Trivia
Listen to this quizzical audio and you'll be the smartest human in any room. Bring your curiosity and learn fun facts, aired on premium podcasts and leading talk radio shows.
Does This Happen to You
Things I'd Wish I'd Known When My Kids Started College
"Things. I wish i known when my kids started college like how their meal plans. Don't include ten dollar la taes three years ago when my kids started college. I could've used some guidance. Decent advice wisdom. I went on college tours asking. What are your dorms. Emergency exit plans. I should've asked how many essential oil marketers within a fifteen mile radius. Hold a communications degree from your university. What did i know. I was worried. Said to be losing my babies and wondering how in the name of god they survive without homemade smoothies would my make good choices. Texts be as effective without the appropriate facial expressions. I should have focused on the upside vodka. Bottles would soon return to the oven where they belong. I could keep my journal out in the open rather than hidden in the closet near the vibrators. Real changes happen for empty nesters and our kids during college years. Not all of them bad. Here's what i wish. I knew it will take one year to go from crying when they leave to crying when they come home six months. If you enjoy the kind of privacy you haven't had since clinton was in office. Prepare a speech for when they call to say we've been seeing each other exclusively for eight weeks. Should i still use a condom. That kid who is said to leave home will soon be wondering why you do things like visit and stay overnight. Go ahead and share opinions about what they wear an instagram pictures. I dare you. Are we supposed to quickly pivot from casting out trans fats and other sources of evil to serene acceptance that their diet now includes edibles. Yes yes we are so steel an edible. When you visit. You're paying for it. Your boys will bring home girls who start sentences with as a capricorn. But stay supportive or though blame you for the inevitable. Break-up relax with the anti-capitalist you don't need to be investment bankers bullshit. You'll have to pay their rent when they eventually decide work as oppressive. It will take years before they stop asking questions about. Laundry and ironing
No Stupid Questions
How Can You Escape Binary Thinking?
"I want to be less of a binary thinker and. I wonder if you can help me. Stephen you know they're two kinds of people couldn't resist. Here's my problem. I'm not sure whether this is me personally. Whether this is the human condition or whether it's the human condition in the modern era you know society and politics and media being what they are in this early twenty first century. I guess it is. But i feel that the confidence of all these forces constantly hurting me into yes or no blacker way all or nothing choices. You can't belong to political movement x. Unless you subscribe to all twenty of its tenants and precisely zero of the other movements twenty tents for example now my brain and even my soul no that the world should not work that way that there's so much more nuance than variation to how life should unfold. But it's hard to not veer toward binary thinking. So how can i and everyone get better at that. Well you're not alone. It salient with politics. These days especially in the united states that you're you know all the way onside although the end of its don't seem to be a lot of people in the middle ground not a lot of room or permission even to be a moderate but it's actually much more fundamental cognitive scientists have been documenting just how systematic the distortion is when we try to summarize evidence and we binary is we create categories of what is effectively data. That's so interesting. Can you give an example. There was a study in science and the title of this paper is the binary bias. Oh it's a thing. Yeah plus a little ration- binary bias a systematic distortion in the integration of information and these scientists run variety of paradigm. that essentially. Say that when people are looking at data and visualizations of data center that they tend to be biased toward this extremity. That's in their own minds. But it's not really in data so we tend to make categories of continuous data and there are other studies documenting this tendency when i thought about this without being a scientist to studies directly. I thought there must be a functional
Timesuck with Dan Cummins
The Grim Sleeper Serial Killer
"From at least as early as nineteen eighty five to at least as recently as two thousand seven a serial killer lonnie david franklin junior eventually dubbed the grim sleeper roam the streets of south central los angeles where he was born and raised targeting young and particularly vulnerable. Women this killer kidnapped raped beat typically shot his victims with a small twenty five caliber semiautomatic pistol often carried in his shirt pocket. He obsessively took photos of his victims. Both dead and alive both clothed and nude often sexually explicit positions saving them as trophies and keeping them carefully tucked away in the garage behind his home where he worked his youngest victim just fifteen years old not apprehended until two thousand ten. The grim sleeper roam the streets of south central for a quarter of a century incredible. He got away considering how careless he was this murders rather than carefully hiding the remains of victims in some heavily wooded body disposal site. He typically just toss him out of his old pinto an into some urban alley. The bodies are often discovered the next morning after he killed him and he almost always shot his victims. Water were still sitting inside his car. He left so much evidence he took photos of the victim shared them with any of his friends who wanted to see him not the best way to not get caught but no one tipped police off to him and he wasn't caught for so so long. Why how nhi no human involved and h. I was a term thrown around by some lapd officers originally investigating the murders in the mid eighties when the killings began and it was used because the victims were often sex workers or all assumed to be turning tricks on side at least an all or at least nearly all of them addicted to crack cocaine and there were black. The term crackhead was thrown around a lot and hooker. It was like the victims weren't seen as humans reviewed less than human. They were black. Crackhead hookers so who cares. Nhi no human involved so no real investigative priority given but this is not going to be some lapd blame game some apathy from the lapd only partially explains why lonnie was able to keep killing for so long.
No Stupid Questions
When Is It OK to Tell a Lie?
"How many times a day do you tell a lie. And when and why is it okay to lie and maybe the answer to both questions is never but i think that would put you well outside the normal range of humans. I would like to say that. I go days if not weeks or months without a single lie. Wow i said i would like to say that you like to say that i would like to be six five right okay. I do think though stephen that if we define a lie as intentional deception then i definitely go days without lying. I'm not saying that every day without lying. I just ballpark. This and say that my average allying rate is point. Five lies per day okay. So you're ale. Our average lying rate is point five daily. How do you think that compares to the rest of humankind. I would imagine. I'm guessing this in part because i'm pretty familiar with dan. The psychologist and his research on lying and he says that most people lie a little not many people. I love most people i little and by the way. We're not talking about a lie. Every other day that includes white lies so give me an example of your medium lie for example if somebody asked me to review an article for scientific journal and i click no i decline and then the next green says why are you not able to review this article and the default response is. I don't have expertise ages. Press next. I don't think like oh god i should probably be honest. Which is to say that this terminals terrible are you. Kidding would never review for this journal
Chicago Dog Walk
Who Was Serial Killer Todd Kohlhepp?
"This week. We're going to talk about todd. Cole hep which i know you said you were not familiar with correct This he is a infamous case Murdered several people. He actually got caught because kind of similar to discuss. Couple of weeks at one of his victims ended up being rescued. And then it was a whole can of worms that was open and he got caught. So todd call hep. He grew up in south carolina in a very very dysfunctional home. I mean broken family. He was abused by his father. He was abused by his grandfather. As a child he was constantly moving from one place to another which created instability in his life. And it was kind of this storm of poor factors in his life that created this soup to create a monster essentially by like okay if you come from a broken family. That doesn't mean you're this crazy murderer if you move around constantly that that's not gonna make you a psychopath right it. But being abused by the male figures in his life adding with all of these things coming from dysfunctional household. They all added up to make this to make him into what he is. So you can look at it as we always look at the nature versus nurture right. This is a little bit more of a nurture situation. Because he was just hitting left and right with these bad circumstances he was not he was not taking care of the way he needed to be taken care of and created this everything that he was late. I mean to me. That's like the greatest debate and forever like in the world. I i really think so.
Miss Information: A Trivia Podcast
The Inspiring Story of Margaret E. Knight
"So margaret louise night. She was a prolific american inventor of machines and mechanisms for a variety of industrial everyday purposes. Margaret was nicknamed maddie mit. She lived with her widowed mother and older brothers. Charlie and jim in a little house in york maine. she was born in eighteen. Thirty eight by the way so after her father passed away mattie had inherited his toolbox and she liked to think of things that could be made with these tools and she drew them in a little notebook that she labeled my inventions. Mattie demonstrated knack for tools and mentioned from an early age making toys kites sleds and household items in as little girl. She preferred to play with woodworking tools. Instead of dolls saying that quote the only thing she wanted whereas a jack knife gimblett and pieces of wood. She knew she wanted good for her so when she was eleven. Maddie's finley moved to manchester new hampshire to work in the textile mills there and so matty was going to continue going to school only going so far as a complete her elementary school education and she got to know the head engineer there while wandering around the grounds after school waiting for her family to be done with their like fourteen to eighteen hour shifts. Sure textile mills. Yeah including like her twelve year old brother and fourteen so at age twelve. She started working the mill herself and aloom ow function and injured a worker So it turns out that one of the leading causes of serious injuries at the mill that she had observed was the propensity of the steel-tipped flying shuttles so those were manipulated by workers to unite the left in the warp threads in their weaves. I'm so these shuttles would come free of their looms and they would like shoot off the machines high-velocity even at like the slightest employee error. So like there were people dying from this. There are people like you know basically like you're getting almost shot. Yeah basically tipped metal thing like flying off a machine you know so it was really dangerous and so matty what she did. She created a guard. That would stop the shuttle from coming off of the machine if it malfunctioned. So like the exact details of this device have kind of been lost to history but mentions of it came out throughout published stories of her work and her Mentions articles that will get into so again because this was the mid nineteenth century. And why would anybody document what they actually did anyway. So workman who installed these types of guards all the looms and all the males in manchester. So this sounds like a big deal. She clearly didn't make any money for sure. You know maybe save some lives so after she turned eighteen. Mattie left manchester for better opportunities She worked in several different factories on new england along with other short-term technical jobs too so that she could keep
Does This Happen to You
I Got Egged, For Sure
"I got egged for sure if you leave out any gradient years. Zucchini bread won't rise to the occasion. Sometimes things don't go the way you want them to. What happens when you're entirely in the wrong. No ifs ands or buts about it. Well for life's little peccadilloes. There's always someone to meet out the proper punishment and they won't taste so good another lifetime ago. A colleague and i were in charge of designing the food section of a metro daily. The newspapers food editor selected the recipes. And did the test cooking and baking and wrote stories about the bounty. She discovered someone else. Took enticing photos. My friend and i had to make sure the recipes stories and photos were put together in an attractive package and then printed. Once a week. I learned a valuable lesson one day about paying attention to details my friends in the news. Business new this heck. Even my nana's quilting circle was familiar with the drill. Turns out that. I found out the hard way that cutting corners when it comes to recipes at least is pretty much a cardinal sin and the cooking community every little old lady in dallas county and beyond apparently gets up with the sun every thursday to snag their copy of the dallas morning news. Why well the food section of course then. They hunt recipes and coupons and pick up provision at the store to make those recipes that very same day. Yeah even in the digital age quite a few folks still get their paper thrown daily in the driveway. Any clue what happens when you make zucchini bread without eggs you end up with the equivalent of zucchini rocks along with quite a bit of egg on your metaphorical
No Stupid Questions
Why Do We Forget so Much of What Weve Read?
"I've been thinking about a conversation that we had about a tree grows in brooklyn. Do you recall this conversation. Do you said you loved. That book loved loved. Loved it. but you couldn't remember single thing about it. Yes so. I thought you might have forgotten the conversation about how i had forgotten but anyway my point is that it's a really interesting thing that people can read books that they absolutely love so much that they're like evangelical trying to get everyone to read this book and then when you ask that person oh well what's it about. There's this long pause because like me. They have no idea at all who the protagonists were the plot. Was it a tragedy. They just have this residue of emotion. That says i loved the experience of the book and it makes me think of that actually. I don't think he's actually my angelou quote. People may forget what you said but they'll never forget how you made them feel. I don't think my said that. But i do think it's an interesting question whether we may forget what is in a book but we don't forget how it made us feel. What do you think. There's a nice thought on this topic that resonated with me. pamela paul. who's the editor of the new york times book review. She says when. I'm reading a book that i even really like. I remember the physical object. The addition the cover says. I usually remember where i bought it. Or who gave it to me. Which to me is really lovely and important information. What i don't remember she rates. Is everything else. So what's in the. I don't think that this is uncommon. You have those kind of connections to books. I do sometimes remember the cover. Or even whether i took out like outside papery part it gets in the way so i often remember. Did i take the cover off of this one or did i not. I find that my memory does hang onto some things. Which honestly i find to be. Not that useful. Mostly i remember how i felt. I remember whether i liked it. Or whether i didn't like it. Maybe that's what i want to remember. Like when i'm reading it i want to know whether i'm going to want to look fondly back at this or recommended to stephen. It could just be functional.
Dude Soup
Giant Tortoises Eat Baby Birds
"Scientists have just published the first piece of video evidence that proves the giant tortoises are fucking murder. Machines cool yeah. They have a list they do. Yeah checking one item fair. It's true the bird. They are from east africa. Shows one of these big boys hunting killing and eating a baby. But that's very exciting to watch telling fish swim in school tomorrow. You really cool evolution right. What murder but once you get good enough at evolving you just murder humans apex. Swear not late. that's an apex. Turtle it off so you said it was a baby bird though. It was a walk up to a nest. And just like oh. This looks lucia. Yes so the bird fell out of a tree. Oh of all and then fell onto the ground and then the tortoise walks up to it and just fucking start snapping at and the bird also to its credit starts pecking tortoise. The tortoise bats. Well okay. here's the thing a biologist who watched it spent a lot of time in his right up trying to convince us that it was actually a fair fight. Tortoise tortoises the size of the advantage of size the bird try to defend itself by pecking at the reptiles is. which is. it's only weak spot. Who's actually a fair fight. Is that a fair fight. Or one creature has one weak spot in one's a baby and one's probably a hundred and twenty years old. Yeah it's also got age it's aged. Yeah okay so who won though the tour okay. He's wearing armor. Yeah that's what i'm saying though. But he was. The bird was had open access to the is. That's the weak point of the eternal but deter had open access to the birds is like smacking guy in the nuts is a fair fight. That is a fair fight. Not
Timesuck with Dan Cummins
Lady Diana: Fairy Tale or Horror Story?
"Diana princess of wales oftentimes called the people's princess born into a wealthy aristocratic family with strong royal ties. Dina grew up assuming her future would be pretty damn bright of course. She assumed that she was raised. Essentially to be married someone with royal blood to be married to a high born man of means. But you couldn't have known or assumed dreamt. Maybe that you would actually marry the prince of england heir to the british throne and become the british commonwealth princess. That's exactly what happened. She i caught. Prince charles is is a teenager when he was of all things. Dating her older sister would appear to be a sweet and dreamlike. Royal romance would begin later when that would capture the world's attention then it seemed to have it all to be living a fairy tale. A little prince the off romanticized prince charming had picked her her foot at fit the fabled glass slipper and she looked like a fairytale princess. She was young elegant fashionable beautiful. And now she wasn't actual princess but fairy tales. Don't often actually really come true do they. Yes dan i was becoming a princess but she was not becoming the happy bride of a devoted in love struck prince charming their fairytale romance was fake from the beginning a show put on for the cameras to uphold the all important picture perfect and profitable image of the british royal family beneath the facade of their romance behind the beautiful clothes and jewels. Extravagant wealth was a woman who is sick and suffering. Diana wet a man whose heart and bed already belonged someone else someone. The king and queen had deemed unsuitable wife for the prince. Diana's happy heavily publicized honeymoon was spent largely in tears. She married a man who she didn't really love because you didn't really know him a man who wished he was married to someone else and now diana worked hard to hide her true feelings from the media frenzy that surrounded her. She'd sacrificed any hope for a private life. Once she'd said yes to prince charles's marriage proposal. The british media and paparazzi would now watch her every move the rest of her life often waiting for her to make a mistake looking for suspected chinks in the royal family's armor diana herself said towards the end of her life after her marriage had ended. I seem to be on the front of a newspaper every single day which is an isolating experience and the higher. The media puts you places you. The bigger the drop
Does This Happen to You
My Husband Told Me To Quit Undressing In Front of the Window
"My husband told me to quit undressing in front of the window. There's no place like home when you stayed in a motel. You're standing naked in front of the window again. My husband said then. He closed the blinds. You're probably thinking if you know me at all that this doesn't sound like me to be standing naked in front of a window and you're right at sixty eight years old. I don't gyrate nude for all the world to see. But i had a perfectly valid reason for dressing with the blinds open. The motel room was dark as a cave. Maybe my vision is failing. But i don't think so. I can still read the fine print and the eye doctor confirmed last week that my eyes were doing great her words but i have spent huge amounts of time in motel rooms recently and they are dark. I begin turning on lamps as soon as i swipe my keycard and crossed the threshold. And i don't stop until i reached the air conditioner control panel on the opposite side of the room by this time. Six twenty watt lamps glow dimly because six dim lamps only succeeded in throwing faint shadows across the room. I thrust aside the curtains push back the blinds and let the light poor in the view from the motel window is never much a parking lot or maybe a retaining wall one time. We overlooked a construction site but at least sunlight can seep through illuminating the room. Enough for me to tell if i've grabbed my black jeans or my blue ones are first motel. Stint of the summer was in minnesota. Because we went to visit kids and grandkids. We even took some grandkids from georgia with us so they can visit their cousins. For three days. I accuse the georgia grandkids of accidentally packing my swim bottoms in their luggage.
No Stupid Questions
Whats the Best Advice You've Ever Received?
"I wonder what the very best piece of advice you've ever received was. Oh that's so easy. I can't believe very asking me that influence now. I really want to know the best advice i've ever received was approximately one point five years ago when an angel from heaven visited me and said stephen life is short. And if you know what's good for you you will ask angela duckworth to make a podcast with it. Most of the questions. That was not the best piece of advice you've ever received. I think it was an angel from heaven. It might actually just been our executive producer. Okay you will have to tell me the second best piece of advice i ever received then. The advice that comes to mind is something that happened. When i was quite young i was maybe eleven. Twelve years old. I grew up in upstate. New york kind of middle of nowhere and our dad had died when i was about ten and so it was rural but people really did look each other. There came to emerge a pattern. Where men who were not my father would contact my mom and say hey. Would you like me to take little stevie out for an adventure of some kind and it was almost always fishing. That's what people did so there was this one guy. His name was bernie dusk quits. He was the barber in the town and bernie took me out on a boat in this lake. One day we were trying to catch you know the big fish and we were getting nothing. We're getting no bites and this went on for like an hour. To and i was bored but i was also very polite and obedience. I didn't say like this sucks. Onboard just sat there kept fishing then it started to rain. Really hard and bernie does quits drove the boat in towards the shore under some trees to be protected from the rain and all the sudden we started catching all these fish. But they're little fish too little to keep. But i was having a blast. Then the sun comes out and bernie dusk quits pulls up anchor and drives right back out into the middle and even though i was kind of quiet and shy and obedient. I said hey what are we doing. This is the best fishing spa ever and he said these are just little fish. We don't wanna keep catching them. It's not really worth the time. Let's go catch real fish so we went back out. We never caught a real fish. We literally sat there for another two hours. Catching nothing but the lesson. I took away after much. Rumination was that sometimes it is really a good idea to go for the big fish to not be satisfied with the little easy target in front of you. Even if you spend a lot of your time pursuing the big goal and it doesn't work out and that's something that i don't know for some reason that day stuck with me long enough that i was able to process it and as an adult think about that all the time. It's one of the reasons. I really fell in love with economics. One of the central tenets of economics is opportunity. Cost right if you spend all your time catching the little fish. You won't have time or developed the technique or the patients to ever catch the big ones. I think it's the best single piece of advice that's ever been sent my way.
BBC Newsday
Gun That Killed Billy the Kid Sells for $6 Million
Planet Money
The Lost Archives of Sadie Alexander
"There was a single piece of writing the change the way we think about economic history and completely changed the life of professor nina banks. It was an essay published in nineteen ninety one in the american economic review. It's called missed opportunity. Missed opportunity was about sadie alexander. The essay told the story of how sadie was the first black woman to receive a phd in economics in the us in nineteen twenty one but once you tried to get a job in the field. She was functionally shutout so city. Alexander went back to school and became an attorney a very important civil rights attorney. The thinking was that when she became a practicing attorney and she had a very distinguished and important career as an attorney that she had lost interest in economics. That was pretty much the end of the conversation and this essay argued that sadie. Alexander represented a huge missed opportunity for economics. Had things been different. There would have been this whole body of economic research that sadie would have contributed to the field especially when you consider the one major piece of research that she had done while still in economics. Her phd thesis for this thesis sadie. Alexander looked at the economic conditions of black families that were moving from the south to philadelphia as part of the great migration. It was a massive undertaking with tons of data intimate interviews with people about their finances. It was focused on this corner of the world. That other economists were ignoring and as nina banks. Read about all this in the essay. It's spoke to her personally. She also was a black woman and had also recently gotten her economics phd. I had done dissertation research. That was also focused on african american migrants from the south to a city in pennsylvania. to pittsburgh with. That was your does the research. You're doing very similar to city alexander's research. Isn't that crazy. It was a perfect match.
Kottke Ride Home
The History of the ICEE, the Coolest Drink in Town
"As summer rounds out. Let's cool down with the story of what was once. Hawked as the coolest in town talking about the icy david book recently shared a brief history of the frozen carbonated beverage over at tedium and shared a few things that i definitely wasn't expecting zoo. There are three different stories about how the icy began. But they all happened under the tutelage of omar nedlac while he was running a dairy queen in coffee ville. Kansas nedlac had grown up in kansas and after returning from serving in world war two owned an ice cream parlor of his own for awhile and dabbled in running hotels before ending up. Buying a dairy queen franchise location. Now here is where the stories differ. Either ned lick didn't have a soda fountain and therefore put bottled soda in the freezer. To keep it cool and sold it partially frozen. Something that is customers loved because the partial freezing created some kind of chemical change. That led to a pleasing slushy consistency. The other version of the story is that nedley did have a soda fountain but when it broke one day he threw some bottles of soda in the freezer and same thing customers were really into it. The final version. That sometimes gets told. Is that nedley regularly ran out of bottled soda during rushes and would put some in the freezer so that they could get cold faster and you know what happens next whichever version of the story is true and however the discovery i came about it was an instant hit customers loved these semi frozen sodas and would request them when they visited his dairy queen. So ned likud always had a predilection for machinery and tinkering decided he wanted to build a machine to create the slushy drinks on according to tedium. His first prototype was made out of an old ice cream machine and a cars air conditioning units and once. He had a successful proof of concept. He teamed up with the john. E mitchell company in dallas to perfect and scale up the
No Stupid Questions
Do We Buy Things We Never Use?
"So angela. I have a habit. And i suspect many other people do as well of acquiring often buy purchase. What i've come to think of as aspirational objects which is to say. I will buy stuff that i think i want. Or maybe more accurately that. I would like to want but which in fact i'll never actually use so one tiny example at home. We probably have six hundred boxes of keen wa in our cupboard seen wa as far as i know we've never actually eaten keen wa at home high protein grain. It's not actually a green per se it's close to a grain. Oh is the lagoon. No it's neither to seed. I believe but that's beside the point also similarly. I have over my lifetime bought. Hundreds perhaps thousands of books that i've never read or at least not more than a few pages of i know many people who have bought closets and basi- full of exercise equipment and golf equipment and nutritional supplements in hair oil. So my question is are such acquisitions. Nothing but a waste of time and energy or is there an upside in such aspirational thinking. Even if the thought rarely translates into deed so aspirational consumerism. I mean that's a bit of national behavior. And especially the repeated part right. I can understand buying the first back of keen wa not using it and then you know whatever money down the drain but the second bag of king juan even the third now. That's that's that's interesting. And i should say just to draw the fuller picture. I do like to keep things tidy. I will go through our cupboards at home and know purge them. You'll marie condo. Yeah i'll purge so every. Let's say six months i'll throw away or donate eight boxes of keen wa her and literally eleven but then over the next few weeks you'll buy more okay so of course when you buy that next box keen wa. You don't think let me buy another box of keen wa that i can six months from donate. You're actually thinking at that moment that you're going to make the keen wa right. Oh yeah because for every box of keen wa that i've bought there have been approximately one trillion articles written about the benefits of and. I've read them all by the way it's quite good. Okay how do you know major kean. I've eaten it out but you know when you're cooking at home it's more of an investment when you're out and you say oh kean mutt. Sure all i have to do is say the word and it's going to be brought to me well here in. I think maybe is the solution to this. Least a clue. So what is it that keen wa and books and exercise equipment having common self-improvement and effort. So i think the difference between keen wall on the menu and keeping your covered is and by the ways even just have to boil it not that much effort. I know it's not a big investment but it's a big investment for the payoff for the while payoff which is small in your view.
Does This Happen to You
Three Signs You Shouldn't Buy Whatever Someone is Selling
"Three signs. You shouldn't buy whatever someone is selling number one when they have king of the puddle syndrome. I'm basically an omni channel marketing ninja. Lucas told us. Once i optimize your seo you'll increase your sales by a thousand percent. I'm the best at what i do. You mean the best within a two mile radius. My intern muttered under her breath. Sending me an i role the marketing ninjas self-confidence was sky high but his pitch read on how do your metric compared to competitors i ask him other digital marketers had shown us track records of two to three point conversion rate increases. But lucas was baffled. It seems he didn't consider that there were others like him out there. But with more data driven sales pitches he stammered. Yep but What i do can't be summed up in a single number. It's complex because i look at the whole picture that's a little vague lucas and we hard lucas. The marketing ninja our investment would probably have vaporized thankfully his pitch fit a pattern that made it quick and easy to rule out. Still people often get fooled by others. Self-confidence it's hard to be the only person in the room thinking. I'll be the judge of that and if you're not a subject matter expert it can be even harder to spot baloney but when you're about to be bamboozled. There are a few ways to tell that self confidence is just camouflage for a lack of substance one. They exhibit king of the puddle syndrome. The only way to be the best at something when you are in fact not the best is to shrink your reference circle until you are the best in the circle. That's how millions of people can claim to be the most sought. After life coaches health experts marketing gurus or ad agencies they could be sought after by millions of clients or merely sought after in their own neighborhood
Does This Happen to You
The Time I Found a Rat in the BBQ
"Story. This week is from amy stromer. Who you'll find on medium dot com and here is the time i found a rat in the barbecue and scream so loudly. My dead grandma heard me after a steamy summer day in sonoma's county california the air cooled as evening approached. I looked up from the kitchen sink to gaze at the majestic redwoods that lined our property. Those trees mark the edge of our land and the beginning of our neighbors massive yard displaying a variety of fruit trees and gorgeous flowers. The beauty was contrasted by my grumbling. Swear words as. I washed a never ending supply of dishes. Why can't anyone else in this house. Do dishes broken arms allergic to water trying to make me crazy note to self. Check the security cameras for evidence that my family is plotting against me. I glanced at my watch and all my angry dishes thoughts disappeared because it was five o'clock and angelic humming entered my head. Five o'clock is a socially appropriate our to open a bottle of wine especially as a stay at home. Mom five o'clock also means dinner. Prep the menu featured stakes that night. Because hydration is vital to sustaining life. I carried my wine with me to start the barbecue. I opened the white french doors. And sauntered across the redwood dick to the built-in barbecue. I placed my glass on the gray flagstones counter to the right of the grill and swung open the lid. A primal scream erupted from my mouth. As i slammed the grill lid down. Oh my god. There is a rat in the barbecue.
No Stupid Questions
Can You Escape a Drama Triangle?
"Angela. I recently came across. Something called the drama triangle. Also known as the karpin triangle. Since it was created by the psychiatrists stephen cartman. Can you explain the carpet triangle. And why it's worth knowing about. I find it more useful to refer to as the drama triangle. It is dramatic. And this is how i know about it stephen. It's not because psychologist. But because i run a little nonprofit called character as you know. And when i was a green leader i even in a small team had this phenomenon where one person would not like another person and then how do you make a point. The third point was me so disgruntled employee number. One would come to me. And say hey. I don't really like employee number. Two then i would say something that i thought was comforting to disgruntled employee number one but then employee number two an hour later comes into your office annoyed about employee number one this can go around and around and motions. Heighten didn't know this term drama triangle. Until i consulted a management coach. And you realize that you're in the middle of one. Yeah well i call up. This leadership coach named dustin peterson. And he says oh classic drama triangle. Little drawing like occurs you. Here's employee number one. Here's employee number two and what you never get all three people talking at the same time and you certainly never get any resolution. I also see that. The three points are assigned to particular roles which are usually called the persecutor rescuer and the victim all right. let's start with the first person who is the victim. The victim is being annoyed by the second person. Who is there persecutor. So let's say that you're the victim. Stephen always always the victim. And somebody else. I'll just see rebecca rebecca's persecuting you rebecca's annoying you cutting you off in conversation ignoring your emails. You're the victim. She's a persecutor. Can i just say for the record. Everything you're saying one hundred percent true. I'm glad it's finally coming out on the air because you know she's got this whole holier than thou fact checking thing going on related. Stevens said this wrong. Stevens said that wrong. So now you need a third person and that's me because you who are the victim. Get to complain to someone who gets put in the role of the rescuer. So victim runs to the rescuer starts complaining about the persecutor. What typically happens. Is i just kind of comfort. You disagree with you and i spoke your flames of indignation. Another day though. Maybe rebecca's the victim and you're the prosecutor roles can switch around. But i think the whole point of drama triangles is there's always victim persecutor and that creates the need for a rescuer because the victim is looking for comfort. And they don't want to go and talk to the prosecutor because why would they do that. They're annoyed that the person so they seek a third person to comfort them and then the cycle just perpetuates because the conflict the source of the disagreement or the miscommunication is never resolved because the persecutor and the victim never really actually talk.
Timesuck with Dan Cummins
Jodi Arias and the Murder of Travis Alexander
"Jodi areas. Remember her an early summer of two thousand eight the mortgage crisis in the us loomed. Large barack obama was campaigning. For the presidential election in the fall the world was looking forward to the summer olympics in beijing. A horrifying crime was going down into phoenix suburb of mesa. Arizona travis alexander. A thirty year old mormon motivational speaker of sorts would be found five days after his murder by his friends and roommates in a scene. Look like something straight out of a slasher flick. Blood was splattered on the walls of the bathroom. Where travis his body was found along the sink mirror entitled floors. He's been stabbed nearly thirty times his throat slit and he'd been shot in the head and his friends and family immediately pointed their fingers at the one person who the all thought was most likely responsible. Jody areas a slightly built attractive woman with no criminal record. Someone who did not look like the person most would connect with travis brutal crime scene. She was the woman. Travis had been dating off and on for the better part of the past year and a half and odd woman. Once you looked into the relationship. A woman who wants slept under. Travis is christmas tree after he told her she couldn't sleep over at his house. A woman who'd snuck into his house through the doggy door after they broke up and crawled naked into his bed. A woman who. The all suspected had slashed all four of his tires twice when he'd started dating someone else for over for over a year and a half travis and jodi had been involved in a highly toxic sex crazed torrid romance after meeting at a las vegas. Mlm conference in september of two thousand six and jody's jealous suspicious and sometimes downright crazy behavior toward travis set a lot of alarm bells for his friends and we'll travis him to understand how unhealthy his relationship with jodie was he would never totally break it off with her. He just seemed to have liked to sex too much so he kept inviting her back in no matter what she did and in the end he did that too many times in the last days of may two thousand eight. Jody started putting together a plan to kill him or did she
Does This Happen to You
Three Rescues for the Price of One
"Rescues for the price of one one boy one dog one old coot bentley. And i don't see i. The reason bentley is a brown. Eyed boxer slice shepherd slash. God knows what else mix. And i'm an old coot. He's now eight so that makes him fifty six in dog years younger than me. But he's catching up. My oldest grandson and i rescued bentley five years ago. The eleven year old boy had just found out another baby would invade his house in less than a year and he was livid he already suffered through to other babies in his life his four years younger brother and a sister not yet a year old. This last one was a surprise to his parents and infuriating to the boy. Despite being the seniors sibling of the household. He didn't like it. One damn bit not sure why. Less room and attention for him. I guess who knows how an eleven year old thinks anyway. We live in the same town. So i went over to get him out of the house and hopefully his sn. It seemed like a good excuse to go get ice cream. I had no actual plan. Figured we'd hit a best buy to troll through the electronic wonders. Maybe visit brahms a big pet store. Occupied part of the same retail cluster. As the big geek paradise as past it. A sign outside announced a rescue dog audition side by that. I mean dogs. That needed it. Not those that did it. The boy opted for that. He already had a pet dog but his sudden excitement was much better than his silent brooding. What the heck. That's where we found the beast. The biggest dog on display a silky blonde. Sixty five pounder. He lay in his cage yawning while all the little yipper ze m. medium parker's on display. Set off a cacophonous row. He looked up at us and gave jason's offered fingers a token lick through the wires name on the cage. Red bentley sounded like an english butler doubted. This dogwood would hunt
Unexplained Mysteries
The Phenomenon Of "Coffin Births"
"Francois are a vias dissuade so lifted a living baby boy out of his wife's coffin. He thought it was a miracle to celebrate his son's birth he named the child. Feast dilatot french for son of the earth. The boy's name would forever be synonymous with coffin births. But he wasn't the only example of a post mortem delivery or even the first there had been other documented examples like one from roughly two hundred years prior during a time of gruesome bloodshed in europe in sixteenth century spain. The inquisition was a tool for catholic. Monarchs to keep control to stop rebellion before it started. Inquisitors traveled around the country and rooted out heresy including anti-catholic and anti royal sentiment. Those accused of betraying the throne were punished severely with practices that ranged from torture to execution. Nobody was safe not even pregnant women in one case in fifteen fifty one. The inquisition tried and sentenced a pregnant woman to death by hanging. These deaths were meant to be examples for the public reminders. Of what happens to those who choose to defy the powerful institutions that govern their lives. The woman's body remained dangling from the gallows long after her death about four hours. After the execution passersby noticed something strange according to his self-proclaimed medical professional from the time quote two living children fell from her womb. This was the first written record of what is now called postmortem. Fetal expulsion given. There aren't any other accounts of this incident. It's impossible to verify. It could have been falsified or exaggerated to illustrate the brutality of the spanish inquisition. But it's probably fair to say that until this moment humans never magin. A corpse could deliver a child
Does This Happen to You
You Can Lead a Dog to Water, but Can You Make Him Drink?
"You can lead a dog to water but can you make him drink over the years. I've taken my dogs to the veterinarian. Dozens of times for wellness dog checks accidental poisonings and other less fun things when doug does reach a certain age. They're considered senior citizens as we all know. The older someone gets the more their body glommed on health issues like a ramoro on a sharks back lover attain the ripe youthful age of thirteen. He achieved his level up. So i brought him into the vet for his reward of shots and getting felt up. He's not particularly fond of what people do to him at the vet but he does love cookies and pets. The potential bribe has always been enough to keep him on good behavior while they're due to cova. No one enters the vet office except the people working there. I handed lover off to a vet tech and waited for my phone call in my car. Fifteen minutes later lovers doctor told me that he acted like a puppy but she heard a heart murmur. I went through this before with another dog so i asked for the tests and waited longer. Lovers results came back a few days later. Everything look good thankfully but he is creating was elevated creatine shows kidney functionality lovers levels were iffy the vet told me she needed his urine. How do you want to get it. I enquired because i have never once in my life needed to get a dog to pee into a cup. We can get to text to walk him and get it that way or you can get it yourself. The vet inform me. I paused for a moment. Envisioning the absolute fun involved. Juggling a dog leash dog cooperation and a container full of dog p versus the extra charge for the vet technician's time. He pretty much puts everything out there. So i think i can do it. The next day hands covered in vinyl gloves. I took the dog and a glass jar for walk.