Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

29: P-Rex and a return to The Magic Window

Sun’s up, what’s up! That won’t be changing. Some of the show will be changing though. We’re going to try something new. Instead of one book a week we’re going to try switching our focus to podcasts. A podcast about podcasts.

What’s the new format?

Here’s the new format:

  • Opening: We’ll start with the usual intro and then say something like “So whatcha listening to?” or like “Heard anything cool lately?” and get into it.
  • Recommendations: We’ll each recommend 2 podcast episodes (so 4 total)
  • Borrow a segment: From one of the podcasts, we’ll try using one of their segments.
  • The magic window: The last segment will be the magic window where we’ll talk about that 9-12 year old range and come up with some kind of favorite thing from then.

What wasn’t working with the old format?

We did a lot of book-of-the-week episodes. Like 24 of our episodes were about a book. Some were better than others. Here are some things that didn’t work:

  • We can’t read a book every week: The best episodes were the ones where we all read the entirety of the book and we outlined things and were ready to go. It was also when we actually talked about the book itself. Sometimes we would take high level themes from the book.
  • We didn’t connect with authors at all: I never felt comfortable even as much as sharing something in a tweet with an author because, as mentioned, we didn’t actually talk so much about the book in every case. This is a bit ridiculous because (a) it’s unlikely they’d even see the tweet at all and (b) I mean we did sort of talk about the book so if someone was sort of talking about something I made I’d probably find it interesting at least.
  • It wasn’t exactly the right niche: I listen to a lot of podcasts and none of them are about discussing nonfiction books. People writing those books actually do interviews on podcasts to promote their books. That’s more interesting than listening to a book summary. I always wanted this podcast to be a non-interview one because some of my favorite podcasts have been non-interview podcasts with 2-3 friends. (Half-baked Ideas with David Jacoby and Kevin Wildes, TADPOG: Tyler and Dave Play Old Games, Joe Rogan when he has Joey Diaz on, Bill Simmons with Cousin Sal or Joe House.)

We aren’t as accomplished or entertaining as those people but I want to aim toward that instead of aiming toward the great interviewers. (Some of the people mentioned are also excellent interviews.)

What the magic window episode revealed

More of my friends commented on the magic window episode than any others. (Which is to say that any commented at all.) My guess is that it was just more interesting to hear about than a self-development book that you’d need to spend money on to read.

At the same time, if we do want to talk about a book, we can talk about a podcast that the author appeared on. I didn’t count it up but I’m sure 80% of the books we talked are written by authors that appeared on some podcast.

I’m hoping this will tie in better with the videos I make and the posts I’m writing. This year was sort of unfocused just trying different things. It’s not wasted time. I have a better idea of what I enjoy making and what I enjoy having made. Making the podcast is the most fun of the different things, probably because talking to a friend is fun. Making the videos actually can be a little bit of a grind but it’s rewarding because strangers actually watch them. Writing posts is rewarding in a weird way because I do enjoy writing even though nobody reads them. And I’m okay with that.

We’ll try this for 8 episodes and see how it goes.

(We will also stop calling podcast recommendations P-Rex because once was enough.)

Book Notes: Four Seconds

Here are some thoughts on a few of my highlights from “Four Seconds” by Peter Bregman.

First, remember that good enough often beats perfect.

“To get your most important things done without losing your mind, stop trying so hard and aiming for perfection. Instead, try racing as quickly as you can through the next phase of work. Spending less time on it might just make it better.”

I’ve been thinking about first drafts lately. For the past year I’ve bought into the idea of writing two crappy pages, the down draft, the vomit draft, and every other name it has.

Still, I don’t think I had the right speed in mind. Sometimes I’ll write a draft and do some minimal editing as I go along. I’m going to try removing even that amount of editing. Then I’ll have revise and rewrite at least once.

The above excerpt also reminds me of the recommendation that you can capture your voice better if you’re writing quickly. I experimented with writing emails daily and practiced by just sending them to a friend. Re-reading them, it’s clear that I wrote different.

It was some combination of (1) writing quickly, (2) writing casually in an email compose window, and (3) intentionally hamming it up while writing.

Speed can help.

Here’s another idea I’ll try to keep in mind as the new year approaches:

Fight the urge to fill every empty moment in your day, especially if you need to be extra-productive or creative for a task. Our best ideas typically come to us when we are being unproductive.

Take more showers, some long walks, and some time to not do anything at all. There was a New York Magazine article last year on productivity that I need to dig up and re-read.

It pointed out how ridiculous productivity culture has become. You make your work efficient to free up time to fill up with more work and now you have more to make more efficient.

To what end?

So the question is, Have you structured your environment—your life—so that you are more likely to accomplish your most important priorities?

Through reading many body-dysmorphia inducing male fitness magazines through the years, I’ve seen how effective changing your environment can be. (Put a mirror in your kitchen and 6 other weird tricks!)

I ate pretty strict paleo a few years ago and the biggest takeaway is that you need to remove items completely. Or you’ll eat them eventually. I always took weird joy in seeing my kitchen bare of any bad snacks. As a result, I didn’t eat bad snacks at home. (That was when I was at my healthiest.)

The other aspect of the above passage is that you need to know what your most important priorities are in the first place. (And also to recognize that the plural “priorities” is a contradiction.)

I’ll be reflecting as the year comes to end. I’ll see what I can do to create an environment that encourages terrible (but quick!) first drafts.

Stories we believe in

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.

What are some stories we believe?

One of the best things in Sapiens is that it points out the stories we believe that we don’t even realize are stories at all.

Bitcoin is a hot topic right now. Most people don’t actually know how it works. (Not that I do, either.) Most people can wrap their head around the idea that Bitcoin is a story. If you’ve followed along you’ve seen it’s value rise from nothing other than the belief that it will someday be used widely. (Or just the belief that enough other people believe in it.)

What you might not wrap your head around as quickly is that currencies around the world are also just stories. That $1 bill in your wallet is only worth anything because the world collectively believes in the story.

The world economy is built on the stories of debt and credit.

In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane points out that he doesn’t believe in the story of money. His financier has zero power over him.

You might believe that the month you’re born in has an effect on your personality and place in life. That’s because of a story.

But which story?

Is it the story told by horoscopes tying birth months (roughly) to different personalities? Or is it the story Gladwell tells where birth month determines how big you are when you start competitive sports? (Slightly older kids are also slightly larger, get more of a coach’s attention, and then become part of a reinforcing cycle.)

What stories do you believe in?

Book Notes: Basketball and Other Things

I finished reading Basketball and Other Things by Shea Serrano. (I loved it.) It reminded me of how fun it was to go through the FreeDarko books years ago. Shea takes the weird thoughts and conversations you and your friends might have and goes deep on them. For example, everyone has a memory hero:

A memory hero is, in most (but not all) cases, someone who you remember as being way better than he or she actually was. Most times, the talent inflation happens because the memories were formed when you were a child or young person, and so since children and young people don’t know things and are very bad at placing things in context,

I loved this section. Shea shares answers from his writer friends.

The memory hero concept reminds me of a Steven Yuen interview where he talks about the magic window where you’re 10-12 years old and there are things you experience that just become your favorite things.

I had the privilege of listening to a Frank Darabont conversation earlier on during The Walking Dead, and he kept on talking about this “magic window” — I think it’s from maybe ages 10 to 12 — when you watch a movie, and it moves you. It just becomes one of the greatest things in your life for the rest of your life.

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One of my memory heroes is Jeff Hornacek. I’d play NBA Live ’951 against my brother Dan.

Dan’s 4 years older than me which isn’t as much as adults but in elementary school it made him my nemesis. He rooted for Jordan which left me rooting for Barkley then Malone. 

Usually my brother was off playing his season alone, but ask to play once in a while. One time we played he really thought he was Phil Jackson and was making a bunch of pre-game tweaks to his starters and then when the game started he paused it to tweak some more options for his team.

At this point I thought he was just messing with me so I told on him.

I can’t remember if it escalated slowly or if it all happened at once. What I do remember is that my mom ripped the cartridge out of the SNES. Raw strength because she did it without pressing the eject button. Not good but potentially not terrible—the cartridge and console would probably be okay.

Then she spiked it on the floor as hard as possible.

Okay so the console would probably be okay.

Dan couldn’t save his season progress after that. You could shake the cartridge and hear something moving around in there. Our theory is that the battery or whatever storage thing was in the cartridge must have exploded internally.

There’s not great lesson here: don’t tell on your older brother? Don’t spend 5 minutes setting your roster to beat your little brother?

Oh yeah so I just thought Jeff Hornacek would never miss in real life because he was some guy I could pass to in the game and he would make 3s.

That was his first year in Miami, and the general tone surrounding him and the Heat was that he was a bad guy for leaving Cleveland and the Heat were the bad team for Voltroning up with him and Bosh, and so of course him losing that year allowed for people who didn’t like LeBron to stare at his lackluster stat sheets and masturbate furiously.

Guilty. One of the best things reading this book is that it skips everything before the merger. The book’s history starts with Bird and Magic. I was too young to remember that decade, but I’ve read a couple books about it. More importantly, my dad kept a bunch of VHS tapes around from whatever the NBA’s equivalent of NFL Films or Coliseum Video was. I remember one of them being about how to play basketball by Larry Bird.

These legitimate tapes sat next to things that said like 120 Minutes on the face and on the edge there’d be a sticker with some sharpie written on it saying “Bulls Lakers Game 3”. One of the chores me and my brother had was learning to use the VCR to set recordings. And to make sure to switch tapes out so that the basketball games don’t record over the recurring Tonight Show tapes. For many years, I’d wake up and make a bowl of cereal while my dad drank coffee and watched Jay Leno2.

Anyway, I remember a lot of the things mentioned in the book. They were players I rooted for in high school. They were the players that retired and signaled to me that I wasn’t young anymore. And of course the current talent.

The passage above reminded me of how much I was in the camp of people rooting against LeBron. (Then rooted for him when he re-joined the Cavs.) And the book reminded me of where I was at different points when LeBron moments happened. I was in UW’s Electrical Engineering lab when he had the 48-point special.

I think I had NBA league pass at the time but you couldn’t access it on a phone. I was in Vegas for a bachelor party when he hit the game winner against the Magic. And I experienced the entire Heat/Mavs series in a 3-week hotel stay for a work trip to D.C. Yes, just waiting for bad stats. Which seems incredibly petty now but it was just that time in basketball history.

For all of the other parts of this book, each chapter is treated as a single question, and each answer for each question is carefully considered and worked through thoroughly. It was important to me for the book to move that way because in situations like these—situations where you’re trying to convince someone of something—people are far more receptive to receiving an answer (even one that they might disagree with) if they can see how you arrived at your conclusion.

I couldn’t put the book down. It was fun to read. I wrote a post about Bill Simmons and the Holy Cross Crusader archives that was sort of built around one of his podcasts when he had Chuck Klosterman on as a guest.

One point in there is that I’d love to write like Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman. Not necessarily about the same things because I’m not nearly as big a sports fan as either of them. But mostly I’ve always had fun reading things by Simmons and feel in some way smarter when I follow Klosterman through one of his thought experiments. (A recent favorite I read was a scenario where you can perform actual magic—as in like sorcery—but the extent of your skill is street magic. You can really make that card disappear. How do you feel about this?)

My point here is that I’d love to write like Shea Serrano also. This book is packed with these scenarios. (Which NBA player would be best as a group leader in The Purge?) He also has a great handle on his voice. I’ll continue to do terrible impressions of all these writers until I have a handle on my voice and can turn ideas into good premises for writing.

Utility of fiction

I finished reading City of Thieves. Really moving book.

(Check out some of my thoughts from when I started it.)

I picked it up after seeing it mentioned in Tribe Of Mentors, recommended by Brian Koppelman:

And, lastly, City of Thieves by Benioff. This book is just a joy. Fiction has a real utility, and it’s one I think high achievers sometimes forget, and that is: fictions stirs you up inside, unsettles you, forces you to engage with that which isn’t easily solved. This book does all that and delights along the way. I’ve given it to 100 people.

It was funnier than I expected.

Here’s a passage I enjoyed from City of Thieves:

In certain ways I am deeply stupid. I don’t say this out of modesty. I believe that I’m more intelligent than the average human being, though perhaps intelligence should not be looked at as a single gauge, like a speedometer, but as a full array of tachometers, odometers, altimeters, and the rest.

My dad once asked my brother and me, “For being so smart, how can you be so dumb?”

I don’t remember the exact situation, but I remember how it made me feel. (It made me feel smart and dumb.)

I’m reading through Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman and came across something similar about how a lot of movie stars don’t have education beyond high school:

Now, this doesn’t mean they’re not bright. I’ve never met a star who wasn’t clever and shrewd and loaded with more street smarts than I’ll collect in a lifetime.

No doubt you’ve come across people who are book smart and that’s just about it. I had a friend growing up who probably should have been held back a grade or two. He couldn’t focus on schoolwork at all. It always blew my mind that he could give complete attention to any RPG he was playing.

I don’t know what I’m getting at with this. Maybe it’s that people write off reading fiction as a waste of time. As Koppelman says, you really can learn a lot reading fiction.

A lot of the world’s great thinkers are great writers. You won’t find all their knowledge in the self-development shelf.