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The Rule of 3

Now this leads to this idea of the rule of three it turns out, if you take a step back from all of the studies that have been done in psychology on memory for the last fifty years, one of the themes that emerges is that in any given situation, we tend to remember approximately three things about every situation that we encounter, whether it's reading a book, watching a movie, going to an event, hearing a lecture, watching an online class, whatever it is, we're going to remember roughly three things about it, and so we need to make sure that we maximize the quality of those three things that we remember. Okay, now, most of us actually leave our memory for things completely up to chance, and we need to stop doing that. We need to do a much better job of making sure that we control the information that we're going toe ultimately remember, okay, so so what I'm going to do is to really focus now on how it is that we can maximize the quality of what we learned, and then how can we maximize t...

he quality of what we present to other people and in in the in the workbooks that I have here? One of the things I want to direct you to is in order to create habits, one of the things that you have to do is to is to influence your environment. So tomorrow afternoon, one of the things we're going to talk about his ways of using your environment in order to help you to change your habits, and one of the things that I gave you is some templates. So here on page three and again on page four, I believe, um, we have we have templates that you can use to help you remember things more effectively and had to help you to create better presentations. And the purpose of these isn't necessarily to fill those out right now, it's to create a scaffold just like you'd build a scaffold toe to build a building where you create a temporary structure that helps you tow t create something, some new building, you do the same thing mentally it's really useful to influence your environment, to create these scaffolds that help you to build mental habits, and one of the mental habits really is to help you to do a more effective job of learning things when you encounter them and to create presentations when you have to create presentations for other people. So how do we do this when we're trying to learn new things? And I have a couple of soapboxes, I'm going to get on to something that all of you need to be. Aware of for the next couple of days I have a lot of strong beliefs about the way that the mind works and the way that you should use it and periodically I'll try and explicitly step on my soapbox and and and tell you why it is that I think that there are some habits that you have that you need to change and then I'll do a good job of trying to step off that soapbox okay and some of these are things that I want you to ask questions about because they may fly in the face is on the things that you're doing and I'm about to get onto the soapbox in a moment so I'm just preparing you for that okay now here's the thing whenever you encounter something when it whether it's a book a movie a lecture a meeting that you're at you are going to remember roughly three things about it so how can you control what it is that you remember? Okay the very first thing you need to do is to prepare yourself toe learn you need to be ready remember memory is all about connections so you need to start by figuring out what is it that I'm about to learn what's the information gets stuff ready in your in your memory to make new connections because it turns out that that that we get better and better at learning the mohr and more we learn about something because we can attach new things to what we know about already. Think about it like this imagine, uh, well, the world cup is on right now, okay, so I'm just curious how many of you are soccer, slash football fans? Anybody? How many of you couldn't care less about? Okay, I fall somewhere in between. Okay? Um, if you are a big soccer novice, then if somebody flips on a world cup game for you, you sit down. You weren't even really prepared. You don't not even sure which countries are playing. You may not even know where some of those countries are, and what you see is a whole bunch of people running around in a fairly scattered way every once in a while, one of them falls to the ground and holds their ankle until they realized nobody's watching and then they stand back up and run around. And if I ask you later, what do you remember about the game? You remember that a lot of people ran around for a long time? You might remember that a goal got scored by the team that was in yellow, and you might even remember that some cards got pulled out every once in a while and people didn't seem happy about that. Right that's all you remember now if you're us if you're a soccer expert, that is a completely different game that you've watched because you actually understand the strategy that's going on you understand what the players are doing? You understand which team was good on the counterattack? Which team had difficulty with corner kicks? And so when you remember that game later, you can actually construct really elaborate recollections of the game you're still only remembering approximately three things, but the three things that you remember are bigger because you're able to attach what it is that you're remembering toe a vast array of knowledge of the game so the more you know, the more that you're able to remember about things, okay? By the way, um, a lot of people, uh, really begin to worry about what, what happens to their memory as they get older on dh, so I want to I want to help you with that I'm gonna okay? So I'm gonna talk about this. This isn't quite a soapbox, but it's, um don't worry about your memories you get older first thing to remember is that as you get older, it actually gets easier tto learn things not harder, not because your memory we works better, but because you know more stuff and so it becomes easier for you to take a much more elaborate understanding of a situation that you're in, you're not like the soccer novice, you're the soccer expert, you're in a situation which you can see all sorts of things that nobody else cincy and remember them because you can attach all of this new information to things that, you know already. And so it's, almost unfair, even though you've gotten older and maybe, you know, maybe your brain isn't working quite is effectively anymore. The fact is that that you have so much knowledge already that you get to use that knowledge to learn new things. Okay? Uh, as an example, I teach graduate seminars all the time where will have ten or twelve graduate students their early in their graduate careers, and I'll give them three articles too read, and they'll they'll pore through these articles, they'll read them, you know, at a pace of about ten pages and our it's excruciating for them to go through this, and then we get to class and say, so what did you think of the article? And they all go uh uh, I can't remember any of it there didn't have to flip through it, and then they go, oh, it, uh, you know, and they really only little little bites to come out and what will I do when I'm teaching these seminars? Even if their papers I haven't read before I walk into my office about twenty minutes before class I read over the paper I'm like, oh, god, it and I come in and I can talk at length about these papers. Why? Because I already know how this paper's situated with respect to the rest of the research I'm able tto learn a lot more about these papers in a fraction of the time, even though I'm considerably older now than all of my students are okay, so that's the unfair part so here's here's the thing to remember about your memory for any of you out there who who are worried that someday you might get older and that might influence your memory here's the bad news and then the good news. Okay, the bad news you are all undergoing a long, slow cognitive decline. Once you hit your early twenties, you reach your peak of brain efficiency and after that it's all downhill luckily it's downhill like that. Not like that. So that's the good news. The decline is long and it's slow, which means that actually deep into your seventies and eighties, absent riel brain injury so absent strokes or traumatic brain injury actually your brain isn't that much each worse at seventy that it was a twenty it's worse it's measurably worse, but it's not that much worse. Ah lot of it is counteracted by the fact that you know a lot more so you can actually attach new information to what you know and so you can understand situations much more readily. Okay? And it turns out that the biggest error that you can make a sze yu get older is to begin to worry about your memory because stress and worry impairs your memory far more than then just normal aging does in fact, they've done studies to show that you take adults in their seventies and you ask them to do a memory test now either before that memory test, you actually tell him, you know what? Your memory doesn't get all that much worse or they tell you who your memory gets a lot worse, the people who are told that their memory gets a lot worse to do far worse on the test and the people who are told their memory doesn't get that bad. And in fact, the people were told the memory doesn't get that bad don't even do that much worse than college students, right? It's worrying about your memory that has the biggest impact the way I like to say this is to bear in mind if you've ever hung out with teenagers and I had well to my could just turned twenty but but you know, I have three kids who are in that you know, peak of cognitive capacity they forget stuff all the time all the time I say to my kids you take out the trash who spaced you know, um how'd you do on the test? I didn't do so well I studied and then I forgot a lot of it right at no point did they take that is the sign of an impending apocalypse never once that any of my kids say, oh, I just had a senior in high school moment, right? No, no instead they just spaced on it it's part of normal brain function that every once in a while you forget something and then you meet somebody who just turned, say fifty and they forget the name of some obscure movie star and they think I'm losing it it's all over for me and from that moment on, every time they forget something, they decide that that's because they're getting old and that concern about their memory actually makes their memory worse. So you gotta chill. Okay, so one of the soap boxes I get on is I am on a crusade to stamp out the senior moment, okay, if you know anybody who says I just had a senior moment tell him to stop okay if you know somebody who's always forgetting something and they seem to really be losing it please haven't talk to their doctor because there are brain disorders that you know so senile dementia and alzheimer's and things like that that people need to watch out for as they get older but if you don't have one of those than chill okay because chances are your brain actually isn't getting that much worse you gotta relax so let's let's just completely get rid of the senior moment okay now off the soapbox ok that was so box number one now we've prepared ourselves to learn something okay now what are we going to do the next thing that we need to do is to actually pay attention one of the problems of the modern world is that nobody knows how to pay attention anymore okay now I cleverly shut this off a zay was instructed to do before I walked in the room but do you recognize this this device this is a smart phone okay smartphones create dumb people okay the reason that they create dumb people is because they provide a constant invitation to multi task and it turns out that the human mind does not multi task the human mind timeshares so have you ever been to a timeshare apartment no somebody's been to one ride herd of timeshare apartments anybody out there? Timeshare apartment how does it work somebody you by like a week at a vacation destination. And so one person goes, the one family shows up one week, then they leave. Another family shows up another week, they leave another family shows up another week. They leave that's the ideal way for a timeshare toe work. Imagine for a second that you show up to this time share and two families have come at the same time. That's kind of a disaster, right? You get the bedroom, we get the bathroom. I don't know. How is this gonna work and that's? What happens when you multi task your brain doesn't really multi task. What it does is it shifts back and forth between the various task that you're trying to do. And so you do a little bit of this and a little bit of this and a little bit of this and that's inefficient it's actually inefficient for two reasons. The first is imagine so so those of you at home right now. Okay, you you have a real temptation to multi task because you've got a screen up for this for this lecture, but at the same time your email programs probably running in the background, you might even have, you know. Messaging window. Not to mention the chat window that's here and so there's. A temptation to want to shift back and forth between several different things, not to mention that there may be things on your desk top. The problem is that as soon as you shift away from what we're doing here, I'm still talking. And I'm not going to stop just because you decided to go do something else. So mentally, you may be sitting in front of the computer. But you're somewhere else. And while you're somewhere else, things are ongoing, and you're gonna have to catch up. So the first problem you have is that you're gonna have to catch up with what's going on here because you missed something. And even in addition to that, even if I were to stand here and wait while you check your e mail, go ahead. Okay even if I were to stand here and wait while you did that uh there's still a switching costs there, there there it takes time to switch back to what you were thinking about before so if I switch off to my email now I got to think oh, who is this person who just emailed me what they want and I get all that back in my head because remember it's all about connection so I got to get all that information into my head and so and so now I get that I answer the email and now I come back and uh oh there's a lecture what was that about again? What was he talking something about threes? Oh, yeah, okay. And so they're that switching costs takes time so we have to really stamp out multitasking in our daily lives in all of the places where it comes up and I want to say several things about this this is my soapbox and I hope people weigh in on this too because this is a really important issue in the modern world. And if there's a habit, I want you all to break it's the habit of multi tasking at home it's particularly in the car, right? So there's several things that say number one a lot of you think you're really good multi taskers, okay ah, and it turns out that about five to ten percent of the population are pretty good multi taskers that doesn't mean they're great at it means that they suck less at it than other people do ok, now there was there was a serious of studies that came out at one point suggesting that women are better multi taskers than men, that that finding seems to have evaporated over the years, so it doesn't seem that that was true. And even when the study's existed, those studies tend to show that women got less worse than men. It wasn't that they didn't get worse. Okay, everyone gets worse. So that's the first thing to say second thing to say, why do people think they're good multi taskers? Because it turns out that the same areas of your brain they're up here in the frontal lobes of your brain those the and I'll talk with frontal is so if you ever let me just oriented to the brain, the brain sort of looks like a pair of boxing gloves set the wrong way around thumb of the boxing glove back of the boxing glove with hand goes in the front where the fingers are that front is the frontal lobes of the brain and in those frontal lobes of the brain, our areas of your brain that help you to shift back and forth between tasks another thing that those areas of the brain are involved in is monitoring your own performance which means that the more multi tasking you're doing them or that you are soaking up the resource is you need to figure out how well you're doing which means that you are your own worst judge and how well you're doing when you're multitasking so you have to have somebody else watch you to see if you're doing well when you multi task don't don't rely on your own judgment because you will believe that you are excellent and you are probably wrong okay um another thing to say people ask me all the time well sure, that might have been true for you old people but we have been multitasking forever because we have ipads and we have you no smartphones and we have all of these other devices we have been practising multitasking since we were little and what I'll say to you is psychologists have been studying the ability to multi task under what they called dual task performance which basically means doing two things at the same time we've been doing this for fifty years and the experiment's still work. So even though we run all these studies on college sophomores, college sophomores now still get worse when you ask them to do two things at once just like college sophomores did thirty years ago so having extensive experience multitasking didn't make us better at it it just made us learn more poorly all along the line. So the invitation to multi task is a really dangerous one, and we are almost deeply addicted to multi tasking. And let me explain why we are like rats in a box. Okay, uh, I don't know if any have any of you ever had a chance to train a rat. I mean, not like god and catch one in the butt, but they sew and they don't do this anymore, which is a good thing ethically. But when I was in college, I actually got a rat to train my lab partner and I interest psychology got a rat and so that the rat was in a box, so I don't have to touch it, which was good. I'm a little squeamish about rats, so they had this rat in a box and and you train the rat to press a bar, and the way that you do that is you don't give the rat too much to drink before it comes in and that's probably not that ethical either on dso rats really thirsty and now you reward the rat by giving it a little bit of water and a tte first, you just teach it where the water is, and then after that, you on ly reward it when it's near the bar in the cage and then on lee, when it touches the bar when it puts its paul on the bar. And finally, when it presses the bar now, after the rat learns to press the bar. Now you reward it roughly forty to fifty percent of the time or less randomly so that it can't really predict when it's gonna get a reward. And when it's not and one of the industry's that's learned this schedule really well, of course, there's a casino industry. So if you've ever hung out and watched people playing slot machines, they are literally getting people to learn to press a bar, okay, repeatedly until the social security check is gone. Okay, who else? Where else does this apply in our lives? Well, it applies when we have our smartphones. Why? Because you pull that smartphone out. It's got that little badge that tells you you've gotten a new male or a new text or something like that. You pull your phone out, and when you pull your phone out and you see that you've gotten a new message, what happens is your brain says, oh, this is something I should learn because something new and unexpected happened and that's really how habits are created as we'll see in the next the next situation is that your brain is learning oh, something new and interesting happened I should learn this so you pulled the phone out, you look at it, something new and interesting happened you look, you had a message, you put it away, you pull it out again sometime, but there was nothing you put it away, put it, pull it out again. So look, there was a message and it's, unpredictable, and so what happens is you learn to create the habit to pull out your smartphone so that you get that room ward of noticing a new message fifty, sixty percent of the time that you pull it out of your pocket so you are basically a rat in a box, okay? And you have develop this very deep seated habit to check your smartphone, which is, or and it's it's true, not just for smartphones when you're sitting at your desk and you've got your email program up. Whether it's whether it's a program like outlook or whether it's just a brought you something on email jamming your browser, you've learned to check the little badge to show that you have new messages even worse, if you also have twitter and on facebook up where you could see if there were new comments on your latest post on facebook, or if somebody retweeted something that you just wrote these air all invitations now to multi task while you're doing something else, and the problem is that every time that you multi task, you are pulling your attention away from the thing you're supposed to be doing, the thing that you're supposed to be learning, the thing that you're supposed to be reading if you're sitting in a meeting at work and and and this is awful, I mean, when you think about people in business, in entrepreneurship, you have a meeting and people are checking their cell phones, all right? What are they doing? They're leaving the meeting mentally in orderto to take care of something that happened across the globe, right? We can't do that, we have to stamp out multi tasking if we're going to get people tto learn effectively if we're gonna have people who really are taking away from meetings as much as they're supposed to be taking away, and this is really a problem, it requires a cultural change. We have to tell people we need to change the culture that when you know, this idea of be here now, right goes all the way back to the sixties and seventies, we need to do that. In business, we need to do that in our daily lives we need to be involved in what we're doing and not in all of the other things that we potentially have access to and this requires a number of changes. It means that if you have if your if you are responsible for hosting a meeting, make people park their technology at the door, right force people to disgorge their cell phones when they walk into meetings and I've been in meetings now where people put baskets in the middle of the table and said put your telephone in there so that no one can be checking their cell phones while there while they're in a meeting okay, so we really need to change the culture in that way we also need to recognize that that that we force people to multi task we expect to get answers to our emails within milliseconds of their arriving because we know that the e mail on lee took milliseconds to traverse the globe right when I was a kid kid I went to college fall of nineteen eighty four when I got to college my mom sent me a letter every week, every day for the first six or eight weeks of school, every single dad go to my box there's a little yellow envelope with my mom's teacher handwriting there'd be a little note she would say something about her day and I would read these letters and at the end of the week I would sit down and I'd write a letter back to her and I mail it and we had this wonderful correspondents took place over about a two week period and all was well and now my mom has email and so what happens is my mom sends me an email and if I haven't responded in about twenty minutes she follows up with a text message and then she calls to make sure everything's okay okay the fact that that emails arrived so quickly does not mean they have to be answered at the same speed almost everything really will keep there are very few things that are fires that need to be put out immediately and so we have to give people permission to really pay attention to really learn because if we don't give people that permission then they're gonna live their lives at the surface of things and we have to we really have to stop that and this is a this is really a big problem write this because because we have created a culture in which we demand that every single thing be done right now I mean the amazing thing is all of you have agreed to take three days of your life tto learn something new okay how often does that happen in most of the time we barely give ourselves fifteen or twenty minutes to do something and I'll bet that each of you were sitting at home with the opportunity to multi task right now are starting to feel that little jones there that says I got to be checking my messages okay you have to learn to resist that urge on one of the things we'll see tomorrow afternoon is that one of the things we need to do is to play around with our environment we need toe protect ourselves from ourselves it is okay to shut down your email program for a while it is okay to shut off your cell phone for a while it is okay to put yourself in an environment in which you single task in which you focus on just one thing at a time so that's really crucial yeah so you know sometimes I end up in situations where like let's say I'm watching a video and this actually was not I was watching a video about howto podcast there wasn't that much information there may be three takeaways that I could take from it and they could have put it all in ten seconds but I need to watch the video so I tend to multi task because I'm convincing myself that that that's I'm not wasting those twenty minutes how hi lindy decide yeah that's a great question and obviously every once in a while you are at something where your physical presence is required and your mental presence isn't you know, they're I've been in meetings where they just wanted bodies in the room by all means multi task away, however, I would say that in a lot of situations you never know when a new piece of information is going to turn out to be really valuable. So on day three, one of the things we're going to talk about it, cem cem aspect of more effective thinking and one of the things that were going to see there is that it's actually really important to understand the details of the way that the world works, and not just a have some general sense of how it works to the extent that you live life on the surface of things, you may not have the knowledge you need to do something really smart later, and unfortunately, you never know which piece of knowledge you're going to need until you need it, and so often, it's actually really valuable to invest yourself in the details of something and to be responsible for that, because even if you're not sure why it's going to be later, it may very well turn out to be important later. So one thing we're going to see is if you look at the history of inventions, for example, and innovation and innovation, of course, is crucial for current business and crucial for entrepreneurship. The history of innovation is filled with cases in which people were able to take obscure elements of their knowledge that didn't seem relevant at first and use those to actually help them to solve a problem in a a new and exciting way and so actually holding yourself responsible for details that didn't seem obviously important can can be valuable of course, that requires doing a good job of selecting the sources where you get your information every once in a while somebody really doesn't have anything to tell you and in those situations, you know, multi task questions yeah, well, that one that you just brought up andrew came up in the chat room as well. About when is when do you limit sort of the multi tasking you kind of mentioned the physical versus the mental capacity, but we had another one come in. This is from habit hunter in the chat room. This goes back to what you were talking about with the memory and losing your memory over time. You may be getting to this in a later segment, but they want to know do memory exercises work? Is there anything we can do like luminosity for exit, for example or other sort of braingames things like that? Yeah, boy, uh, if you're gonna pick something to do for twenty minutes a day to improve your mental capacity, sleep okay, honestly, most of us are are chronically sleep deprived and it turns out sleep is incredibly important for your memory let's face it right by the time you had forty five years old, you've been asleep for approximately fifteen years, right? And that's an awful lot of time, so you'd better be doing something interesting and in fact you are your brain is continuing toe learn while you're asleep both skills so I play a musical instrument I mentioned I play the saxophone if you practice the sacks and then sleep, you get better still then went at that then you were after just practicing and you also learn conceptual information your memory is consolidated, it is locked in while you're asleep. So so sleep is by far the best thing anyone can do almost anyone could do. There are a few people out there, most of whom are not in the entrepreneurial community. There are a few people out there who are getting enough sleep most people aren't and you could tell whether you're getting enough sleep, sit and read something that's mildly interesting. Okay, if you find yourself dozing off while you're reading it, you're not getting enough sleep. Okay, so even a twenty minute nap is a good thing uh avoid brain games like the plague, they do absolutely no good for you whatsoever if you think about it, it would be sort of like on lee doing, you know, bicep exercises on lee, these would be bicep exercises that may not actually help you too do anything but even if you on lee worked your biceps, your brain is all about the coordination of information across various aspects of your brain. And so if I just do a couple of very abstract tasks, I don't actually teach my brain to do something that's ultimately gonna help me very much you are far better, so so if you're not going to sleep and you want to do something for twenty minutes a day that's going to help you read something interesting that's not in your domain of expertise learns something new because the more knowledge you have the mohr effectively you're going to be able to think in the long run. It turns out that the people who are really smart are the ones who know a lot it's all about what you know, um one way that I often say this is, you know, they einstein is generally considered to be a smart guy. I think we could all agree they have einstein's brain in a vat in princeton and presumably they want to study einstein's brain and figure out what it is that made einstein so smart and so I'm going to tell you something right now we are not going to learn anything about what made einstein so smart from his brain nothing if we want to understand what made einstein so smart we need to spend our time understanding what he did when he was sitting in the patent office in geneva all those years reading paper is walking through the streets and studying clocks and thinking about things it was that ability to acquire knowledge and to make connections between it that made einstein who he wass and not anything interesting about his brain okay so so we we we so that this is a long way of saying you know don't do these abstract braingames learn things sleep engaging conversations with people but really maximize the content of what you know and don't worry so much about whether the individual pieces of your brain are functioning at some kind of capacity even the on ly people I would recommend these games for or if you ever relatives in their seventies and eighties and they're not that mobile anymore and they don't have much social interaction action and so they spend a lot of time watching tv and having information washing over them doing something active can be very helpful for those people even then you know just buy him a book of crossword puzzles but but but that's those are the only people I think who would really benefit from from engaging in activity rather than than having activity engaged over them about this multi tasking thing when it becomes sort of habitual because when you were talking about, I was thinking about it, I was watching a dvd at home and it's just this hour half movie, it took me six hours to watch this thing because it kept pausing, oh, got to go do laundry oh, the durables ring or any dancer that email or something, and it is a reflecting on that's like that's ridiculous, but technology offered me the opportunity deposit and get all these other things done. So was I'm or efficient because I could do that? Well, let's hear some of their explanation? Yeah, that's a great question, so you know, to what degree could multi tasking making more efficient? And the answer to that question is it depends, right? So if that hour and a half video that you're watching was pure entertainment didn't really matter that much, and you were able to stop and take care of all these other important things in your life while you were doing that. It's probably fine, but, you know, think about the typical teenager these days teenagers, air spending three and four hours doing homework that probably ought to take him about forty five minutes, because what they're really doing is splitting your time between homework. Read it mostly read it I think and a couple of other you know sites and what's happening there is that rather than just buckling down and taking the half hour or forty minutes that would be required to do the work they're spreading it out over this longer period of time which has problems galore you don't learn it is effectively you ah you you take way too much time which is frustrating and then you have a bunch of teens who are overstressed because they feel like they're doing nothing but homework but they're not really doing nothing but homework there doing nothing but homework credit facebook vine you know andi all sorts of wonderful texting apse that that we won't get into here so you know, I really think that that if we adopt the strategy of working when we're at work and not working when we're not at work then we actually make our lives better right? But that does require creating a new set of habits and the very first thing you could do again toe kind of preface what were going to say tomorrow afternoon is to protect yourself from yourself by shutting down some of these programs parking some of your technology at the door and finding the things that get in your way and just making it impossible to engage with those things while you're trying to get something else done it actually makes your life much better any other questions now? Just a few more clarifications on the multitasking we should. Johnny, for instance, says, well, is listening to a podcast while driving is that considered multi task king like, when can you are? I know a lot of times I'll listen to audio books, one out for a run or working out now is that something where the physical and the mental still not a good idea to be multitasking, right? So the danger with multi tasking is the prospect that there will be something that you needed to learn that will interfere with something else that you need to learn. Okay, so listening to a podcast while you're running, that sounds like a good idea because the running itself, first of all it's, kind of habitual and as we'll see in the next unit, habits are one of the ways of breaking multi tasking because you can actually, if you do something purely by habit, then you could do that and something else at the same time, so your ability to run probably won't get in the way of your ability to listen to a podcast. However, one of the dangers is that if you're doing something that does require paying some attention, then in fact, that can be taken away. By trying to multi task so among the other crazy things that I do in my life, I have a radio show in austin called two guys on your head where we provide some information about psychology toe over the radio and and we went to the tech, the department of transportation to a conference that they were holding on distracted driving on it turns out that that even talking on the cell phone, let alone listening to a podcast on audio book while you're driving makes you about as bad as a driver as if you were drunk, right? And this isn't just staring at that something while you're texting this is talking on the cell phone now it turns out that most people who are drunk don't run into things either, right? I mean, drunk drivers tend to get into problems when there's something that they need to be paying attention to that they you weren't paying attention to. And the same thing happens with distracted driving. You don't notice another car you don't notice that you've moved out of your lane. You don't notice a pedestrian on the side of the road even when you're carrying on a cell phone conversation and so and so and you don't notice that you don't notice again, right those areas of your brain that that that monitor your performance or being soaked up by the multitasking so in fact um, what? So what does that mean, really, for listening to audio books and things like that while you're driving, it means that if you're on a on a deserted freeway and your only job is to keep yourself in your lane, it's probably fine. Um, if you get into traffic, if the weather gets bad, if you're driving in this city, then shut off the audio book and drive because, uh, you know, particularly because the, you know, if you think about what can go wrong, you know what can go wrong with the car is far worse than what could go right. You know, it's it's that that vanishingly small probability, increased probability of an accident or what feels like a vanishingly small probability has huge consequences if you wrap yourself around a telephone pole or you wrap yourself around another person, right? So so it really is worth minimizing the multitasking in any kind of serious driving situation.