The Jordan Harbinger Show - 214: Gabriel Weinberg | How Mental Models Boost Super Thinking

Episode Date: June 20, 2019

Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, founder of privacy-protecting search engine DuckDuckGo, and coauthor of Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models. What We Discuss with Gabriel Weinberg: What are mental models, and how can they be applied to make your life run more efficiently and effectively? How mental models used primarily in physics, economics, biology, and math can be easily adjusted for everyday decisions. What a South American tribe that can only count to three and our own grade school experiences with multiplication tables can teach us about the power of math as a mental model. Why you should be second-guessing your natural intuition during the decision-making process, and how you can use mental models to do it. First principles versus conventional wisdom for approaching familiar situations in an innovative way. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/214 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! The Mental Illness Happy Hour with Paul Gilmartin is a weekly online podcast that interviews comedians, artists, friends, and the occasional doctor. Each episode explores mental illness, trauma, addiction and negative thinking. Give it a listen here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer, Jason DeFilippo. My friend Gabriel Weinberg is something of a genius. He's the founder of Duck, Duck Go, the search engine that actually doesn't track you, which even now is a pretty novel concept. Today, though, we're not talking about search and privacy, but about mental models. Mental models help us understand an internalized complex concept so that we can use them for ourselves. Today, Gabriel and I will discuss quite a few mental models, teach you how to use them, and give you a lot of tools you can leverage to look at and understand complicated concepts, cognitive biases, and problems much more easily, giving you a more accurate and comprehensive view of the world around you. It might sound complex, but it's actually the opposite. This episode will help you make better decisions more reliably and see through smoke and mirrors, even if someone is intentionally trying to deceive you. And that is a skill set worth having. I met Gabriel through my network,

and I'm teaching you how to create amazing connections for yourself for personal and professional reasons. I'm doing it for free over at six-minute networking, which is at jordanharbinger.com slash course. By the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter, so come join us. Enjoy this episode with Gabriel Weinberg.

We're hearing a lot about mental models lately, and your book, super thinking. other friends like James Clear with Atomic Habits, Shane Parrish with his book, The Great Mental Models, Creative Title. What are mental models and why are they important? It seems like this is trending up in geekdom these days. Yes, it is trending.

So mental models is a fancy word for concept. Okay. And basically you have concepts for everything, right? But there are several concepts, there's about 300 we put in the book, that are just generally useful across all sorts of areas. So, for example, I was a physics major in college. Lots of physics concepts you probably don't care at all about.

Sure. Aren't generally useful. But one that is, is critical mass. So critical mass was the concept of a mass of material that needs to be there to create a nuclear chain reaction, very useful in physics and in the history of the world. But also useful in general in decision making. So products can have critical mass. The show probably got a critical mass at some point. Before things, is it like before things snowball and take?

That's right. Their own. And so it's like the amount of material you need before that happens. And if you can recognize that this is a critical mass situation, and you can immediately realize that it's going to have a snowball at some point. And you can start to ask questions like, well, how many people do I need to reach critical mass? Or can I do it earlier?

Or is there an easier way to reach it? And so these are effectively shortcuts of how to think strategically. And so if you can recognize all of these, like that one's from physics, but there's one from economics and biology. and, you know, all different science areas and math, if you have all these in your head and you get a random situation, you can be like, these three things apply. You can really quickly assess a situation and be a better decision maker. Right. That makes sense. So every discipline has its own mental models, like you said, physics, law for me, which comes in

handy occasionally. Yeah. You think of like, oh, this is what, this is this weird Latin thing that I've never have never used before. It's kind of like that. And people all the time will ask me, how do you come up with these analogies on the show so quickly, or these metaphors on the show so quickly, to relate one thing to another? And it's, it's kind of a sister to mental models. It is. I mean, it basically is. I mean, it's just, you, through your coursework, learn deeply ones that you use metaphorically all the time, right? But then there are some general ones that everyone can use kind of all the time. But yeah, that's exactly the same concept. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. And of course, some being physics only, I can't think of any because I'm not a physicist, but I'm sure there are

tons. The Lagrange point. Cool. Never heard of it. Right? Don't have to worry about it. Don't have to worry about it. Don't need it. And then we've got like critical mass, for example, is the one you gave. And critical mass is a real easy one, I think, because everyone's heard this term before. I think there's probably a huge percentage of people that don't even realize this was for something like the atomic bomb. All right, this is how much, I don't know, uranium we need. Exactly. That's where it actually came from. It is. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So plenty of people don't even know that. They think it's for apps. Yeah. All right. We need these many people using Duck, Duck Go browser before they start to tell enough people that we get enough traction every day where we hit our goals. Yeah. Something like

that. A party can have critical mass, like a house party. Sure. I think the classic critical mass illustration is that video where there's a guy dancing on the hill. Oh, I love that video. What I'm talking about? Yeah. It's the first follower to a leader. Yes. So for those of you who don't know this video, there's a concert full of, I don't know, drunk hippies or something. And one guy's dancing by himself. Everyone's kind of laughing at him. And then another person probably dares her friend to go dance with this guy just to sort of probably just to tool him, honestly. And then other people are like, ah, screw it, let's go dance. And then suddenly the whole hill is dancing. The critical mass was however many people, wherever you want to sort of split hairs, however many

people it took before everyone went, oh, it's okay to go dance now because it's not weird. Yeah, there's a lot of like related mental models. So what we try to do in this book is like relate them all together. So like tipping point is another one people have heard of. That person coming over read that critical mass point is with a tipping point of like everyone dancing, right? Yes, tipping point. So tipping point in critical mass are part of the same. Yeah, a lot of times you'll have a concept and then to operationalize it or to describe it in another way is another mental model.

Oh, okay. I didn't realize that. I think the original mental model that you bring up in super thinking is, is math. And I thought, well, okay, everyone has math. So, and it's such an old mental model. We look at like Greek philosophers and things like that who came up with us and mathematicians. There's a story of this tribe that really only could count to three, which is shocking that that even exists. Yeah, it is amazing.

Like, so you basically almost no mental models are innate to you. Like, you're not born with them. And so there are really groups of people who can't add, really. That is crazy to me. And so we start out of the book with that, but also that everyone can relate to who generally is not one of those tribes can add. But you can remember a point when you didn't know multiplication, because usually you learn that in like third or fourth grade or something like that.

Yeah. And so if you know multiplication, and multiplication is just repeated addition. When you do like two times four, it's just two plus two plus two. That's how I did it in third grade, too. It was like, nine times eight. I can just remember this, but I'm just going to do nine plus nine. Exactly. And you learn the kind of faster way to do multiplication.

That's much faster, especially if you have a calculator, than doing addition like 30 times, like if you have 30 times seven. And so once you know a multiplication exists, you never go back to doing repeated addition, especially once you have a calculator. That's like what mental models for you use as a metaphor, because once you know the equivalent multiplication and all these other scenarios, you don't just go back to repeated addition.

it's much slower. Right. Although I will admit, now when I multiply, I'm like, okay, six times eight is 48, but I can't remember what the other one is. So I'm going to have to do that one and then subtract. That's why I use the calculator. Assume you have a calculator. Yeah, yeah.

You just don't know what the time symbol is. Right, yeah. Just, oh, crap. What was that again? Now, division is a whole different thing. It's kind of like me subtracting a bunch of times. And it just gets clunkier from there. So thank God for calculators.

But the concept of unforced errors is interesting. Tell us what those are and how do we avoid those? Yeah, I mean, it's another thing from the introduction because it's a good way to explain mental models. So unforced errors actually comes from tennis. I don't know if you're a tennis player. No, but I've heard of this and I want to say it's pretty, I'm hearing it more and more now, again, because mental models are probably trending. Unforced errors is kind of a... Yeah, so it's like in tennis, you know, generally you think of tennis is hitting back and forth and whoever like strategically places the ball wins the point.

but often points are lost just because someone hits it into the net. Or you just serve double fault and hit it right into the net. Those are unforced error because the other person didn't force you to make the error. You've made the error on your own. And so as a metaphor, if you can make less unforced errors in your life or decision making, you're just going to be better at decision making. And so part of the idea of mental models is to help you make less unforced errors. And so like the first whole set of mental models that we talk about in the book is all these

bias model. So like your brain has, you know, we call intuition and it's generally wrong on them. Yeah. Oh, thank you for saying that. Let's repeat that. Your brain has intuition and it's generally wrong because there's this whole thing now. There's a whole field of, well, your gut is correct. And it's like, no, your gut is loaded with cognitive bias. Exactly. Crappy experiences you had 20 years ago that you don't remember that are coloring the way that you think. Like, no, your intuition. is probably crap. It's not that you shouldn't, like, use it as a guide maybe or hypothesis.

Sure. But you shouldn't just go with it, you know, without checking it. Right. Especially when it's, well, you know, this seems like it's a con. And I've seen people get con this way. But, you know, my intuition is just saying, you're a stand-up guy. Here's all my money. Right.

It's like, okay, start there. Don't end there. Right. And so there's a lot of mental models about how your mind works that explains. that explain why your intuition kind of fails you. Like confirmation bias is a very common one, where once you like confirm would be the term, but you agree to something,

or you believe something or commit to a belief on something, you're like, it's just seeing facts that line up with your belief thereafter. You're not really looking for the opposite point of view. Then there are a bunch of, like you point out con people, there are a bunch of just influence models that you have to watch out for, like reciprocity. if salespeople often give you like free concert tickets or, you know, nonprofits, mail you,

address labels. They're doing that because once someone gives you something, you have a real innate feeling that you want to give something back. So they use these tools. There are rules about this in corporations and especially in government. I work a lot with military, special forces, and intelligence agencies. And sometimes I'm like, hey, let's go eat. And they're like, we can, but you can't pay because it's over $100. And it's like this whole annoying thing, because I'm like, I don't want to eat at Chipotle. I want to take you guys out to sushi. And it's a whole thing.

But they know that even these razor sharp thinker decision makers are subject to, well, he flew me to Hawaii. So I have to give him the contract, even though it's $300,000. There's a whole set of regulations behind why companies can't do this. I remember when my dad accepted a gift basket, he worked for Ford. This is like literally with like mustard and sausage in it. And I remember we were eating it. And the next year I was like, hey, where's the gift basket? And he's like, can't do that anymore.

New rule. No gift baskets from suppliers. And I thought, this is BS, man. These are awesome. Where are my sausage? And they'd find out he had kids. And they'd be like, hey, is your kid like race cars? Here's a bunch of cool stuff.

Can't do any of that anymore. Because they know that, especially when it's corporate money, you're just like, oh, screw it. I like it. It really gives me a lot of stuff. Yeah. I mean, it really does influence people. And so you need to kind of be aware of all these models if you don't want to be

out duly influence or just, make bad decisions. Sure, sure. First Principles is the idea of approaching new or familiar situations in innovative ways. And I'd love it if you'd separate first principles with conventional wisdom, because the example you gave is job searches. This is a concept I don't think many people are familiar with. I hear first principles and videos done by McKenzie and I'm just like, sounds smart, but I have no idea what they're talking about half the time. Yeah. I mean, so first principles is really just throwing out assumptions. So when you start a job search, for example, you may assume that you need a college degree

for that job or you should do the same thing you're already doing or that this job has a certain salary range just because you heard your friend say that, right? And those are all baked in assumptions that you haven't tested yet. So what first principal's thinking does is start from scratch and try to verify that those assumptions are correct. And in this case, it could be as you go all the way back and say, you go all the way back and say, what kind of career do I really want? What are the attributes of it, you know, location, salary, et cetera, and try to build up from the bottom. Or you could say, I want this job,

and here are my reasons why. I'm going to check those reasons are actually accurate. You can kind of go from the top down or the bottom up, but either way, you're listing out your actual assumptions and you're going to test them. Most people never do this, right? So with the job search, how would this work in the context of a job search? What does this look like? So in the job search, I would suggest the bottom-up approach, right? So you're really starting from the bottom and try to assess, what do I want out of a job? You know, fundamentally, you need some money,

what you're going to work on, where it's going to be, who your coworkers are, all these different things are attributes of the job, and you should define them and try to write them down, prioritize them. And then once you have that, then you can go look and say, okay, what jobs may fit that.

It may be a completely different careers than you had ever been thinking initially once you write that down. And that really, opens up your ability, like the whole solution space of the job in this case. It's funny you should mention that because I remember doing some exercises like this as a young person, maybe even in middle or high school, probably even earlier. And coming up with the idea that I wanted to be like Dan Rather, if you remember him,

like on the news, traveling to all these crazy places and reporting. And my mom told me, ooh, you don't want to do that. Those guys don't make any money, which is a huge lie. She just didn't want me going to war zones. This is the perfect example. Right. So you take that assumption. You're like, okay, that career is out.

I was like, oh, that's such a bummer because it looks great. And there were so many years where I thought, I really want to do that, but I don't want to be poor. And then as I got older, I was like, I see this guy everywhere. How is it possible that he is poor? And then in high school, of course, I was like, wait a second. You know, but then, of course, you get sucked into all these other assumptions. Like, oh, well, that is impossible to attain. You've really got to start early and you've got to be talented and special.

And I'm not any of those things. So my best bet to living a rich life is like to go become an attorney. which I did, and then I went, wow, this totally stinks. And here we are full circle, having not really gone for what I wanted for a really long time, because I didn't break things down. I didn't break down these assumptions early enough. Yeah, I mean, it's key if you ever want to start a company too. Because like every company is really built on assumptions.

Like I assume customers will want my product. I assume people will pay this much for it, et cetera. And all really, a startup company is at the beginning is just testing assumptions. And a lot of failed companies. companies that go in without first person. People's thinking and they just have some mastermind vision of how it's all going to work. It never works according to that idealic plan. Yeah.

Yeah, good point. There's so many tech innovations, and I put innovations in air quotes that I've seen in San Francisco or elsewhere, where you just go, okay, why are you making a cup that tells you how much water is in it? Well, people want to know how much they've drank. Well, okay, I know this is a 16 ounce cup. Can I just finish it and then refill it? and I know I've had 60 ounces of water and I'm about to have 32.

And then I'm like, well, no, no. I mean, it'll tell you like in real time how hydrated you are over time and all the stuff. I'm like, well, then I don't really need the cup. I can just enter the data in the app, right? So they made a crappy app and a crappy, well, not a crappy, a mediocre cup. But the cup didn't do what it was supposed to. And then the app didn't do much at all. So I ended up with a hydration app from a different company and a regular cup.

That company doesn't exist anymore, as you might imagine. Yes. Yeah. some other models that I think are really useful, Occam's Razor. Tell us about this one, because I think this is misused a lot. Yeah,

Occam's Razor is, and then there's a sister thing called Hamlet's Razor, which is pretty interesting. Oh, yeah, that's talking about this. As applied to people. Occam's Razor is basically just saying the simplest answer is often the true one. Now,

it's not always a true one. No. But it's saying that if you have a lot of data and you have a simple answer, you should try to investigate that answer first before you investigate your conspiracy answer, basically. That's really complex. Yeah.

I'm reminded of the whole pyramids are made by aliens thing. It's like that is very simple. They came and they just dropped them in the sand. Very simple answer. The other answer with all the slavery and the elephants pulling huge blocks up a hill for a hundred years is more complex for sure, but probably more likely. Right. And it's the same thing with the assumptions.

You don't stop at Occam's Razor. you go test all these things you're going to test your theory in real life. The people counterpart is this thing called Hansen's Razor, which is never attribute to malice, which can be explained by carelessness. And what that means is in general life is you're often faced with situations where, you know, the most commonplace comes up is like texts.

So you get a text from your friend and you're like, what is he saying? she's saying, like, you think they might be angry at you or, you know, they might be trying to screw you or something and you might get angry, but the real answer might be just that they didn't have a lot of time to write the text. Right. They were careless, you know? And that is the most common answer is most people aren't necessarily out to get you. They're just, you know, being careless. And so if you go in with that intention, it can save you a lot of time and effort. Yeah, you have this sort of practical concept here. If we want to increase empathy in our thinking, we look, you call it

the MRI technique. I don't know if that's something that you came up with. No, it wasn't me. And I'm forgetting the person who came up with them. So I have to credit them separately. But it was a psychologist, most respectful interpretation. That's the way to really operationalize Handlin's razor, which is you basically just give everybody the benefit of the doubt, you know? And it sounds like you could be naive, but it's not really because you're not necessarily you have to do it forever. It's that first interpretation. You're asking me more inquisitive instead of accusatory. You know, so if someone writes you just like, Like, the canonical is able, someone just writes you the text back, K or okay, which I'm guilty of a lot.

And people are like, you're being dismissive or whatever. But the real answer is, no, I'm in the car. I'm not trying to text while I'm driving. Right. I'm on the 405. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're on the 405, you've all kinds of time to text.

You could write a book in the car. You're out on a highway that's moving. Exactly. So the most respectful interpretation is maybe they're busy, you know, and then you ask. That makes sense. It's kind of like the fundamental attribution error. Yes. This is the point of them all being.

interrelated, right? It's like different ways to look at it of the same thing. And so if you know a bunch of these, you can get your head around the concept. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Gabriel Weinberg. We'll be right back. Don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Gabriel Weinberg. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you like some tips on how to subscribe to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe.

Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means you get all the latest episodes in your podcast player as they're released so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Gabriel Weinberg. We wrote an article about the fundamental attributionary. If you want to check it out, it's Jordan Harbinger.com slash articles. And what that was about, well, the fundamental attribution air is when you, you get cut off in traffic and you go, this person is a bad person and drives like a terrible person

and is inconsiderate, we judge other people based on their actions and we judge ourselves by our intentions. So if we're weaving around crazily in traffic, it's because we're late, there's an emergency, it's important. Other people do it. It's because we, and we ascribe all these negative characteristics to them. That seems to sort of hold hands with the MRI technique. If you're doing, if you're making the fundamental attribution error, you're not doing MRI. Right. Exactly. If you want to avoid it, you should do the MRI. The book, The Super Thing is full of all these really interesting examples, one of which was nudging and on restaurant menus. I always wondered why some things are in boxes. And when I go out

to eat with my brother-in-law and my wife, for example, he'll go, ooh, this is the house special. I'm like, that doesn't mean anything. It's in a box. It means that this is the highest profit margin thing or they can make a huge pot of it in the morning and it stays there all day. So they're like, if we sell more of this, it's gone, we don't throw it away, and we make, you know, 30 cents on the dollar for it or something like that. I didn't know that. Yeah, restaurants are using a lot of influence models. Nudging just as little cues that kind of nudge you into the direction people want you to go in like specials. Other things that restaurants do often is anchoring. So they will throw out really high priced items that not anyone really buys, but it anchors you to

higher prices for the rest of the menu. And so if you look at a menu, all these are like embedded on a menu. You can almost take a part of menu and kind of see these things. That's fascinating. Where does the anchoring take part? I'm trying to imagine where they put super expensive stuff so that you view the other price. So it depends on the restaurant, but even on any restaurant, there often people aren't necessarily buying the most expensive thing on the menu.

And so like, but people look at it. And then once they look at it, they're like, oh, well, now I'm buying like the second or third thing most expensive. And I'm okay buying that because it's not the most expensive thing. Right. Oh, right. So it's when there's like, hey, this burger has caviar on it. It's $200. But there's another burger that is.

It's $20. Right. It's still a $20 burger. Right. But you're like, it's not the $200 one. Right. You know, so they anchored your price of burgers higher than you would normally pay. That's brilliant.

Man, I'm such a sucker for all this stuff. Here's the thing. I've studied mental models, cognitive bias. but when it's in real time, it is so difficult to go, wait a minute, this is nudging and they're trying to get us to do this and then this is anchoring me to a lower price because it's all happening subconsciously. Your brain is processing all this stuff really quickly because these biases exist for, we've evolved all these things, right? They exist to help us get along better in the world to make data analysis faster, not necessarily more accurate, but faster. So we have to kind of like slow down our natural processing, take a step back, look what lens we might be using, what bias lens we might be using, and then undo that. There's another kind of mental model of reversible or irreversible decisions. And you could also kind of subclassify this as consequential and inconsequential. But reversible decisions are ones that you can change really easily. Can't think of it as a door that you can walk back through

any reversible decisions are ones that have really high consequence that you can't. Should we have kids or should we not have kids? Exactly. We don't want to test that right now and then go, you know what, this is a bad idea. A lot of these are, you know, there's the day-to-day decisions, and then there are these larger decisions, both professionally and personally. And when you realize you have an irreversible decision, then you really want to take a step back and not go fast at all, right? You really want to slow down and even start to do a bunch more things

like that are later in the book about decision making, where you're writing things down and you're using very specific processes and even statistics and bigger company decision cases. to stop you from making these bias problems, right? When I read about how you do that at Duck, Duck, Duck, Go, I thought, yeah, I could never run a company like this, because it's so complicated sometimes. There's all this data, and you have to find it, and you have to make sure it's good, and then you have to present it, and then you have to think about it and make a decision, and then everyone fights you or whatever, and you have to convince all of them,

and I thought, what a pain. I'm so lucky I just do this podcast. This is so much easier. Well, one interesting thing, one mental model that we use, a lot is this one called forcing function. And so all it really is is a reason why it's called force function is a function that forces you to do something. Yeah. But the way that we use it is you schedule different things into your calendar. So if it's personal, it's like you're scheduling going to the gym. But in a company, we schedule in post-mortems after all of our projects to be like

what went well, what didn't go well. We schedule in one-on-ones with someone every week. week. And we have like board meetings every 10 weeks where we have a roadmap that we produce. And so all of these are by default scheduled into the calendar to force people to think critically. And by scheduling it in, it forces you to have these conversations that you're talking about. They're a little more difficult. Yeah. But at least if you don't schedule it in, people just won't have them because they're difficult. Right. Exactly. Right. So you have to schedule in and make it the culture and the default. And then people will have the conversations. And they'll still be difficult sometimes. But they're not as difficult because if you're having postmortems,

So here's another kind of sub-key to this is we do it for every single project, whether the project is going, went really well or went really poorly. If you only do it when things go poorly, then they're always bad conversations and no one likes them. Oh, they become, yeah, everyone dreads. Like, yeah, but if you're doing it all the time, you know, you have the meeting every week and after every project, then it's not necessarily a stigmatized thing, right? Yeah. Because most of it's good.

The project went great. It's like high-fives all around. And we can still talk about the few things that maybe we could have improved. It's not like a negative event every time. Right. And if you don't do it when things go well, you miss the opportunity to go, hey, look, this went well, but we kind of got lucky here, here, and here. Yeah, that's actually the best time to improve because when things didn't go well,

like you're stressed and you don't really want to change your behavior at that point. You want to just climb out of the hole. But when you're doing really well, that's the perfect time to improve because you're like, I have some extra time. I can work on this. Ah, that's brilliant. The idea that we reject new ideas kind of on a reflex, turns out it is a reflex. This Semweiss reflex? Is that what that's called?

Yeah, I mean... I never heard of this. It's really unfortunate. Like, people think that science is very methodical without emotion, but it turns out when you look back through the history of science, basically we go way, way far before we believe the outsider, and then it changes science. So this guy, sadly... story, he discovered, this was in the 1800s, I think it was 1800s, that all sorts of babies were

dying at childbirth. And he did experiments in the hospital, and he found that one side of the wing, they weren't dying as much, by like half as much. And the only difference between the two sides was, one, the doctors were delivering babies versus midwives. And he tried to figure out what is the difference between them. And he finally figured out... So the midwives had a higher success rate than the doctors. Double. And he finally figured out that it was because the doctors were doing cadaver research at the same time with delivering babies and not washing their hands. So gross. So gross.

Like you're handling like this dead rotting body that's not preserved. This is pre-derm theory. I got to go deliver this kid. You're reaching in there, pulling out a kid. And then you go right back to the dead body. So he did an experiment. He had people washed their hands and it cut it immediately. And then he couldn't get people to do it amazingly. And he couldn't get this to take off, even though it literally cut the like death rate in half.

And it took another like decades before this work. And the problem was twofold. One, he didn't really know why. Right. You know, explain it. And it seemed like it was the doctor's fault. And I mean, it was. They weren't washing their hands.

but he didn't know the germs weren't invented, like the discover. That would discover germs. Yeah. And so it wasn't until Louis Presdor discovered germ theory that then everyone was like, oh, now I can see the stuff under a microscope and I should wash my hands. I believe, didn't he have the hypothesis that there were small invisible organisms and they were like, oh, you're mentally ill. Yeah. He put him in a same asylum. But the evidence was there.

And so like overwhelming evidence where it's just rejected. And that's happened again and again in science. So much so that Max Planck has this famous line that's like, science progresses one funeral at a time. Oh, man. That is pretty dark. Yeah, it's pretty dark. But unfortunately, that happens a lot in companies too.

And, you know, probably in your personal life to family members, you ever try to convince somebody to change their mind about an ingrained political opinion? Yeah, yeah, good luck. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, it's difficult. And so this reflex of to reject. you know, something new is really hard, is really ingrained. And so you really have, if you want to

develop against that, you really have to have a culture that has an ability to kind of embrace new ideas. We've gone so far that like our, one of our core values is, of only three is question assumptions. And so we've tried to just build it in that like, look, we're, we're not right at everything all the time. The organization's going to be wrong a lot. And we're going to constantly question our assumptions. I really like that. In fact, Jen, can you write down question assumptions somewhere. I like that as a core value. And I feel like not only do we do a lot of that here, we need to do more of it all the time. Yeah. And you have to make it a value because it's so difficult that it's against our innate

feelings that if you don't like make it something like that, it's just not going to happen. It makes sense in my own life, in my own head, because when I hear new ideas and I don't want to believe them or I don't want to do them, maybe it's a lot of work or maybe it's like, ooh, I have to like take an ego blow and realize that I can improve on this thing that I thought I didn't need to work on anymore, whatever. I always go, wait, I don't like that idea, but why? Yeah. And if the answer is because it's going to be hard or annoying to do, it's like, well, okay. Or, hey, it makes you look bad to think you've been doing this wrong for a decade. But you have to do that or you'll never improve. It's never comfortable. But there is that

ego. Yeah. Ego is at the center of a lot of it. I mean, there is another good book called Thinking in Beths by Andy Duke. Sure. Yeah, she was on the show. And she's got a good way to, to really make this work for people to. Because we were talking about confirmation bias earlier. A lot of the problem is, is you start to have a belief, and you confirm it's my belief, and then it's part of your identity, and then you don't want to hear a new idea

because it's going to hurt your identity. Yeah, it's going to mess with the picture. You already baked the cake. So instead of totally committing to something, in this book, the mental model is called Thinking Gray, is you try just not to commit to things. You can be what she says, her book is 99% sure. You can say you're 99% sure.

It's very different than 100% sure. Yes. Because you're conveying that you're open to the idea. And so with thinking gray, you can be like, look, I'm getting a lot of information. That sounds like it could be the right answer. But I'm not going to say it's the right. Like, I'm going to just keep holding out that I could be wrong forever. You know, and then you're never totally committing to your identity at that point.

Yeah, what is it called? Is that an asymptote where it goes down, but never quite. Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to picture it. It's like you never get to 100% on anything. So you're always willing if the right evidence comes along to change your position. You talked about confirmation bias, and we mentioned that before. It's common character here on the show. What about disconfirmation bias? I'd never heard of that. Obviously, it exists. I was surprised when I heard it. Shouldn't have been. What is that? It happens in both ways, right? So you can, you can, you get confirmation bias when you confirm your belief and you're like, I'm ready for that. Disconfirmation bias is you also block out other things. Okay. And so there's something called. the backfire effect, which is related to this.

Oh, yeah. Which is a good name because basically when you try to convince somebody of something, just like the hand washing thing, you want to bring overwhelming evidence to them. You think that that would convince them because you're like, look, I know you've confirmed this belief, but I'm going to bring this overwhelming evidence to you. Unfortunately, through this disconfirmation bias, people have a backfire effect on it, whereas people actually get in their belief stronger than before, which relates to the whole reflex. Frustrating. Yeah. And so, unfortunately, there's not great structural ways to get people to change.

I mean, either you have to, like we said, you have to not get them to commit in the first place or else you have to connect with them more on an emotional level or get them to become in a vulnerable space where they don't feel it's going to hurt their identity. I'm reading a book about cult mind control where having the author on, it literally teaches people how to get other family members out of cults. Yes. And this sort of makes an appearance. He doesn't say disconfirmation bias, But it really is that.

He's like, what you, you're telling families, what you think is going to happen is you're going to get them over for dinner one night, even though they're supposed to be isolated from you. And you're going to go, look at all this news about your cult and look at who you are. And all your friends and family are worried about you and they love you and like, we're all panicking and crying. And look at all these bad things your cult does. And what happens is the person starts like chanting or doing religious BS from their cult and rejecting it and then runs out of the house and you never see him again. But what he's saying you need to do is you need to go, hey, hey, we're really kind, we're going to be really loving with this person, we're going to get their old self to just peek out for a second and then relate to that. And then gradually we show them like,

hey, we're still here for you and we're not spawns of Satan like your cult leader said. And look, the world's not on fire and all these different things. You really have to ease into it. Otherwise, you have the backfire effect where the person just can't attack someone's identity straight away. And then if it's for you, you have to realize, like, you have to kind of almost get out of yourself and try to reduce your ego and not have your identity attacked all the time. And the reason that we reject these things are that we can't seem to change quickly is something called cognitive dissonance. And we've talked about this on the show before as well, but I'd love it if you'd explain the concept of cognitive dissonance. It is overused a lot,

but I think a lot of us don't really know what it actually means. Yeah, I mean, just to explain at a higher level about all these different names because they're throwing a lot of terms, it's like part of the reason for writing this and think, about all these terms is once you have a name for something, you can really start to spot it in the real world. And once you start to spot it, then you can really start to use it. And so the names are actually kind of important. So you can learn the names, then you can start to really use the tools. But cognitive dissonance, I imagine you'll see it everywhere once you start looking for it. The idea is it is literally painful to hold two opposing ideas in your brain at once.

For example. Like, I believe in climate change and I don't believe in climate change. You know, or any of the things we've been talking about, if you've confirmed a belief on something, like, you know, I like eating meat, but I don't want to hurt animals or something. And when people get put in labs and they actually, like, do brain scans on them, they can see, like, a painful center in the brain light up when you ask people to think of two contradictory ideas at once. even like one plus one equals two and one plus two equals three or something, you know? And so what it ends up happening is people don't want to hold these composing ideas in their brain. But if they're wrong about something and you're trying to convince them about something else, you're basically introducing an opposing idea to them.

You're causing them pain. And so this whole process of changing their mind is a painful, literally a painful process. And so this whole notion of dissonance is like, you know, it's the word for, you know, like a dissonance. is one that you don't really like. And that's what this is going on in your mind. When you have cognitive dissonance, you're trying, you have one belief and you're hearing information about another belief that's contradictory, and it's causing you anguish.

And so what people end up doing is they compartmentalize. And so that's why people are hypocritical in a whole different place. They think of one thing in this part of their life and the one thing on this part of their life, and you're from the outside being like you're being totally hypocrite. But they don't see it because they're blocking it out so they don't feel the pain. Right. I don't hurt animals. I buy my meat from the supermarket.

Yeah, exactly. What? Yeah. Yeah, this makes sense. I love the concept of cognitive dissonance is one where I, when I learned it, I went, oh, yeah, that. And by the way, all these terms, we'll throw them in the show notes. We'll throw even more in the worksheet for this episode.

There are worksheets for every episode that people can get at Jordan Harbinger.com where the show notes are. So don't worry if you're like, oh, my gosh, there's so much here. It'll all be in the show notes and or the worksheet. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Gabriel Weinberg, We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. So to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out our amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to us on the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Gabriel Weinberg. You've got a great exercise here called the Five WISE, and this was used during the Challenger disaster. Take us through this, because this, I think, is very wise. No point intended. Yeah, so earlier I mentioned this concept of post-mortem, and if people don't know what that is, it's basically after something has happened, I mean, it literally means post-death, and so it came from, like doctors doing autopsies and trying to figure out why it went wrong. but like I said, we do it at Dr. Go different projects.

And all we're asking is, you know, what went wrong, what went well, what can we do better next time? When you start to go into what went wrong, you got to ask a question, okay, well, what really went wrong? And that's where this five Y has come in. It really is asking a series of whys and digging into what they call the root cause. And so you might ask for like, okay, say it was a post-mortem because our site went down or something. You say, well, why did the site go down? Well, the server broke. Okay, well, why did the server broke?

Well, you know, it got overloaded. Okay, well, why did it get overloaded? Because we didn't have good enough scalability. We didn't have enough servers. I go, why don't have enough servers? Because we didn't do a, we're not planning ahead of time enough. And so you get down to the root cause. And then you can say, okay, well, the real answer here is not we just need to, you know,

add a little more capacity is we need to have a better planning mechanism for the next five years and build out so we don't have this problem again. And so you're asking this question. again and again until you get to the real reason. Right. So the Challenger example sort of mirrors yours. It's like, what happened? Well, the shuttle blew up. Okay, well, why? Something didn't detach. Why? There was ice on it.

Why was there ice on it? Well, and then it gets, it's like dot, dot, dot. There's probably more than five. Well, yeah, it doesn't have to be five. Right. It could be like, I think in that case, I put seven in the book. But that's a really interesting example because it illustrates something that's kind of key to everything we're talking about is that. So it was a mechanical problem for the O, ring. It was like a little black thing that was supposed to hold the fuel in. And what happened was

is they launched the shuttle way colder than they ever launched before. And so the old O-ring busted. And you kept asking why, and it ended up, why did they launch it, even though they knew it was out of the range of the normal range. And it turns out that some engineers said they shouldn't launch it. But management said, you know, you don't have enough data. We're going to launch it. And so they did a whole report on. this. And so the end result here of the root cause was more of a management problem than it was an engineering problem. Like it literally had, they hadn't tested it fully in cold weather. And they decision to go and launch a shuttle was not an engineering decision. It was a management decision.

And so what often happens in the five wise is you end up at a people problem, you know, like you start off at a physical or an engineering problem and you end up with so and so, you know, kind of screwed up because their processes are bad. Damn that Weinberg. Yeah, exactly. And so the answer ends up being often not just like put a band-aid over it but we got to change our you know corporate processes or or NASA processes yeah I think the people problem being at the root of it is why a lot of people are scared to do these things yeah I mean it's true I mean there's there's a we didn't talk about this but there's a whole notion how to do these better we have these things called we call them blameless post-mortems you know and the going in position is no one is

going to be blamed for the fault. It's the company, if there's a screw up, we all screwed up. And it's the process that screwed up. We're going to improve the process. But if people think they're going to get fired at the end of it. Right. They're going to cover their ass. Yeah. And so you have to, you actually have to have a culture where that's not going to happen to get to the real answer of these things. Yeah, you almost want them to go, hey, look, I know that I had a big hand of this thing and this might have been part of the problem. So let's save us three hours of digging and start with me. Yeah, exactly. Let's acknowledge all of our role. in it, but no one's going to get like fired for this or a slap on the wrist or anything.

We're just trying to improve. Right. Yeah, they have to feel pretty safe to raise their hand and go, I didn't, I tripped over the server cord and I didn't plug it back in. I mean, this stuff, this culture stuff is difficult to get right, but if you can get it right, it really can accelerate, you know, the whole company. I'd love to blow through a few different concepts, biases, mental models, and sort of have you speak to each one in this part of the show so that people can get an idea.

The lightning round. The lightning round, but not really, like, not super lightning. Not too lightning. Yeah, not too like. Rolling thunder. Rolling thunder round. Yeah. Optimistic probability bias is the first one.

I love this one because everyone does this and I do this and I think, oh, crap, that's a bias. This is totally true. I mean, this is also the challenger. Is management thought, oh, you know what? The shuttle launch is going to go fine. You know, we don't have, this has ever happened before, but what's the probability? It's probably 50-50, even though it was, you know, It was probably one in a million, even though it was more like 50-50 or something.

You know, it was like, the report actually said they were orders of magnitude off with the probability, which means powers of 10 off. And people do this all the time, and it's related to something people call the narrative fallacy. It's like, if you can make up a story for why it's going to go okay or why something might be true, people are like, oh, that's got to be true. That's the reason, even though the probability may be very small or very high. And so what effectively is is people get probabilities wrong all the time. Right.

you want something to be true, you enhance the probability, you want something not to be true, you minimize it. Yeah, exactly. And by extension, there's other biases that creep into this. There's one called availability bias. And the canonical example here is people over underestimating death causes. You know, like we see shark attacks on TV all the time. And so people think the shark attack rate is orders of magnitude higher than it really is.

People think the death rate from like heart disease is much lower than it actually is. Because nobody reports on it. Yeah. It happens so much. It's not news. Exactly. You know, terrorism is overstated in people's, when people write down the probability of actually getting hurt. Whereas car, the other one is car deaths are understated.

It's one of the most risky things. I told this story on the show before. I remember I was getting literally, I was getting kidnapped like 20 years ago in Mexico in a taxi. That sounds crazy. It was crazy. I was 20 years old. I was really young. And I remember thinking,

well, this has never happened before. So what are the odds that's happening now? And I went, you know what? If you get kidnapped and murdered, you don't go, you don't show up on a spreadsheet and like people are calculating this. You just vanish. So I remember thinking like,

oh, well, this has never happened before. And then I thought, that is so dumb. This is like not, this is illogical thinking. The fact that I'd never been kidnapped and chopped into little pieces before, therefore, this time. it's probably not happening. Exactly.

I mean, people say that's all the time with like smoking and it's like, I know an uncle who's never, who smoked all his life and didn't die of lung cancer,

therefore. Yeah, anecdotal BS. Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of this comes down to, in a fortunate reality, which is sometimes

you have to put some numbers to things. Yeah. You know, even if it's rough, like another one from Annie Duke, she was like to say, well,

give it a number out of 10, you know, at least of a probability so people just aren't working off of 50-50 or 99 because people just like to say it's 100% once they believe something could be true. Try to get some actual numbers behind things.

That's a good idea. Yeah, and he does say, even if you're totally spitballing, try to guess lower, less sure than you might even be. Yeah, exactly. Put some number to it. The tragedy of the commons, this is something that I remember reading about, I think, in property class in law school. Yeah.

And it basically was, if everyone can graze their cows in the same field, then your incentive is to let your cows overgraze the field. Yes. And now we have that, but with antibiotics. Antibiotics, you know, people, what it happens is a lot of times is people are making short-term decisions for themselves, but it actually has a consequence for the rest of the population. So like climate change and carbon emissions?

Yeah, all of this stuff. Climate change, even privacy violations to your friends. Like if you share your contact book with, you know, some service, and now you actually violated the privacy of your friends. You're diminishing the resource for everybody else. Spam, email, Wikipedia edits that people kind of edit their own articles, all of these things. They're polluting this kind of, any kind of pollution or metaphor around pollution has this tragedy that common effect. But it's related to these more general model called short-termism where you may make short-term decisions.

And generally, short-term decisions aren't necessarily great for a long-term, and so you want to be thinking more long-term. But sometimes your short-term decisions also affect everybody else. else. And that's where this kind of group scenario is. So you can think of like changing lanes in traffic. Like everybody, as soon as you get in traffic, everybody starts changing lanes. Oh, yeah. Because they're like, that lane's better. That lanes better. It's like office space. Yeah. But as soon as you start changing lanes, you're just causing more congestive everybody else. And so it just adds more and more congested. The tyranny of small decisions, I'm not sure if I even remember this one, but the example was splitting the check at a cafe. So I'm like,

ooh, that's something everyone does. Yeah. I mean, it, it, the, These are, you know, two sides of the same coin. So it's like, say you go to a, say you simplify it, so you go to a restaurant and there's two meals you can get the cheap one or the expensive one. You know, when you're by yourself, you might be like, okay, I'm going to go for the cheap one. When you're with a group, you're like, okay, well, the group's going to split this check. So maybe I'll go for the expensive one. But if everybody makes that same decision, now everybody just paid for the expensive meal.

Right. Which you weren't going to pay for if you were there by yourself. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah, I remember going to like some crab place. My friend got a salad and someone else got all you could eat oysters or something. Yeah. And his was like $87. And my friend Dory Clark, who you might know, got like a side salad.

It's probably six bucks. It happens to us all the time because my wife and I don't really drink. Yeah. Oh. Yes. Worst. You guys had three bottles of wine. I had this.

How was my bill $60? Oh, right. I'm basically buying. a bottle of wine for the table. Exactly. Free riding and herd immunity. This is a vaccine thing, essentially. We're talking about this with Dr. McCarthy who's a disease specialist, but free riding

and herd immunity is a really apropos. Yeah, so herd immunity comes from vaccines, and it's this idea that you need to have a certain number of people, a certain percentage of the people of the population to get vaccinated or else you can get outbreaks. And the reason is, is because outbreaks spread because there's people to infect. But if everyone's vaccinated, there's no. one to infect. And so it turns out some of these diseases are extremely contagious. So like the measles outbreaks, you need 95% approximately of people in a community to be vaccinated or else you get

outbreaks. And that's kind of what we're seeing in the country. But as a metaphor, it's really useful well beyond this specific area. So think of it as a company perspective. If you have a policy or a process and everybody needs to follow it because it's a good practice, say it's like everyone needs to update their projects every week so everyone else can be informed to them. or there's an expense policy, you know, and everybody is only allowed a certain amount per day when they're traveling or something. And then someone else starts flaunting that

or doesn't do the updates. They're like the unvaccinated person. And immediately, you know, if more than a few people do that, you can start to have an outbreak of bad kind of decisions and because they're like, well, they're not doing it. Why should I do it? Right, right.

And then it's like, they can't punish all of us. Yeah, exactly. And all of a sudden, now it's completely out there. So this herd immunity concept is you got to kind of hold the line at some level, the threshold level, or else you risk kind of descending into a chaos state. This is a little bit of a tangent, but running a company here or anywhere in the United States, especially I would imagine with offices in California or something like that, are you allowed to say, and probably not because of the whole medical thing, are you allowed to say, hey, if you're not vaccinated, you can't come in my office? That is a good question. I don't know. We're an interesting company. We're distributed. Yeah. Good.

You're like, hey, you can be sometimes just if you don't die while you work here. Yeah, we don't come in contact with each other very often. But, I mean, I think there are laws about that because, like, schools have it, you know. They do. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm just wondering, because I know school, maybe schools are different. I know here you can't go, hey, do you have this disease?

Are you seeing a psychology? It's probably state by state. Yeah, probably state by state. My guess is if the government can do it, though, because that's a major health risk. that a company should be able to do it. Theoretically, but I don't know, man. California, sometimes I don't get it. Lemons versus Peaches, I had never heard this concept,

and it is so interesting. The whole lemon versus, well, I guess, I never heard of peaches as far as cars. Everyone's heard of the lemon car. Yeah, exactly. Everyone's heard of the lemon car, the lemon bar. So this is the idea of if you can have this thing called in a market, and it could be any kind of market.

This is a used car market, but it's also, it could be the healthcare market, or any kind of thing where there's buyers and sellers, you have what they call this death spiral where the whole market breaks down. And if you think about it and use cars, a lemon is a used car that's just bad. You know, it's just got problems with it.

Whereas peaches, the opposite, are good cars. And so if you can't tell the difference as a buyer between lemons and peaches, and let's say there are lemons out there, all of a sudden you don't want to pay a lot for the car, cars because you could get a lemon. And so what happens is, is the price goes down, the average price goes down as these lemons are discovered in the market because people are like, oh, I just paid $1,000 for this car is only worth $200. Sure. So now I'm only going to pay $400 in the market.

As the average price starts to go down, the people who have good cars, they don't want to sell in the market anymore because they're like, I'm not going to sell my car that I know was worth $1,000 for $400. And all of a sudden, the market just completely breaks down. Because it's full of garbage. Because it's full of garbage, because the good cars get pulled out, and the only thing left are the bad cars. Oh, wow. And so the way to stop this, this is a real problem called asymmetric information. And the basic problem is you don't know, which is the lemon, which is the peach. And so something like Carfax... I was just going to say something like Carfax is needed to help solve this problem. You need some discovery mechanism,

either a way to kick the lemons out or to verify that you have, you know, different levels of quality. But if you don't have that, then you can't get these markets started. Huh. God, man, that is that these things exist everywhere and we just don't see them. Right. And so all of these are like, they come up in different situations. And so like this most recently came up with the U.S. healthcare marketplace. That's what people are talking about. In that case, lemons are people of preexisting conditions and peaches would be really healthy,

young people. And in that case, you don't want to kick anybody out, but you need everyone to participate for the market to work. And so these recurrent concepts are just kind of. of inherent to markets and economics. And so if you want to understand what's going on in the policy world and in the business world, you kind of need to understand like these type of concepts. The Streisand effect is something that is kind of funny and seems to be popping up all over the place, especially with the internet. This comes up more and more, yeah. It's amazing

how much this is come up. This is just a funny story. It's the early name for Barbara Streisand who someone took a picture of her like beach mansion and she did want anyone to see it for some reason. And this photographer posted to their site and had like six, literally like six views on it. And she sued them. And that became news. Yeah, five of the people were her lawyer. Exactly. And it became news. And then all of a sudden it was a huge news story. The picture is shown everywhere, which is what she didn't want in the first place. And then the photographer who won the suit decided to make it a public domain. And so now the picture can be used for free everywhere. And now there's a article in this whole effect and named after her about this

house, which is the opposite of the original goal of it. And so like the picture is now freely available on Wikipedia and you can go see it and everything. I assume she sold that place at a long shortly thereafter. So the stricent effect now generally applies to anything where you, if you draw something like bad, you don't necessarily want to draw attention to it. But if you draw attention to it, try to get out ahead of it or try to squelch it, it can be worse. than actually just letting it go. It's kind of like the cover up is worse than the crime. Yeah.

And so you have to make a, something bad happens. You really have to make a calculation. Like, you just want to just say, yuck, I'm sorry, I'm going to like this happened or I'm going to let it go versus draw attention to it. Because you're pointing to the internet, these things just spiral out of control really easily. People love stories like people trying to cover something up.

Especially, the America loves a story of a rich person trying to maintain some sort of privacy or benefit that is, frankly a little unreasonable, and then just getting their ass handed to them. Even somebody who's just universally beloved like Barbara Streisand. I mean, imagine if that had been anyone else. It would have been even worse. And companies fall into this all the time. They try to cover something up or they put up a tweet and they delete it, you know,

put them a blog post and remove it. And maybe you just leave it up. Yeah, yeah. It's like cats out of the bag. Can't really mess with this. Chilling effects and collateral damage. This is something that's sort of in your niche. I didn't know that after Snowden,

and Edward Snowden went through his whole rigoma role, I didn't realize that people searched for different things less online. Take us through that. That's kind of creepy in a way. Oh, it's very creepy. I mean, the chilling effect is this general concept where, you know, you won't do something for fear of retribution. So, you know, think about China or other kind of authoritarian regimes

where no one wants to speak out. And effectively, their speech is chilled because they're afraid. if they speak out, you know, they might get kidnapped or killed or what have you. But that happens all over the place. So this notion of after Snowden, people realized they were being surveilled or could be surveilled by their governments, which came directly from corporations. And so people started searching less. And so this came up in a number of ways.

People went to Wikipedia topics less, especially terrorism-related ones. But even non-terrorism-staffed people started searching health topics less on Google, thinking that they're government or even private people and they figure out of their health concerns. And that's bad for people. What is this red watch on my, yeah. Which could be important to research. Yeah, you should know what that might be.

I mean, granted, searching for something health-related online, it's like three steps and you have cancer or it's got to get amputated. So you should go to a doctor, really. But the chilling effect comes up really in any policy. It really is common. You got to think of this whole chapter. we're talking about it is about unintended consequences basically.

And people think that, you know, oftentimes you hear Monday morning quarterbacking on TV and you're like, I could have never known about that. Sure. You know, like no one could have ever predicted X. Well, it turns out there are a lot of these mental models of unintended consequences that you can predict. Like, you can predict this dry-send effect. You can predict this death spiral, you know, of address selection.

You can predict chilling effects. You can think of if I pass this policy, what might happen? And it can have side consequences. It's like, there are a lot of. lot of harassment laws that have come out where people, they set out to have mandatory reporting for harassment. But because of the mandatory reporting, it's actually had a chilling effect where people want to report less because they don't want to be involved in this mandatory reporting process. And so that was clearly an unintended consequence to the people who set up

the policy or law wanted more reporting, which is why they made it mandated. But it had this other chilling effect. And so you have to think about, like, are the people that I'm trying to have to help actually going to be chilled by this policy. Survivorship bias. I've talked about this on the show because I think a lot of successful entrepreneurs, they say things like, never give up and like follow your passion. It's terrible,

terrible advice. And the reason we're hearing it from, I don't know, Mark Cuban is because he doesn't, his process wasn't like this sexy commencement speech. It was like all this grind. People don't want to hear that. And then also we're not hearing from the other 99 out of 100 who are on their

mom's couch. We're like, I don't know. I heard never give up. So I'm not giving up. And mom's like, get a freaking job, right? The aircraft bullet hole example, though, fascinating. Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, this comes up in, well, let's talk about the airport bullet hole thing. So this was back in World War II. And people are looking, you know, all these planes are going out and they're getting shot down and they're coming back. And so what they wanted to do is look at where the bullet holes were on the plane and see maybe they could reinforce the armor a bit better. so less planes would get shot down. But what a statistician realized is, you know what, there were whole areas of the plane where there were no bullet holes.

And first people were like, well, those must have been good. You know, like we don't need to reinforce those. But it turns out is they're not looking at the planes that got shot down. They're only looking at the way to get back. Yeah, those are on the ground in Germany. Those are the dead planes. Right. And so the opposite was actually true.

And survivorship bias is what this means is, is looking at only of the things that survive the process and not looking at all the other ones that didn't survive. And so you brought up kind of entrepreneurship. People like to say, you know, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, they all dropped out of college and became billionaire. Right, yeah. So therefore, you know, I got to do.

College become billionaire. But you're not looking at all the other people who dropped out of college and didn't become a billionaire. And so you have to look at, like, the full set of people to make any conclusion. You can't just look at the few success cases. Right. That's the survivorship bias or the survivor bias. You're only looking at the survivors.

So the selection of people that you're looking at is biased. Yeah, another good example they write about is like old buildings in a city. So I love to go through the city and the best buildings are like the oldest ones with like all the sort of neat stuff. And so you kind of have the idea, well, wow, old architecture and buildings must have been awesomely made. Why would we destroy all these amazing old buildings? Yeah, they're all gorgeous. But the only ones that remained are the ones that are really awesome. worth preserving maybe? There were tons of other buildings that have been knocked down that were not

necessarily worth preserving. Yeah, or they burned or fell down because they had pieces of crap. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's a really good example. Because you look at San Francisco and they have this huge fire. And it is a shame. We probably lost some amazing buildings, but the ones that remained were made out of like stone. And yes, there's a reason there are old castles in Germany, but not a whole lot of old wooden shacks. Yes. You've got to, like, lot of concepts here on decision making. In fact, the whole book has like just tons on decision making and pros and cons and how to make effective lists and make decisions. One thing, concept I thought was extremely interesting was when you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs where

it's like food, shelter, water, I don't know, dot to dot, self-actualization. If we have a safety or esteem need, we might actually self-sabotage our success in other areas because we're focused on those needs instead. And this explains a lot of examples. that we see in society where you see somebody who's given an opportunity and you go, you ever see, what is it, the wire? Is that what it's called? Remember that show? Yeah, Baltimore? Yeah. And the kid is at this party full of fancy people and then he like goes out and starts selling drugs on the corner. And it's like, this is the lesson there is like, it's all he knows or something like that. But really, he's focused on safety and security. So he can't really evolve past

a certain point. And we see this with with ourselves as humans all the time. Can you take us through this a little bit? I thought this is such an insightful point. Yeah, I mean, this is a whole area, the whole set of models around unlocking people's potential. And unfortunately, a lot of psychological and just physical reality things hold people back from reaching their full potential. And what Maxwell's hierarchy of needs is really saying, and it's been disputed whether it's actually a hierarchy per se, but the concept itself is really good. And it's saying you have these different levels of needs. Like you need safety, you need food, you need shelter. You also need like to feel like you belong, you know, and then

if you can achieve all that, then you can start to kind of do the rest. But if you're hung up on some of these other basic human needs, you can't really focus on, you know, self-improvement and other things. You're going to need to solve that first. So as someone's coach or, you know, friend or family member, and you see someone kind of struggling with that, you can really, you can really, realize that they're probably not going to like get that job that you want to give them if they don't solve this other stuff first. And then you can try to help them with that. How do we know if this is us? How do we know if we're self-sabab? Yeah. Like, how do I know I'm self-sabit? You were saying this earlier about the biases. I think it is unfortunately really hard to do yourself. And so like,

the answer is not a great one. But I actually think you need other people in your life who are basically going to call you on your BS. Yeah. Yeah. I'm imagining somebody saying, hey, you don't have to hoard money and not spend money on yourself. Or like, you don't have to distrust all of our new friends. Nobody's going to sneak in and take away your life that you built for yourself. If you grew up in a scarcity place where you're- I think it requires those deep conversations. It goes back to the identity thing.

It's like if your whole history is one way and your brain is really just like a computer that learns things. And if you see it all through that. that lens, it's going to take a while to change it. And that's going to be, it probably is not an immediate process, you know? I'm thinking of this example. There was a basketball player, his name escapes me. I remember reading this news story. And another more famous player, Gilbert Arenas, he pulled, they ended up pulling guns on each other in like the locker room of, at an NBA, it's just ridiculous, okay? But as is though, I know Gilbert Arinas had a problem

and got suspended or whatever. The other guy ended up going, he was a, gangbanger. He ended up going to prison for life. He was in the NBA. It's like, what are you doing? And people just couldn't get, wrap their mind around it. Grands are all the rap stars. Yeah. And you're like, you're thinking, you have millions of dollars. You are guaranteed to be wealthy pretty much up until you stop getting paid in which case, at which point you can blow it all. But you have a bright, bright future. And you're rolling through South Central LA with a Mac 10 shooting an idiot, other idiots. What are you doing? And the idea is he's probably focused on the survival need, the self-esteem and acceptance of his posse crew.

He just couldn't get past that and look higher on the hierarchy of needs. He probably is making millions of dollars. And he was in prison. It's so ridiculous. There's all sorts of other psychological models that kind of hold people back. One that we talk about a lot is imposter syndrome. Yeah, that's a staple of the program here. Yeah, yeah.

Everyone knows about that already. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it comes up all the time in work situations, too. Yeah, it's the idea that you think, in case this is your first episode of the show, it's the idea that you think, oh, I'm the one that slipped through the cracks. Whenever I go and speak at Ivy League universities or corporations and I bring up this topic, I was go, who here secretly thought when they first started? Because you can't ask him who feels that way now.

Who here when they first started thought, I can't believe I got a job here. They're going to figure out I don't belong here. And like the whole, the whole room's hands go up. And if you're giving this at Harvard, if you're doing it at LinkedIn or Facebook or something, everyone's hand goes up. If you do this at a high school, no one's hand goes up because they know everything already. No imposter syndrome in any high schools. That's funny. It's a sign of high performers.

Yeah, I mean, what people don't realize, too, when they get into like on the management side is like people think, oh, I'm just going to be coaching people with skills. But most of a lot of management is helping people overcome these psychological barriers. Yeah. I know you testified in front of Congress. about privacy, how does that happen? Do you just get a call from like Nancy Pelosi and they're like, get in here? That is pretty much what it was. It was like Nancy Pelosi. But yeah, I mean, they have these hearings. And so what the proximate cause for that one is I was at another hearing

in the California State House on privacy. And they were going to have a Senate hearing on privacy. And they're looking for, you know, experts to talk to various things. And they saw my one testimony and they were like, come to this. That's pretty cool, though. Oh, it was very cool. Yeah. And it's great to be part of, like, the process. Sure.

Like, you don't have to run for office. You just go and address everyone. Yeah, I mean, it is a good. Now you're on C-SPAN. That part of the system is good because, you know, you have legislators have to legislate on every topic, right? And so they can't be experts at everything. And so they have these hearings to bring in experts to represent lots of different sides.

Because these. Did anyone testify against privacy, though? Yes. That's kind of what I'm saying. Who is that? So there were representatives from big tech companies, and I wouldn't say they wouldn't classify themselves as against privacy. Very, very bad tack to take.

But they were advocating for, I would say, much lax privacy regulations or even self-regulation effectively for privacy by big tech companies, which I don't think would work. And so a lot of the debate right now is, you know, what should the laws actually be like? and how strong they should be. And, you know, I'm on one side advocating for really strong privacy laws. And people are on the other side of that.

Yeah. I mean, I am curious. You have kids. How are you teaching your kids to be better thinkers and parse information better? The short answer is writing this book. Write this book? You think your kids are going to read your book? Get real, buddy.

Never going to happen. Got to read it to them. Yeah, yeah. So we tried to organize this material. But the, I mean, the way that has worked best so far is we've been trying to find good content that is kind of thought-provoking. Like, we're just talking about like it's hearing, like, two sides of an issue and then, like, listen to it with them and then talk about it.

And so instead of just trying to like tell them this is the right thing, like, be like, look, reasonable people disagree here. Let's look at all sides of this thing. Then I'll tell you what we believe. But, you know, before we do that. why don't you say what you believe or think about, you know? And so we found a lot of good content for that. There's this podcast, Intelligent Squared Debates.

Oh, yeah. And so we listen to that and things like that. I can't believe you get your kids listening to Intelligence Squared Debates. Yeah. How old are they? They're 8 and 10. Wow. That's early, man.

There's a lot of pausing, you know, and being like, do you understand this or that, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think I often have to do that when I listen to things like that. and I'm 39. And then we listen to a lot of things like the daily, the New York Times podcast, or just some kind of daily news and then try to explain, like, what's going on with this. They really do, they don't have any good news for kids or anything that teaches kids critical thinking that I've found. Nothing great like this.

No, we've had to, like, do this roundabout process. There's a crash course, which is more like knowledge. You know, it's kind of like Khan Academy. That's good, but it's not like critically thinking. It's more like learning better curriculum, you know, early on. Well, this has been fascinating. There's so much more in the book. This was, one, we didn't even get through all the notes and all the biases and all the

concepts and all the mental models. But two, even if we did get through everything here, I think this is two or three out of how many chapters are in the book? Nine chapters. Yeah. So there's so much more in the book, especially about running a business or applying these things to corporations, businesses, startups. You really walk the walk, obviously, at Duck.com.

Must be a nice place to work. I hope it is. Yeah, you hope it is. Yeah, we'll never know. Thank you very much. Thanks. Great big thank you to Gabriel Weinberg. The book is called Super Thinking.

And links to his stuff, of course, will be in the show notes. If you want to know how I managed to book all these great people and manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits, check out our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. A problem with kicking a can down the road is that we're not able to make up for lost time when it comes to relationships and networking. The number one mistake I see people make is postponing this, not digging the well before they get thirsty,

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