Learn a 5-minute hack for beating procrastination from Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom; why spiders are good for your home, and the most humane way to get rid of them; and a primer on a few philosophical disciplines to get you started in the world of philosophy. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: The 5-Minute Hack for Beating Procrastination Used by Instagram's Co-Founder Even If You Don't Kill Spiders, You Might Be Doing Them Harm Read These 5 Books to Understand Philosophy Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn a 5-minute hack for beating procrastination from Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom; why spiders are good for your home, and the most humane way to get rid of them; and a primer on a few philosophical disciplines to get you started in the world of philosophy.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron!
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/5-minute-hack-to-beat-procrastination-spider-benefits-and-dangers-and-philosophical-disciplines
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiositydotcom to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn a five-minute hack for beating procrastination, why spiders are good for your home, and the most humane way to get rid of them. And a primer on a few philosophical disciplines to get you started in the world of philosophy.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. Are you procrastinating right now? Well, lucky for you, we've got one of the easiest tips ever for actually doing that thing you keep putting off. And it'll only take five minutes. This short and sweet life hack comes from Kevin Systrom-- co-founder and former CEO of Instagram. Here's what he says to do, quote, "If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing." Unquote.
That's it. Just commit yourself to five minutes of whatever it is you're trying to do. Make sense when you think about the saying, getting started is the hardest part. That's the whole story, Ashley.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's it. No. That's great. I mean, It's a five-minute hack, so it's tiny.
CODY GOUGH: It's literally the shortest story we've ever done on this show.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: But there you go.
ASHLEY HAMER: Do you ever find a spider inside of your home and you're not sure what to do about it? Well, entomologists have a few ideas. They're scientists who study insects. And some suggest you might not be doing what you probably should be doing when you run into an eight-legged creepy crawly.
CODY GOUGH: I bet you're one of those people that scoops it up and then sticks it outside.
ASHLEY HAMER: Always.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes. My most extreme was in college when I took a spider down four flights of stairs to the front door because the windows didn't open. I always do that, and I just found out that that's the wrong thing to do.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, no.
ASHLEY HAMER: So first, right off the bat, let's be clear. Spiders are pretty much inevitable. North Carolina entomologists look through 50 different homes and all of them had spiders. Some were better at hiding than others and some were from different species, but they were all there.
In fact, a typical home has between 50 and several hundred spiders. Don't worry though. They're really good houseguests. They almost never bite humans. In fact, they prefer to avoid us altogether. In a way, they function like free invisible groundskeepers for our houses who trap and kill other more obnoxious pests. Kill too many spiders and you could find your house buzzing with flies or mosquitoes that thirst for human blood.
But let's say you see a spider and you just can't stand the thought of being near it. Are you a person like me who scoops up stray spiders and tosses them outside? Well, it turns out that that's not always the most humane approach. If the spider you kicked out is native to your area, then it'll probably be fine. But if it's an immigrant spider that came from somewhere else, you might be giving it a death sentence.
That's because spiders are built for very specific environments. A species that came from London will definitely die outdoors in Seattle, even though those two cities have a ton in common. And your house has more non-native spiders than you think. According to Arachnid Expert Rob Crawford, the American house spider is probably native to Northern South America. Meaning, it'll be just fine if your backyard is, oh, I don't know, Brazil.
If you want to get rid of a spider in a truly humane way, then put it in a place where you won't have to see it. Think of a crawl space, a basement, a garage, and other places that are not your bedroom or bathroom. Trap that spider between an empty cup and a piece of cardstock, dump it in the right spot, and you're almost guaranteed to keep your friendly household spider alive.
CODY GOUGH: Today's episode is sponsored by Purple Mattress-- better sleep, better you.
ASHLEY HAMER: Sleep is important for staying happy and productive. But it's also important if you want to be less hungry. We wrote about this on curiositydotcom a couple of years ago. We covered a 2011 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine that showed that people who got less sleep had higher levels of a hormone that can make you hungrier, boost fat retention, and reduce calorie burn. Is your stomach growling yet?
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The Purple Mattress feels unique because it's both firm and soft at the same time, so it keeps everything supported while feeling really comfortable. Plus it's breathable, so it keeps cool.
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ASHLEY HAMER: The only way to get this free pillow is to use our code, "Curious" at checkout. purple.com, code, "Curious."
CODY GOUGH: Today we wrote about some book recommendations if you want to learn more about philosophy. You can find the full list of books in our article on curiositydotcom and on our free Curiosity app for Android and iOS. And of course, there's a link in today's show notes. But what does philosophy even mean, anyway? Kind of a broad term, right?
Well, don't worry because I'm going to go over a few philosophical disciplines you should know about and maybe inspire you to learn more about them.
ASHLEY HAMER: I have such a love-hate relationship with philosophy. For the longest time, I believed that it was stupid and it's, basically, just a bunch of old dead guys and what they thought about the world and why do I need to know that. And now I'm starting to understand that pretty much everything we know is underpinned by philosophy. Everything comes down to philosophy. And now I'm just trying to learn about it, and I'm so glad that we wrote about this so I can learn more.
CODY GOUGH: I don't think it's that hard, honestly. I think it's about knowing what questions to ask and there's a few different approaches you can take to ask those questions, I guess.
ASHLEY HAMER: I think the thing is that every philosophy resource that I find is very heady and I haven't really found a good beginner resource. And so these are really good beginner resources, I think.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, awesome. And again, we'll have links to those in our write up, but I'm just going to go over the high-level disciplines and what they are. So if you walk into the Philosophy section of a bookstore, maybe you'll know what to do. And by bookstore I mean Amazon because that's what everyone does.
The first discipline is metaphysics. That's probably the first thing you think of when you think philosophy. Metaphysics, basically, covers any question you have about the nature of Reality with a capital R. That also means the nature of change, the nature of causality, the nature of identity, and questions about whether any of those concepts are even real in the first place.
Metaphysics even interacts with physics sometimes for the science buffs out there like the nature of time. Ideas from the worlds of physics or philosophy could have major impacts on one another when you're talking about time. So maybe, a good place to start if you love space science could be metaphysics.
Another philosophical discipline is ethics. I can illustrate this using the trolley problem which you've probably heard of. There are various versions, but it, basically, goes something like this. A runaway trolley or train is barreling down a track towards five people. You're standing next to a switch. If you flip the switch, then the trolley will switch to another track, but there's one person stuck on that track.
So is it your responsibility to save those five people but cause the death of one? Does flipping the switch make you a murderer? And what's the difference if there's five people on that track versus 10 or 100 or 10,000? Yeah. Fun questions in ethics. And one of the disciplines you should know about is epistemology. This is the study of knowledge itself and how we know things.
Here's an easy way to sum this one up. Say, you believe something because you have proof. And you believe in that proof because you have more proof of that proof and then you have more proof of that proof and so on and so on. So where's the like actual proof? Where does it end? To know something you have to be certain of it. The challenge is to find an idea for which certainty has never eroded away.
Anyway, check out our full write up to read about the philosophical discipline of logic, if you're interested in that, and you can get some ideas for where to learn about all of the above in our reading recommendations.
ASHLEY HAMER: I definitely will. You know we've been asking you to fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a Curiosity t-shirt? Well, we did some fun math on that. We figured out how many responses we'd need if say, we were doing a psychology study to figure out our audience preferences within a 5% margin of error. Well, we're almost exactly halfway to that number right now.
So scientifically, we actually have a specific need for more responses. Find the link to our survey in our show notes and on our Patreon page and on our podcast page on our website all right here in the Milky Way. It should only take about 10 minutes, and you'll be doing it for science. Read about today's stories and more on curiositydotcom.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
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