The Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology (And How to Reclaim Them)
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Summary
While he s a digital skills educator who appreciates the way technology can enhance our abilities, Graham Lee worries that our ever-increasing reliance on algorithms and artificial intelligence may be robbing us of elements that are vital to the core of who we are. He s the author of Human Being: Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We're Losing to Technology.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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would you get lost while driving downtown if you didn't use gps do you find yourself
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struggling to read a book for more than five minutes without checking your phone
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would you have trouble writing a grammatically correct email without google's auto-suggested
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corrections do moments where you run up against your dependence on modern technology get you
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wondering about the way some of your personal capabilities seem to be atrophying graham lee
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has spent years thinking about this idea while he's a digital skills educator who appreciates the
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way technology can enhance our abilities he worries that our ever-increasing reliance on algorithms and
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artificial intelligence may be robbing us of elements that are vital to the core of who we are
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lee is the author of human being reclaim 12 vital skills we're losing to technology and today on the
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show we talk about some of those dozen endangered skills including navigation reading writing
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craftsmanship and solitude lee offers case studies on how these skills enhance our humanness
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why their loss matters and how we can reclaim these capabilities in a greater sense of satisfaction
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and self-efficacy after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is human being
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all right graham lee welcome to the show thank you so you are a digital skills educator what sorts of
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digital skills do you teach so over the years i've taught in all manner of different digital skills
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from the likes of digital marketing to various digital technologies and how to use them things
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like analytics data science ux design various aspects like that okay so what's interesting though
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despite being a digital skills educator you wrote a book called human being reclaim 12 vital skills we're
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losing to technology which is about how our reliance on technology and digital tools that you teach
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is making us less human so how did a guy who teaches digital skills end up writing a book about how our
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digital technology is robbing us of our humanness yeah no good point i mean i was finding in training
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people i think just through that process that i just began to get a sense of something going missing
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that with people spending just the type of people we work with where typically they're in roles so they're
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very digitally orientated a lot of screen time i just began to to notice and i began to read up on the
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topic there's a lot of technology criticism literature out there and i dug quite deep into it got very
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interested but but found that a lot of it was doom saying and didn't really offer any practical
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guidance as to what to do about any of these aspects of whatever might be negative about how we interact
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with technology today so i began to think well what can we do technology's not going it clearly is here
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to stay and if anything is just becoming increasingly a part of our our lives so i just began to think well
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what's the middle ground how can we enjoy the benefits of it while also mitigating the negative
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sides that can happen how did you select the 12 skills that ended up in your book
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yeah i mean that was through a lot of careful thinking one of the the chapters is reading which touches on
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commonplace books which was a discipline that people back in sort of the 18th century and beyond used to use
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and if they were ever studying a topic they would have different headings in a book that often were just a
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simple word and i used that process so i i sort of delved into across this literature where i felt
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skills were being impacted and i whittled down eventually to these 12 but what i found really was
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they touch on almost every part of of our lives and some of the most fundamental things that we do
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day to day so someone might hear the the theme of your book and retort well do we really need to be
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able to do things like navigate which is one of the skills you talk about or memorize things if
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technology can do them faster and better i mean can't offloading things to technology allow us to do
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more of other things what's your response to that argument yeah i mean i think there's certainly some
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things that it's really handy and pleasant and useful to offload to computers there's certainly no doubt
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about that but there's some critical abilities whether they're learned or innate that are very
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much part of who we are as human beings and when we begin to offload those it is to the detriment of
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our own personal capabilities and those capabilities often spin out to other aspects of of our lives
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so my principle really and this of the key thread that i run through the book is we're at risk of
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losing really key parts of of us and important notions of what makes us capable and able in
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different parts of our lives yeah um something i think about is whenever we rely too much on
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technology we reduce some of the joy we can experience as human beings some of these skills
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you talk about like navigation one of the things i find incredibly satisfying i mean i use gps all the
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time to you know if i'm going to a restaurant i've never been before in town i'll just pull it up in
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google maps and just get there as quickly as possible but i've noticed one of the things i
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enjoy i get a lot of satisfaction out of is just navigating on my own trying to figure things out
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looking at the lay of the land and using my own innate sense of direction to figure out well
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i know this restaurant's in this location how can i get there and sometimes you get lost that's part of
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the fun of navigating on your own as well because you learn about your learn things about your city
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that you didn't know about so whenever i rely on google maps i miss out on that true yeah no exactly
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i think what you miss out on is there's a loss of awareness of your surroundings the attention that you
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have to focus outwards when you're trying to make your own way and learn environment around you
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versus having your head down and just being guided so that's the the prime difference really
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and the other thing too i've noticed too is when i rely too much on technology when the technology
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doesn't work i end up being helpless so everyone's probably experienced that when they're using google
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maps there's construction and the maps hasn't updated for that construction and you're like well what
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do i do now or you take the turn that google tells you to take and actually that's not the most
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efficient or effective way that's right i mean there can be those moments where you suddenly
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feel a bit hapless or there's a gap you stumble a bit mentally and i think those are the times to
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look out for whether it's navigating or whatever skill it might be i often find those are the prompts
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that show you that something's going missing and that can help to alert you and something too i've
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noticed i'm not against using technology i use a lot of technology to make my work more efficient
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but one thing i've noticed is that by knowing how to do these things we'll call it manually like in
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my head without using the technology i'm better able to understand how the technology works and
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actually make it work for me so here's an example going back to my law school days so in legal research
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when you're researching a case on how to you know argue for it write a memo or write a brief you have to
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look at case law so you have to look at previous cases to bolster your argument for your case and
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when we were in law school one of the things we did that first week we learned how to find case law
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using these books west law has these series of books that you can use to find cases and it's uh they
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had this elaborate keyword system so you have to like know the keyword and then you can find the
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keyword and from the keyword you can find the cases in the case books and they spent a you know
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a week or two teaching us how to use these physical books to find case law but the thing is you can west
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law has like an online thing where you just like type in your legal issue and it'll bring up the cases
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but the legal research and writing people said well the reason why we tell you how to use this tactile
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system is that you're better able to understand how the law is organized so that whenever you go and
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you just use the the search feature you'll understand how you got the result and maybe
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the search feature didn't give you all the results that you know you needed maybe by going through the
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books you're able to serendipitously find things you otherwise wouldn't find and i've noticed that
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with when i use tools like grammarly for my writing to edit because i've spent so much time learning how
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to write you know in college and in law school sometimes grammarly will give you suggestions and you're
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like that's actually not good i don't like that suggestion so i'll ignore it and i imagine someone
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who didn't go through that experience you didn't have that scaffolding and the elements of good
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writing they would just think well you know grammarly says do it like that so i'll just do what it says
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and it might actually not be the best option yeah yeah so i think what you're you're saying there is
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that any guidance on how to help with a skill or whatever you sort of have to test out yourself
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and give it a go and work out what works best for you yeah i totally agree with that yeah so let's
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dig into some of these skills the first one you talk about is navigation so we've talked about today
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most of us use google maps or apple maps to get around but you highlight that humans have long been
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able to navigate great distances without the use of technology so what can we learn about the human
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ability to navigate from polynesian seafaring that's right well so polynesian seafaring
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is one of the only ancient forms of seafaring that actually was recorded in the last strands of
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people still exhibiting and showing how they use these abilities in particular there was a british
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sailor called david lewis who went over to some of these far-flung islands and spent time with them
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he himself was trying to learn it he was a sort of around the world adventurer so he spent time there's a
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a fantastic book that he wrote there's a couple of others that in detail goes through all the
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different methods that these sailors would use when navigating in the open sea and it's particularly
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interesting if you think about navigating in the open sea versus in a city or with landscape around you
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it's far harder because there's very few signs to actually follow yet they would get from point a to point b
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exactly as they needed to and how they did it put simply is purely by paying attention so they were far more
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observant of their surroundings they knew what to look out for they really closely studied different aspects to give
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them an indication of whether they were going the right way or whether to make any adjustments and that was
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the key thing i found and another took away from it that it's a deployment of your your attention
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to the world around you and almost gives you a bit of a handle on your your circumstances around you
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that's the main difference yes if you've seen the movie moana the disney movie moana you see a little
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bit of that polynesian seafaring so they pay attention to things like the stars yeah and they would
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have stories that they would pass on orally it's basically they're telling themselves a story as
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they're going from point a to point b that's how they remembered okay i gotta look for the star in
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this point in the sky they'd pay attention to things like water temperature they put their hand in the
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water and you know based on the temperature they well we're close or far to land they pay attention to
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animals they'd see animals i guess the phosphorus in the ocean sometimes it lights up it creates sort of a
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runway for them absolutely absolutely yeah exactly and the the color the the certain hue that might
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appear in clouds might indicate that they're over land or they're over a reef and even the difference
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of movement of clouds they'd spot that certain clouds would slow when going over land versus sea
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almost as if it's held by a kite line and so little you know small traces of hints or clues
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that the the person myself they wouldn't be so well versed and they certainly wouldn't notice them
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you see this in other indigenous people i know in australia aborigines to navigate they tell themselves a
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story they just kind of recite a story to themselves that allows them to get from point a to point b
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and it part of that story is you have to pay attention to these small details in the landscape
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i also know the inuit right in the arctic where it's it's sort of like the sea it's just sort of this
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yeah landscape that there's not a lot of difference in how things look but because they pay attention to
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really small minutiae like maybe the snow is a little bit different the wind is blowing differently
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they're able to navigate vast distances without getting lost yeah exactly no there's actually quite
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a similar example in this sort of white blanketed environment similar to the sea you're quite right
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so what are the downsides or the unintended consequences on ourselves in our modern people
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over relying on gps to get around so i would say two aspects so one the more we use gps the less
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we're studying our surroundings and focusing and paying attention on them so i think there's just
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something you lose a sense of place i suppose is probably how i how i describe it a grounding
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in your environment but secondly the more you use your your your navigation abilities it does fine
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tune your memory your spatial awareness there's certain strengths of mind that it gives you
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which undoubtedly carry with you in other parts of your your life and the less you do that there's
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something that just weakens that gets lost that i'm sure then impacts you in other parts of your
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your life and particularly your memory is totally entwined with your your navigation abilities
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yeah so something scientists have found is we the way we remember things it's we actually create like
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a geographical map in our brain and one of the things that scientists they're concerned about
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they're researching this is that our over reliance on gps because we use gps we don't have to create
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that mental map in our head as you said it might have unintended consequences on our memory overall
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and one thing that they're concerned about is it might increase the chances of alzheimer's as we get
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older because since we're relying on gps to do this navigation for us we don't have to remember or create
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this mental memory map in our head that might affect us later on and actually hurt our brain health as we get
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older yeah exactly um there are there have been quite a number of studies that do confirm this
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the practicing navigation abilities really does have quite an effect on your brain it's been seen to
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actually cause brain matter to develop and grow and equally diminish if we're not using those abilities
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so definitely something that's been proven so what are some things that people can start doing today
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to reclaim our natural ability to navigate yeah i mean one quite clear one is to just seek to reduce
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the amount you're using sat nav and an easy one to try is when you make a trip try and use it on your
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outbound trip and then on your return journey rely on your own abilities and by doing that you can find
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your way somewhere you know simply using this sat nav but because you know you're going to have to do
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it on your way back you have to pay more attention and you'll notice in doing that you're suddenly
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you're scrutinizing road signs you're looking at the fields you're passing whatever it might be
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to just give you an indication of how to get back so straight away you notice that you're just more
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alert you're more switched on to what's passing you by some other action points you provide use a printed
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map so buy a printed map of your area and if you have to navigate instead of using your google maps
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look at the printed map first and chart out your journey on the printed map because what you're
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doing is you're adding an extra step in your navigation process like you have to use your brain
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to transfer the the information on the map and actually navigate with it that's right yes maps are
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fundamentally different to gps i mean with a map if you're out say on a hike you've got to turn and
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orient orientate that map to match your surroundings so you're going for a mental process to almost
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overlay it and make sense of it and read it and apply it to your surroundings where sat nav there's it's
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guiding you step by step you know it's switching to your perspective and it removes those mental leaps
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and the mental work that you have to do if you're using a map so they're actually very different
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another tip i'd recommend take an orienteering class if one's available in your area that's been
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one of the most fulfilling and satisfying things i've done is learning how to orient myself with a
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mapping compass and there's all these cool tricks like math tricks you use to triangulate where you're
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at and it's cool you just look at a map and look at your landscape and use your compass and pinpoint
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exactly where you're at yeah absolutely you know it could be very rewarding i think something that
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really pays back and i'm quite sure gives you it's something that can be intangible in some ways but
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certainly a more connection a deeper connection with the area around you and you can test yourself
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and branch out further and it really does wide i think it widens your perspective okay so don't rely
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rely on gps all the time maybe use it only in certain situations another skill you talk about is
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movement how is movement a human skill and how is technology atrophied our movement skill yeah so this
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was one perhaps most enjoyed researching because it really did open my eyes to how little we move
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when we're at a screen for all intents and purposes we practically stop moving the way that a screen
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catches our attention so if you're watching tv or you're in the cinema it really does pull you in
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so it's commands your focus naturally if you're sat at a laptop even more because you're actively
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engaging with it you're moving your hands a slight sway of your shoulders and that's it now if you
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actually begin to look at the number of hours that a typical person is doing that they're surprisingly
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high i think we all would think that they're of a certain level but the number of hours were
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immobilized because of using screens is huge in everyday life nowadays and if you then compare that
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to our evolutionary past and what's led us to have the physical form that we have as human beings
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there's a total mismatch we evolved primarily to walk and run we're one of the few species that is
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bipedal you only can look at say kangaroos or birds there's very few other species that stand on two
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legs and we evolved to do that predominantly as a method of hunting has been found where we were in packs
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would hunt down prey and our main strength has been endurance that we're able to cover long distances
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in ways that a lot of other species simply can't do and our bodies basically are primed to walk and
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run we have the most fantastic ability and all aspects of our bodies are attuned to allow that to
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happen and that's what we're built to do so when we stop doing it when we're static sat down or laid
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down on the sofa our muscles degrade our bones equally suffer and so many of the the health
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issues that people face today the biggest source is lack of movement sedentariness rather than diet
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alcohol smoking it supersedes all of these there was one study i came across it was a substantial
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study of 300 000 people across europe and it found that lack of exercises is the absolute top cause of
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early death rates so it is very important yeah we had a guy on the podcast herman poncer who studies
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metabolism and he's done a lot of studies on indigenous like hunter gatherers the big takeaway i got from that
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episode is that as you said human beings are designed to move we have to move we don't move then we
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easily put on body fat but if you look at other primates they can just like not move at all and
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they'll eat and instead of their bodies turning that into fat tissue they just turns into lean tissue
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humans are the opposite if we consume calories and we don't move our body just naturally turns that into
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fat and that causes all these other health issues so i think we're saying here our technology
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causes us to be more sedentary so we have to be proactive about moving more and so that's something
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i've tried to do take walks in the morning and get up from the the screen every you know 30 45 minutes and do a
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little movement break yeah exactly exactly and what i found illuminating is just considering how much more
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people walked and ran in in the past one thing i i came across was a look at native american
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running abilities so much like polynesian sailing is one of the last reported examples of that
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fundamental skill that we've had as humans native american running is another example of that for
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how much we used to move there was a book an article at one stage that stuart brand the founder of the
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whole earth catalog and now more recently the long now foundation in san francisco and he asked a writer
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to compile an analysis of of native american running abilities and this eventually took shape as a book
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that you can still get now it's called indian running i think it came out in i think in the early 1980s
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and it's fascinating to see how much people ran across all age groups i mean this is an ability we take
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late into life so endurance sports is one aspect that actually you can follow into your 70s and beyond
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as long as you keep that up and trails and furrow fares when first sort of arrivals got to north america
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south america trails and furrow fares were found across the whole span of the american continent
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people quite obviously it was their own only method of transport and that that that's how they got around
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obviously now we have cars we have public transport and we're sat down a lot of the time
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so there is our way of living is fundamentally different so that does need a bit of proactivity
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to just remind yourself and prompt yourself to just get out and get moving again but the difference
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that it can make for your health and well-being physically and mentally is substantial we're going
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to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors
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and now back to the show so another skill you got is reading how has technology atrophied our
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reading ability arguably the internet has only increased the amount we read we're constantly
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reading text messages social media updates blog posts online articles so how has technology
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made us worse at reading yeah i mean technology i think it's fair to say has changed how we read
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and it's a strength often we become highly capable at scanning vast quantities of text just because
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of the abundance of information textual information online we're very good at quickly working out if
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something's relevant to us but i find that we often we sift to almost work out what to disregard
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rather than what to really closely attend to um and i looked at periods in our past where we read
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actually very differently and the renaissance was a time when reading abilities were probably at the
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highest level as humans and at that time reading was very much an active pursuit so people would would
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sit down and they actually would very typically annotate as they read so they would mark up underlining
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writing in the margins what became known as marginalia so books from that period have scrolls and
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scribblings all over them they really were made their own they also used commonplace books i just
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touched on before where they would note take and take out the key pieces of information that were
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relevant for them and write them in their their own notebook that they took away with them and that
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active process where you're really focusing and intently involved in the reading process make sure that
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you take away a lot more with you it becomes part of you it is far more easily memorable versus
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the sort of in attention in some ways of just flitting between one thing and the next not really
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taking the time to focus and an online medium just isn't so disposed to that physicality of marking
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things up and almost sort of getting a handle on things and interestingly in the renaissance so many
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words that were used at the time to describe some of the different aspects of reading related to the
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latin word for hand manis so we have like manuscript manual and and funnily enough in the marking up that
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people would do at that time they'd often use what was called a manicule which were little pointing
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fingers that people use to indicate aspects of the text which were most interesting and today that's
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more commonly we'll see that on a cursor that we're moving across on the screen so it's quite different
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okay so to improve your reading make reading more physical it sounds like yeah make it yeah and more
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active so i i actually used this method for researching my book so i i only read physical books
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i highlighted uh underlined wrote in in the books which i really now enjoy i feel that they really do make
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them your own you know you've got your own thoughts and learning process it's there on the page
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i hand wrote all my notes i did then digitize it and and use it just so it was a bit more searchable
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afterwards but i found going through that process it allowed me to make the topic my own and for me to
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interrogate it really closely and in a lot of detail and sort of you know it can be harder but that's just
00:27:26.460
the way it is that i think any proper learning or mental work is an exertion but that exertion pays off
00:27:34.380
with the information that you gain and the wider sort of learnings and outlook yeah i prefer physical
00:27:40.360
books over digital books i use both in my work but i find that i i absorb more and can remember more
00:27:47.080
when i use a physical book with physical books i think there's that connection between memory and
00:27:53.120
physical location like when i read a physical book when i open the book up i have an idea of like well i know
00:28:00.020
it's like towards the front of the book and in the upper part of the left hand page that the bit i'm
00:28:07.020
looking for you can't do that with a kindle book because everything's just flat there's no no place
00:28:12.520
to orient yourself yeah that's true that's very true it's it's interesting because you're you're
00:28:17.260
actually using some of the same aspects of your navigation abilities and in some ways sort of
00:28:21.900
spatial awareness and that's connecting into your memory and your ability to comprehend something and
00:28:28.160
carry it away for later and something else i've been trying to do more of is making time for
00:28:33.140
dedicated reading well where i'll read for maybe just try an hour non-stop and that can be hard if
00:28:39.280
you know your reading has been just in five minute spurts so maybe set aside like i'm going to really
00:28:45.700
push myself get a really dense novel or dense non-fiction book i'm going to try to read it actively
00:28:51.660
for an hour and you'll you'll find yourself you'll you'll be pooped after that yeah it's very true it's
00:28:57.220
certainly a skill that you hone that you get increasingly able to handle more text as you go
00:29:03.500
but as i say try and read with a pen in hand you know if it's non-fiction or something that you're
00:29:08.160
you're trying to study to take away whatever it might be something to do with work or maybe you're
00:29:13.380
learning you know how to build a shed or something reading with a pen in hand just gets you more involved
00:29:18.980
and i find that really does help the learning process yeah i do that too so i've got my own
00:29:24.200
little note-taking system that i use when i read a book and prep for a podcast conversation and then
00:29:29.680
i'll sometimes if i need to i'll write notes at the end of a chapter kind of summarizing the the key
00:29:36.960
takeaways i got from that chapter that so when i go back i can just pull that easily and also i mean
00:29:42.620
just the act of summarizing helps me understand the material better well funnily enough that's something
00:29:48.000
that a lot of people did in the renaissance and montaigne the french philosopher he did exactly
00:29:51.580
that he summarized at the start of his books the key outputs so there's certain habits that just
00:29:57.420
make sense and naturally you know work so there's three skills you highlight in the book art writing
00:30:03.240
and thought that have recently been encroached upon by artificial intelligence so you can use chat gpt to
00:30:08.640
create images get ideas and you could spit out some pretty well-written articles in just a matter of
00:30:14.400
seconds and i want to talk in particular about writing because as someone who makes their living
00:30:18.820
writing i think a lot about what these large language models like chat gpt are going to what
00:30:25.680
effect they're going to have on the profession of writing and even if and how the fundamentals of
00:30:29.520
writing are going to be taught to kids in the future we've already touched on this a bit earlier
00:30:33.560
but what do you think we miss out on when we don't engage in writing and just let artificial
00:30:38.780
intelligence do the writing for us yeah well i think we miss out on a lot so in the book i look
00:30:46.860
at winston churchill who although most people think of him naturally as a wartime leader his second
00:30:53.400
profession was as a writer the existing words that were written by him total around 20 million words
00:30:59.900
that appeared in his public published books his speeches his memos and various documents he created
00:31:07.060
through his career so it's hard to find any other leader of such you know well-known notoriety that
00:31:14.760
wrote so much so it was very much something that was part of who he was and helped him untangle his
00:31:22.020
thoughts and clarify the direction he wanted to go on on any topic and he dictated a lot he dictated in
00:31:29.520
the car the bath one of his assistants would use a muffled typewriter to try and make sure that she didn't
00:31:36.340
disrupt his thoughts as he spoke so he found that the act of speaking equally helped helped his his
00:31:42.980
thinking and there is i think a fair argument to say that that that nuanced approach to assembling and
00:31:50.000
structuring his thoughts allowed him to have a far more ready appreciation of the risk that hitler and
00:31:58.420
the nazis showed before the start of the war and he was ahead of everyone else in parliament in the uk
00:32:05.460
in indicating that there was a substantial risk but if you compare that to text being assembled for you
00:32:13.180
clearly you're not involved in the creation so you're not having to structure your thinking to
00:32:20.800
assemble your own logic and thread of thought and that's a key difference and i think something that
00:32:28.080
really will if you you allow that to happen too much will impinge on your ability to think through
00:32:34.620
naughty complicated problems yeah something that i've noticed is you know this is why we generally
00:32:40.520
have authors as guests on the podcast and why we typically focus on talking about books something i've
00:32:44.960
noticed is that when someone has only offered their thoughts orally like they've just done coaching
00:32:49.860
videos podcasts things like that they often have trouble articulating their ideas in a sustained
00:32:57.320
way like they have these good nuggets of thoughts but they haven't synthesized them yet and writing
00:33:03.240
forces you to do that so i like talking to authors because they've already gone through that difficult
00:33:07.560
process of synthesizing their thoughts so usually what they have to say is a little more organized
00:33:12.780
and coherent than someone whose thoughts have just been bouncing around in their head so basically what i've
00:33:17.800
observed is that writing improves thinking i think absolutely writing i think is a way where you can
00:33:25.260
structure and organize your thoughts on the page i mean it's interesting if you think about it that
00:33:31.680
these large language models they have come about through the organization of text you know they're fed
00:33:39.860
huge reams of text from across the internet it's textual based and that's what's led to intelligence
00:33:46.320
and the form of ai that we now understand today that that in itself shows the value of our relationship
00:33:53.500
with text and you also talk about you know the chat gpt and these other large language models they're
00:33:59.280
impressive like you can just give it a prompt and it can write something that just it's amazing like
00:34:04.960
it's really good but you argue that there's some things that chat gpt can't capture that human writing
00:34:12.300
can what do you think ai can't replicate in human writing and thought well i think one of the the
00:34:17.540
fundamental aspects is however intelligent ai gets so there's no doubt that certain human abilities
00:34:25.360
ai is already beginning to match and and obviously it surpasses us in in certain areas it can scan
00:34:33.780
volumes of data that we would never be able to do and quickly churn out text at a speed that we just
00:34:39.740
couldn't match so it clearly surpasses us in certain areas but there's other areas where it just can't
00:34:44.680
match what we do um it doesn't exist in a physical world so it doesn't have a way to empathize and
00:34:52.940
understand someone else's perspective it basically doesn't have a perspective it doesn't have its own
00:34:58.900
viewpoint on the world it's just fed text that's been created by humans or increasingly also other ai tools
00:35:07.500
so you can't bring in that subjective experience yeah yeah and i think that's a key aspect i mean
00:35:13.740
if you think about winston churchill and the decision making he would have had to have made
00:35:18.900
during some of the most hotly difficult periods in the second world war he would have framed any
00:35:24.440
decisions based on his own life experiences and his acknowledgement of how other people operate in
00:35:30.980
the world and that it would have been grounded in his own real world experiences and a computer
00:35:37.020
simply doesn't have that is it possible to use ai as a supplement to your writing and thinking
00:35:42.900
absolutely absolutely so so my view certainly is not a wholesale negative on ai at all it's immensely
00:35:52.160
powerful and can be really really useful when i was researching this and really playing around with
00:35:58.780
ai tools in writing the book one thing i sort of came back to is often in philosophical thought
00:36:06.800
there's an interrogation the socratic method in particular is questioning is asking questions of
00:36:15.080
thoughts that you or someone else might have and trying to get to the core of the matter and you can do
00:36:21.400
that with ai so you might have a problem you're wrestling with or a dilemma and naturally it's great to talk
00:36:28.580
about that with a friend or someone in your family but equally with ai you can you can now because
00:36:34.620
it's it's it's human language based you can critique your thoughts and compare them to the human record
00:36:41.980
to just the swathes of information that exist online and zero in on that to get some feedback on your
00:36:48.360
thoughts so that's immensely useful yeah i've been exploring different tools that are out there now i know
00:36:54.420
google just launched this thing called notebook lm okay where you can upload text that you're you know
00:37:00.480
you're using for your research and then you can just start asking the ai questions like well are there any
00:37:06.160
connections between this concept and this concept and it'll go through all this research and help you find
00:37:12.760
that it's basically like having a research assistant like a human research assistant yeah
00:37:16.420
um and i think yeah ai can be useful in that sense but then actually figuring out the best way to express
00:37:23.820
that you leave that to yourself yeah i mean one thing i look at in the book is um that churchill had a team
00:37:32.060
of assistants so he had assistants that would uh note down when he dictated but he also had great minds
00:37:39.400
and thinkers of the day so one guy that went on to head up the un various sort of oxford and cambridge
00:37:45.560
graduates that compiled fresh new information for him that he then assimilated into his writing and
00:37:52.480
his thinking processes he was a man with resources and in his day it would be very difficult for most
00:38:00.440
people to arrange such a setup today actually you can achieve that with ai tools so there's huge
00:38:07.860
power in that and it sort of levels the ability for us to operate in a similar way okay so use ai to
00:38:14.840
help you with your research maybe find connections and then going back to this idea of you should
00:38:20.020
still learn the rules of grammar and how to write because yeah ai can do that but there's instances
00:38:27.000
where i think ai gets it wrong so i use grammarly but as i'm going through the suggested changes that
00:38:33.460
grammarly makes sometimes i'm like no grammarly i don't think that's good actually i want to end that
00:38:38.620
sentence with a preposition yeah even though it's not grammatically correct it just sounds better
00:38:42.600
so if you have that that ability innate ability to write you can make better decisions with ai
00:38:48.260
yeah i know i agree yeah um so another skill you talk about is craftsmanship and you talk about what
00:38:54.220
we can learn from watchmakers on how the power to craft can make us human so what can we learn from
00:38:59.760
watchmakers well so my thought with craft is it's anything where you're making things with your hands
00:39:08.220
so there's a physical intelligence that too often today gets lost in the screen work we're doing
00:39:15.560
where as much as we talked about the benefits of dealing with text etc there isn't a physicality to
00:39:22.380
it and if you think back to any diy projects you might have done recently or maybe projects at school
00:39:32.460
sometimes we have to go back quite far to find examples of it because sadly it has gone missing
00:39:37.200
in a large number number of our lives the process of working with your hands and learning how to do
00:39:43.840
something certainly is a different type of intelligence you you're actually thinking with
00:39:49.740
your body motion to get around something and work out how to do it and that that was something that
00:39:56.740
we used to do a lot more of so in the book i i look at a particular watchmaker called george daniels
00:40:02.840
who passed away only a few years ago but he himself learned i think it was something like 140
00:40:10.040
different what used to be individual crafts so skills that people worked on in the clock industry
00:40:17.180
in europe he mastered all of them and handcrafted his own very very sort of top quality watches so i look
00:40:26.140
at how the process he went through learning those skills and actually in the process of doing it
00:40:32.400
he ended up innovating and creating a new watch movement uh it's called the escapement the sort of
00:40:39.200
the the ticking element in a watch which controls its time he actually invented a wholly new method
00:40:45.520
eventually was purchased by omega and still used today so that physical physicality of work actually
00:40:52.840
allowed him to really innovate and uh find new ways forward yeah and you make the case that at the
00:40:59.020
time there's technology like there's computer design tools that you know watchmakers use to design watches
00:41:05.240
and you make the case that these design tools probably couldn't have made that innovation
00:41:09.280
because they're not in the physical world it took this guy being like actually working with this stuff
00:41:15.720
physically to see oh i can make i can do this differently and it will work because he's able to test in real
00:41:21.640
time able to learn through his body you couldn't do that with a computer exactly those sort of clinks
00:41:27.060
and clanks of just dealing with the reality of the world where things don't work versus moving things
00:41:34.120
around on the screen and and watch designers now there are a certain number of software tools that they
00:41:40.100
use and a lot of the steps that george daniels would have had to painstakingly have gone through
00:41:44.760
himself to learn and understand the very working mechanics of a watch it's just click of a button
00:41:50.980
or a drop down to just do that add this and you know so naturally the the actual full understanding
00:41:57.440
gets lost because you're just selecting options rather than actually going through the process
00:42:02.480
yourself why do you think people who might not engage in craft for a living someone who's not a
00:42:08.140
watchmaker or a carpenter maybe they just sit at a computer all day managing spreadsheets why should
00:42:15.160
they incorporate craft in their lives well one it's it's very enjoyable and it's rewarding again if you
00:42:22.940
think of it try and if you try and think of something you've done recently that was more of a physical
00:42:27.900
challenge i mean sometimes it might be like assembling flat pack furniture something like that actually it's
00:42:33.580
quite rewarding and the process you go through the challenge of it all feels different it feels
00:42:40.340
different to working on a spreadsheet say and you're using sort of your own your whole sort of bodily being
00:42:46.620
to tackle something and that yeah is is fundamentally different so i think if you are overly screen-based
00:42:53.520
and a lot of us are trying to find opportunities to do that whether it's certain tasks in the house or the
00:42:59.340
garden just ground you a bit i think and pulls you out of your head and into more your physicality in
00:43:05.540
the world around you and i think also can help improve your work in that digital realm yeah so
00:43:11.740
going back to winston churchill he was a wordsmith his work was thinking and writing but he had hobbies
00:43:17.900
that weren't thinking and writing they were very tactile so he painted something he did i also know he
00:43:23.880
he laid brick at his his estate he did some landscaping as well so he made time for that
00:43:30.820
and i think it actually improved his writing and thinking because i'm because when you're doing the
00:43:35.360
sort of like manual tactile things sometimes you're often just thinking about work or maybe a problem at
00:43:40.740
work and having that physical thing kind of distracts you a bit and you're a little bit more unfocused
00:43:48.020
i mean when you're in that unfocused state you're able to make connections you otherwise wouldn't have made
00:43:52.360
that's right i mean he suffered from depression he called it his black dog of depression and uh he
00:43:59.420
would build walls as you mentioned and yeah i think that was a way of dealing with his thoughts
00:44:05.500
ruminating and you know trying to sort of work through difficult stages absolutely so it can be
00:44:12.000
good for that i mean it has been found to be good for our mental well-being there's no doubt about that
00:44:16.340
that we get a boost from doing physical tasks so it's certainly something to look at all right so
00:44:22.340
find a hobby where you have to use your hands exactly yeah could be carpentry could be you know
00:44:28.200
pottery whatever find that one more skill i want to talk about is solitude how is solitude a skill
00:44:35.340
yeah so what i look at with with solitude is the fact that today we're so connected with our devices
00:44:44.480
always switched on really whether that's receiving emails texts checking online for news etc and if you
00:44:54.160
compare that to most of our past we gravitated between whole total engagement in physical conversation
00:45:03.920
and then lots of time on our own um switched off which is where we could really explore our own
00:45:10.500
thoughts daydream and just be grounded in who we are as a person in the book i look at an example
00:45:18.560
of alexander selkirk who was a castaway on an island just off of chile and actually robinson crusoe
00:45:26.380
daniel defoe's book was based on him so there was a real world real life robinson crusoe and he was
00:45:32.340
he was cast away for four and a half years he was a difficult character who almost caused a mutiny on
00:45:39.260
board a ship that he was on and he was thrown off by the captain to this island but through the course
00:45:45.400
of his stay there he changed he became more at ease with himself and in the book i sort of look at well
00:45:52.420
when we spend time on our own what is the value of it what can we achieve and there's it can be quite
00:45:58.980
nuanced but very deep and actually the the effects can be really quite changing for us i mean any any
00:46:07.080
form of religion or spiritual viewpoint tends to consider that it's time alone where we can fully
00:46:16.040
begin to comprehend our relationship with the world and the universe and our place within it
00:46:21.760
so it's why the likes of monks or dervishes whatever it might be have always sought out time away
00:46:27.740
to try and just work through that that that thinking so alexander selkirk inadvertently found
00:46:35.060
himself in that position not of his choosing but he benefited from it and actually when he was saved
00:46:40.320
and brought back to london eventually he was found on board the ship to be a be very much a changed
00:46:47.240
character he was given responsibilities to lead the ship but when he got back to london he sank back into
00:46:53.080
his old ways um drinking too much violence so the benefits he found when he was alone were lost back
00:47:02.920
in success society and human societies often wrestled with that notion of how do we take so much of the
00:47:12.660
benefits that we have when we have time alone to really sit and be in our own company into the busy
00:47:19.680
throws of our social life how can we match the two and i my thinking is that today in in our digital lives
00:47:26.980
that there's even more of a need for that how do we remain grounded in our own sort of viewpoint and
00:47:33.920
being when we're bombarded with information and drawn this way and next and our attention direct and
00:47:39.740
in all manner of different ways how do we keep a control of who we are so that that's when i talk about
00:47:45.780
a skill of solitude it's what abilities can you hone so you sustain that through your life and all
00:47:54.400
notions like um or exercises like meditation or physical practices like yoga or qigong which are
00:48:01.860
becoming increasingly popular seek to do that mindfulness you know it obviously has become a
00:48:07.940
popular discipline aspects like that i think are more and more relevant for our digital world to keep us
00:48:15.000
grounded well graham this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more
00:48:18.640
about the book in your work well you can find the book anywhere really where you would hope to to
00:48:23.060
find it yeah so that that's what i'd suggest any retailer and i hope anyone who reads it finds it
00:48:27.780
useful fantastic well graham lee thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thanks a lot my guest today
00:48:32.440
was graham lee he's the author of the book human being reclaimed 12 vital skills we're losing to
00:48:36.720
technology it's available on amazon.com check out our show notes at aom.is slash human being
00:48:41.620
where you find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic
00:48:44.260
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:48:55.380
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00:48:59.300
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as always thank you for the continued support until next time it's brett mckay
00:49:18.320
reminding you to not listen to anyone podcast but put what you've heard into action