The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 423: Julia Galef - Why Some People See Things Clearly & Others Don't

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

Text LEARNERS to 44222 for more... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12  https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Julia Galef is co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. She is the author of The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. Notes: What is the scout mindset? "The motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish them to be." The Scout Mindset allows you to recognize when you were wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course. It's what prompts you to honestly ask yourself questions like "Was I at fault in that argument?" or "Is this risk really worth it?" As the physicist Richard Feynman said: "The first rule is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." The three prongs: Realize that trust isn't in conflict with your other goals Learn tools that make it easier to see clearly Appreciate the emotional rewards of scout mindset She closes her TED talk with this quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." "The biggest bottleneck is not knowledge. It's motivation. You need to cultivate the motivation to see things clearly." "Julia Galef is an intellectual leader of the rationalist community, and in The Scout Mindset you will find an engaging, clearly written distillation of her very important accumulated wisdom on these topics." -- Tyler Cowen We should assume that we are wrong. We need to build the skill to change our mind. "Our goal should be to be less wrong over time." How do you work on this? The key principle is the way you think about being wrong. "Don't accept the premise that being wrong means you screwed up." Jeff Bezos left his job on Wall Street to start Amazon and acknowledged the uncertainty. He estimated that his idea had about a 30% chance to work. The Scout versus Soldier mindset: A lot of times, humans are in a soldier mindset - "Belief was strong, unshakeable, opposed argument. A soldier is having to defend." Scout mindset - survey and see what's true. Form an accurate map. Practical application: Be cognizant how you seek out and respond to criticism. Don't ask leading questions. Recognize the tendency to describe the conflict accurately. Also... Not all arguments are worth having. Show signals of good faith. Distinguish between two kinds of confidence: Social - Poised, charismatic, relaxed body language, be worth listening to Epistemic - How much certainty that you have in your views Persuade while still expressing uncertainty: "I think there's a 70% chance this won't work." Lyndon Johnson - Need to understand why someone wouldn't agree with you... We are all the sum of our experiences... Approach people, places, and things with curiosity Life/Career advice: You're creating a brand - Be conscious of the type of people you're attracting. Work to attract those that make you a better version of yourself. Make the choice to attract people who like intellectual honesty like Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum)

A lot of the time, humans are automatically in what I call soldier mindset, a way of thinking in which your motivation is to defend your pre-existing beliefs against evidence or against arguments that might threaten them. And so our whole language is just this militaristic metaphor for how the point of reasoning is to defend your beliefs against threatening evidence. And scout mindset was my term for an alternative to soldier mindset in which a scout's goal is not to attack and defend. and the scouts goal is to go out, survey and explore the territory, and see what's actually there as accurately as possible. There's no such thing as a threat to your beliefs. There's just more and less useful information that can make your map more accurate, and that's a good thing.

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virtual assistant. Just text Leader to 55123 for your free copy of the CEO of Belay's book, Rise Up and Lead Well Today. That's Trisha Shortino's book, Rise Up and Lead Well today. Text Leader to 55123. Welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 44222 to become part of Mindful Monday. You along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning 9 o'clock Eastern with the latest ideas, trends, topics, books, articles, podcast videos to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, Welcome to Management will help you become a more

effective leader. Text learners to 4-4-222. Now on to tonight's featured leader a special one. It's Julia Galev, co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, and the author of the best-selling book, The Scout Mindset, why some people see things clearly and others don't. So a few of the topics we discuss, the Scout versus the Soldier Mindset. and why you as a leader must know the difference and how to implement your strategy based upon those two different styles of thinking.

And then how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, then how to both give and take advice more effectively. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great one. It's Julia Gayliff. Julia, it's great to have you here on the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Hi, Ryan. Thank you. Great to be here. So there's a number of places to start. I'm actually going to go to the end of your TED Talk because there's a quote you use that I really like and I want to expand on that, especially knowing that we're talking from a leadership perspective. And the quote is from Antoine to Saint. author of the Little Prince.

I'm not sure if I pronounced that correctly. It's an exuberie. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. The long name. Yes. Author of the Little Prince.

So it says, if you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood. Divide the work and give or. And don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give worse. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Can you expand more on that specific quote and why you chose to end your TED talk with it? Yeah, I love that quote. It kind of makes my heart sting. And I chose it because, you know, I've been interested in improving reasoning, improving decision making for many years. And one important way in which my views, my perspective shifted over the years is that originally I thought that the way to think better and make better decisions was just to know more, to have more knowledge about, you know, good decision-making. methods and cognitive biases and logical fallacies and if you acquired all of this knowledge and really force yourself to apply it, then you would be a better reasoner and decision maker.

And that's not entirely wrong, but what I gradually noticed more and more over the years as I worked with people and talked to people and tried applying the principles in my own life in decision making was that the biggest bottleneck in reasoning and decision making better, is not knowledge so much as it is motivation. The motivation to actually figure out the right answer, the motivation to notice how your decisions could be improved. And without that motivation, all of the knowledge in the world isn't going to help you very much.

And so the point that I was trying to make in my TED talk in general, and with that quote in particular, was that we should be trying to cultivate the motivation to see things clearly, which might sound like a thing we all do naturally, but it really isn't. There's a lot of other motivations that we have that kind of get in the way of the motivation to figure things out and make the decisions. Motivations like bolstering our ego or motivations like looking strong, not looking weak, motivations like proving that we were right all along. These goals are very often in tension with getting the right answer to the question we're

thinking about. And so the quote was my my attempt to point at the importance of motivation in this process. I think of the leaders in my life who I've respected the most, who have wanted to commit to, who've been the most effective, quite frankly, as far as achieving their goals and the results that they need, whether it be in sports or in the business world, is they have the, I would say, confidence combined with competence and security in oneself to change their mind.

In all of your research, Julia, this is a big part of your book, is a big part of you. Can you share more why having the, or cultivating the skill to change your mind is a superpower? Well, so first off, I think it's important to recognize that we are all wrong about lots of things. You know, even the most brilliant and most knowledgeable and experienced people, their model of how the world works, of how their business works, their model of themselves is always going to be imperfect. And so your goal, I think, should be to become less wrong over time, to take a new information, learn new things, get feedback. try things, see what happens. And over time, all that new information will, if you're doing it right, that new information will make your views more accurate over time, less wrong.

But the key to that process is actually wanting to notice the ways in which the world doesn't match your expectations and actually wanting to hear feedback about what you might be wrong about or what you might be doing wrong. And so that willingness to, or not even will, I would go farther than that to say that eagerness to notice the things that are wrong in your model of yourself or the world, your company, et cetera. That's the key that makes this process work, because otherwise you just stay entrenched in your prior view of what's going on. How do you work on this yourself for yourself?

So one important principle that's made a big difference for me, and I see it making a big difference for a lot of other people that I've worked with and just in stories that I read about successful people in different fields. One key principle is the way you think about what it means to be wrong. So the standard way that people think about being wrong is, you know, you screwed up, you did something wrong. wrong, you, there's something wrong with you, you've kind of made yourself foolish in some way. And so this is a big reason why people are very reluctant to acknowledge to other people or even to themselves that they were wrong about something. And a common way that people try to correct for that, like other advocates of things like intellectual honesty or changing your mind, often the way they try to correct for that is to say it's okay to admit you are wrong, you know?

And I actually don't like this advice as much as you might think I would. I think it's very well intentioned. I think there are people who say this are trying to express something kind of like what I believe is important. But I think it's importantly wrong in a particular way, which is that it, the language of admitting you are wrong still makes it sound like being wrong means you screwed up in some way. And this advice is saying, it's okay to screw up because we're all human, we're fallible, you know, we should forgive ourselves. And to me, you know, I appreciate that. I do think it's important to acknowledge we're human and we screw up and we should forgive ourselves, but I don't accept the premise that being wrong necessarily means you did screw up. Because,

As I was saying a minute ago, we all have these imperfect models of the world because we don't have all the information. It's impossible for even the most brilliant person to have all of the information. And we have limited time and processing power in our brains. And so even if you're doing everything perfectly, which no one is, but even if you were doing everything perfectly, you would still be wrong about tons of things. And when you get new information, you just revise your model and become a little less wrong. And at no point in that process did you screw up necessarily.

A caveat to that is sometimes being wrong means you did screw up. And I think the important question to ask yourself, not in a judgmental way, but just in a how can I improve way, is, you know, was I wrong because I was negligent in some way? Was I wrong because I was stubborn in some way? Did I do something that I should have known better not to do? And so an example of that, I, from my own life is I was, there was this argument on Twitter. I get into a lot of arguments on Twitter. And some people were criticizing some public figure for something he'd said on an interview. And it was, it was obvious to me when they were criticizing him, that they were taking his remarks out of context and they were strawmanning him and misrepresenting him. And so I jumped in and defended him.

And then later, maybe a day later, I actually watched the video clip that they were talking about, and I realized, oh, actually, no, they didn't misrepresent him. That was a fair criticism of what he actually said in the interview, and I should not have jumped to his defense. And so in that case, that's a case in which I think I was wrong because I screwed up. I do, in fact, know better than to defend someone without checking the facts first. And so, you know, that was a mistake. but I'm trying to distinguish that from all of the many other cases in which you were wrong simply because you made the best call that given the information you had at the time. And so you're revising your view, but that doesn't mean you screwed up and you shouldn't feel guilty. You shouldn't, you know, be self-flagellating in any respect.

And so I could talk more about that. But the key point I'm trying to make is just that having this attitude about being wrong is, I think, A, more correct and be much more useful because, because it means it doesn't have to be this big kind of, you know, emotional production when you admit to yourself that you were wrong. No, just you were wrong. You revise your opinion and you go on. I think we could all envision a boss that perhaps we've worked for at one point in our careers where that that person was terrible at this. And I have a specific person in mind right now. I bet. I'm sure we all do. This seems like a much, better way to live. Why are we so bad at this? It's a great question, especially because,

you know, if you think the human brain evolved to work in ways that are useful to us, that are advantageous to us, then this is kind of a puzzle. You know, if it's useful to notice you were wrong and change your mind, then why would the human brain have evolved in a way that resists that. And I don't think anyone has a definitive answer to that question, but, you know, one important thing to point out is that the world we live in today is different in a lot of important ways from the world we evolved in. And one of those ways is that there are a lot more complicated decisions to make, complicated reasoning that we have to do in today's world that our ancestors didn't, you know, tens of thousands of years ago. We have to make decisions about

where to invest our money, about which medical treatments to use and which not to use. We have to make decisions about where to live, what career to choose, whether to get into a relationship or get out of a relationship, whether to have children. And these are all complicated decisions. And the answer often matters a lot for our happiness and our ability to achieve our goals. and they involve the kind of reasoning that we didn't necessarily evolve to do well, kind of abstract reasoning where you synthesize different sources of information from people you don't know personally, and it's hard. We're going to screw it up often.

And so my point is that the ability to kind of revise our models over time as we learn new information is more important now than it was when we evolved. And comparatively, the ability to seem strong. to the people around us is less important now than it was, arguably, for our ancestors when you lived in this relatively small tribe and your ability to be accepted by your tribe was a matter of life and death. And, you know, you had to defend yourself against threats to your status in the tribe. Those were really important things in the past that are somewhat less important now. I'm not going to say it's not important at all, but you know, you can choose a different tribe if the tribe that you grew up in, you know, doesn't, you don't fit well with it. You can achieve happiness and success without necessarily having everyone like you and accept you. And so I think there's just a different, the landscape of what's important and how to live a happy and fulfilling life is different now than it was when we evolved. And so it's not necessarily that surprising that the skills,

that are most valuable are different now than they would be in the past. Let's talk about Amazon for a second. And you've written about Jeff Bezos and how he avoids overconfidence. But I want to, we may touch on that. But I also want, I've reviewed their leadership principles. And I believe there's 16 of them. And one of them is the fact that they write leaders are right a lot. how when you read that what do you think of that being a leadership principle i i don't know if

i've seen that anywhere else where where they say basically leaders must be right a lot that's a part of one that's one of our it's important enough to us to publish it on our website to say it's a part of our leadership principles what do you think of that i appreciate it because i think there are a lot of other things that that can often contribute to who ends up in a leadership position or who retains their leadership position that are not about your accuracy and making good judgment calls and are worse criteria like your ability to play office politics or your ability to bully other people into you know giving you the right of way or your connection to the boss, your personal connection to the boss. Things like that are often reasons

why people end up in leadership positions. And I think their worst criteria because those things are not necessarily correlated with being able to make good judgment calls that make the company successful. And so the fact that Amazon explicitly called out, no, we prioritize choosing leaders who can actually make good judgment calls, not necessarily that they're going to be right all the time. I'm sure Amazon wouldn't claim that. But at least that they're they are going to be right more often than most other people. And that's what makes you deserve a position of leadership. So I appreciate that.

And I don't know exactly what your motivation was and asking the question, but I can imagine that you might be wondering if this is in tension with what I've said about the importance of being wrong, recognizing that you were wrong, and the fact that everyone is wrong about tons of things. So I don't know if that's what you were thinking, but if it was, I don't actually think there is a tension there. There's kind of a funny paradox that, or pseudo paradox, that in order to actually be more right over time, you have to be willing to be wrong in any given case, because that's how you improve your model,

and that's what over time leads to you being right more often than you would have been. How does- Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. I'm curious, how does Bezos himself avoid overconfidence? Well, I, so the specific thing about Bezos that I noticed and admired and I've talked about in my book and in some other writings and talks that I've done, the specific thing is not so much about how he avoids overconfidence, but in how he reconciles his often lack of confidence in his views about things that it's impossible to be fully confident in. like, will my business succeed or is this the right bet, how he acknowledges uncertainty about things like that, while still being bold, a risk taker and a leader that so many people look up to

and see as competent and confident and all of those things you were talking about before. Because that's a combination of things that people often assume can't go together. they assume that if you want to be a confident and competent leader that people look up to, you have to always express 100% certainty in your views. You can never allow yourself to admit you don't know the answer to something or admit that you're not 100% certain. And I think Bezos is a great counter example to this common wisdom because he'll say things like, you know, well, when he was first deciding to leave his job on Wall Street back in the 90s

and to start the company that would become Amazon, he thought explicitly about, okay, what's the probability that I'm going to succeed if I start this company? And he was not overconfident, or at least not nearly as overconfident as most people are. His estimate was, I probably have about a 30% chance of success with this company and a 70% chance of failure, which, you know, might seem like demoralizing odds. But to Bezos, he was like, no, that's actually, that seems like a good bet. Because if you think about it. out the upside and the downside. The upside is great. I'll have a successful company. But the downside, even in that 70% case, if I fail, I actually still feel pretty good about that because I will have

gotten to participate in this exciting new, new at the time world of internet commerce. He found that very exciting. And it's the kind of thing where once I'm 80 years old and I'm looking back, I'm not going to regret trying this even if it failed. And so I feel good about this bet, even though I think the most likely outcome is failure. And so that's a, the ability to think that way, to acknowledge the likelihood of failure and still feel, you know, driven to go out and try is a really important thing to be able to do. So that's one way in which I think Bezos combines realistic, probabilistic reasoning

about the odds with the ability to go out there and be confident and take risk. And then I could talk more about his ability to be influential while also acknowledging uncertainty, but I feel self-conscious about having talked for too long. So feel free to interrupt me and redirect me if you want. I love the honesty. So I want to actually define and admit something to you, Julia. So I first heard about the scout mindset. I think it was through it was PR people or others that had made me aware of your work and your upcoming book.

this is a while ago. And my first thought was awesome. When I think of a scout, I think of like a talent scout. So this is going to be a book about how to find talent before anyone else knows about them. That's genuinely what I thought. I was like, I really want to talk to her. But that's not really what this is about. Not quite. No, a different kind of scout. This is this is this is about the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish them to be, which I felt like is a bit of the stockdale. paradox, which Jim Collins writes about and good to great of this like realism, optimism balance. Can you can you flesh out more of what it is to have the scout mindset? Also, maybe you want to compare and contrast versus the soldier mindset because I know that's a big premise of the book

in your work. Can you can you share the differences? And maybe an example of that as well. sure yeah so the scout metaphor makes it's clearer what it's referring to in the context of the scout and the soldier metaphor so hopefully if you if you were aware of the broader metaphor maybe your mind wouldn't have immediately gone to talent scout but i get it that's just i guess yeah that's on me that's my bias i guess i don't know i was like oh scout well no it's also in sports like in and there's talent scouts there's there's scouts and sports so like i'm that's my background not totally dissimilar because they're both going out there to try to explore and figure things out and find things. Yeah. Okay. Not totally dissimilar. But yeah. So the broader metaphor in my book and in my talk is that most of the time or a lot of the time, humans are automatically in what I call soldier mindset, which is a way of thinking in which your motivation is to defend your preexisting beliefs against evidence or against evidence or against.

against arguments that might threaten them. And so you can see soldier mindset to a large extent just in the language that we use in the English language to talk about reasoning and thinking. We say things like his belief was strong or firm or unshakable. We talk about shooting down opposing arguments. Even the idea of an opposing argument is kind of a soldier mindset term.

We talk about poking holes in an argument if you're poking holes in armor. And when we talk about changing one's mind, we also use militaristic language. So we'll say things like, you know, he conceded the point and the root there, ceding is like ceding territory or ceding ground in a battle. Or even the word admit, to admit a point

or to admit that someone is right, is like admitting people into your walls in your fortress or your city, letting in the enemy. And so our whole language is just this metaphor, this militaristic metaphor for how the point of reasoning is to defend your beliefs against threatening evidence. That's what I call a soldier mindset. And it's universal and innate. And scout mindset was my term for an alternative to soldier mindset in which your goal, a scout's goal is not to attack and defend.

The scout's goal is to go out, survey and explore the territory and see what's actually there as accurately as possible. possible and to form as accurate a map of the territory and the situation as possible. And so in scout mindset, you know, there's no such thing as a threat to your beliefs. There's just more and less useful information that can make your map more accurate. And that's a good thing. And as a scout, you may, you have preferences. It's not that you're completely, you know, completely Vulcan where you don't, you don't care about anything. you may hope to learn that, you know, there's a bridge across the river where your troops need to cross.

But you don't, above all, you want to know, is the bridge actually there? You don't want to draw a bridge on your map when there isn't a bridge in reality. So that's the metaphor. And then what was the rest of your question? I'm sorry. I was stuck on the explaining the metaphor part. I was curious about the, like, practical application for, a leader in general as to why it's advantageous for them to to have a scout mindset versus a soldier

mindset. And I think first this comes from awareness. So we just clearly defined it, which is helpful. And the next step is, okay, how does this actually apply to me? And then how can I implement this into my life, into my work? So that I'll be more effective with my team at work. I'll be more effective with my family at home in that regard because that that's when it starts to get real, real is thinking like, wait, I think I'm, I am, I do have much more of a soldier mindset. I need to think about this and work on this and be more of a scout. Right. Yes.

So practical applications, especially for someone in a leadership position, there's a ton. One area of application is in how you seek out and react to feedback to construct. I mean, I'm sure people are already aware of it's important to go out and get feedback and, you know, to respond graciously to criticism and so on. But I think just to delve into it a little more, there are a lot of ways in which we kind of unconsciously phrase questions or seek out feedback in a way that tells, that gets us answers that we already wanted to hear anyway. Because, you know, soldier mindset, I don't know if I made this clear, but it's it's very unconscious. You often don't feel like you're in soldier mindset when you are. You feel like you're being reasonable and dispassionate and objective,

but actually the way that you're reasoning, the criteria that you're choosing to make your decisions are kind of unconsciously chosen to defend the answer you wanted to get all along. So the point being that even when you're kind of trying to do the virtuous thing and seek out criticism or feedback, often your soldier mindset is working in the background to make sure that you don't actually have to change your mind, your face, an uncomfortable truth. So an example of this, again, from my own experience is I used to run these educational workshops on decision making,

which I was alluding to earlier. This was during the period of years as I gradually realized, oh, hey, the bottleneck is the motivational component, not so much the knowledge component. So anyway, I was running these workshops and I'm not naturally very good at seeking out constructive criticism. I hate it and I have to force myself to do it. But at these workshops, I knew that it was really important to have an accurate picture of how are my students doing? Are they enjoying themselves? Are they lost? Are they unhappy for some reason?

Something going wrong. And so I kind of forced myself to chat with the students in between the classes, in the evenings. It was like a four-day workshop. and I would ask them, you know, how are things going for you? Are you enjoying the workshop? Is anything suboptimal? And so I felt proud of myself that I was seeking out feedback until I noticed this thing that I was doing that I had not been consciously aware of, which is when I asked my student, are you having fun at the workshop? I was nodding my head at them. And occasionally I was even like holding two thumbs up. And so I was saying, like, so are you having a good time at the workshop? Which was clearly just, I really wanted to get the answer that I wanted to get. And so even though part of me was trying to be in scout mindset and hear the truth, the other part of me was in soldier mindset and was really trying to defend, you know,

my picture of the workshops as amazing and me as perfect and infallible. And so I think there's a lot of different versions of this that we do. you know, we'll ask leading questions if we're getting someone else, say, you know, you had a conflict at work or a fight with a partner or something, and you're getting an outsider perspective on the fight. Often the way we describe the fight to other people, we're describing it in a way that makes us look like the virtuous or reasonable one and the other party look like the unreasonable one. And so, of course, we're going to get the answer that we want to hear. And so one important aspect of Scott mindset is recognizing that tendency and actively trying to

trying to correct for it. You know, when you're describing the conflict to someone else, try to describe it as neutrally as possible so that they can't tell whose side was which or at least describe the other side's position in a way that you think that side would endorse. You know, describe what your partner's view was in a way that if they heard you saying it, they would go, yep, that's an accurate representation of what I was saying. And if you describe it that way and your, you know, the third party still says like, oh, I think you were in the right there, then you can be more confident that you actually were. But you have to, you have to sort of make an extra effort to not put your finger on the scale, you know, when you're getting this kind of feedback. So that's one.

I could go on, but. The feedback one's great as far as I found training yourself, like going, go into the meeting properly prepared. to because your immediate reaction to the negative feedback is going to teach the other person if they can give you feedback or not in the future. And so for me, if you care about having a solid challenge network, as Adam Grant might say, which I really value, if I go to you and say, Julia, can you give me feedback on my lighting or my microphone or how the questions I ask? And the second you start criticizing me, I start either like wincing or then even explaining well, this is why my lights this way or my microphone this way.

You're immediately going to be what you're going to say to me is he can't take it. I'm never giving him feedback again. And I'm overly stating it. But I think that's true. And we all have people in our lives where they ask you for advice and you start to give it to them. And then they give you a hundred excuses. You're like, well, I guess I'm just not going to do that. Why are you?

Right. And we've done the same. I'm sure. I've done the same thing to others. When I ask for it, I explain a way. Or, you know, I'm trying. well, yeah, but this is why I opened the speech that way. And it's like, no, dude, you just did a bad job. Like, you got to fix it. You know what I mean? So I think, I think that the feedback one's important.

One other thing, though, I want to bring up, like, maybe, I don't know if there's an opposing view, but what if you're dealing with just really unreasonable people where it's like, no, they're just not good. Like, they're not like, not someone that we should associate. You know what I mean? Like, how do you manage those types of interactions and those types of people? Yeah, so first off, I think not all arguments are worth engaging with. There's absolutely, you know, it sounds pretty to say, you know, everyone's, you can learn something from everyone and you should always have an open mind that they might be right and you might be wrong. And that, that is technically true, but there's a wide range. And there's some people who just, you know, they, there's,

really don't know what they're talking about and they they aren't even trying to argue in good faith at all they're just trying to kind of troll you or you know be contrarian or something and so it's easy kind of emotionally to get sucked into those arguments and I've been guilty of this myself many times too but if you just kind of have a habit of taking a step back and asking what am I does this seem useful at all what am I trying to accomplish here and and sometimes the answer will be nothing plausibly nothing is going to happen good as a result of this conversation and so just you know choosing not to get into it is often the right strategy especially because I think when you spend too much time arguing with with especially unreasonable people or people who are especially bad representatives of a view you know like if you spend your time arguing only with especially if say you're a liberal and you spend your time arguing with the worst representatives of the conservative view, people who are the most unreasonable and stupid and pig-headed, then that's actually quite bad for your own scout mindset, because it just further entrents you in the idea that I'm smart and everyone who disagrees with me

is an idiot. And so I think it's actually quite important to prioritize the disagreements with people who you find more reasonable and who, even if you think they're wrong, at least you can recognize that, well, they're smart. I can see how someone would think that, even if I think it's wrong. So it's, it's good for your own kind of mental hygiene to, to prioritize that. And then the other thing I'll say is that, you know, even if someone is is kind of in soldier mindset when they're talking to you, you often can shift the tone of the conversation just by setting a good example of scout mindset yourself. Not always, not 100%, but often, significantly. You know, so if you, you know, if you show a lot of signals,

of a good faith engagement in the conversation where you recognize that, you know, I'm not 100% sure I'm right. You know, I'm open to the possibility that I might be wrong about some things. Then that can often kind of disarm the other person and make them, put them more in scat mindset as well. So what about from a leadership perspective, one of the, this is what criticism I've received is sometimes we just want you to speak with certainty. And because like if I'm saying all things, well, I may be wrong or this is what I, at least as of today, this is what I think. Because I mean, I interview really smart people and I have for six years that it's, it becomes part of like my regular being that my mind's going to change and shift because I'm, I'm regularly

talking to people who are more competent, especially about their specialty area than I am. So I say like I withhold the right to change my mind. But as of right now, this is what I think. And at times, I've got criticism. Well, why don't you stand? for something. Why don't you give us your point of view when instead of just saying like, well, this is what I think now, but I may change my mind. Not everybody likes that. What do you think about that criticism that I've personally received? So I think it's important to distinguish between two kinds of confidence. So confidence is absolutely important. Demonstrating confidence as a leader is important especially. But there are these two

kinds of confidence that we often conflate, my words for them are social confidence and epistemic confidence, where social confidence is, you know, how, how poised are you, how self-assured are you, how charismatic are you? Do you have kind of open and relaxed body language? Do you make eye contact? Do you speak with a relaxed and confident tone? Do you just seem to, do you act like you're worth listening to, basically. Do you go out and do bold things and take charge, etc.? So it's social confidence. And then epistemic confidence is about how much certainty do you have in your views. And so, you know, saying that you're 99% sure or you're absolutely positive, that would be high epistemic confidence, whereas saying that you don't know the answer or your view

might well change is lower epistemic confidence. And I think, you know, we conflate these two things a lot. it's easy to picture someone with both types of confidence, like a leader saying, you know, giving a pep talk saying, you guys, we're definitely going to win, we're definitely going to win. And it's easy also to picture someone with a lack of both types of confidence, someone who kind of stammers nervously, guys, I'm really not sure what we should do here. But they don't have to go together. And so Jeff Bezos, we were talking about a few minutes ago, is a nice example of how you can have social confidence without being certain in your views.

So, you know, the example I was talking about was about his ability to be bold and take risks while still being uncertain. But another aspect of it is his ability to be influential and persuade people, persuade people to invest in him, persuade people to work for him, while still expressing epistemic uncertainty. So I brought up how he thought there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail when he was starting out. And you might assume that he wouldn't express this kind of epistemic uncertainty to investors especially, like, who's going to invest in something where the person says, by the way,

you're probably going to lose all your money. But he did. In all of his initial pitch meetings to investors, he said, you know, I think there's a 70% chance this is going to fail. So you shouldn't invest unless you're willing to lose all your money. And lots of people invested. And they did because he demonstrated confidence in other ways without needing to be 100% certain that his bet was going to pay off because you can't be 100% certain and he's smart and he knew that. So, you know, the other ways in which he demonstrated confidence were his passion in talking about his vision for what he wanted to create with Amazon, his passion in talking about just the early days of the internet. He found it really exciting. He called it the Kitty Hawk stage of Internet commerce, I think. And so if you

watched, there's not a lot of early videos of him, but there's one I found from, around, 96, sometime in the mid-90s, where it was still early stage enough that the interviewer's first question for Bezos was, so who are you? And so in that video, he's just like sitting, you know, he's in his kind of like skinny bookseller Amazon phase. And he's just like sitting out on a curb somewhere outside of some small conference. And he's just talking about how exciting the internet is and all of the huge potential that is still untapped. And he's very passionate and inspiring. And you kind of get swept up with him and in his vision for what he wants to create.

And none of that requires him to say that he's 100% certain about his company succeeding. And that's the point he's emphasized in interviews again and again throughout the years that, no, you can't be certain. Anyone who tells you they can be certain is fooling you because this is an inherent. unpredictable business. So that's, I guess that's the last thing that I'll highlight, aside from the ability to be inspiring without claiming certainty, that often it helps if your audience is expecting or, you know, demanding you to stand for something, it often helps to point out, maybe gently, that this is not a domain in which it's possible to be 100% certain. And

anyone who tells you that they're certain that you should be you should be wary of that. And so often unless the person's deliberately being a troll or trying to antagonize you, often pointing out the inherent uncertainty in the world on that topic makes them realize. Oh, actually this person is more trustworthy than someone who claims to be 100% certain without good reason. Does that help? It does. Well, big time because I also immediately just think of examples and people and the ones who you could tell have like I just think a lot of it is have like have they done the work and

in that Bezos video I know which one you're talking about it's oh yeah it's evident that he had done the work to understand what he was going to do but that doesn't mean like he's not going to lie I almost viewed as lying like you don't know that it's going to work I mean he's going to work like crazy to make it work but that doesn't mean he knows it will and I think that's that to me gives me more confidence that he's shown that he's done the work leading up to the time. But he also is a realist and he understands that he can't predict the future. And to me, that gives confidence. That's why. And I think it takes a lot of confidence to say there's a 70% chance that you're going to lose your money. Now, there could be a massive upside here if we get this thing going. But there's

also a greater odds that you end up with zero than you end up at a billion or whatever it ends up being. I think that takes a lot of comments. But speaking of certainty, I just have a couple more things here. I want to talk about Lyndon Johnson, somebody that you've written about because he had an exercise when he was a senator. And he had this ritual with his friends and aides called Working Up, where he would practice arguing a position with passion over and over willing himself to believe it, you write.

And eventually he'd be able to defend it, again, using that word defend it with utter certainty. What do you think of this exercise that he did? Well, so Linton Johnson was, I think, an outlier in terms of his ability to intentionally deceive himself. Most of us, we deceive ourselves all the time, but it's more of an unconscious process where we want to believe something. And so we pay more attention to evidence that supports it and we pay less attention to or we don't look for evidence that might not support it. And so we end up becoming more confident in it, but that's not We didn't set out to do that consciously. But, you know, in Linton Johnson's case, his ability to persuade people,

I think it's important to distinguish between two types of persuasion. There's a kind of persuasion where you genuinely convince people that you're right and they kind of willingly sign on to your view. And then there's this kind of almost bullying persuasion. where, you know, if you, there's this, this old photo of Johnson persuading some other senator or someone, someone in the government. And it's so striking. He's leaning towards the person who's kind of leaning back and he's, you know, waving his finger in the guy's face. And I don't know the outcome of that conversation, but, you know, I'm sure like many of the conversations, there's a good chance

the person acquiesced and agreed with Johnson. And I don't, that is persuasion in a sense, but it's not so much about convincing the other person that you actually are right on the merits. It's more of a social strategy. And I don't like that strategy all that much myself. I'm not going to claim that it's inherently wrong or something. If, you know, maybe some people have a reason to do that. But I think the point is especially if what you want to do is actually change someone's mind and not just kind of bully them into going along with you,

then I think it becomes much more important to genuinely understand why someone wouldn't already agree with you. And so the process that Johnson was going through of kind of psyching up his confidence in his own view, it didn't involve any step where he tried to understand the other side and tried to understand the flaws in his position or the reasons why someone might not see that he's right even if he is. So, you know, I think in a lot of contexts, the more important thing is to be able to show other people that you, you know, you understand why your view is not obvious or not obviously correct to them. And this is, you know, this is especially true if they start out maybe being less sympathetic to your view than than some already receptive audiences or if you don't want to bully them.

Yeah, I think like it just goes back to some simple practices, but hard to execute of one, seek first to understand before being understood, right? As well as just as parents probably told most kids growing up, certainly minded, put yourself in other people's shoes. Like do your best to understand and understand why they may think that way. and then just open, when you talk to them, have a curious mind, not like a persuasive one, but one of curiosity. I approach people with curiosity to just get a better feel because we are all the sum of our life experiences. And I'm fascinated by those experiences of others because they all shape their worldview and

they shape why they believe what they believe. And unless I have to attempt to gain some sort of understanding of those experiences. because in a lot of cases, they're wildly different than mine. And that's why we may be on, have different views, and probably is why we have different views about a specific topic. And if we worked to try, at least, to approach it with curiosity instead of like, I'm going to bulldoze you into changing your mind, I feel like we'd have a better shot. You know what I mean?

It's such a good point. And actually earlier when we were talking about how to deal with disagreements, especially if you think the other person is being unreasonable. One thing that I wanted to say was how important it is to approach those conversations with curiosity. And it doesn't have to be curiosity about whether that person is right. Because that's not a very tractable kind of curiosity a lot of the time I find because it just feels so obvious that they're wrong. But you can in those circumstances still be curious about why they think the way they do. That I find is a much easier curiosity to call up in the moment. Like why it seems so obvious to me that you know this view is wrong and yet this person

who isn't an idiot hopefully seems to think it is true. That's that's interesting. That's like a puzzle to be solved. I want to understand it. And so sometimes the result of those of that investigation is actually the realization that oh actually they are they're seeing something that I wasn't seeing. Or the result might be, oh, I was misunderstanding their view. Actually, their view is more reasonable than what I thought it was. Or sometimes the result is just, no, I still think they're wrong, but at least I have a better understanding now of how they came to that view. And that's useful in its own right, just to understand better how people think and how they work and how people react to me. And so you don't know what the result of that process is going

to be, but I find you're much more likely to get something useful out of the conversation if you approach it with the spirit of genuinely trying to understand why they believe what they believe. Absolutely. Julia, one more question that's actually completely different than what we've talked about. But it's great. It's because of you and the career that you've built for yourself for, and I'm sure you get peppered with these types of questions from people who are earlier in their career, but for maybe a recent college graduate who loves what you do and they want to put their own dent in the world and impacted in a positive way. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you would give to that person? I mean, everyone's situation is different,

but maybe one piece of general advice that I can stand behind is that over time you, through your actions, through the way you talk, you kind of, you're creating a brand for lack of a better word, and that brand will attract certain types of people and it will repel certain types of people. And I think it's good to be very conscious of, you know, what types of people am I attracting and what types of people am I repelling? And you can't attract everyone. It's not possible.

So I think a good goal is to try to attract the kinds of people who make you a better version of yourself. And for me, that has a lot to do with scout mindset. So, you know, I try to put vibes out there that attract the kind of people who value scout mindset and who are less likely to, you know, denigrate me for changing my mind and more likely to admire me for it. And the kind of people who just, you know, they're not going to take everything I say at face value. They're going to push back if they think I'm wrong about something. And so that over time is going to make me a better thinker and, you know, make me more likely to notice on my own accord, like, oh, actually, I don't think I can.

can defend that. Let me see if there's a better version of that idea than I originally had. And so, you know, I talk, often the way I talk about improving your reasoning makes it sound like we're all just in a vacuum and, you know, you can just practice these habits and learn these techniques on your own. And there's a lot of value to that. But even more important is the context you're embedded in, the community that you're in, because we humans are social creatures. And so, you know, the things that are valued by the people around us are going to start to seem more important and more salient to us. And so you can you can either create, you know, a headwind or a tailwind for yourself, depending on what kind of community you're in and what they value. And so, you know, if you want to become a better thinker, a better decision maker and so on, I think you might as well try to give yourself a headwind by surrounding yourself with other people who reward you for the things that make you a better thinker instead of positive.

punishing you for them. Oh, I love it. Be the type of person, be aware of your brand so that you attract the type of people that make you a better version of yourself. I love it's it's similar to making the trust wager, which came from Bill Lazier. He's like, I'm going to lead with trust because I see if I find that when I do, even if I get burned every once in a while, but leading with trust, meaning you don't have to earn it. You have it. It, it seems. seems to attract the type of people that I want to hang out with and repel the ones who I don't. And I thought, that's, that's so good. Yeah.

I think it's hand in hand with what you're saying. I actually, I did an interview that maybe your listeners would enjoy, on my podcast, rationally speaking. I interviewed Vitalik Buderen, who's the creator of Ethereum and its corresponding cryptocurrency ether, which is now second, I think, after Bitcoin. And I was interviewing Vitalik because I think he's a great exemplar of Scout mindset. that he often talks about his uncertainty and is less than 100% certain in all of his proclamations. He, you know, openly acknowledges the potential downsides of the plan that he's endorsing as the leader of Ethereum and talks about, you know, why someone might disagree with him.

And he accurately or honestly and fairly represents the views of people who disagree with him. So I love all these things about him. And I was asking him, you know, do you, is there a downside to this? like do people scold you for not being a better strong leader? And he said, you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes, you know, people will get mad if I say that I think there's a less than 100% chance that, you know, Ethereum or that either is going to keep going up. Because that wouldn't be honest, and I can't say that honestly. But he said, I've made the intentional choice to attract the kind of people who like that intellectual honesty and repel the kind of people who don't like that intellectual honesty.

because I genuinely, I, Vatelic, genuinely think that the former category of people, the people who prize intellectual honesty and respect me more when I, when I am honest with them, I just think those are better people for the goal that I have in building this Ethereum community and the Ethereum project. And so that's the kind of people that I want to appeal to. And you should just accept that you can't appeal to everyone and you have to choose, you know, what kind of person you want to appeal to. Wow. Love it. Yeah. Julia, thank you so much for being here. Where would you send my viewers and listeners to learn more about you online?

My pleasure. Well, my website is Julia Galeff.com. And on the website, you can find links to my podcast, rationally speaking, and to some of my videos on YouTube. I have a YouTube channel. And also a link to my book, The Scout Mindset, which is coming out on April 13th. It's about everything we've been talking about in this interview. So if your interest was piqued, then I think you'd enjoy the Scout Mindset as well. So Julie Gallup.com.

Perfect. The scout mindset, why some people see things clearly and others don't highly recommend reading it. It'll make you think. Those are my favorite ones. And like when you're able to combine great stories with the science, with the practical application, that's my kind of book, because it keeps you entertained, it shares the science that that proves that it's true. and then it also says this is how I could apply it in my life like that's what I really want and you've figured out how to do that that's really hard but you made it look kind of easy you made it look easy so and the TED Talk's awesome too I would encourage me to watch the TED Talk which there are some overlap of the book in TED Talk but yeah with with some of the stories but really good thank you for being here I appreciate I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress that sounds great thanks Ryan thank you hi Julia is definitely one of those leaders

who makes you think super intelligent, thoughtful, curious, and really fun to talk to. I hope you enjoyed that one as much as I did. Some of the notes I took, we should assume that we are wrong. We need to build the skill to change our mind. Our goal should be to be less wrong over time. I remember Elon Musk sharing a similar message to Julia in regards to how he approaches building rockets and electric cars, among other things. The key principle is the way you think about being wrong.

Don't accept the premise that being wrong means you screwed up. I think it means you're a little bit closer to figuring out a better way to do it. And then persuade while still expressing uncertainty. Jeff Bezos left his job on Wall Street to start Amazon and acknowledged the uncertainty. He estimated that his idea had about a 30% chance to work. And his honesty and realism gave confidence to other people. And that was how he gained some support. And then remember the scout versus the soldier mindset, the difference between the two

and appreciating unique and different viewpoints on situations. I found, again, Julia, to be such a thoughtful leader. I hope you enjoyed it and I would love it if you would tell a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Julia Galef. It could help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and because you continue to write a review on Apple Podcasts and rate the show, hopefully five stars, you are continuing to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful.

Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.