they use at their Apple events, like think about the way that they present these things. Like,

00:46:37

even when Steve Jobs did this, he's like the parent of all of that mentality. He's like,

00:46:43

he would refer to things as the most elegant, you know, the revolutionary device. Like, he

00:46:48

referred to things that way. And despite your arguments for or against his statement, it was

00:46:55

already implanted in your brain and you had a hard time. Like, you had to actually refute it.

00:46:59

Otherwise, people just accepted it, you know, cart block. So yeah, I think this is a very

00:47:06

interesting part. Again, we need to cover symbols, but I couldn't help ignoring or I couldn't help

00:47:11

seeing the connection that Apple takes advantage of all this. Yeah, that's interesting. I did not

00:47:18

make that connection when I read it, maybe because of the phrasing of this section, the world

00:47:24

within us. I don't know. I guess when I read that, it kind of felt like yeah, external factors

00:47:31

haven't entered into the equation yet. But I do think you're right that marketers recognize

00:47:40

these things and they use them to their advantage. Right. And it's interesting, probably not a

00:47:47

conversation for right now, but where is the line there with the responsibilities that the

00:47:53

companies have to call things what they are and not prey on people's, I don't know, not prejudices,

00:48:00

but the way that they're wired, you know, and because you want to obviously sell more of your

00:48:08

widgets and your services and stuff like that. So you want to position things correctly. But if

00:48:14

you do it in a certain way where you know you're manipulating the people that you're supposedly

00:48:19

serving, that's not good either. So that's a tough balancing act there for pretty much anybody who

00:48:26

works on the interwebs, I think. Yeah. Right. The last piece here before we move on to the second

00:48:33

part symbols, all kinds of examples that he shares here, probably the most prominent one

00:48:39

was the swastika. Yep. Everybody knows what I'm talking about now. And even whenever I said that,

00:48:46

you know, internally you had a reaction, usually negative, hopefully negative.

00:48:52

It's interesting how he does spell out how that particular symbol did exist before World War II.

00:49:00

Not mainstream, but it did exist. But the meaning behind it that became a part of that symbol post

00:49:11

World War II, you know, now it's considered a symbol of hate just to have that symbol anywhere.

00:49:17

It's completely taken on a different life form from what it used to be. So symbols are very,

00:49:23

very important and invoke a lot of feelings and meaning behind them in the fraction of a second.

00:49:31

That was something that I thought was kind of interesting because they would refer to these

00:49:37

some studies where they would have someone looking at a screen and then they would

00:49:41

show an image for like one or two frames, which is so fast that you really can't tell what it was.

00:49:47

And yet it would have an effect on their results, like they would, you know, be mean towards another

00:49:56

student or be kind to them depending on whether or not they saw or had the image of a swastika

00:50:02

shown to them versus the image of a church having those two competing with each other.

00:50:07

You can't even recognize what it is. How is it supposed to have an effect on you? But apparently

00:50:12

it did. Did they do it enough times? I don't know. I don't know if it's just speculation, but

00:50:17

I thought that was fascinating. Yeah, this is where I start to call BS.

00:50:25

So I understand that symbols have meaning and based on the symbols that you show people,

00:50:32

it can impact the way that you look at things around that particular symbol.

00:50:39

And that was one of the studies that they did in this section on priming. They mentioned symbols

00:50:45

can prepare us for particular thoughts or behaviors. The swastika is kind of associated with aggression,

00:50:51

hatred, anger, and negativity. So one study they did showed that students who were exposed to the

00:50:56

swastika were primed to associate a character with being immoral and to deserve extreme punishment.

00:51:02

And the number that they shared here was they were 10% more likely to do this.

00:51:05

And at this point, I'm like, well, duh. So the swastika is not something that you see every single

00:51:14

day. Maybe if it was more normalized, people would just not be impacted by it. But if you're seeing

00:51:22

a series of images and you see a picture of a, if someone were to show me a series of images,

00:51:27

and all of a sudden there's a swastika there, it's kind of jarring because it's not something

00:51:31

that you see every day. And those things that have that sort of shock value, they do put you

00:51:37

in a certain state of mind. So obviously, everything else that you're going to be looking at after that,

00:51:44

your brain is kind of on guard is like, okay, so we are looking at some crazy stuff here.

00:51:50

And so you're kind of leaning that way where maybe you wouldn't be normally leaning that way.

00:51:54

At least the way I'm wired, I would not normally be leaning that way. Does that make sense?

00:51:58

It does to me. Yeah.

00:52:00

Yeah. So the fact that the 10% more likely to assume that a character has impure motives and

00:52:08

deserves punishment when they're shown a picture of a swastika that just seems natural to me.

00:52:14

And honestly, 10%, this is one of those ones where it's like, you're going to use that number

00:52:19

to justify your claims really. I would expect this to be like 50%.

00:52:23

It's almost like so little that it's not even worth mentioning.

00:52:28

Right.

00:52:29

You know? And I just think that what are you going to do with this? Are you going to

00:52:36

assume that everything you watch on TV is sending you subliminal messages and you got to be on

00:52:41

guard against this stuff? I don't think that's any sort of solution. So you deal with this junk

00:52:48

when you see it. But other than that, why worry about it? I don't know if it's so much worrying

00:52:53

about it. It's just being aware of it. Just my thought. I guess. But I already know swastikas are

00:53:00

bad. So why do I need to be told that swastikas are bad? Fair point.

00:53:05

You know? I don't know. And then also, like he mentions that these symbols,

00:53:10

they don't have any meaning until they're associated with some existing meaningful concepts.

00:53:15

Okay. So if you are a child who knows nothing about World War II, Adolf Hitler,

00:53:24

and Nazi Germany, and you see a swastika, are you naturally leaning that way? I'm guessing

00:53:32

probably not. Okay. So for somebody who doesn't have negative associations with certain symbols,

00:53:39

and I would argue the swastika probably is one that you want people to associate negative

00:53:44

feelings with when you see this, this is bad. Okay, stay away from this symbol. But to a lesser

00:53:51

degree, do we need to explain things in a way where it's like, Oh, you shouldn't do this because

00:54:00

this is the way that it can be interpreted? Like to a certain degree, I kind of think

00:54:04

for some of this stuff ignorance is bliss. I guess the Bible way to define it would be to

00:54:10

the pure, all things are pure. Like, why do we have to teach all the subliminal possible messaging

00:54:17

with every single symbol that we have so that we can be manipulated by them? If that makes sense.

00:54:21

Or just seeing how other people are attempting to use them against you.

00:54:27

That was that was maybe the piece of this that I enjoyed. Through all of these different pieces

00:54:34

was that it showed me how a lot of people are trying to like specifically attempting to use

00:54:42

these things against me and to influence me and to be aware of that to combat it to some degree.

00:54:49

Like that's that was kind of my meant might after about a chapter or two, that was kind of the

00:54:54

mindset that I took with it. Gotcha. Okay. So my next question then would be,

00:55:00

why do we want to be so aware and I'll use the term worried, maybe you're not worried,

00:55:08

but I feel like if you're going to be made aware of what potential impact things around you can have,

00:55:14

that's kind of the logical next step is like, Oh my gosh, this stuff has been impacting me for

00:55:19

so long and I didn't even realize it, right? So now I'm on the lookout for for everything.

00:55:25

Why not flip this and instead of worrying or being concerned about the things that other people

00:55:33

are trying to influence you with, why not just internalize your own set of symbols,

00:55:40

your own values, vision, whatever, and just make that super strong so it overrides everything else.

00:55:47

I totally get what you're what you're saying and that's kind of the way that this chapter is

00:55:52

positioned is like all these things are around you and they're impacting you all the time,

00:55:56

but that's not the real application of this in any sort of positive form, I feel.

00:56:02

Like people are selfish, people are jerks, they want what's best for them. And so whenever anybody

00:56:08

else is showing you symbols, you should have that reaction of like, Oh, how are they trying to

00:56:12

manipulate me? Like there's the potential for that anyways. And really the only sort of beneficial

00:56:17

application of this is like, okay, so what are the things that really mean a lot to you? What are

00:56:22

the things that you really want to internalize and say like, this is who I am, this is what I do?

00:56:27

That's a positive application of the symbols, but that's not really what he talks about at all.

00:56:32

Yeah, I think my take on this, and we got to keep moving here, but my take on it is that

00:56:39

I don't know that I'm trying to watch out for it to see where people are trying to influence me

00:56:45

and then reject that. I'm just somebody who likes to pick up details. Like I like to pick up

00:56:51

subtleties. I like to notice that sort of thing. Not for any real, I don't think for any real

00:56:58

meaningful action from that as much as just my own curiosity. Maybe there's some strategic

00:57:04

things that come with that just in daily life, but overall, I just like to notice things.

00:57:09

If that's that's my own preference on that. I don't really know why I do that, but I do.

00:57:15

Fair enough. All right, part two, the world between us.

00:57:18

So this again has three different chapters. I'm not sure how much of this will go into the

00:57:24

first one, chapter four, is the mere presence of other people.

00:57:27

Chapter five is the characteristics of other people, the social motives. And then number six is

00:57:33

the is culture, seeing objects in places through a cultural lens. The first one here,

00:57:38

the mere presence of other people, it's in the eyes. If I were to sum this up in a single thought,

00:57:44

it would basically be that the image of a pair of eyes, whether it is an actual pair of eyes belonging

00:57:52

to another person or simply a picture of a pair of eyes, can cause you to do what's right.

00:57:57

Is that fair? Yeah, which is kind of interesting because, okay, this might get deep, but

00:58:09

there's a body of thought in our culture, maybe this belongs in the culture section of this,

00:58:17

that states that humans are inherently good people. This directly contradicts that.

00:58:25

Yeah. Because it states that people become better morally and ethically if they feel that they

00:58:35

are being watched by other people, but that they are inherently more evil or more bad

00:58:42

when they feel like they're in isolation on their own and no one's watching them.

00:58:47

That's basically what I took away from this. So I know that a lot of people have a tendency to

00:58:56

think that we're good people, we just are led to bad things. If you read this particular section,

00:59:02

you can't help but see the opposite. So people are jerks and less convinced to act

00:59:07

act nicely. Yep. Through manipulation or through brute force punishment? I mean,

00:59:18

because there's a lot of different examples here. One of them they mentioned that people paid

00:59:22

almost three times as much to the honesty box when there was a picture of a pair of eyes

00:59:27

and playing with her being watched. So basically, if you bought something from the

00:59:31

company cafeteria, whatever there was a box where you were supposed to put your money and if you're

00:59:36

there and no one's watching you, you're tempted to just grab your thing and not put any money in

00:59:40

the box. But you're three times more likely to put the money in just because there's a picture of

00:59:45

a pair of eyes there. But there's also examples from here that have to do with the police departments

00:59:52

and there was one called Operation Momentum where they put up posters which featured a pair of

00:59:57

piercing eyes as he puts it with the slogan, "We've got our eyes on criminals and local officers

01:00:03

reported a 17% reduction in robberies from these signs," which is not a small thing. But then there

01:00:11

are other examples which I don't know, maybe this is a bigger deal than it sounds, but they used the

01:00:16

Opower Company which got people to reduce their power usage by 2.5% by giving them symbols

01:00:26

that went along with their power usage. So people who did great got a couple smelly faces, people

01:00:30

who did well got a single smelly face and they're saying that isn't this great simply by using

01:00:35

these symbols, we're able to reduce power consumption by a ton. And he did throw out some specific

01:00:40

numbers of like the amount of money that it saved and stuff like that, but 2.5% really doesn't

01:00:47

sound like a whole lot to me. Yeah, but this is where like sure 10% of one thing doesn't sound

01:00:54

like a whole lot, but 2% of this is actually a huge number. I forget what it was, it was millions of

01:01:01

dollars. Yeah, but based off of how many people, I mean there's millions of dollars for tens of

01:01:09

millions of people could or could not be a lot. And I feel like by saying, "Oh, these symbols are the

01:01:17

thing that drove 2.5% decreased the usage by 2.5%. What were the other options and what was the other

01:01:25

impact?" So you could say like, "Oh, look at this made a big impact, but I kind of feel like there's

01:01:31

a lot of other stuff that you could do that could make a 2.5% difference or greater." And it's kind of

01:01:38

weird to say like, "Oh, this is the thing," which is kind of how all this stuff is presented is like,

01:01:42

"Oh, look at this specific example, isn't this thing great? Everybody should do this sort of thing."

01:01:47

And then backs it up with some numbers and 2.5% is solo that he actually did have to give us a dollar

01:01:53

value here. But when your sample size is big enough, those numbers almost mean nothing. You know,

01:02:00

it's kind of like if people talk about the budget of the United States and wasting millions of dollars,

01:02:06

well, when you're dealing with billions and trillions of dollars, millions don't really

01:02:09

matter. So it's all based on the scale here and then also because he's selecting these stories

01:02:15

and presenting them to us, we really don't know what any of the other options were.

01:02:19

To defend Opower, the Smiles was the only thing they changed that led to that. Everything was

01:02:25

operating the same, which is why I think that's an interesting number. I did look it up. It's a

01:02:31

billion kilowatt hours. So I guess my question to you is if you didn't know the 2.5% per person

01:02:39

number, but you were told the billion kilowatt hours number, it sounds a lot more impressive

01:02:47

than 2.5%. Yeah, but when you say, "Oh my gosh, the United States Senate is slashing our budget

01:02:54

by millions of dollars," right, yeah. Billions to work with, it's the same effect. It's like,

01:02:59

"Oh my, how could they do that?" Those jerks don't they care about the kids? But when I think about

01:03:07

my own power usage and you were to say, "Okay, figure out a way to decrease your power usage by 2.5%."

01:03:14

Okay, that's not a lot. I could do that very easily. And could you instigate that with a couple

01:03:23

of symbols on my bill? Maybe. But there's got to be more effective ways to do that too.

01:03:29

You know, like one of the things that I think about when I think about my situation and how do

01:03:33

you make this decrease by 2.5% just get the kids to turn off the lights when they leave them.

01:03:37

Yeah. That would make a much bigger difference than 2.5%. And I'm not going to show them a smiley face

01:03:43

and then all of a sudden they're going to get that. All right, so the second chapter here are the

01:03:47

characteristics of other people. This chapter, it's entirely based on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of

01:03:58

needs. And I, for a long time, have struggled with that particular pyramid.

01:04:04

Yes. So to have an entire chapter dedicated to it and then have him skip past the validity of that

01:04:14

pyramid and just accept it, like without any qualms whatsoever and just accept it as truth

01:04:23

to stand on that I kind of struggled with. But I had to just kind of set that aside and say,

01:04:31

okay, you're not even going to touch on this. So let's just go with the rest of the chapter,

01:04:36

not worry about the pyramid itself, but let's talk about the individual aspects. So

01:04:40

just getting that off my chest, the core basis of this I had struggled with.

01:04:45

And the same reaction. And to be honest, looking back at this, talking through it now,

01:04:50

it really shouldn't have been a surprise because that's how he frames every single argument that

01:04:54

he uses. He's like, oh, look, here's this thing. Here's the research that supports it. It's obviously

01:04:59

true on the next one. And I also have my own issues with Maslow's hierarchy of needs because

01:05:07

on one level, it makes sense. And just for people who have never heard this before,

01:05:10

Maslow basically says there's five different levels, physiological. And then when you have

01:05:16

those needs met, you can move on to safety. When you have those needs met, you go on the love

01:05:19

and belonging. When you have those needs met, you go on a self esteem. And then when you have

01:05:22

those needs met, you go to self actualization. Personally, as someone who has created a video

01:05:31

course called faith based productivity with the tagline, connect to your calling, discover your

01:05:35

destiny, live life you were created for, I basically take the approach that this is all backwards.

01:05:40

And you should think about what's the impact that you want to have. Why are you here? What's

01:05:45

your purpose? What's the thing that you're designed to do? And then do that. And the rest of this

01:05:51

stuff is going to take care of itself. And obviously, there's a lot of detail that goes with that.

01:05:57

If you are in a soul sucking job that you hate right now, you cannot just quit and follow your

01:06:03

passion. You know, and well, it's not even go there, but I've got my own definition of passion.

01:06:07

It's not what people think. But that being said, like the real way to get to the end of your life

01:06:14

and say, yes, I have lived a fulfilled life is to start with the end in mind, like Stephen

01:06:20

Covey talks about, it's not to climb this hierarchy of needs. Because if you do that,

01:06:26

you'll never get to the self actualization. I feel like for a lot of people. And so that

01:06:32

kind of tainted my perspective too of the he talks about the sexual motive, the safety motive,

01:06:37

and then the power of loved ones in this this chapter.

01:06:39

Yeah. And I mean, I don't know what else to say about this particular chapter. It was just,

01:06:45

you know, he goes through each of those levels in the pyramid and explains how we seek those out.

01:06:53

That was pretty much what what it was about. Sure.

01:06:57

Well, one thing I want to call out here under the sexual motive, because they use this statistic

01:07:02

that men are more than 3.5 times more likely to die from accidental causes than women.

01:07:08

So basically men are stupid and he's really saying that men are doing this as a way to show

01:07:15

that they are strong, daring, whatever, and in a way to attract female attention. There probably

01:07:23

is an element of that. I think a big part of this though is just guys don't think stuff through

01:07:30

sometimes. You ever see those pictures like the guy standing on the ladder that's like precariously

01:07:34

balanced? Never known that in my life. Well, there's a whole bunch of stuff like that. I mean,

01:07:41

it's again, common sense if you see this sort of thing. And he talks about the presence of a

01:07:45

beautiful female causes the male to produce more testosterone, which is really the thing that

01:07:50

it gets them to do this this dumb stuff. He talks about how male chess players were more

01:07:56

likely to employ risky moves when their opponent was an attractive female. I don't know. I think

01:08:02

the summary here is that men and women are different. Go figure.

01:08:06

I don't know. At hard time arguing with him on the whole testosterone, things are different

01:08:12

thing. I think there's probably a lot of truth to that one. Well, one other quick thought on this,

01:08:17

okay, as a heterosexual male in a committed relationship. So basically, if I'm taking this

01:08:23

stuff at face value, he is saying that if I am in the presence of a beautiful female that is

01:08:31

going to cause me to produce more testosterone and I'm going to do stupid stuff in order to get

01:08:36

sex from her, that's not true. Okay. I that I may have that temptation, but that is not going to

01:08:43

happen. And maybe that's just my religious belief system talking. And that's coloring my

01:08:51

perspective with this. But I kind of feel like in certain situations like mine where

01:08:59

I have given up all the other sexual options for my life. And so does that mean that

01:09:06

I don't have these reactions, these urges? No, but it doesn't mean that I'm doing it in order to

01:09:15

get with the other person. And so that's kind of the disconnect for me. And I'm trying to resolve

01:09:22

this in my head. Like you saying that me where I've sworn this off and it's not an option for me,

01:09:30

but it's still going to be an instinctive reaction for me and it's going to cause me to do all this

01:09:34

stupid stuff. I kind of think that's probably not true. So two things here. One, you did state,

01:09:41

like this is your, you're not saying you don't have the temptation, you just don't act on it.

01:09:47

That's part one. Self control, go figure. Yep, so control. Part two, all of those studies that

01:09:54

they did that involved young males, like they were talking like teens and early 20s, most of the time.

01:10:01

I had a hard time with him taking that and extrapolating it out because testosterone levels do

01:10:07

change over time. So I would have a hard time seeing how that would apply to somebody in their

01:10:13

80s. What? True. That doesn't. So anyway, he didn't call that out at all. He didn't make any

01:10:21

adjustments based on age or any aspect of that. Are you going to have the urges? Very likely. Are

01:10:30

you going to act on them? That depends on your own ability to control yourself and your belief

01:10:36

systems. So that's my thought. Yeah. Well, another, another thing I didn't think about till just now,

01:10:42

you mentioned young men and I forget specifically when your brain stops developing, but it's not

01:10:52

till you're like age 25. So by doing for 25, yeah, something like that. Yeah. So let's say you're

01:10:59

doing this with college students. Their brain isn't fully developed yet. They're literally idiots.

01:11:05

Sorry guys, I was there too. You think you're seeing your situation correctly and you're not

01:11:12

because your brain is not fully developed. So why are we studying these people?

01:11:16

Anyways, all right, it's a culture. Let's just move on. I don't think it's any surprise that

01:11:26

culture impacts us. Just the variety of ways that culture develops the things that exist around us,

01:11:34

but also the fact that different cultures operate differently. He does call out the extreme difference

01:11:41

between individualistic and collectivistic societies, United States being an individualistic

01:11:49

culture where people take care of themselves. He didn't, I don't think he used these terms.

01:11:57

It's not all about me, but I take care of myself first, number one first.

01:12:01

Yep. Whereas a lot of countries like China and Japan have collectivistic

01:12:08

societies where everything they do and everything they see is seen through the lens of taking care

01:12:16

of the community at large. And everything they do in their own lives is designed to be helpful to

01:12:26

the broader community as opposed to themselves. And the one story he told about this that really

01:12:34

impacted me was the fact that, and I forget what the details of the experiment, like what they

01:12:39

were testing for, but he stated that people who are from an individualistic background, if they're

01:12:46

presented a picture, say of an automobile with a backdrop of the woods, a wooded area,

01:12:55

people from say the United States would tend to focus on the car. And if you were to ask them

01:12:59

some details about the car later, they could tell you the color of it, maybe the make and model of

01:13:05

it like they would be able to tell you that. But for the most part, they wouldn't be able to tell

01:13:08

you much about the background because they hadn't focused on that. They focused on the single point

01:13:12

in front of them. Folks that grew up in collectivism, they would see the entire picture. They wouldn't

01:13:22

necessarily be able to tell you what color the car was. They wouldn't necessarily be able to tell you

01:13:26

you know what was in the background, but they could at least tell you it was a wooded background

01:13:31

with a car, whereas the folks in the US would say, yeah, there was a car, but I don't remember if it

01:13:36

was in a mountainous area, if it was in a wooded area, was it on the highway, like they may not be

01:13:40

able to tell you where it was, but they would be able to tell you that it was a car. To me, that

01:13:44

was just an intriguing connection point. I had never really heard that particular way of saying it.

01:13:52

I've always known like cultures are very different. I run a web dev business and work with almost

01:13:58

70% of our clients are international, so I work with a lot of different regions throughout the

01:14:04

world, which is fascinating, but certain areas you need to have conversations differently because

01:14:09

they see things differently. I don't know. I thought it was a very fascinating chapter.

01:14:13

Yeah, he mentioned specifically with the art example that we were talking about,

01:14:19

the Western world tends to zoom in on the face and highlight the person the Eastern world focuses on

01:14:24

more contextual detail in the background. I'm also curious how much this is impacted by the current

01:14:33

state of the culture that we live in. Like we just did digital minimalism last episode and the

01:14:39

smartphone and all of this information that we're constantly bombarded with. And I kind of feel like

01:14:46

as the amount of information that you're presented with increases, you probably lose at least a little

01:14:52

bit the ability to look at the context and the background because there's so many things just

01:15:00

flying at your face and you're just trying to keep up with things. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but

01:15:06

and maybe that's the cultural difference there too, but I'm curious how a collective

01:15:15

society responds to the endless feeds and the infinity pools differently than maybe we do.

01:15:21

Yeah, no, that's an interesting question. I don't have an answer to that, but it's interesting.

01:15:27

Yeah, me either. The other thing I really like from this section, by the way, is this conversation

01:15:33

about the culture of honor and the way he frames this kind of tick me off because he mentions that

01:15:39

the culture of honor is prevalent in the south and the west and typically there's more entrenched

01:15:45

family values and it's absent from the northern states because we don't have the same cultural

01:15:50

expectations. And I think that the whole idea of honor is really something that in the United

01:15:58

States anyways that we've lost and would solve a lot of things for us. Just something simple like

01:16:08

what's the terminology I'm looking for? When we were talking about the Atul Gawande book,

01:16:13

he mentioned his grandpa in India and he could basically do whatever he wanted because everybody

01:16:18

honored the elderly. We don't have that anymore and not that you should automatically get

01:16:24

honored because you get older. I think that's a simple example of how if we treated our elders

01:16:29

with more respect, only good comes from that, but it could apply to people in authority. You see

01:16:36

all of the nastiness on social media, Twitter specifically, and some of it is self-solicited

01:16:45

when you've got a president who's tweeting crazy stuff. People are going to respond to it.

01:16:51

But even before that, you see people in these authority positions and people are just sending

01:16:59

this nasty stuff. And every time I see it, I'm like, how can you possibly talk like that to

01:17:06

somebody like this? Maybe that's just my... What's the term I'm looking for here?

01:17:15

Obviously my upbringing and the way that I've been taught to view people and things and situations,

01:17:23

but I don't see a negative that comes from this. And the way that it's kind of framed,

01:17:30

it's kind of like, well, this is an antiquated idea. And the Northern states are more progressive

01:17:37

and they've kind of done away with this. But I think we could go a long way towards thinking

01:17:43

better of people. Yeah, I think so. I grew up in Missouri in kind of the backwoods area. So there

01:17:51

was a pretty high amount of honor and respect was expected. And I've spent a decent amount of time

01:18:01

in the Southern states down in the Texas, Alabama area. And I know that in the deep South,

01:18:10

there's a much higher expectation for this honor culture than what there is right now in Minnesota.

01:18:18

To me, it's just massive... It's just worlds different between those two. So having that background,

01:18:25

I was agreeing with him left and right when he was going through all of it. I'm not real sure

01:18:32

how I feel about your thoughts on honor being something that would help us a lot. I haven't

01:18:37

really thought that through, but it's an interesting thought pattern that I kind of want to explore.

01:18:43

Maybe you and I should talk about that at some point, but that's something I haven't thought about.

01:18:46

Let's have an interesting thought, Mike. Yeah, well, kind of the way I view it is that when you don't

01:18:56

have honor towards whoever you esteem highly, typically your perspective is just looking out for

01:19:05

yourself, what's in it for me? And I feel like any sort of perspective shift that gets your eyes

01:19:14

off of your own problems and onto the solving and helping the needs of others, that's going to be

01:19:24

a net win. And I feel like you don't have to have a religious belief system in order to recognize

01:19:31

that we've got it for the most part pretty good. And then when we focus on everything that's going

01:19:36

wrong in our lives, we can quickly get discouraged, depressed. And one of the quickest ways to snap

01:19:42

out of that is to go serve somebody else. And when you think about honor, the emphasis or the focus

01:19:48

is on the other person, and you're kind of forcing yourself to see things through their eyes. And you

01:19:54

could apply the whole concept of honor to whoever is earned it in your particular worldview.

01:20:04

I still think that it's missing and it's something that we should be implementing. I feel like it's

01:20:11

one of those safeguards that can keep us from doing a lot of stupid selfish stuff, if we really

01:20:16

understood it. Yeah. All right, part three, the world around us, colors, locations, weather and warmth.

01:20:26

And the first piece of this colors, I came at this from a view of the website world,

01:20:36

where colors are used very specifically. There's a lot of theory around different colors that people

01:20:44

use for buttons and backgrounds and fonts. And all of that has very specific uses. People don't always

01:20:53

realize this, but Google is always testing that Facebook has tested it tons and tons of sites have

01:20:59

tested this. There's a reason a lot of the mainstream, social media sites are all blue. Like,

01:21:04

there are reasons for that. And they're trying to not necessarily manipulate, but they're trying to

01:21:11

increase time you spend with things, we're increasing clicks. And simple things like colors

01:21:17

make a huge impact in the website world. So I see it a lot from that stance. I've seen companies

01:21:24

test 12 different shades of blue buttons to see which one gets more clicks. And it drives a bottom

01:21:31

line depending on which shade of blue they pick for a by now button. Like, it's just nuts

01:21:36

how that impacts people. So there's a lot of truth to this one. I had a hard time arguing with it.

01:21:43

Yeah, this is, I agree. I definitely this section. Oh, I had the, I don't want to say the least

01:21:51

negative reaction. But like you said, when I read through this stuff, it's going like, oh, yeah,

01:21:56

that makes sense. I agree with that for the, for the most part. One of the things that did kind of

01:22:02

stand out to me was in the 2004 Olympics, he mentions that the wrestlers who wore red instead

01:22:08

of blue one 62% of the matches. I'm not sure where I land on this one yet. I kind of feel like

01:22:16

just based on the color uniform that you're assigned, that shouldn't necessarily impact you

01:22:23

in terms of like, Oh, I got the blue one. So I'm fighting an uphill battle. That seems kind of

01:22:28

ridiculous to me. But I do agree that generally speaking, the colors can elicit different,

01:22:35

different reactions. He does talk a lot in here about the cultural differences with the colors too

01:22:41

though. So he mentions that most of the world likes blue, but Hong Kong actually associates it

01:22:46

with sadness and the US likes black because it shows strength and masculinity. But Columbia

01:22:52

doesn't because it implies sadness and formality. So a lot of this stuff is interpreted through the

01:22:58

lens of the culture that you're familiar with as well. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don't know what I

01:23:05

have a lot to say on the colors piece. You know, I had things like red is a color of love. And he

01:23:12

goes through like the reasons for that. Blue is calming pink, of course, can disarm people from

01:23:18

violence. Like there's different colors and he goes, he doesn't go through all the colors, but he does

01:23:23

spell out quite a bit with those. So I don't know. I thought it was interesting. There's one thing I

01:23:28

want to touch on here, because he mentions the glass, Glasgow police, they installed the blue

01:23:32

lights instead of the standard white or yellow lights. Yeah, that was not that interesting to me.

01:23:37

But then he uses another example right after that on blue light being installed at a sawmill in

01:23:44

Canada, which caused night workers to be more alert and make fewer mistakes. Okay, now this,

01:23:51

I believe, has nothing to do with the color and has everything to do with the concept of the blue

01:24:00

light causing your body to not produce the melatonin that causes you to fall asleep. And I say that

01:24:06

just because I've had flux installed on my computer for years, I swear by it. And this is one of those

01:24:12

things that I've studied out quite a bit, because I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was 18 years

01:24:19

old. So one of the things that can trigger a seizure is not enough sleep. So I have been very

01:24:26

militant in both the amount of sleep that I get and also everything, everything I can to

01:24:31

control the quality of sleep that I get. I cannot have a bad night sleep and not sleep because

01:24:37

it could literally cause a seizure the next day. And if I'm driving my car, obviously that's a

01:24:42

big, a big disaster. All right. So I really believe in this idea of the the blue light. And it's been

01:24:50

something that I've been controlling for a number of years, not trying to look at screens before I

01:24:55

go to bed, because I've noticed for myself, and some people say I don't notice any difference.

01:24:59

I believe there really is a difference here where the quality of sleep that you that you get when

01:25:04

you don't look at your phone for three hours before you go to bed, or as opposed to if you're

01:25:08

scrolling through Twitter before you lay down and go to sleep, you're going to have a lot harder

01:25:12

time falling asleep. And so I don't know that this has anything to do with colors, but the blue light

01:25:19

idea is definitely a powerful one. And I couldn't quite reconcile in my head how this fit in the

01:25:27

colors section. Oh, because of the melatonin aspect? Yeah, because that's really the thing that's

01:25:32

going on here is the blue light versus like the artificial candlelight or whatever, where your body

01:25:39

is kind of transitioning into that state of sleep. Well, you've got people who are going directly

01:25:43

against their body's grain by working at night. Right. So the color doesn't do anything to inspire

01:25:51

them to be more safe. The color causes a physiological change in their body. Now, to his benefit here,

01:26:00

just to defend him a little bit, that particular story was told as an introduction to the chapter.

01:26:05

And he only it was only like a paragraph long, but he was using it to intro the whole thing,

01:26:12

just to defend him on that one, because I don't know that he would disagree with you

01:26:16

as much as like he was just using it to introduce the chapter. Because I think that would maybe

01:26:23

confirm like he would agree with you in the sense that yes, this color does have a biological effect.

01:26:30

Because that would prove his point here that colors do affect us. Like that's not an argument

01:26:35

against what he's saying. Yeah, but when speculating, when you're talking about the light, for example,

01:26:41

I feel like that's a different argument than going back to drunk take pick at the beginning,

01:26:46

where you're looking at a piece of paper that is a certain color. I feel like color temperature

01:26:52

in terms of light is very different than the policeman's blues. That's the subtitle of this

01:26:58

chapter, the color of uniform that you might use, or the color of the lights in the area causing

01:27:08

a decrease in crime. Like literally you are trying to prevent your body from shutting down.

01:27:18

So how is this different? Because way back at the beginning of this, you were talking about

01:27:23

how even the color pink increased donations. Yep. And you made it sound like that was a good thing,

01:27:31

and you agreed with that. How is this now different? Well, that's what I'm saying. I think that the

01:27:35

color that uniform that you were increasing donations, like that is a very real thing. And

01:27:40

that argument in this chapter would make total sense. But I feel like the blue light argument

01:27:46

maybe doesn't quite fit because this is getting outside of the realm of these are the colors that

01:27:52

you see. And it has more to do with the intensity of the light and the impact that it's having

01:27:59

in your body at a subconscious level. And maybe I'm not doing a very good job of describing this.

01:28:07

I think it sounds like you're confirming him. Well, I don't know. I feel like there's a difference

01:28:11

between a color that you would see any other place in the world and the color of the light

01:28:18

temperature in the room. I feel like that one, especially as it pertains to keeping your body

01:28:25

awake and not entering into a state of sleep, that's a little bit different than causing you to

01:28:32

everything is equal, you're going to act one way or another. Having a choice between how to act is

01:28:40

very different than is very different in my mind than trying to keep your body from breaking.

01:28:51

Does that make sense? No, I think you're crazy. So I think with his point, the color itself has a

01:29:00

biological edit to your body. It does leave an impact on you. Red light would not do that.

01:29:09

Yellow light would not do that. But blue light does. I don't get your point of how,

01:29:17

because it's a light bulb, the color doesn't matter. Just as an example, blue light is going to have a

01:29:22

certain impact in your body no matter what, right? But the color blue is going to have different

01:29:28

impacts based on the culture and the association that is assigned to it. There is no option for

01:29:36

assigning anything else to the blue light. The blue light is literally going to keep your body awake.

01:29:41

In my situation, if I was in that situation, the blue light is literally going to keep me awake to

01:29:49

the point where my body is going to shut down, I'm going to have a seizure. Regardless of what I

01:29:54

would try to do in that particular situation, whereas if the United Wave volunteer comes up

01:29:59

wearing a pink shirt, I still have the choice whether I am going to donate and how much I'm

01:30:04

going to donate. And I can recognize that, oh, they're wearing the color pink. So I'm more likely to

01:30:10

write out a bigger check. But there's no option when it comes to the blue light.

01:30:16

Why does that matter? Maybe it doesn't. I don't know. But that's his point.

01:30:22

Yeah, that's the thing that makes it different in my own head. And maybe it's just because it's

01:30:27

associated with this topic of sleep, which maybe just the way that he framed it, where I felt like

01:30:34

it wasn't really fair, because he's talking about how these blue green lights cause night

01:30:40

workers to be more alert and make fewer mistakes. That wasn't a conscious choice. They weren't

01:30:44

saying, oh, well, I'm going to be more safe as opposed to I don't care what I'm going to do.

01:30:49

Like they're manipulating these people at this point. They're like rats in the machine,

01:30:53

and there's nothing they can do about it. Maybe that's what you're because drunk tank

01:30:57

pink is the same thing. Kind of. They because they did some of the testing and found like some of the

01:31:03

blood levels of, I forget what it was, some hormone, they found some of that being affected as

01:31:10

well. Like that's the same type of thing. Like it's impacting people physiologically.

01:31:14

Yeah. In the same way that this blue light does with with drunk tank. Why is one okay and

01:31:18

one? Well, with drunk tank pink, you've got the drunk in the cell and yeah, they're not in the

01:31:22

right mind, but they have the ability to choose to not be a crazy drunk anymore. Okay. If I'm

01:31:28

exposed to blue light, I don't have a choice anymore. I'm going to stay awake. Okay. And so that's

01:31:35

kind of where I feel like this is a whole nother level when he's talking about blue light as it

01:31:40

just opposed to the the colors and the associations that go with them. I mean, there's a lot of stuff

01:31:44

in here and in the next section too about the locations and and green being in nature, you know,

01:31:50

that has a calming effect. Like that that's all. That's all great. But I feel like with with blue

01:31:56

light specifically, this is something that like you're manufacturing and you're hacking people's

01:32:02

biology and that just seems so wrong. That's his point though. See, this is this is why I'm confused

01:32:10

because I feel like you're confirming his exact point. Yeah. Yeah. Because he's saying this color

01:32:16

causes this effect, which is exactly what you're saying. And his point is like it does help people,

01:32:22

it does do that. It does help them stay awake. He's not arguing whether or not they have a choice

01:32:28

or not. That doesn't apply at all. He's saying and probably most of this book is in most cases,

01:32:34

this is happening whether you want it to or not. But this does happen. Yep. Like that's anyway,

01:32:40

we should move on. But that's that was my thinking on it. So I feel like you're confirming it. Yeah,

01:32:44

I still I still think it's not resolved. Like in this he mentions in the mid 40s,

01:32:48

there was that Aurora tone films that were being introduced. And it's like different colors can

01:32:52

calm different people. So it's not as simple as like what people are exposed to this color.

01:32:56

It always elicits this reaction. I don't know. Like when it comes to to sleep and regulating your

01:33:03

body's rhythm, I feel like that's like I said, whole nother level. Yeah, you're right. I don't like it.

01:33:11

All right, locations. I don't have a lot on this one other than go outside. Like that's

01:33:18

and maybe I should lump this one in with the other one. Weather and warmth, like most of this was

01:33:23

go outside, enjoy nature. It makes you a better person. Like that was my core takeaway between

01:33:31

those two sections. Yeah, there's a couple interesting ideas in here. Number one, and again,

01:33:36

this is like for me, maybe because I'm introverted, but this just seems like the whole idea of overcrowding

01:33:43

how that causes claustrophobia, mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, family disorganization,

01:33:48

lower quality of life. So get out of that situation whenever you can. I think that's probably associated

01:33:55

also with this whole idea of getting out into nature, but kind of the positioning of the nature

01:34:00

argument in this chapter has to do with the green environment having a calming effect.

01:34:05

One thing that he talks about in here is the broken windows theory, which says that people are

01:34:13

encouraged to act immorally and commit crimes in neighborhoods with broken windows.

01:34:17

I don't know, I guess maybe I just don't hang out in those neighborhoods.

01:34:21

Well, just to give you a different story on that, I, so I work in the agriculture industry, grew up

01:34:28

on a farm, have a strong ag background. I have met more than a handful of farmers who

01:34:34

take meticulous care of their equipment. They have their tractors repainted every three years.

01:34:42

They make sure everything is in perfect working order. They make sure they get waxed on a regular

01:34:47

basis. And it's not because they just like clean and bright colored equipment. They can show,

01:34:55

and they've seen this multiple times that if they take that good of care of their equipment,

01:35:01

the people who operate it operate it more safely, and they have fewer repairs. So the repair bills

01:35:08

are significantly lower than any I've really seen elsewhere. Yeah, because they take such

01:35:12

good care of their equipment. So I don't know, I definitely can get on board with that one.

01:35:17

That makes sense. I kind of in the same way about our family vehicles, like it drives me nuts when

01:35:23

something isn't in pristine working order. Because I know that as soon as one thing is broken,

01:35:30

that's kind of a license to not take as good a care of the thing. So I agree with that.

01:35:37

But I also think that, like he mentions in one study, half of the drivers littered and through

01:35:43

the flyer tucked on their windshield when the parking lot was already full of litter, but only a

01:35:48

tenth of them did when it was clean. I don't know, but I can't see myself in any situation

01:35:54

being like, "Hey, I'm just going to check this on the ground." Right. So again, a lot of this stuff

01:36:00

is probably cultural. And if you are in a situation, in a environment where people don't take care of

01:36:08

stuff, maybe that has a bigger impact on whether you're willing to break something or not take

01:36:14

care of it than the fact that you notice that there's something broken. I'm not going into

01:36:21

my buddy's car and something's broken, so I'm just chucking trash all over.

01:36:26

Yeah. Weather and warmth go outside, stay warm.

01:36:31

Again, basically he talks a lot about sad seasonal effective disorder. There's a couple

01:36:40

of these. But anyway, he was showing how during extreme heat, people tend to be more agitated and

01:36:46

have road rage more often or the big one was Major League Baseball with pitchers hitting each

01:36:54

other's batters because the other one did it first and retaliating. There's a lot of

01:37:00

pieces around this. They had a ton of data behind that one. So that one, I was definitely like,

01:37:05

"Okay, that one's hard to refute." But there was a lot there.

01:37:10

I think having played baseball, I kind of think that maybe it has more to do with the fact that

01:37:20

the games matter when it's warmer. At the beginning of this season, you're not going out and plunking

01:37:28

people on purpose. But by the time you do get to the summer months, there's this whole culture

01:37:36

with baseball. You got to protect your players and teammates and stuff like that. That's always

01:37:42

the justification that pitchers give for hitting other people. You can totally tell when it's intentional

01:37:49

and when it's not. Every time you see it, they say the right things, "Oh, the ball slipped out of my

01:37:54

hand," whatever. But you can tell everybody on the team, the managers included, have put their

01:38:00

subversive stamp of approval on this thing. I think it has more to do with the fact that now

01:38:10

you're involved in games that matter and you're not going to let them take out your best player

01:38:16

for weeks, months at a time, which can happen when you drill somebody with a 98-mile-an-hour

01:38:22

fastball. I don't know. This argument about the baseball, the baseball batter is getting hit.

01:38:29

I know that there's data behind it, but when it was presented to me, it was presented as someone

01:38:35

who really didn't understand baseball. Maybe that's completely unfair, but that was the impression

01:38:40

I got when I read it. Well, the data they had went back to when seasons were not where the

01:38:47

important ones were in the summer. It was far enough back that that was still in springtime,

01:38:53

because the seasons have gotten a lot longer now. Some of that is somewhat corrected for because

01:39:00

of the long history that they pulled it on. I have a hard time with your argument against that,

01:39:09

but I've played a lot of baseball as well. I'm not arguing with you one bit about the

01:39:15

protector player thing at all. I'm definitely not in the professional ranks, but the ebb and flow

01:39:21

to me is like, "Okay, everybody's excited beginning of the year. All it takes is one

01:39:25

person to accidentally get hit. Now all of a sudden, you've got somebody's like, "Oh, I'm going to get

01:39:29

them back." By the time they get them back, the ums, that's enough, but by the time it gets to the

01:39:39

summer, there's certain things you can do to encourage right behaviors. I feel like they're

01:39:48

real lax at the beginning of the year. As a response, pitchers are going to take advantage of that.

01:39:55

Middle of the year, start to crack down on it a little bit. By the end of the year,

01:40:00

it's like, "Okay, guys, you really got to knock this off because we don't want our superstars hurt

01:40:03

going into the postseason. This is what people pay to see." If you try that, in September,

01:40:08

October, you'll get tossed right away. Is that a factor of the cold weather making you less angry

01:40:16

and you're 5% less likely to decide to hit somebody? Or is it more, "I better not screw this up for

01:40:23

my team and get tossed out of the game, so I'm just going to let this one slide."

01:40:27

Probably combination of things. Yeah, there's a lot there. All right, what else, Mike?

01:40:33

We should wrap this up. Seasonal, effective disorder. This is a very real thing.

01:40:39

He also mentions daylight savings here, which we just went through.

01:40:42

Daylight savings is a very stupid idea. We should get rid of this.

01:40:46

But he at least explains the thought process behind it. It's an effort to make people happier

01:40:51

by exposing them to more sun in the summer. But it can also cause a lot of stress when you

01:40:58

have to spring forward. He mentions that there's 7% higher accident rates the day after daylight

01:41:04

savings, which that should be enough to get rid of it right now. Let's just all decide that we're

01:41:09

never going to do this again. Yeah, most hospital stock, that's terrible. They book a lot more

01:41:19

nurses and staff for the day after daylight savings. Sure. Because they know. All right,

01:41:26

we should probably wrap it up there, huh? Yeah, action items. Zippo.

01:41:32

Yep. I also have no action items. Although as I was going through this and thinking about like,

01:41:37

how can I take action on this book? The one thing that kind of stood out to me is that I can

01:41:43

consider my environment in my office and I can put the right symbols, colors, cues, whatever in

01:41:49

there to help me transition into a state of work faster. Sure. I'm really not going to put an

01:41:54

action item associated with that because I've kind of gone through all that with creating my

01:41:59

home office the way it is right now. But if you were to do an action item from this book,

01:42:05

I feel like that's the only one you can really implement. Sure. Yeah, I could see that.

01:42:10

It's style and rating. So Adam Alter, I will say he's pretty easy to read. This is not a difficult

01:42:19

look to pick up and go through. Tons and tons of stories, we shared a lot here, but we probably

01:42:26

only touched, I don't know, 15, maybe 20% of them, maybe not even that. There's a lot,

01:42:33

a lot to go through here, which keeps it fast moving. That's partly why we weren't real sure how

01:42:38

this was going to go because there's so many stories you could cover. So again, super easy to read.

01:42:44

It's about the right length, I feel. No arguments against topic density here at all. As for a rating,

01:42:55

it's kind of hard because I had some definite qualms, like really serious qualms with certain

01:42:59

pieces of this, but there were other pieces of it. It's like, that is brilliant. That's,

01:43:04

I am so happy. I know that now. So parts of it, like, yeah, definitely five. And then

01:43:10

other person like, yeah, definite two, like, that's what do you do with that?

01:43:14

I bridge it out. I think I'm going to drop it at a 4.0. I think that's, yeah, I'll put it there.

01:43:22

I do think it's worth reading, though. It's at least enough to spark you to think about things

01:43:28

that are going on around you from a marketing stance, from a livelihood stance, the way people

01:43:35

things work between people. I think it's worth reading. But there's some issues we've had with

01:43:41

it. Obviously, we've talked about those. So I'm putting it at a 4.0.

01:43:45

All right. I am on the fence. I think I'm going to give it a 3.0. I kind of want to give it a 3.5

01:43:55

because there's some good ideas in here. And like you said, there's certain parts of it that

01:44:01

really do impact you. But I also found myself arguing with him a lot. And that never felt good.

01:44:11

So my overall state of mind as I went through this book was probably more negative than positive.

01:44:18

Sure. And I just can't shake that. So I'm going to air on the side of a lower score and put it at

01:44:27

3.0. All right. Well, let's put it on the shelf. What's next, Mike?

01:44:32

The next book is "Extreme Ownership" by Jaco Willink. And this is a story about taking responsibility

01:44:40

from a couple of former Navy SEALs. Have you started this book?

01:44:45

I have not, but I'm itching to. It's really interesting regardless of your take on the whole

01:44:52

military background because there obviously is a lot of that. In fact, the chapters are really

01:44:57

interesting because they tell a story from their deployment in Iraq. And then they'll go into the

01:45:06

principal. And then the third part of each chapter is the business application of the concept.

01:45:12

Interesting. So they do leadership training for businesses and stuff right now. So they

01:45:17

share stories from people that they've worked with. That sounds really interesting.

01:45:21

It's really interesting. It's a really big book. I think it's like 300 something pages. One of the

01:45:25

bigger ones that we've covered. Yeah. But it's a really easy read. And I'm learning a ton from this

01:45:33

book. I've already ordered a bunch of copies to give to people.

01:45:36

Interesting. So this will be a good one next time.

01:45:39

Yeah. I feel like this has got to be the right thing at the right time for the right person. But

01:45:43

it's right in my wheelhouse and I'm loving it so far. Cool. Following that, I have selected a

01:45:50

recommendation from the club, "Quiet" by Susan Kane. Welcome to the world of introverts.

01:45:57

This will be good. Nice. I'm excited to read this one.

01:46:02

By the way, Extreme Ownership was a recommendation too. I picked that one just because of the number

01:46:06

of votes that it had gotten in the Bookworm Club. So thank you. Yeah. We've been doing a lot of

01:46:11

those lately. Yep. All right. Gap books. I've got one which was recommended by Shahid when we

01:46:18

interviewed him. He mentioned that he liked digital minimalism. But the one book that presented

01:46:25

the same sort of arguments that he really, really enjoyed was this book called "Make Time" by Jake

01:46:30

Knapp and John Zoratsky. And so I have this one in my hands right now, but I have not started this yet.

01:46:38

And I'm excited to dig into this one. Cool. Cool. I don't have a gap book this time.

01:46:44

That's okay. Life's been crazy. We'll forgive you. Thanks. Cool. Cool. All right. So if you want

01:46:50

to recommend a book like Extreme Ownership or "Quiet" by Susan Kane, you can do that over at the

01:46:56

Bookworm Club, club.bookworm.fm. Just create an account and then go to the recommendations category,

01:47:03

add a recommendation, and then also remember to vote for it because we do look at the number of

01:47:08

votes when deciding what books we're going to cover next. And click the vote, like when you make a

01:47:13

recommendation, then turn around, hit the vote button. People keep forgetting to do that.

01:47:17

Exactly. And if you want to see a list of the books that are upcoming, you can do that on the

01:47:24

website by going to bookworm.fm/list. There's a few ways you can support the show. We've been

01:47:31

expanding that particular piece. The fun one is leaving us a review and joining the club.

01:47:38

Like those are great ways to get feedback to us to help us see, you know, what it is you like

01:47:43

about the show. So leave us a review. Tell us how we're doing. Join the club club.bookworm.fm.

01:47:50

Lots of cool conversations happening out there and those continue to expand and grow.

01:47:54

One of which being our action items, we're now posting on the club and trying to talk through

01:47:59

those as the in-between time occurs. But the one we would encourage you the most is supporting the

01:48:06

show through a premium membership. And you can do that at bookworm.fm/membership, right? Mike?

01:48:14

I got to remember what we put it at. Bookworm.fm/membership. If you go there, you can sign up

01:48:20

and donate to the show month to month. We talked about all the benefits earlier in the show,

01:48:25

but you can get all the details there at bookworm.fm/membership.

01:48:28

All right. So if you are reading along with us, pick up extreme ownership by Jocko Willink.

01:48:35

And we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.