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alltimebestbooks · 4 years

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Best Books Help you Change Way to think

1. Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain

The New York Times bestselling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. Then came SuperFreakonomics, a documentary film, an award-winning podcast, and more.

Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and teach us all to think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally—to think, that is, like a Freak.

Levitt and Dubner offer a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems, whether your interest lies in minor lifehacks or major global reforms. As always, no topic is off-limits. They range from business to philanthropy to sports to politics, all with the goal of retraining your brain. Along the way, you’ll learn the secrets of a Japanese hot-dog-eating champion, the reason an Australian doctor swallowed a batch of dangerous bacteria, and why Nigerian e-mail scammers make a point of saying they’re from Nigeria.

Some of the steps toward thinking like a Freak:

First, put away your moral compass—because it’s hard to see a problem clearly if you’ve already decided what to do about it.

Learn to say “I don’t know”—for until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.

Think like a child—because you’ll come up with better ideas and ask better questions.

Take a master class in incentives—because for better or worse, incentives rule our world.

Learn to persuade people who don’t want to be persuaded—because being right is rarely enough to carry the day.

Learn to appreciate the upside of quitting—because you can’t solve tomorrow’s problem if you aren’t willing to abandon today’s dud.

Levitt and Dubner plainly see the world like no one else. Now you can too. Never before have such iconoclastic thinkers been so revealing—and so much fun to read

2. The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest To Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind

Recording memories, mind reading, videotaping our dreams, mind control, avatars, and telekinesis - no longer are these feats of the mind solely the province of overheated science fiction. As Michio Kaku reveals, not only are they possible, but with the latest advances in brain science and recent astonishing breakthroughs in technology, they already exist. In The Future of the Mind, the New York Times-bestselling author takes us on a stunning, provocative and exhilarating tour of the top laboratories around the world to meet the scientists who are already revolutionising the way we think about the brain - and ourselves.

3. A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

Whether you are a student struggling to fulfill a math or science requirement, or you are embarking on a career change that requires a new skill set, A Mind for Numbersoffers the tools you need to get a better grasp of that intimidating material. Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses, before enlisting in the army immediately after graduation. When she saw how her lack of mathematical and technical savvy severely limited her options—both to rise in the military and to explore other careers—she returned to school with a newfound determination to re-tool her brain to master the very subjects that had given her so much trouble throughout her entire life. In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to learning effectively—secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they’d known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there’s only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions—you just need the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. In short, studying a problem in a laser-focused way until you reach a solution is not an effective way to learn. Rather, it involves taking the time to step away from a problem and allow the more relaxed and creative part of the brain to take over. The learning strategies in this book apply not only to math and science, but to any subject in which we struggle. We all have what it takes to excel in areas that don't seem to come naturally to us at first, and learning them does not have to be as painful as we might think.

4. Train Your Brain

Would you like to sharpen your memory? Would you like to keep your brain agile and focused? Would you like to age-proof your brain so that it stays young, healthy and fit? Then this is the book for you! Train Your Brain is a book of puzzles, exercises, riddles, and brain games that will help boost your brain power and jump start your brain! Whether you are a teenager, young adult, or a senior citizen, this book provides a vigorous mental workout to help increase your memory, sharpen your deductive and mathematical skills, improve your observation, increase your problem-solving skills, and improve the overall health of your brain. • More than 100 fun, brain-enhancing exercises, puzzles, and riddles. • 50 neurobic exercises that you can practice anytime, anywhere. • 66 popular games that will help you polish your cognitive skills.

6. Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

In Your Brain at Work, David Rock takes readers inside the heads—literally—of a modern two-career couple as they mentally process their workday to reveal how we can better organize, prioritize, remember, and process our daily lives. Rock, the author of Quiet Leadership and Personal Best, shows how it’s possible for this couple, and thus the reader, not only to survive in today’s overwhelming work environment but succeed in it—and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.

7. Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More, and Be More Productive

With over 300,000 copies sold, Unlimited Memory is a Wall Street Journal Best Seller and has been the #1 memory book on Amazon for more than two years. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages including French, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian.

Most people never tap into 10% of their potential for memory.

In this book, you're about to learn:

How the World's Top Memory Experts Concentrate and Remember Any Information at Will, and How You Can Too

Do you ever feel like you're too busy, too stressed or just too distracted to concentrate and get work done?

In Unlimited Memory, you'll learn how the world's best memory masters get themselves to concentrate at will, anytime they want. When you can easily focus and concentrate on the task at hand, and store and recall useful information, you can easily double your productivity and eliminate wasted time, stress and mistakes at work.

In this book, you'll find all the tools, strategies and techniques you need to improve your memory.

Here’s just a taste of the memory methods you'll learn in this book:

The 3 bad habits that keep you from easily remembering important information

How a simple pattern of thinking can stop you from imprinting and remembering key facts, figures and ideas, and how to break this old pattern so you’ll never again be known as someone with a “bad memory”

How to master your attention so you can focus and concentrate longer, even during challenging or stressful situations

How to use your car to remember anything you want (like long lists or information you need to remember for your studies or personal life) without writing anything down

Simple methods that allow you to nail down tough information or complex concepts quickly and easily

How to combine your long-term memory (things you already know and will never forget) and short-term memory (information you want to remember right now) to create instant recall for tests, presentations and important projects

The simple, invisible mental technique for remembering names without social awkwardness or anxiety

How using your imagination to bring boring information to life can help you dramatically improve your attention span and recall

An incredible strategy for remembering numbers (the same system Kevin used to remember Pi to 10,000 digits and beat the world memory record by 14 minutes)

How to use a mental map to lock in and connect hundreds or even thousands of ideas in your long-term memory (this method will allow you to become a leading expert in your field faster than you ever dreamed possible)

8. Calm Your Mind: Break the Cycle of Anxiety, Stress, Unhappiness, Exhaustions, and Find Peace in a Rushed World

Overwhelmed by the demands of a fast-paced world? Want to reduce your stress and anxiety?

Endless worrying is mostly the byproduct of unconscious living.

What makes you anxious: your lifestyle, your prospects for the future, or the shadows of the past?

If you’re desperate to slow down and find inner peace, mindfulness is the solution you’re looking for.

In Calm Your Mind, bestselling author Steven Schuster will help you to find back your way to the present moment following a few simple yet powerful principles. They don’t require more than a few minutes of practice daily. Their impact, however, is monumental with long-term benefits.

Improve your focus and productivity.

The book will not only show you the best practices to find peace of mind but will also help you transform these practices into daily, automatic habits. The wholeness you’re so keen to find is already within you. Practicing mindfulness is the key to channel those parts of your brain.

Learn to exclude the junk from your thoughts.

•Improve your focus and attention during your everyday activities •How to bring awareness to your life and practice conscious living •Become more decisive, disciplined, and calm

Become aware of the person you truly are.

•Learn how can you "calm your mind" •The best tips to manage your energy •The scientifically proven benefits of practicing mindfulness •How to overcome your discouraging and negative thoughts

Stop being the victim of your circumstances. Be aware and thus prepared to overcome them.

Mindfulness helps you experience a deep feeling of happiness and peace. It seeps into everything you do. You can meet the worst that life throws at you with courage, discipline, and determination. Life will make sense because you’ll be in greater control of it.

#change way think #think #thinking

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hellyeahheroes · 5 years

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In celebration of Superman Smashes the Klan #1 premier, here is Gene Luen Yang TEDx talk. And bellow is part of his Interview for POCCulture.

POC Culture: Switching gears to Superman Smashes the Klan, a really unique and timely project. You mentioned that you were reluctant in terms of taking it on, where did that come from and why did you ultimately decide to do it?

GLY: For this project I put in a proposal for it with DC Comics, but shortly after I did, I did feel kind of freaked out about it. It deals with a lot of subjects that are touchy in modern day America. It’s about racism – the fundamental question behind it is whether or not a multicultural country can work. It was a question that was around after World War II ended, which was when the original story came out, and I think that question has reared its head again in very intense way. And it’s not just in America, the question of multiculturalism has reared its head all over the globe right now. As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, it’s really unexpected.

Q: The book is inspired by the Superman radio story Clan of the Fiery Cross, which itself is credited with subverting some of the KKK’s efforts in the 40s. What is the message that you’re hoping to get across?

GLY: I went into the project wanting to learn myself. I wanted to learn about the 40s and what America was like after the end of the war. After doing my research, this is what I came away thinking – before World War II there had always been two streams in America: One stream that was “All human beings are created equal” and then there was another stream that was “These particular people are worth 3/5ths.” And these two streams were competing. Then in World War II, America went across the ocean to fight these Nazis. but really a big core of the Nazi philosophy was centered around Madison Grant, who was an American. He was an advisor to President Theodore Roosevelt. He was a conservationist but also a pretty intense eugenicist and deeply racist. He wrote this book called The Passing of the Great Race and Hitler called this American book his Bible. So in some ways, as an American, you can see World War II as our country going across the ocean to face ourselves, or the worst version of ourselves. And when the war ends and the American troops come back, I think they saw what one of the streams of American history led to – it leads to concentration camps, it leads to genocide – so there was this embrace of the other side, at least in these really big and influential corners of America. It wasn’t 100%. It was an imperfect embrace, it was incomplete, but there was this sense that we saw what that other way of thinking leads to and we don’t want that. I think we’ve forgotten that. Whatever we learned by fighting the worst version of ourselves in Europe, we’ve forgotten.

I think that Superman radio show, it came out a year after the end of the war, in some ways you can see a crystallization of what America learned in World War II.

Q: Backing up a little bit, how familiar were you previously with this radio show and where did the inspiration come from to propose it to DC Comics?

GLY: I learned about it the same way a lot of other folks learned about it, I read Freakonomics and they devoted an entire chapter to this. After I read that, I told my son about it and talked with him about it. Then I found this middle-grade book called Superman versus the Klu Klux Klan by Rick Bowers and it goes into detail about the creation of Superman and the Klan and how they eventually came to a head in 1946. So it was always in the back of my mind. Then after I began working for DC Comics, I was at a book conference, I had breakfast with a couple of the editors at DC Comics and we were talking about this and this project came out of that conversation.

Q: I’ve heard you say that Superman is a symbol of American tolerance and his story is, at its core, an immigrant story. How much of that do you get to tackle in this book?

GLY: When I first signed on to do Superman, I did 10 issues beginning in 2015, that was my connection point with the character. I had always thought of Superman as this dweeb and kind of a square. That flipped for me when I realized the reason he’s a square is the same reason my parents are square – it’s because they’re immigrants. They know they’re foreigners and they know that there’s a part of them that’s deeply threatening to the people around them. So they gotta hide it under this perfect facade. They have to be the perfect citizens because if they’re not, people will start questioning their citizenship. That same dynamic is there for Superman. So that was my connection point and that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about. Writing mostly superhero comics is really crazy! I had a great time doing it, but at the same time, I felt like I never got to explore that core of the character and that’s what this is. This is me being able to talk about that.

I actually think that’s one of the big differences between Batman and Superman. Batman dresses up to be scary. Batman’s a WASP! [laughing] He fits right in! There’s nothing scary about him. If things had gone the way they were supposed to go, if his parents were never killed, he’d probably be like some kind of politician or something. You know? Everybody would love him. He’d go to these fund raising galas. He’d become the mayor of Gotham. But Superman, deep down inside, is legitimately scary. He’s this foreigner, he’s an immigrant, he’s from this completely different culture. So I think he wears these bright colors so people don’t freak out about him as much.

Q: Wow. I love it but after this interview posts, you’re going to get Batman stans all up in your mentions! [laughing]

GLY: [Laughing] Yeah sure. That’s fine!

Q: I love it because it’s so true to my own immigrant experience. Growing up, my parents were always like “Don’t make too much noise at home. Don’t play your music too loud because you’re going to bother neighbors.” So that experience of needing to be so perfect so others don’t start questioning whether you should be here is so true but I don’t think anybody has talked about that with regards to Superman.

GLY: I think that’s exactly it. He’s the boy scout because he has to be. He’s trying to get people not to question whether he should be a citizen.

Q: Prior to this you created and wrote Kenan Kong and the Justice League of China, which is one of my favorite stories ever. I know you initially had some reluctance to do that project and Jim Lee encouraged you. Looking back now, what was the highlight of that project and is there anything that you wish you had gotten chance to do?

GLY: That was super fun. I’m really glad I did it even though I was very hesitant at the beginning. I was hesitant because they didn’t want a Chinese-American Superman. I felt like I could’ve done a Chinese-American Superman. They wanted a Chinese Superman living in China. I’d never lived in China before and I’d only visited twice. I just felt like I didn’t have the insider’s knowledge to do it right. Ultimately I had to make peace with that. I had to make peace with the fact that this was going to be an American take on a Chinese superhero. To anybody who lives in America, I’m sure it feels very American. Have you ever heard of this comic called Lucky Luke? It’s a French comic set in the American West. It’s like a Western with cowboys and high noon shootouts but it’s done by a French cartoonist. It’s set in America but it feels very French but I still think it’s an awesome comic. I was hoping that’s what this was going to be like – it going to feel like an American comic that’s set in China. So once I got over that hurdle, I started working on it. In the end, I think I feel like my favorite part of that project was being able to do a chubby Chinese Batman (Wang Baixi). I’m super proud of that!

Q: [Laughing] And he was great too! What’s amazing is that at first you think “What in the world? Is this a parody?” but you made his character awesome!

GLY: Well thanks! I wanted to play with this trope. It’s like a kung-fu movie trope where you have this chubby guy come on screen and everyone laughs at him and he just whoops everybody’s butt. He turns out to be the best out of all of them. I think there’s a subversiveness to that in kung-fu movies, where it’s a warning to not judge people by appearances and I wanted to play with that too with Batman.

Q: Sammo Hung fans agree with you!

GLY: [Laughing] Exactly! Sammo Hung is Batman!

Q: You mentioned that you would’ve been interested in doing an Asian-American version. That’s the tension right now. China is a huge market that everyone wants to tap into, but there’s also this Asian-American market that’s very hungry. Do you want to do more Asian-American characters and stories. Is there anything like that on the horizon for you?

GLY: Yeah I absolutely do want to do more Asian-American characters and stories. There’s nothing…concrete yet but that’s definitely on my to-do list.

Q: Kenan Kong and the Justice League of China, are we going to see them again soon?

GLY: I hope so! There’s nothing concrete yet but I would love to do more stories. I feel like the Asian corner of the DC universe in general has plenty of material there that ought to be fleshed out. And hopefully we’ll be able to see that happen soon.

Q: Agreed. Whenever there’s a new diverse character that’s created, there’s always the conflict of whether they should be given a wholly new identity and try to build them up, or should we allow them to share an iconic mantle like Kenan and Superman. Not promising anything but what would you like to see in terms of the next evolution of Kenan Kong and any of the others?

GLY: We did talk about giving Kenan his own identity apart from Superman. We didn’t get to that point of the series where we were able to introduce that but that was something we definitely talked about. In terms of diversity, I think you need both. You need characters that take on established legacies and you also need characters that establish new identities and new legacies. When you have something like a Korean-American Hulk, or Miles Morales, you’re tapping into a name recognition that I think is really important for visibility. But at the same time, as popular as Miles Morales is, Spider-Man is still going to be Peter Parker first for most readers. So the way to overcome that is to also have characters of color establish new stories and identities.

Q: There’s a significant burden that comes with being one of the primary Asian-American writers in comics. How do you manage that?

GLY: I’m interested in doing that. Maybe it would be different if I didn’t want to write Asian-American characters, but I really want to write Asian-American characters, so I don’t know if I even think of it as a burden. It’s just something I’m naturally interested in. It’s actually something I want to do. Even if they didn’t pay me, I would being doing this. Even when I was losing money in comics, I was doing this.

Q: I love that you embrace that. Going back to Jeremy Lin, he’s talked about how at first he didn’t know that he wanted to be the Asian-American standard bearer, but he’s come to embrace that. You’re the Jeremy Lin of DC Comics!

GLY: [Laughing] I don’t know about that! There’s Greg Pak, though he hasn’t written in DC in a long time. There’s Amy Chu. There’s a lot of us.

Here is first part of that interview

- Admin

#Superman Smashes the Klan #New Super-Man #Super-Man #Kenan Kong #Kong Kenan #DC #DC Kids #Long Post

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i-can-get-extra-with-my-ships · 5 years

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A Slice Of My Love. Chapter 5. What Did I Miss Last Night?

Hello children!! I am sitting at the kitchen table today. Now, if the title didn’t tell you who’s POV it is then you’re either new, not paying attention, or just can’t take a hint.

Also, because I had no clue as to what I wanted to happen at the end of chapter 4 this is a le time skip to the next morning.

Parings: This whole book is the glasses gays show people, platonic Prinxiety.

Tw: Cursing, (I mean what did you expect. It’s normal for my writing to be littered with curses), Pat and Lo being shippers, the boop™ my own personal opinions shoved in through Roman, Roman being a shipper, floof. (Or fluff for those who are new here.)

Roman’s POV

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I woke up this morning feeling great. I had already determined that today was going to be an amazing and productive day.

Once I had made it downstairs, I turned against my original opinion on today.

Patton, Logan, and Virgil were sitting at the kitchen table, there was tension in the air, so thick that you could cut it with a knife.

Very unusual.

Logan and Patton were sitting at one end of the table holding hands. They were staring at Virgil and looked like they were about to give a parental lecture of some kind. Their expressions matched. Concern, and anger.

Oh damn. Virgil must’ve done something really bad.

I don’t think my presence had been made known. I cleared my throat, which alone caused everyone to look at me.

“Ahh. It appears that I have missed some crucial information. Care to tell me what’s going on?”

Patton let go of Logan’s hand, sighed, and then pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I forgot that Roman wasn’t awake during last night’s events. Both of you,” He gave both Logan and Virgil the dad look™. “Shut up and don’t interrupt me. Especially you Virgil.”

Oh god. Patton told them to shut up. Shit must’ve went down last night.

“Ok. So at like 2:45 ish I heard someone’s bedroom door open. I didn’t want to get up, but you know me, I had to check and see who it was. It turns out that it was Virge. He was making coffee. I went to take the cup away from him, but he looked like death and like he hadn’t slept in days.”

I looked at Virgil in surprise. He looked back. We locked eyes for less than a second before he averted his eyes to the counter.

Patton pinched the bridge of his nose once more. He started mumbling. I believe he said “I love my dark strange son” a good 200 times in the span of about 30 seconds. Logan started to rub Patton’s shoulders.

“Goodness! How much did I miss last night?”

Logan looked up at me with a sympathetic look. “A lot.”

Once Patton finished his mumbling he looked up at me once more. “Then I was telling him how unhealthy it was and how he needed to sleep. You know. Standard serious dad mode. He wasn’t listening to me. Then he said that there was a person sitting on the counter when there was only the bag of bread. I went upstairs to get Logan’s help. Then we came downstairs to see a piece of bread on the couch and Virgil quoting that one musical that you two quote together sometimes.”

I stood there trying to figure out which musical Patton was speaking of. I quote several musicals with Virgil.

“Virgil, which one of our musicals is he speaking of?”

He tried to turn his head away from me further. It wasn’t possible, but he tried anyway.

“Patton, do you remember what Virgil said, by any chance?”

Pat looked at Lo with pleading eyes.

“Virgil said, if I’m not mistaken, ‘Don’t just quote Heathers at me and then walk away’ or something similar.”

I over-dramatically put my hand over my heart and cried out.

“VIRGIL!! How dare you quote Heathers without me!! How in God’s name did you even quote Heathers without your JD?”

The whole spectacle was supposed to be a joke to lighten the mood. However, I could tell that it was not taken that way.

Virgil had tensed up and looked at me very guiltily. My heart broke at that sight. I practically ran over to him and hugged him.

“Look, Virge, I was being overly dramatic and failed at being funny. I’m sorry.”

I pulled away from the hug, Virge still looked guilty, but not as guilty as before so it was an improvement.

I stood up to go get breakfast when I saw Patton clinging onto Logan’s arm. He looked like he was trying to suppress a squeal. Logan looked rather amused. I rolled my eyes and went to go get food.

“Padre, would you be so kind as to continue with last night's events? If it isn’t too much trouble, of course.” I wanted to move away from the subject that Patton was about to bring up.

“Oh yeah, I almost forgot about that. Then Virgil said that there wasn’t a piece of bread sitting on the couch and that there was a guy sitting there.” Patton turned to his boyfriend. “Logan, am I forgetting anything?”

Logan thought for a moment. “Well, there is a piece of information that you forgot Patton. But I’m not too sure that it is necessary to the recap of last night’s events.

Did I care if it was 100% necessary? No. No, I did not.

“Logan, just tell me. I don’t care if it’s all that important. I just need to know what went down whilst I was sleeping.”

Logan hesitated for only a second or two. “If you so insist, Roman. Now, if I’m not mistaken, Virgil said that the supposed ‘guy’ that was sitting there’s name was Alonso.”

I stood there trying to fully comprehend what I had just heard.

I just turned around and asked Virgil a simple question.

“Virge, you ok buddy?”

He looked at me like I was the insane one then responded. “Like I told Patton last night, I’m never okay.”

I looked at Pat. He looked like he was about to blow a fuse.

“I WILL PHYSICALLY FIGHT YOU IF YOU KEEP SAYING THINGS LIKE THAT!!!” Pat was talking as if Virgil was from a different planet. Slowly annunciating each syllable.

Logan put an arm around Patton’s shoulders and with his other hand he lifted his chin up.

“Someone sounds like they still need more sleep.”

“No, I don’t!! I need to worry about my kiddo.” Patton yawned.

I snickered, That didn’t help your case much.

“Patton, if Freakonomic is condoning extra sleeping then, you need to sleep.”

Virgil didn’t look up from staring at the counter, he just joined our conversation.

“Yeah, I’m with Princey and Lo on this one.” He didn’t look at anyone of us. He just kept staring at the counter.

I really shouldn’t have said what I did, but I couldn’t stop myself before I said it.

“Hypocrites say what?” As always, Virgil fell for it.

“What?”

Patton and Logan gave me the look™. At the same time too!! If Patton is like our dad, then Logan is our mom. CHANGE MY MIND!!

They’re so cute together!! Have I ever mentioned how much I ship them?

You realize that you’re about to get lectured right?

Oh right!!

I always need to pull myself out of a shipper train of thought.

“Umm, Logan! Doesn’t Patton need more sleep?”

“Ahh yes. He does. Come on Pattoncake. We need to get you,” He booped Patton’s nose “to bed.”

That right there, ladies, lords, and non-binary royalty is Patton’s weakness. The boop™.

“Fine!” he mumbled in a failed attempt to be mad at the fact that he was being sentenced to bed.

What can I say? The boop™. It works wonders.

Logan walked Patton up the stairs. I heard a door, presumably Patton’s, open and close. I expected that the sound of Logan coming back downstairs would follow. It didn’t.

Perfect!!

Now I have time alone with Virgil. To get to the bottom of this Alonso? Was that the name? I think it was.

The Alonso thing.

Now. How do I bring up this delicate subject?

“You wanna ask me about Alonso, don’t you?”

Well, there we go. That is one less thing to worry about.

Virge, you’re my best friend and all, but you just interrupted my train of thought. (Interrupted By The Storm, anyone? Roman can’t stop being interrupted. I am so sorry I’ll go now)

Now. How do I ask about this delicate subject without offending the emo nightmare?

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Ok. Let me just say. I FUCKEN LOVE WRITING ROMAN’S POV!!! It gives my extra bitch self a chance to be an extra bitch without being considered extra!!

This chapter was sooo much fun to write!! I hope it was worth the wait. (I’m still incredibly sorry for making you guys wait so long.)

I was going to end at “You wanna ask me about Alonso, don’t you?” but, but, but, I had to end the chapter with a good place to start the next.

WHO THE FUCK AM I KIDDING? I’m gonna go back and start the next chapter slightly before “You wanna ask me about Alonso, don’t you?”.

I mean… the ending I gave this chapter gave me the chance to bring up Interrupted By The Storm. And yes, the extra bitch ending was necessary. I wrote this whole chapter with my extra bitch. I had to write the end with the extra bitch too.

(Side note, this chapter is also over 4 pages long on google docs.)

(Side note take 2, I didn’t have to do much editing for this chapter. I’m proud of myself)

(Side note take 3, I don’t care that at the moment it’s 8:03pm. At least where I live)

The random internet human who fails at writing,

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Taglist, please let me know if you’d like to be added or removed: @winterswishing-reblogs @thetomorrowshow @iixclementine @just-some-gt-trash

#Well #It is finally here.#Was it worth the wait?#I have no clue.#If you were wondering when Roman was going to come in #He came in now.#I might write some glasses gays.#Like while they're upstairs.#I'm plotting that they didn't sleep.#Yep.#Screw it.#Chapter 7 will be Logan's POV.#Why not chapter 6?#Chapter 6 is Virgil's.#That's how it works.#Why do I write out this loong string of tags?#No one reads the tags.#A Slice Of My Love #Em's crappy attempts at writing

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sammyhale · 6 years

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J2 JIBCon 2018 Saturday Panel

Jared says he isn’t feeling so hot. Jensen: I think you look amazing.

Jared on episode 22: We saw it in the wild! Jensen: You can just say everyday life lol.

Jared: Believe in your fucking self - I love that shirt!

Jared can’t stop looking at the monitor with his face on it lol. Jensen: Ignore it! You make a living with a camera pointed at your face! Jared: I can’t ignore it, I’m totally famous right now! :P Jensen put Jared’s jacket over it.

Jensen: I think Dean always envisioned a warm and loving/caring and nurturing mother, so it was jarring to him seeing Mary in a different light when she came back. Sam was more accepting of Mary being a hunter.

Jensen about Jared: You’ll have to excuse my friend.

Fan: You’re beautiful. Jared: We are not. Jensen: Speak for yourself.

Jared just took a fan and put it on his lower abs.

If J2 were on Magic Mike, this fan wants them both to die- “I mean dance!” J2 crack up at her slip and Jared comes off stage to high five the fan.

Jared: If there was a Magic Mike Changing Channels, I would get my dance on!

Fan asks J2 to tell each other what they find beautiful about one another. Jared: He has a wonderful tuft of hair and I can see it because I’m 6′4 and he’s a mere 6′1 lol.

Jared: Jensen will as a friend, very uniquely, be able to tell Jared “dude, you’re better than this.” Basically, he likes that Jensen can tell him to up his game. Jensen holds Jared to a higher standard. He loves Jensen’s ability to remain who he is, that he can be real with him and call him out on his shit. Jared has very few friends that can do that.

Jared: You know him as Jensen Ackles and Dean Winchester, I know him as Uncle Ackles, like my kids call him.

Jensen: I wanted to say his chest but that sounds inadequate now lol.

Jensen’s serious answer about what is beautiful about Jared: Says he has many qualities, but one is Jared’s “ability to liven and lighten and make a room better just by walking into it.”

J2 keep bumping each other on the thigh for support.

Jared: It’s so pretty - touches Jensen’s face.

Fan: Which animals would you be? Jensen: I was told recently a wolf. Jensen says that Jared would be a bull.

Jared and Gen set a trap to stop things eating their chickens and they caught a possum! Called him Mr. Possum. When Shep catches lizards they are always called Lizzie.

Jared thinks he’d be an opossum. Jensen: Opossums play dead when in fear... That doesn’t apply and they also have a long tail, I don’t think so... Jared: Phhhh...

Jensen keeps roaring and Jared just did it, too

Fan: I think you would be a bear, Jensen. Jensen: *growls like a bear* Jared: *growls like a tiger*

Jensen: I don’t think you’re rat-like. Jared: My tail is. Second wave of laughter over what might have a double meaning here lol.

Jensen: How about a giraffe? Jared: I’m going with moose, man!

Fan chose lion for Jared to be. Jared: I love it. I’ll have news for you in a couple of days.

Jensen: I had a fundamental issue with the fact that Dean left Sam when he died in 13x21. But it was too late to change the script. He thought it was doing a disservice to the character. He wasn’t quiet about it.

Jared: I knew that Dean was gonna go back for his brother.

Jared: I have an interesting perspective as the dead brother. I never doubted that Dean would go back, and he thought it was heartbreaking seeing Dean have no choice but to leave Sam behind even though he didn’t want to.

Jared thinks Jensen did an awesome job showing Dean’s emotional state. Jared says it’s easier to play the bravado of wanting to go in guns blazing and Jensen was amazing in bringing Dean’s heartbreak in not being able to go back for Sam, in playing “I don’t wanna be anywhere but dead with my brother in that cave.”

Silent conversations between J2.

Jared: On the way in today we watched the gag reel, it was really good! Jared wants to show it but Jensen says no lol.

Habits they’ve adopted from each other? Jensen about him and Jared: “We have adopted a short-hand language with each other.” They can read each other so well. In gag reels, you see it a lot. Derail with each other when it’s fun/prank time.

Jensen: When he derails and starts pranking, I derail with him. And when I derail, he, instead of pulling me back on the rails, he just pushes me further and jumps off with me and we go off the tracks together! Jared: Wheee!

They can read each other so well they don’t have to discuss things like improvising a scene.

Jared: I Dean it up once in a while (when there’s a crowd of people and he’s trying to get through) and does a Dean face lol. Says Dean’s posture “toughens himself up” lol.

Misha arrives for the brief J2M panel. He livestreams on the monitor: Sorry, I didn’t think you could see me! Jensen: We always see you, Misha, you livestream your entire life.

Misha: Jared and Jensen were plucked off of playgrounds and told, you’re a star! Jensen: No, that’s not true at all.

Jensen: Everything in life is a gamble but if you’re passionate about it, it’s worth it. Says there was a lot of rejection early in their careers as actors, but their passion for it made them push through.

Jared: Do something that brings you joy every day. Says this industry can be very judgmental. Don’t listen to them, but make sure you do what makes you happy. “I’ve been in the business 18 years and sometimes I feel judged or less than. But just do what makes you happy and kick ass, and to hell with everybody else.”

Misha read a book called Freakonomics that said you have the same amount of likelihood as being a successful drug dealer as you do being a successful actor.

The hug from the last ep was changed a bit by J2. It was written as too light/happy/reunion-y, but J2 felt it needed to be more heavy because of what happened and the Lucifer problem. They felt the reunion would be unsatisfactory and fleeting because they still had work to do. “The satisfaction of it being over wasn’t there.” The hug was written for Jared and Jensen to add their interpretations, the writers usually don’t write those moments and trust them to find those moments.

Jensen says Dean had mixed feelings about Sam’s return from the dead because his happiness was undercut by the fact that it was Lucifer who had brought Sam back. They never get the chance to just be happy in these moments because there’s always something ominous going on.

Jensen: We aim to satisfy!

Fan: How does it feel to play another character other than Dean? Jensen: I haven’t really had the chance to play this character just yet, but I will. Says “ohhh it’s good!”

J2 leave as Misha’s solo panel begins.

Photo Credit: eeecat

Info via: Maisie, Kelly, Ross, Fandomnatural, Sil’s livetweet list

#j2 #jared padalecki #jensen ackles #jibcon #jib9 #panel sum #long post #shpost

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clickbear · 3 years

Text

Stop learning and start doing

After eight years of searching, I finally found it...

In grad school, I would drive home from night classes and listen to audiobooks.

Freakonomics...

Outliers…

And any other entrepreneurial audiobook I could find.

I remember listening to one book that contained a short story that really resonated with me, but since then, I couldn’t find it.

I remembered the gist of the story, but I could never remember the details to actually find it.

Until today...

After years of searching for this short story, today, I decided “I’ll look for it one more time,” and finally came across it.

And I want to share it with you. It’s from the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

It goes like this:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

This is exactly how I felt after graduating from college and grad school with marketing degrees.

I knew all about the marketing theories, models, and frameworks. But when I came to actually marketing a product or service and getting customers… I was SOL.

I spent all my time reading and no time actually doing what I was reading.

Instead, I had to learn all of this stuff after college on my own.

The reason I bring this up is because I often hear questions from beginning copywriters and entrepreneurs.

Almost every one of them wants a huge list of books to read before they start doing a single thing.

They won’t write copy.

They won’t try to find their first customer.

They won’t do anything.

Instead, they’ll spend weeks, or months searching for that perfect book or that perfect online course that will give them the answers.

After all, it’s much easier to read books and watch videos than putting yourself out there and getting rejected 100 times before you even get a “maybe.”

I know… I used to be that guy.

But the thing is, reading isn’t enough. You have to put in the sweat in order to truly understand the skill you’re working on.

If you keep looking for that silver bullet that will make everything easy, you’ll never find it. And you’ll never improve yourself or your business.

Sure, it’s good to read and attend training in addition to getting out there and actually doing the work.

But if you’re not already out there pitching your services, writing copy, or doing something else to get to your goal, put down the books for now and start doing.

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rockofcalifa · 7 years

Note

1, 5, 24, 31?

1. What’s the last book you read? What did you think of it?

ahh ok tbh it’s been a while since I started Cancer Ward so I had to look it up... but it was The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin. I read it because Kimmy C said I should read Baldwin’s nonfiction, and that’s just what my library had. I read it over the span of many months, but it was a collection of essays, so that was okay. The essays were sort of his B-sides (his better known ones were in a /different/ anthology), so I sort of wish I had been reading those, but these were good too! I liked getting a view on how Baldwin constructed an essay, and which arguments he returned to time and time again... and then of course he had book recs which I then tried to chase down at the cmu library (which is like. so small and sad. im sad)

5. Which genres don’t you read?

uhh ok just looking at the goodreads list of genres... I read very little nonfiction, only essay collections and sociological/freakonomics type stuff, probably because it never looks interesting enough to pick up off a shelf. Then I don’t read crime/thriller stuff or historical fiction or romance, and I don’t do poetry (yet) either, although I’m sort of looking for a wedge in that one. Trying to get away from YA too (very successfully, judging from the books I’ve read this year).

24. The book that you got into because of the movie/TV series/etc, and the relative merits of each version.

LMAO OK let me tell you about the godfather book by mario puzo. it’s so bad! just like. compared to the movie? it’s constant exposition and fluff, while the godfather movie is like. not expositioning at all, very concise, etc. anyway i’m #1 godfather stan so catch me defending both the book and movie

31. Bonus question: rec me something!

I think you would really like the short story collection The Unfinished World by Amber Sparks? it has some really high quality and touching and weird stories, and sometimes they’re gay, and sometimes they’re riddles, and it’s lit! It’s short and you can skip stories that aren’t working for you! So there’s no excuse >:)

#thanks ceara #books #general's orders #i was about to rec a house for mister biswas #and then i thought hm its 500 pages of like nothing so maybe not #but that was a damn good book ill reread someday #dis-queen-of-erebor

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themoneybuff-blog · 5 years

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The psychology of passive barriers

A surprising thing happens to people in their forties. After working hard, buying a house, and starting a family, they suddenly realize that they'd better start being responsible with their money. They begin reading financial books and trying to learn how to set up a nest egg for themselves and their families. It's a natural part of growing older. If you ask these people in their forties what their biggest life worry, the answer often is, quite simply, money. They want to learn to manage their money better, and they'll tell you how important financial stability is to them. Yet the evidence shows something very different. In the table below, researchers followed employees at companies that offered financial-education seminars. Despite the obvious need to learn about their finances, only 17% of company employees attended. This is a common phenomenon.

As Laura Levine of the Jump$tart Coalition told me and I paraphrase Bob doesn't want to attend his 401(k) seminar because he's afraid he'll see his neighbor thereand that would be equivalent to admitting he didn't know about money for all those years. They also don't like to attend personal-finance events because they don't like to feel bad about themselves. But of those who did attend the employer event, something even more surprising happens. Of the people who did not have a 401(k), 100% planned to enroll in their company's 401(k) offering after the seminar. Yet only 14% actually did. Of those who already had a 401(k), 28% planned to increase their participation rate. 47% planned to change their fund selection (most likely because they learned they had picked the default money-market plan, which was earning them virtually nothing). But less than half of people actually made the change. This is the kind of data that drives economists and engineers crazy, because it clearly shows that people are not rational. Yes, we should max out our 401(k) employer match, but billions of dollars are left on the table each year because we don't. Yes, we should start eating healthy and exercising more, but we don't. Why not? Why wouldn't we do something that's objectively good for us? Barriers are one of the implicit reasons you can't achieve your goals. These barriers can be psychological or profoundly physical, like something as simple as not having a pen when you need to fill out a form. But the underlying factor is that they are breathtakingly simple and if I pointed them out to you about someone else, you would be sickened by how seemingly obvious they are to overcome. It's easy to dismiss these barriers are trivial, and say, Oh, that's so dumb! when you realize that not having an envelope nearby could cost someone over $3,000. But it's true. And by the end of this article, you'll be able to identify at least three barriers in your own life whether you want to or not.

Why People Don't Participate in Their 401(k)s If you're like me, whenever you hear that one of your co-workers doesn't participate in their 401(k) especially if there's an employer match you scratch your head in confusion. Even though this is free money, many people still don't participate. Journalists will cite intangibles like laziness and personal responsibility, suggesting that people are getting less responsible with their money over time. Hardly. It turns out that getting people to enroll in their 401(k) is just plain hard. Using simple psychological techniques, however, we can dramatically increase the number of people who participate in their company's retirement plan. One technique, automatic enrollment, automatically establishes a retirement plan and contribution. You can opt out at any time, but you're enrolled by default. Here's how it affects 401(k) enrollment. (AE = automatic enrollment.)

From 40% participation to nearly 100% in one example. Astonishing. Today, J.D. has given me the opportunity to talk about one of the ways to drive behavioral change when it comes to your money. I call them barriers. While I do this, I'm going to ask you for a favor. You'll see examples of people who lost thousands of dollars because they wouldn't spend one hour reading a form. It's easy to call these people lazy and there's certainly an element of that but disdainfully calling someone lazy doesn't explain the whole story. Getting people to change their behavior is extraordinarily hard even if it will save them thousands of dollars or save their lives. If it were easy, you would have a perfect financial situation: You'd have no debt, your asset allocation would be ideal and rebalanced annually, and you'd have a long-term outlook without worrying about the current economic crisis. You'd be at your college weight, with washboard abs and tight legs. You'd have a clean garage. But you don't. None of us are perfect. That's why understanding barriers is so important to changing your own behavior. Just Spend Less Than You Earn! There's something especially annoying about comments on personal-finance blogs. On nearly every major blog post I ever made, someone left a comment that goes like this: Ugh, not another money tip. All you need to know is: spend less than you earn. Actually, it's not that simple. If that were the case, as I pointed out above, nobody would be in debt, overweight, or have relationship problems of any kind. Simply knowing a high-level fact doesn't make it useful. I studied persuasion and social influence in college and grad school, for example, but I still get persuaded all of the time. These commenters make the common mistake of assuming that people are rational actors, meaning they behave as a computer model would predict. We know this is simply untrue: Books like Freakonomics and Judgment in Managerial Decision Making are great places to get an overview of our cognitive biases and psychological motivations. For example, we say we want to be in shape, but we don't really want to go to the gym. (J.D. is a prime example of this, and he'll be the first to admit it.) We believe we're not affected by advertising, but we're driving a Mercedes or using Tupperware or wearing Calvin Klein jeans. There are dramatic differences in what we say versus what we do. Often, the reason is so simple that we can't believe it would affect us. I call these barriers, and I've written about them before: Last weekend, I went home to visit my family. While I was there, I asked my mom if she would make me some food, so like any Indian mom would, she cooked me two weeks' worth. I came back home skipping like a little girl. Now here's where it gets interesting. When I got back to my place, I took the food out of the brown grocery bag and put the clear plastic bags on the counter. I was about to put the bags in the fridge but I realized something astonishing:

if I got hungry, I'd probably go to the fridge, see the plastic bags, and realize that I'd have to (1) open them up and then I'd have to (2) open the Tupperware to (3) finally get to the food. And the truth was, I just wouldn't do it. The clear plastic bags were enough of a barrier to ignore the fresh-cooked Indian food for some crackers!! Obviously, once I realized this, I tore the bags apart like a voracious wolf and have provided myself delicious sustenance for the past week. I think the source of 95%+ of barriers to success isourselves. It's not our lack of resources (money, education, etc). It's not our competition. It's usually just what's in our own heads. Barriers are more than just excuses they're the things that make us not get anything done. And not only do we allow them to exist around us, we encourage them. There are active barriers and passive barriers, but the result is still the same: We don't achieve what we want to. I believe there are two kinds of barriers. Active barriers are physical things like the plastic wrap on my food, or someone telling me that it'll never work, etc. These are hard to identify, but easy to fix. I usually just make them go away.Passive barriers are things that don't exist, so they make your job harder. A trivial example is not having a stapler at your desk; imagine how many times a day that gets frustrating. For me, these are harder to identify and also harder to fix. I might rearrange my room to be more productive, or get myself a better pen to write with. Today, I want to focus on passive barriers: what they are and how to overcome them. How to Destroy Passive Barriers Psychologists have been studying college students for decades to understand how to reduce unprotected sex. Among the most interesting findings, they pointed out that it would be rational for women to carry condoms with them, since often the sexual experiences they had were unplanned and these women can control the use of contraceptives. Except for one thing. When they asked college women why they didn't carry condoms with them, one young woman typified the responses: I couldn't do thatI'd seem slutty. As a result, she and others often ended up having unprotected sex because of the lack of a condom. Yes, technically they should carry condoms, just as both partners should stop, calmly go to the corner liquor store, and get protection. But often they don't. In this case, the condom was the passive barrier: Because they didn't have it nearby and conveniently available, they violated their own rule to have safe sex. Passive barriers exist everywhere. Let's look at some examples. Passive Barriers in E-mail I get emails like this all the time: Hey Ramit, what do you think of that article I sent last week? Any suggested changes? My reaction? Ugh, what is he talking about? Oh yeah, that article on savings accountsI have to dig that up and reply to him. Where is that? I'll search for it later. Marks email as unread Note: You can yell at me for not just taking the 30 seconds to find his email right then, but that's exactly the point: By not including the article in this followup email, he triggered a passive barrier of me needing to think about what he was talking about, search for it, and then decide what to reply to. The lack of the attached article is the passive barrier, and our most common response to barriers is to do nothing. Passive Barriers on Your Desk A friend of mine lost over $3000 because he didn't cash a check from his workplace, which went bankrupt a few months later. When I asked him why he didn't cash the check immediately, he looked at me and said, I didn't have an envelope handy. What other things do you delay because it's not convenient? Passive Barriers to Exercise I think back to when I've failed to hit my workout goals, and it's often the simplest of reasons. One of the most obvious barriers was my workout clothes. I had one pair of running pants, and after each workout, I would throw it in my laundry basket. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I would think is: Oh god, I have to get up, claw through my dirty clothes, and wear those sweaty pants again. Once I identified this, I bought a second pair of workout clothes and left them by my door each day. When I woke up, I knew I could walk out of my room, find the fully prepared workout bag and clothes, and get going. Passive Barriers to Healthy Eating Too many people create passive barriers to healthy eating. You're sitting at your desk at work and you get hungry. Rather than reach for a healthy snack (because you don't have one with you a passive barrier), you go to the vending machine for a bag of Cheetos. Here's a real-life example of passive barriers preventing J.D. from eating healthy. We were in Denver together in 2013 for a conference. During a long day with no breaks, he didn't have a healthy snack with him. But he did have Hostess Sno-Balls. Bad J.D. That's not even food.

J.D. needs to remove passive barriers to healthy eating If you find yourself snacking on Cheetos (or Sno-Balls) all day at work, try this: Dont take any spare change in your pockets for the vending machine. Even if you leave quarters in your car, that walk to the parking lot is barrier enough not to do it. Give yourself an alternative. Carry a healthy snack with you, like apple slices. Remove the passive barrier to eating healthy. Applying Passive Barrier Theory to Your Own Life As we've seen, the lack of having something nearby can have profound influences on your behavior. Imagine seeing a complicated mortgage form with interest rates and calculations on over 100 pages. Sure, you should calculate all of it, but if you don't have a calculator handy, the chances of your actually doing it go down dramatically. Now, we're going to dig into areas where passive barriers are preventing you from making behavioral change sometimes without you even knowing it. Fundamentally, there are two ways to address a passive barrier. You're missing something, so you add it to achieve your goals. For example, cutting up your fruit as soon as you bring it home from the grocery store, packing your lunches all at once, or re-adding the attachment to a followup email so the recipient doesn't have to look for it again.Causing an intentional passive barrier by deliberately removing something. You put your credit card in a block of ice in the freezer to prevent overspending. (That's not addressing the cause, but it's immediately stopping the symptom.) Or you put your unhealthiest food on the other side of the house, so you have to walk to them. Or you install software like Freedom to force yourself not to browse Reddit three hours a day. Personally, here are a few passive barriers I've identified (and removed) for myself: I keep my checkbook by my desk, because for the few bills I receive in the mail, I tend to never mail them in. I keep a gym bag of clothes ready to work out. And I cut up my fruit when I bring it home from the store, because I know I'll get lazy later. Now let's see how this can work for you. Here's an exercise I'd like you to do: Get a piece of paper and a pen or open the note-taking app on your phone.Identify ten things you would do if you were perfect. Don't censor. Just write what comes to mind. And focus on actions, not outcomes. Examples: I'd work out four times per week, clean my garage by this Sunday, play with my daughter for 30 minutes each day, and check my spending once per week.Now, play the Five Whys game: Why aren't you doing each of these things? Let's play out the last step with the example of exercising regularly. Let's assume I say that I want to exercise three times per week, but I only go twice per month. Let's do the Five Whys: Why do I excercise only twice per month? Because I'm tired when I get home from work.Why? Because I get home from work at 6 p.m.Why? Because I leave late for work, so I have to put in eight hours.Why? Because I don't wake up in time for my alarm clock.Why? HmmBecause when I get in bed, I watch Netflix for a couple of hours. Here's a possible solution: Put the computer in the kitchen before you go to sleep sleep earlier come home from work at an earlier time feel more rested work out regularly. That's a gross oversimplification, but you see what I mean. Homework: Pick ten areas of your life that you want to improve. Force yourself to understand why you haven't done so already. Don't let yourself cop out: I just don't want to isn't the real reason. And once you find out the real reasons you haven't been able to check your spending, or cook dinner, or call your mom, you might be embarrassed at how simple it really was. Don't let that stop you. Passive barriers are valued in their usefulness, not in how difficult they are to identify. The Bottom Line Passive barriers are subtle factors that prevent you from changing your behavior. Unlike active barriers, passive barriers describe the lack of something, making them more challenging to identify. But once you do, you can immediately take action to change your behavior. You can apply barriers to prevent yourself from spending money, cook and eat healthier, exercise more, stay in touch with your friends and family, and virtually any other behavior. You can do this with small changes or big ones. The important factor is to take action today. A caveat: Sometimes people take this advice to mean, The reason I haven't been sticking to my workout regimen is that I don't have the best running shoes. I should really go buy those $150 shoes I've been eyeingthat will help me change my behavior. Resolving passive barriers is not a silver bullet: Although they help, you'll be ultimately responsible for changing your own behavior. Instead of buying better shoes immediately, I'd recommend setting a concrete goal Once I run consistently for 20 days in a row, I'll buy those shoes for myself before spending on barriers. Most changes can be done with a minimum of expense. J.D.'s note: This is one of my favorite guest articles in the history of Get Rich Slowly. It had a profound effect on me, my life, and my work. This piece was originally published on 17 March 2009. I'm reprinting it today to celebrate the newly-published second edition of Ramit's book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich [my review].

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mass-and-volume · 7 years

Audio

EPISODE 24 | THE WORK (with Joycelyn Wilson)

The summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, I went to a summer program called the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program (GHP). Basically, if you were particularly good at a subject (ranging from traditional subjects like Language Arts and Science to offerings like French, Fine Art, an instrument, or Dance), you lived on campus at Valdosta State University for 6 months with 600 other highly-passionate nerds. I was there for Math (probably the least passionate and most nerdy sub-group), but nearly all of my memories that summer come from some place other than the 6-8 hours each day I spent learning about new kinds of mathematics. Most of what I remember is from the two guys I spent the most time with on my hall: my roommate, Dallas, and my best friend that summer, Colby. Each had a lasting impression on me in a distinctly different way. And every single thing we did that summer was soundtracked to hip-hop.

When I walked into my room for the very first time, Dallas was blasting Biggie. Life After Death had just come out, and Dallas was all about it. I was more of a lighthearted listener of hip-hop - OutKast was my group, I knew all the words to “Regulate,” and I had some favorites off E. 1999 Eternal, but I had no real exposure to and New York or LA rap. Dallas made sure to learn me. He played a steady dose of Biggie and Tupac, explaining to me the history of both coasts, the sampling techniques, the rivalries. While we were at Nerd Camp, No Way Out and The Art of War both released, and I’d later go home and buy them for myself. Dallas’ biggest contribution to my life - one that still lives on today - is introducing me to “Mo Money Mo Problems” (sidenote, what a glorious video. So weird, though, that Puffy’s caddy didn’t pull the pin for him), one of the top songs of my life and the one that will always make me break conversation and beeline to the dancefloor.

Colby’s sensibilities were drastically different. He was also a Math major, but the type of kid who scared me: loud, brash, inappropriate, and disrespectful to authority. At the time, I didn’t know how those qualities could co-exist with an affinity for mathematics. I’m not sure why he paid me any attention, but we found ourselves in conversation on the first night of GHP and were close to inseparable for the rest of the summer. One of us mentioned OutKast at some point - it’s difficult to believe there was a pre-Aquemini world, but this was… somehow pre-Aquemini. And even though we were in Georgia and it would have been weirder for someone to not know OutKast than to love them, this connection was the keystone for our friendship. It opened up the world for our summer in Valdosta: sitting in hallways, cafeterias, or laundry rooms, playing Spades as ATLiens blasted, front-to-back, from the AIWA boombox I’d brought. Colby turning me onto Pete Rock and CL Smooth while we worked on a math project. Debating whether or not the next album should be Goodie Mob or The Roots.

That summer changed my life in a lot of ways, but the one thing I’ll never forget is how it sounded. And how it bounced. And because I was taking in so many new experiences (first or new definitions of independence and romance and connection), the values I underscored for each were shaped by the stories I heard day and night. Hip-hop became one of the primary lenses through which I see the world, and it remains the form of art or media that excites me most to consume, absorb, investigate, and understand.

After that summer, my path traveled through Bad Boy and Bone Thugs, 2Pac's Greatest Hits, and The Roots' catalog in between OutKast releases every 2 years. After Stankonia, I drifted more into the crossover and/or R&B side of rap (thank you, TRL): Nelly and Murder Inc. and Aftermath and Snoop and basically anything Neptunes-produced along with a lot of stuff from the South: Cash Money, Ludacris, T.I., Jeezy, and others. Around the time I moved to LA, it was all Kanye and The Black Album all the time. And then Drake. So much Drake. Still here for all the Drake.

And it's with this backdrop that I now see the dilemma.

It's an easy listening path from Nostalgia, Ultra to Kaleidoscope Dream to House of Balloons to Late Nights to I Am Not A Human Being to anything-DJ-Mustard-produced... and in what is a very natural sonic progression, the messaging of romance goes from "here are the ways I want to love you, if only I could" to "I'm going to do x with y and you’re gonna z," the variables substituted for words that make most folks (but not the President) very uncomfortable. For pretty much my entire life, I had no interest in finding that line of demarcation.

The song I reference in the podcast is 6LACK's PRBLMS. It occurred to me that I can't stand up the way I want to stand up in the world while fully embracing certain messaging in music, film, television, or otherwise. And while lyrics and storytelling are open to interpretation and speak to that artist's experience, language, or expression, I have to draw my lines. As Dr. Joyce said, that's the work. But I see now that the art of storytellin’ that drew me in and built so much of my world led, years later, to a collection of music I enjoy but doesn’t present the art nor the storytelling I want to present to the world.

As part of an experiment, I thought I'd share a handful of some (previously) favorite tracks by some of my favorite artists. These are artists (or songs) I listen to weekly, if not daily, and have appeared on many a playlist I've made and shared. Some of them have issues because of the year in which they were written, others because of the genre they fall in, others because of the writing itself. But, regardless:

HIGHLY PROBLEMATIC SONGS I USED TO LOVE

Ray Charles - “I Got A Woman”

She's there to love me both day and night

Never grumbles or fusses, always treats me right

Never runnin' in the streets, and leavin' me alone

She knows a woman's place is right there now in her home

Yikes, Ray. And yet debatably less problematic than the anthem it inspired.

Dean Martin - “I’ll Buy That Dream”

Imagine you in a gown white and flowery

And me thanking Dad for your dowry

[Later]

Imagine me on our first anniversary

With someone like you in the nursery

Sounds like Dean’s got all the roles scoped.

OutKast - “Jazzy Belle”

In this dog-eat-dog world

Kitty cats be scratching on my furry coat to curl

Up with me and my bowl of kibbles and bits

I want to earl cause most of the girls that we was liking in high school

Now they dyking…

This one breaks my heart, as this was my first favorite Kast track. I guess for every Sasha Thumper there’s a Suzy Skrew, for every Ms. Jackson, there’s a Hootie Hoo.

Drake - “Shot for Me”

I'm the man, yeah I said it

Bitch, I'm the man, don't you forget it

The way you walk, that's me

The way you talk, that's me

The way you've got your hair up, did you forget that's me?

And the voice in your speaker right now that's me

That's me, and the voice in your ear

That's me, can't you see

That I made it? Yeah, I made it

First I made you who you are and then I made it

Another one that cuts deep. This was a longtime favorite for several choice lines in the 2nd verse.

Jay-Z - “Bitches and Sisters”

Sisters get respect, bitches get what they deserve

Sisters work hard, bitches work your nerves

Sisters hold you down, bitches hold you up

Sisters help you progress, bitches will slow you up

Sisters cook up a meal, play their role with the kids

Bitches in street with their nose in your biz

I mean, the entire conceit of the song is trouble. But in the second verse, after a sample says, “Say Jay-Z, why you gotta go and disrespect the women for, huh?” this is how he defends his point.

In the words of Dr. Joyce on the podcast, “Who wants a sexist social activist?” That’s the work.

-Scotty

Subscribe to Mass + Volume on iTunes. Check out our new website and visit our Patreon page if you feel so inclined.

Show notes:

Dr. Joyce (website | twitter | instagram)

Four-Four Beat Project / Hip-Hop 2020 (website)

Bring The Noize by Dr. Joycelyn Wilson (Bitter Southerner)

In this episode, we referenced:

Big Gipp Details Future's Dungeon Family Background; Rapper Was Known As Meathead (HipHopDX)

Future Describes Dungeon Family Ties And Purposely "Dumbing Down" His Music (HipHopDX)

The Art of Organized Noize documentary (Trailer on YouTube | Watch on Netflix)

Blues People: Negro Music in White America by Leroi Jones (Amazon)

The Making of OutKast's Aquemini (Creative Loafing)

Bad and Boujee Civil War lesson (AJC | youtube)

Migos Rapped A Children's Book. It's Funny, But It Makes Perfect Sense (NPR)

Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Amazon)

Why Is My Life So Hard (Freakonomics podcast)

Music

“SpottieOttieDopalicious” by OutKast (YouTube)

“Synthesizer” - OutKast (YouTube)

“It’s Okay” - Slimm Calhoun feat. Andre 3000 (YouTube)

“She Lives In My Lap” - Andre 3000 (YouTube)

“Coldest Winter” - Kanye West (YouTube)

“Street Lights” - Kanye West (YouTube)

“Made of Glass” - Lil Yachty (YouTube)

“Pretty” - Lil Yachty (YouTube)

“Belly of the Beast” - Da Connect (YouTube)

“March Madness” on Saturday Night Live - Future (YouTube)

“Mask Off” Remix - Future feat. Kendrick Lamar (YouTube)

Soul Music - Tr380 the Future (SoundCloud)

“I’m The One” - DJ Khaled feat. Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance The Rapper, and Lil Wayne (YouTube)

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itpulkit · 3 years

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How to Be Resilient: 8 Steps to Success

I see a lot of stuff about resilience, persistence and grit. What I don’t see is a lot of legitimate info on how to actually increase those qualities.

How can we be more resilient? How can we shrug off huge challenges in life, persist and — in the end — succeed?

So I looked at the most difficult scenarios for insight. (Who needs resilience in easy situations, right?)

When life and death is on the line, what do the winners do that the losers don’t?

Turns out surviving the most dangerous situations has some good lessons we can use to learn how to be resilient in everyday life.

Whether it’s dealing with unemployment, a difficult job, or personal tragedies, here are insights that can help.

1) Perceive And Believe

“The company already had two rounds of layoffs this year but I never thought they would let me go.”

“Yeah, the argument was getting a little heated but I didn’t think he was going to hit me.”

The first thing to do when facing difficulty is to make sure you recognize it as soon as possible.

Sounds obvious but we’ve all been in denial at one point or another. What do people who survive life-threatening situations have in common?

They move through those “stages of grief” from denial to acceptancefaster:

Via Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why:

They immediately begin to recognize, acknowledge, and even accept the reality of their situation… They move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance very rapidly.

What’s that thing doctors say when they’re able to successfully treat a medical problem? “Good thing we caught it early.”

When you stay oblivious or live in denial, things get worse — often in a hurry. When you know you’re in trouble you can act.

Nobody is saying paranoia is good but research shows a little worrying is correlated with living a longer life.

(For more on how a little negativity can make you happier, click here.)

Okay, like they say in AA, you admitted you have a problem. What’s the next thing the most resilient people do?

2) Manage Your Emotions

Sometimes when SCUBA divers drown they still have air in their oxygen tanks. Seriously.

How is this possible? Something goes wrong, they panic, and instinctively pull the regulator out of their mouth.

Via Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why:

M. Ephimia Morphew, a psychologist and founder of the Society for Human Performance in Extreme Environments, told me of a series of accidents she’d been studying in which scuba divers were found dead with air in their tanks and perfectly functional regulators. “Only they had pulled the regulators out of their mouths and drowned. It took a long time for researchers to figure out what was going on.” It appears that certain people suffer an intense feeling of suffocation when their mouths are covered. That led to an overpowering impulse to uncover the mouth and nose. The victims had followed an emotional response that was in general a good one for the organism, to get air. But it was the wrong response under the special, non-natural, circumstances of scuba diving.

When you’re having trouble breathing what’s more natural than to clear an obstruction from your mouth?

Now just a brief second of clear thinking tells you this is a very bad idea while diving — but when you panic, you can’t think clearly.

Rash decision making rarely delivers optimal results in everyday life either.

Resilient people acknowledge difficult situations, keep calm and evaluate things rationally so they can make a plan and act.

Via Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why:

Al Siebert, in his book The Survivor Personality, writes that “The best survivors spend almost no time, especially in emergencies, getting upset about what has been lost, or feeling distressed about things going badly…. For this reason they don’t usually take themselves too seriously and are therefore hard to threaten.”

(For methods Navy SEALS, astronauts and the samurai use to keep calm under pressure, click here.)

So you know you’re in trouble but you’re keeping your cool. Might there be a simple way to sidestep all these problems? Yeah.

3) Be A Quitter

Many of you might be a little confused right now: “A secret to resilience is quitting? That doesn’t make any sense.”

What do we see when we look at people who survive life and death situations? Many of them were smart enough to bail early.

Via Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why:

“…It’s a matter of looking at yourself and assessing your own abilities and where you are mentally, and then realizing that it’s better to turn back and get a chance to do it again than to go for it and not come back at all.” We are a society of high achievers, but in the wilderness, such motivation can be deadly…

The best way to take a punch from a UFC fighter and to survive a hurricane are the same: “Don’t be there when it hits.”

You quit baseball when you were 10 and quit playing the piano after just 2 lessons. Nobody sticks with everything. You can’t.

When the company starts laying people off, there’s always one guy smart enough to immediately jump ship and preemptively get a new job.

And some people are smart enough to realize, “I am never going to be a great Tango dancer and should double my efforts at playing poker.”

And you know what results this type of quitting has? It makes you happier, reduces stress and increases health.

Via Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain:

Wrosch found that people who quit their unattainable goals saw physical and psychological benefits. “They have, for example, less depressive symptoms, less negative affect over time,” he says. “They also have lower cortisol levels, and they have lower levels of systemic inflammation, which is a marker of immune functioning. And they develop fewer physical health problems over time.”

You can do anything — when you stop trying to do everything.

(For more on how to determine what you should stick with and what you should abandon, click here.)

Okay, so maybe you can’t bail and really do need to be resilient. What does the research say you can do to have more grit? It sounds crazy…

4) Be Delusional

Marshall Goldsmith did a study of incredibly successful people. After assembling all the data he realized the thing they all had in common.

And then he shouted: “These successful people are all delusional!”

Via Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success:

“This is not to be misinterpreted as a bad thing. In fact, being delusional helps us become more effective. By definition, these delusions don’t have to be accurate. If they were totally accurate, your goals would be too low.” Goldsmith noticed that although illusions of control expose people to risk of failure, they do something else that is very interesting: they motivate people to keep trying even when they’ve failed… “Successful people fail a lot, but they try a lot, too. When things don’t work, they move on until an idea does work. Survivors and great entrepreneurs have this in common.”

Crazy successful people and people who survive tough situations are all overconfident. Very overconfident.

Some of you may be scratching your head: “Isn’t step one all about not being in denial? About facing reality?”

You need to make a distinction between denial about the situationand overconfidence in your abilities.

The first one is very bad, but the second one can be surprisingly good. See the world accurately — but believe you are a rockstar.

Via Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success:

Denying or distorting a bad situation may be comforting in the short term, but it’s potentially harmful in the long run because it will be almost impossible to solve a problem unless you first admit you have one. In contrast, having an especially strong belief in one’s personal capabilities, even if that belief is somewhat illusory, probably helps you to solve problems… A useful, if somewhat simplistic, mathematical formula might be: a realistic view of the situation + a strong view of one’s ability to control one’s destiny through one’s efforts = grounded hope.

(For more on what the most successful people have in common, click here.)

So this is how superheroes must feel: there’s definitely trouble, but you’re calm and you feel like you’re awesome enough to handle this.

But we need to move past feelings. What actions are going to see you through this mess?

5) Prepare… Even If It’s Too Late For Preparation

Folks, I firmly believe there is no such thing as a “pretty good” alligator wrestler.

Who survives life threatening situations? People who have done it before. People who have prepared.

Now even if you can’t truly prepare for a layoff or a divorce, you can work to have good productive habits and eliminate wasteful ones.

Good habits don’t tax your willpower as much as deliberate actions and will help you be more resilient.

How do you survive a WW2 shipwreck and shark attacks? Keep preparing for the future, even when you’re in the midst of trouble.

Via Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience:

As the days went by, he continued to concentrate on strategies for survival. At one point, a rubber life belt floated by and he grabbed it. He had heard that the Japanese would use aircraft to strafe shipwrecked Americans. The life belt could be blown up through a rubber tube. He cut the tube off and kept it, reasoning that if the Japanese spotted them, he could slip under water and breathe through the tube. He was planning ahead. He had a future in his mind, and good survivors always concentrate on the present but plan for the future. Thus, taking it day by day, hour by hour, and sometimes minute by minute, did Don McCall endure.

One caveat: as learning expert Dan Coyle recommends, make sure any prep you do is as close to the real scenario as possible.

Bad training can be worse than no training. When police practice disarming criminals they often conclude by handing the gun to their partner.

One officer trained this so perfectly that in the field he took a gun from a criminal — and instinctively handed it right back.

Via Make It Stick:

Johnson recounts how officers are trained to take a gun from an assailant at close quarters, a maneuver they practice by role-playing with a fellow officer. It requires speed and deftness: striking an assailant’s wrist with one hand to break his grip while simultaneously wresting the gun free with the other. It’s a move that officers had been in the habit of honing through repetition, taking the gun, handing it back, taking it again. Until one of their officers, on a call in the field, took the gun from an assailant and handed it right back again.

(For more on how to develop good habits — and get rid of bad ones, click here.)

You’re expecting the best but prepared for the worst. Perfect. Is now the time to de-stress? Heck, no.

6) Stay Busy, Busy, Busy

What’s the best way to survive and keep your emotions in check when things are hard? “Work, work, work.”

Via Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience:

Remember the saying “Get organized or die.” In the wake of trauma, “Work, work, work,” as Richard Mollica wrote. He is a psychiatrist at Harvard who studies trauma. “This is the single most important goal of traumatized people throughout the world.” The hands force order on the mind.

When things go bad, people get sad or scared, retreat and distract themselves. That can quell the emotions, but it doesn’t get you out of this mess.

Resilient people know that staying busy not only gets you closer to your goals but it’s also the best way to stay calm.

And believe it or not, we’re all happier when we’re busy.

(For more on what the most productive people in the world do every day, clickhere.)

You’re hustlin’. That’s good. But it’s hard to keep that can-do attitude when things aren’t going well. What’s another secret to hanging in there?

7) Make It A Game

In his book “Touching the Void,” Joe Simpson tells the harrowing story of how he broke his leg 19,000 feet up while climbing a mountain.

Actually he didn’t break his leg… he shattered it. Like marbles in a sock. His calf bone driven through his knee joint.

He and his climbing partner assumed he was a dead man. But he survived.

One of his secrets was making his slow, painful descent into a game.

Via Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why:

Simpson was learning what it means to be playful in such circumstances: “A pattern of movements developed after my initial wobbly hops and I meticulously repeated the pattern. Each pattern made up one step across the slope and I began to feel detached from everything around me. I thought of nothing but the patterns.” His struggle had become a dance, and the dance freed him from the terror of what he had to do.

How does this work? It’s neuroscience. Patterned activities stimulate the same reward center cocaine does.

Via Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience:

And tellingly, a structure within the basal ganglia is activated during feelings of safety, reward, and simply feeling great. It’s called the striatum and drugs such as cocaine set it off, but so does the learning of a new habit or skill and the performance of organized, patterned activities…

Even boring things can be fun if you turn them into a game with stakes, challenges and little rewards.

And we can use this same system for everyday problems: How many resumes can you send out today? Can you beat yesterday?

Celebrating “small wins” is something survivors have in common.

Via Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why:

Survivors take great joy from even their smallest successes. That is an important step in creating an ongoing feeling of motivation and preventing the descent into hopelessness. It also provides relief from the unspeakable stress of a true survival situation.

(For more on how to increase gratitude and happiness, click here.)

You’re a machine. Making progress despite huge challenges. What’s the final way to take your resilience to the next level? Other people.

8) Get Help And Give Help

Getting help is good. That’s obvious. But sometimes we’re ashamed or embarrassed and fail to ask for it. Don’t let pride get in the way.

What’s more fascinating is that even in the worst of times, giving help can help you.

By taking on the role of caretaker we increase the feeling of meaning in our lives. This helps people in the worst situations succeed.

Leon Weliczker survived the Holocaust not only because of his resourcefulness — but also because he felt he had to protect his brother.

Via Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience:

When his fifteen-year-old brother Aaron came in, Leon was suddenly filled with love and a feeling of responsibility for the two boys. He was shedding the cloak of the victim in favor of the role of the rescuer. Terrence Des Pres, in his book The Survivor, makes the point that in the journey of survival, helping someone else is as important as getting help.

Sometimes being selfless is the best way to be selfish. And the research shows that givers are among the most successful people and they live longer.

Via Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why:

Helping someone else is the best way to ensure your own survival. It takes you out of yourself. It helps you to rise above your fears. Now you’re a rescuer, not a victim. And seeing how your leadership and skill buoy others up gives you more focus and energy to persevere. The cycle reinforces itself: You buoy them up, and their response buoys you up. Many people who survive alone report that they were doing it for someone else (a wife, boyfriend, mother, son) back home.

(For more on how helping others can also help you, click here.)

So once the threat is passed, once the dust has settled, can we have a normal life again? Actually, sometimes, life can be even better.

Sum Up

So when life is daunting and we need resilience, keep in mind:

Perceive And Believe

Manage Your Emotions

Be A Quitter

Be Delusional

Prepare… Even If It’s Too Late For Preparation

Stay Busy, Busy, Busy

Make It A Game

Get Help And Give Help

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andrewdburton · 5 years

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The psychology of passive barriers

If you ask these people in their forties what their biggest life worry, the answer often is, quite simply, “money”. They want to learn to manage their money better, and they'll tell you how important financial stability is to them.

Yet the evidence shows something very different.

In the table below, researchers followed employees at companies that offered financial-education seminars. Despite the obvious need to learn about their finances, only 17% of company employees attended. This is a common phenomenon.

As Laura Levine of the Jump$tart Coalition told me — and I paraphrase — “Bob doesn't want to attend his 401(k) seminar because he's afraid he'll see his neighbor there…and that would be equivalent to admitting he didn't know about money for all those years.”

They also don't like to attend personal-finance events because they don't like to feel bad about themselves. But of those who did attend the employer event, something even more surprising happens.

Of the people who did not have a 401(k), 100% planned to enroll in their company's 401(k) offering after the seminar. Yet only 14% actually did.

Of those who already had a 401(k), 28% planned to increase their participation rate. 47% planned to change their fund selection (most likely because they learned they had picked the default money-market plan, which was earning them virtually nothing). But less than half of people actually made the change.

This is the kind of data that drives economists and engineers crazy, because it clearly shows that people are not rational. Yes, we should max out our 401(k) employer match, but billions of dollars are left on the table each year because we don't. Yes, we should start eating healthy and exercising more, but we don't.

Why not? Why wouldn't we do something that's objectively good for us?

Barriers are one of the implicit reasons you can't achieve your goals. These barriers can be psychological or profoundly physical, like something as simple as not having a pen when you need to fill out a form. But the underlying factor is that they are breathtakingly simple — and if I pointed them out to you about someone else, you would be sickened by how seemingly obvious they are to overcome.

It's easy to dismiss these barriers are trivial, and say, “Oh, that's so dumb!” when you realize that not having an envelope nearby could cost someone over $3,000. But it's true. And by the end of this article, you'll be able to identify at least three barriers in your own life — whether you want to or not.

Why People Don't Participate in Their 401(k)s

If you're like me, whenever you hear that one of your co-workers doesn't participate in their 401(k) — especially if there's an employer match — you scratch your head in confusion.

Even though this is free money, many people still don't participate. Journalists will cite intangibles like laziness and personal responsibility, suggesting that people are getting less responsible with their money over time. Hardly.

It turns out that getting people to enroll in their 401(k) is just plain hard. Using simple psychological techniques, however, we can dramatically increase the number of people who participate in their company's retirement plan. One technique, automatic enrollment, automatically establishes a retirement plan and contribution. You can opt out at any time, but you're enrolled by default.

Here's how it affects 401(k) enrollment. (“AE” = automatic enrollment.)

From 40% participation to nearly 100% in one example. Astonishing.

Today, J.D. has given me the opportunity to talk about one of the ways to drive behavioral change when it comes to your money. I call them barriers.

While I do this, I'm going to ask you for a favor. You'll see examples of people who lost thousands of dollars because they wouldn't spend one hour reading a form. It's easy to call these people “lazy” — and there's certainly an element of that — but disdainfully calling someone lazy doesn't explain the whole story. Getting people to change their behavior is extraordinarily hard — even if it will save them thousands of dollars or save their lives.

If it were easy, you would have a perfect financial situation: You'd have no debt, your asset allocation would be ideal and rebalanced annually, and you'd have a long-term outlook without worrying about the current economic crisis. You'd be at your college weight, with washboard abs and tight legs. You'd have a clean garage.

But you don't.

None of us are perfect. That's why understanding barriers is so important to changing your own behavior.

“Just Spend Less Than You Earn!”

There's something especially annoying about comments on personal-finance blogs. On nearly every major blog post I ever made, someone left a comment that goes like this: “Ugh, not another money tip. All you need to know is: spend less than you earn.”

Actually, it's not that simple. If that were the case, as I pointed out above, nobody would be in debt, overweight, or have relationship problems of any kind. Simply knowing a high-level fact doesn't make it useful. I studied persuasion and social influence in college and grad school, for example, but I still get persuaded all of the time.

These commenters make the common mistake of assuming that people are rational actors, meaning they behave as a computer model would predict. We know this is simply untrue: Books like Freakonomics and Judgment in Managerial Decision Making are great places to get an overview of our cognitive biases and psychological motivations.

For example, we say we want to be in shape, but we don't really want to go to the gym. (J.D. is a prime example of this, and he'll be the first to admit it.) We believe we're not affected by advertising, but we're driving a Mercedes or using Tupperware or wearing Calvin Klein jeans.

There are dramatic differences in what we say versus what we do. Often, the reason is so simple that we can't believe it would affect us. I call these barriers, and I've written about them before:

Last weekend, I went home to visit my family. While I was there, I asked my mom if she would make me some food, so like any Indian mom would, she cooked me two weeks' worth. I came back home skipping like a little girl.

Now here's where it gets interesting. When I got back to my place, I took the food out of the brown grocery bag and put the clear plastic bags on the counter. I was about to put the bags in the fridge but I realized something astonishing:

…if I got hungry, I'd probably go to the fridge, see the plastic bags, and realize that I'd have to (1) open them up and then I'd have to (2) open the Tupperware to (3) finally get to the food. And the truth was, I just wouldn't do it. The clear plastic bags were enough of a barrier to ignore the fresh-cooked Indian food for some crackers!!

Obviously, once I realized this, I tore the bags apart like a voracious wolf and have provided myself delicious sustenance for the past week.

I think the source of 95%+ of barriers to success is…ourselves. It's not our lack of resources (money, education, etc). It's not our competition. It's usually just what's in our own heads. Barriers are more than just excuses — they're the things that make us not get anything done. And not only do we allow them to exist around us, we encourage them. There are active barriers and passive barriers, but the result is still the same: We don't achieve what we want to.

I believe there are two kinds of barriers.

Active barriers are physical things like the plastic wrap on my food, or someone telling me that it'll never work, etc. These are hard to identify, but easy to fix. I usually just make them go away.

Passive barriers are things that don't exist, so they make your job harder. A trivial example is not having a stapler at your desk; imagine how many times a day that gets frustrating. For me, these are harder to identify and also harder to fix. I might rearrange my room to be more productive, or get myself a better pen to write with.

Today, I want to focus on passive barriers: what they are and how to overcome them.

How to Destroy Passive Barriers

Psychologists have been studying college students for decades to understand how to reduce unprotected sex. Among the most interesting findings, they pointed out that it would be rational for women to carry condoms with them, since often the sexual experiences they had were unplanned and these women can control the use of contraceptives.

Except for one thing.

When they asked college women why they didn't carry condoms with them, one young woman typified the responses: “I couldn't do that…I'd seem slutty.” As a result, she and others often ended up having unprotected sex because of the lack of a condom. Yes, technically they should carry condoms, just as both partners should stop, calmly go to the corner liquor store, and get protection. But often they don't.

In this case, the condom was the passive barrier: Because they didn't have it nearby and conveniently available, they violated their own rule to have safe sex.

Passive barriers exist everywhere. Let's look at some examples.

Passive Barriers in E-mail

I get emails like this all the time:

“Hey Ramit, what do you think of that article I sent last week? Any suggested changes?”

My reaction? “Ugh, what is he talking about? Oh yeah, that article on savings accounts…I have to dig that up and reply to him. Where is that? I'll search for it later. Marks email as unread”

Note: You can yell at me for not just taking the 30 seconds to find his email right then, but that's exactly the point: By not including the article in this followup email, he triggered a passive barrier of me needing to think about what he was talking about, search for it, and then decide what to reply to. The lack of the attached article is the passive barrier, and our most common response to barriers is to do nothing.

Passive Barriers on Your Desk

A friend of mine lost over $3000 because he didn't cash a check from his workplace, which went bankrupt a few months later. When I asked him why he didn't cash the check immediately, he looked at me and said, “I didn't have an envelope handy.” What other things do you delay because it's not convenient?

Passive Barriers to Exercise

I think back to when I've failed to hit my workout goals, and it's often the simplest of reasons. One of the most obvious barriers was my workout clothes. I had one pair of running pants, and after each workout, I would throw it in my laundry basket. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I would think is: “Oh god, I have to get up, claw through my dirty clothes, and wear those sweaty pants again.”

Once I identified this, I bought a second pair of workout clothes and left them by my door each day. When I woke up, I knew I could walk out of my room, find the fully prepared workout bag and clothes, and get going.

Passive Barriers to Healthy Eating

Too many people create passive barriers to healthy eating. You're sitting at your desk at work and you get hungry. Rather than reach for a healthy snack (because you don't have one with you — a passive barrier), you go to the vending machine for a bag of Cheetos.

Here's a real-life example of passive barriers preventing J.D. from eating healthy. We were in Denver together in 2013 for a conference. During a long day with no breaks, he didn't have a healthy snack with him. But he did have Hostess Sno-Balls. Bad J.D. That's not even food.

J.D. needs to remove passive barriers to healthy eating

If you find yourself snacking on Cheetos (or Sno-Balls) all day at work, try this: Don’t take any spare change in your pockets for the vending machine. Even if you leave quarters in your car, that walk to the parking lot is barrier enough not to do it. Give yourself an alternative. Carry a healthy snack with you, like apple slices. Remove the passive barrier to eating healthy.

Applying Passive Barrier Theory to Your Own Life

As we've seen, the lack of having something nearby can have profound influences on your behavior. Imagine seeing a complicated mortgage form with interest rates and calculations on over 100 pages. Sure, you should calculate all of it, but if you don't have a calculator handy, the chances of your actually doing it go down dramatically.

Now, we're going to dig into areas where passive barriers are preventing you from making behavioral change — sometimes without you even knowing it.

Fundamentally, there are two ways to address a passive barrier.

You're missing something, so you add it to achieve your goals. For example, cutting up your fruit as soon as you bring it home from the grocery store, packing your lunches all at once, or re-adding the attachment to a followup email so the recipient doesn't have to look for it again.

Causing an intentional passive barrier by deliberately removing something. You put your credit card in a block of ice in the freezer to prevent overspending. (That's not addressing the cause, but it's immediately stopping the symptom.) Or you put your unhealthiest food on the other side of the house, so you have to walk to them. Or you install software like Freedom to force yourself not to browse Reddit three hours a day.

Personally, here are a few passive barriers I've identified (and removed) for myself: I keep my checkbook by my desk, because for the few bills I receive in the mail, I tend to never mail them in. I keep a gym bag of clothes ready to work out. And I cut up my fruit when I bring it home from the store, because I know I'll get lazy later.

Now let's see how this can work for you. Here's an exercise I'd like you to do:

Get a piece of paper and a pen — or open the note-taking app on your phone.

Identify ten things you would do if you were perfect. Don't censor. Just write what comes to mind. And focus on actions, not outcomes. Examples: “I'd work out four times per week, clean my garage by this Sunday, play with my daughter for 30 minutes each day, and check my spending once per week.”

Now, play the “Five Whys” game: Why aren't you doing each of these things?

Let's play out the last step with the example of exercising regularly. Let's assume I say that I want to exercise three times per week, but I only go twice per month. Let's do the Five Whys:

Why do I excercise only twice per month? Because I'm tired when I get home from work.

Why? Because I get home from work at 6 p.m.

Why? Because I leave late for work, so I have to put in eight hours.

Why? Because I don't wake up in time for my alarm clock.

Why? Hmm…Because when I get in bed, I watch Netflix for a couple of hours.

Here's a possible solution: Put the computer in the kitchen before you go to sleep → sleep earlier → come home from work at an earlier time → feel more rested → work out regularly.

That's a gross oversimplification, but you see what I mean.

Homework: Pick ten areas of your life that you want to improve. Force yourself to understand why you haven't done so already. Don't let yourself cop out: “I just don't want to” isn't the real reason. And once you find out the real reasons you haven't been able to check your spending, or cook dinner, or call your mom, you might be embarrassed at how simple it really was. Don't let that stop you. Passive barriers are valued in their usefulness, not in how difficult they are to identify.

The Bottom Line

Passive barriers are subtle factors that prevent you from changing your behavior. Unlike “active” barriers, passive barriers describe the lack of something, making them more challenging to identify. But once you do, you can immediately take action to change your behavior.

You can apply barriers to prevent yourself from spending money, cook and eat healthier, exercise more, stay in touch with your friends and family, and virtually any other behavior. You can do this with small changes or big ones. The important factor is to take action today.

A caveat: Sometimes people take this advice to mean, “The reason I haven't been sticking to my workout regimen is that I don't have the best running shoes. I should really go buy those $150 shoes I've been eyeing…that will help me change my behavior.”

Resolving passive barriers is not a silver bullet: Although they help, you'll be ultimately responsible for changing your own behavior. Instead of buying better shoes immediately, I'd recommend setting a concrete goal — “Once I run consistently for 20 days in a row, I'll buy those shoes for myself” — before spending on barriers. Most changes can be done with a minimum of expense.

J.D.'s note: This is one of my favorite guest articles in the history of Get Rich Slowly. It had a profound effect on me, my life, and my work. This piece was originally published on 17 March 2009. I'm reprinting it today to celebrate the newly-published second edition of Ramit's book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich [my review].

The post The psychology of passive barriers appeared first on Get Rich Slowly.

from Finance https://www.getrichslowly.org/passive-barriers/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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markjsousa · 6 years

Text

So, You Want to Be a Futurist?

Where do you start?

How do you know when you’re done?

This second question is supposed to be funny. I hope you at least smiled.

I think the best way to start is by reading and watching what known and renowned futurists in your industry are doing. Also, by diving deep into areas where you have an interest. I know this sounds quite obvious, but it’s the way we can learn what others are doing, seeing, and predicting. I do have a few recommendations though.

Tips for future futurists:

Write down what you’re thinking today

Write down what you’re thinking tomorrow will look like

Most Important – Grade Yourself. Take the time to go back to what you have previously written and give yourself a grade.

History is bound to repeat itself.

Or, perhaps a better way to say this is …

Don’t ignore history

While it is true that technology advances impact the way the future will be realized the fact remains many of the things we’ve seen have already happened in one way, shape, or form.

Are there new things developed? Sure. But, quite often the way humans interpret those innovations follow a pattern.

Will this change as more AI and robots take over? That’s hard to say.

Perhaps you have a prediction about that. Share them in the comments if you are so inclined.

So, what’s your definition of a futurist?

The good news is… you get to define who is a futurist. In a sense everyone is a futurist. However, some people are much better at predicting things farther out in the future than others. By “better” I mean they have a demonstrable track record of success in predicting the future. See the first 3 points in the beginning of this post.

If you live in the technology arena you probably have several people that you have observed over the years as being “good“ and “predictable” futurists.

Some are more generic than others, but they have spotted trends and documented them. And, quite often they have turned out to be true.

For example, Gordon Moore of Intel came up with… what else… Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

This has held true for several decades. There were and are physical and technological factors that influenced each iteration. It’s likely this will compress in the coming years with the rise of quantum computing and continued improvements in design, manufacturing, and other factors.

What does it mean to be a futurist?

Does being a futurist mean accurately predicting the future any specific time and place? I think the answer is no. I’d certainly like to hear your opinion in the comments. Futurists are especially good at making predictions 10, 20, even 50 years out. Yes, many of these are educated guesses. But, the education and thinking behind those “guesses” can be years in the making. To me a futurist is anyone that is willing to take the time to make bold predictions and to write them down or put them on video. As noted in point 3 above the definition of a good futurist

Can a futurist be a sci-fi writer?

Absolutely. Science-fiction writers, or as they are sometimes called speculative fiction writers a.k.a. Spec fiction, often have a fanciful and somewhat precognition vision of what the future could be. Does what they say and show always come through? Absolutely not. They are writing a story. Not necessarily trying to be futurists.

A few great writers that come to mind include HG Wells, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. There are many, many others. I only use these as an example. But, each of them created amazing worlds and people with equally amazing skills that seem

What about actual Futurists? Here are some of my favorites:

You may disagree with my list and I encourage you to add yours to the comments

Tech and Publishing – Tim O’Reilly

Tech and Society – Buckminster Fuller

Economist – Milton Friedman – A thinker with futurist oriented economic thinking

Government – Amy Webb and the need for The Department of the Future

Philanthropy – Bill Gates and Warren Buffett

I am also a fan of Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, and the Freakonomics guys.

What about Reverse Futurists?

There are people out there that just want to tell it like it is and I would argue that they aren’t necessarily what I would call a futurist by definition. But, they are for lack of a better terms a”reverse futurist“

People like Tom Peters who wrote the seminal book “In Search of Excellence“ and regularly talks about what’s really going on in the workplace. So, by definition he’s not describing the future he’s describing the present. But, quite often the present he is describing is what could and should be envisioned as the future of the corporation. , quite often the present he is describing is what could and should be envisioned as the Corporation of the Future.

Others that fit this category W. Edwards Deming, Alfred Sloan, Thomas Watson Senior, and many others that defined what their vision was and most importantly put it into practice and build businesses around their vision. By applying their special skills for reducing defects, automation, technology adoption, respectively they created a framework to create the future of the companies they worked with and/or built from the ground up.

Back to being a futurist. I think the future will continue to hold a lot of promise and allow those that are willing to make bold predictions to continue to make those predictions. For those that try and those that end up having a modicum of success they will find that they stand out in your career. If you try and find that you aren’t great at it … don’t give up. Try again and remember the first three points above. The more you try the better you’ll get.

So, you want to be a futurist?

It’s never been easier to try. Perhaps you won’t change the world, but I don’t think that is the most critical part of being a futurist. Unless, you expect to be paid for your vision. And, there’s nothing wrong with being paid for your vision. But, there’s also nothing wrong with making predictions, backing them up with facts, writing them down, and giving yourself a grade on how you did on your predictions

As Tim O’Reilly said in his book WTF … “I was named future just because of one paper I wrote where I ended up getting a lot of things right.”

The essay was “What is Web 2.0”

He said it much more modestly. He said “I didn’t invent the future… I drew a map of the present technology… that is shifting the business landscape“ and in a sense this is what being a futurist is all about. Thinking of maps, finding missing pieces, aligning your thoughts, and seeking to fill gaps. It’s not easy and perhaps it can take a special kind of creative thinking, but I do believe almost anyone can put their mind to work and “become” a futurist. Even if only for a small point in time out there in the future. You’ll never know until you try. So, just try.

Some of the modern futurists I’ve been following include:

Heather McGowan

Tiffani Bova

Regina Dugan

Jane McGonigal

Yes, they are all women. Hint: The Future is Female. At least in the way I’m thinking of futurists. One where we tap into a vastly underutilized resource. Females have been and continue to be vastly underrepresented. Imagine … engaging the “other” 50% of the world’s population. Females have been and continue to be vastly under-represented in STEM and every other field. We can fix that. I’ve been working on that for several years and will continue to advocate for more women in technology (and every other field).

So, you still want to be a futurist?

Read about and learn from some of the people I mention here. Follow the first three points and especially the 3rd point. See how you do. Perhaps you’ll have a knack for predicting the future and be able to confidently call yourself a futurist. I hope so.

The post So, You Want to Be a Futurist? appeared first on Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career.

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joejstrickl · 6 years

Text

So, You Want to Be a Futurist?

Where do you start?

How do you know when you’re done?

This second question is supposed to be funny. I hope you at least smiled.

Tips for future futurists:

Write down what you’re thinking today

Write down what you’re thinking tomorrow will look like

Most Important – Grade Yourself. Take the time to go back to what you have previously written and give yourself a grade.

History is bound to repeat itself.

Or, perhaps a better way to say this is …

Don’t ignore history

While it is true that technology advances impact the way the future will be realized the fact remains many of the things we’ve seen have already happened in one way, shape, or form.

Are there new things developed? Sure. But, quite often the way humans interpret those innovations follow a pattern.

Will this change as more AI and robots take over? That’s hard to say.

Perhaps you have a prediction about that. Share them in the comments if you are so inclined.

So, what’s your definition of a futurist?

If you live in the technology arena you probably have several people that you have observed over the years as being “good“ and “predictable” futurists.

Some are more generic than others, but they have spotted trends and documented them. And, quite often they have turned out to be true.

For example, Gordon Moore of Intel came up with… what else… Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

What does it mean to be a futurist?

Can a futurist be a sci-fi writer?

What about actual Futurists? Here are some of my favorites:

You may disagree with my list and I encourage you to add yours to the comments

Tech and Publishing – Tim O’Reilly

Tech and Society – Buckminster Fuller

Economist – Milton Friedman – A thinker with futurist oriented economic thinking

Government – Amy Webb and the need for The Department of the Future

Philanthropy – Bill Gates and Warren Buffett

I am also a fan of Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, and the Freakonomics guys.

What about Reverse Futurists?

So, you want to be a futurist?

As Tim O’Reilly said in his book WTF … “I was named future just because of one paper I wrote where I ended up getting a lot of things right.”

The essay was “What is Web 2.0”

Some of the modern futurists I’ve been following include:

Heather McGowan

Tiffani Bova

Regina Dugan

Jane McGonigal

So, you still want to be a futurist?

The post So, You Want to Be a Futurist? appeared first on Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career.

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rainbowjay20 · 6 years

Text

For NonFics For The New Year

I am Fiction girl. Any type. Give me romantic, epic, science, Gothic, horror, mystery, magic anything as long as it’s fiction. I’m picky on the writing but fiction it must be.

I very rarely delve into non-fiction of my own free will. It’s just not me, you know? I’m good with trivia and I’ve read trivia books, and I guess they must count as non-fiction but they aren’t the kind of book I’m talking about. I’m talking about the boring kind of adult book that are usually featured on talk shows and at book club meetings and have all the pretty awards on the covers. Those books. They pain me. If I try to read most of them, they make me reach for a large glass of water, they are so dry.

But upon occasion, I have come upon books whose subject matter has intrigued me or was recommended highly to me by either a personal friend or someone I trusted highly. I have four such books I’d like to discuss and recommend to you now.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

The first of the books is Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. This is an odd book. I found it by watching the special on HBO of the same name. I know usually read the book first! But, as I said, I don’t read many non-fictions books and this had just started as I changed the channel. So I decided to stick with it and reverse the process. If the TV special was good, I would return to the book and read it through.

Both the book and TV show speak on how microeconomics can be applied to the real world for practical ends. The theory of nominative determinism is very interesting. There is also controversy surrounding the book and podcasts as some say they are sociology or criminology as opposed to economics. Any time there is a controversy, I always try to read the source material, so that I have a good ground in the material when an argument erupts in casual conversation somewhere.

_________

The second book is Words That Work by Frank Luntz. Frank Luntz worked for years for the Republican party. He refers to himself as a political consultant and pollster. What he really is a wordsmith or word massager. He takes the message a politician wants to say, and makes it into what people want to hear. At first, this may seem to only apply to politics; but after a longer look you will find yourself thinking about how you construct your sentences. The answer is very carefully.

He talks about how you can have an estate tax and a death tax which are the same thing but it depends on which side you are on and whether you want to promote it or you opponent is promoting it. He talks about negative and positive words. I’ve actually had people tell me there is no such thing as a negative or a positive word. There is a difference between a big crevice and a cavernous chasm. Both mean a wide gap but one sounds more doom and gloom then the other. The assonance also helps with the mood of the phrase. Also in speaking or writing repeativiness helps drive a point home but can be over used. These are just a few points that are brought up by Frank Luntz in his book. This knowledge can be useful when giving speeches, or listening to them. Job interviews might be made easier with this knowledge as well! I would also think this information would be invaluable to a writer! Who knows where else you might this information useful?

I also love language itself. That leads into this next book.

________

The third is The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker. I don’t even think I can explain this. But I can tell you how I found out about it. I had insomnia. It was one of those days where absolute nothing was on. Usually even at like 3 or 4 am there is still junk tv to watch like repeats of Roseanne or Big Bang Theory. Just till I get sleepy you, know? 😴😴

But there wasn’t so I was scrolling through the the channels looking for something to catch my eye. Well, something caught both my eye and ear. I saw this nice dressed man that looked like a college professor on C-Span 2 and I heard him say the word, “Fuck”. That made me stop.

I almost never watch C-Span. But I didn’t know about C-Span 2. They run book lectures and interviews and book groups on the weekends. That’s all they run on the weekends. They call it BookTV.

So I had actually come in at the beginning of the lecture and this man continued to swear for another 10 minutes or so. Then he said well, now I that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I feel better and you are used to hear me say those words I will be saying them a lot. He explain why humans used curse words and how people cursed in other languages and how certain things were curses almost universally. Scatalogical words being the one that pops into my mind first. Also being irreverent no matter which deity you worship. Almost universally, all humans use blasphemy to curse and express themselves.

Then he explained why we cursed, why it feels good to use cursing as a physiological response. Cursing when in pain has been known to be helpful. It lowers blood pressure, and has numerous responses over various systems that I can’t remember off the top of my head. But the upshot was that it was it good for you to curse.

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015-12-17/study-people-who-swear-more-are-smarter-have-larger-vocabulary?context=amp

A recent study has shown that people that curse often tend to larger vocabularies and higher I.Q.’s Via the Above Study

So I went out and read the first Steven Pinker book they had at the library as I was low on funds. I later bought the book he was talking about on the program as well as a few other and bought it for a gift for a few people as well.

__________

The last (But not least!) is What Every Body Is Saying by Joe Navarro. Mr. Navarro is a Former FBI agent who is an expert in body language. He also has other books as well. He is known as the human lie detector. He can look at you and know if you are lying. In his books he tries to impart some of his wisdom. He also has a website and is on twitter. He also offers lectures. You can see why this is a fascinating subject to learn about. Not only studying others but also correcting my own bad behaviours. (* I tend to cross my arms a lot and lean away from conversations. Both signs that I am bored. Not that I am completely bored. Just that things may not be going my way. 😉)

So in conclusion, if there are any non fiction books you must read in your life these are the ones you should put on your list. They are great and well thought out. They are well written and researched. Some of these topics are things that coincide with with the current topics being discussed and the most talked about topics of the season. They are written ed by experts in their fields sometimes by people who helped to create the field.

I can fully recommend these books although they are not my genre because of all the above reasons. But mostly I recommend them because they are just damn good books.

#books #recommended #New Year #non-fiction

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jeroldlockettus · 6 years

Text

Thinking Is Expensive. Who’s Supposed to Pay for It?

Google spent nearly $5.4 million on lobbying in the second quarter of 2017. (Photo: Vladislav Reshetnyak/Pexels)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Thinking Is Expensive. Who’s Supposed to Pay for It?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Corporations and rich people donate billions to their favorite think tanks and foundations. Should we be grateful for their generosity — or suspicious of their motives?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

I’m sure you’ve been hearing the ever-more-anguished calls to regulate the huge tech firms collectively known as GAFA: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.

Barry LYNN: These companies, these super-large platform monopolists, they have developed the capacity to manipulate us, to control us, to control the information that is delivered to us, to control the pricing at which products are delivered to us, to control us as producers.

The GAFA companies are far bigger, richer, and arguably more dominant than tech companies in the past. Google, for instance, has more than 80 percent of global search-engine market share. Facebook has nearly 2 billion monthly active users. Amazon has an estimated 90 million prime members in the U.S. — that’s something like 70 percent of all American households! It’s estimated that 40 percent of all online spending goes to Amazon. This kind of scale creates a lot of concern. We’ve examined this concern in previous episodes, like “Who Runs the Internet?” and “Is the Internet Being Ruined?”

Zeynep TUFEKCI from a previous Freakonomics Radio episode: We’re seeing the birth of a new center of real power. We depend on these technologies that have been, in many ways, wonderful and fascinating. But they’re making significant decisions unilaterally.

There’s also the question of whether the mission of these firms is as socially beneficial as many people believed they were in the early days of the internet:

TUFEKCI: There’s all these really smart engineers. They’re the brightest computer scientists, and all they’re thinking about is, “How do I keep someone on Facebook for 10 more minutes? What’s the exact combination of things that will keep them staying on the site as long as possible so that we can show them as much advertisement as possible?”

So here’s a question: if you were one of those huge, dominant, super-wealthy firms, what would you do to ensure that the good times stay good? You’d probably spend a lot of money lobbying politicians — which, yes, they do. There’s been a huge ramping-up lately in lobbying by tech firms. But you might also do something a bit subtler than that.

Robert REICH: Yeah. There’s been a parallel ramping-up of the philanthropy that’s associated with the tech firms. That philanthropy comes in a variety of different forms.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: corporations using philanthropy to shape the public debate — and how that can go terribly wrong:

Barry LYNN: That was on June 27th. And on June 29th, I was told that my entire team had to leave.

* * *

Our story today begins with a journalist …

Franklin FOER: I’m Franklin Foer, a writer with The Atlantic.

Stephen J. DUBNER: You are one of three brothers who write books. Talk about that for just a minute, and the family that produced all of you.

FOER: Right. So I have two brothers: Jonathan, who’s written a good number of novels, including Everything is Illuminated. I got a younger brother named Josh, who is a science writer [and] wrote a book called Moonwalking with Einstein. It’s actually incredibly uncomfortable for us to talk about growing up in a family of other writers just because— I’m sure in some ways, we benefit from the novelty act of being three brotherly writers. But then we all, of course, want to be known for our own accomplishments.

DUBNER: Right.

FOER: But our parents didn’t do anything— They didn’t force us to play violin four hours a day or sit down and study the great chess masters. We watched a lot of He-Man and Addams Family reruns on television when we were growing up. But one of the things that they did was they gave us a credit card, which they said we weren’t allowed to spend essentially on anything except in the event of an incredible emergency. There was one exception to this: they said that we could basically spend the credit card at will at the bookshop. They basically guided us to one thing.

DUBNER: Your first job in journalism was at Slate, one of the very first mainstream online publications, which was started by Microsoft. There was this huge enthusiasm, certainly among the chattering classes.

FOER: There was a certain amount of utopianism that was associated with the emergence of the internet, this idea that we were going to tie the world together. I love search engines. I love the fact that I can access every book in human history in a nanosecond. I love that I can get things delivered to my door incredibly quickly. These things, arguably, make life much better; maybe inarguably make life much better. These technologies were incredible! Amazon is an incredible company. The Kindle was an incredible invention. The iPad and the iPhone were incredible innovations. We were right to marvel at them.

DUBNER: After writing for Slate for a while, you moved on to the New Republic — as you call it, the “intellectual organ for hard-nosed liberalism.” You ultimately became editor there not once, but twice.

FOER: The New Republic was this little magazine that always had outsized influence in politics and culture. It was an incredibly elitist organ and it managed to persist over a hundred years while never really turning a profit. As we entered the Internet Age, that became a more and more difficult thing to continue to do. We ended up shifting from one ownership group to the next. I got so exhausted trying to find an owner and sick of that, I ended up resigning as editor. But then a couple of years after I resigned, the magazine got bought by a guy called Chris Hughes who had been Mark Zuckerberg‘s roommate at Harvard, and co-founder of Facebook. He bought the magazine and, to me, this seemed almost too good to be true. You had this guy who understood social media, who had incredible number of resources, and seemed devoted to this little magazine that I was also devoted to. So I came back, I edited the magazine, and Chris and I tried to re-make it.

DUBNER: The relationship in the beginning seemed like it was unbelievably good.

FOER: We became really good friends and it was exhilarating. We felt like we were trying to save something that was imperiled in the world and that maybe we could help provide some dignified solution to the rest of journalism, which was grappling with a lot of the same issues that we were grappling with. But there was a moment when things just took this turn. Chris had always talked about wanting to make a profit with the New Republic, and he suddenly decided that he didn’t want to lose, at least not a whole lot of money with it. So we had to turn around our financial position incredibly quickly. He insisted that we start chasing clicks. In 2013, the surest way to get clicks was to post a clip from last night’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart. You slap a headline on it and maybe write a couple sentences about it and everybody would click on it.

DUBNER: You got caught up in, at least, monitoring the numbers, right?

FOER: Yes, I did. Look, data is crack cocaine. If you’re the guy who had a hard time getting a date in high school, to suddenly find yourself producing things that are extremely popular — you become obsessed with replicating that popularity. In some ways, everybody in the magazine wanted to be successful on Facebook. We wanted to master social media and this new environment. But we didn’t want that new environment to dictate how we did our jobs.

DUBNER: All right, so we should say that [you were] quitting as you were about to be fired from the New Republic.

FOER: Yeah. I took the brave decision to resign when I learned that there was some guy who already had my job and was offering other people jobs at the New Republic.

DUBNER: It’s funny. You’re describing what was happening to you at the New Republic. But it sounds as though you’re also perhaps describing your view of what happened at places like Google and Facebook over time, where you may begin with a certain set of motivations, but as those motivations lead you to this overwhelming commercial success, you’re so seduced by the magnitude of that success that you can’t help but want to replicate it over and over again.

FOER: Yeah, that’s completely right. In retrospect, I realized that I was living this compressed version of recent history.

The recent history of the internet at least. Over the years, Franklin Foer’s views of the internet had shifted. The same guy who used to think this …

FOER: There was a certain amount of utopianism associated with the emergence of the internet.

And this:

FOER: I love search engines!

And this:

FOER: These technologies were incredible! Amazon is an incredible company.

Has now come to think this:

FOER: Amazon thinks of itself as “the everything store.” It’s gotten itself in pretty much every conceivable business. It owns Whole Foods, it powers the cloud, it houses data for the C.I.A., and so on. There’s really nothing that it doesn’t try to squeeze into its empire.

He also thinks this:

FOER: As Facebook shapes the way that we consume news, as Google shapes the way that we interact with information, and as Amazon has shaped the way that we interact with books, the dominance that these companies exert ends up trickling through the cultural intellectual ecosystem. With Amazon, my concern is that the book business has become utterly dependent on them, that they hold one of the few true monopolies in the world.

Actually, that’s not quite true.

Swati BHATT: My name is Swati Bhatt. I teach at Princeton.

One course she teaches: The Economics of the Internet.

BHATT: The existence of a monopoly — of a single firm in any product space, unless it’s a government-granted monopoly — is rare in the digital economy.

So even though Amazon has, for instance, at least 70 percent of e-book sales, that doesn’t make it a monopoly.

BHATT: Technically, no. Because that leaves 30 percent for some other set of firms.

When describing firms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, Bhatt prefers the term “behemoth.”

BHATT: Yes, there is a difference. “Behemoth” suggests that it’s simply a large firm, whereas a “monopoly” suggests that it’s the only firm.

Okay, economic semantics aside: Bhatt does see strong parallels between these modern behemoths and what we traditionally think of as monopolies. But a modern tech behemoth has a particularly modern advantage:

BHATT: Ownership of a scarce resource is the definition of a natural monopoly. What we’re seeing with the behemoths today is an ownership of a scarce resource called “personal data” or “data” in general. There’s an interesting self-reinforcing dynamic here. Whereas a firm transacts, buys and sells, [a behemoth] acquires data about its consumers. That enables it to grow by producing more personalized products by advertising more effectively. That brings in more customers, which brings in more data, which then enables the firm to grow even further and that leads to the behemoth status.

And that is what Franklin Foer, and a growing chorus of other critics, are so concerned about. Foer recently published a book called World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. It’s part-memoir, part-screed against the dominance of the big tech firms. It’s not a particularly empirical book; and it’s hard to say how much of Foer’s argument was informed by personal experiences, like the New Republic disaster. It also turns out that Foer’s family, in addition to encouraging his love of books, encouraged his distrust of monopolies.

FOER: My dad was a University of Chicago-trained lawyer who’d worked in the antitrust division of the Carter administration. I grew up in this household where antitrust was part of the family religion. My dad would drive around in a car that had a bumper sticker that said “bust the trust” on it. It was a real obsession and passion of his. For a long time he was this lonely activist who was railing for greater, more aggressive enforcement of these laws prohibiting monopolistic behavior. I always admired him for this quixotic stand that he took, but I never really fully bought into his arguments until Amazon got in this fight with the book publishers, when it started to hit close to home.

DUBNER: This was the Hachette deal, yes?

FOER: Exactly. Let’s just say something about book publishing, which is that book publishing is an incredibly oligopolistic industry. There are four or five big companies that dominate book publishing. They’re oftentimes jerks. It’s hard to have a whole lot of sympathy for the book publishers. But suddenly you have these five big companies that were up against one big company, which was Amazon. Amazon basically controlled their access to the marketplace. Amazon was renegotiating their ebook contract with the publishers one by one, trying to strong-arm them with their market power into pricing their books lower and lower. To me, it was grotesque and ominous that Amazon was able to use its market power to try to dictate to the publishers in this incredibly aggressive way.

DUBNER: Where do you draw the line between winning — or competing — and being evil?

FOER: Right.

DUBNER: Persuade me that it’s not just a case of big companies being really good at what they do and winning and you having sympathies with the people who are not winning.

FOER: My book, in some ways, is a valentine to competition. I believe that a marketplace is most healthy when you have a number of market players. I might not love book publishing. It might be too concentrated in some ways for my taste. But at least there are five companies competing against one another for the marketplace. If I don’t like the way that one company is treating me, I can always go to another company. Or if I don’t like the goods that one company is selling, I can go to another company. The problem with Amazon, and the problem with Google, and, to an extent, with Facebook, is that they become the only market player. The choice that we have as consumers is limited and competition is limited. My argument is against the big technology companies, which are racing to expand into every nook and cranny of our lives.

As it happens, this expansion had just raced into Franklin Foer’s own life. We spoke to him in early September, just before his book was to be published. And there had been a plot twist.

FOER: The New America Foundation supported my book.

The New America Foundation is a center-left think tank devoted to “renewing American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age.” It’s run by the political scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter, who’s a former top official in the Obama State Department.

FOER: One of the cool things that New America does is that they give money to journalists who are writing book projects. I didn’t get a lot of money from them, but I got a small sum. They were especially generous to me because I’d just been fired from a job at the New Republic.

And the partial funding of Foer’s book about the dominance of firms like Google suddenly became relevant because—

FOER: That’s since become relevant just because they fired a vociferous critic of Google from the foundation. Which is noteworthy because the foundation has received a fair amount of money from Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

DUBNER: Right. How much fun is it for you to be publishing a new book and already distancing yourself from the foundation that funded the writing of it?

FOER: It actually doesn’t feel good because New America has been supportive of me over time. I’d rather not seem like a jerk and disavow them when they’ve been so nice to me. But this does feel sadly reflective of a much bigger issue.

DUBNER: Who was the critic who was fired?

FOER: His name is Barry Lynn and he ran something called the Open Markets program there. Very active opponent of monopoly and a very vociferous critic of Google.

LYNN: We used to have an affiliation with the New America Foundation, but that ended on August 31st. We were kicked out of New America.

And that is Barry Lynn.

LYNN: And I direct the Open Markets Institute.

So the name of his project has not been taken away; but his affiliation with the New America Foundation has.

LYNN: We’re working out of a WeWork on the 1400 block of G Street in Washington.

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: the story is not as neat as the headlines would have it:

Anne-Marie SLAUGHTER: At no point did Google or any funder tell me to fire Barry Lynn.

Also: funding controversies can reach across many decades. Like all the way back to the founding of Stanford University.

REICH: There is an effort to unearth the sordid history of the university’s initial benefactor.

* * *

Barry Lynn started out as a journalist …

LYNN: I worked in Venezuela and in Peru as a foreign correspondent. Then, I ran a magazine called Global Business Magazine.

We should say it was a pro-business magazine.

LYNN: We were a magazine that aimed at the people who ran businesses. We had a[n] inside look at how globalization actually works at the institutional level.

That inside look led to Lynn crossing over to the other side. He came to believe that corporations are too powerful, and that their power is too concentrated. This was a theme he pursued in a couple of books and, since 2002, with the New America Foundation. His project came to be known as Open Markets.

LYNN: We got the work going. We did it with increasing effect over the last seven years, to the point where in 2016, we had a number of folks on the Hill starting to understand that, indeed, America has a monopoly problem. The first person who really reached out and said, “I want to actually help shine a light on this problem,” was Senator Warren. The result was a speech that she gave on Capitol Hill.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s speech was part of a conference, organized by Open Markets, called “America’s Monopoly Problem.”

Elizabeth WARREN: Today in America, competition is dying.

LYNN: This was probably the most important speech about concentration in the United States, about the monopoly problem, since a series of speeches that F.D.R. gave in the 1930s.

WARREN: Google, Apple, and Amazon provide platforms that lots of companies depend on for survival. But Google, Apple, and Amazon also, in many cases, compete with those small companies. That platform can become a tool to snuff out competition.

LYNN: She said, “It’s not just an issue that affects us as consumers. It also affects our democracy, because it’s this concentration of power that leads to concentrations of wealth. Concentrations of wealth lead to concentrations of control over government, and other institutions of authority.”

This line of criticism would seem to be very much in sync with the mission of not only Open Markets, but also its parent organization, the New America Foundation.

SLAUGHTER: In my own scholarship, I’ve written about monopolies and risks of consolidation and data ownership.

That’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department official and Princeton professor, who’s now president and C.E.O. of New America.

SLAUGHTER: What convinced me to leave Princeton and become head of New America — which was a big move, because I had a wonderful position at Princeton — was this idea that we really could be a place that hosted fundamental debates about our future in the digital age.

But as Barry Lynn tells the story, New America didn’t share his enthusiasm for the conference he put together where Senator Warren spoke.

LYNN: Well, a few people in my organization at New America were not happy with the way we were framing the conference, and the fact that we were focusing some of our attention on the platform monopolies and especially on Google.

What was wrong with focusing on Google in a conference about monopoly? Remember, they do own some 80 percent of the global search market.

LYNN: Or I guess the question is, “Why was our work at New America problematic for Google?” Eric Schmidt, who is now the chair of the board at Google, was also, for a long time, on the New America board and then for a period of time served as the chair of our board.

Eric Schmidt, who was C.E.O. of Google for 10 years, has also given New America a lot of money, both personally and through his family foundation. So did Google itself. Between Schmidt and Google, New America had received roughly $20 million since its founding in 1999.

LYNN: There was a relationship between our two organizations. This is a relationship goes back to the very early days at New America and actually had never seemed to result in any problems at New America up to this point.

But now, it seemed, there was a problem. Were Schmidt and/or Google leaning on New America as Lynn’s critique of the company grew more intense? A year after the New America conference where Senator Warren spoke against Google’s domination, European antitrust regulators hit Google with a huge fine, $2.7 billion, for allegedly tilting search results in its own favor. Barry Lynn posted a statement on the New America website. It congratulated European regulators for giving Google such a good spanking, and it urged American regulators to do the same.

LYNN: We released this statement in support of the decision in Europe. That was on June 27th. And on June 29th, I was told that my entire team had to leave. We had two months to leave.

One natural conclusion to draw was that Google had stepped in and asked New America to do something about Barry Lynn. Indeed, that’s how it was portrayed in The New York Times. Their headline read: “Google Critic Ousted from Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant.”

LYNN: At that point I asked for this decision to be reconsidered, and if it could not be reconsidered, I asked for more time. I was told that neither of those was possible.

The writer Franklin Foer, who happens to sit on the board of Barry Lynn’s Open Markets Institute, told us a similar version of events. He made it clear that Lynn’s statement about the European regulators’ decision—

FOER: This was something that was a bit too far for Google. New America was very generous in supporting me, and they never did anything to interfere with my own work. But I was fairly outraged by their treatment of Barry. I can’t resign from New America because I’m not affiliated with them. I’m not taking any money from them now, but I’m extremely disappointed.

But Anne-Marie Slaughter offered a substantially different portrayal. First of all, she says—

SLAUGHTER: No funder at New America has ever influenced New America content in any way.

And, this:

SLAUGHTER: New America has a set of principles on our website that makes very clear that no funding can affect the integrity of our research and/or shape the research in any way. We do not pay to play. We take funding and we do our work. Those two things are separate.

But the timing of Lynn’s firing certainly gave the appearance that Google and/or Eric Schmidt had asked Slaughter and/or the New America Foundation to get rid of Barry Lynn and Open Markets. And Slaughter found herself on the defensive.

SLAUGHTER: At no point did Google or any funder tell me to fire Barry Lynn, and at no point did Google or any funder try to influence the work of anybody here. If any funder ever did tell me that, I’d tell them to take a hike!

That’s Slaughter at a New America event a few weeks ago called “Is Big Tech an Existential Threat?” The event was actually in support of Franklin Foer’s book.

SLAUGHTER: I did not part ways with Barry Lynn for anything to do with Google. I decided that Barry Lynn and I had to part ways because he could not work respectfully, honestly, and cooperatively with his colleagues.

So Slaughter says she got rid of Lynn, not because of a funding conflict of interest, but because he was a difficult employee. That said, she acknowledges a real and long-standing tension between the people who fund research and the people who do research.

SLAUGHTER: I don’t actually think this is just a think-tank issue. I worked at three universities, and universities have private funders for centers and for different bodies of research. Even newspapers have constant tensions between advertisers and reporters that reporters don’t have to navigate, but the management does. There is a general tension wherever you need to protect the integrity of research and you also need to fund that research.

New America says all its major funders are listed on its website. We asked Slaughter for a breakdown:

SLAUGHTER: Only 12 percent comes from corporations. By far, the largest amount comes from foundations and then from private individuals.

LYNN: Taking corporate money does not mean necessarily that the work of the entire institution is suspect—

Barry Lynn again.

LYNN: —but it definitely can create a slippery slope that will lead to pressures being brought to bear on those people who are questioning concentrations of power or the use of corporate power in other ways.

REICH: People are right to have a skeptical, maybe cynical, orientation to corporate lobbying or corporate philanthropy.

And that’s Robert Reich, a political scientist at Stanford.

REICH: My research interests these days focus a great deal on philanthropy and the role philanthropy plays in democratic societies.

And that philanthropy increasingly comes in the form of foundations.

REICH: There are lots of foundations.

DUBNER: What is the median size of assets? It’s really small, right? A million or so dollars—

REICH: Oh yeah, it’s not much. It may be a couple of million dollars. But there’s an enormous growth in the number of foundations, and that’s just a logical consequence of the growing inequality in the United States.

DUBNER: Just talk about your thesis essentially — the role, the influence, and the complications around modern philanthropies.

REICH: I’d start by saying most people’s attitude about philanthropists and about foundations is that we should be grateful that people are trying to do good with their own money. That’s the attitude I want to try to sweep away. I don’t think philanthropists deserve that amount of charity, if you will. Why is that? Because philanthropy, especially large philanthropy, in the form of a foundation or especially wealthy person represents the exercise of power in which they attempt to use their own private wealth to affect public outcomes or to produce public benefits or make social change. Power deserves scrutiny in a democratic society, not gratitude. I’d add on top of that that a foundation, in particular — which is a legal form that allows a wealthy person to create a donor-directed, unaccountable, barely transparent, perpetual, and tax-subsidized corporate form in order to use their private assets to affect the public — is an especially interesting and potentially worrisome form of power.

DUBNER: Let’s talk about think tanks, per se. Is there such a thing as a truly nonpartisan think tank, or is it just too hard because of where the money is coming from?

REICH: Well, I’d say that you’re more likely to make the case that there are nonpartisan universities, universities which are funded in not entirely dissimilar ways from think tanks. Officially, they have to be nonpartisan, so do think tanks. In other words they can’t declare themselves in favor of particular political candidates. But think tanks have become far more popular in the United States as a result of the polarization and inequality in the United States. Idea generation that happens in think tanks — the policy frameworks and proposals that get disseminated from think tanks — flow from philanthropic interests with particular policy positions in mind.

DUBNER: Tell me what you know about Google’s history of philanthropic, foundation, or think-tank giving and especially the timeline because I understand it’s accelerated quite a bit recently.

REICH: Google, like lots of other tech firms, has gotten much more aggressive in its formal lobbying efforts. I think it’s now the case that the top five Silicon Valley companies are amongst the largest sources of lobbying, greater even than the five top Wall Street firms in New York. There’s been a parallel ramping up of the philanthropy that’s associated with the tech firms. That philanthropy comes in a variety of different forms.

DUBNER: Rob, knowing what you know about the situation with the New America Foundation and the Google money and the controversy, what would your advice be for them, for the New America Foundation?

REICH: The New America Foundation needs to be aware of the soft power, the agenda-setting influence that donors can have to the think tank even in the absence of calling someone up and saying “we disagree” or “we object to the work that someone does.” When Anne-Marie Slaughter — whose job is chiefly to ensure the existence of the New America Foundation into the future, which involves fund-raising — does her work, she needs to be cautious that she hasn’t internalized the policy preferences of the donors such that she shapes the work of the foundation around the donor interests. The idea is you’re worried about the conversation you’ll have with your donor in the future. You orient the work that you do to please the donor, rather than to displease the donor. That has, functionally, the same outcome from the donor’s perspective, without even having to say anything.

DUBNER: Now, your own fine university, Stanford, benefited, was founded from the private largesse of a man, Leland Stanford. Most of history paints him as a classic robber baron — a railroad man who did all kinds of stuff that we would frown upon today. Talk to me about that and whether that’s a conversation that takes place regularly at Stanford. Or is it avoided?

REICH: I’d say people here are aware of the history of the university and the deep connection between philanthropy and the well-being of especially wealthy universities. People here, I think, know something about the history of Leland Stanford. There is an effort on campus to unearth the sordid history of the university’s initial benefactor.

DUBNER: Has there been any movement of any magnitude to rename the university?

REICH: Not that I know of. They’re starting with lower-hanging fruit — monuments and places on campus named for people with no obvious connection to the university and whose historical records are not so appealing.

DUBNER: Let’s say I have some money, Rob. I want to set up a foundation. I come to you and I say, “I’m a big believer in bringing critics into the inner circle. I know that you’ve been critical of how foundations behave, and that it’s undemocratic, and so on. But Rob, I’d like to make you the executive of my foundation.” Let’s say I made my money in ammonia fertilizer. How would you go about setting it up in a way that takes advantage of my largesse to try to accomplish something that we could all agree is some public good without falling into all the traps that you’ve been describing to us?

REICH: First, I’d say, despite the fact that laws don’t require me to be especially transparent about what the foundation is doing, I pledge to make completely available to the public all of the grant-making we do, the evaluations of the grants that we make. I’d want to invite in outside experts as well. I would want to find ways in which to organize the foundation’s efforts to seek out the most severe critics of what we were doing in order to try to learn the most in order to give grants away to greater effect.

DUBNER: Let’s say I also make you chairman of the board. Tell me about that board, how you’d set it up. What would the elections look like? What would the terms be like? Who’s on it?

REICH: Well, “elections” already reveal that you don’t know much about how foundations are operating. There are no elections on the boards of foundations. The boards are hand-picked by the initial donor. You can create the governing board of a foundation in such a way as you guarantee that only family members and heirs ever serve on the board. There’s no public representation necessary. The Gates Foundation, with something in the neighborhood of $40 to $80 billion devoted to philanthropy, has as its governing trustees Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, and, I believe, Bill Gates Sr. I’d like to see possibly experimentation with a form of foundation peer review in which an effort analogous to what happens in academia happens within the foundation world. It would be surprising if the philanthropic efforts of corporations were purely altruistic. Corporations seek to advance their own interest especially in their lobbying — quite possibly often in their philanthropy. I’m trying to stimulate people to be morally awake and in the same moment, to get people to consider what types of public policies or frameworks ought to govern and structure our collective lives, which is a moral and philosophical question.

That was the Stanford political scientist Robert Reich. We also heard today from Anne-Marie Slaughter, Barry Lynn, Swati Bhatt, and Franklin Foer. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio: my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt drops by to answer your FREAK-quently Asked Questions:

Steven LEVITT: That is one of the weirdest definitions of social good I’ve ever heard in my entire life—

LEVITT: The thing you want to do, from a public policy perspective, is not put people’s identity and their morality in conflict with efficiency—

LEVITT: As you take the knife and think about whether you’re going to stab the person with it, you’re not thinking about what’s going to happen 15 years later when I apply for a job and I have to check the box—

That’s next time, on Freakonomics Radio.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Brian Gutierrez. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern and Harry Huggins; the music throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected].

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Swati Bhatt, professor of economics at Princeton University.

Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic.

Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute.

Robert Reich, professor of political science at the Stanford University.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and C.E.O. of New America.

RESOURCES

“America’s Monopoly Problem: What Should the Next President Do?” Elizabeth Warren, New America (June 29, 2016).

“Antitrust: Commission Fines Google €2.42 Billion for Abusing Dominance as Search Engine by Giving Illegal Advantage to own Comparison Shopping Service,” European Commission (June 27, 2017).

How Digital Communication Technology Shapes Markets: Redefining Competition, Building Cooperation by Swati Bhatt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

“Is Big Tech an Existential Threat?” Anne-Marie Slaughter, New America (October 5, 2017).

“Repugnant to the Whole Idea of Democracy? On the Role of Foundations in Democratic Societies,” Rob Reich (July, 2016).

“What Are Foundations For?” Rob Reich, Boston Review (March 1, 2013).

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer (Penguin Press, 2017).

EXTRA

“Is the Internet Being Ruined?” Freakonomics Radio (July 14, 2016).

“Who Runs the Internet?” Freakonomics Radio (November 14, 2013).

The post Thinking Is Expensive. Who’s Supposed to Pay for It? appeared first on Freakonomics.

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