Matthew Royal > Recent Status Updates

It's striking how many blunt diagnostics are used in CBT and for assessing states like depression. You could build an app that for CBT: documenting thoughts, feelings, and behaviors by integration with social media, phone GPS, Fitbit, etc. and your phone could ask occasional questions about how you're feeling, in order to constantly assess and nudge you toward better mental health.

Very mixed idea of who the audience is, given that sometimes Satterfield implies the techniques he's presenting are for the listener to use personally, and other times he speaks to the audience at though they're mental health professionals who have patients themselves.

This is more than just an audiobook. There are recordings of therapy sessions. Perhaps they are reenacted? It feels weird to listen in on these conversations, and I wish that Satterfield went into a description of the CBT process first, rather than delving right into sessions.

I love that there's a Blanche and Dorothy in one of these accounts, as I get the Golden Girls warm fuzzies. What a perverse world to live in that only gives black women a fair shot at a good job when there's literally no one else who can do it.

I feel like this is a dangerous book to read when I'm in the middle of anything else. I need a notepad and a highlighter, both for what Questlove says and for the insights his words trigger in me.

There are patterns and links to everything. You have to be open to them. According to studies, alertness is the enemy of creativity. Feeling fatigued lets the creative thoughts through. Also having a couple drinks.

In the last 1/3 of this book, Ferguson gets lazy -- he rails against the administrative state's volume of regulations compared to the Magna Carta, missing the change to make a point about the inefficiency introduced when hierarchical bureaucracy attempts to regulate networks. So far, his thesis is a poor guide to predicting the future or guiding strategy. Hopefully the last 13% of the book provides a synthesis.