No Stupid Questions

I think he's a historian by discipline.

Yeah, I don't know what he is but I may be wrong but you know his big big book is Sapiens but then he's written other things and he was on Steve Levitt's podcast People I Mostly Admire and he said one small thing that I found so interesting and insightful he was talking about this isn't quite hypocrisy but I filed it under that. He was talking about how quick we are to punish public people and he was talking about politicians in this case.

Charles Duhigg wrote about this as a keystone habit. He said, making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of wellbeing and stronger skills at sticking with a budget. That was in his book, The Power of Habit.

I think Charles Duhigg was just a guest on our sibling show, People I Mostly Admire. Yes?

The first time I was truly introduced to the idea of manifestation came in, I don't know, 2006. There was this book that came out in this movie that came out called The Secret.

So The Secret was written by this Australian TV writer. Her name is Rhonda Byrne.

In the first half of the show, Mike says that in her 2006 book The Secret, author Rhonda Byrne writes that the titular concept is largely based on the law of attraction.

I am in awe. I so wish...

Michael Lewis is a writer that a lot of writers envy.

Michael Lewis is someone who I and a lot of other writers think makes really good writing look really easy.

When you talk to him, it kind of is.

I read writing by him and I'm like, swoon and you know, envy.

I'm sure I'd heard of him, I read Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, but I think he was the executive right, who sort of first had the idea.

Oh Billy Bean, I saw the movie with Brad Pitt.

Yeah, so Brad Pitt plays the role of Billy Bean.

Okay, he's the general manager or the coach or something right?

He's the general manager I believe and then Jonah Hill plays the role of Paul DePodesta.

He has this new book called Complicit, How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop.

I was teaching this group of executives online. I asked the class what caused the massive fraud at Theranos?

Clearly there were multiple causes of fraud at Theranos. But when I looked at the class's answers, I found they tended to be simple and singular.

62 of the 70 responses offered a single cause. 56 of those 62 were a simple description of Elizabeth Holmes, such as her ego or lack of integrity.

In other words, the vast majority of the sophisticated executives in my class who knew all aspects of the story blamed a single source.

And he says, the potential role of the zygotic effect is colossal.

If we engage in a tuned processing, right, getting to closure of a negative emotional event or a regrettable incident with our partner, we will only foggyly remember it. The details will become hazy and the event insignificant.

On the other hand, if we dismiss and avoid processing a negative emotional event, it will not disappear. It will fester, ready to be triggered again.

This is why attuning, right, getting closure to a negative regrettable incident is so incredibly important, like the Viennese waiters in Zygarnik's cafe, if partners avoid processing the incident with attunement, the event and its negative emotion will lie inside each partner like an improvised explosive device, an IED ready to explode if inadvertently stepped on.

The way relationships fail is through something called the zygarnic effect. If a couple's negative events are not fully processed, that's what he calls attunement, right? Like getting to closure. If they're not fully processed, then they're remembered and rehearsed repeatedly, turned over and over in each person's mind.

I mean, there's this Valentine's book that we always read as kids called Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch.

It's an awesome book, but there's this older gentleman lives alone, never had a family, and he gets this big box of chocolates that says somebody loves you.

He's like, maybe it was the person I buy the paper from. Maybe it was someone at work. Maybe it was the neighbors.

And then the postman comes back and says, Mr. Hatch, I'm in a lot of trouble. I delivered this to the wrong house.

And he becomes so involved in his community and he starts making brownies and inviting people over and all this.

He's got a forthcoming book called Power and Progress Our 1000 year struggle over technology and prosperity.

John McWhorter's most recent book...is actually about swearing. It's called Nine Nasty Words English in the Gutter, Then Now and Forever.

He describes essentially three historical eras of what swear words were about.

But growth Mindset is a pretty sexy phrase, right?

And so growth Mindset ended up being the terminology we all know and love today.

She used to call it implicit theories of incremental--I know, right? I can't even remember. It was like incremental intelligence theory.

I will leave Jenny with one thought if she's looking for ammunition for why she's right to think that young people are terrible. This is from Aristotle who did his thinking many centuries ago. He wrote, And for the record, That is true. Aristotle wrote, Aristotle is really cranky. I think he's throwing everyone under the bus.

So I guess if Jenny wants to feel better, she should read some Aristotle and say that compared to him, everybody is actually pretty awesome. I think that's a good antidote.

If I gave Raymond, who sent us this question, why do people get scammed? What's your advice? If I gave Raymond the best advice, I think it would be go read Influence by Bob Cialdini.

And I know you and I have both read Influence and we're both big fans. The reason I suggest that is that what Bob Cialdini as a psychologist did was to document the half dozen basic principles by which human beings persuade other people to do and believe things.

And I want to recommend this to Raymond not only because, like, wow, how do I not fall prey to these techniques? Well, learn them from the master.

But when I got to know Bob in the last several years, I came to discover something that I didn't realize from reading Influence the first time, which is that he is like the most morally upright person.

And I think what truly has motivated him is just the idea that his moral duty is to kind of inoculate all of us against scams and against being had and against being fooled and taken advantage of by writing as clearly as possible about how it is that that happens.

So he has this podcast, and he was telling me about this famous self-help book called The Artist's Way. I, of course, had never heard of it. And he said, wait, what?

And the advice that he was passing along to me from the author of this apparently extremely famous self-help book, which was written by and for artists.

And if you're an artist, what you do is you grab a hard copy journal and you write, I think it's four pages. And that's the rule.

It's not about time. It's not about what you write about. But it's just that you write four pages in the morning.

By the way, every time you say winter is coming, I think of Game of Thrones.

I've never watched it. It looks too like combination scary, sci-fi, noisy, time consuming, cold.

So how can you be this alleged goal-oriented person who's always thinking about accomplishment and achievement for the sake of helping the kids, but you're also spending hours and hours and hours watching Game of Thrones?

He wrote Merchant of Venice.

OK, Harold Bloom, maybe the most prominent literary critic of the past generation at least, he called Merchant of Venice a profoundly antisemitic work. And most people who study that kind of thing would agree.