Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Frameworks for Better Decision Making | Dr. Eric Johnson

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Eric Johnson, a Norman Eig Professor of Business, and Director of the Center for Decision Sciences at the Columbia Business School. He has been the President of the Society for Judgment and Decision-Making and the Society for Neuroeconomics. His academic awards include the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award of the Society for Consumer Psychology, Fellow of the Association of Consumer Research, and an honorary doctorate in behavioral economics from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.Eric’s research examines the interface between Behavioral Decision Research, Economics and the decisions made by consumers, managers, and their implications for public policy, markets and marketing.Among other topics, Eric has explored how the way options are presented to decision-makers affect their choices in areas such as organ donation, the choice of environmentally friendly products, and investments. I wanted to have Eric on because I read his latest book, “The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters” – Decisions and microdecisions are one of our greatest human privileges. It is our choices that ultimately reveal who we are. Eric has spent his life understanding the frameworks for decision making – how we set conditions, and how conditions influence us. You’ll be fascinated by what Eric has to share about decision making._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. So there's been, you know, 30, 40 years of research on the idea that we use shortcuts or heuristics to make choices and they do well most of the time. I mean, that's, you know, sort of how we get through life. Danny Kahneman famously coined the term system one versus system two. System one is this automatic system that uses shortcuts.

System two does the math or does much more complex thinking. And we would freeze if we always use system two. So system one is very important. But a lot of the shortcuts have blind spots. Welcome. This is the Finding Mastery Podcast, and I'm Michael Gervais by trade and training, a sport and performance psychologist. And I am fortunate to work with some of the most extraordinary thinkers and doers across the planet. And the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn from people, learn from those who are challenging the edges of the human experience in business and sport and science and life in general. We are pulling back the curtain

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Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put them on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them. One a day, one a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell. Okay. All right. Look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits so conveniently into a performance-based lifestyle and actually tastes good. Dr. Peter Attia, someone who's been on the show,

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davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. Now this week's conversation is with Dr. Eric Johnson. He's the director of the Center for Decision Sciences at the Columbia Business School. He's also a professor at the school. He has been the president of the Center for Decision Sciences at the Columbia Business School. He's also a professor at the school. He has been the president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and the Society for Neuroeconomics. Eric's research examines the interface between behavioral decision research, economics, and the decisions made by consumers, managers, and their implications for public policy, markets, and marketing.

So among other topics, he's also explored how the way options are presented to decision makers, how those options affect their choices in areas such as organ donation, the choice of environmental-friendly products, as well as investments. So I wanted to have Eric on because I read his latest book, The Elements of Choice, Why the Way We Decide Matters. So decisions and micro decisions are one of our great human privileges. It is our choices that ultimately reveal who we are. And Eric has spent his life understanding the frameworks for decision-making, how we set conditions and how the conditions influence us. So I'm fascinated by the decision-making process, that small little quiet thing that

happens inside of us that we align our thoughts, we make a choice, and then we act accordingly. Like that process is materially important for you becoming your very best. And the conditions that are at play for that sometimes seem below our available conscious. Understanding how those conditions also are impacting our decisions is really important. So I think you're going to be fascinated by what Eric has to share about the decision making meshed network that we're all engrossed in. So I'm excited to introduce Eric to you. So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dr. Eric Johnson. Eric, how are you? I'm doing very well, Michael. How are you?

I've been looking forward to this conversation. I'm excited. So thank you in advance. Good. I am too. Let's start with a quick flyover of the chapters of your life. And the reason I want to do that is to set the context a bit for what we're going to talk about later, which is becoming a designer and a chooser in your decisions. So the architecture of decisions. Sure. Absolutely.

I grew up in a working class suburb in New Jersey, very insular in lots of ways. Going into New York City was something I started doing at 16. It was a wide, wide opener of my mind. Went to high school, sort of Catholic high school, then went off to college. And that was actually really important for me because I discovered that people did serious things like research and I discovered I sort of liked that a lot. And I ended up majoring in a major, I kiddingly say, is the thing that all the football players major in, which is human communications. But in my, at Rutgers, that was actually a great excuse to take courses all over the place without a minimum, with a minimum of requirements. I also discovered I could play string bass and actually worked as a musician for a while about that time.

Then it got time to go to graduate school and went to Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, where I was very lucky to work with one of the first, in fact, the first Nobel laureate from psychology and economics. That was a gentleman named Herbert Simon. And then I had to get a job, which seemed like it would be daunting, but I was lucky enough to do a postdoctoral fellowship with someone who is actually pretty well known in the field, who was Amos Tversky. You might know Kahneman Tversky. So I got to spend a year there.

And then I really had to get a job. I ended up going back to Carnegie Mellon, then Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. I had a great time, had wonderful colleagues and research assistants, then finally ended up going to Columbia about 20 years ago. Oh my goodness. Okay. So was higher education always part of the family appreciation for the next step after high school? Or is this something that you're carving new territory, new uncharted territory? I think I'm the first, not the only now, but the first of my big set of cousins, which is 32. So that's a big set to actually have graduated from college. Now others have done that. Wait, wait, wait, wait, Eric, you have 32 cousins?

Yeah. Well, one side of the family is Irish Catholic, and that explains a lot of it. And my mother was one of seven children. So you can do the math. Yeah. Okay. So what was it like having so many aunts and uncles and cousins around? It was interesting. They were geographically dispersed.

So there were sets that we saw every weekend, every other weekend, and others we saw rarely. But that was a big occasion when the North Carolina cousins or we would go to Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is where other cousins were. So the extended family was big and large and important. All right, very cool. So your book is... I loved your book. I love the simplicity. I love the

design thinking. I love the, you're a systems thinker. And at the same time, you don't lose or untether the intimacy of how decisions are made or the people involved in it. And so I loved your book. And so I'm excited because, you know, like in today's world, we have more options than, than I had when I was a kid. And so I, decisions are hard for people, for me sometimes too. And part of it is the way they're presented. And, you know, you've illuminated that, but even from But even from the dating rhythms to options of a restaurant to what am I going to wear to an event, to dinner or something, and even what groceries that I'm buying and you illuminate all of those. And so can you just start with why you were fascinated by the architecture of decisions? Can you just start

there? And then hopefully we can drill right into some of your systems thinking. Sure. Thanks. One of the things that struck me is that when I was making choices about colleges, I saw kids who were very bright decide, I'm going to go to the community college. And other kids who were about the same decide they would try, you know, for IVs and other things. I was really interested in why they did that. You know, I, I had, I had a very small set and I was very lucky. I hit, hit it off very much with some, some folks. It was a very, Rutgers was a very good place for me, but what was interesting is people ended up with different

choice sets, you know, different, you know, I'm going to go to either X, Y, or Z, or I'm going to go to, you know, Harvard, Swarthmore, Yale, you know, those are the kinds of choices. And how did those choice sets come to be and how did they decide that's how they were going to limit themselves? So then I was lucky enough to, when I ended up at Carnegie Mellon, it's really interesting. There was one of the origins of artificial intelligence and the idea that people were limited information processors. Herb Simon won the Nobel Prize for the idea of bounded rationality. That when you think about choice, you don't think about every possible option. You don't think about every possible attribute of those options. You think about some of them. And so again, the fascination was how does that happen?

It happens for experts. It happens for novices. It happens for all sorts of people. So that was sort of the origin of my interest. And I was just very lucky to go from one really good place to another throughout my career. Okay. Makes sense. So there was an influence based on the folks that you were studying with and under at some point. Or was this an original fascination that you brought into your professors? It's hard to say because I had the fascination. They fed that fascination. But certainly, the idea that you can change what people choose by changing how you pose it to them,

I think is something that was in the air. My contribution might be to turn that from saying that's something you can do to show how people make choices. To change it, that's how you can help people make better choices. Yeah, because there's a benevolence to what you just said, and there's also a Machiavellian approach here, which is the manipulation of holding back or positioning information to help guide somebody to make the decision you want them to make. And even architecting it in a way where you can manipulate that you know the decision that they're likely to make. And so maybe we can start with, let's get flat-footed on the benevolence part of it.

And so start there with what makes a decision hard? I think two things. One, I don't talk as much about in the book, but it's obvious, which is when you have conflicting goals. So the one example I do talk about, which I like is, you know, when we choose what to eat, we want something that's delicious, filling, sweet, or, you know, and we also want something that will make us help us be felt. Now that's a conflict that many of our decisions have. And those are the ones that are more open to be affected by the way they're presented. Another thing is just things like

the number of options. You can do a lot to make the same choice hard or easy. You can add more options. You can make the numbers used to describe them hard to process. You can use fonts that are hard to read. It's something, I think we all want choices you can use fonts that are hard to read it's it's something you know i think we all want choices that are fluent that are easy that flow fluent means flow and that's the other thing lack of fluency makes choices hard and you suggested that competing interests or competing goals i found've found, and I can't point to the science here, but I'm sure it's probably tip of tongue for you, but one of the hardest decision inflection points is when I need to decide between two things that are both favorable or two things that are

just about equally unfavorable. So that makes it a harder decision as opposed to the, you know, one choice is clearly better than the other. And so can you remind me of some of that psychology? And the other thing I would add to that is it's easy if they were identical, right? If it was like a vacation to Las Vegas and a vacation to Tahoe, that's one of your goals. But if they were very similar, that would be easier. But if it's a vacation in Las Vegas or it's a vacation in Rocky Mountain National Park, when they're both attractive and equally attractive but similar, it's easy. When they're equally attractive and very different, it's harder because that's where

the trade-off with goals happens. Got it. Okay. That makes sense. That helps clarify it. Okay. You also talked about what makes a good decision. And so can you speak about accuracy as one of the indicators of a good decision? Now, this is something that the idea of being fluent is sort of what designers do. Typically, when you have someone who is a human factors expert, they make the decision flow easy. But there's a second part of that, which is making the decision accurate. That is one that we'll be happy with in the future. And that's hard. Philosophers have thought about that for many years. And I think about a couple of things. One is it's pretty clear that a good decision should be consistent. That if I flip an attribute

or describe something differently, you should pick the same thing. That would be bad because if someone can flip your choices easily, they can exploit you to come back to an earlier theme. Second thing is sometimes you make choices where when you look at it, the thing you choose is worse on every dimension. So let me give you an example. Picking things like health insurance. Lots of people have very confused by that decision. And there's lots of nice research that shows that people pick policies that are the same as others, but just more expensive. So you're paying more for the same coverage. I think everybody would of getting an accurate choice is quite clear when you think about that. When you're picking an option that's bad on every dimension, then you know you're making an error. Okay. That's really cool.

And just to be incredibly concrete, you are talking about having a couple choices to choose from. Too many is a problem. Not enough is too restricting. So let's just say, I can't remember, but is it between three and five? Probably three is the ideal bundle of choices to choose from. Let's talk about that more in a second, but let's say it was three. Okay, let's say it's three.

And let's be concrete. That's great. Okay. And then underneath each one of them, you can manipulate how much information you give and you can manipulate the order of the information you give it. And you can also manipulate the way that you present the information as leading with the favorability of the product or service or leading with the absence of the favorability. And that's super non-concrete and you use the better example of, uh, the concrete example of, um, fat in hamburger. And so do I have that

framing, right? That those are, that's what you would basically AB test. Yeah. I mean, you would have all sorts of things you could do, including I'd argue the number of options, not is not written as three, but that's a discussion maybe we should just postpone a little bit. But yeah, you're the designer. And as a designer, you basically get to make lots of choices about how that information is presented to somebody. So the example that is due to a psychologist who was doing these studies in the 80s in Iowa, he described hamburger as either 70% lean or 30% fat. Now, it doesn't take much to realize those are the same thing. It's just one emphasizes one half

of the attribute, the other emphasizes the other. And people would think the fat tasted better than the lean. They pay more for the lean than the fat. It's really quite incredible. Even if they tasted it, they had that effect. So if I wanted to present information in a way that was compelling to help somebody make a choice that I'm less interested in, this is the Machiavellian, I'm less interested in them having the benefit of the range of choices or the benefit of what's going to accurately fit them best. But I want them to think about, or I want them to make a decision that will be more favorable for me.

I'm asking it this way because I don't want to be manipulated. I don't want that. I feel like after reading your book, I feel like I've been highly manipulated at every corner of my life, at almost every decision. So I'm trying to flip it in that way to say, getting into the minds of how people are giving me information that is manipulating my choice. But maybe you can take the designer's approach and say, how did they do it? Right. So when I first started thinking about doing the book, I was wondering whether I should write for both designers, the people presenting choices or choosers, the people like us who are making choices. Of course, I realized quickly every day, we're both. You talk to your spouse, you're presenting choices. Where do we go to dinner? What do we watch on Netflix tonight? You're a choice architect, or as I call them, a designer. At the same time, your spouse can turn to you and say, oh, here's three vacation ideas. So we're all in both roles. And to make things simpler,

I concentrated on the decisions the designer makes. But of course, by lifting the curtain a little bit, I think we also learn some of the tricks that designers can use. And you talk about, this is the choice. Basically, what we're talking about is the choice architecture. And I love the one you use about kids in bedtime. And so this was like, so concrete. Maybe you can just walk us through. Yeah. So this is a true story. It was a friend of mine. When I started working in the area, I sort of said, depending upon how you present things, you can actually change people's choices. He says, ah, this is exactly what I do with my three-year-old daughter. She used to complain about whether or not to go to bed. I would ask her, you know, do you want to go to bed?

And, you know, a fight ensued. Instead, he changed it to, do you want to fly into bed or do you want to bounce into bed? And she would pick one and end of contest. You know, he just changed the choice set and both his daughter was happier because now she exercised some agency. She made a choice and he got a lot more sleep. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family,

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for 20% off. I i love that it's super benevolent and it's a great tactic if you will to help provide two choices that the parent in that case wins you know not that it's a war or anything like a competition but the child also wins because you know children need ample sleep that being said said, can we use that to help people understand that are listening and me how to present information to help move people down a path that you're hoping that they will move down? And even when I say it, it almost sounds like I'm trying to manipulate. It's not what I want to do, but I do want to understand how this works better right so you know people accuse choice architecture of being

paternalistic and in that example it is paternalistic means it's what a parent would do so paternalism which is basically taking agency taking freedom away from people is something that I think people take very seriously and should. But just because you don't know about choice architecture doesn't mean you're not exercising choice architecture. So there's lots of examples that I can think of where people are doing it very badly. And rather than being paternalistic, they're actually hurting other people. Let me give you an example that, you know, it was a lot of fun to research, partly because I live in New York City. But when you're a kid in New York City, in the eighth grade, you get to pick what high schools to apply to. And it's a

little bit like college, you get to rank order high schools. And they did this based on some wonderful work done by a Nobel Prize winner named Al Roth, who actually, interestingly enough, is a product of New York City schools. His parents both taught in those schools, so he knew the environment very well. And what he invented was a method which says if kids rank and if schools rank, the match will be the best possible. That is, if I want to go to this high school and the high school wants me, we're married. It's actually something that people have talked about for things like finding residencies. And I suspect it's going to be applied to dating someday.

But that match sounds like a brilliant idea. And it's literally a Nobel prize winning genius designed it. The problem with how it's implemented in New York is kids get a thing like an old style telephone directory with 769 different high schools to choose from. So it's not that they're being paternalistic, they're being anti-paternalistic or they're being bad choice architects. And there's lots of stories of kids who basically pick randomly or pick based on where their friends are going. Or in the book, I talked about a young kid who's a valedictorian of his grammar school who actually picks the schools that are the most likely to graduate you, which is great, except they're also the most competitive.

So you can get into any of them. So unless you have a lot more resources, unless you do choice architecture, you're hurting people. So there's no choice architecture option. Does that help a little bit, Michael? It does. How would you have designed that with your science? Well, some clever sociologists did an attempt at this as a first pass. And they said, well, we can actually simplify the choice a lot. First thing we're going to do, it turns out in New York City, there are sadly high schools that graduate less than 70% of all the kids who enter. I mean, that is just astounding and sad, but we can eliminate those. One of the things about this choice is basically bad performing

schools get closed down because nobody goes there. So they just took those off the list entirely. And I don't think anyone's going to regret that. So they just took those off the list entirely. And I don't think anyone's going to regret that. Then they said, what we're going to do is then sort of list first the schools that are within 30 minutes, because most kids think 30 minutes is a decent commute. And so they basically got it down to 30 minutes and they sort of then presented the kids with one sheet of paper instead of the book. They could go to the book if they wanted to. No choice were taken away, but they made the choice much simpler for kids.

And that at least got much better matches. They basically matched with higher ranking schools. They went to better schools. So if I'm designing a website for the services that I provide for my business, would you suggest that we ask a handful of questions and then that directs them to a product or service that best suits based on the matching, what they told us basically that would serve them? Would that be thoughtful design architecture? Oh, it would be very useful. I call those choice engines in the sense that what they do,

they help you make a choice. Just like you think of a search engine helps you search a choice engine can help you make a choice and one way of doing that is by learning a little bit about you let's say that somebody comes to the website and they kind of have a sense of what we're doing and and i say um i don't know what the question is, but it's something like, what would you like from us? Or how can we help you? Are you interested in more information around one, two, three, four, five, you know, options? Or is it six options? Or like, let me give you a nice example of how this can be done badly and better.

We did some work for a large German auto company who makes upscale cars. I call them GLAM, German Large Auto Manufacturer, but you get the general idea of what kind of cars they make. And they had a website with 56 different choices. Now it turns out Germans really care about their cars. So things like what engine you have is really important. They got a choice of 16 different engines. That may be too many. But one of the things they did, which was amazing, is they had the price for each of these options. Let's say what upholster you had in the car, always set to the cheapest. Or for engine, it was always the smallest, cheapest engine.

Now, when I asked them, they said, well, some programmer made that decision. Well, one thing we know about those pre-selected options, we call those defaults. Those defaults actually get picked more often than if they're not pre-checked. And so what they were doing is essentially selling people cars that had cheaper seats, smaller engines than they would have picked if they hadn't pre-checked it. So to your point of choice architecture has an influence, whether it's done by a programmer who doesn't know what they're doing or a highly sophisticated executive, that's going to have an influence. Now, to get to your point about making this a choice engine and making it something where people were customized, it turns out there are certain constellations of attributes. So if I were to say, Michael, you're buying a car for yourself, it's going to be one that you drive on weekends.

Don't worry about the kid seats. You could tell me a lot about the car. We have a pretty fast engine, probably have manual transmission. It might be convertible. You could tell me a lot of that. So what we did was for them is they just asked, what kind of car do you want? Not the whole set of 56 questions, but basically a family vehicle, a sporty vehicle, you know? And once you did that, they set the defaults to the best option,

or at least a good guess of what the best option is for every person. So what they did was basically, as opposed to somebody saying, here, were you born in 1956, 1957, 1958, blah, blah, blah. What they did was basically say, here are four engines. This one we think is best for you, but knock yourself out. Change it. Buy something more expensive. Buy something that's expensive. And their consumers were actually much happier that way. And it turns out they sold cars for them, which was great, which are slightly more expensive and presumably more profitable.

So they help by using charge-to-electricity. They help their consumers and they help themselves. Okay. Which is the win-win. You've made that point clearly in your writing, that that's the goal. So how many questions? If they're really good questions to get to know somebody to help them make a choice. So sometimes I fight back to the questions like that because it's sort of like saying,

how many engines should an airplane have? And it's going to depend, is it a cargo jet? But let me work with this for you. I mean, if there are questions that someone understands why you're asking them, that's an important thing. So let me give you a simple case. Retirement. Most people who don't know much about finance end up in something called a target date fund. This is a fund. It's actually the default option in most retirement plans. What is it called? A target date fund. Let me explain that to you because it's a marvelous concept. Essentially, in finance, what you're supposed to do is basically start out mostly in stocks.

As you get older, shift to less risky investments. Because at 25, you have a lot of time. If the market goes down, it will go up again. But if you're 64 and you're going to retire in a year, not so much. Now, it turns out most people don't do that rebalancing. They basically buy stocks and sit on them, no matter what Jim Cramer says. That's really what is going on. And so what they do is they ask you one question, which is, how old are you?

Hopefully not every year, but they ask you that question. They can say, for someone of your age who's likely to retire at 65, we're going to put you in a target date fund that will do that automatically for you. They ask one question and it makes a huge difference in essentially the outcomes people have because they will automatically change your balance between stocks and bonds, making them more conservative, less likely to have a big loss as you get closer to your age. So one question can be enough. Not always, but it can help. Yeah. And I understand the ridiculousness of that question with lack of context because psychological assessments, let's say we're going to screen for suicide. Well, there's one question

that trumps all others. do you want to kill yourself right now right right and and i don't want to be callous in any way but that is the question whether you're in person or paper pencil or digital that we're trying to understand and then all of the other questions if the answer is no it's to understand risk you know do you have a plan have you thought about it do you have the means and and and so so i understand the ridiculousness of the reduction question but i was wondering if back to an original point we talked about earlier number of choices being bundled and the number of questions that there's a a fatigue i was wondering if um people get fatigued after a certain number of questions, like, give

me the options. Like, I just want the options. So that was maybe a more nuanced way of asking that question. Yeah, and I think you had asked earlier, and so this is maybe a good time to talk about even how many options to present, not just in terms of making the choice engine smarter, but just how many high schools should I present the poor little kid who's making this choice engine smarter but just how many high schools should i present poor little kid the poor little kid who's making this choice um three in that case is probably not enough because there's a broad variety of high schools there's you know schools for foreign arts schools for electronics you end up going to a great school which turns out that was uh essentially for people

who were doing technology human interface it was co-sponsored by IBM. It worked out well for him. But the thing that's interesting is you can't just present three options there. You have to give people a broader set of choices. So there's sort of a balancing act. The balancing act is you're going to overwhelm people as you add choices. But as you add choices, if you're doing it right, you're giving them more variety. And so if I know nothing about someone and it's a paper instrument, a book, it's very hard to customize. But on the web, when I might even know stuff that you don't know about yourself,

depending upon the website, your website could know a lot. I could actually do a lot in terms of actually generating a set in terms of actually generating a set of options that'll be good for you. And so if I know more about you, I can reduce the number of options. So certainly 700 is too many. I will say that definitely. Okay, that's fair. So you said something important.

This is my naivete around programming and websites is that you said the website can know a lot about you. Is that from making up words that I think the website can know a lot about you is that is that from I'm making up words that I think I should know like cookies or when you enter onto a website there's some sort of identification I would imagine of who you are but I don't really know how this works are you saying that there's already information that comes with you to a website or are you saying that based on the questions that you would materially wait for responses from is the best way to gather?

Well, let's go to an extreme example, which is a company like Netflix. Just from their internal data, they know what movies you've watched, how long you've looked at them. So even a company can often use their internal data. Amazon, any of the large tech companies know a lot about Michael because they've seen Michael's behavior. In addition, if it's a new site, there are often, as you say, cookies and those cookies link to other things you've done on the web.

And that's a whole nother fascinating question. But the idea is you can actually run a choice engine, which helps people without asking any questions because there's data that you may know already. An airline may know that you will always fly. You always take the aisle seat. You know, they can help you by, by, you know, making that the default. Okay. All right. So it's like, I better understand the levers, but I still do not understand, even after reading your book, I still don't understand how to be a better architect. And I know that you've got a decision tree or you've got a framework for helping people make better choices. But before we get there, can you go up a level?

Because I feel like I'm down in the weeds with you too far. Can you go up a level and say, Mike, if you want to be a better architect, these are the core pillars to make sure that you're a better designer. These are the core pillars to include. So the two drivers, I think, your goals as a designer is A, to make the choice fluid, to make it seem easy to people. Because if it isn't, they might not engage and they might not make a choice at all. The second, which is actually to make it accurate, and I sort of defined accuracy, but something that's in their best long-term interest. So for example, you want them to pick retirement plans that will get them more money rather than less. You want them to, if you have a, you know, if you ask them questions about what their tradeoffs are for food, you know, you probably can make sure that you can help them choose a better diet.

So, the idea, and I'm an optimist, is that a good designer is helping you make better choices. And I'm defining that both by fluency, that is, it should be easy, and it should be accurate. So just like a conversation is fluent, there's a pace to it, like you and I are in right now. And fluency on making decisions is that I met with the interesting information at the right time is that what fluency from a like a purchasing decision um standpoint is that how you think about it's a subjective judgment do i feel do i feel like this is following do i feel like it's easy let me give you one example of something that makes things more or less fluent. Imagine I'm giving you a price and I give you the price as, okay, let's use something like a gym.

I could tell you it's $10 a month or in a bizarre world, I could tell you that every time you come to the gym, we're going to charge you $1.92 an hour. Yeah. One is much more fluent than the other, easier to understand. And that's a good example. That's a great example. Yeah. Okay. Economists, by the way, would love the per hour pricing. Because the math is probably better there. Yeah. And you could actually charge as a function of usage. You know, someone who uses the gym a lot pays more than somebody who uses the gym very little. Then if we drill down a level on fluency, you also eloquently explain trends that people tend to make when they make choices. It's like smaller sooner versus larger later. I think that that's a really cool insight. And then the time versus money variable as well.

And so it's kind of classic, you know, this is the lotto mechanism, if you will, right? Like some money now versus more money later. And so can you just walk through some of those levers, smaller sooner, larger later, the time money conversation? Right. One of the things that people study a lot in psychology and in neuroscience and in economics, it's become sort of a really important question, is how do people make choices between smaller rewards now versus larger rewards later? A classic case of this is I study now for income, a better job later. I'm teaching a group of Columbia MBAs right now, and I tell them,

you guys are giving up making income to come here and study. The reason is you think that in the future, you're going to get a better job and make more money. So that's the kind of choice that you study in the lab, but it's important because it's what happens in the real world all the time. So what is fancy to phrase is called intertemporal, but it's just called choice over time. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Say it again. Intertemporal choice. Choice between time.

Intertemporal. Right. Sorry about that. choice, choice between time. Intertemporal. Right. Sorry about that. No, it's good. You can take the academic out of the institution, but not always take the words out of it, the academic. Okay. Intertemporal, meaning within time? Yeah.

You're making trade-offs. So typical question. Let me ask your listeners, if we were live, we could have them raise their hands. Would you prefer $50 now or $60 in four weeks? So I can answer that question. Yeah, go ahead. If I need 50 bucks, I take it now. Right.

If I've got some resources and I've got some sort of bet that I'm making that money's going to come in over time, then I wait. Even among my Columbia MBA students who presumably have some resources, about half of them pick the $50 now. And when you go to more broad samples, you find that. Now, there's an interest rate there, by the way, implied. And that interest rate is like 120%. Let's break that down. So imagine I was taking the $60 in four weeks. Okay. Now, that would seem to be a fine thing to do.

The $50 now is the equivalent of taking out a loan for 120% interest. Actually, if you do the math, it's as if you're demanding 120% interest to wait. So the way of thinking about this is you have $50 now, Michael, how much would I have to offer you to wait four weeks? And you say $60. I say, that's 118% rate of return. You're crazy. Imagine putting this investment. I gave you $50 now. Would you really expect to have $60 in four weeks? That would be an amazing investment. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So people choose the smaller sooner at a higher rate when larger later, the calculus for larger later is based on what?

It's basically saying that if you gave up the advantage of the larger later, the $60, is that you will have more money. In fact, if you could borrow money, let's say you needed $50 now, like you were saying, Michael, if you could borrow money, 21% against your credit card, you'd be much better off because in four weeks, a measly four weeks, you're going to get $60. Credit cards only charge you $21. But in that time you pay back the $50 plus interest, you know, $52, and now you have 60. So you really should be waiting in that case.

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and use the code findingmastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. On that note, can you talk about load shedding? So when we're overwhelmed, right? I love the phrase when we're overwhelmed, we want, we, there's a craving to shed load. And so can you, can you talk about some of those, um, the impact, what that is and the impact of that in making decisions? Sure. So if you're faced with a choice and the choice is difficult and you know, the example I, I love from the book, I love it in part because I have an apartment that has a view of the Hudson and I would have actually seen Sully Sullenberger. That's the pilot who's

famously played by Tom Hanks in the geese had hit the engine, if you all remember that. And what happened is basically he had to choose whether he goes to one of three places, the river, another airport, or back to LaGuardia. And he uses the phrase, which he says, I load shed immediately he immediately figured out what the most important attribute was and that was to save lives he was perfectly willing to choose to lose the airplane but he was really helped and this is how choice architecture can really help load shed there was a nice little gauge that told him look if you fly at this angle you're going to go this far.

And it made it much simpler. He didn't have to do the calculations in his head. And as a result, he had time to think a little bit more. He load shed. In the electric industry, power generation industry, that's exactly what people do. If there's a shortage of power, they turn out the power to the aluminum smelter and don't have the power cut off to the hospital because one is more important than the other. And what he did was basically say, I know I've been to New York. I've been to see around 42nd Street. On this day, the weather was 19 degrees air temperature. So you don't want to be in the Hudson River when there's 19, unless you're going to get saved very quickly. And he said, I know that's where the city police keep all the fireboats. I know that's where there's lots of ferries.

So if I land there, he had the time to think about this. If I land there, we're going to get rescued very quickly. And so he load shed, decide what his priorities are. And with this gauge called the airspeed tape, he actually was able to actually land the aircraft on the water. Why is that load shedding? What was he using to shed the load that he was carrying? Was the load the anxiousness and the intensity of decisions? I think the load was he had lots of considerations when we talked about the qualities of options. So he had one which was saving lives, another was saving the aircraft,

no doubt there were others, but he could concentrate on the one he cared about. He load shed to concentrate on saving lives. And so, okay, we know from a pressure standpoint, from an activated sympathetic nervous system, that we choose speed over accuracy. And I think the way that I interpreted your findings in the story is that one way to increase accuracy versus speed so we're you know with pressure which is speed over accuracy one way to increase uh the ability to be accurate is to is to shed the load of all of the decisions that you might have to make so

hit some priorities and then keep stacking those decisions based on the core priorities. Is that close to being right? That is. And I think the other thing I would add to that is that the beauty of a good choice architecture of good design, it helps you do that. So there was just one gauge that helped him. Actually, he didn't have to do calculations. He didn't have to think about, oh, if I fly at this angle, I'm going to be going this far. The gauge told him that. And it did load shedding for him. It let him think about other things. That choice architecture helps you load shed. It basically frees up mental resources so that you can actually

think about the heart of the matter. So that you can attend to the more important, less mundane decisions that need to be made. Exactly. Okay. So the way that I think about it as a psychologist is that the load shedding also was done when his priorities were clear. So he was working from first principles, ship, reputation, lives. reputation lives and so he already valued lives and evidenced by the the his ability to make that decision maybe we would say most people would do that just that but if it's not clear it's harder to get to the actions that would flow from that first principle so i love that you talk about

the structure of being able to make these decisions. And I also think that when we're clear about our first principles, that when we feel that constriction, call it pressure, when we feel it and the first principles are evident, that the downstream decisions or the micro decisions that we make become more clear. Would you agree with that? I would. And I would suggest that just to bring it back to choice architecture, that the design of what you're looking at, imagine you're in that situation, there's not a gauge that says, here's a probability of having everybody live, but there was such a thing. Having a metric that's close to that core principle would be really important. That is, you manage to what you see, and what's more important is actually what you see is what is easiest to think about. Okay. If you were to design a set of questions to help people become clear on their first principles, so you're designing something to give them a choice for clarity.

How would you go about structuring that? Now, I'm not necessarily looking for the exact questions by any means, but is there a God or no God? I mean, would you ask it concretely like that? Or how would you go about designing that type of thought structure yeah i'm not sure i'm going to weigh in on on the existence of a higher power but no no no that was just that was meant to yeah you know do you like blue cars or red cars could we could use we could use anything here but there's so many options for first principles that's. And one of the ways of resolving that is to actually give yourself, put yourself in the situation where you have two options that differ a lot and think about how you would feel in each of them. So do I want to go to a

small college or a big college? Now I could think, I could think about, do I like this school or that school? But I also could say, how do I feel about being in a place where there are only 1200 kids versus a place where there's 20,000 kids? But first we have to assume that the person wants to go to college because there's, I'm getting down to much more concrete. I agree. Okay. Yeah. So that's where I get a little overwhelmed is of all of the, of all of the choices that you and I have to, to be able to make a decision about which words we're going to string together to make a sentence. There is some, there is some architecture behind that, that is informing where you're

choosing, choosing words and where I'm choosing words to have hopefully a fluent conversation. And I'm just trying to understand from that perspective, if we're to help people in a way to design a structure for them to be more clear about what matters most to them, the white page doesn't work. Like a blank page doesn't work. It becomes overwhelming. And so just a couple principles that you would employ to get closer to designing something for clarity for folks. So, I think I would still go back to thinking about what I feel about relatively concrete options. I mean, it's one thing to think about what's the role of material comfort in your life? Well, that's a really hard question to answer.

But to say, how do you think you'll feel about this kind of life versus that kind of life? That's much easier to think about. And it turns out people aren't particularly good, by the way, at guessing how they'll feel about their future. They adapt, but at least that gives them a hand thinking about what the trade-offs are. It's better than just assuming the blind life of just, I'm going to assume I'm going to make more money and more money and more money without ever questioning that assumption. Okay.

So this is somewhat related to load shedding, but then can you just quickly talk about cognitive shortcuts and the biases that we make to make quick decisions, I guess? So there's been 30, 40 years of research on the idea that we use shortcuts or heuristics to make choices, and they do well most of the time. I mean, that's sort of how we get through life. Danny Kahneman famously coined the term system one versus system two. System one is this automatic system that uses shortcuts. System two does the math or does much more complex thinking. And we would freeze if we always use system two. So system one is very important. But a lot of the shortcuts have blind spots. So let me give you one example, which is actually going to come back to our conversation about how many options.

So one of the reasons, in addition, people just freezing is when you give people too many options, they adopt a shortcut. So one of the things that I thought a lot about is dating sites. Now, I'm happily married. So this is all for the sake of research, but there are dating sites, Tinder being one of them, that give you an infinite number of options and you might think that's great. There's another website that when it was started, it was started by three Korean women called Coffee Meets Bagel. And the goal was to make a site for women. And that presented you originally with just one option a day. So you might think, you know, they're presenting dates.

How could they differ? Well, on Tinder, people use a shortcut, which is called let's look at the picture. And they don't look at the other information. They don't look at somebody's profile, where they live, what they're looking for. And that's probably pretty relevant information in many cases. And some people will tell me that the pictures you see on something like Tinder are not exactly honest. So you're looking at a bad piece of- Somebody told you.

Somebody told you, yeah. I've been told. And long story short, people basically get unhappy on Tinder because they keep flipping, flipping, flipping. And there's even a term from urban dictionary, they call it Tinder thumb. And that's the feeling of annui, of lostness, you feel, with too many options. Now in coffee meets bagel, if you're stuck, you have to actually look at the other attributes. And that makes you not use heuristic, but actually think about, well, this person actually seems interesting. It's a very different way of thinking. It's much more system two way of thinking. So these shortcuts actually happen in part because of bad choice architecture.

And then you also picked up something in the book about some of these shortcuts is that people are not always honest. So if you're going to make a shortcut, and we make shortcuts all the time, when we're overwhelmed with something, we rely on shortcuts to move with speed and accuracy, usually choosing speed over accuracy, if I have it right. And you also said that, I can't remember the data or the number, but males sometimes don't put their height down. Surprise, surprise. They're accurate, they're accurate height. And so if you're going to gate out information so that you're not going to choose a shortcut non-consciously or consciously make the shortcut. And one of the things that you're going to gate out is like, you're going to limit. I only want, what was the example using the book, like six foot and above or six, two and above or

something like that. It might be a chance that you've got somebody that's five, nine that says that they're six foot. And then all of a sudden now you're dating a liar. And the taller they are, the more likely they are to be a liar. That is too funny. And so that is not actually an accurate statement, right? But it is that people, it doesn't mean that taller people are liars, but in your words, how do you get to that statement? Yeah. The line I like is that if you choose to, and so backwards, because it's important, women tend to want men who are taller than they are, at least some women. This research, by the way, they actually watched people using the website. So they actually saw what people had seen. So it's almost like eye tracking. And women, they've discovered want men who are at

least three inches taller than they are so they can wear heels. Now, the problem is if to get three inches taller, men are lying. It turns out the women will end up with dates that don't measure up. Eric, you also talked about who's the famous actor that you brought up that if he's 5'11", you've just gated out one of the most attractive men in the world, right? George Clooney is the person. That's a good example. We're not making a trade-off, right? You're using height as a cutoff. That's right.

Yeah. Okay. All right. So listen, let's wrap it up. I've got one intimate question and then one more mechanical. So let's start with the mechanical, which is, are you familiar with Jeff Bezos decision-making process? Not deeply. No. So I attribute it to him and I'll have to go back and make sure that this is accurate but the idea is one way and two-way doors so one-way decisions and two-way decisions so

one-way decision is there's no coming back you bought the farm and nobody wants the farm you know like it's a one-way decision you put you've chipped all in and a two-way is like oh well we can try this for a little bit and then we can swing back around it's no big deal and like it's a one-way decision you've chipped all in. And a two-way is like, oh, well, we can try this for a little bit and then we can swing back around. It's no big deal. And so it's more of a revolving door. And so what do you think of that as a framework for decision making? It's interesting because it's important because it brings to mind the fact that decisions can be undoable or not.

And you have to think about those in very different ways. Heuristics are not particularly useful when you're making one-door decisions. That's exactly. So this was his way of saying this was the framing to get to speed and accuracy, the grail if you will. So if it's a two-way decision, speed. If it's a one, one way door, we need accuracy. And so it's a way to slow down or, or move with speed. So I really liked the framing and I just, you know, I wanted to get your take on it. It brings up a really important point, which is what decisions are ones that you should really work hard on and what ones aren't as important. Which ones should you... Okay. What are some of those? Now we're getting into your framework of having choice. So what are some of those? That's great. I think it's interesting because there's a mismatch sometimes between the decision that really should be given a lot of effort and the ones we do.

Retirement planning is a great example of this. Most people hate to think about it because it's not very fluid. You have to think of all these terms or thinking about health insurance. There are a broad range of decisions that I think we think of as being important, but because they're very hard, they're not fluent, we tend not to engage in them. And so one of the things I would try and do is make those decisions either easier, more fluent, or get the right default so that if I don't engage, you get the right option. Much like the retirement plan, it used to be the case there was no default,

and so people saved nothing. Now, by giving people a default of saving three or four or 5% and putting them in a target date fund, people don't engage in the decision. And it's hard to get them to engage, but now they have much better outcomes. So again, I want to put the blame responsibility on the designer to help people with that decision. Yeah. That's the benevolent, optimistic part of you there. I have a sense. I'm thinking about me right now. There are some decisions that I can easily make. And there's some decisions that you you know, you ask my wife or some of the folks I work with, they're like, dude, make a decision, you know, come on.

And so I don't, I don't think that I am a great decider. I like information. I like to mull it over and think and feel and integrate it. And that's why I like the Bezos model or the one-way, two-way, because it gives me a framework to say, this is a two-way door. Let's go. And speed over accuracy there is fine because we can back it up. And I'm not saying be sloppy. I'm just saying I have a concern or an awareness.

That's a better way to say it. I have an awareness about myself that if given the option, I will take my time to make a decision. Meanwhile, the party might start and finish. And I never went inside. So is your best estimate that people are good decision makers or humans struggle with decisions? I think we all struggle for some decisions some of the time. And what we don't have in reality is, I don't like the word rationality in the sense that it assumes that you have infinite processing capacity, right?

It's the word that economists use to sort of say people are making the best possible choice, but our own hardware is limited. And so, you know, we are trying to do the best we can with the abilities we have. And so I ended up saying, I think people probably do well given that, but you don't have to have the standard of the best possible outcome. I mean, you know, basically there are 50,000 apartments available in Manhattan. I don't have to pick the one that's the very first. I'm pretty happy if I get one in the top 100. I would be thrilled for me using my taste. Okay. What is the hardest decision, either daily decision or life decision, that you have had to contemplate?

I think the one, and it's definitely a one-door decision, which is I'm quite lucky to be a cancer survivor. And so those were decisions where I don't feel like I have tremendous expertise. I had very, very good doctors, but still there were choices. And talk about consequences. And, you know, I was very lucky the treatments worked. That was 21 years ago. But, you know, that was a decision with obviously high consequences.

I was not an expert. I did read as much of the academic literature as I could, but ultimately it was basically trusting in other people to help and they did the right thing. So your decision was to trust or not trust, or was it chemotherapy, no chemotherapy? What was the decision at play? The decision was actually, it turns out I had to have stem cell transplants and whether or not to do that. And ultimately I made that decision, out I had to have stem cell transplants and whether or not to do that. And ultimately I made that decision, but I had the counsel of some very good people.

And when you go through making decision for yourself of that magnitude, what is your process to get as much information as possible um and whether that made a difference or not at the same time it wasn't they didn't have a lot else to do you know when you're sitting in a hospital bed um you know in your life state you know so sort of what's happening with the steelers or the yankees is not exactly as appealing as it would be in other situations um whether that made a difference or not i don't know um you know we never run i always have a phrase when people ask questions like that we never run the control eric we don't have the the counterfactual we don't know what would have happened if i made the decision a different way and i think that's something that's comforting for all of us when we worry about our choices, we don't see the control

group. Right. And let's just kind of use the medical model, balloon it up a couple levels here, many levels, which is, let's say that you're in charge of helping people make decisions for vaccines. Clearly a hard decision for our country. We've struggled with this decision. We've partly been, um, we've partly struggled with this because of the choices and the information and the credibility of the people designing the choices were at an all time, um, low trust. Let's maybe that's the way to think about it. So if you were, if you were at the helm and you know, you could help people make decisions about it. So if you're at the helm and you could help people make decisions about vaccines, how would you structure that as a designer?

There's actually a fair amount of good work that's being done with that, helping people. But there's one aspect that I would love to see tested. And I think we hear about people are certain. I know, I'm certain for myself, personally, I want to be vaccinated. That's fine. But there were a lot of people who weren't sure what I, in the book call, they assembled their preferences or guessing what they were going to do. They're not certain. And that's a place where depending upon how you pose the question, it can make a difference. So it has been suggested that what you should do is tell people, you have a vaccine and it does work.

You have a vaccine waiting for you. You know, come and get it. Gets about a 30% increase in the number of people who get vaccinated. An even better version of that, which hasn't been done in the US, but has been done in some areas in Sweden, is you have an appointment Tuesday at two o'clock. You can change it, but we do have an appointment for you. That in some sense makes the vaccine, you're not required, but it's a default. And so now people ask themselves, why should I not get the vaccine as opposed to the question of why should I get the vaccine? It to the question of why should I get the vaccine?

It changes the way they frame the question. Okay. So the question, so the principle at play here is we've taken care of you. Is that the principle that is operating where people feel value taken care of, seen there's an ease to make the decision or is there some other pressure that's at play? Well, there's part, there's three things that go on with defaults. And I think this is in essence a default. One thing is ease. It's easier to do that. And so you're exactly right. A second thing though, is we ask ourselves a question differently. We ask ourselves first, oh, I have an appointment for a vaccine. Let me first think about why that's a good thing.

As opposed to asking myself, why is that a bad thing? And it turns out that because we're using memory to retrieve these things, you're going to get a lot more of the first category. So making the vaccine appointment changes the question we ask ourselves. It changes the way, what I call, assemble the preferences. Just like think about the fat versus lean. What I'm told this hamburger is 30% fat. I think about it very differently than when it's 70% lean. So for those people who are sure it's not going to have any influence, but for a lot of people in the middle, it does increase. It could have an effect.

So I, I, I'm an applied scientist. you know, I, I deeply value the scientific process and I'm vaccinated. It's been very clear that, you know, that it was good for me. And I, I think for most people, but, um, but that's a how to make a decision based on the speed that the vaccines were being presented. Were there shortcuts? Just because I don't know that world. I don't know how that works. So I did my best research, again, you know, as somebody would already recognize for me taking my time to make decisions, as I gathered as much information I could. It was hard to do that even as an informed person. And then at some level, I had to make a decision. There was no forcing function to make it today. But for me, the decision for the vaccine was based on, it was like the Wild West. I didn't have any help, right, on the thoughtfulness of what you just designed, which was, and again, say the question again, which is we have an appointment for you. Right. Right. And we know by the way, that increases uptake of things like flu shots. So it does work for immune, for other kinds of immunizations. Very cool. Okay. And then this is again, mechanical, but it's on the same idea is if you are a senior leader at a large corporation, how would you want people,

how would you want your direct reports to present information to you to help you make a decision? That's a great question. I think this is going to sound like a plug and it is. I'd want them all to read the book because it will help them become better designers. It would say, don't give me 20 options. Give me a smaller set of options. Think about the attributes and the way we haven't really talked about the tools in depth. There's lots of things in the book about tools you can use to help people make better decisions. So one we did talk about is the number of options, the attributes, the order.

Maybe you should do something like if there is an option you think is really good, you should present that first. Right. Yeah. So you would say, so primacy has more weight than recency? Particularly if you're presenting things in a way that I as your boss control. If you're giving me a verbal report, it might be different. But it's clearly that the first thing in a list, in a written list,

gets more attention and is much more likely to be chosen. Okay. Right. So if I'm going to try to move some choices along for you, you're my boss, right? You would want me to give you a handful of options, list the one that I think is the best first, and then bullet point two or three reasons or expound two or three reasons why that's the case and then order them in a way that is more favorable to, how do you put it? I'm trying to put in the framework around when a medical provider says for this vaccine, there's 1% of patients experience these symptoms

versus 99% of patients- And frame it in a way that may favor the option, one option. I mean, it's not as if your boss doesn't have, because he's we assume relatively smart, knows what is right for him. Now you're talking about yourself, Eric. You're talking about yourself because you're the boss in this case. Well, in that case, I want you to frame it in a way that I think will result in my best decision. It's an interesting question, but I can help train the decision, the designers around me to present information so I make better choices. That's what I'm trying to get at. Like, how would you coach me to help you make a better decision?

Limit the number of options, pay attention to order, use attributes in a way that will be in a way that's consistent with the company's best and my best interest. There it is. That's it. Okay. That's how you order. That's the one I was struggling on. Okay. That's awesome. Ericic like i love your systems thinking and i'm sorry to get down into the weeds into the oh it's important kind of the practicality but i also love the examples like you make it you put handles on the esoteric here and so um i just want to say thank you and you know i really appreciate what you've done and i want to encourage people to check out your book where do you you want to drive them? What is the right place to drive people to pay attention to your work? There is a website, elementsofchoice.com, and that's at least a good place. And you can find

the book hopefully anywhere good books are sold. I love it. Eric, what is fascinating you right now? One step beyond the work that you just published. And what are you on to next? So I heard a great talk today, actually, at a conference I went to earlier. And there was a really important choice architect we've not talked about, I don't talk about in the book, and that is social media companies. If you think about their choice of what's in the feed, That is choice architecture. And often that is meant to reflect what we want, but if we're making heuristic choices, we're making bad choices, it's just going to reinforce those. So I think that's a really important question, which is what do the news feeds,

what do the social feeds think of us to present the choices they do? And is that really what we want? They're the best. They're doing it better than anybody probably at scale is knowing us, tracking us, manipulating and guiding by limiting the available options that we're watching. It's extraordinary. But are those the options we really would want to see? If you sat down and said, I'm not going to press yes so often, but I'm going to sit back and think, what is it I want to see? That's right. That might be different. That might be a different answer. I'm not saying benevolent or healthy, but they've limited based on what they think of me and what they think I'm interested in at speed. It is quite remarkable. We're outgunned.

I mean, there's, I don't know, 2,500 PhDs that are manipulating choices all the time per company, per app. So anyways, different conversation. That'd be fun for us to talk about at some point as well. I love your work. Thank you for sharing both at the intimate level and the very practical approach. And if you had one suggestion to help people live an extraordinary life, what would that be? I would say choose mindfully for important decisions.

All right, Eric, I appreciate you. Thank you so much for your contribution. And I'm excited to share this with folks. Michael, thank you for a thought provoking and interesting conversation. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors, and we take our recommendations seriously.

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