Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Podcast Notes: Malcolm Gladwell on “The Daily Stoic”

I started listening to this first thing in the morning during my first walk with Booster. Very first question: Ryan Holiday asks about when Gladwell writes.

I run in the afternoon, always have. Never in the morning.

Never, like not even when you’re traveling?

Never.

So you write first and then run?

Yes. Morning is thinking time. So it’s creative time. It seems crazy to put a run in the middle of the most cognitively valuable stretch of the day.

They also discuss working on their own ideas first thing in the morning before tainting it with other people’s most recent thoughts.

Maybe a good argument against my habit of waking up and throwing the Airpods on and picking whatever’s near the top of my podcast feed.

This inspired me a bit to go and draw some notes at a coffee shop. Feels good that the backpack load out is becoming a more frequent activity.

Anyway I’ll paste the rest of these notes below and then go for a run. I mean. Gotta get that BDNF.

From John J. Ratey, MD’s Spark:

Early on, researchers found that if they sprinkled BDNF onto neurons in a petri dish, the cells automatically sprouted new branches, producing the same structural growth required for learning—and causing me to think of BDNF as Miracle-Gro for the brain.

Oh yeah, the rest of the notes I sketched out:

“Don’t read Ryan. Don’t read Gladwell.” Instead just read a dozens original books written by actual Stoics or read 100s of original research papers that Gladwell uses. (Or, actually, read Ryan and Gladwell.)
Gladwell’s progression as a writer: writing in a loud news room at The Washington Post, writing a series of big-idea books, then starting a podcast and learning audio storytelling, and finally giving a full narrative nonfiction book a shot. (He mentions Michael Lewis as being the master of narrative nonfiction and eventually wanting to write his own.)
They discuss the effect where, if you’re an expert, you’ll notice an incorrect detail in an article and you can subsequently dismiss the rest of that article. But then you’ll move on and read the other articles taking things at face value, even though they might similarly have incorrect details. It sounds like Gladwell has sort of changed his thinking on this and knows it’s important to consider the audience. If it’s an intro to professional runners, he’s not the audience because he’s deep into running. It’s for a lay audience. A small incorrect detail is bad but the article as a whole can still serve as a good gateway.
They don’t talk about putting a meal together, but it came to mind for me. They discuss the criticism they often get: “You’re just a popularizer.” It’s supposed to be a bad thing. But, yes. That’s the intent of writing the books: to popularize good ideas. And so the meal idea for me is that you start with raw ingredients (books from stoics, research papers) and you can combine those and create a delicious plate of food (a single book, in their case). There are exceptions: a steak is a single ingredient that tastes great. Plenty of non-delicious plates of food. Just as there are great, approachable ancient books and entertaining research papers, there are also many many bad books.