Do you smell a disturbance in the force? Did you fart? It's our Dosh. He doesn't smell.  I'm Rick. And you can follow us on Instagram! So cheesy. Whenever you're here. And the only reason that Ashley and Alexis who are right over there aren't doing this is because they haven't watched any sitcoms yet. Yes. Which by the way, that's what we're doing. But you knew that. You saw the thumbnail.  That's true. But... Yeah, see that? He doesn't like you getting close. But yes, it dropped last night at around 11 p.m. our time. Finally here, we do finally get to watch... Saif Ali Khan. Saif Ali Khan. Saif Ali Khan. In Saqlid gams he is Sartajman. Ready? Yeah. Here we go. August 15th. That's next month? I know. There was so much to see and you know there's like Easter eggs all throughout the thing. That trailer doesn't reveal much. Who is that guy? That obviously got him out of the prison. I'm guessing it was the guy that was laughing. I'm guessing, I don't know. You think the guy laughing at the fire was his third father? Yeah. And then it also had very Godfather-ish, scar-face-ish, Godfather-y vibes. Yeah, but it also had Da Vinci Code vibes too. It had that spiritual dark... No, because like in the first season Kattende was kind of... He was like top of the food chain but he was like not in the political aspect. Looks like he's like all dressed up now. Yeah.  And then that's usually what happened in Godfather, the scar-face. They got more prestige, I suppose. So, I don't... I'm so excited. I am really like... On August 15th, I'm going to be the most excited I've been for a show to come on the air since Game of Thrones. Seriously, as far as... I'm not comparing it to Game of Thrones. I'm just saying I haven't had an excitement for a new show like I do for this one. And there's a lot of new shows I want to be watching but this one's got me hooked. Yeah. And you know what it was? 5, 6, 7, 8. That's where I just... I was hooked in and I... And now they're bringing in a ton more people. And yeah, a lot of people. And I guarantee they've got a lot more money to work with now. Oh yeah, you saw it in the shot. They got an explosion card. A lot more money to work with. More money and they'll have more time, creative time to put the stuff together. I cannot wait. And it's only season two, man. Wonderful. It seems like it's... Yeah, you know what we gotta do? In addition to all the other freaking things we need to watch, we gotta get you guys... You guys need to watch Sacred Games so you can watch season two. We'll binge watch it. That was me. It wasn't another earthquake.


Welcome to the Rich TV Live podcast, I'm your host Richard D'Souza and we have some big breaking news from Lift Power Limited. I want to bring your attention to the symbol. Lift in Canada on the Toronto Stock Venture Exchange is under the symbol LIFT. In America on the OTC QX exchange under the symbol LIFF and Frankfurt, Germany under the symbol WSO. Some big breaking news, they are pleased to announce that they have obtained a Type A land use permit from the Mackenzie Valley Land and Water Board for its Cali project in Northwest Territories. The land use permit will enable LIFT to expand its exploration activities in the Cali area and allow the company to establish an exploration camp and fuel caches conducting diamond and reverse circulation drilling and construct and maintain winter access roads. This permit will grant the company adaptability to scale up the exploration efforts, adjusting its approach according to the findings and enhanced knowledge of the area. The land use permit has a term of five years, which may be extended for an additional two years. April Hayward, Chief Sustainability Officer of LIFT commented, I am very pleased with the terms and conditions in the land use permit, which provide LIFT with the flexibility to expand our exploration program in response to results as we learn more about the area. I am also grateful for the support and feedback we received throughout the permitting process and look forward to continuing to strengthen the collaborative working relationships we have developed with regulatory agencies and local communities in the Cali area. LIFT is dedicated to working with local communities to find the right balance between environmental and socioeconomic impacts. LIFT is committed to creating a culture of safety for all stakeholders, including its employees, contractors, and local communities by adhering to the highest standards of environmental and social responsibility. LIFT is a mineral exploration company engaged in the acquisition, exploration, and development of lithium-pegmatite projects located in Canada. The company's flagship project is the Yellowknife Lithium Project located in Northwest Territories, Canada. LIFT also holds three early-stage exploration properties in Quebec, Canada, with excellent potential for the discovery of buried lithium-pegmatites, as well as the Cali project in Northwest Territories within the little Nahani-pegmatite group. I believe they are undervalued, under-appreciated, and under-exposed. Please put their symbols on your radar, LIFT in Canada, LIFFF in America, and WSO in Frankfurt, Germany. Remember, if you're not winning, you're probably not watching. We're bringing the winners, CO interviews, breaking news, trending topics, and we bring them to you first. Must remind you that Rich TV Live is strictly for information and education purposes. Please do your due diligence and do your research whenever you're looking at investing into companies that we are featuring. Past performance is not always an indication of future results. In saying that, we think that you need to put LIFT Power Limited on your radar. We think they have explosive opportunities to grow, and we'll keep you updated on everything as it happens right here exclusively on the Rich TV Live podcast. Other than that, have a nice day. We'll see you soon.


As Tom mentioned, I'm Allison Captor. This is places you can find me on the internet, Twitter and GitHub and so forth. I work for Dropbox on the desktop client team. The desktop client is written almost entirely in Python. There's some C and C++ in performance sensitive areas, but it's really more Python than you might expect. The server for that matter has also got a lot of Python in it. I'm not gonna talk too much about my work at Dropbox in this talk, but if you're curious about that, please come find me later on in the day. I would love to talk to you about that more. So before I joined Dropbox last year, I spent two years working in a company in New York City called the Recurse Center, which you may know by its former name, Hacker School. And the Recurse Center is sort of like a writer's retreat for programmers. The idea is that people like you and me, who already know at least some programming, go and spend three months working on whatever is interesting to them. So very often we'd see people who had spent 10 years writing Java, come spend three months learning Haskell, or who had just finished computer science degrees, but felt like their programming wasn't quite where they wanted to be, come and spend three months learning Haskell. I'm kidding, there was more than Haskell to it, but that was particularly tempting to people. There's almost no structure to the Recurse Center program. There's no deadlines, there's no teaching, there's no assignments. There's basically nothing to enforce that anyone makes the most out of it. So it was an experiment in unstructured education for adults. And my role as a facilitator was to make sure that people could make the most of that disorienting level of freedom. People who came out of traditional educational backgrounds and traditional jobs very often didn't quite know what to do with that. So I would work with people on goal setting and help them make the most of the experience. So one of the things that we thought a lot about at the Recurse Center was how to get the most effective learning experience possible for adults as well, for adults and for programmers. And so today I wanna talk about some of the research into effective learning and how all of us in this room can apply that in our daily lives as programmers. So there's kind of two pieces to this talk. The first set is about research around mindset. Some of this may be familiar to you, but there's some that I think definitely won't be. And then the second part is about particular strategies that you can use. So I'd like to ask everyone to take just a minute and think about what you want to get out of this talk. Here are a couple of possibilities. You could want to learn something new about how you could be as efficient and effective in your job as possible. You might wanna hear about how you can be a better teacher or a better mentor to junior engineers. And you might wanna hear about how you can make institutional change in your organizations to sort of set up a better environment for these kinds of things. All of those are useful goals for this talk and I'll touch on all of them. However, I do wanna challenge you a little bit to consider these strategies mostly for yourself. Because I think when I hear about these very often, it seems obvious to me that other people should be following these strategies, but it's not necessarily obvious that I myself should. And I'll come back to that tension a little bit later on. So let's talk about the first key to effective learning. The sociologist Carol Dweck has done a ton of really interesting research into how people think about intelligence. And what she's found is there's sort of two frameworks for conceptualizing intelligence. One of them is the fixed mindset, which holds that intelligence is a trait that people have in some fixed amount and they can't really affect how much of it they have. And the other mindset is a growth mindset, which says that intelligence is something that you can work on and something you can develop with effort. And Dweck found that a person's theory of intelligence has a huge impact on how they respond to challenges, what sorts of choices they make, their cognitive performance and even their honesty. So I'm gonna run through a couple of the most interesting results from her work here. The first interesting result is that this framing impacts how people view effort. If you have a fixed mindset where, and so you think that people are either smart or they're not and they can't really change that, people also tend to believe that if you are good at something then it should be easy. And conversely, if something is not easy then you're probably not good at it. That is a fixed mindset view. People with a growth mindset tend to believe that you need to exert effort and work hard in something to become better at it. So there are studies that show that people with a fixed or a growth mindset will choose to either exert effort or not exert effort, depending on the mindset that they have. The second interesting result, and this is probably the most famous, so you might be familiar with some of this. So Dweck and her collaborators showed that giving students different kinds of praise significantly impacted their performance. So in this study, Dweck and her collaborators gave students a series of problems. And after the first set of problems, all of them did pretty well. And half of the students were told, wow, you did really well on those problems. You must be very smart. And the other half of the students were told, wow, you did really well on those problems. You must have worked very hard. Then they got a second set of problems where everyone did badly because they were much harder. And then they got a third set of problems that was more like the first set, back to the easier level. So they found a bunch of really interesting things from this. The first aspect of the experiment is that in between the first and the second set of problems, right after the praise, they asked students what kind of a challenge they would like to do next. And in practice, everyone got the same harder problem set, but this was a sort of hypothetical exercise. And they found that the students who were praised for being smart were much less likely to choose a challenging set of problems next. And among the students who were praised for working hard, almost all of them chose the harder challenge next. So that was the first part. The second thing that they looked at was how students performed on the third set of problems, which was about the same as the first. And they found that students who were praised for being smart did significantly worse on that problem set. And students who were praised for working hard did slightly better on that one than they had on the first. So for the students that had this smart's praise, when they hit the wall in the second problem set, they weren't able to recover for the third. And after this, they had all of these students write letters to pen pals in another school, saying, oh, we did this cool study in school and here was the score that I got. And they found that almost half of the students who were praised for intelligence lied about their score. And almost none of the students who were praised for working hard were dishonest in that way. So what's fascinating about this is how subtle this difference in praise is. I think I almost wouldn't hear the difference before reading this research, that saying, oh, this is great, you must be so smart, or, oh, this is great, you must have worked so hard. Like, they sound really similar, something that I would say to another person or that people would say to me. But instead, when you're told that you're smart, you work really hard to preserve the appearance of being smart. And when you're told that you work hard, you preserve the appearance of working hard, and the most effective way to do that is to actually work hard. So another study looked at what happens when students faced a temporary period of confusion. So in designing this study, Dweck and Her collaborators wrote up a short course on psychology, a booklet, and then a series of questions to following it. And some of the booklets had a really confusing passage in there that just didn't make any sense. The confusing part wasn't on the quiz, so students could master the material if they just totally ignored that confusing point. And so the researchers wanted to see whether students would be able to recover from that confusion. And they found that students with a growth mindset mastered the material about 70% of the time, whether or not the confusing passage was in the booklet. For students who had a fixed mindset, if the confusing passage was not there, again, it was about 70% mastery. But if there was a confusing passage in the booklet, then the mastery fell to 30%. So those students were not able to recover from this period of being totally bewildered if they had a fixed mindset. And I wanted to put a section of this confusing passage up there, because this really resonated with me. So here's the passage in this booklet about psychology. How can one best describe the nature of people who will most of all be that way, which will make the imitating of others happen most often? Is it that these are the people we want to be like because they are fine, or is it that these are the people we want to be liked by? Raise your hand if you've ever read documentation that sounds like this. Yeah, absolutely. You're sitting down in the new project, and you're like, but what is it? What are you talking about, right? So this happens all the time when your docs are written by experts for beginners or it's out of date or something like that. So it is a critical skill for programmers to be able to push past things that sound like this. So programmers need a growth mindset. The things that a growth mindset helps you with, like response to confusion, recovery from errors, picking new challenges are all things that are much easier when you have a growth mindset and much, much harder when you have a fixed mindset. Now, sometimes when people hear this research, I think the fixed mindset almost sounds like a straw man. Like, does anyone really believe that intelligence is a totally fixed trait and can't be changed? But I think it actually is fairly pervasive in the tech industry and in programming, and I'll have a couple of examples to show that. How many of you have heard of the idea of the 10x engineer? Right, so this is the idea that some engineers are just an order of magnitude more effective than others for some definition of effective. And there's lots of critiques of this framing, but sort of setting that aside for a moment. If you believe in the 10x engineer, do you think that that person was born as a super effective engineer or did they get to be 10x, 1x at a time? And I think very often in kind of the popular framing of this, the 10x engineer is set up on a pedestal as someone that other people cannot become and very often is approached from a fixed mindset perspective. Another case where we see this is with hero worship. So Julie Pagano gave a great talk at Picon 2014 on imposter syndrome and one of her suggestions for how to combat imposter syndrome is kill your heroes, not literally. So don't put other programmers on a pedestal, don't say that person is so different from me, right? And fixed and growth mindset is really useful for this framing as well. So if you have a programming hero, do you think that that person is totally different from you or do you think that you could become more like them? And if you don't think that you could become more like them, then that's some evidence of a fixed mindset. So I would argue that yes, this mindset is in fact, quite prevalent in the tech industry. So hopefully by now you're convinced that a growth mindset is much more useful and effective for programmers than a fixed mindset. So the next question is, is this actually malleable? Can it be changed? If you have a fixed mindset, are you stuck there? And the answer is, heck yes, you absolutely can change a fixed mindset into a growth one. And in fact, in lots of Dweck studies, the way that they experimentally induce a fixed or growth mindset in really simple ways. So the praise study is one example, like this one sentence changes the student's behavior. And other ways that they induce a fixed or growth mindset is they have students read a paragraph about Einstein or something and at the end of the paragraph it says because he worked very hard because it was in his DNA, that sort of thing. And so it's absolutely malleable. So how do you change a fixed mindset? And I think some of the time, the challenge is just in identifying the fixed mindset. And once you hear yourself say the words, oh, I could never learn physics, it's pretty obvious that maybe that's not actually true. But other times it's a little bit harder to root out. So here's a couple of flags that I use to identify fixed mindsets. Now if you're on the lookout for places where your mindset might be fixed or you might have a fixed mindset with certain aspects, listen for sentences that start with I am or contain the word just. So I'm not good at CSS, I'm not a people person, some programmers are just faster than others, these are all fixed mindset types of words. And obviously you can start sentences with I am that are not indicators of a fixed mindset, right? But if you're on the lookout for this, you can kind of use these as a yellow flag to indicate that it's something you could examine more closely. I just as an aside, the I'm not a people person example is in fact supported by the research. The Duak and her colleagues also did a study on making friends and social aspects that show that it does hold there too. Okay, so once you've identified a fixed mindset, how can you go about changing it? And here are four strategies. The first one is you can reframe praise and success. So if someone says to you, wow, great job on that project, you're so smart. You can turn it around for yourself and say, yes, I did do a great job on that project. I worked very hard and used an effective strategy. And you don't necessarily have to do this out loud, right? You can just do it yourself. And you can use the same techniques for successes and accomplishments. So if you had a project that went really well, you can say, okay, yeah, that project went really well. Here was the strategy that I used and I should do that more instead of saying, yeah, that project went well because I'm awesome. So of course, the flip side of this is also the case. You can also reframe failures that you have. And a huge part of fixed or growth mindset is how you respond to failures and setbacks.  If you're saying maybe I'm not cut out for this job after all, you're spending a lot of energy and that's definitely a red flag. So instead, you can ask yourself what you learned from those unsuccessful attempts and what strategies you could have used instead. And it sounds really cheesy, but this does in fact work. The third way that you can change a fixed mindset is to celebrate challenges. So how do you react when you're forced to struggle when you're really stuck on something? And this was something that I was really consistent about as a facilitator at the RecurCenter. So someone would sit down next to me and they would say, I have this weird Python bug. And I would say, awesome, I love weird Python bugs because first of all, that's definitely true. And if you have weird Python bugs, let's talk about them. But more importantly for this context, it was emphasizing to the participant that finding something where they struggled was an accomplishment and that was intentional and that was a good thing for them to have done that day. So as I mentioned at the RecurCenter, there's no deadlines and there's no assignments. So this attitude is pretty much free. And we say, oh great, you get to spend a day chasing down this weird bug and flask, how exciting. And now at Dropbox where we have deadlines and the product to ship and users, I'm not always uniformly delighted about spending a day on a weird bug. So I am sympathetic to the sort of reality of the world where there are deadlines. However, if I have a bug to fix, I'm gonna have to fix it anyway. And so sort of being very grumbly about the existence of that bug isn't gonna help me solve it any faster. So I think even in a world where deadlines loom, you can still apply this attitude. So the last strategy for changing a fixed mindset is to ask about processes. So like many of you, I work with some great engineers and sometimes I will try to fix it, solve a bug and will not be able to and then one of them will get the answer right away. And one of the things that I'm trying to be really disciplined about is to say, oh cool, how did you do that? And especially when I was new in my company, the answers were really illuminating and sometimes it was something like, oh I looked in this source of logging that I didn't know existed and that's where the answer was. Like oh, that's good to know. And now that I've been there for a little longer, that happens less often. But I still very often learn techniques that I wasn't using as much or strategies or like here's some detail and why my strategy had not succeeded.  So I wanna spend just a minute talking about imposter syndrome. I think Dweck's research is really interesting in that context and really doesn't come up often enough in the discussion of imposter syndrome. If you're not familiar with it, I haven't heard this before, imposter syndrome is the feeling that a lot of people have that you are secretly a fraud who will be discovered at any moment. Hands up in the room if anyone has ever felt imposter syndrome in their career. Yeah, okay that's like 80% of you, that's great. And I definitely have as well and it sucks, it's so painful and it's also really bad for your career because you're much less likely to take chances and to look for new opportunities to grow and that sort of thing if you're worried about getting fired from the job you already have. And the proposed solutions for imposter syndrome very often seem to center around confidence. Where it's like, oh, well, if you feel like you're not qualified for the job you already have, maybe you should be more confident and then that would be fine. Which sometimes it's like, well, don't feel that way. It's not very helpful as advice goes. But even when it's more nuanced than that, there's often this focus on confidence and past accomplishments. But so here's the catch. Dweck's research shows that confidence does not predict how you respond in the face of failure. So in this study, Henderson and Dweck studied students who were moving from elementary school to junior high in the United States. So that's like a significant transition around age like 11 to 12. I'm not sure what the Kiwi equivalent is. And they asked the students to assess their confidence when they were still in the younger grade.  And what they found was that confident students with a fixed mindset suffered academically. And students with a growth mindset tended to thrive academically regardless of their confidence. And this is in contrast with a lot of research that shows that there is in fact a correlation between confidence and success in some endeavor. And the angle that Dweck is looking at here that changes that, is she's saying that if you were doing something new, then confidence and doing something old doesn't help you with your new task. And in particular, confidence doesn't help you respond to setbacks or failures. So if you hold a fixed mindset, basically any moment is a chance to prove that in fact you can't hack it. So running into challenges is really stressful in that context. And by contrast, if you have a growth mindset, then struggling or having a challenge is the way that you grow. And that's much less scary. And the second related point that Dweck found is confidence, so not only does confidence not predict resilience in the face of failure, but a history of successes also doesn't predict resilience in the face of failure. So this is really exciting to me actually. Because I think this is a much better framework for how to think about imposter syndrome. And basically if you're holding a fixed mindset, you're going to be really stressed and afraid at any moment that you have to struggle. And we're programmers, so it's mostly struggle, right? It's not a struggle all the time. And with a growth mindset, you can sort of enjoy struggling and enjoy working on something that's really hard. And when your identity isn't being threatened by a particularly tricky bug, it is much easier to focus on the bug when you're not worried about also getting fired and being a fraud. So you free up those cognitive resources to actually work on the task at hand. So again, if you believe, for example, that some people are not cut out for programming, you can spend a ton of time and energy looking for validation and evidence and all sorts of reasons why you are in fact one of the ones who can make it. So instead of doing that, just dismiss the idea that some people can't do it and move to an idea where everyone can increase their skill by exerting effort. Right, so having a growth mindset makes you more resilient to failure, makes it easier to exert effort, makes you more likely to sign up for new challenges, all things that are super useful for programmers. If you'd like to dig more into the details of this research and also see some of the findings that I didn't have time to cover today, I highly recommend the book that Dweck wrote, which I have here called Self Theories. Self Theories is a collection of essays that summarize many of the major points of her research. She also has a book called Mindset, which is written for more of a pop science audience. So if you're looking for detail in sort of a technical level, I recommend this book instead of Mindset. Mindset I think is a little bit of a higher level, sorry. Okay, so one of the themes that comes up again and again in Dweck's research is that mastery-oriented people, those with a growth mindset, are really focused on strategies and not just on outcomes. So in the second half of this talk, I wanna spend a few minutes talking about strategies for effective learning and these again are all supported by research and many of them are counterintuitive or pretty different from predominant strategies, at least that I was taught in school and perhaps that you were taught as well. Okay. Much of what I'm about to discuss is drawn from this great book, Make It Stick, by Peter C. Brown and others. And they aggregated a ton of research on effective learning strategies. Most of this research is done on students and in classrooms, but I think there's a lot that we can apply to our lives as programmers as well. So the premise for this book that you have to accept for any of it to be worthwhile is that learning is an acquired skill and you can get better at it with practice. This probably sounds familiar to you at this point in the hour, so I won't belabor this point, but I do think it's worth noting explicitly. So the question here is, okay, what are the most effective strategies for learning new things? And there are three findings in particular that I find pretty counterintuitive and surprising. The first finding is that engaging in what the authors call effortful retrieval is much more effective than just passively reviewing the material. So effortful retrieval is anything that makes you work to think of the answer. So flashcards are a really easy example or anything where you have to draw the answer out of your brain, not fill in the blanks, sorts of tests, that sort of thing. And that's much more effective as a learning strategy than just rereading your notes or rereading the material that you drew from. And this is pretty surprising because rereading notes or rereading the textbook is a really common way for students to study. And certainly it was a way that I studied when I was taking courses and is still a way that I try to learn things now if I like some man pages I just reread almost every day. What is the order of the arguments to LN? I always forget. And other thing that was really interesting from this study is that rereading gives you the feeling that you know the material without actually teaching you the material. So you end up with what the authors call the fluency illusion where you're kind of reading through and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got this, I got this, I got this. And then as soon as you close the book, you're like, wait, I don't actually have any of this. So effortful retrieval, something that requires you to do some work is a much better strategy. The second finding is that spaced practice is more effective for learning short-term and long-term than mass practice. And there are three different ways of spacing out a practice that authors cover. The first is spacing it out in time. So there's a study here that having four one-hour sessions over the course of a month was more effective for medical residents learning a new skill than having one four-hour workshop. The second way is varied. So doing different kinds of the same sort of style of exercise. And this one, they had two groups of eight-year-olds tossing beanbags into a bucket. And half of them were throwing the beanbags from three feet away. And half of them went back and forth between four feet and two feet. And then after a couple of weeks of that, all the kids got tested on their ability to toss a beanbag into a bucket from exactly three feet away. And they found that the students who'd been doing the four-foot and two-foot exercise did better than the three-foot exercise. So varying up the practice was better than even when the test was on the single thing that the students who did not vary their practice did. And the third form is interleaving different kinds of exercises. So in this study, they had students calculating the volumes of geometric solids, the spheres and cylinders and so on. And they found that students who did sort of a shuffled exercise of all the different kinds of volumes performed better on later tests than students who did 10 cones and then 10 spheres and then 10 cylinders and so on. And in interleaving, part of what you're training there is the skill of identifying what kind of a problem this is rather than being given the kind of problem that it is and just applying the formula or what have you. The third really interesting finding is the difficulty is usually desirable. And so the authors found that things that were hard to learn were more likely to be retained. And they found that this was true even when the difficulty was something really dumb. Like in one of the studies, the reason why the thing was difficult to learn was because it was in a really blurry font. They found that after struggling to read this blurry thing, people retain the underlying material later. The related point for this is that making errors is usually desirable. So for a long time in the US educational system, there was this idea that you can't let a student make an error because then they will remember the error instead of the right answer. So don't let them guess wrong. And it turns out that this is not in fact the case. And if you struggle on your own to come up with an answer and then are corrected, you're much more likely to remember the correct thing. Not all difficulties are desirable, despite the fact that a really wide array of difficulties are. And in particular, a difficulty that is not desirable is anxiety about performance. So this is really consistent when we saw out of Dweck. People who are anxious on a test do much worse in part because you're spending all that cognitive load worrying about other things. So here's the challenge with all of this, all these strategies. It feels really hard. You constantly feel like you're struggling because you constantly are struggling. You don't feel like you're being efficient. You don't feel like you're being effective.  And so the consequence of how bad all of this feels is that people don't do it and they fall back to less effective learning strategies even after they've been specifically instructed in how these strategies are more effective. So you have to expect some amount of struggle with this. That is in fact the intention and like the goal. The other consequence is when you do like mass practice, so lots of problems in a row cramming for the test, you can feel the rapid gains but then you can't feel the rapid forgetting. So this brings us back to the growth mindset. If we don't fear struggle, if we're not seeking to avoid it, then it frees us up to be using these more effective strategies. Okay, so for us and our daily lives as programmers, how can we implement these? So one bit of low-hanging fruit and effortful retrieval is like literally flashcards. And I'm seeing a lot of skeptical faces and I'm so sympathetic to that. This was one where I was like, yeah, of course everyone else should use flashcards but not me, no. And I studied physics in college or in university, I should say. And I came out of that with the view that like, anything that can be learned from flashcards is like probably not worth learning, right? Like let me derive it from first principles, otherwise it's not worth my time. And in fairness in like my physics courses, not much that could be learned from a flashcard was super worthwhile. Like that wouldn't get you very far. But it would get you like the very lowest foundation. And so currently in my experience programming, there are not a ton of cases where like, rote memorization helps you that much. You need like this towering edifice of understanding and conceptualization. But if you don't have the underlying facts, you cannot build your tower of understanding. So particularly for certain kinds of new things where it's like I need to be remembering them to learn the implications, I think having a flashcard-like system is actually pretty useful. Other ways to do effortful retrieval. Take guesses. So I joked earlier that I can never remember the order of arguments to make a sim link.  And I can also tell you from experience that if you reverse the order of arguments making a sim link, nothing bad happens. This is obviously not the case for all of your shell commands, so know what situation you're in. But if you're in a situation where the cost of making an error is basically free, go ahead and take a guess. The other thing to do here is to debug systematically. So if you're trying to find out a bug in your program, make sure that you always have a working hypothesis for what the bug is. And you're constantly either validating or invalidating that hypothesis based on your experiments. If you work on an infrastructure team, you can conduct war games or mock outages, that sort of thing. And finally, you can do this in conversation, like here at this conference. So I was talking to someone the other day, and he said, are you familiar with graph isomorphism? And internally I was like, yeah, I know those words. Yeah, okay. And it's really, really tempting there to go, oh yeah, yeah, definitely sure. And instead I tried to actually check my understanding and I was like, yeah, sort of. It's like the research into how graphs are like each other, right? And he was like, yeah. And in fact, here's all this nuance, that was his PhD topic, so lots of nuance there. But it was really tempting in that moment to be like, oh yeah, sure. And you lose the chance to first of all do effortful retrieval and second of all to actually get feedback. So I encourage you to do that as well. Implementing space practice is also pretty straightforward. So you work on different kinds of problems. You work on the same problem over time and you interleave different kinds of problems together. And this is really good news for anyone who's got a side project. How many of you either don't program for a living and work on something on weekends or just do program for a living and have something you do not in your day job? Yeah, a couple of hands. Some of you would like to do more of not in your day job. So very often people say that it's hard to make progress on their side projects because they only get to work on them for like two hours on a Saturday, right? And this is definitely true. But what's interesting about this is in the context of this research, all of the energy that you spend reloading all that context and trying to remember what the heck it was you were doing last Saturday is good for your long-term learning. So you're more likely to retain later on the thing you really had to work to retrieve. So one thing that's really interesting to me here is how deeply this conflicts with sort of the conventional wisdom around engineering time. And at Dropbox, like a lot of places, we try to be really thoughtful about maker time and giving engineers uninterrupted blocks of time to work on things. There are social conventions around interrupting people who are wearing headphones. There's a lot of thought given to context switches and that sort of thing. And what this research shows is that the context switch is not completely wasted. It definitely does slow down your immediate progress. And so for any context where what you're most interested in is getting the product at the door, getting the thing finished, there's a real cost there. But for your long-term learning, the context switch can be really productive. So there's a little bit of a balance here that I didn't really appreciate before hearing about this. So it's not just a dead weight loss to have to context switch and then have to pick something back up later. Implementing difficulty. Put all your documentation in a really unreadable font. No, I'm kidding, don't do that. Right, so this is sort of funny to me because I think there's plenty of difficulty already in programming. We don't really have to work too hard to seek it out. Implementing the sort of space to make errors is much more interesting. For one thing, making an error sort of implies that somewhere in the line, there's a feedback loop. And so if you take a guess and never find out if it's right or not, that's not very useful to you. So then you can sort of get into ways to get feedback, ways to create feedback loops for yourself. And that depends a lot on the context and on your job and that sort of thing. There's some evidence that reflection on how the week went serves as a useful feedback loop in this context.  The other thing that is really interesting here is that it's much easier to be willing to make mistakes if you're in a context where people aren't going to be jerks to you because you made one. So you see this a little bit in like blameless post-mortems.  And the other thing that is sort of interesting in this context, so at the recurse center, there's a set of social rules.  And it's much lighter weight than a code of conduct. If you break a social rule, someone's like, hey, you broke that social rule and that's the end of consequences, right? There's never any punishment for it. And one of the social rules is no feigning surprise. So if someone says, oh, who's Richard Stallman? You're not allowed to say, you don't know who Richard Stallman is? He's the only thing that you're doing is celebrating your knowledge to the expense of this other person. So having an environment where small and unimportant mistakes are welcomed can also go really far on this. Okay, so as programmers, can have a growth mindset to be more effective. We can engage in effortful retrieval as much as possible. We can space out our practice in time and in type of projects and by interleaving different sorts of projects. And know that most difficulties are desirable. All right. Some thanks to folks who gave me early feedback on this talk and to the KiwiPyCon organizers for inviting me. I'm gonna take some questions now, but while I do that, I'm gonna put a pop quiz up here and you're free to totally ignore it. But if you thought that this research was interesting and you wanna remember it later, I encourage you to engage in some effortful retrieval by answering these questions to yourself right now. Thank you. I'll be running around taking questions.  Someone had a hand up at some point. I have a half formed question about, is there any research about whether teams of people who could be in a growth or a fixed mindset whether the growth of fixed mindset might work in the matter, thinking of them as a team and how that team approaches its problems. Are they always doing things the same way or is the team who maybe growth people always and centered to use the same technologies rather than finding new solutions? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I'm not aware of any research that operates at a level other than individuals, but I would love to see that, yeah. Thanks for your talk. I also read this book by Keraldoic and I'm a father to twin girls and once I start using these strategies in my parenting, I just wanna reiterate that it really changed my guilt confidence in how they were tackling the problems in day to day life's it was really good, that's the point of the site. Yeah, the research is actually kind of terrifying, right?  Like, oh no. But yeah, it's interesting how much you could drive this and there is some, I didn't have a chance to talk about this, but there is some research in this book that's covered about gender discrepancies in particular and the way that high achieving girls are more likely to have a fixed mindset and less likely to be willing to risk failure when they hit something hard. I mean, I think that probably resonates with a lot of the women in the room that probably had that experience. I have two questions. Firstly, I'm guessing that a fixed mindset and a growth mindset is not binary, so it's more of a grayscale, so that's my first question, is it grayscale? And my second question is, is it possible to have a fixed mindset in certain areas but have a growth mindset in a completely different area? Yeah, so your first question is this, in fact, a spectrum? I think it probably is, that would be sensible. For purposes of this research, there's classification into a binary model. I'm not precisely sure where the line gets drawn. And for some of these cases where there's experimental induction of a fixed or growth mindset, if someone has a strong growth mindset going in and then you tell them that they're going to be, you know, that this test assesses how smart they are forever, you'll end up in like a little bit of a moderate place. Yeah. And your second question, is it possible to have a fixed mindset in some areas and a growth mindset in others? Absolutely, yeah. And I think one that is most common for programmers is to say, sure, I can learn and grow a lot in my programming skill and also I'm never gonna have, I'm never gonna be socially smooth. This resonates with a lot of people, I think. And then there's all sorts of areas completely divorced from that. So, you know, like your hobbies or your sports or whatever those things are. Yeah, definitely. Hey, thanks very much for your talk. I found it really interesting because I'm very aware of the fact that through my first years of my computer science degree, I had a very fixed mindset. And again, I think it's that kind of like, there was that gendered nature to it, like the high achieving girls in the class, we all kind of went through this, which we'll plead with other people too as well. And I was wondering, for our kind of first year's programming courses, would you have any advice on a scale getting kind of encouraging a whole, an entire course full of first year students to have more of that growth mindset? Because a lot of people come in from school with a fixed one and it can be really damaging in those first year courses, but you can't really chat to them about this stuff quite easily. Yeah, are you a TA in this context or are you a professor? Very sometimes teaching assistants, sometimes lecturers, sometimes. Sure, so if you're a lecturer or you have a chance to get up in front of the auditorium, I think you can just say this, right? So like, programming is a skill that you can get better at with effort. And even though that it doesn't sound like it would convince people, the study shows that in fact that does make a difference. The other one that's really interesting is there's a study on a values exercise that shows having women in particular write down their values before they enter a context where they experience stereotype threat can significantly improve their performance. And the basic theory here is that if you are not having your, if you're saying, oh, I'm a programmer and then your programmer identity is threatened, that's really painful and difficult. But if you have this, if you've done this values exercise to be like, oh, I'm a programmer and also hear these other things that I value about myself, then the stereotype threat is not so strong. So yeah, if you look up values exercise and the results are really dramatic, particularly for women and for other people who are marginalized in that context. It doesn't hurt the men. Hi, really great talk. I'd just like to say that we, I did a performance music degree in Trombone and the same thing happens in music. There's this really fixed idea that people are just born musicians or they're not, you know, oh wow, they're so talented, they must be amazing, you know, they must be in the genes. It's just, it's not, it's really that 10,000 hour thing that Malcolm Gladwell was talking about. I forgot my question. Yeah, thanks for sharing your experience in music. I think there absolutely is a lot of that attitude there. Like, oh, some people are musical geniuses and you can't become that if you're not already. And there's also that interesting aspect of the response to hard work. Like how do you feel about exerting a lot of effort? If you have this growth mindset, you feel really good about it. If you have a fixed mindset, you maybe think that you should be able to play the Trombone without working very hard, which is my understanding that that doesn't actually work out that well. So this is really the nature versus nurture argument all over again, is it? I wouldn't characterize it that way, in part because I think that the mindset is mostly driven from the individual and less from, you know, parents or environment. Which is part of why I think it's so important to think about this research from the context of ourselves and our own lives and challenges and less from the context of our students or children and that sort of thing. So there certainly is an aspect of rejection of the nature argument that people are changeable, that you can increase your skill. But I think this pulls a lot of the ability to change onto the individual and less onto the environment or context. So you said before that it was more effective to have a lot of small sessions rather than one big session, which I find when I teach my kids that they want small sessions and not enough to keep forgetting this next day. So sometimes maybe two hours is better than one hour. But how do you find a balance? Yeah, that's your question. So the cost here certainly is it takes time to reload the context. I think the most important thing here is to have a view of their learning and forgetting other than when you're teaching them. And so I'm not sure what the best way for you to do that is maybe you can have like, you know, take them quizzes or something like that or just play with the session length until you find something that, or they like walk in the door still knowing what they're doing. It's gotta be more time. I really love the idea of if you don't know guess because I think that ties to quite a lot of the other keynotes about education. I think the best thing about Python is that because it's a scripting language and you can pull up the ripple, you can guess if you can't remember how to do that and the barrier to getting that wrong compared to say Java or C where you gotta go through quite a lot of work before your guess results comes out. So thank you very much for validating my guessing techniques. Yeah, there's science. Right, I think there's a lot of areas that just for me is a programmer feel much better to work and like, please, can I have a ripple? You know, that sort of thing. And it's the same thing with like having a quick feedback loop, having the ability to guess really quickly. And this also came up a little bit in Katie's talk yesterday about auto-completion and like, should there be auto-completion? She said basically, no, we don't want to hand the answers to students until they have a high facility and like getting them out of their own heads. And I think that's the same thing here. Like you actually have to take the guess. Awkward silence. Someone put it in their hand. Tricked you. It's not actually a question. Um... I just think, well, in my experience, one of the things I do is I turn auto-completion off at the shell so that I actually have to try and remember what commands and stuff I'm typing in and all that stuff in the ID, you know, auto-complete function names and all that kind of stuff. Oh, is that what you were talking about? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you turn all that off and then it's forcing you to try and remember what you're doing.  Yeah, and again, it depends slightly what your goal is. If your goal is to write the thing as fast as possible, auto-completion, sure. Yeah, great. If your goal is to learn it as deeply as possible, then always keep auto-completion off. And of course, in practice, most of us have those two goals simultaneously to one extent or another. And so it depends where you fall and balance on that particular day. Yeah. It seems quite easy to think of ways of applying this in programming, but can you, or do you have, or can you think of any particular ways of applying what you've been talking about in the social situation? Yeah, so the study that was covered in this book, Dweck had the children write letters applying to the pen pal club, which turned out to be a real pen pal club. They did eventually match people up. And then they got rejected from the pen pal club. And before writing the letter, they had told half of them, this is to see how good you are at making friends. And they told the other half, I forget exactly what the frame was, but something more towards a growth mindset. I was socially like, see if you can learn how to interact with the people. And so they rejected them from the pen pal club and then had them write another letter. And the kids who were primed with a fixed mindset sometimes wrote exactly the same letter, sometimes wrote a much shorter and less detailed letter. And then the kids who were primed with a growth framework were much more likely to write longer things, to be more inviting, to say, oh, I really love talking to you, even though it's the first letter to a pen pal. Yeah, and throughout this book, throughout this work, Dweck and her collaborators were pretty careful to not ruin any students, not to leave them thinking that they're bad at making friends. And so there's some really interesting twists that they have to do. I'm sorry? Great question. This was like the 19, this study I think was in the 1990s, so probably. Yeah, so there's some pretty interesting twists in terms to not break children's spirits. Yeah. So I found it interesting that you said there's value in context switching. Do you have any opinions on in the workplace, open office, open plan office versus individual offices and how does your workplace depend on that? Yeah, so I work in an open office. I sometimes hate it when there are things going on that I don't care about. Sometimes there's things going on that I do care about and I'm happy to pop up from what I'm working on as I'm in the conversation. I think this isn't a terribly strong argument for an open office, because you can apply context switches in a more deliberate way if you're going back and forth between related things that you're doing or stopping your reasonable break points and that sort of thing and like raw interruptions are still pretty expensive. So it's interesting to me that they are not completely wasteful, but I still think that there is a pretty significant cost. Talking about the context switches in a work environment, it seems to me that when I have a problem with it, I'm mainly trying to remember, like you said, what I was doing and it's not actually something that's useful to learn particularly. So would it be more useful to maybe have two jobs that involve different skills and switch between those rather than just say both jobs are programming in Python. So the switch is literally just the structure of your project and what it was you were supposed to be doing with it rather than a different skill which maybe would then be learned better. Yeah, I mean definitely interleaving different projects and Python has some value as well as just like waiting a week in between picking it off different things. Yeah, there are varying degrees that you can pick this one up, yeah. Anyone else? Oh, I realize I didn't fully answer the question about how you do this in a social setting. So if you are interested in this, I highly recommend the blog, Captain Awkward. If anyone reads Captain Awkward, you guys all go start. And she's got a couple of constructions of like social challenges, like I'm gonna go to a party and like talk to three people and I will award myself 10 points for each person that I talk to and learn a fact about. So there's a lot of interesting stuff in kind of the internet of social anxiety coping that has interesting strategies around this that I think you can apply regardless of sort of where you fall in that. Excellent, please join me in thanking Alison for her time and for traveling all this way.


Personal notice, dangerous my stock and trade. If the job's too tough for you to handle, you got a job for me, George Valentine. Write full details. Standard Oil Company of California, on behalf of independent Chevron gas stations and standard stations throughout the West, invites you to let George do it. Tag, you're it. Another adventure of George Valentine. She's got one, right here in her purse. I made that. Get it back. No, no, no, lady, wait a minute. Here's your letter. Now, what's the matter? Don't you want me to read it? Oh, you wrote this. That's it. You wrote it and haven't mailed it. You're probably bad at the postman. The only rang one. Uh-oh. Ladies, listen to this. Listen, my dear Mr. Valentine. Valentine. What do you mean? Now, don't blush, lady. Don't blush. If our radio audience can only see her, I said not me. If I'm brave enough to wear your scarf over my head, it's really a good fit, don't you think? Don't you think it is? Over the face. What did you say? It's not a fit, it's a concussion. Oh, you're real cute. Listen, how about your husband, madam? You suppose he's listening? I'll bet he doesn't know about this, Mr. Valentine. Ladies, isn't that a romantic name for you? Valentine. I'll bet your husband's out buying a gun right now. He's got a rival. But you remember our bargain now, lady, on this program. You dared me to wear your scarf so I can read the same thing I find in your purse. Shall I read it, ladies? All right, that's right. All right, ladies, here goes. Now, dear Mr. Valentine, I've got to see you about a telephone call. A telephone call, huh? Well, let's make her do the call right here from the studio, shall we? All right, ladies. But here's the rest of the letter. Listen, I've got to see you because I'm not sure, but I think somebody is trying to murder me. Murder? Trying to murder? All I wanted to tell you was that it isn't my letter. It's not my purse. A large woman. She got up and left in a hurry. She must have taken mine. It's her letter. Mrs. Oscar Pettyman. 432 West 16th Street. Mrs. Oscar Pettyman. This is 432 West. Ain't here. You her husband friend, Mr. Pettyman? He's in Chicago. He's in Stendor. He leaves every chance he can get. Ansel Pettyman's my name. My brother-in-law, I board here. Yes, the police told me miss, and no, I don't know anything. You hung up on him? Well, why not? Bunch of pests. Anybody tries to kill Birdie, it wouldn't hurt anybody. I should take care. Wow.  Puzzles, contest prizes. You got to see what she looks like. Sister-in-law. So, she started to let you letter. He thinks somebody's trying to kill her. All right. What's all the fuss? Let him. Yeah, there's a time-wasting contraption. Now, wait a minute. I'll answer that. I have somebody to call me here. Valentine speaking. Hal McMurtry. Mr. Valentine, now listen. Did you find her? There are cops all over the studio. I want you to understand, though, that I didn't know who you were when I read that letter. No, not exactly. Not yet. But believe me, we're turning the place upside down. Now, thought that game, I play on my program. Give me that phone. Give it to me. Well, look, I want to explain... Hey, what's going on? What's going on with McMurtry? This is Holman speaking, F.J. Holman. What? Who? What? I'm a studio manager, Mr. Valentine, and, as I told the police, we'll do everything possible. I've warned McMurtry before about that silly game he plays with those women. They were wearing their scarves by trying into their purses. Well, they love it. You know they love that. Be quiet. Be quiet. I just wanted you to understand, Mr. Valentine. Well, yeah, sure, Mr. Holman. Sure, nobody's going to sue anybody. Skip it. But you can ask Ansel there. He's been our janitor here at the radio station, you know. He's what? No, I didn't know anything about it. That birdie Pattyman, she's the sort of a person any number of people might want to kill.  A pest. A criminal radio contestant who's forever snooping around here. And sooner or later, she'll be back. You see, that's what I mean. You don't need to worry. She's a non-pleasant woman. Oh, tell it to McMurtry, I'm pissed. Hey, what's your character's work at that place?  Of course. 20 years. Never a day sick. How else do you think my sister and I get all the broadcast tickets I get them for? Keeps her away out of my brother's hair. I just want facts. Never mind the double talk like that Holman gives out. Because he's scared his radio station will get involved. Hello from Tag. You're it. You're wealthy. Letter she started said something about a phone call, didn't he? That's right. And when the police asked you about it... I do remember. Only a phone call I know anything about happened yesterday when I was home for lunch. Birdie stepped out to look up something for a newspaper contest. Voice says, hello from Tag. You're it. You're wealthy. I'm not foolin'. That's the kind of crazy stuff down here. No greedy, no nothing. I remember every word.   And that's all? Look in your mail? Hope you enjoy your award? It happens all the time. She don't do anything for a living except that. Puzzles, contests, coupons are always bringing up delivering things. You ought to see your stuff. She's got five vacuum cleaners in this house and she doesn't use one of them. What was in it the mail? What was the award that they... Search me, friend. I wasn't here. I work for everybody. Okay, okay. Hey, uh, Bruxy, phone Riley. Get him to check the mail, man. Sure, George. So, uh... So you don't like your sister-in-law, huh? Nobody seems to. Doesn't do anything for you. I know, I know, yeah. Not on contests. Well, sometimes I like contests myself, but I suppose it's a little different if that's all she does. Or we should train to get some bigger and nothing. Well, that's not the point. The idea is she was worried, wrote to me. How worried could Birdie be if she went gallivanting off the radio studio to have fun before she mailed your letter? Well, I'll grant you that it's... I don't take it seriously because neither did she. Murder, yes.  He asked me if she's not some place now. Forget all about it. Wait a minute. Tell me, what kind of a voice was that on the phone, that, uh, tag, you're it? Man or woman? Man, I guess I don't know. It lists. It what? List. Like this. Can it, Riley? Well, this is Claire Brooke. Oh, wait a minute. Here. Let me have it, Angel. Hello, Riley. Listen, Valentine, we haven't found that Pettyman Damien, but we just put out a bigger alarm on it because... Riley, no, wait a minute. A quick angler. Her husband's out of town, so he doesn't like it. Yesterday she got a phone call, and later on some kind of package. Wait, wait, wait! Are you trying to accuse my brother? I already got in touch with her husband. He's in Chicago. He's got nothing to do with it. Oh, Riley, everybody seems to think this is just a false alarm. I want to... All right, maybe so. But if there's one chance in 50 of I preventing a real murder... I said wait, will you? It's already happened. I don't mean Mrs. Pettyman. The exact opposite. Riley, for the love of heavens, will you? I always will keep on helping you look for Mrs. Pettyman, all right? But don't bother me. This one's a real case, my friend. This blonde, see? And the only clue I've got to go on is a note in her purse which says, tag, you're it. She's working all right. She's dead. How long ago did the doctor say, Lieutenant? Oh, it happened the first thing this morning. The traffic officer found her body in a car packed up an alley. Girl was shot, huh? Yeah, that's right. Nobody would have noticed it for hours. The best place in the world. Right in the middle of town, an alley in commercial district. But, oh, brother, how you get a connection between Mrs. Pettyman and something like this? Maybe it don't, Riley. This girl certainly lived in a fancy apartment. That's what I mean. What was she doing in the commercial district? Three-eight of the left, I guess. What's she doing with a note in her purse that says the same thing as... Yeah, there we are. Dorothy Cheever. I got the house made. She can never stop crying. Oh, Lieutenant, she was such a lovely person. Such a lovely person. George, she really did do all right. She donated her. Yeah, you can see that again. I'll bet the ball hit a giant and she'll have it as their father. No, no. She was alone, I think. So well-liked. So lovely. Yeah, so you said, well, now take hold of yourself. She's done so well, she's... I'm sorry, lady. I'm sorry, but here. Here, take a look at this. Tag, you're it. You're wealthy. Yeah, that's right. We found this note in Mrs. Cheever's purse. Now, the handwriting doesn't check with the signature on a driver's license. Well, of course not. It's mine. I wrote it. Oh? You better start drying your eyes, lady, and explain what the name... I wrote that note for her. So she'd remember that's all after the phone call. The phone call? Oh, no, no, not the same...  Well, I... there was this phone call. First thing after breakfast. I was into cleanup. A boy says, Tag, you're it. You're wealthy. What else? Well, an address. I took the message from Mrs. Cheever. An address of what?  It's the back entrance of Benson's first door. Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. Sure it is, and it's the most expensive place in town. Yeah, sure, go on. The boy says she's picked for a chance at a mink coat. You know, one of them giveaways is something. I guess they take your name from a phone book. Well, of course, she went right away. Wouldn't you miss a chance at a real mink coat? Just cause you're lucky and your name's been picked for... Hey, tell me. What kind of a voice was it? It list. It was, hello from Tag, you're it. You're wealthy. So, like that, Miss Dorothy Cheever has been selected for a chance at... Some crackpot. Some absolute nut. Sergeant, get hold of whoever runs that program and the radio station. You haven't heard the worst of it, Riley. Tell them what kind of a case he's got, what kind of a connection there is between Mrs. Pettyman and this. We already did call the radio stations, Lieutenant. The newspaper contested it, there's all of them. There isn't any such thing as Tag, you're it, you're wealthy. They've never even heard of it. Oh, brother. Well, that does it. You mean Mrs. Pettyman will turn up dead too, huh? And anybody who's tagged will jump for it. Just like the poor girl here did. Oh, my friends, we're up against a phony giveaway. Somebody just calling people up and giving away... ...death. We'll return to tonight's adventure of George Valentine in just a moment. Anyone who has cooked french fried potatoes knows that the frying fat can be used again and again. But eventually, this fat becomes contaminated and has to be replaced by fresh, clean fat. Oddly enough, something like that happens to the oil in your car's crankcase. You start out with fresh, clean oil. But after about a thousand miles, the oil has to do more harm than good. That's because the oil, which has to protect hundreds of precision-fitted engine parts, is now contaminated by dirt, moisture, and grit. And that leaves you with a choice of two things. You can make the oil last longer, or you can make your car's engine life last longer. You can't do both. To play it safe and economical, have the crankcase drained every thousand miles. Ask for this car saver service at the same stations or you get Chevron Supreme Gasoline at standard stations and independent Chevron gas stations, where they say and mean, we take better care of your car. Now back to tonight's adventure of George Valentine. Yes, tag your it, your wealthy, and the lisping voice on the telephone rarely means that you've been selected for death. A fictitious giveaway, a contest, and you're the winner. At least that's what happened to Miss Dorothy Cheever. She went to collect on a chance at a mink and was shot. And earlier, a message came from Mrs. Oscar Pettyman, promising a prize in the mail. And no sooner had she written her fear to you, than she disappeared. Well, if your name is George Valentine, you'll have to agree with Lieutenant Riley as back at the radio station, he puts it so mildly. An absolute madman is calling up everybody, taking anybody's name from the phone book. And we'll never find Mrs. Pettyman. She'll probably walk into something just like the blonde did. Everybody else. George. Hey, the lisping. So it wouldn't happen again, huh? Wait, it's from this way, something. Here, come on in here.  Hey, hey, what's going on? Who are you? You were whispering just a second ago. Why don't you ring the bell or not? Oh, Lord. And still, I said. All right, I'll take it easy. I didn't do anything. Here. Hello from tag. Your it, your... Just a gadget. I like gadgets.  Oh, I'm Russell, Johnny Russell, a night engineer. That was a record, you mean? What'd you get it? A telephone.  I'm out of the room for a minute. Telephone rings, goes on the tape. Listen. You're it. You're wealthy, Mr. Russell. You have won. Your name has been selected.  We wish you happiness as a winner in our contest. See?  With the Valentine, I stepped out for a second. Tape machine rig. Pick it up. So, I'm tapped. So, it's me. Don't you have any idea who it could be? Look, detective, I'm a lazy guy. I don't like old women and dogs, but I don't want anybody wants to kill me for it. So, just hammy my coat there, friend. I'm on my way. Uh, tell a boss and they... Oh, no, no, you don't. Wait a minute. Ouch! Hey, let go. There we are. Smiling, the boy dropped dead. You don't think I'm going to stick around here, do you? We'll find out what happens. I'll stay right with you, pal. And wait for my prize to come. I'm not that curious. I'm going to put as many miles between me and this place. Then you'll get a bodyguard. Sergeant! All the same by me? Oh, a janitor. Can I get the sergeant? Stay here, Angel. Well, McMurtry. Holy smoke. It could be me next to you or just anybody. Oh, no, it couldn't. See, it's quite a place Russell has here, isn't it? All these gadgets, pinups, hot plate for coffee, and this, uh, this picture. George! The blonde. Yeah, Dorothy Cheever. Russell ran around with her once in a while. Yeah, it all starts to tie together. Not the way I figured, but... Well, she used to work here, you know. Oh, no, we didn't. Well, if you could call it that. She's not the working type, if you know what I mean. I took her out once and twice myself, but she's too rich for my blood. Well, just what do you mean? Well, don't misunderstand, but, you know, ambitious. She wouldn't turn down a Duesenberg if you offered it to her for the best she could get, you know, but that certainly wasn't Johnny here. No, no, she liked men with more money. Like, uh, F.J.H. What, George? Initials on the picture of the other guy. Ball had it one bag at her place, remember? Well, I wanted to see if F.J. Holman is bald. Hey, now, look here, friend. The boss is all right. Sure he dated Dorothy, so what? It's him, sure, but there's no love triangle. George! Yeah, hold it. Come on. F.J.H. Holman's holiday, my friend. In the radio station, why do they listen to? I'm the radio station.  We found her my sister-in-law. Bertie's all right. She ain't even half way dead. Listen to her. Well, I don't see anything to laugh at. I'm right, isn't I? Back to the mic. Well, I'm going to get a prize, ain't I? I mean, who do you like? Yeah. Two of you, what she's like, might have known it. Ran out in McMurphy's program this afternoon, because she remembered she had tickets to this one. She was just telling them over there... Well, we'll have her under protection too, Valentine. To the audience, her cat was sick. They'd laugh. Don't blame them. Piece of candy Bertie got in the mail yesterday. What? What is all this? I'm so confused. Well, apparently Mrs. Pettyman got a box of candy. That's what the package in the mail was yesterday. The award, the Lisper Center. But anyway, she's out of danger now, like Russell is. Hey, Riley, take a look at Johnny Russell there. What? Huh? I'm... I'm... What? Well, I can't move. Get him to the hospital. Come on, lift him. Come on, step on it. Fast as we can, sir. George's coat. That's what it was. He said ouch when he put it on. Remember? Let me see that. Yeah, you see that needle there hooked in the lining?  Oh, brother, how fast you have to work in this three-ring circus to keep people alive. Mr. Holman's not in his office, Mr. Valentine. Oh, well, never mind. Uh, where are you going, Ansel? I work for a living. What do you think? Instruction box says Sweep Studio B. Well, janitor's hard pay. All right, all right. George, I don't understand. Well, I'll take him one at a time. Bruxy, Mrs. Pettyman got her call first. In some kind of murder attempt through the mail. Candy or whatever it was. Yeah. The whole case got thrown in the open fast because her letter was read right out on the air for everybody to hear. But in the meantime, Dorothy Cheever got her call and had been killed. Then Johnny Russell. You see, Angel, the murder was working against time, making mistakes, because it was really going too fast for him, too. George, they're tied together, though. I mean, the blondes... I've all been around here in the studio, sure. The blonde, Johnny Russell, even Mrs. Pettyman, always snooping around trying to get free broadcast tickets. Remember? Who's going to be next? I mean, what's the pattern? A killer like that doesn't stop. Hold it. What's the matter, Ansel? I just happened to think Studio B isn't being used tonight. It's a spare down in the basement with a reserve switchboard. What? Uh, supposed to sweep it out for a broadcast, you said. The note told me to do it. It was in the instruction box. Just a type note, though. Only now it's not there. Ansel, you're the janitor. You'll see everything that goes on around here. Logically, you'd be the next person that... Hey, Bruxy, get Riley back here.  What? Yeah, stay up here, Ansel. I'll take a look at Studio B for you. Record storage, music library, phone booths. Ah, here we are. Pretty good-sized studio. What? All right, come on now. Turn them on. Turn the lights on. Come on now. There's a master board around here someplace. What's the matter? Can't you see? Look, it's too late to play games, friend. Put your lip back in shape. Where am I? Yes. Where am I? You can't tell in the dark, can you? Where am I? Oh, no. Look for the lock. Music stands set up for an orchestra. Did you hurt yourself? Not half as much as you're going to be, friend. Have a music stand yourself! You only struck the piano. All right, now look, look. You're wasting your time, Buster. I know who you are. Is that so? And I know who you are, too.  You're Mr. Valentine. Oh, great.  Smart as anything. That was a sound effect for Mr. Valentine. Thunder, bells, anything you want. But no one upstairs will hear it, you know it. It's a radio studio. It's sound proof. Yeah. Yeah, radio studio. Great place to work in. What happened? Did you get fired or something? They pick on you? Come on, come on. Tell me. I know where you are. You haven't moved, so you're still somewhere by the big control switchboard. Mr. Valentine.  Yeah, I'm on your side. In fact, I'm almost done. Hey, let's go. There ain't no switches. Isn't there wrong switch, Mr. Valentine? No. What a madhouse. No, no, you don't. Get away. I'll get the lights. Get over there. And I still have the gun. Well, well, well. Hello, Ansel. You couldn't shoot me in the dark, could you? You guessed who I was. It wasn't a guest, Buster. You made a mistake. Let's skip that part of it. I'm on your side. Forget it. Of course, you're on my side. But I was fired. You guessed that. Fired? You have 20 years of service? Pullman said I should rest. But I worked for your living eye. I'm not like the others. Yeah, I know, OK? The girl who was out for everything she could get without working for her. Johnny Russell. He's that type, too. And Birdie. Always looking for a free prize someplace. Stop looking past my shoulder. I'm not going to turn around. The work is worth it. And I work. And I get fucked.  Lots of people I'm going to kill. Parasites who toil not. Sure. Yeah. Upstairs you pulled that gag to get me down here. It was going too fast for you, wasn't it? Holman was out and you had to have time for him. You understand, don't you? You're in the way. Now look, Ansel, you know this is all in your imagination.  Holman's all right. I know too much, but I'm not so bad either.  Why don't you lisp like you did in the phone calls? That was your mistake, you know. I don't make mistakes.  And you pretended you'd taken the first call from that boy. She said you remembered every word. Hello from Tag. You're it. You're wealthy. If you're looking to mail today, you'll find you're a winner.  Friend in that entire message, there's not a single S for anybody to lisp on. The last time, look at me. Now. Now look at the gun. You can't fool me. There's no one behind me. I locked that door when I called you in here. What difference does it make when I say... Oh, sure, that's right, friend. This is a radio.  No one's ever going to know what. Let me tell you just one thing, mister. It's just what I've been staring at. One of those switches we hit. Maybe lots of people will know about you, friend. Now you listen to me. Now I don't know what it means. You can tell me.  Yeah, look at it. In great big red letters, it says... On the air. What? No, no, this studio is... That's old sucker! Ansel was always strange. Mr. Holman told you that. He saved enough money. He didn't need the job. I wouldn't try to explain him. Of course, I never paid much attention to him. We know you were busy all the time doing... Well, doing... Well, doing what Ansel didn't like. I beg your pardon. There's nothing wrong with contests, is there? With a bit of skill and a bit of luck? Oh, no, no, we just... You can't tell me there's anything too many of those ideas he had. A madman like that, a man who'd kill people. Oh, no, no, no, no. I like puzzles myself. You're perfectly right. Now there's no excuse for him. He's locked up where he should have been long ago. Well, I just wondered, that's all. Because, you see, I just heard about another contest. They're going to give away the most beautiful prizes. And it ain't really getting something for nothing either. Because it's a mystery quiz. And I thought if you'd give me some help, Mr. Alton, I might even... This is where we came in. Good night, Bertie. We're going to a movie. Yes, George, to the Tivoli. Why the Tivoli? We're giving away a set of dishes. The last place in the world for a gum is in the gasoline you use in your car. That's because gummy gasoline raises cane with a fuel line, the carburetor, and spark plugs, cuts down your car's power, and makes it loggy when it should be peppy. The fact is, most raw gasolines contain impurities that form gum. The only way to get rid of those impurities is to refine them out. That's why Chevron Supreme is so good to your car. It's the gasoline that's super refined to prevent power robbing gum. And it gives all the qualities in careful balance that your car needs for every driving condition throughout the West. This proper balancing means faster starting, faster pickup, smoother power on hills. So for supreme performance and plus mileage, depend on super refined balanced Chevron Supreme. Ask for it where they keep a watchful check on your engine oil at standard stations and independent Chevron gas stations for they say and mean we take better care of your car. Tonight's adventure of George Valentine has been brought to you by Standard Oil Company of California on behalf of independent Chevron gas stations and standard stations throughout the West. Robert Bailey is starred as George with Virginia Gregg as Bruxy. Let George do it is written by David Victor and Jackson Gillis and directed by Don Clark. Wally Mayer is Lieutenant Riley and Jack Bailey appeared as Hal McMurtry. Pat McGinn was heard as Ansel, Bill Boucher as Holman, Martha Wentworth as Mrs. Pettyman, and Anthony Barrett as Russell. The music is composed and presented by Eddie Dunstetter, your announcer John Heaston. Listen again next week same time, same station to let George do it. This is the Mutual Don Lee Broadcasting System.


moving on to the. Looks like the third time MVP Nicola Jokic game winning three against the magic time expiring also had a seventh career triple double last night magic head coach Mosley said after the game and MVP type player makes the MVP type play. That's what it came down to him. This conversation will go on until the awards are handed out. But Chandler is Jokic starting to really distance himself in this thing. I think so.  Maybe you know maybe he's in the lead now maybe he's you know you know so it kind of keeps going back and forth. But when you watch your kids last night the guy took 11 shots. He went 8 for 11. He's so efficient the way he plays. We really have never seen a big play like this where you can initiate the offense through him. He gets the rebound. He takes it coast to coast. He's the guy's shooting 62% from the field because he doesn't take bad shots. He doesn't force his vision is unbelievable. At the beginning of the season I was I was finding every excuse to be like no way I can give this guy a third MVP. Someone else give it to a Luca give it to a Tata who's having a great year on the best team. I can't this guy is unbelievable. He's averaging 25. He's averaging a triple double. They're the best team in the Western Conference and he makes everybody around him so much better. It's not just one of these guys with God he stashed his putting up 4050. This guy is making his team better. He's making his team the best team in the Western Conference pretty much for the majority of the season. And it's so impressive what he's doing. So yeah I think it's him and I think it's truly remarkable that he could possibly win three in a row. That is unheard of. Look at that. Yeah I think I think I think he's running away with it. I mean I've been calling the MVP a narrative award for some time and the narrative is building and the only narrative block he had was voter fatigue and now the voters are fighting back at voter fatigue. They're saying yo that's not a real thing that shouldn't exist. This is in a vacuum. Doesn't matter like suddenly we've shifted the narratives. Last year the narrative was like yo they would have never been in the sixth seed. If he wasn't there and he wins the MVP this year it's well he's the one seed and he has the best that so now he's the MVP. I'm not trying to diminish what he's doing. He's playing incredibly well. But if you just look at the way people vote and the things that they weigh when they do that Luca is seven games back in the standing. So if you had him as close that's that's a big enough gap. Jason Tatum were already kind of writing him off as a competitor here for the award. Kevin just went down for two three maybe four weeks. And so who is left Yannis they're slipping in their up and down all season long. The MVP is his to lose at this point halfway through the season. And it's it's you know it's kind of like the coronation of Yolk it's right now. And like all the things Chandler said he's having some trouble. No we've got the best record in the West. He's looking incredible night in night out. And so I get it. I can hear the noise. I can see the noise. I can see the narrative already building up. Help if he remains healthy. That award is his. Let's talk about the other awards. And the combo is already over as far as I'm concerned. Wow. All right. How about how stoic. How about how stoic he was like he hits that it's a crazy shot game winner.  I love I love the fact that Nikola Yolk is going to just be him unabashed. And so shout out to Nikola Yolk for that. But I think if this team is a number one seed in the West it's hard not to look at him as the MVP for sure. And I know if you're Nikola Yolk and the Denver Nuggets the expectations that they've set on themselves is trying to win a championship. So they've been to the conference hours before if they get the number one seed individual accolades are cool but I know what this team is going to be going for what Calvin Booth is going to be aiming for is try to get this team to a championship. And so those are going to be the expectations especially if they get the number one seed but it's going to be tough to deny Nikola Yolk of an MVP if they're the number one seed in the West. By the way the Nuggets have been doing a good job of putting out content. There's a pop culture contest between he and Jamal Murray that just shows his person.  I'm taking a quick break right here but we've got the latest on my favorite thing in the whole wide world the slam dunk contest and the latest edition of that man has a family when we return.


And so today we're going to do a lab called freezing point depression. We're going to use the effect, the colligative property, the effect of freezing point depression to determine the molar mass, the empirical formula, and more like a formula of an unknown compound. So as you can see here, I had to set up the logger pro to measure the temperature, and this is our temperature probe. And the first step in this lab is to measure five grams approximately of loric acid, which is going to be our solvent. Now, we're going to add the chloric acid to the test tube. Okay, so now we've added the loric acid to the test tube, but before I proceed, because some of the loric acid was left in our wayboat. This is the mass of the amount of loric acid that did not get into the test tube. Okay, so now we're going to place the loric acid in the water bath, which is at 61 degrees, and we're going to melt the loric acid. And we're going to add the temperature probe, which we can use as a stirrer, but being careful however that the core does not touch the hot plate. Now the loric acid is fully melted. We're going to place it back onto the stand, and we're going to begin collecting data with logger pro. And now we have come to the end of our run. We have collected all the data possible. I will save this logger pro file and make the data available to you so that you can derive the freezing point of loric acid from it. Okay, so now we're going to add 0.75 grams of the unknown solute. And that's pretty close to 0.75. Okay, so now we're going to carefully remove the probe, temperature probe, and we'll set it up to where we don't lose any of the loric acid very gently. And we will take this test tube, add the unknown solute to it. Okay, we have added the unknown. I will put this here, back here, and next I'm going to weigh the small way board again so that I can find out how much unknown I actually have added to the test tube. Okay, so now I'm going to put the probe back in the test tube. And I'm going to put the test tube in the hot water. And the temperature of this water bath is 51 degrees Celsius. And I'm going to proceed to melt the mixture. And now it's fully melted. We're taking it out of the bath and we're going to place it onto the stand and we're going to start recording. And so we have collected all the data that we need to collect. I will provide this graph to you. And your job now is to turn in a lab report using the lab template, lab report template that is being provided to you.


It wasn't that long ago that there was speculation rumor flying that there was going to be a new Harry Potter TV series coming to HBO Max, tentatively titled Max, which is the new rebranding of HBO and the Discovery merger thing. I don't know what's happening. It's a complete disaster. I'm also not a fan of this Harry Potter series. Let's talk about it. In a press release today, it was uttered that there would be a decades long, a decade spanning, which is 10 years for those that are stupid, TV series following all the Harry Potter books. There are, I believe, seven books and there was eight movies because they cash grabbed the last one, but I love the Harry Potter movies. I'm a big fan of them. I'm not a big fan of this news.  I understand book purists want to get more bang for their book and they're probably gonna get that with what I would assume are gonna be hour-long episodes, hour plus maybe. We'll see. That doesn't necessarily mean they're still gonna follow the books to a tee. I thought the movies did a bang-up job. Yeah, they took out key ingredients. They swapped some character arcs here and there.  I never liked peeves the ghost, but if you're peeved about that, you're probably gonna get him in the TV series. They are recasting Harry, Hermione, Ron, the whole gang. I'm worried about this because those movies were such a love letter to not only the books but to film in general, to cinema. You had top-tier actors, a lot of which are dead now, which is very depressing to think about. When I watch those movies I'm like, and he's dead, and she's gone, and he's on his way out. It's not fun. It's not fun in that respect, but everything else is magic, baby. Everything else is just top of the line from the cinematography to the beautiful score to the amazing castle Hogwarts. Everything about it was just knocked out of the park, so to scale it down and claim that you're still gonna do the books justice, I just, I kind of balk at it, is what I say. Good luck. Good luck getting that kind of quality and that kind of acting. I'm not saying it's impossible, Kim. It's very Kim possible, but I just have a hard time believing it. I also think that quantity over quality can play a factor. Sometimes less, most of the time, less is more. So those hour and a half, well I don't think any of them hour and a half, those two hours to two and a half hour movies may seem rushed at times. They may seem to be sidestepping some plot points, but man, they are very tight films all around. So this news is not tickling me the right way in my swimsuit area, quite the contrary. It's like being punched in the nuts and I'm not the kind of guy that likes that. Here's the bottom line. This type of announcement on a film property that wasn't that long ago, it wasn't that far back when the last Harry Potter movie came out, is the equivalent to me of them rebooting Star Wars, the OG trilogy, like 10 to 15 years after the originals came out. They still haven't rebooted those and they probably never will because they're untouchable. It's kind of like Indiana Jones or Lord of the Rings. You don't want to mess with that.  There's so many stories you could tell. There's all these different magical schools. Why are we so stuck on Hogwarts? Because we have source material? What do you do? Make new material! There was a damn fine game that came out, Hogwarts Legacy. Takes place at Hogwarts, but it's about an entirely different storyline, different characters. It's very well done. Why not just take that and make it the show? I have a lot of concerns, is the bottom line. I want to know what you think though. Let me know in the comments. Are you excited about this? Are you happy that you can get another... Maybe you didn't like the movies and that's fair. That's fine. They're not for everyone. So you're happy for a fresh start to do over. I just don't think it's going to work. I don't think so. And to kind of maintain it for 10 years, which is the plan. Each season is going to have a book to its name or more apparently. That's tough to maintain those actors. To keep that story quality good. The cinematography, the music. Everything has to fall into place for this all to work out. I just... I don't see it. I don't see it. Let me know. Like the video. Subscribe.  And hopefully I catch you next time.


What's going on everyone? Sam here with Leighton Sports Cards and I'm ripping two boxes of 2022 Leaf Ultimate Draft Football for Gary P. So good luck Gary. See what we got in here for a minute. Hopefully something big. One of the nice rookie QBs. So first up we've got base auto that is Grant Calcuttaire base auto and that we've got 299 CJ Williams that is 35 of 99 and I'm not 100% sure where all these guys are. Give my best guess if I can. We've got base auto behind that that is Jaylen Weidemeier nice hit there got Charlie Kohler behind that he's a Raven now that is 92 of 99 nice one behind that what about this how about rookie autograph Kenny Pickett there you go congrats on that one there Gary that's pretty much who you want to get nice hit man congrats on the Kenny P Kenny Small Hands there you go congrats on that one Gary that'll do it for box one pretty solid pretty solid box for sure uh I think it's next I think it's nine days away so probably what's today Monday maybe it's this weekend I don't know to be honest I really don't know I'm not 100% sure Chris wrong person to ask I'm not going so I don't know got blue of Jerry on early or Ely Jerry on Ely nice one there got Joseph Nauta Joseph Nauta base auto behind that nice one here for the Jets now Jermaine Johnson the second that is to 99 nice one there got ultimate signatures to 75 that's Slade Bolden or Ultimate Futures excuse me Slade Bolden for Alabama and nice one to end it also for the Jets we've got 18 of 75 Garrett Wilson nice hit there Gary really nice break for you man congrats on all those that's gonna do it for your break there Gary like I said again congrats on all the hits we'll get those right out to you man thank you