Something You Should Know - Who Actually Discovered Fire and Other Amazing Firsts & How to Find A Job Now

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

It is a bicyclist's nightmare – dooring! It is when someone in a car along the side of the road opens the door just as you drive by and – WHAM! It happens a lot more than you might think – and it probably ALMOST happens a lot more. There is an interesting way to prevent it that comes from the Netherlands. Listen and find out what it is. http://www.rd.com/advice/travel/open-car-door-right-hand/1 Have you ever wondered who discovered fire or who invented the wheel? You might think it was too long ago to ever figure out but Cody Cassidy has done the research and was actually able to trace it all back to discover the answers to these and other questions like who invented clothes and who drank the first beer. Cody is the author of the book Who Ate the First Oyster?: The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History (https://amzn.to/2WMDa2f) and he joins me to reveal some of these fascinating firsts.  If you need a job, it may be tempting to respond to online job posts but that turns out to be an inefficient and often ineffective strategy. What works better? Listen to my guest Steve Dalton, founder and CEO of www.Contact2Colleague.com and author of the book The 2 Hour Job Search (https://amzn.to/2SXYBMC). He has developed a proven way to speed up a job search and get a job that is well suited to you. If you want to know how sincere someone is, look at their hands. Listen as I explain what to look for. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/malleable-mind/201205/emotion-is-reversed-in-left-handers-brains Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. actually know. The first person whose name we know lived in Mesopotamia almost 5,000 years ago, and he wasn't a king or a prince or a warlord. He was actually an accountant. He was an accountant for a brewery, and his name was Khushim. Then how a person's hands can tell you how sincere they are and how to get a job quickly by understanding it's not about going out there and selling yourself.

I wish that piece of advice, that concept of sell yourself, I wish it would die in a fire, by understanding it's not about going out there and selling yourself. I wish that piece of advice, that concept of sell yourself, I wish it would die in a fire, frankly. It causes so much pain because if we sense a sales pitch, our guards go up. But success in the modern job search means having the ability to bring people's guards down. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts.

Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. Now that people are starting to go out more, a lot of people are riding their bikes. At least where I live, I see a lot more people riding bikes because I suspect it's something to do. And if you've ever ridden a bike in traffic, you've probably been pretty careful about watching the cars parked along the side of the road for fear that somebody might open the car door just as you drive by and crash. Well, there's actually a name for this.

It's called dooring. And it happens more than you might think. A report from a few years ago said one dooring accident happens every day in the city of Chicago alone. And I suspect there are a lot of near-miss dooring accidents all the time.

But there is a solution. Next time you open your car door, assuming you're the driver, try using your right hand instead of your left. It's called the Dutch Reach. This simple motion causes you to pivot your entire body as you reach, first drawing your line of sight past your rear view mirror and then out to the street behind you. If you're on the passenger side, you use your left hand instead of your right.

The trick is to just use the hand furthest from the door to ensure that upper body pivot. What's interesting is that this tip comes from the Netherlands, where people are taught to open a car door this way. The result is, doing this doesn't even have a name in the Netherlands. It's just how people open the door, and there are far fewer dooring incidents as a result. And that is something you should know. I bet you've wondered things like,

who discovered fire? Or who invented the wheel? Or who drank the first beer? Those kind of big firsts are curious and obviously impossible to know. Or are they? Some of those big firsts we actually do know something about. Or more specifically, Cody Cassidy knows something about. Cody is a writer who has investigated what would seem to be impossible, and his latest book is called Who Ate the First Oyster? Hi, Cody. Hey, thanks for having me. So uncovering all these firsts

seems like fun, a bit of a daunting task, but what made you decide to look into this? I wanted to write about something that couldn't be looked up on Wikipedia, and a lot of the evidence of their inventions has decayed, and that really brings in this interesting concept of piecing together different science and different archaeology and genetics to try to figure out who they were and what they looked like and how they did it and what the effects were. Yeah, well, I would wonder, and you have in the book, you know, who discovered fire, and I would think, well, come on, how could you really figure that out? I mean, that's got to go way, way back, and it may have been more than one person. So who discovered fire?

The first person to control fire is, it's remarkable, we do actually have an answer for this question because fire has such a dramatic effect on food, for one. It breaks it down so we get nearly double the calories from a cooked meal than we do from a raw one. And this has had a dramatic effect on how we've looked. We grew more than a foot, the average, so archaeologists can see this dramatic change in our skeletons. And they've been able to pinpoint then when the first fire was first controlled, when the first person sparked one. And I call this person, I give these people names in the book, I called her Martine. And she lived about 1.9 million years ago and was probably chipping rocks to make sharp

cutting tools. But a lot of people think if you just chip two rocks together, you'll eventually spark a fire. But that's not true. You need a particular kind of rock called a pyrite. And if you are chipping a pyrite, you'll knock off a piece of iron. And once it hits oxygen, it oxidizes and burns bright enough to spark a fire. And that probably happened before, but I think she was probably the first person to realize why it happened. And this insight was probably the greatest geologic discovery in our evolutionary history. And you say she, but you're just assigning a gender like you're assigning a name, right?

You don't really know it was a woman. Yeah, in many cases I try to profile these people because I think it helps to remember and envision a single person was responsible for many of these things. And in some cases, I have a lot of evidence to suggest their gender or what they looked like or how they acted. And in other cases, I don't. In the case of fire, this happened so long ago, there really isn't any reason to suspect one gender or the other. So I basically just assigned one. But you said something a moment ago that I want to go back to, and that is we grew a foot because what?

So fire is, it's basically like chewing our food outside of the potty. It breaks it down so that our intestines can extract far more nutrients from food. And so before fire, we had intestines, guts that looked a lot more like a chimpanzee. They were more than twice as long as they are now because you have to really, the intestines have to really process a raw piece of food. But once we had cooking, we no longer needed that extra intestines, and that energy, that excess calories and energy, went toward making us taller, for one, which enabled us to have a longer stride, and we were better runners.

We lost our fur because fire was a source of warmth, and we no longer needed to stay warm at night. And even the size of our brains grew. Our brains are calorically gluttonous. They require a lot of warmth, and we no longer needed to stay warm at night. And even the size of our brains grew. Brains are calorically gluttonous. They require a lot of energy. And when we had cooked meals, we had the extra calories. Isn't that interesting that fire would, just that, just cooking food would change fundamentally who we are in many ways?

It's really probably the greatest shift in our evolutionary history, and I don't think we realize how much we depend on it. We really couldn't exist without fire. Nobody has ever been found to have been able to survive in the wild, on wild foods, on wild uncooked foods, for more than a few months. We can't extract enough energy out of a raw meal. I'd love to hear a little bit about who invented the wheel, because I would have loved to have been there,

just to see everybody's mouth open like, oh, wow, this is so much easier. The first full-size wheel and axle, a lot of scholars call it the greatest mechanical insight in human history. But it was actually a really, it may have existed, A lot of scholars call it the greatest mechanical insight in human history. But it was actually a really, it may have existed, the idea may have existed beforehand in small rolling toys, but the first person to really revolutionize farming and travel was the person who scaled it up into a full-size wagon. And we can see this happened at one point in one time, and then it spread virally throughout the continent, throughout Middle East and Europe.

And he was sort of a craftsmanship genius because these first wagons were 500 pounds, and so they required metal tools to make the fitting between the axle and the wheel perfect. And so it really was a piece of engineering and crafting genius. How quickly, though, I wonder, did somebody say, well, it not only works here, but it'll work on all kinds of things. Yeah, so at first the wheels of these wagons were pretty funky. They were really heavy. The wheels had to be solid, so they were almost a few hundred pounds, and they required oxen, sort of castrated male cattle, to pull them. These were not wheelbarrows or mountain bikes. And

it took nearly a thousand years before they even started inventing spokes, which meant the wheel could be significantly lighter and you could have things like chariots. So the first wagons, though they were revolutionary and allowed single-family farms, for example, because one person could carry a lot of weight, these people weren't racing all over the place. They were still really heavy. But people weren't saying, hey, and we can use this on this thing, and we can use a wheel over here, and we could use a wheel over there. That didn't happen right away? The wheel is, like some other inventions, it's taken, as time has progressed,

we've sort of taken a long time to realize how great it really is. When I grew up, we didn't have wheeled luggage. And then someone realized that if you put wheels on luggage, you can get around the airport a little bit easier. So it's really, and that's kind of been the trajectory of the wheel and many other inventions. It's sort of a, invention is a great moment, but then there's many other subsequent revolutions that occur. Yeah, we've talked about that one before, because it does seem that wheeled luggage came way too late, that somebody should have figured that out, because like you, I remember the days before wheeled luggage came way too late, that somebody should have

figured that out. Because like you, I remember the days before wheeled luggage and people would drag at the lift, and how come nobody figured that out until what was it like the 80s, 70s, 80s, right? Yeah, recently I think I read some, I think it had to do a lot with airplane travel, because wheeled luggage doesn't work nearly as well as on a sidewalk that has cracks and bumps. So I think it really came into its own when the floors were the linoleum-like, very smooth surfaces, which sort of is another key element of many of these inventions, is that sometimes you can look silly for not having an invention, these ancient people, but then you realize that there were other key elements that they were missing.

Without them, it sort of renders the invention itself useless. So when you describe that first wheel, you know, I keep thinking of the wheels on Fred Flintstone's car. Is that basically what they were? Well, they were made of wood. Oh, yeah, not Fred's. Not stone, but they were still really heavy and difficult. It turns out you can't... My first instinct, and I assume other people's,

would be to just sort of cut a log salami-style, and you got your wheel. But it turns out that doesn't work, because the grain of wood runs in the wrong direction i'm told so the wheel will actually crack almost immediately under the weight so you actually have to take vertical cuts from a log and then dowel them together and then shave them into a round circle of course with a with a middle hole for the axle so even with just that first part of the wagon, you can see how difficult a manufacturing process it actually was. So since it's the title of your book,

who did eat the first oyster? Because when you look at an oyster and you think of all the things you could possibly eat and look at that and go, hmm, that looks tasty. Who did that? The question of who ate the first oyster is actually, it sounds like a joke, but it actually has a surprisingly, it surprisingly has an answer, because archaeologists recently found the oldest eaten oysters. They're around 164,000 years old, and they found them at the bottom of South Africa. And it was not only a bold woman who made this discovery. I call her Oyster Gal.

She was a scientist as well, because she didn't live along the coast. She had to travel to the ocean, and that brings up the problem of the tides. You can only gather oysters around 10% of the time when the tide is super low. So she wouldn't have been able to gather them efficiently until she understood how to predict the tides, which meant she was able to piece together that a full or new moon coincides with a super low tide. So she was not only a bold eater, she was a bit of an astronomist as well. We're talking about great firsts in history, and we're talking with Cody Cassidy, who is author of the book, Who Ate the First Oyster? Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the

blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill

about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named the Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Cody, this is interesting. You somehow traced back who is the first person whose name we know.

The first person whose name we know lived in Mesopotamia almost 5,000 years ago. And he wasn't a king or a prince or a warlord. He was actually an accountant. He was an accountant for a brewery and his name was Cushim.

And we see on the first pieces of writing are actually just receipts. So this is a receipt that we found

that is proving that this Cushim had purchased a measure of barley. We actually know a few details about him, too. He wasn't a very good accountant, because there are a few examples on his tablets of him making some pretty egregious errors.

So even though he was the accountant in charge of a fairly large brewery at the time, it's a mystery how he got his job. Maybe some nepotism or something was involved. So his legacy is that he sucked at what he did. Yeah, but he's remembered, at least. His name is remembered. So where did the idea of soap come from? Soap was probably made deep in human history by accident

because you can make it with simply combining a fat and the ash from a fire. It will help. So if someone cleaned their greasy plate with ash, you'll create a little bit of soap accidentally. But it wasn't actually made intentionally until around 4,500 years ago. She was a textile factory worker. I've named her Nini Sina after the Sumerian goddess of medicine. She was just simply making something that made it a little bit easier to process wool.

She was working in a factory that processed a lot of wool, and soap helps remove the fat off of wool so you can spin it. It had nothing to do with washing herself or her hands, and so even though soap has saved more lives than penicillin, it's one of the greatest medical products we've ever come up with. She probably received no acclaim in her time. It's actually sort of been a long 4,500-year process of us understanding how great soap is at saving lives. Wait, wait. Soap has saved more

lives than penicillin. Explain. It allows water to coexist with oil. So it helps remove, if your hands are greasy and you use soap, you can remove the oil. And this is beneficial because it removes any bacteria or viruses that might be in the oil. This is why it's much better to use soap when washing your hands than it is to use just water. And soap also destroys viruses. It rips them apart, basically. It rips apart viruses and bacteria. So soap makes living in dense cities almost possible, because otherwise we would be passing around so many viruses and pathogens that it would be too dangerous.

Kind of like we're doing now. Exactly. You're right. The first beer. Let's talk about who drank the first beer, because in order to drink the first beer, somebody would have had to have made the first beer. So I'm sure that's an interesting story. Yeah, the first beer was made, I call her Osiris.

She lived around 16,000 years ago in the Middle East. This is about when hunter-gatherers first began gathering wheat and rye. And she would not gather it too often because it's rare and difficult, but when she did, she probably made a watery granola or a gruel. And she was probably a forgetful person because if you just leave out a gruel for a day in the sun, it'll ferment and turn into a slightly alcoholic beer. So she might not have been the first person to do that, but she may have been the first person with the courage to try this fermented mistake.

And she would have understood and recognized the taste of alcohol and presumably wanted more. And this is why archaeologists are starting to think that people actually began gathering wheat intensively, not because they were interested in bread, but because actually they wanted beer. And when she invented, or when she created the first beer, had there been other alcoholic beverages before that, or was this also the beginning of drinking? No, alcohol occurs naturally, and we think that we first developed a taste for it

long before we were even homo sapiens, probably when we began eating fruit off the ground when it had fermented, and so this sort of explains our preference for the taste and smell of it. So fermented fruits can't be stored or accessed easily. And so they think that, which is not the case with cereals, which can be harvested in mass and stored. So they think this... And then they have the other benefit of actually being a food. So they think the discovery of beer was actually a really important shift

in the lifestyle of humans. Do you have any sense as to what the recipe was? Would we recognize what she made as beer today? My local brewery actually made a similar beer to this once as a part of a celebration, these ancient recipes for beer. They tell me it would have tasted, there's actually a brand he compared it to called a Berliner Weiss, which is a beer made without hops. It's sort of tangy, and it would have been low alcohol without very much carbon dioxide. And it would have also had a lot of sort of wheat chaff on the top.

These old beers were drank with straws. So I don't think we would enjoy it, but we would certainly recognize that it had alcohol in it. I wanted to ask, as you look back on all of these things, in these very early days, these thousands and thousands of years ago, when people are discovering the wheel and fire and all that, was there any kind of, I don't know how to, you know how today we're always kind of looking for a better mousetrap?

We're always looking to improve everything. Were people looking, or were these all kind of accidents, and people weren't always striving to build a better mousetrap? I think most of our inventions, and certainly some of the most unique ones, were probably made by accident. I think that it's somewhat true today, but it was even more true back then. I think one of the ones that I was looking into, and I think this is certainly the case for, was the first bow and arrow, which was, these are really ancient. The first arrowheads were found a little more than 60,000 years ago. But a bow and arrow is a really

sophisticated weapon, and it's a little bit, and it doesn't have, it's not a replicant of anything in nature, which is, so like most unique inventions, I think we arrived upon it by complete accident. I think the best evidence is these people were playing with sticks and strings and sort of played with the flexion in this, you know, tied them together and discovered you could launch little sticks. But even then, that isn't a killing machine. It's a toy. And I think this is actually pretty common in history that weapons began as toys. We see it with boomerangs and gunpowder and rockets. So I think the first inventor of the bow and arrow was a complete accident and may have been the first user,

may have been a child. And lastly, who invented clothes? Seems like a great idea. Remarkably, we can actually answer this question as well, because even though clothing degrades quickly, body lice live on clothing, and geneticists have looked at these body lice, and they've determined that they first began to live on clothes just over 100,000 years ago. So we actually know when this person lived, and I've called him Ralph. We think he was actually not interested in clothing for its warmth.

He was more interested in showing off, because many people have lived in colder climates than he lived and not used clothing for warmth. They used fire, such as in Tasmania and South America. But it is a universal human activity to show off, to decorate one's body. So I called him Ralph after the designer Ralph Lauren, because I think in his case, in the case of clothing, fashion may have predated function. Was there a time prior to that that people just walked around naked all the time? Presumably because we lost our fur with the invention of controlled fire, which was more

than a million years before these people first began wearing clothing, which is a remarkably long time. But with fire, which is the reason we lost fur to begin with, is we had a source of warmth, and it seems like we made do with that. And then after we moved into, Homo sapiens moved into Europe, which was during the Ice Age, we certainly needed clothing for warmth. But that wasn't until more like 70,000 years ago. Well, it's quite a task you took on, and it's really interesting to hear the stories. Cody Cassidy has been my guest. He is author of the book, Who Ate the First Oyster? The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History. And you'll find a link to that book

in the show notes. Thanks, Cody. Thank you so much. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts.

With the economy starting to open up, people who need a job are starting to look again. And if it's been a while since you last went job hunting, I've got some excellent and encouraging advice from Steve Dalton. Steve is founder and CEO of Contact-A-Colleague, a corporate training firm, and he's author of the book, The Two-Hour Job Search. Hi, Steve. Welcome to Something You Should Know. It's a pleasure to be here.

So in 2020, I suspect a lot of people believe that the best and easiest way to find a job is to look at the online job postings and respond to the ones you like. And sooner or later, hopefully sooner, you get a job offer. But everybody has that same idea. So any job posting is inundated by interest from qualified and unqualified candidates alike. So if I'm a hiring manager, the logical thing to do would be to look for people who've done this exact job before, but somewhere else, or to just ask my colleagues who they know and they like. And whenever that first option is available, they'll take it. But barring that, their next option will be, give me someone that is vouched for by someone

I trust. And that's where networking becomes so critical. And that's always been the way that most people get their jobs, right? It's because you know somebody who knows somebody or you know somebody that it's more than just a resume in the mail or a posting online. It's always been that way, and it probably will for some time to come, I would imagine. I think what's changed in the last 10 years is the sense of false hope that online job postings provide that that is no longer the case. When in reality, I think it's only magnified the need to build that human connection.

The funny thing is nobody's really trained to do that. They think of having a network and knowing the right people as a passive activity. It's just something that happens to you. You know the right people or you don't. For me, I'm very passionate about empowering people to build that network for themselves, especially for those people to whom such activities do not come intuitively. And it seems, too, that, and I can speak for myself, but I've also talked to other people, and I've also heard some research that the idea of building the network, of going to functions, of meeting people, people would rather have their teeth pulled than do that. They hate the whole process, or at least the prospect of going through that process of building a network. Rightly, they should. I wish that piece of advice

that is so ubiquitous, that concept of sell yourself, I wish it would die in a fire, frankly. It causes so much pain, and it really upsets me when I hear very well-regarded career coaches give that advice to people because we live in sort of a post-sales world right now where authenticity is key. If we sense a sales pitch, our guards go up. But success in the modern job search means having the ability to bring people's guards down on demand. So it's not just about having a big network that you keep warm at all times. It's about identifying what you want and building a relevant network as needed just in time. I would assume that that would take too long. If I need a job now, I don't need to go out and build my network.

That could take years. And I need a job now. I don't think it has to take years. I think that's the perception. Again, when you haven't been trained for something, how are you going to be good at it? It's like expecting a grade schooler to be excellent at the violin the first time they pick it up. This is a skill that is critical to your success in your career, which is shocking because

it's so rarely taught anywhere with any sort of degree of formality. I think what you'll find is that a modern job seeker who's very desperate might spend 10 hours today applying for online job postings. And the response rate is so close to zero, it's almost negligible. But if they don't get a response from any of that 10 hours of effort, they're back where they started the next day. They're no closer to a job. However, if they spend that 10 hours reaching out to people in careers they want to enter, asking for the gift of their time, and letting them speak about why they're so good at their jobs, they will have a lasting benefit from that 10 hours. They will develop additional eyes and ears that are looking on their behalf, and it will all be authentic and result in learning along the way, which is the exact opposite of the experience of blindly applying online for the next postings that you see. But it's so attractive to do that because you think, here's a job.

I need one. I can do the kind of what they're asking for in this job. What a great way to connect. You know, if I do it enough times, I'm bound to get a job. I equate it to seeing the job of your dreams 10 feet away. It's just out of reach. But what you don't realize until you try to approach it is that you're separated from it by a foot wide wall of plexiglass that's as high and as wide as the eye can see. You can't go over it. You can't dig under it.

And what people today are doing is they're hurling themselves into that plexiglass wall over and over and over, battering themselves in the process. And in reality, the only way to get to that job that's behind that wall is to start hiking around the wall to find that end. What's ironic about that is you initially get further away from that job, that goal, when you start this process. You feel like you're missing out because you're no longer applying at the same rate. You're reaching out to people and it feels like it'll take a long time. But once you see the edge of the wall, everything else becomes clear and it's just a matter of time. It's a much healthier way to live. But I get it. It is the candy hide. The only positive reinforcement job seekers get in their search is the candy hide. The only positive reinforcement

job seekers get in their search is when an online job posting says, congratulations, your application has been successfully submitted, or when their family members say, we know you're doing your best, honey. They don't correlate with success. The way that you get affirmation from your support network is you quantify your efforts and number of resumes dropped and number of hours spent. But neither of those things correlate with success in the modern job search. The amount of informational meetings you do does correlate with success in the job search. So take me through your process. And obviously, it took a whole book to explain it.

But help me get a better feel for what you're recommending people do. If we're not going to do that, we still got to do something. So what's your way? Yeah, there has to be an alternative, right? I think what drove me to write a book is that every piece of intellectual capital on the subject I'd ever seen was presented as tips. Here's 50 tips, go figure it out for yourself. But when you buy a cookbook, you don't want lists of ingredients, you want recipes, because recipes are replicable. I'm a former chemical engineer by trade. So I very much think in terms of recipes. Also, interacting with strangers is not intuitive to me. So I had to learn a lot of these behaviors, because nothing came natural. So my process in a nutshell,

before we spend dozens of hours, it falls into three steps. First, you're going to prioritize the world of all possible targets into a logical subset. Second, you're going to reach out to people at those targets. And third, you're going to recruit the advocacy of those people. Now, the prioritization piece is the one people most often overlook. Before we spend hours and hours networking and getting people to open up about why they're so good at their job, we need to spend just one hour doing a little bit of brainstorming to make sure that the companies we spend hours networking with are actually the right ones first.

So let's use an example, because when you say things like prioritization and subsets and those kind of terms, I get a little lost, but I think maybe a really clear example would help here. Sure. So in terms of prioritizing contacts, the concept that I teach is something called the lamp list. It takes the universe of all possible employers and puts them into a logical order of attack. Now I equate this to the TV show, The Bachelor. On The Bachelor, it's from a game theory perspective, the show fascinates me because if you're The Bachelor on a show called The Bachelor, you're going to win. But if you're one of 25 contestants, you're at a distinct disadvantage already. Right out of the gate, you only have 4% odds of success.

What The Lamp List does is it turns you into The Bachelor in your own job search. So the way that we do that is we brainstorm 40 employers in about 40 minutes. So how do you do that? Brainstorm 40 employers? I mean, I would have a hard time coming up with that many, at least in my line of work. I would have a hard time brainstorming 40. So how do you do that? So essentially, we try to identify different employers we'd work for using a few different approaches so that we get a different set of results each time, with the end result being that we've pushed ourselves beyond the obvious handful of employers that first occurred to us. So if I were to say, think of a soda brand, everybody would immediately think of Coke and Pepsi.

But when you push people to brainstorm beyond the obvious ones, that's where you start uncovering the less obvious but more promising opportunities in a market like this, the Jones sodas of the world. My goal is to get everybody to push past the obvious employers because those are the same ones that everybody else is targeting too, to get to things that are a little bit more unique. Interestingly, the more unique companies that you network with, the more success you'll have at the larger, more mainstream companies, because you'll have shown a more genuine interest in that particular industry sector or space. Okay, so let's say I got my 40 employers. It seems a bit daunting to come up with 40, but 40 it is. So the idea is, without a lamp list, what tends to happen is people just pick the first five companies that come to mind, and they make that the entirety of their networking strategy, regardless of whether the data suggests that

those would be good targets for them or not. So what we do by brainstorming 40 is we ensure that the five that we end up focusing our networking efforts on are the five that give us the best reasons to believe we're going to get traction quickly. So find that job faster. So basically, we're looking for the presence of existing advocates. We're looking for our own personal motivation and pain tolerance, frankly, for approaching companies, knowing that we'll get ignored a bunch of times before we find a friend. That will give us a top five that will take into the second step of the process for outreach. So this process, I think a lot of people think when you approach companies, you got to sell yourself. I strongly disagree with this. When you approach a total stranger to ask them if they're willing

to talk to you about why they're so good at their job, they don't know you yet. The quickest way to turn them off is to start talking about yourself. Instead, I want to employ the opposite approach. Don't talk about yourself at all. Talk about this person's experience and why you'd like to hear more about it. This seems counterintuitive because how will they know I want a job if I don't tell them I'm looking for a job? If I'm asking for their insight and advice instead of a job, trust me, they know you're looking for a job. Nobody sends meeting requests for informational meetings for fun. At least I hope not because that's pretty messed up. What will entice them to talk to you is your genuine interest in what they have to say. Basically, some research showed that if

you ask for favors, you're just as successful as if you offer a compelling amount of money to get people to cooperate with you. So asking for a favor is much cheaper and much easier, and it's very authentic as well. What does that mean to ask for, like, what would you possibly ask somebody? What kind of favor would that be? Oh, that's a great question. Can you tell me about your experience in product management, or as a traveling nurse, for example, that's really all the email boils down to. I teach something called the six point email, and there's six very simple elements to it.

Basically, keep it short, keep it authentic, ask for insight and advice rather than job leads. Make sure you ask a question and make sure that at least 50% of the word counts about them rather than you. That's a common mistake people will make. They may ask for the gift of a contact's time, but then spend 80% of that email talking about themselves and why they should be interested to be talking to the job seeker. So it's really about writing a selfless email that's shortened to the point and recognizing that only 20% of people are going to respond to it. The 20% that respond, I call them, I think there are three types of people you encounter in the job search. There are curmudgeons who will never respond under any circumstances. There are obligates

who will respond but don't really want to. They're responding out of a sense of obligation. And there are boosters. Boosters are people who just want to pay it forward, the help they've received in the past. They're just good-hearted people. But I would put them at only about 20% of the population. So you've got to kiss a lot of frogs to find your princess in this process. And so that email would look like what? Like give me a for instance, dear Bob Smith. Dear Bob, do you have some time to talk to me about your experience as a product manager? Your insights would be greatly appreciated

because I'm trying to learn more about product management in the North Carolina tech space. It'd be something like that. Something very quick. Very short. It almost seems, because I'm just gut reacting to your email that you just mentioned, that it's almost too short.

Like there's no reason for it. Like this is coming out of the blue from somebody I don't know who's asking me one question. There's no context to this. It's easy for me to dismiss this guy. I think it would be easy for people who are not inclined to help strangers with their job search to ignore this email. And this email is not about getting the most responses possible. It's about getting the most responses from boosters as possible. So the less reason you give them to compel their cooperation, the more likely they are to be the genuinely helpful kind of contact you need. And is the goal to get a phone call, an in-person meeting? When you say, can I have some of your time, how?

Great question. Most often it will be done by phone. Strangers aren't generally comfortable meeting strangers in person. And so if you are open or you're local, offer the option. Once they respond and say they're interested in chatting, you can say you're happy to meet by phone or in person over coffee. And they'll opt into whichever approach they prefer. But the goal is generally going to be a real-time conversation by one means or another. Okay. And what's the next step? I imagine having the conversation. Yeah, now we're at the conversation. Now this is where things get tricky because everybody knows how to prepare for job interviews, but how do you prepare for an informational meeting? Because you have to manage the agenda this time instead of the interviewer. So I teach

my job seekers something called the Tiara Method. It's a rigorous questioning algorithm that really focuses the job seeker on active listening rather than sales. So the way that we accomplish that is we use the first half of the conversation to portray this contact as an expert in their field, which they are especially relevant to you, relative to you. And we use the second half to shift the frame of our questions to portray them as a potential mentor. So the way that we do this is by asking questions that are both fun and flattering to answer. So we're not going to ask them what the corporate culture is like at their firm. That's tedious. It results in a laundry list of information you could have gotten off the

internet. We're going to ask questions like, what's your favorite part of the corporate culture? That's fun. That's superlative. There's only one answer and the person you're interviewing can't be wrong. It's their own opinion. You could ask 10 people and get 10 different opinions. So Tiara itself stands for trends, insight, advice, resources, and assignments. Assignments is another word for projects. But using that algorithm, starting off with some small talk to promote likability, asking trend and insight questions that basically ask the person why they're so smart at their job, and then shifting them towards a more mentorship style of question, where you ask them what they would do if they were in your position and what resources you should investigate next. That's how you maximize the chance that you turn this conversation into what you're really looking for, which is a referral. Referrals are the

currency of the modern job search. Brown, Setron, and Topa did this fascinating study at the New York Fed, where they found that for every one person who was hired through an online job posting, 12 were hired through internal referrals. You said a moment ago to ask people why they're so smart at their job. How do you word that question? Because it seems you wouldn't ask it that way, would you? Absolutely not. No, I'm being flipped for shorthand purposes. So trend questions, that's where I would start.

These are macro questions. A good trend question would be, what trend is most impacting your business right now? Ask 10 people, get 10 different answers, all of which are correct, regardless of their level within the organization. Or you could ask it a slightly different way. How do you predict business will be most different five years from now? So we're basically asking for them for their take on their market. Insight questions are the second category. They get a little more personal. So what's been your best professional decision so far and why? What do you know now that you wish you knew when you're in my position? So they get a little bit more intimate, but then we get to advice and that's where we start shifting the frame from portraying them

as an expert to a mentor. So if you were me, what would you be doing right now to best prepare for a career in this field would be an advice question. And the resources question is where we give this contact a chance to share a referral with us without the awkward face losing opportunity of putting them on the spot and asking directly who you should speak to next. So the resources question is this, what resources do you recommend I look into next? By asking for what resources we should look into next, you're giving people who are open with their network a chance to give you a name, but you're also saving face in case they're not comfortable doing that. If they're not comfortable giving you a name, they'll say, what sort of resources are you looking for?

At which point you would say, are there any conferences you make sure you attend each year to stay up to date? What's the most important 10 minutes of research you do on your space in a given week to stay current on your field? So there's ways to pivot away from that, which allows us to ask for a referral directly after the informational meeting itself, usually a week after. And then what? Or do you just leave it kind of vague like that? So after that, you send a thank you note within 24 hours.

And that, to me, closes the transaction. You asked for the gift of their time. The thank you note closes that transaction. However, you set yourself a reminder to follow up a week later. My recommendation is ending the informational with a phrase like this. Wow, you've given me a lot to think about. I'm going to take the weekend to reflect. Is it okay if I reach back out to you with any additional questions?

To which they'll probably say yes. If they do, you set yourself a reminder for one week later, you send a thank you note that night. When that reminder goes off in your calendar, then you follow up with an email like this. Thank you so much for your time last week. Upon further reflection, this is definitely something I'd like to pursue further. How would you go about doing that if you were me? For example, can you recommend someone I should speak to next? This is your best chance, best opportunity to request a referral explicitly. It's over email, so it's less threatening. They've had a week to realize they kind of liked you. You didn't try to upsell them or put them into an awkward situation. So if you don't get a referral

here, you're probably not going to get a referral. But allowing a little bit of time to pass, make sure that they see that your interest in their expertise was sincere. Okay. Something in me says you still got to ask. You got to ask for the job. Because the type of contact we're working with are boosters, we don't really have to worry too much about that. Generally, they're going to offer more than you're willing to ask for. So no booster I've ever met has said, oh, I met this job seeker who is great, but because they never asked me for a job

explicitly, I just didn't mention that we had an opening. That's literally something that never happens. So if you get people to like you, and interested is interesting. If you express a genuine interest in others, they will take an interest in you. And then it's just a very organic conversation from there. The idea is that you can't guarantee success through any one single referral. So we just keep building our bench of referrals at multiple organizations and different sectors that we'd be open to working in. And over time, I equate it to fishing for lobster rather than fishing for fish. When you fish for fish, you put bait on a hook, you throw the hook in the water,

and fish swim up and you have dinner, or they don't and you're right back where you started tomorrow. But when you fish for lobster, you buy cages. Lobsters don't swim up to hooks. So you buy cages that you bait and you leave them in the water for a little while, and you check them regularly to see if you caught anything. Now, you never know with any certainty that any individual cage will ever catch you a lobster, but you do know with certainty that the more cages you have in the water, the better your odds are of catching a lobster eventually. And that's the right mindset taken at the job search. It's not about going immediately towards the goal. It's about acquiring cages systematically. Each booster that you find is an additional set of eyes and ears job searching on your

behalf, even when you're sleeping. And what's your sense as to how many lobster cages you've got to put out there? I mean, if it's 10, that's not so bad. And 20, if it's 200, that's now you're asking a lot. It's a great question. So when using the LAMP list, everybody I've had who's followed it as designed, who's followed the recipe exactly, while I have people brainstorm 40 employers, pretty much everybody's done by the time they get down to number 10 on their list.

Now the catch here is you don't move on to, you start with companies one through five and you don't move to company six until you find a booster at companies one through five. But everybody's done by number 10. I've only had two people reach number 15 and then they landed it by number 15 and they were more experienced professionals for whom the job search is going to take longer just because there are fewer positions at that level and pay grade to be targeting. Well, there's a lot of detail there and listeners may want to go back and listen for the specific steps and techniques, but I like this idea of rather than just applying for jobs to build that network of people from these informational meetings, seems like it has a really good shot. My guest has been Steve Dalton

and the name of his book is The Two-Hour Job Search. You'll find the link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Steve. Excellent. Thank you so much for the opportunity. You can tell how sincere someone is by watching their hands. According to a blog from Psychology Today, people tend to gesture with their dominant hand when they feel positive or passionate about something. When we aren't so sure or we don't like something, that dominant hand tends to quiet down a lot. It's because we associate things we like or feel strongly about with the side of the body we use the most. And that is something you should know.

I could use your help in growing this podcast audience. All you have to do is share it with a friend. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been

investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. wherever you get your podcasts. a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.