Hi, welcome to the Personality Hacker Podcast. My name is Joel Mark Witt.

And I'm Antonia Dodge. Today we're talking about awareness and one of the reasons why this came to my mind is I remember listening to a radio

interview back in the late 90s I think. Terry Gross of Fresh Air was

interviewing a guy by the name of John Stillgo and he was talking about he was a professor at

Harvard he was talking about he wrote a book called Outside Lives Magic and talking

about regaining awareness and history in everyday places and it's really cool I'm kind of

of rereading the book right now and I as I'm reading through I'm understanding

that he is really focused on the visual human landscape, right?

So basically like buildings that have been built over the years and then modified or road systems or rail beds or power lines,

how humans have affected the environment and how we have kind of put our mark on the world in a sense.

And going out, the book is talking about going out and observing

natural history and human history and how they've merged

and then using that to increase the awareness of what you think

about the world, basically pattern recognition, things like this.

So it's a really fascinating book and I thought we could talk about it today.

I haven't read the book. You read the first chapter to me or was it the

prologue yesterday and what I thought was interesting is that it's specifically

like what he's talking about or it seemed to me what he was talking about

was specifically awareness around things that we completely take for granted.

Yeah. Like you know you've walked walked by this mailbox a thousand times.

And when you increase your awareness of what's going on around you,

you might stop and notice that the paint is chipped, and's not the paint underneath it is not the

...