The Jordan Harbinger Show - 378: Steven Johnson | How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson) is the best-selling author of 11 books on the intersection of science, technology, and personal experience, including Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. He also hosts the Fighting Coronavirus podcast on Wondery. What We Discuss with Steven Johnson: In a world where we might put more thought into brunch than buying a house, what types of decisions warrant a "decision-making process?" Why we can do better than relying on the old pros and cons list that Ben Franklin, Charles Darwin, and our parents once found useful. Uniform phases of decision-making that we can teach, learn, and apply to tailor-made decisions of varying complexity. How AI might help us augment decision-making processes involving probability. The premortem: why planning as if a future event has already happened might result in better decisions than just asking ourselves "what if?" And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/378 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! 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.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. The assessments have all been done, and it's like you should wear the seatbelt, and you should buy a car with airbags because this is good, and you should do the, and you shouldn't drink and drive. We've figured out the odds of all these things over time. But then when you get a unique situation, like the one we're in with COVID-19, suddenly you realize you have to run all those kind of risk assessments on your own, or the experts are trying as best as they can, but nobody knows yet.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the Matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave. We want you to become a better thinker, especially a better decision maker and critical thinker. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies, CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, as well as toolboxes for skill sets like negotiation, body language, persuasion, and more. So if you're smart and you like to learn and improve, you're going to be right at home here with us.

Rarely do we put a lot of thought into making decisions. I know it seems like we do or should, but for most of us, we just ruminate on something, worry about random variables until eventually coming to a decision. Or perhaps you're like me and you bust out a pro and cons list and then you ignore everything you wrote down, and we think we really thought it out. As it turns out, the process of making decisions hasn't really evolved much in, I don't know, 100 years. Today, Stephen Johnson, author of Farsighted, is going to help us hone the process and get better at the skill of decision making. If you want to know how I managed to book guests like this, bestselling authors, thinkers, performers, et cetera.

It's always about that network. Check out our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So if you want to be in some smart company, come join us in that course at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, here's Stephen Johnson. A lot of people don't put too much thought into decisions, and I know this because I'm one of those people a lot of the time. I think the most common example I give is when I bought my first house, the decision-making

process was, hey, Jordan, wake up, my wife, you know, hey, wake up, do you want to go see this house down south in the South Bay? I was living in San Francisco at the time. And I said, not really. And she goes, my dad got up really early. he's in line, it's new construction, so it's first come for a serve, it's not like they're showing it, you know, it's just a whole subdivision. We should go or he's going to be annoyed that he stood in line, and I'm like, great. So we shower up, get ready, run down there. And then we walk through the house,

I'm like, it's all right, you know, whatever. And my father-in-law goes, so you like the house? And I said, sure. And he goes, great, okay, we'll take it. And I went, well, what? And then I applied for a mortgage and I thought, you know, I don't even need to argue. There's no way. I'm not pre-approved. This is like, there's 50 people here. They all want to buy the same house. I'm never going to get it. Sure enough, we apply for the mortgage. They're like, uh, you're approved, but it's too late.

And then somebody dropped out and anyway, long story short, I got the house. And I went, wow, I literally put more thought into most brunch orders. Right. Than this purchase of this house, which turned out to be a really good purchase. So I'm all for outsourcing decisions to people who know how to do them better. Yeah. But this, you know, generally when it comes to like who you're going to marry, where you're going to live, what kind of career you want, you want, you want some kind of

process for that decision. Ninety-nine percent of decisions probably don't need it, but what kind of decisions should we be looking at when we think, I need a decision-making process? Yeah, I mean, look, if you all, if everyone has a father-in-law that you can just offload the decision process to, I think everybody should just do that. It clearly worked. It's fine, but most of us don't have access to that. Actually, it's funny because my dad shows up, the book is dedicated to my dad, and he kind of shows up at a couple of points in the plot because he's consulted on some of my decisions and he plays a role which we can get into of basically being the kind of negative scenario planner.

Who helps me think about all the downside, you know, scenarios, which I tend to be not so good at doing because I tend to be more optimistic. The point is there are, you know, our lives are filled with decisions where the kind of time scale of the decision in terms of its effects in the world is vanishingly small, right? It's like, what should I have for dinner tonight? What should I order at brunch? You know, those kinds of decisions. And for those kinds of decisions, you can go with your gut or you can think about them a little bit, but it's not a big deal.

But your life is fundamentally shaped by a set number of decisions. For some of us, it's maybe 10. For others, it's 100 or something like that, that really have long-term implications, right? That really are transformative ones in terms of the course of your life, your family, your work, all the different things that really matter. And the argument that I was trying to make in Farsighted is that for those kinds of decisions, it is, as you say, in, incredibly helpful to have a process and to think about how we make those kinds of decisions and what are the kind of routines we're going to go through to try and make them. And when you look back in your life, these kind of crucial kind of turning points in your life where you chose this path

over this path, those are the things that shaped everything for you. And so to think about like, how did you do that? How did you make that choice? And in some sense, the origins of this project was thinking about the one tool that most of us have and the most of us are taught at some point. I remember my dad teaching it to me, which is the pros and cons list, right? Which is it turns out to be like in a very old tradition. Actually goes back to Ben Franklin who wrote about it in a letter to Joseph Peasley, who I'd written a book about many, many years ago. So I knew about this, you know, Ben Franklin's use of the pros and cons method,

which is kind of a funny thing because Franklin was such a like self-help guru. Yeah. Like in his own time, it was like founding father, but also like advice columnist. Yeah, it's weird. When you think about him, you're like, wait a minute. This guy's like, OG Dale Carnegie and also like, let me go ahead and sign the Constitution or whatever. Yeah.

No, no. It's such a, somewhere is like the American kind of ethos is there in Franklin and that mix of things. But the thing that really sparked it for me was I'd written years ago another book called Where Good Ideas Come From.

And that has a lot of stuff about Darwin in it. And in Darwin's notebooks, which are amazing documents for a lot of different reasons in terms of watching a mind wrestle with really big ideas, you know,

and argue with himself and all this stuff. But at one point in his notebooks in the late 1830s, He kind of interrupts as he's like coming up at the theory of natural selection. He interrupts his musings and creates a pros and cons list trying to decide whether to get married. And it's hilarious. It's in the book. If people want to see it, it's a very funny list of things.

I saw. Yeah. And I think it is kind of a funny anecdote. Like, go ahead and tell it. Because the guy's considerations are like pretty basic. Yeah. I mean, he has, he has some things that is like, you know, on the pro side of getting married, you know, someone will be around and maybe we'll have kids.

But he has one line where it's like, better than. a dog anyhow or something like it hasn't aged very well. But on the negative side is that he's afraid he's going to have to give up the clever conversation of men in clubs. Like that's his that's like the negative. That does kind of sound nice though. I'm like, oh, there's clubs where guys just sat around and talked. I don't think we have that anymore. Yeah. I mean, that's that was the dream back in 1837. From knowing these two stories from other books that I'd written, I thought, you know, that's so funny because like the pros and cons list is. still the only tool that most of us have for making complex decisions. Like that's the vast

majority of people, if they're ever taught anything about decision making. It's, yeah, write down the pros on one side and cons on the other and see which list is longer, which is better than nothing probably, but it's so limited. And we think about all the different other ways that we've advanced and our kind of tools that we use to do things in life. And decision making, particularly complex decision making, long-term decision-making is so important. Like, surely there must be something better out there. And so that was kind of the quest. that I went on in writing Farsighted is to figure out, like, what is the kind of the state of the art in decision-making theory or science? And to what extent can we, like, actually use

these things in the real world? What's funny, I found it. It's just, he's so hilariously candid about how he sees taking a wife. So he said, it would be nice to eat good food, but not to get fat. But, oh, what a waste of time to have female chatter around the house. It's like, wow, that aged well. And then he gets married six months later. Like, okay, buddy. Yeah, yeah. Also, The other thing, he ends up being very happily married, although there's some tragedy in his life because the daughter dies, which shows up in the book actually later as well. But the woman he marries, Emma Wedgwood, is his cousin. Oh, God. And it's someone pointed out to be, like, when I was on book tour for this, it's weird that on the negative, on the con side of the list, it never says,

is my cousin. You'd think that would have been a factor. The whole family might say something a little negative about that. It just goes to show at the time. It was like fully expected to just marry your cousin because yeah they're convenient we already know the family everybody was doing it back that yeah exactly now most people don't actually make decisions right they're just doing kind of the next best thing with very little information or deliberation kind of like my house purchase and that sums up the first two-thirds of my life pretty well also i think right where it's just like well i should go to law school because i graduated from college and i can only get a job at best buy and that's not where i want to end up so have more education why not not like i should be a lawyer there's all these good things

about it, just like, this is a grad school that I got into that doesn't seem impossibly hard. And also, lots of people say lawyers make money, because I've seen that in movies. Like, I mean, this is like how I based most of my major decisions. A lot of people write in for advice to the show. And they're like, I think I screw this up. And I'm like, don't worry, I screwed up the first 30 years of my life and I'm fine now. Like, it's okay. We usually also just decide whether or not to do a specific thing.

it's very rarely like, here are my five options or my three options. It's like, do I go to law school? It's a wait, wait, wait. That's not really your, we're artificially constraining our choices, right? Yeah, exactly. And let me say two things to just back up a little bit. One of the things that I wrestled with a lot in writing this book, which gets to your role as advice, you know, people are writing in the show for advice. One of the things that I took really seriously in writing this book is the fact that when you're writing about major decisions in people's lives, by definition, they're all unique, right? There's no easy formula. You know, when someone is deciding whether this is a decision that runs through the book, whether to like leave the city and move to the suburbs,

like that classic, like you've got young kids and you've been living downtown and you're trying to decide if you're going to move to the suburbs, that kind of decision is like, it's unique for everybody trying to make it because it involves so many different variables that are specific to you and your partner and your kids and the city you're in and whether there's a pandemic going on in the middle of your city and all the different things. Yeah.

And as an author, writing a book, trying to give people advice, by definition, I have no idea who I'm talking to, right? Like, I'm not talking to an individual person who I know whose circumstances I know. And, you know, there's a lot of self-help out there where it feels just kind of silly because you don't know me me and why am I listening to you, Total Stranger, give me advice. And I almost didn't write the book because I was concerned about that. But what I ultimately realized in going through the science of it all and the history of kind of decision theory is that all of the tools that are in the book and that we can talk about here

are ultimately tools in a sense of kind of perception, right? It's about when you have a really complex decision that has a lot of different variables or that involves unpredictable, kind of downstream effects of the different paths that you take, that you have to go through a bunch of exercises to get yourself to see it in all of its complexity and to understand all the different variables that are at play and to get around your kind of usual biases, your default assumptions and stuff like that challenge, your conventional wisdom, what are we want to call it. And those are things that you can teach, right? Like, I can't tell you whether, you know, you should take this new job because I don't know you, but I can give you

a set of strategies that enable you to understand and perceive the problem more clearly. And that's something that is transferable. And something that's teachable, by the way, which we can talk about. I mean, one of the things that I ultimately came around to is the idea that these things should be taught, like, as a required course in high school. But we can talk about that later. So, in order to get that kind of perceptual clarity about the choice that you're facing, the main idea is to have different stages of the decision process, right? To divide it, to not just sit down and be like, all right, I've got my yellow eagle pad. I'm writing down pros and cons, like, but I actually have different phases.

And the first phase is this idea of kind of mapping it, right? You're trying to understand, like, what are all the kind of variables that are at play, and what are my options. And this is coming back to your question, which is, most people look at a decision as what you described it as like a whether or not decision. I'm trying to decide should I go do this or not. Right. And this is true in life and this is true in business of where this has been analyzed kind of extensively.

When you look at high level kind of executive decisions people make, there's a tendency to just like something presents itself. And they're like, well, should we do this or not, people like, let's gather around and decide this. Right. And people who just jumped in and tried to decide based on that one option, whether or not to do it, when you look at the long term life of these decisions and their effects, it turns out that those people are much less successful and less happy in the end with their choice than folks who in the early stages of the decision had a phase where they looked for other options. They're like, look, we're not going to decide this yet. Right now we're looking at option A, but is there an option B and is there an option C

and option D? And this actually, I mean, sounds intuitive. Right. Yeah, it's almost like, okay, this tell me this show isn't just about like consider multiple options when making a decision, right? Like, People are going on. Where's the beef? But people rarely do it. That's the thing. And they don't kind of realize it. They don't say, okay, let's have this period where we're just really keeping our mind open and we're deliberately trying to explore other kinds of options that are out there. And the kind of business case studies have looked at this. I've found that people who, like, have that earlier stage are like are much, much happier in the end with the decisions they end up making. That makes sense, right? I think often, another thing is we often have one, I don't know what you'd call it, like an anchor or core variable where we make decisions, based on that. So I find that a lot of bad decisions I've made just in business or something like that is I'll say something like, is this the cheapest way of getting this done? And then later on I'll talk to someone in there like, you shouldn't be doing that at all. And I'm like, oh, so not only did I pick the cheapest way to get it done or not the cheapest way to get it done,

I'm doing something that doesn't need to be done. Or we pick nutritional value or let's pick something less nebulous. Whatever my parents will like the best, that's a pretty common choice I think that a lot of people make when it comes to career and education when they're young. Or will this make me happy right now? Which sounds really dumb when you say it like that, but then when you're at the store thinking like, oh, look at this fancy gadget. You don't really say, well, this make me happy right now. You go, no, I need this because you rationalize, oh, I'm definitely going to use this giant

we were just talking about our tech toys before this because we have audio gear that is absolutely not required to make a podcast, right? it's a hundred times the price of the minimum entry level podcast gear. And like music studios don't even have some of the stuff that you and I have for recording our very imperfect voices into the computer. And so it's like, well, yeah, this will make me happy. But I've convinced myself that this is good for the business, right? That I'll have more listeners because I have an $8,000 studio instead of an $80 mic.

Well, and that's the thing. I mean, I want to make it clear all the techniques that we can talk about that are in the book are things that most of the time should not be applied to the decision of whether to buy that gear. You should just go buy that gear or not. But don't like, you know, go through an elaborate state. No gymnastics. It's really like separating out the times when it really matters. In a funny way, like what you said offhand there about like, you know, one way to do it is just like what would my parents like.

Right. It's in a way, it's not a terrible strategy, particularly when you're young and you're impatient because you're in a sense saying like, look, my parents have been around for a lot longer. They've accumulated a lot more kind of tacit knowledge about the world. and the consequences of choices and all that kind of stuff. And so maybe it's just easier rather than me do all this math myself, like if I just offered it to them in that way. And there's not a crazy way to do it. But this is for folks who want to do the math on their own.

And also, one of the things I should say is like this is a, the book goes back and forth between long-term decisions for individuals and also like social decisions, like planning decisions, city decisions, political decisions and things like that. Because the rules that I'm talking about are the tech. I'm talking about applying both cases. And in terms of the other options kind of idea, you know, one of the stories that I enjoyed kind of putting together in the book is a story in Brooklyn right now as I'm talking to you. And in New York, there's this great story in Manhattan

about the high line, which was, you know, this abandoned, you know, elevated rail line that ran through Chelsea and was for 30 years, like basically it was abandoned, it was his eyesore and it was, you know, there was one question about like, basically, like, should we tear this thing down? Like, that was it. It was obviously not useful. in any way. And there was just, you know, should it be torn down or should we just let it rot there? And then kind of collectively, as a society, people came over the idea like, wait a second, maybe there's another option here. Like, maybe we're looking at this problem wrong. And in fact, you could reinvent this space and you could turn it into a park and people could walk this long 30

block stretch elevated above the city and you can have these wonderful grasslands and things like that. And it ended up being, you know, it's one of the probably most influential urban parks built in the last 20 years because precisely because people were like, wait, are we really including all the potential options here? And now it's so successful, of course, that like, you know, the neighborhood around is being incredibly expensive and it's overcrowded. And, you know, it's such a success. Nobody goes there anymore. Yeah, it's a park and you're like, I don't want to be asked to elbow with a bunch of people walking on this kind of like elevated park. It's such a pain. You can't walk. And like, God forbid, you got a stroller with you. Forget it. You got to carry your kid over seven other people who are

standing there taking selfies. Oh, and now you've got to be six feet away. There can only be one's on one end of the rail, the others on the other side. It's like, this thing is not fun anymore. Yeah, and if you overlooked it, I don't know, 30 years ago, you're like, this damn eyesore outside of my window. This thing sucks.

And now you're like, ooh, I got a park out there. And, yeah. Right. Unbelievable. Humans also kind of don't really think well about probability, I think. Andy Duke was on the show, her show, Thinking and Betts, or her book Thinking and Betts.

We'll link to that in the show notes. But thinking and bets, her argument is leads to better predictions because I know when my three guesses for probability are for sure that's going to happen, no way that's going to happen, or maybe it's going to happen, right? I kind of have like zero, 100, and sometimes I have a 50-50 chance, and that's when I'm feeling very creative. I never really drill it down deeper than that. Yeah, that's a great.

I mean, that's the Amos Tversky has a line where he says that those are the three settings that humans have. Like, definitely never and maybe. Like that said. And it's one place actually where we may find more and more opportunity for collaboration with machine intelligence, right? That machines are actually really good at doing probabilities. Humans are really bad at doing probabilities. Humans are good at lots of other elements of it. But we may be able to, like one of the things I talk about a little bit, and actually in a piece I wrote after the book came out, is decision making in terms of things like decisions that judges make and in terms of things like, you know, setting bail for people where you're really looking at probabilities. Like what is the likelihood that if I release this guy on $100 bail that he's going to go and commit another crime. And that turns out to be a thing that it looks like if you tune it right, you can get algorithms that can actually outperform judges that can actually be less racist than judges. There's a lot of talk about the algorithms being more racist than judges. And it's not a kind of thing where you want to just say like, all right,

I'm trying to decide if I should take this job or not. So, you know, hey Siri, you know, tell me, I just lit up by Siri here. You know, tell me the odds of this. That's not going to be the case. and actually have the AI make the decision for you. Take whatever job you need to pay for the next iPhone. She looked up the word odds in Wikipedia. Yeah, it was very nice. So it's not that you're going to offload the decision to the machine, but you might collaborate with the machine,

where it's like, this is my assessment. And the machine is then another voice that gives you, you know, a different perspective. And if the machine analysis of the situation is so wildly divergent from yours, then you have to question your assumptions, but, you know, it's a way of kind of getting more eyes on the problem in this case, digital eyes. But a broader point about risk is, you know, I think this is something that has come up a lot in our current crisis, right? Because so much of it is about trying to make risk calculations that are entirely unique, right? Like we were living in New York, we live in Brooklyn and a big apartment building and we've got teenagers. And, you know, we have a dog that we have to walk through the elevator. And you're sitting there saying, like, okay, how much are we at risk in terms of COVID-19? Like at what point am I going to, you know, how dangerous is this elevator? And if we get into a car and we drive seven hours to a place where we're far away, like, are we actually creating more risk for ourselves because, in fact, we're more likely

to die in seven hours of highway driving than we are as healthy young people more, I'm not that young, but it's a healthy 51-year-old. I was like, who are we talking about again? I'm not like, you know, so and life is like that. And you begin to realize how much of risk is pre-calibrated for you. Like the assessments have all been done. And it's like you should wear the seatbelt. And, you know, you should buy a car with airbags because this is good.

And you should do the, and you shouldn't drink and drive. And we've figured out the odds of all these things over time. But then when you get a unique situation like the one we're in with COVID-19, suddenly you realize you have to run all those kind of risk assessments on your own or the experts are trying as best as they can, but nobody knows yet. That's a huge part of these kinds of calculations. Another AI kind of version of this I talk about a little bit in the book is the original patent application for Google's self-driving car system had this great thing that I love, such a great metaphor. It was called the Bad Events Table. And it's this grid of like all the things that could go

wrong, you know, as the self-driving car is driving around. And so it's like, you know, clip the side of, you know, a parked car, slightly damaging, you know, the door handle of the current car all the way to head-on collision with bus, destroying all the, you know, destroying the passengers at high speed. And next to each of these possibilities is the likelihood of it happening, given the current situation and given the options that are available to the car at that particular moment swerving this way, swerving that way, and the magnitude of the risk in the sense of how bad would it be, right? And so it was a way of measuring, you know, how likely is it and how terrible would it be if this happened? And what the car is doing kind of at the speed of thought

is running all those things and saying like, okay, if I swerve this way, there's a slight chance that I will, you know, accidentally graze the side of a car, but I'm entirely eliminating the risk that I will run over this pedestrian, which would be terrible and has a very high kind of magnitude of danger or threat or whatever. And that is in a sense, like, what you want in your life, like is to be, you know, at a slower pace sitting there going like, okay, with this choice, like, what are the potential dangers here? How bad are they? And then what's the likelihood of each of these dangers? So a very, you know, kind of like high likelihood but low danger thing is, okay, I can tolerate that. Sure. But how much are we planning for the very low,

probability, but very high danger or threat scenario. Like a meteor hitting the earth? Like a meteor or like a pandemic, right? Like that part of the critique of where we are right now is that we didn't spend enough time as a society or some people in power of paying attention to low probability, you know, week after week it's very low probability, but in a long run, it's higher probability, but very high risk, high threat events. Like that's something to be thinking about.

Even if they're not likely to happen this year or next year, they're probably likely to happen at some point, and they're going to be so bad that we want to plan for that. And hopefully we'll get better at that kind of thinking, having gone through this. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Stephen Johnson. We'll be right back. Those are some great products and or services, were they not? Now, back to Stephen Johnson on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I do totally understand why people in power were like,

spend tens of millions of dollars on this thing that hasn't happened since 1918, or fix some other problem that everyone's, whining about right now. Yeah. You know, I get it. I do too, but hopefully we now will will now be able to point to this and say this is, yeah, this other thing we want to spend money on is like, right, you know, the next COVID-19. We need to be, we need to at least spend some time.

Yeah, like, remember when we lost $10 trillion in value because we didn't invest like $200 million in prevention? Yeah. Right. Right. Do you remember, does that ring a bell at all? Yeah. Oh, you mean last year.

Oh, you mean right now. You mean March. Yeah. So the problem is this can also be a mistake, right? We zoom into the aftermath of decisions, but we seldom look at the process. And we look at results over process, but knowing the results never really helps us recreate the success or, I guess, failure. So knowing the process is what really does this.

And this is where we can learn and grow in our abilities, right? Like we're not going to get necessarily better at, I guess some of us might get better at predicting results, but we would really stand to get better at knowing what the process of getting a positive result looks like versus just like getting better at guessing where things are going. So one of the things that kind of runs through the book is this extended analysis of the decision-making process that the Obama White House made in deciding on its approach to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Right, the Osama bin Laden raid on the compound in Abbottabad. And I focused on that because it's a beautiful example of a decision process that was thought about specifically

as a process with these different stages, following a lot of the kind of techniques that I talk about in the book, not that they, not the faith. I'm learning from them. They didn't learn for me. So it's a wonderful kind of case study in that. But it also, you know, I think it has an important in a sense kind of political message, which is to say the one question you're like, you never hear in a presidential debate is how do you make decision, right? But that is the job on some level. It's like, what are we going to do? Like, should we raise these taxes? Should we decide to, know, fight COVID-19 this way, should we? It's all about decisions all day long. And so it seems weird to me that we don't ask someone who were handing the keys to the country. Yeah.

Like, how are you going to do that? Like, what's your process going to be? And, you know, there are some, I think Obama was actually a very interesting kind of as a decision maker was very deliberative, sometimes critique for that. But the methods that they used, they were constantly about, you know, kind of challenging assumptions, bringing in a diverse team of people with different perspectives to look at the problem. A lot of the kind of the kind of best. strategy that you used, like, constant asking you of like, what are the probabilities here? He was all, both Obama and McRaven, who was kind of running the process, were constantly saying, like, what are the odds? And what's your confidence level in this assessment, which is,

you know, a crucial kind of second question when somebody says, I think we should do this. And you say, like, okay, but how confident are you that you're right? And just that exercise is really important. And so to me, like that, when we think about leadership roles anywhere, whether it's leadership roles in a corporation or in a nonprofit or in government, asking people like, what is their process for making a decision? I think it's a really important question we should do more of. Yeah, we see in the bin Laden raid how some of the brainstorm ideas they came out with. This is a little bit of a side note because I guess whenever you're making a decision, you brainstorm and some of the ideas are just terrible.

Like, what were some of the worst ones? Because I know you mentioned them in the book. I'm just trying to blank right now. So it was a two-part decision in sense. They were trying to figure out, is this mysterious figure in this compound actually Osama bin Laden? Oh, right. They spent months trying to figure that out because they didn't want to get the wrong guy. And two, then it was, what are we going to do about it, right? And so the first part of the decision, they were trying to figure out, how did they determine that it is Osama bin Laden? And so they had these ideas kind of like, they were trying to get people out of the compound.

And someone was like, we could broadcast out something saying, like, this is the voice of God. Like, this is the voice of Allah. Like, come out of your compound. you know, like, that's a incredibly stupid idea. I was going to fall for that. So, but that was, you know, it was a classic brainstorming kind of scenario where it's like no idea is too stupid. Throw out is, you know, get as many parts on the table that you can think about. And, you know, something interesting will happen out of that.

That was a really, I wonder who the person was, like, who said that. Was this like a contest to get the worst idea out there? Or was it just somebody who, like, was new? I don't know. I don't know. Like, that's one of those ideas where you're like, hmm, who brought this guy in the room? Who's guys that? Yeah.

Yeah. Everybody's like, oh, that idea is too stupid. I'm sorry. We said no idea is too stupid, but that one actually is. And you're fired. Yes, yeah. Sorry. What was your name again?

Yeah, you don't work here anymore. How did they avoid group think during the deliberation, right? Because it seems like you could easily be like, well, it's got to be him because I really want to get out of here and do this and like, it doesn't matter what the Pakistanis think of us invading their airspace. I mean, so many things could have gone wrong in this. Raid. One of the arguments that I make in the book is that, you know, diverse decisions are really good, where you get an interesting mix of people together. There's a collective intelligence that's there.

But there is a downside of that, which is group think, right? The room gets too united and confident and its choice and you miss a lot of things. And that's, to some extent, what happened, for instance, with the Cuban Missile Crisis and things like that. The Bay of Pigs, really even more than Cuban Missile Crisis. But a diverse group is one way around that, right? Have people with different fields of expertise, different perspectives, literally gender diversity, like, faculty, you know, ethnic diversity, all those things contribute. There's an endless amount of study that show that diverse groups make collectively smarter, more nuanced decisions than homogeneous groups. So that's just one thing you can do to help yourself. And by the way, another political argument is,

like we tend to talk about, you know, when we see less diverse groups being elected to office, there's a kind of a quality of opportunity argument there or equal representation argument there, which is all important. But there's also another point from the social sciences, which is like, we know that those groups will make worse decisions. You know, they are much more prone to group think than a group that is more eclectic. I mean, it makes for more tension and infighting and stuff like that. But the overall collective IQ of the group goes up, the more diversity. That's interesting.

So, like, I know the study in the book was that diverse juries tend to deliberate more and also better. What you'd said was just the presence of, let's say, non-whites in a jury made everyone else more open to alternate interpretations of what happened. And this also holds true with detectives picking some. suspects out of a lineup, all these different things. So it's not just like, oh, we need diversity because otherwise some people will feel left out. Like that's important. Don't get me wrong. But that's sort of one of those arguments where it's like, but freedom. And you're like, okay, whatever. Yeah. Right. But it's like, no, no, no, no. The decision will be better for everyone. The result will actually be unambiguously better. Yeah. If we have people in there bumping heads together, you know.

And there's two levels to it. I mean, the original theory, so this is a somewhat old idea. guy Scott Page who's written about this, who would be a great guest on the show if he hasn't been on. But he wrote a book called The Difference. He's the guy who kind of is famous for the diversity trumpsability kind of argument. You can get a bunch of high IQ people in a room who are all from the same background and they're all white men or whatever. They could be all black women. But if they're homogeneous, you get a lower IQ or whatever you want to measure intelligence group that is diverse. They will outperform on tasks that involve creative thinking and problem solving because of the But the old theory was that the reason why the diverse groups are smarter collectively is that each person brings in new perspectives and ideas and information that other members of the group don't have.

And so there's just more information that's there to help deliberate. And that's part of the answer, the explanation for this phenomenon. But there's another part of it which has kind of been revealed recently, which is that you alluded to this, which is just the presence of people with a different perspective or background or general. or whatever it is, elicits new information from the original in-group. So let's say you're the, you know, the guy who was part of the original homogeneous group and then you diversify the group. You yourself actually will come up with new ideas in your own mind. You won't just learn from those other people because the presence of people with different

backgrounds and assumptions makes you kind of challenge your gut, you know, first impressions or instincts. And so everybody individually gets smarter in the group. So it's a really interesting phenomenon. But I forgot now how we were where this was connected to. I think we were talking about group think and avoiding. You know what? I'm sure we'll pick that thread back up. Oh, I know exactly where we're going.

Okay. The big strategy in terms of avoiding group think beyond just having a diverse group, which has played a key role in the Osama bin Laden decision process, is this technique of basically building deliberately negative scenarios or predictions about the consequences of the choice being made, The best example, this is this technique called the premortem. Yes. It's maybe my favorite little trick from the book.

And the idea of the premortem is, so a post-mortem in conventional language, right, is you're the medical examiner and someone comes in and they're dead and the post-mortem is to figure out what has killed this person. A premortem is a mental exercise you do in a sense where it's like, this patient is going to die. Tell a story about how the patient came to die. And the exercise is we're about to make this big decision. And we have decided that Path A is the right one to do. We're going to do a raid by helicopters on Bin Laden's lair, or I'm going to go to law school. Yeah. Whatever it is.

Both equally important decisions. You're basically right there. And you're pretty much ready to pull the trigger on this decision. And you get a group together and you do a premortem. And the premortem exercises to say, okay. okay, he's going to go to law school, and in five years, this turned out to be a disastrous choice. Tell the story of how it became such a disaster. And it's basically, it's a scenario planning.

It's a kind of a narrative storytelling exercise. And everybody has to kind of do it separately, basically. And everybody comes back and is like, okay, here's a story. He went to law school, and it turned out that it really narrowed his perspective on the world. And he ended up, it turns out the law business, like, crashed because there are too many lawyers out there. And he ended up not actually having a job and he wasn't intellectually happy. You know, whatever it is, you build the story, right? Am I describing your life?

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, the result was like it did crash because the economy crashed. It was like, we don't need all these knuckleheads doing paperwork about real estate finance. They should all retool overnight. And now the law firms are like, we're not going to hire you. You didn't even want to work here originally. And I'm like, I didn't even want to be a lawyer. What the hell was I doing?

Start a podcast. That's where the money's at. There you go. So it all worked out. But so you'd run that exercise. And the point of the exercise. is from the folks who've studied it, is that people are much more perceptive at seeing potential problems with the choice when you ask them to tell a story that way, as opposed to just saying,

like, okay, the plan is, we're going to go to law school. Does anybody have any problems with it? You know, when you ask it that way, people are like, no, it looks good. A lawyer is a great job. Like, he seems like a lawyer. This is great, you know. But when you ask them to tell the story, it forces them to actually look for the holes. And the exercise of gathering the group and hearing all these different stories ends up, even if you end up going to law school or pursuing the raid, you're prepped a little bit for the ways in which it could go south on you. Or you end up being able to kind of keep some of the potential problems at bay because you've anticipated them through this exercise. Is this the same thing as scenario planning where you get people

together and you tell multiple stories, one where things get worse, one where things get better and one where things get weird? Or is that something else? Yeah. I mean, Scenario playing, it's very similar. Conventionally, it's slightly earlier in the process where you're looking at a bunch of different options or you're trying to understand that kind of broader kind of tableau. And I do love, I'm glad you brought it up because that trio, like tell three stories about the future, one where it gets better, one where it gets worse, and one where it gets weird. And the third one is the great one, right?

Like, you're like, we're trying to figure out, we're going into, think about it in a business context, right? Like, you know, we're going to launch this new kind of tooth-based. And, you know, we want to think about, like, where the world's going to be in 10, years long-term decision-making here, right? And so if we launch this new toothpaste, like, write a story about how this goes great and tell the story about how it goes terrible and then tell the story about how it goes weird. And, you know, you can be like, oh, it goes great because the market, you know, is huge and we break into all these new markets. It goes badly because

our competitors come up with another kind of toothpaste is better. Weird is like, maybe people don't have teeth in 10 years, you know. Right. I was going to say, what if we just don't need teeth? Like, you can just buy new teeth so easily at the dentist. It's like, why would I waste time brushing them, I can go get a new set in a month. And it'll be fine. You know, I mean, most people aren't inclined to imagine the weird scenarios, right? But like, look at where we are. Like, we're in, like, we're in a classic weird scenario that a small number of, like,

you know, interesting eclectic people have been predicting precisely because they're open to the idea of weird scenarios and thinking about what those would be. And so those people are called doctors, by the way. They all, pretty much every doctor was like, this was inevitable, man. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yes, but sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but this process does seem quite interesting. I want to, before I forget, I want to go back to the diversity of thought issue.

You mentioned that reading can also make us better decision makers, which is music to my ears. But what is it? Is it the stories? Because, you know, can I just use Netflix? Like, you know, to have to read a novel? You know, actually, I mean, I would say the great long kind of format, either movies, but particularly, you know, long format, television narrative these days in the Golden Age. television is the closest thing. I talk a lot about novels in the book, but, you know, a classic Netflix drama is as close to that as you can get, I think. But remember how we were talking

at the very beginning about how every complicated life decision is unique, right? It's like a snowflake or a fingerprint. Like it's never, it will never be repeated exactly this configuration. And so the trick of it is to like develop better perceptual skills to see the problem in itself and its unique, you know, properties and all that stuff. And in a sense, what I began to realize is as I was writing this, is that great storytelling, and I would say particularly novelistic storytelling for a specific reason, in some ways, gives us practice. When we see somebody making a complicated decision in a story, and when it's told, you know, I talk a lot about Middlemarch, Eliot's great book from the 19th century, because there are these core decisions in that book,

and she is so incredibly good at teasing all the different elements, and you watch this, you know, a very sophisticated mind trying to figure out what the best path forward is. And it just gives you, it's like a rehearsal. It's like a simulation of the kind of thinking you will need to do in your own life. It's a different set of problems, a different set of variables, different people involved. But when you see somebody doing it, it's a way of kind of rehearsing that. And I think you can get that from TV, right? There are like Breaking Bad, Middlemarch and Break.

Speaking of great novels and literature, Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad and Middle March. are similar in this way. Here you go. They both were in the mess. I'm going to go back to grad school to defend this section. But what it is is like a series of, you know, you could say cascadingly bad decisions, but he's constantly trying to figure out, given an incredibly complex set of problems, the best path through this thing, trying to keep his family alive and somehow support himself and but not get killed by the drug lords or whatever it is, you know, whatever issues. Right. And what makes it so powerful is not actually like the action scenes or like the violence or all these other things

that we think of as being thrilling. It's like, how is he going to figure this out? Like, how is he going to thread this needle that he's found himself in? And it made me realize how, like, the thing I've always loved about great storytelling, whether it's, you know, on TV and movies or in a book, are those points when somebody has a really complicated choice to make and they either make it well or they make it poorly, but like they have that kind of moment. And so I began to realize like, this is one of the reasons why we, why literature and great storytelling is an important thing because it's like practice for our own lives and for our own choices. And the more we read, the more we kind of get these alternate kind of scenarios that we can learn from and kind of rehearse the choices we're going

to have to make in our own actual lives. Got to take a quick break from Stephen Johnson for a little capitalism. We'll be right back. After the show, we've got a preview trailer of our interview with hip-hop legend T.I. Harris on how we went from committing crimes to committing rhymes. If you like a good comeback story, stay tuned for that after the close of the show. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us going, and it means a lot to me, means a lot to us. If you want to get a handle on those discounts, go to Jordanharbinger.com slash deals, and they're all listed there. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode and for every episode. The link to those is in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com

slash podcast. Now, here's the rest of our conversation with Stephen Johnson. You mentioned novels in the default network. Can you tell us a little bit about what the default network is? We talk about on the show from time to time, but I think a lot of people are probably wondering, okay, how does the default network help me make better decisions? Like, why am I making decisions in the shower, right? Yeah. That's kind of the common refrain. I post a lot of things that I come up with in the shower because it works. I'm glad you're not podcasting from the shower, though, like that. I do see a video image of you. The waterproof mic market is really small.

There's only two options, and I haven't found satisfaction with any of them. So I actually wrote a longer piece for the New York Times Magazine about this. If folks are interested, it was name I can't remember, but you'll hopefully find the link to it because it's a really interesting story. So the default, it's a great story of scientific discovery, actually. So in the early days of brain imaging, when you had the first generation of fMRIs and PET scans, this is the kind of late 80s, early 90s. So for the first time, you could see changes in activity in different parts of the brain over time, over short intervals of time. And so you could ask someone to do multiplication and you can see parts of the brain light up that were clearly attached to like doing mental math in your head or reading or speaking or thinking of chocolate or whatever was you wanted to study. Sure.

And so everybody's like, oh, this is amazing. We can finally like tell what parts of the brain are devoted to what kinds of tasks and so on. But to do that, because there's a lot of activity going on in your brain all the time, you had to have a control, right? So you had to, you know, if you're studying people doing mental math, you had to scan them doing multiplication tables, and then you had to scan them not doing multiplication tables, right? And so you could compare the two images and figure out, you know, what the difference was. And the difference would be that's the part of the brain that's involved in mental math.

But then they had this weird thing where they would tell people to sit there and do nothing as the control while they scan their brains for 30 seconds or a minute or something like that. And when the scans came back, when people were told to do nothing, there was more activity in the brain than when they were actually doing the tasks they were allegedly studying. And the activity was in the evolutionarily modern parts of the brain, the most human parts of the brain. Interesting. We're lighting up. So for the first 10 times this happened separately, there people were like, well, our machine is broken.

Sure. We told them to think of nothing. And I remember doing these in college a lot. And I always secretly wondered if I was the control. And they're like, there's nothing going on this guy. Like, does this guy know he's part of the experiment? Like, hello. So then they started like asking people like, what was happening in that period when we told you to do nothing?

And they basically realized what people were doing is they were daydreaming. Yeah, sure. You know, they were just like, they were told to do nothing. And their brains naturally was like, you know, okay. So next week I got to do that thing. And I wonder if I can get that job promotion because then if I could do that, I could get that raise. And then we could buy that house and maybe I could, you know, people are just doing those cycles. And it turned out that most of the time people were telling kind of mini stories about the near and long-term future.

They were running these little scenario plans in their heads. And what eventually they realized is that this part of the brain, they call it the default network because it seems to be what left to its own devices, this is what the human brain does. It runs these little scenarios about the future. And they now think that this is a key part of our intelligence as a species. We think that most animals, even some of our close relatives, like, you know, in the Great Apes, have very limited sense of the future. Like, nobody's sitting there. No chimpanzee is like, what are we doing next summer? You know, like that?

There's no concept of a next summer, you know, in the mind of a chimpanzee. Whereas humans are constantly thinking like this. And it seems like actually we do it. It actually, it's one of these things where we do it so well. We don't even realize how much kind of computation cycles it's using up in our own brains until we were able to scan it. And suddenly we realized, wow, thinking about the future is really hard. It uses up a lot of cycles, but we're so good at it that we don't even think of it as like

a superpower, but it actually is a superpower. And people believe that you can look at folks who have had damage, like Phineas Gage is like this, a famous kind of 19th century study where people who have damage to parts of the brain that are integral to the default network. They're very bad at decision making. They can be very nice. They speak fluently. They don't seem to have brain damage, but they end up like losing all their money gambling or unable to like map a kind of career path for themselves. And so the argument is that this cycle of kind of daydreaming and thinking about the future and running through these different scenarios is essential to our ability to make nuanced, important life decisions. So the

The implications of that are that you want to leave time in your life for doing that. That's what the shower is, right? Like, the shower is that because there's nobody else in there with you most of the time. And there's generally, unless you really have a problem, there's generally not, you know, Twitter in there. You can't host a podcast from the shower. So it's one of the few times in life where you get, you know, 10 minutes where you're just kind of sitting and letting your mind wander. And, you know, there are other ways to do it like walks. Like I get, as a New Yorker, like, just going out for a walk.

Actually, I tend to do it without headphones and things like that because I like to let my mind kind of go off in these little loops. That is a really important kind of exercise. And it's not, the other thing is like people talk about screens and getting away from screens and meditating more and things like that. It doesn't quite fit that opposition, right, because so much of meditation, this is not true of all meditation, but so much of meditation is trying to stop your brain from wandering. Right.

I'm like, shut off the default network. like, well, yeah, and there may be some value, and there's definitely some value for people who have issues with anxiety, because what happens when you have, you know, kind of clinical anxiety is the default network keeps taking you to these negative places and it sets off. Right. Rumination. Right. You're never going to be successful. Yeah, I was just trying to get a bagel. Yeah. But if you don't have a serious problem with that, and meditation in and of itself can be valuable for other things, but also leaving time in your life where you just let that default network run and, you know, you take a longer shot. hour, you take a longer walk, and you kind of let those, that processing happening. That's an incredible, you know, kind of intuitive resource that we all have. When we're making these choices, how do we look for our blind spots, right? We can't really say, like, sit down and make a list of everything you would never think of. Yeah. Yeah, that was the cliche, right? Yeah, that was a great quote. Like, the one thing a person cannot do is right a list of things that would never occur to them.

But that is on some level, like, that's what these choices are about. Like, there's something that you're not seeing that you have to kind of figure out how to get. to. And, you know, a lot of the things that we've talked about are blind spot or tools for seeing around blind spots, right? So that's a huge asset in thinking about diverse groups in decision making because somebody has a different perspective and literally can see, you know, they see that thing that's coming that you can't see because they just look at the world in a different way. And that's another way in which the premortem is a really useful exercise, right? Like, what's the risk that you're not seeing? That's what I was joking about at the beginning of the

conversation. Like, that's the role my dad is always playing. Like, he is the, I think I, in the knowledge, I think I called him, like, you know, master par excellence of the premortem. Like, whatever, whatever I'm doing, like, Dad, so we're going to have, you know, a nice salad for dinner. And he's like, oh, that's going to go very poorly. Yeah. Oh, there's so many problems with that. But it is great because it complements my natural optimism about things, which is something that I have benefited from as well, but I need someone around me to kind of be like on my shoulder. Like, but think about how this could go badly.

or what are you missing? You know, what's in that blind spot that you can't see? You mentioned that we tend to overvalue information that we have and undervalue information that we don't have. So if I already know something, maybe I'm more apt to kind of think

that that's what's important. And the metaphor, I guess, you give, is a drunk guy looking for his keys under a street light, even though he dropped him somewhere else because the light is better over here. So explain this, because I'd never heard

that we actually tend to overvalue information that we have. but it completely makes sense, right? We do more consideration with it because there's more to hold on to. Yeah, it's part of this exercise of, it's a kind of information humility, right? Like you, particularly when you're in the early stages of a choice, beginning with the assumption that there's a whole vast set of variables that are going to be important to this choice that you haven't even identified yet.

That's part of the reason why it's important to have that early stage we were talking about at the beginning about, you know, seeking other options, right? there might be a second path that hasn't even occurred to you yet. So don't even start thinking about whether to do this or not. Like, let's be humble at this early stage and assume that we only know a small kind of part of that process. I mean, you know, a lot of the problems we're talking about right now are variations on a theme of overconfidence, right? Group think is collective overconfidence, confirmation bias, which we haven't said, but it's kind of like implicit in what we've been talking about. You want to see your preconceived ideas kind of confirmed in the world.

And so you see everything through that lens. You know, we were talking about like, what's your, you know, in the Obama routine, like, what's your confidence level that this thing you're advocating for is right? Like asking that follow-up question to say, like, yeah, you're advising us to do this, but like, how confident are you that you're right? And that's the bet strategy you talked about as well, like, forcing yourself to be like, how much do I really believe in this particular theory of change and what's going to happen? And so so much of this is about battling over confidence.

and having that kind of initial humility that I don't fully understand this yet. And that, you know, it's hard to do, particularly, you know, I mean, I find it hard to do because I've generally like my life has gone pretty well and I've made decisions that have ended up putting me in a pretty good place that I've been happy with. But I also have to like remind myself, you know, there are lots of things that I could have done better. And just because I ended up following this path and it turned out already doesn't necessarily mean I was right all the time.

I could have just been lucky a couple of days, you know, and that you have. that you have to have that kind of humility to go into making a complex choice. I think it's good to celebrate the idea that we could have forgotten something or that we did forget something or that some of it is luck. And I think the funny anecdote you give is in the bin Laden raid. They planned every detail meticulously. But at the end, they forgot a tape measure to see if the guy that they killed was actually six foot five because they knew bin Laden was six five. So they've got this body and they're like, oh, shoot, nobody's got a tape measure to measure and we got to make it's part of the identification process.

So they had some other soldier who was, I guess, verifiably six, five, lay next to this dead body, which must be one of those stories that this guy tells at the bar every chance it gets, right? No one believes it. Right. Why were you lying? You know, Grandpa laid down to a next to a dead body of a famous terrorist to see if it was him. I mean, it's just kind of crazy and it's dark, you know, like we're chuckling. But it is like you're laying next to some dead guy.

But they put a tape measure, I guess, on the plaque commemorating this operation. Is it that they gave it to Admiral McRaven? There's like a tape measure, and it's like, here's the one tiny detail that you forgot in this otherwise almost perfectly executed mission. Yeah, it was, I thought it was kind of great because it was a little bit of a, I don't know, like, back-ended compliment for the award. You're great, but I just want you to know, you're not perfect. You're going to put this thing up in your cabinet.

Right. It's going to have the reminder of the one thing that you screwed up in this incredible achievement. Right, right. Like, it's like if you landed on the moon and it was like, here's the ham sandwich that it was half eaten that you left on the shuttle in the way back. Like, oops, when supposed to do that? But, you know, that actually reminds me that one of the other stories that's connected to this in the Obama thing is that they, once they had decided that they were going to fly through Pakistani airspace to get to the lair, and they weren't going to notify the Pakistanis, right?

They were worried about the security risk if they said, hey, by the way, we're going to send, you know, three of these helicopters, you know, through your airspace at low altitude. They were afraid that it would leak and they weren't sure since it was so crazy that bin Laden was there, In Pakistan, they were worried that somehow that maybe the authorities knew it. And so they decided to not tell them. But then they did the same kind of premortem, you know, negative scenario planning. They were like, what could be the consequences of that? And one of the things that they did was they said, oh, well, they could be so ticked off by this that they might eject us from using both land and air routes through Pakistan, which was their primary way of getting military supplies to Afghanistan.

And so nobody realized this at the time, but like a month or so before the raid, when nobody had any idea that they'd found him, they opened up another path through parts of Russia that would allow them to get supplies into Afghanistan if, in fact, they got kicked out because of this. So they were just running all these different kind of imagined scenarios because they didn't want to be, they'd seen so many cases, whether it was the botched rescue of the hostages in Jimmy Carter, whether it was the base. of pigs fiasco where people had just failed to run all those different scenarios and anticipate them. And you can't, you know, obviously there's always the tape measure that you forget, but, you know, it's not a perfect science. You can't anticipate everything, but you can dramatically increase your odds of getting a result that you like by trying to run through these routines. How did you go from far-sighted decision-making to, all right, I'm going to write about pirates. I mean, I guess that's what writers do, but it seems like a wild jump. You know, you see business book

writers like Chip and Dan Heath. And it's like their books are different, but they're at least seemingly tangentially related. Yeah. It's been the kind of curse and blessing of my career that I have, like I wrote a book about video games and pop culture and I wrote a book about cholera in the 19th century. And then I wrote a book about innovation and decision making. And then now I'm back to 17th century pirates with enemy of all mankind. So it is weird. I mean, I think there's some people who are like, I like those kinds of books that Stephen writes. But I have to figure out. when he comes out with the new one, whether it's one of those books or whether it's one of the other ones. Like I probably would have a more cohesive audience if I wrote the same kind of book.

But I don't know. I just like writing different genres. But there is a connection between far-sided and the pirate book. So the pirate book is about this 17th century pirate Henry Everie who pulls off this heist of an Indian treasurer and ends up triggering the first global manhunt in the history of the world. And it's a story about piracy, but it's also a story about kind of the birth of capitalism in the world system, and it's got a million different themes. And it's a crazy, just the plot of the story, true story, is amazing. And hopefully I kind of conveyed some of these issues around it in a compelling way. But what I realized is I was kind of finishing far-sighted as I was starting Enemy of All Mankind. And there are multiple points in Enemy of All Mankind where

the story kind of stops for a second. And I take the reader through what I imagine was going through the mind of a few of these key players in it and the decisions that they're facing, right? There are a couple of key points where the pirate, for instance, has to be mutinies one ship at one point, and then he decides to go after this incredibly audacious kind of prize, which is very high risk, and then he has to figure out how to escape. And I realized from writing Farsighted that the kind of dramatic potential of getting, you know, as much as I can as historian mode, inside the mind of these people and trying to show them wrestling with this immense choice they have.

It's like literally life or death choice with global consequences. It was a whole technique that I had never used really before in any of the historical accounts that I'd done. I'd written a lot about innovation, how people come up with new ideas and similar in that way. But watching somebody wrestle with a choice, the dramatic potential of that was something that was new to me with enemy of all mankind. I think it made the book a lot better for that. Yeah, it makes sense. I'm wondering how you chase a pirate who's moving around the globe on a ship in a like 1750 or whenever these things were happening.

1695. So the other interesting connection to Varsighted is that this pirate, Henry Every, was basically the bin Laden of his time, right? It's the first time where there was this question of like, here's this guy who's done something terrible. And the whole world is because of this battle between England and India and the East India Company is making all this money, so they can't afford to take off the Indian government.

And so it's just this huge thing that has erupted because of this one crime that this small band of people have committed, it's very similar to terrorism in the 20th century and 21st century. So the question was then, as with bin Laden recently, was given a whole set of institutions all around the world, if they're all intent on finding one person, how likely is it that they'll find them? I remember thinking this about bin Laden.

Like, if you are the most wanted person in the world and everybody knows your name, like, is it possible to stay hidden? Yeah. And it was kind of amazing that he lasted as long as he did. It was easier in a sense for every because there wasn't the internet and no one was putting them on their Instagram feed in the background or something like that. Is that how they found like El Chapo one of those times his son was like, yeah, I'm hanging out with my dad. It's like, you are a moron.

If they'd only had TikTok back in the day, my pirate would have been caught much earlier. Yeah, like swashbuckling with my mateys. Oh, man. Arrested. Yeah. Stephen, thank you so much. It's been a great show, been a fun, interesting show, and of course, decision-making is always something that if you're, like, able to get one percent better at it, if that extrapolates or

sort of ripples through your whole life, well, that's a worthy pursuit. Well, I'm glad you had me on, and I'm glad you didn't become a lawyer. That's all I have to say. I did, unfortunately. I did. I was, and then I passed the bar, and then I was like, now that I've done all the hard stuff, I'm out. Thank you very much. Thanks, friend. Thanks to Stephen Johnson for coming on the show today. His book is called Farsighted. His newest book is called Enemy of All Mankind, the true story of piracy, power,

and history's first global manhunt. You can find those in the show notes. By the way, you know, I thought it was interesting today when he was saying that a lot of people are making decisions in poor ways. Jeff Bezos, he said when he's 70% certain or only 30% uncertain, he'll pull the trigger on something.

Imagine being less than three quarters, sure. Most of us don't think about certainty or anything, any decision as a matter of probability. We're usually pretty binary, as we mentioned in the show. I thought it was interesting that Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, is confident being more or less just over half sure before trying something. And most people really only consider one alternative when making a choice. I know this is true for me. It's really bad to constrain yourself like this.

It's not a yes or no. It's not a this or that. Usually there's a whole smorgasbord of choices, and we just tend to ignore them because it's easier for our brain to wrap our mind around one or two choices or a binary choice. Decisions with multiple options, though, have statistically or historically, I should say, been judged successful more often than binary decisions. So in other words, if you give yourself three, four, five choices, you will be more satisfied or more successful with a choice made from there than a yes or no.

So when you constrain yourself, not only do you make a worse choice, but you feel worse about that choice. So in the future, if you find yourself thinking a whether or not decision, you're thinking about whether or not to do something, instead try and actually bring in other options and consider those as well. So turn every whether or not decision into a which one decision. Not do I take this job, do I not take this job. But yes, maybe I'll take this, but I want to modify that and I only want to do it for part time or I only want to do it for limited time. You can always, always, always add options in there. And that's also true for negotiation, by the way. I first,

frequently negotiate deals, whether it's for advertising or something like that. And it's usually, here are your options. And it's never going to be in your favor when you're presented with options in a negotiation. So you should always take control of those options wherever possible. It's not going to be, well, this is $30 CPM for this or it's $40 CPM for that. It's, how about $25 CPM for a combination of this and that? And also, I have all the leverage because you're trying to sell me something.

You know, like that's how you can add options in here. and usually you end up with the other party being less prepared to defend against that because they're used to controlling the frame and the set of options. And also, it gives you so many alternatives that you realize once you have some alternatives, you realize you have even more. So it's never just yes or no. You add one option in there and you find, oh, you know, I could actually do this, this, this, this, or this, or just walk.

Before you felt like you had to choose one of those options. You'd never have to do that. It's always a negotiation. and you will be more satisfied with your decision after you do that too. So that's always nice. One thing I was also reminded of during this conversation was Shaquille O'Neal, when he's trying to make important decisions

in his life, if you heard our Shack interview, we're going to be replaying that soon. But if you heard our Shack interview, he has a panel of experts. It's like his accountant, his cousin, his mom, one of his coaches, his lawyer, they all opine because his mom wants him to be happy. his cousin wants to do what's really cool

and is going to make his brand look good. His lawyer wants to keep him safe and his accountant wants to make money. So when they can all kind of agree on things, he can take input from various places and it stops him from getting screwed because anybody else's agenda, you know, the accountant trying to pull one over on you,

the lawyer, whatever, is going to get called out by the other experts. I think that's a genius way to make important decisions in your own life. So think about who's on your panel. Who can you trust to help you make important decisions? They don't have to be experts on you, you or your life, they just have to be experts or people with good judgment in general or an expert

in a particular area, like law or accounting. Anyway, that's enough for me right now. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Show notes will have the worksheets for this episode, so there'll be the practicals in there. We've also got the transcripts for each episode, and if you do buy the books, please use the website links because they do support the show. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people like Stephen Johnson, manage relationships, using systems, using tiny habits in six minutes a day.

Literally, it's even less. But look, I needed a clever name. Six-minute networking. That's free, and it's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The problem with doing this later, you got to dig the well before you get thirsty. Build your network before you need it, folks. Even if it feels hard, it feels like starting over, I guarantee you you got more momentum than you think.

Go there now, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. It's freaking free, people. I don't want to hear any winging if you don't do it, and you get screwed over later and you don't have a network. This is easy to do. Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Second best time is right now. Most of the guests you hear on the show,

they subscribe to this course and the newsletter. You think you're smarter than them? I think not. By the way, if you did like this, reach out to Stephen Johnson. Show guests love hearing from you. Twitter handles are always in the show notes. You never know what's going to shake out of that.

Speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and or follow me on social. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show's created an association with podcast, one and of course my amazing team including Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, Millio Campo, and Sal Cotching. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own. And I might be a former lawyer and even a current lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. I'm sure as heck not a doctor nor a therapist. I'm not even a writer. So do your own research before implementing

anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody's got a big decision coming up or wants to learn how to make decisions better, share this episode with them. Hopefully you do find something useful in every episode, so please do share the show with those you love. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. As promised, here's a preview of our interview with T.I. Tip Harris. Let's expedite this ice. Now where I'm from, we do what we call pouring our own troubles. All right. Cheers. Cheers. All right.

dropped out of high school when you were that age, were you thinking, oh, I'm just going to sell drugs for a while, then I'm going to become a famous musician. Well, to be perfectly candid with you, that's exactly what I was thinking. I was going to sell drugs until I earned myself the opportunity to become a musician or an artist. I found out my girlfriend at the time was pregnant with my oldest son, quit my job at the airport, completely starred head first into the street.

That probably lasted about three or four months, but my probation officer still thought I worked at the airport. we had been working on a demo to shop around. It was phenomenal stuff. I said, if you could take me somewhere right now where I could have an opportunity to present myself to somebody, then I'll stop. Jason said, I know somewhere, and I say,

see, that's why we're on the team again. So we pull up, Jason walked me in the room, and then immediately I meet Reese and Mello. Three months after that, I was signed. A month before my son was born, I was straight. Your parole officer must have been like, oh, great, he's got a record deal. He's going to be back at the airport in like a month and a half.

You are on thin ice, man. I mean, to be honest, he didn't find out I wouldn't at the airport. He still thinks he worked at the airport. For more with TI, including some tips on how he runs his business here, check out episode 262 with Tip Ti Harris right here on the Jordan Harbinger show. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like something you should know

with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently

interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work, itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.