The Rich Roll Podcast - Shane Parrish: A Former Spy On How To Think Smarter

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Every single day you make about 35,000 decisions. Our lives truly are the sum of our decisions compounded. What we do and what we decide quite literally defines who we are. In this destabilizing moment of fear and uncertainty -- when lives quite literally hang in the balance -- the nature and quality of our decision making is paramount.  It is thus incumbent upon us all, now more than ever, to optimize our decision making skills. So how precisely do we do this? It’s a question that became an obsession for Shane Parrish, a former computer scientist and spy who began to ply his curiosity and copious analytical aptitude to create a canonical roadmap to drive better judgment, better decisions, and ultimately better life outcomes for himself and others. According to Shane, the key is expanding our mental models, the frameworks we craft and rely upon to simplify complexity and understand the world. Prioritizing objective reasoning, mental models help to better frame the decision-making process, putting us in a better position to create relevancy and succeed in life. One of the biggest influencers across Wall Street, Silicon Valley and professional sports, Shane is a former cybersecurity expert for Canada’s version of the NSA and the founder of Farnam Street — a curated collection of research and musings to sharpen your mind, help you make smarter decisions, and ultimately live better. Featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Economist, Shane also hosts The Knowledge Project podcast (always high in my personal rotation), pens the Brain Food weekly newsletter and is the author of The Great Mental Models Vol. 1: General Thinking Concepts and The Great Mental Models, Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology — the first two releases in a series of books designed to improve your decision making, productivity, and how clearly you see the world. We begin today's exchange with Shane’s prior career at Canada’s top intelligence agency. His take on cybersecurity in a post 9-11 world. And the lessons he learned from his time as a spy. It's a conversation about the importance of reading and deep learning— training yourself to remember everything you read and how to apply it to your life. And it’s about developing your mind and thought processes to create a competitive advantage. But more than anything, this is a conversation about distilling wisdom into teachable formulae for living a better, more fulfilling, more wholesome life. Because how we decide is how we live. The visually inclined can watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the audio version streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Note: this conversation was recorded on February 11, 2020 -- weeks prior to the alternate reality we find ourselves in today. Therefore, there is no talk about the pandemic. Nonetheless, Shane's wisdom and experience is both timeless and timely. I suspect you will find this exchange instructive and helpful in navigating the perils of our current situation. If you are interested in Shane's pandemic related thoughts, he recently penned an excellent piece on Farnam Street entitled What You Truly Value. I’m grateful for this exchange and am better for it. My hope is that you find Shane as dynamic and helpful as I did. Peace + Plants, Rich

Your environment will dictate a large part of where you go in life. So who you hang around, how much you care about other people dictates, I mean, to a large extent, how fulfilled and meaningful your life is. And the question that I want everybody to ask is like, where am I going? Am I going to get there? Is what I'm doing today going to get me where I want to go? And if not, what do I need to do in order to get where I want to go? So much of what we want, we think we want it in the moment, but when we get it, we're no happier, we're no better. We tell ourselves that narrative and that narrative

becomes reality when another narrative you can replace that with. And often we have to replace narratives to get sort of better narratives, is that I'm in control of my life. And no matter what's happened to me, it might not be my fault that I'm in this situation, but it's my responsibility how I handle this situation going forward. It's my responsibility to respond to the situation in the best way that I can. And I own that and nobody else owns that for me. And I can't blame my past, but everything in my past has got me here and that's okay. That past has put you on this trajectory. It's put you at this moment in time. Where you go from here is completely up to you, though, and you control that, and nobody else controls that. That's Shane Parrish, and this

is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, fellow bipedal homo sapiens. My name is Rich Roll. Welcome. As together, we enter what is, at least for myself in the United States, week six of pandemic sequestration. And I think in this destabilizing moment of fear and uncertainty, the nature and the quality of our decision-making is paramount. And in general, it's important to reflect upon the extent to which our lives truly are the sum of our decisions compounded. What we do, what we decide, quite literally defines who we are.

And despite the consequences of many decisions we are now faced to make, like how long to sequester, when is it okay to return to work or visit a loved one. I suspect now more than ever, we are primed to respond to our quickly shifting environment, not from a stance of mindful, reasoned objectivity, but rather from a place of reflexive reactivity driven by unconscious impulses rooted in emotions like fear. And this is to say that it is both important and incumbent upon all of us for the sake and welfare of not just ourselves, but our families and our communities to optimize those decision-making skills. So, how precisely do we do this? Well, this question became an obsession for today's guest, Shane Parrish,

a former computer scientist and spy for Canada's version of the NSA, who began to ply his curiosity and copious analytical aptitude, to create a canonical roadmap to drive better judgment, better decisions, and ultimately better life outcomes for himself and others. The answers are coming soon, my friends, in a conversation I should mention was recorded pre-pandemic on February 11th, but first.

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just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more.

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Okay, Shane. One of the biggest influencers across Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and professional sports, Shane is the author of The Great Mental Models, Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts, which is the first release in a series of books designed to improve your decision-making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world. Shane has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Economist, and now, my friends, The Rich Roll Podcast.

This conversation focuses on the nature of mental models and why it is important to think deeply about and expand upon these frameworks that we craft and rely upon to simplify complexity and understand the world. It's about the significance of deep learning, and it's about distilling wisdom into teachable formulae for living a better, more fulfilling, more wholesome life, because truly, how we decide is how we live. Again, this conversation was recorded months before the alternate reality we find ourselves in today. Therefore, there is no talk about the pandemic. Nonetheless, his wisdom, his experience is both timeless and timely.

And I think you'll find this conversation instructive and at the same time, highly applicable to our current situation. Finally, Shane recently imparted some pandemic-related thoughts on Farnham Street in an excellent piece entitled, What You Truly Value. And I'll link that up in the show notes. It is well worth the read. So without further ado, this is me and Shane Parrish. First of all, welcome. Thank you for doing this today.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate you coming out here. When I think about you, I think about somebody who spent a lot of time basically thinking about thinking. of coin a phrase used widely by Yuval Noah Harari, perfecting or optimizing this idea that clarity is power. I totally agree with that. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Where to begin? I mean, I think that we're in a very unique and unprecedented time right now where we've never been so distracted and so tempted by distraction. So much so that we have to erect all of these boundaries and go way out of our way to protect and construct time to reflect and to kind of engage with solitude, whereas that was just a byproduct of living in a bygone era. And you're somebody who's kind of at the bleeding edge of this idea being of paramount importance if you want to be able to make the best decisions and, you know, live the best life that you're capable of living. Yeah, you can't make good decisions if you're constantly pulled in a lot of different directions, right? And today, I think more than ever,

we're distracted. It's so easily available. You're in line at a grocery store, you pull out your phone, you're texting somebody, you're always doing something. But store you pull out your phone you're texting somebody you're always doing something but like you said we're not reflecting and if we think about learning one of the key components of learning and how we make decisions we learn and then we apply that information is reflection and we're losing the ability to reflect even in what we consume online today a lot of what we consume like we're just after the soundbite, we're after the gist of it. Just tell me the summary of the book. And we assume that if we get the summary, we understand what was in the book. We assume that we have this knowledge and then we apply it and it doesn't work. And then we either blame ourselves, we're stupid, we're incompetent, we're lazy, whatever.

Or we blame other people. Oh, they're wrong. They didn't give us the right advice. And then we sort of like, we lose the responsibility angle to controlling our own lives. And we're not exploring. I mean, traditionally, I think what we're going to miss out on is exploring what it means to live life and what it means to live a better life. And it's too late that we realize that we might've been distracted through all of life. And then we want to redo, but there's no but there's no window at the end of life.

Like you get one life. And so you can't walk up at the end and go, oh, you know what? I wasted that one. Let's do it again. Yeah, I think in tandem with that, like looking at it from 10,000 feet, this is only accelerating this pace

towards maximum distraction. And we become habituated to it so much so that even myself who, I'd like to consider myself having a little bit more depth than somebody who's just scanning headlines, but I'll catch myself doing that and thinking, I got it, like I'm moving on to the next thing as I'm scrolling through my Twitter feed.

And I have to have this refrain, like this reminder that I need to step outside of that silo in order to be a fully educated person. I mean, we all do it. It's how we respond when we catch ourselves too. And if we want to do it, that's fine. But are we consciously doing it or are we unconsciously doing it? I think part of what I would like to encourage is that we're more conscious about how we spend our time and what we're distracted with and how we go about learning from our experiences. Like if you think of

learning, going back to that again, most people think that you learn just from experience. You have an experience and then you learn, but that's not how it works. You need reflection. And from reflection, you create an abstraction. The abstraction is what will I do differently next time? And then once you have that, then you put it into action and you have this loop of learning, right? So you have experience, reflection, abstraction, or what will I do differently next time? And then you have an action and that action comes to an experience. And now you have this circle that's full, But if we're not taking time to reflect, we're not learning. And so we're not sort of progressing in life.

And we're not thinking about, what are the things I want to do next year that are going to make my life better? How can I live a better life next year? And we're always looking for that sort of like quick win instead of like, what's the process to just continuously like consciously think about what it means to live life? Yeah. I think the action piece is the hardest piece. You know, when I reflect on my own decision-making patterns, I think I'm somebody who has a pretty well-developed self-awareness. Like I know when I'm making the wrong decision

and I'm aware of the patterns that lead me astray. And yet I will catch myself perpetuating them despite the self-awareness. Can you like, but you quit alcohol? Like, have you relapsed? I mean, I have, no, no, no. I mean, there are certain, yeah, I have, you know, I have made significant changes in my life and, and I believe myself to be on a, you know, a trajectory of personal growth. But when I'm honest with myself and objective about what I'm doing and what I could do better, there are glaring examples of where, you know, that growth, there's still tremendous growth that remains to be manifested. But isn't that our, like, perpetual state, like, state if we want to get better?

But isn't that our perpetual state, like state if we want to get better? I mean, I think happiness is sort of like the absence of desire in the sense of we don't want to get better at things. We don't want more than we have. We don't crave these external validation. We get it from the inside. The flip side of that is we do strive for progress. We strive to get better. And we sort of like we want to live a more meaningful, a better life, whatever that means to each of us. And there's no one answer to everybody. It's like,

here's how you live a better life. It's a question you have to explore inside you. And that pushes us forward. And it's sort of like, yeah, sure. We catch ourselves doing something or doing a behavior that we might not want to do. And then we have to let it go and say, like, do I want to do it again? Or do I just want to leave it there? Right. In looking at kind of the work that you do and what you put out into the world, to me, it feels like here's a guy who has this prodigious computer scientist or, you know, oriented brain that, you know, that sees things, perceives the world in a very like logical, rational way.

And you've taken that acuity and you've placed it on top of something that is extremely diffuse, amorphous and ephemeral and attempted to create a roadmap to like canonize like the best ideas out there to create this lattice work to help us make better ideas. Is that a fair representation of how you approach your work? Yeah, I think so.

I mean, like I did a computer science degree. I went to work for an intelligence agency. And then I realized quickly over the years, maybe two years past, that my computer science degree became less and less relevant. And as I made decisions that were less and less technical and more people involved, I didn't have this sort of canon of knowledge from other disciplines or domains to factor into how I was making those decisions. Right, so let's take it back. You graduate university and you end up

as a cybersecurity computer scientist at essentially Canada's equivalent of the NSA. Yeah. Right, right before 9-11. Yeah, it started two weeks before September 11th. That is crazy. Yeah, it was a terrible time, right? A lot of things happened.

I mean, we were super small at the time. We grew rapidly. You ended up getting promoted just because you're in the building, you're a body. We need this work done. And so you did it. I mean, I worked probably six, seven days a week, eight hours on the low end,

10 to 12 on the high end for seven years straight. And can you talk, can you speak to what your role was there or is that shrouded in? No, I think they would prefer I don't do that. Yeah, essentially trying to make the world a safer place, I would imagine, right? But I can imagine what it must have been like. I mean, how old were you? Like 23, 24, something like that? Yeah, 21. Right. This young person who gets thrown into this situation and suddenly it staffs up rapidly

because of the escalating threats and the attention that this kind of work requires. And you find yourself in a management position having to deal with other people when you're used to ones and zeros on a keyboard. Yeah, I mean, computers are great because you tell it to do something, the computer always does it. Why doesn't the world work like that?

People are different, right? Like we're biological. So it's a very different sort of thing for us where you can sort of tell people, like, here's what I want to happen. And it doesn't necessarily happen. And then you have to think about, well, this affects their family. And a lot of the decisions we were making not only affected the family of the people we worked with, but they affected our country. They affected our country's relationships with

other countries. They affected troops in the theater. They affected civilians in war zones. They affected a lot of people. And so you have to consider this dynamic to a lot of the decisions we were making. And I do want to say it was a great place to work, right? Like I get to work with some really amazing world-class people. And it's very rare that you get to work with some of the best in your field. And they're there because they love it, not for the money, obviously, because it's government, but yeah. But most people in that circumstance would just, they try to make the best decisions they possibly could. They would run those decisions by perhaps a trusted few mentors or advisors to make sure that they're kind of on the proper trajectory.

But what you did, I think, is unusual in that you had the audacity to take a step back and say, wait a minute, like, am I making the right decision? Even if I'm being told that it's fine, like, is this correct? And how can I, you know, create, you know, for lack of a better word, like a better algorithm for how I'm making these decisions that factor in all of these variables that I'm trying to, you know, grok and track as I move forward and upward. I felt, I mean, I felt the responsibility of the decisions we were making at a very personal level. I mean, my parents are in the military. I could easily envision them overseas in a war zone.

And what obligation do we have to make great decisions? And is good enough, good enough? And what obligation do I have as a person? Is there a stone that I need to unturn? Is there something I need to learn so that I can get comfortable with it? What blind spots do I have so that I'm, you know, sort of getting better at making decisions or trying to? And granted, all the decisions are somewhat imperfect, right? And then judging yourself on the outcome is really hard because sometimes you, it's like playing poker, right? Like sometimes you play your hand perfectly and you can still lose. And then how do you not take away lessons from that where you get scared and that also affects future decisions, right?

So it's a very complicated environment to learn about decision making and exploring. I ended up going back and doing my MBA. So after around 2007, I was like, I need to learn how to, I need to get comfortable with these decisions. I need to get comfortable with my process. I need to sort of do the work that I need to do to make better decisions. And for me to feel comfortable, the decisions might be the same, but I'm not comfortable that I sort of fully understand. And nobody did, right? Like we're all just doing the best we can given the environment. So the decision to get an MBA wasn't motivated by some sense that you were going to become an entrepreneur? No, not at all. No. I mean, I need to figure out how to manage these people better. What does that look like?

I definitely want to learn how to manage people and relate to people better and do all that stuff. Stuff you don't necessarily learn in computer science. I spent years debugging and coding and assembly and doing all this stuff. I was very good with computers and less good with people. The MBA definitely helped with that. The whole point of that was I went around the organization. I started following people to meetings. I was like, I need to learn how decisions are really made and how I can make better decisions.

And then I was like, okay, I've done that. Now I Googled, I did what everybody does. I Googled, like, okay, what do I need to know? And an MBA came up and I was like, I'm going to go back and do my MBA. And then that proved simultaneously, I would say fruitful in the sense that it put me on the path of Charlie Munger and mental models. And the flip side of that was the degree I found, you know, pretty useless in the schoolwork also. Right. We're going to get to Charlie Munger, but prior to that, like, you know, the joke that I was going to make is, well, of course you then enrolled for the class on how to make great decisions, and they handed you a textbook, and it was all laid out. That's it, yeah. Wouldn't life be awesome if there was a class on here's everything you need to know about decision making? incredible lack of attention to this very important skill in our educational system

that's premised on memorization, very much breadth over depth and moving forward quickly that doesn't really prepare somebody for how to best navigate the real world, whether you're in a job scenario or otherwise. How are you thinking? How are you making decisions? Is there a better way to think about, you know, these things that happen in life so that you can set yourself up for success? Yeah. And it seems obvious that that would be, you know, something worthwhile for young people to ponder and study.

Well, it's interesting, right? Because there is no class on decision-making. There's no skill called decision-making. Decision-making is a subset of skills. Just like there's no skill called reading. Reading is a subset of skills, right? You take words, you put them into sentences, you take sentences and you form meaning.

And there's a whole bunch of different skills involved in sort of reading, same as decision-making. And nobody's laid out, I mean, there are sort of curriculums at Stanford and all of that for classes on decision-making, but they get very analytical very quickly. And real-world decision- making often involves sort of analytical side, but there's also emotional side. There's also sort of like second, third-order consequences you need to think about that don't necessarily stem from the decision tree that you're creating. Right, and the interdisciplinary approach

that you've taken by looking at physics and biology and these somewhat seemingly distant ways of looking at the world and leveraging the wisdom and the laws of those, you know, of those disciplines into how you make decisions in the real world. Yeah, it's a work in progress, but still definitely trying to incorporate that. Yeah, because this wisdom is out there. It's, you're not inventing these things out of whole cloth by performing experiments on human beings. You're just sort of looking, canvassing the world

and saying, here's what the smartest people in the world have said over the ages, dating back to, you know, the Stoics or, you know, I don't know how far back you've gone, you know, all the way back through, you know, mythology to the latest and greatest of, you know, physics and biology to kind of divine greater truths that can inform how we navigate the world. Yeah. I don't think anything I've done or we've done on the website or anything that we've made public is original content. It's sort of like we are just going back to these sort of timeless ideas. And one of the reasons they're timeless is we keep being able to apply them to everyday life, right?

And if we can learn the timeless ideas, that knowledge doesn't expire. So much of what we consume today is no longer valuable in a week. So what if we just build more depth around the things that are timeless? Because those are the things that are likely to impact us again in the future, likely to come up. So enter Charlie Munger. Yeah, so Charlie Munger. So the version of how I got put on to Munger, I think I'd read something about Buffett in like 2000. And then during the MBA, we end up doing a case study in class and there's

like six groups presenting and we're the last group and all of these other, I'm like panicking because all these other groups have a very different answer on this case study that we do. And we get up there and our team leader sort of like speaks and he's like, well, you know, we thought about it differently and gave our sort of response to the position we were put in. And the teacher, the professor, I guess, would said, you didn't do the work. And he's like, no, actually we did do the work. We just sort of like had a different interpretation of it. And here are all the reasons that we had a different interpretation. Here's why we think all the other five groups answers would not work.

And they got into this like a verbal spat. And he, I remember he just walked out. Like he said, I'm done. The professor? No, no, the student, like our team leader. So he walked out, he said, I'm done. And what he meant was he was done with the MBA program. He literally went back to like his room, packed up his bags. And I ran, ran into him in the cafeteria after that. And I was like,

how did like what we did made sense to me, right? Like, I don't understand how they like, what did we do differently? And he just put me on to Charlie Munger. And I remember going back to my dorm room that night and just Googling Munger. And then that was the next- Went down a rabbit hole. Oh, yeah. I mean, I stopped doing schoolwork, basically, and just started diving into Munger's way of thinking, which is sort of how do we apply these natural laws to give us a tailwind, right? And how do we work with the world instead of against the world? Mm-hmm. A couple of things. I mean, first of all,

it's not surprising that, you know, thinking outside the box was not rewarded, but it is, I think, noteworthy that in the context of an MBA program, you would think that a creative approach to problem solving would be something that would, you know, would warrant recognition. So here's my theory on this, and I don't know if it's accurate, but the MBA programs are so expensive now. They're $75,000, $200,000. A lot of them are paid by corporations. Right, that's why they're so expensive now.

So corporations won't send people if people are failing. So teachers realize, or professors realize that they, again, this is my theory, that they can't really fail people. And so they just optimize for what's easiest, right? What's easiest for me now is like less about teaching. And it doesn't happen at every program. And I'm generalizing, but this is sort of my hypothesis from talking to a lot of people who've done MBAs. And they feel very similar in the sense that to some level, the teachers are optimizing for, okay, well, I can't actually get involved because I can't give people real grades. So because I can't do that, I'm going to step back. And if I'm going to step back, then I'm just going

to sort of like slowly get back to the path of least resistance, which is like everybody passes, just signal that you did the work and we're okay. I think that means that that's a system that could use a little first-order thinking. It could definitely use a lot of improvement. But I noticed last year, I think, MBA enrollments went down for the first time in a long time. So maybe that'll be a cause for them to rethink that. So this discovery of Munger puts a chilling effect on your enthusiasm for your MBA program. Yeah, but it also, I mean, it made it more valuable in a lot of ways, right? Because when we were doing accounting, you start connecting everything together.

Instead of just learning these separate subjects, you start realizing that the world is just connected. Like everything is connected. You can't work in an organization or lead somebody and ask them to do something without recognizing that that might affect their home life or without recognizing that maybe they're in a bad mood today because something happened at home and they're bringing that to the workplace. And if you're asking them to stay late, you're borrowing from the future. And when you borrow from the future, you sort of like have to give that back and like how you accomplish things

matters too. And so you start sort of like connecting all these different subjects, which is like the map is not the territory, which is one of the mental models we have in the book. It's the very first one. Right. So financial statements are a great example of sort of maps, right? They point out sort of how a business is operating, at least on the surface, but it doesn't tell the real story about what's happening below the surface. And we've seen this from the likes of Enron, right? Where all these financial statements are public

and they look great, but below the surface, the terrain, not the map, the actual terrain is much different and it speaks to sort of problems. And so you learn how these things can sort of like play out and then you sort of watch organizations that are run on dashboards. And it's really interesting because organizations that are run on dashboards. And it's

really interesting because dashboards are maps, right? They just want all the indicators to be green or the numbers to be a certain number. And that doesn't necessarily, like a lot of the times what's happening below the surface is you're borrowing from the future and you don't realize you're borrowing from the future. So the terrain is actually different than the map that you see. from the future. So the terrain is actually different than the map that you see. Right. And the utility of the map is directly related to your understanding of its limitations and pitfalls. Right. And a great example, if you want to conceptualize this as a set of financial statements, is online dating, right? You get a profile of somebody that's a map of who they are, and then you meet them in person, and it's often a very different story than the impression you get.

Often? You're single now, right? I am. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, I'm not on those apps, but it seems like that's sort of the unanimous case. It's a crazy story. It's like people show up, they're like a different race than they indicated. It's like, what the heck?

Right. I need to do a better job building. So understanding that going in before you swipe left or whatever it is that you do to say you're interested in, the utility of that is understanding that whoever's on the other side of that is probably not gonna be an accurate reflection of whatever you're seeing and reading on the app.

Right, definitely. Yeah. So I take it then that the fascination with Munger isn't just, you know, sort of his individual unique insights about business and investing. It's the connectivity of all of these ideas and how they can work together to create, you know, you use this word latticework, you know, this interplay of ideas that create almost like an assembly line for how you engage with decision making. Yeah, I think Munger was the first person to point it out. But there's others that have sort of like taken up the mantle since him, like Peter Bevelin and Peter Kaufman and to some extent Warren Buffett. Although he doesn't talk in that way, he definitely thinks in that way. And I think what's happening is here's an example

of people that are applying this in the real world, not in the theory, not in sort of like a classroom. They're actually using this information to make better decisions. They're not perfect, but they're using the information to make better decisions about what matters. And like incentives would be a great example. So incentives drive a ton of behavior.

We spent about 12, 13 minutes on incentives in my MBA program. But if you were to talk to people and you were to talk to anybody who runs a business or an entrepreneur and they know just how valuable incentives are, that would be something worth exploring. What type of incentive systems should you create? How are they gamed? What does it mean to create a good incentive system?

Should you have different incentive systems for different levels in the organization? Should everybody be able to articulate the incentive system? How do incentive systems go wrong? Yeah, I think unhealthy incentives are at the heart of so many systemic ills right now, politically, financially, socially, et cetera. And they're perpetuated to, I think,

at great cost to everybody. Yeah, definitely. And changing incentives is hugely powerful, but you can also unleash potential, right? If you give people freedom. Redirecting those incentives. Yeah, they know what the incentives are and that your incentives are aligned. And you often get into problems, right? Because it's easy to create financial incentives. And a lot of organizations are purely financial, but what if your organization values other things too, right? Like they value the environment or they value all of these other

things. And then you have multiple, I wouldn't say conflicting incentives, but people are overthinking and it's not clear what they need to do. You can't talk about incentives without talking about bias. Right. Definitely. And then bias is an interesting thing because you have Daniel Kahneman, who's won basically, you know, a Nobel laureate out this, and he studied bias his whole life. And when I was talking to him on our show, like on the podcast, he basically said, like, I'm no better at avoiding bias than-

This is the great disheartening irony in all of it. Like the guy who's sort of this pioneer of exploring the limits of rationality in human beings and has a tremendous amount of self-awareness around it still is the first to say that it has had very little impact on his own decision making. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of scary in a way, right? Because what we do is we convince ourself that, oh, if I just create a list of biases, and this was something that came up at my MBA program and something I've seen people apply to varying degrees of success, but they create a list of biases. Like,

am I overconfident? Am I using short-term information versus long-term information? Did I recently acquire this information? Therefore, I'm more prone to overvalue it, et cetera. And they think that if they go through the checklist that they avoid the biases. But what really happens is usually if you're intelligent enough to create the checklist in the first place, you just start telling yourself better stories about why that bias doesn't,

I'm not overconfident in this case, because, right? And then that story gets better, the smarter you are and more convincing you can convince yourself. And so it doesn't actually sort of help us avoid that. Yeah, intelligence becomes an Achilles heel in that context. Right.

Yeah, in 12 Step Achilles heel in that context. Right. Yeah. In 12-step, they always say like, you know, the hyper-intelligent people have the hardest time because they just come up with a million reasons why the steps are bullshit and how they're not going to work and all of that. Oh, that's interesting. As opposed to just surrendering to it and just doing it and realizing the results of that. And this is like an analogous case where if you're hyper-intelligent, you're going to be able to do, perform the mental, you know, gymnastics required to rationalize whatever it is you've already decided to do.

I think I remember listening to you as prep for this, where you had said something along the lines of, it was only when you followed the directions sort of like blindly. Yeah, it's like let go of all of that. And you have to really humble yourself, I think to get to that place. And when you're in pain, it's easier to do that. But yeah, if you go in and you think,

these people don't know what they're talking, you know, like, I know this is nonsense or whatever. And you're gonna, you think you have a better idea. That's where you see a lot of unnecessary struggle. Well, that's the curse of sort of intelligence in a way, right? It's like you're in a meeting at work and you always think you can improve the value of the idea. And I remember one of the things I had to learn as a manager

was somebody would come up with an idea and the idea would And I remember one of the things I had to learn as a manager was somebody would come up with an idea and the idea would be 90% correct. And I would spend a lot of time, and this is my failing, right? I would spend time going like, oh, well, here's how you make it from 90 to 95. But what would happen, I didn't realize it at the time, at least not the first few times, is that the motivation on the person's part would fall from 100% motivation where they own the idea. And it was a 90% solution to maybe like 50%. But the solution would be sort of like 5% better, if you will. But the outcome would be way worse. And so what was happening is that you're adding too much value to it. And it's sort of similar to what you're talking about, right? Where you're trying to add value to the process, but the process has proven to work.

The motivation of the people that are in the meetings is, here's my idea, I want to do it. And maybe you get to that 90% and then you can add value to it, but you sort of like have to let them run with that and you have to let them go with that. Right. So you finish your MBA, you go back to the intelligence agency. Yeah.

And you're leading the Charlie Munger fan club at this point. Definitely, definitely. Okay. Actually, I had an anonymous blog at this point too, right? When did you, did you start the blog when you were still in business school or when you returned to intelligence? No, I started- Because you were working

in tandem when you were going to school. Yeah, yeah. I was working full-time, going to school full-time because, I mean, why not? Right, of course. And I started the website

as a means to keep track of what I was learning. And so the original website was 68131-1440.blogger.com. And the reason it was that is 68131 is the zip code for Berkshire Hathaway. And 1440, I believe, is their unit number in Kewitt Plaza. And it was never intended for anybody else. Only a computer scientist would come up with that URL. Well, it was like only I would type that in.

Nobody will find it. Why not just journal? Why even make it publicly available? Because I like computers and journals. I had to take with me and then I would have to look up things and I couldn't hyperlink and connect ideas. The whole point of Munger was sort of like connecting the world.

Got it. The flip side of this is I worked for an intelligence agency and having any public profile is sort of not a good idea. Right. To varying degrees. Was there even like a little bio blurb that said, I'm anonymously writing this because I work in an intelligence agency? No.

That would be catnip. No, because it wasn't for anybody else. Yeah. Right? It was literally just for me. And it was, so there was no information about who was behind it. It was just this anonymous website. I would say almost completely anonymous at the time.

And then over the years, people found it. And then it became sort of non-anonymous, if you will. Was there an inflection point where suddenly you realized, like, this is being consumed by a bunch of people? I think like 2013, 2014, I started to take it a lot more seriously. And you still have the zip code URL. I think we changed that in 2012, maybe 2013 to farnamstreetblog.com. And now it's fs.blog. Right.

But yeah. Yeah, there was a moment where I sort of, I knew I had to put a name behind it to do the things I wanted to do. And that was a big turning point, right? Not only, because I was still working for an intelligence agency and I was basically like about to cause a ruckus

on the inside because I'm going to have a very- Did you have to tell them that you were doing this? When you're working in that kind of a place, do you need approval to even speak publicly at all about anything? They definitely prefer that. It's a little murky as to whether you need approval, but I wasn't talking about anything to do with work. Nothing.

There was no anecdotes, no stories. No, it wasn't what I did for... Were they aware that you were doing it or were you just keeping that on the DL? Well, a lot of people there used to read it when it was anonymous, interestingly enough, right? And so I had this weird backdoor influence into the organization where the most senior levels of the organization

were reading my website. And having no idea that they got down the hallway. I remember literally my boss came to me one day and he was like, you should read this article. And he sent me, he sent me my own article. And I was like, yeah, that guy, he seems pretty switched on. That had to be, I mean, that's somewhat surreal,

but also that had to arm you with confidence that perhaps you could take this leap and go do this thing. Yeah. I mean, it's also a testament to the people I was working with, right? They're always looking to get better and they're always looking to grow and make, make better decisions. And the website turned out to be sort of about decision-making leadership and to some extent innovation. And now it's morphed into more of like all of that plus, like how can we live a better life? Because they're all incorporated into that. And when you really cottoned on to this way of thinking,

I presume that had a positive impact on how you were managing people and you were able to kind of see and perhaps even quantify the results. I think I got better as a manager, but I mean, I started out from a terrible base too, right? Like I said, terrible. This guy can only go up? Yeah, pretty much. Like I don't know where bottom would have been from that, but it's interesting sort of getting better as you go along. And just, if you think about it, you're sort of like your slope or your trajectory matters a lot more than where you start from.

And so I started from way worse spot managing. I didn't have any of the people skills that other people come in with. I didn't have that thinking by default. And so I started from a lower base, but I think I got to a better place in the end because of just constant progress. in the end because of just constant progress. Yeah, I think all of our brains function and operate on a set of models that we're largely not consciously aware of, right? It's not that we're just free associating

and making decisions willy-nilly, we're defaulting to a set of pathways and parameters that we've sort of habituated to over time based on experience or school or what have you that almost seem like it's just, it's on kind of an autopilot as opposed to taking a beat and really stepping outside of that

and trying to deconstruct how you arrive at a certain decision and then questioning or applying that to a different set of parameters to see if you get a different outcome. So much of decision-making is pattern matching. And you match the patterns based on the information you have in your head. And so much of a better decision-making is delaying that intuition of pattern matching or recognizing it and sort of like not acting on it in the moment. So when did you arrive at this idea that you were going to try to take all of this information and try to create, you know, a better pattern or lattice work out of it, as opposed to I'm posting blog posts here and there, but actually looking at it from a broader perspective to say there's a bigger opportunity here

to do something substantial and meaningful that it seems like no one else had really ever done. Probably 2015. I mean, the idea sort of wasn't mine. It came from Munger, right? He's like, you just need to learn the big ideas from all of these different disciplines. And I was like, oh, and then I Googled that and it's not available.

And I'm like, why can't I make that available, right? Like this is the education that I wanna do for myself over time. And obviously it's a destination you never really reach. It's just something you sort of like get better at incrementally. And I just thought I would sort of create that for the world. And. And at what point do you get in your car and drive to Nebraska and knock on Charlie's door? Oh. Go to Farnham Street. That's funny. That'd be awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Have you met him? I have met him, yeah.

You have met him. Okay, good. I'm glad. I'm actually going to see him tomorrow at the Daily Journal meeting. So what does he think about? With a thousand other people. Wow, that's cool. What does he think about all this stuff that you're doing?

Oh, I have no idea. He's probably not even aware. Really? Oh, come on. Yeah. I'm sure he does. Well, he knows that you've written this book and that you cite his work and all of that, right? He's got a copy of the book, so yeah.

Okay. All right. I think he's just, you know, he's 97 now or something, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. As irreverent and sort of as ever, but. Right. Preverent and sort of as ever, but. Right.

So at some point you decide, I'm going to put cybersecurity and intelligence in the rear view and I'm going to do this full time. And I think it's interesting to kind of spend a few minutes talking about how you reckon with what could be considered to be, you know, an intuitive decision or one coming more from the heart? Like, I think about some of the decisions that I've made that have had the biggest impact on my trajectory, for better or worse. And many of them were made, you know, without a lot of information and no conscious modeling, but really were kind of heart-centered, you know, like, I have a passion for this thing and like, I'm going

to go for it and it doesn't make sense. Like if I was to map that onto your, you know, models, it would have seemed like a terrible idea. And yet in retrospect, perhaps it was the best thing that I could have done. And you kind of walking away from a secure career path to step into this new vocation, this Wild West space, I would imagine. How did that map on to how you think about decision making? Well, everybody else thought I was crazy. So my parents are like, you're walking away from not only basically a predetermined career path that will get you wherever you want to go and a huge, great salary in comparison to anything they ever made and a stable pension and security. And it's a government job, so it's very hard to lose your job. And you're just willing to give all of that up to pursue your dreams.

And I think the answer to that is yeah. My personal take on this is I would rather fall short in life pursuing my dreams than spend the rest of my life regretting not pursuing my dreams. And I think that I believe in myself, and I believe like I didn't have a lot as a kid. I didn't, I mean, I didn't want for anything and there's kids who had way worse lives than I did, but I knew I could always go back to zero and I would be okay.

And if it meant that I had to go get a job working for somebody else again, I would figure it out. And I believe that. And I also knew at the end of the day, I could go back to the intelligence agency within a reasonable time period. So I took a year off a leave of absence for a year.

Oh, so you could have gone back. I could have gone back. And then I'm, you know, I still have a top secret clearance. So at the end of the day, I'm pretty sure I could, if I needed to, I could go back. But that's neither here nor there, right? Like I think I impact that space in a different way now. Yeah.

Right? And that superior who said, hey, you should read this article, at what point did you tell him that that was you? I think it was a few weeks later. It wasn't long because then I felt bad, right? Like I felt like I was sort of, even though I wasn't in on it, I felt like I was deceiving him and I didn't want to be in a relationship where I felt like I was deceiving him because I knew something he didn't know about it. And then it was at that point that I think he unsubscribed after I told him to be honest with me. He started second guessing his own. Yeah, his own judgment, yeah.

Yeah, it's funny. Well, what you build is amazing. Your website is just an absolute treasure trove of incredibly valuable information that's just freely available, including all of the mental models. Like you've got this beautiful book out now, The Great Mental Models.

It's like volume one, starting with general thinking concepts. It's like nine of, you know, nine of the initial mental models in this, but you can get blurbs of all of them on your website currently, right? So what's going to happen is we decided to undertake this project. It's a three to four year project. We're sort of in the middle of it right now. We're going to release four volumes of the book.. We're going to release four volumes of the book. The book is going to contain the big ideas from all the disciplines. There'll be about 113 of them at the end of the day. We summarize them on the website. We're going to release the books. And then at some point in the future, we'll make all the content

freely available for everybody. Because one of the things that I believe in is sort of like equalizing opportunity, not necessarily outcomes, but opportunity. And I think making that thinking sort of like available, free online is a good thing to do for the world. But it's been, I mean, as we were talking about earlier, publishing a book has been quite an ordeal because we're acting as the publisher, our small team. We're doing it all.

We have a graphic designer and we have a creative director and we have a printer in Latvia because we're acting as the publisher, our small team. You're doing it all. Right. Like we have a graphic designer and we have a creative director and we have a printer in Latvia that we're dealing with. And then we have Amazon issues where, you know, we have a distributor, but Amazon's trying to order more copies and we're like, well,

that's all we printed. And like, don't sell more than that. And you go to the Amazon and it's like, yeah. Well, you did. I mean,

you did a beautiful job. I had, you just handed this to me before the podcast. I was, I have the Kindle version, which I'm about 45% into at the moment and I'm really enjoying it. But the tactile experience of this book, like it's beautifully put together

and, you know, a couple observations. I mean, first on the subject of self-publishing, which I think is absolutely the right decision for this kind of book, people think, well, remove the gatekeepers and you can just put it out there, which is true. But you also have to understand that you're starting a new business

and you're gonna have to project manage like a million variables in order to make it happen. It's not a small thing. And especially to create a book of this, you know, caliber. I mean, there's, there's a lot of, you know, very detailed design aspects to this with, you know, inserted color pages and tons of illustrations and, you know, color lithographs and things like that. Like it's, it's unique in that on the one hand it's, it operates sort of like a textbook, like, and the title kind of lends itself to that. Like, there's no click-baity, you know, title or anything to grab you.

It's like, this is sort of a manual, a primer. And yet, it's also very easily digestible. Like, it's very plain spoken. It's not difficult to read. You illustrate these principles, these models by way of, you know, historical anecdotes, et cetera, to elucidate the concepts. And that makes it like fun to read, but also like it's like this perfect combination of, you know, the sweet and the sour. Like giving you your vegetables and your dessert at the same time. sour, like giving you your vegetables and your dessert at the same time. Well, thank you.

I had somebody email me and say, it was the most boring title ever to make the Wall Street Journal bestselling list. The great mental model of general thinking. And no small thing to make the Wall Street Journal bestseller list as a self-published book. Like not very many people accomplish that.

Yeah, we're lucky to have a big audience. I think what, it's a reference book, right? So just to put people in the context of it, it's designed to be a reference book. It's not designed to be sort of like a popular book. It's not designed to be something you sit down and read in an afternoon. It's meant to be, it's almost like a testament to the old encyclopedia Britannica or something, right? Like it's beautifully designed and it's meant to be picked up and sort of explored as you need it and when you need it. And I'm glad you like it. Yeah, no, it's really, it's really cool. So the idea is you're going to do five of these.

Four, I think. We're going to do five, but I think we're going to condense the last ones together. Right. Well, I think it would be good to kind of go through maybe a couple of these mental models so that we can better understand them first. But why don't you, you know, it probably would be good to define what you mean by a mental model. Yeah. A mental model is just a representation in our head of how something works. It's not a testament to whether it's good or bad or true or false it's just how we we conceptualize

an idea and use it to think and it helps us determine if you think about how you approach problems you're using this toolbox of mental models that you have in your head and it determines what you think is relevant the variables you think are relevant how those variables are going to interact over time and what the likely outcome is going to be. And so the better the tools you have for the particular situation you have, the better your thinking is likely to be. The better you're going to interconnect those things over time, and the better you'll understand sort of the second and third order consequences of the decision. And it's kind of a tiered setup, right? weird setup right like this first book is about you know these general um thinking concepts which are kind of required to fully understand before you can drill down into some of the more detailed um models that that that come from a variety of different disciplines yeah so the next volume is

sort of uh physics chemistry and biology and then we're going to go from there. But we're not connecting them yet. So the point of the books is like the models are pretty independent. They're connected a little bit. And then after the books are released, we'll use the internet to connect them. Because we want people to connect them themselves. Because when you do the work yourself to connect the ideas, it has a more powerful bond than if I point them out for you.

I mean, we'll do the work for you, but we're sort of like doing it in stages with the goal of having people learn how to apply them as they go along. How do you think about not being overwhelmed though? Like you have 109 of these and then within them, there's corollaries and like sort of sub models within the models.

Right. So, all right, I have to make this decision. Like, what am I supposed to do? Like run this through 109 different ways of looking at it before I have clarity that I'm, you know, conviction that I'm making the right decision. Well, that's an interesting question, right? Because I think to some extent the answer is depends on the decision, right? And how much you, like so so often today, we put weight into being decisive, we put weight into being a knowledge worker, we put weight into deciding on

the spot, no matter the type of decisions. But if we're making sort of an irreversible, consequential decision, then yeah, I mean, we want to take our time, we want to go through, maybe we do want to go through a checklist of 109 of sort of like the big ideas in the world and see which ones apply and which ones don't, and then use those to remove our blind spots about the idea. Or another way to phrase that would be walk around the problem in a three-dimensional way. But if we're making sort of an inconsequential, reversible decision, then we probably just want to go with our gut or we want to delegate it to somebody else or those decisions don't matter as much. So the way that we approach each decision should vary by the weight of the decision or the consequences or the

reversibility of the decision itself. But the first decision would have to be, is this a consequential decision or an inconsequential decision? Yeah. Is it reversible or irreversible? Is that a first principles approach? That's sort of like how I approach it. Patrick Collison approaches it the same way. I think he talked on our podcast about how they make different decisions based on reversibility of the decisions.

Jeff Bezos calls it a one-way door versus two-way door. And so they're all thinking in terms of irreversible decisions need to be made in a different way, right? If you're making a decision that you can't back out of, then you probably do want to think through it. You want to take, I mean, one of the pieces of advice

that we give people is like, just take 30 minutes and go for a walk and just think about it. What is that doing? It's delaying intuition. If you have the models in and go for a walk and just think about it. What is that doing? It's delaying intuition. If you have the models in your head, you can sort of like think through it. Well, am I using a map here?

What's the map mean? Am I like familiar enough with the train? Is it within my circle of competence or outside of my circle of competence? If it's outside of my circle of competence, do I know somebody who has that in their circle of competence? Can I talk to them about it? And when you talk to them about it, the way that you talk to them about it, coming back to how we learn again, you want to talk to them about it from

the point of understanding, not from a point of what to do. So often we approach people and we're like, what would you do in this situation? And I think that there's value in that, but there's a lot more value in saying, how would you think about this problem? What are the variables that come to mind for you? How do those variables interact? And then what would you do? And how competent are you in this specialty to evaluate the weight of that advice that you're going to be given? Right.

But one of the models in the book is circle of competence, right? So if the decision is within your circle of competence, trusting your gut is probably reasonable. You want to check it, but your gut is probably right. If it's outside of your circle of competence, then your gut probably has less relevance than if it was within. I think it obviously has less relevance than if it was within. And so now you want to, instead of checking it, you want to go, oh, well, who do I know that has more information or better information on this than I do? How can I approach them?

And are there three or four people? Because if there's three or four people, now I can triangulate, right? So I can ask you what variables matter. I can ask somebody else what variables matter. And I can ask somebody else. And then between them, where's the overlap and where are they different?

Those are probably the areas to explore about what's going to impact that decision and what you have to keep an eye on. And then you don't always have to make decisions in a way that you're making a full decision. So often we look at the decision as the decision. But you can often break decisions into smaller decisions and gather information. And that information can change the path. You don't have to decide to invade a country, right? You can decide that, oh, we want to scope out information. We want to scout. We want to do all these other things that are short of sort of like the big decision. But we wrap a lot of our ego up into making those big decisions because we

want to be the person who makes those big decisions. Yeah, and the ego creates a gigantic blind spot for a lot of people, probably most people. All of us to some degree, right? Like Ryan wrote, ego is the enemy, but it's also your friend, right? Like there's two sides of this ego coin, which is it propels us to do things that have never been done before. I mean, the reason that you want to put people on Mars is because you think you can do it, but nobody's ever done it before. So there's a large component of ego there. But when is it serving you

and when is it getting in your way? Yeah. When you think, I mean, you know, obviously Elon Musk is the embodiment of many of these models, you know, first principle thinking, and also somebody whose, you know, circle of competence is very wide. And yet, to land a

rocket, is that inside his circle of... These things become blurred. I would imagine part of this is having self-awareness around the boundaries of that circle in order to properly calibrate when you need to check your thinking with somebody else. So your circle can expand and it can become irrelevant too, right? So you can grow it, or if it's a rapidly moving field, if you're not keeping up to date, it shrinks. And so I think Elon's a great example of somebody who's grown his in multiple domains over the year, probably in ways that most of us would never do, right? He's slept at his office.

He's dedicated his whole life to these things. He's all in on these projects. And he's been all in for years, right? I think he's been basically Tesla and SpaceX for the past 12 years. And there's not much else. And most of us, when we look at that, we're, I wouldn't trade. I wouldn't do that, right? Like, I want to have more time

with my family. I want to sleep more nights. I don't want to be jet setting around the world and always jet lagged. I don't want to be doing all of these things. And I think the world needs more people like Elon. Yeah. Thank God we got Elon. But we also can't sit back and just expect he's going to do it all for us, right? I don't know, man. I'm waiting for his next project. Yeah, I know, right? Let's talk about inversion. That's an interesting one.

Yeah. So what do you want to avoid, right? Often we don't know the answer. We don't know sort of the best path, but we know the outcomes we want to avoid, right? So let's get rid of the bad outcomes and we're only left with the good outcomes. Or another way to think of that is often organizations work on stories. It's the story we tell that gets us promoted. What are you doing? So it's an addition thing. It's like you're in charge of innovation at the organization. So you have to tell a story

about all the things you're doing at the organization that are making the organization more innovative. And it becomes about that story. When becoming more innovative might be asking yourself, what are the things we're doing that are getting in the way of innovation? And then removing those. But that's not a good story you can tell, right? We have too many meetings. The meetings are too long.

People don't feel trusted. They don't feel like they can share ideas. They don't feel loved or respected. have too many meetings and meetings are too long that like, you know, people aren't, um, they don't feel trusted. They don't feel like they can share ideas. They don't feel loved or respected. They don't like all of this. How do we improve those? Those are one angle to it. But the other angle is like, what are the things we're doing that are getting in the way of trust? So instead of trying to improve it, like what's eroding it, is it a values mismatch between what we say are our values and what we're living. And that creates a conflict where people listen to the, I mean, we're more prone to listen to the environment than we are to words. So if the culture, the stated culture of the organization is one thing, but the other culture is a different thing, then we listen to that. And then we become scared. And when we become scared, we don't want to collaborate. We don't feel loved. We don't feel respected.

And that's communicating with our subconscious. So why would we sort of like go all in on this project or for this organization when we're getting these mismatched signals? And a large part of life is sort of like, I think Charlie Munger who phrased it like, I just want to know where I'm going to die so I never go there. And that's inversion, right? Like how do we avoid that outcome? And you can also imply inversion to life, right? If you, it's a great thought experiment to sort of think about where you, like close your eyes and think about where you are when you're 90. You're sitting on a bench and you're at the end of your life. It's your last day.

Like, what do you want your eulogy to say? What do you want people to say about you? Do you want people to say that you, you were the CEO of a fortune 500 company, but you had no friends because the way that you attained that was mutually exclusive from meaningful relationships with others? Do you want people to say that you were always there as a father, a spouse, a partner? And then are you living a life in accordance with that, right? So how do I avoid the outcomes that I don't want, right?

So now I know what I do want, I have a vector. How do I get there? Well, I just start dropping away these things that are getting in the way of that, right? Maybe I don't. I give up sort of trying to make partner at a law firm and that's okay because that's not really what I want. So much of what we want, we think we want it in the moment, but when we get it, we're no happier, we're no better. I mean, I fell into this when I was getting promoted. I always thought, oh,

the next promotion, I'll just be happier. I'll be so much, I can impact the organization more. I will make more money so I can live a better life. But it never seemed to manifest itself, right? No matter how much money I made or what level I got to in the organization, there was always sort of this, your peer group changes, so now you're just comparing yourself to new people, and you don't feel good about it. And I think that keeping the end in mind, which is inverting, like let's live life backwards.

What does that mean to live life backwards? It means that we're living towards that goal. So we can filter on a day-to-day basis and avoid the stuff that gets in the way of where we actually want to go. Right. So inversion, bringing clarity to all of this by basically forecasting all the way to the end point and moving backwards from there to better understand the steps that you want to take that are going to move you in the direction that you want to go. The kind of bug that I see in the system that you kind of touched on here for a second is I think that most people really don't know what they want.

Yeah. Or they think they know what they want, but it's not really what they want. Like your example of thinking that you wanted to be promoted and this would provide you with happiness or whatever else you were seeking in that moment, getting that only to realize that wasn't the fix or that that was a misplaced expectation on your part. And so much of,

I think, proper decision-making is rooted in the internal process of self-reflection. Like it's an emotional spiritual journey where you have to become adequately integrated and self-actualized in order to even set that vector to begin with in the appropriate direction. I don't know if I can add to that. It's true, right? Like nobody's ever taught you how to reflect. Nobody's ever, or very few people ever

sort of like sit down in life and say like, where do you want to go? Like, are you doing the things that you are going to, we're so busy, we're so focused on speed. And the difference between speed and velocity is velocity has a destination. It has a vector attached to it. So you're going somewhere, you're not running around in circles. And we're so busy up until the point where it's too late. And then we realize that we sort of often realize that we didn't spend our time the way we wanted to spend it. But if you know what you want people to say when you're 90, you know what that outcome is, you know what that destination is, which involves sitting down and thinking about it and struggling with it and knowing that that answer is not the same for everybody.

There are people who want money, power, and fame, and they'll walk over other people to get there. So it's not a judgment on that, but do you know where you're going? Do you know how to get there? Are you thinking about it consciously, and are you living a life that's in line with that? And I think that those are really important questions to explore, and not just once.

You explore them as you live, right? Like as we were talking about earlier, some things change, right? What you think you want when you're 20 is very different than say 30 or 40 or 50 or 60. Right, so you always have to be checking in with that. But back to incentives, I think that we're in a culture

where those incentives are misplaced. We're not incentivized to do that kind of internal reflection. You know, short of suffering a personal crisis that compels us to look in the mirror in a different way, it's the rare individual who will step outside of the, you know, structure in which they find themselves in order to really take stock, you know, in a very honest way of where they're at and where they really, really truly wanna be. What bigger incentive though can you have than you get one life? And the opportunity cost of life is like, you only get one.

You're born and then you're sent to school and you're on the receiving end of a tremendous amount of information and inputs and you're driving around and you're looking at billboards and you're watching television and it's impossible to not have all of that you know influence um how you prioritize how you're going to live it's a materialistic culture we're told that luxury and comfort are priorities that we should climb the corporate ladder that we should grind and work harder than the person sitting next to us and, you know, impress the boss and, you know, get the new car lease and, you know, move to the suburbs or whatever it is without ever taking a moment to

stop and apply a mental model to that. Well, I mean, it's easy to live your life by somebody else's scorecard. It's hard to live your life by your own scorecard, but only one of those is likely to make you satisfied. Yeah, and I think it's a personal responsibility thing. It's incumbent upon all of us to take responsibility for wrestling with those questions for ourselves. But it's in plain sight, right? If you do the research on regrets of the nearly dead,

the people in old age homes that are at the end of their life, they all sort of regret the same things. I know, but we all know that, right? So this elucidates another thing that you talk a lot about, which is the difference between knowledge and understanding and the gap that exists between understanding and action. Like we all know that story of being on the deathbed and how the person never says, I wish I worked harder, right? But does that really impact how we're living our lives on a daily basis? What is the trickle down impact of that? And I think it speaks to another model, the specific title, which I can't recall, but it has to do with when the outcomes of your actions are very distant from, yeah, what's that one called? First order to second order to thinking. I think so, but maybe it's a corollary of that, like where the further away the impact of your

actions are, the easier it is to sort of absolve yourself of responsibility for those decisions. Yeah, the distance from the decision. I mean, one of the reasons that we don't learn from our decision-making that we talk about in the book is sort of like the distance from the decision. So if you're communicating through two or three people before somebody actually puts it into action, you convince yourself that your decision was right, just the execution was flawed. Whereas if you put your hand on a hot stove, there's nobody else to blame. Like you have 100% accountability. When you throw a plastic bag in the garbage,

it's hard to tie that to culpability for global climate change. Or when you buy a steak at the grocery store, you're so disconnected. There's so many people in between that steak being in the grocery store and the person that slit the cow's throat that you don't feel like you really have any,

you're not wed to that choice. Or if you eat a Snickers bar every day, right? Like today, it's not gonna make a difference, but you do that every day for 10 years and it's probably gonna make a huge difference. So not only how your body processes sort of that food and your insulin response, but it'll make a difference to your weight difference. So not only how your body processes sort of that food and your insulin response, but it'll make a difference to your weight

and your overall health and probably your happiness. Yeah, and tying it back to the elderly person lying on their deathbed. Yeah, I get that. But like, you know what? Like I got this deadline and the boss is waiting for this thing and I'm just going to have to pull an all-nighter.

I mean, you can live your life one day at a time. If you're going to do that, you might as well go get high on like heroin or something, right? Like it doesn't equate to sort of like where do I want to be when I am at the end of my life. And we don't know if we're going to die today or we're going to die tomorrow or when life is going to end. And so you sort of have to maximize for happiness in the moment, but plan for living forever. Right.

have to maximize for happiness in the moment, but plan for living forever. Right. One of my favorite of your models or sub-models is this idea of first-order negatives in exchange for second-order positives. Yeah. So going to the gym is a great example, right? I don't like going to the gym. Some people like it, but it's not my favorite. I don't wake up and go, yay, I get to go to the gym today.

But it's something I do because it increases the odds that I'm going to have a happy, healthy, longer life. It releases stress. It has numerous health benefits to not only my brain but my body. It increases the odds that I'm going to be healthy. But for me, it's a first-order negative. I don't want to go to the gym. And I do it because I know that the payoffs are sort of positive in the end, or at least they're probabilistically positive. I got a pithy retitle for that. Okay. What is it?

Pay now, love it later. Yeah. That's a great, yeah. I like it a lot. You know what I mean? One of the interesting things about your work is that it has captured the fascination of not only your boss back at work, but Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and professional athletes, right? Which is super interesting.

It's not dissimilar from, I mean, Ryan Holiday finds himself in the same position. Yeah, I think it's interesting to think that those three audiences, and I've been trying to think of like, what do they have in common? Like what is the commonality between Wall Street's professional sports and sort of like Silicon Valley?

And I think one of the things that I've come up with is small differences in how you approach a problem or make decisions have huge outcome variance, right? So if you're on Wall Street and you're sort of like 1% better than other people, it could mean billions of dollars to your firm on a yearly basis. If you're Silicon Valley, it could mean the difference between a million and a hundred million users. And if you're professional sports, it could mean the difference between, you know, a million and 100 million users. And if you're professional sports, it might mean the difference between winning a Stanley Cup or, you know, not qualifying for the playoffs. Right.

When did you first realize that your work was connecting with those communities? You start getting some interesting emails. Yeah. I mean, Wall Street was sort of the first one. Silicon Valley was the second. Now professional sports has been the third in a sort of major way. I think it just resonates with people

who are looking to get better in a non-self-helpy way. Like we're not prescribing anything. We never tell people what to do. We just sort of like, here's a model. Here's how you can apply it. Here's how you can use it. And here's how you can connect it to something else. Or here's a passage from a book that we're going to contextualize for you and sort of like connect to another idea that you've already learned.

So we view Farnham Street as sort of like building on existing knowledge. The longer you read it, the deeper you sort of like get in the rabbit hole of what we're doing. And compounding. Compounding your knowledge, right of what we're doing and compounding, compounding your knowledge. Right. So we're not talking about things that change. We don't ever talk about politics or anything topical. It's just sort of like, we don't want to tell you what to think about the election. We want to offer you the tools about how you could possibly think about the election if you want to do it. Right. In turn, one of the things that you're doing now is you basically provide coaching services to individuals too, right? Like that's part of a small part of what you do. I do two clients a year. Two clients. Yeah. Right. So

walk me through like how you advise, I mean, without, I'm not asking you to, you know, tell me anything that's confidential, but, you know, so-and-so calls you in and says, I love what you're doing. Like, I need some help. Come and help me. Like, how do you begin the process of trying to guide or advise somebody like that? Well, interestingly, like, we only take on, I only take on projects I want now because we only do two a year. So, it's pretty easy to say no to most things. And then it's a match to say no to most things.

And then it's a match between what is the person I'm one for. Often, I mean, what we've had the last year and a half is basically I'm just on retainer. And then people will call me when they have a major life decision and I'll either fly in and we'll talk about it or we'll talk about it on the phone. And a lot of it is just being an outside view into their decision-making. So I don't have, I'm not their friend in that sense. I'm not their coworker. I'm their shrink, right? Like I have a vested interest in sort of like them seeing the problem for what it might be more accurately than everybody else in their life. And if you think about that, like when's the last time somebody came up to you at work and was like, here's the one thing holding you back. But I guarantee you, if you're listening to this at

work now and you look to your left and right, those people know what's holding you back, but they've never told you why, because everything's relative to them. So information gets filtered, right? Information about ourselves, our blind spots get filtered. And we can't see it because we're in the system. It's just like, how fast are we moving right now? And you're like, we're not moving at all. We're sitting here in your studio in LA. But if we were on the sun, we're moving at like 19,000 miles an hour or something around there, around the sun. And if we change our reference point to the galaxy, I mean, the galaxy is also expanding. So our reference point matters. And so often in decisions, just being on the outside

and listening to people walk through their problems, you can find the one or two things that make a difference to that decision. And you can sort of point that out for them in a way that other people won't or can't because they're too close to the person or the situation. And so, I mean, we've done cool things. Like I've advised on billion dollar mergers. I've done all of this thing, but never from a financial perspective, just from a like, how are you thinking about this perspective? And are you comfortable that you've done all of your work on the decision? And walk me through your thinking. And as an outsider, just walking me through your thinking means you sort of like have to go back to basics.

And then I ask questions because I'm like, that doesn't make sense. And then you've assumed knowledge. And that's all the knowledge that you get from being in that system. And so talking about it often, I mean, we point out things or I point out things about how they can go about thinking in perhaps a bit more different way about it or tools that they could use to sort of think about the problem in a different way. But a lot of it is really just sort of like, I'm going to show you what the system looks like. I'm going to give you a mirror or a window into it so that you can see for yourself. And then you often realize your own gaps, like, oh, I didn't think about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To have that outside perspective. And also

somebody who can say, in your case, under your specific set of circumstances, these are the models that I think are most relevant to run this decision through. And then kind of being a sounding board for that like volleyball match. Right. Right. And then often it's also timelines, right? Like in the real world, people are under pressure to make decisions. They feel like they have a short tenure if they're the CEO.

If you're the head coach of a professional sports team or the general manager, you have a short shelf life. You have a short expected shelf life. And so you often will take from the future to try to improve the present. Sometimes you want to do that. Sometimes you don't. And walking through people, are you setting yourself up? Because you eventually have to pay that and you have to pay it with interest. So are you setting yourself up in Because you eventually have to pay that and you have to pay it with interest. So are you setting yourself up in the way that you want? And the difference between the CEO and the owner is the owner is often always thinking long-term. The CEO is a very win-now mentality and sort of bridging that gap.

Are you on the same timeline and making sure that everybody's on board with those decisions? Right. I mean, that would be a scenario in which the incentives aren't necessarily aligned. Like one is looking towards quarterly earnings, and the other one is thinking about where they're going to be 10 years from now. Right. Well, think about most shareholders. Their incentive is, if we assume that most shareholders and corporations want to own the company for a long period of time, their incentive is mismatched from the CEO,

which has an average tenure of like, I don't know, three to five years, I would imagine in the S&B. Yeah. How do you think about the difference between failure and success? Often luck. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I've had a lot of failure. I'll let you know when I get some success. But I think from a decision-making point of view, you're never, the decisions where you know the outcome or you can't fail are not really worth thinking about. And you have to determine if failure is something you can handle or not. And often we are going to fail and how do we recover from that is super important to achieving success because the odds that you

succeed the first time you try something are pretty slim. If you look at like, we're all walking today and we fell down walking hundreds, if not thousands of times, but we got up and we did it again. And so often life is just getting up one more time than you fall down. But going back to decision-making again, reversible, irreversible, like where can you fail? Where can't you fail? And how we think about what failure means.

I think we attach so much meaning to it. And there's so much ego that is infused into that. We're afraid to look bad. We don't wanna appear to have failed to our peers and things like that, that prevent us from perhaps being more open about taking certain risks that could in the longterm create a better and bigger growth curve.

Well, that goes back to sort of like how we're living our life. Like whose scorecard are we using? Are we using an internal scorecard? Are we using an external scorecard? are we using an external scorecard? Am I failing to meet up to somebody's expectations of me? Is that something I want to do or do I want freedom? And the freedom in this case would be freedom from living up to other people's

expectations, freedom from sort of feeling the need to fulfill society's obligations to me. And I'm not saying like break the law or anything like that, but we're so often driven by like, you're subliminally and otherwise told that the people who attain power, money, and fame are sort of the people to emulate. Like my kids come home from school and they start talking about all these celebrities.

I'm like, man, I want you home talking about like Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein. And like, these are the heroes, right? Like Elon, not these political sort of people or not these Hollywood movie stars. And that's, I don't want them in that life where like they see that as success because that leads to how do I get that success, which leads to, I can step on other people. I can do these things that are mutually exclusive from living a life that of meaning in order to try to attain these things. And I think that we know, I mean, that that's not the path that we want our kids on and like who we have as our heroes is super important.

Right. Heroes walk amongst us. We just don't do a great job of shining a light on the best ones. And in order to do that, you have to do a little counter-programming against what mainstream society is feeding all of us, not just young people. But I think some of that comes from just, we were talking about this earlier, young people. But I think some of that comes from just, we were talking about this earlier, reflection, right? Like where do I want to go in life? And that comes from being alone with your thoughts and working through your thoughts and having many false steps and sort of being conscious about, am I working towards those goals or am I not working towards them? Is this where I actually want to end up? Because so many of us reach our destination and we're like, oh, this isn't what I thought it was.

This isn't where I wanted to go. And part of the problem is we didn't check in on the way. And maybe that's a weekly check-in. Maybe it's, I mean, I do it sort of like twice a year at this point, but maybe it's monthly. Maybe it's sort of like something you book a holiday with yourself for a day every year, and you sort of like go to this isolated area where you're not around

people, and maybe you walk in nature, or maybe you sit in a hot tub, or you do whatever you need to do, and you think about, am I living the life that I want to be living? What are the things that I'm doing that are leading me to where I want to go? What are the things that are getting in the way of where I want to go? And what would I regret if I died today? Is there a relationship that I wanna repair? Is there somebody that's not serving me that I need to get rid of because I don't like their anger? Those are the questions

that we can sort of walk through mentally. And then we start, once you realize it, then you put it into action. And as you said at the start, action's really hard, right? You might have a really close friend who's always angry and it's affecting you and it's affecting your health. But at the end of the day, you know, you need to let them go because they're not going to get you where you want to go and you can't help them. What does that daily practice look like for you?

I think a lot like that. I mean, I don't do daily. I sort of do it on a, I have regular like scheduled appointments with myself to make sure that I do it. But I'm always thinking about, how can I help this person? And at some point, you can't help them. And you need to sort of like, your environment will dictate a large part of where you go in life. So who you hang around, how much you care about other people dictates, I mean, to a large extent, how fulfilled and meaningful your life is. So, yeah, it's just, I mean, everybody has their own routine. There's no one prescription for it. And there's no wrong answer to it.

It's just, I think that if there was a wrong answer, it would be like, I'm just not thinking about it because it's hard, right? It's hard to be like, I don't wanna be where I'm at. It's hard to absolve or hard to take responsibility for being in that spot, right? And we're all born into a set of circumstances that we don't control. We don't control sort of our parents' socioeconomic status. We don't control our zip code.

We don't control how much they care. We don't control the trajectory we're put on. But at some point in life, you take control of that trajectory. And maybe it's 18 for some people, maybe it's 25 for other people. But at that point, you're in control. So you don't control what point you're at, but you control where you go from there. And you do that through your habits. You do that through your thinking. You do that through your decision-making. And the question that I want everybody to ask is like, where am I going? Am I going to get there? Is what I'm doing today going to get me where I want to go? And if not, what do I need to do in order to get where I want to go? In order to do that, you do have

to create boundaries around that solitary time to allow yourself that level of reflection. And I agree that it doesn't have to take a certain form. Like, I know you're a meditator. Like, I'm a meditator. I could do it a little more consistently than I do. All of that. And if somebody's saying that's not for me, I'd still encourage them to try it. But even if you're dismissive of that, finding something that you connect with, that you can consistently repeat with relative frequency, I think is critical to being able to have confidence that you're engaging that aspect of your consciousness. But so often, like I was on the airplane yesterday, right? We get this alone time away from our partners, our spouse, usually the person beside us doesn't want to talk to us. And what do we do? We immediately distract ourselves, right? We put

on a movie, we order a drink, we do all of these things to sort of like, I don't want to be alone with my thoughts. I don't want to think about these things. And that's not to say that you need to think about them every day because they're pretty heavy weighty thoughts, but they are something that I think a lot of people will regret not having thought of toward the end of their life. So this New York Times article came out about you. What was that, like a year ago or something?

It wasn't, or nine months ago or something? November 11th, 2018. I like that, you know the date. Yeah. I appreciate the honesty on that. That had to be, I'm sure that, you know, resulted in a lot of attention suddenly coming in your direction.

Like I've been following your stuff for a while and, you know, there's certain corners of, you know, the digital space where you've been a celebrity for quite some time, but that's very different than, you know, the white hot spotlight of the New York Times. It was definitely an interesting experience. It had to be kind of surreal, right? Like, how did this happen?

Yeah. I was just writing my little anonymous blog. Yeah, and I mean, I didn't think the story was gonna happen. And I would say I probably wasn't exactly cooperative with the story for a long time before. But it ended up. Not cooperative.

Why? Because? Not huge on the attentions. Yeah. I mean, I did work for an intelligence agency, right? I'm used to being in the shadows. And this is a big spotlight. Right.

Probably, yeah, it's a different world, right? And it's changed a lot of things. I mean, for Farnham Street and not necessarily for me, but I mean, it's a lot of attention. Yeah. How many people do you have working on Farnham Street now? We have four full time. Yeah.

And that includes books, the workshops, the website, all the stuff that we do. And these retreats that you do, they're limited to a relatively small number of people, right? So we teach decision-making for two days. We limit it to 50 people. Last time it sold out in like 17 minutes. And we just do them a couple of times a year.

And what is the structure of that? Like, what is the program that you're taking somebody through? We'll sort of talk about what does it mean to make decisions? Well, A, I mean, the whole thing is orchestrated around the experience, right? So the content is part of the experience, but, um, you can't just put people in a room and expect them to reveal information about each other or help each other get better. So it starts sort of like on a Wednesday night where we have an open bar and everybody comes in. And so we do selection to begin with.

So it's not selection as in you have to apply to get in. It's selection as in the web page is pretty sparse. You can't copy and paste something and go to your boss. Tickets are non-cancelable, non-transferable. So if you bought a ticket, like you have a ticket, you can't give it to somebody else. So nobody's there who doesn't want to be there. Nobody's there who's not familiar with us.

Nobody's there because somebody told them to go. I mean, you're all, so when you come to the open bar, you have the social event, you have a little bit of lubricant, and if will, to a lot of people are introverts. So it helps them sort of talk to other people, but you all have something in common. And not only do you read Farnam Street, you find out like you share similar values and politics. We sort of like cover the spectrum, but on a value basis, like people tend to value the

same thing. And then the next day you come in for the first day of the workshop. And then that is oriented around, Oh, how do we get to know each other better? So the first thing we do is sort of like walk through, uh, I remember that the New York times had that 35 questions to fall in love article. So we did a rip off of that, which is like, I think we did 15 questions, but elevating intimacy. And so you, so when you walk in, you've already got familiar faces, you sit down at a table with people and

then you go around, you find other people and you start asking these questions and you're only allowed to go deeper. So whatever number you start at, uh, and then you say, forced vulnerability. Well, it's sort of like, uh, getting you used like getting to know people on a real basis, right? So many times you go to conferences and you get to know people, but you don't know anything about who they are, what they care about. And so that's all bullshit. So how do we actually get to know who you are? And it doesn't mean you're going to be best friends, although we've had tons of friendships created at these workshops that span the globe. But it does mean that we're going to help you get to a position where you feel comfortable talking to people about your decisions.

And then we sort of walk you through individual decision making, group decision making, how you respond physiologically to decisions, how you go about thinking about them. And so it's a different experience than sort of the website. And it's very organic. So you can come to the conference like two or three times, which often we get about 20% repeats. And it's just a completely different experience because you're with a different table, you're with a different group.

And the content changes, I would say probably about 25% of the content turns over. But most of the experience is like, what am I learning from other people? How am I helping them? How are they pointing out my blind spots to me? And how can I use that information to make better decisions? And all of that leads into, you have to trust the person. And so then on Thursday night, we'll do dinner and we do a big group dinner. And again, you're sitting with different people. And so we found with more than 50 people,

you can't get to know everybody. And 50 is really tough, but like we found with, we did 50. 50 is a lot for like two and a half days. We did 58 once and it's a different experience. So with 58 people showed up and they clicked. And so what happened is like Wednesday night, you formed a click

and then you just hung out with that click. And so when we sell 50, we really get like 48, 45 to 48 people show up. And then that's a smaller number that you can sort of manage. You at least get to know everybody's name sort of, and you learn something about them and you're always changing seats and sort of,

so again, it's about the experience. And then we sort of connect people at the end And you learn something about them and you're always changing seats. So again, it's about the experience. And then we sort of connect people at the end. You can opt out of sharing your contact information. And then we just share everybody's contact information. We've had people change careers. We've had, like I said, incredible friendships. I think we even had one couple start dating as a result of these things.

And I think it's really neat, right? Like it's a good environment to, but we have all ranges of society. So it's, the other benefit is people who naturally wouldn't talk to each other. Like when you think about work or life, you're, you're in this rut, you're surrounded by people like you, right? And rut's probably the wrong word, but you're surrounded by people who think like you, act like you, reinforce what you already do. You come to one of our events, and now all of a sudden you're surrounded by people who have the same values as you. They read the same website as you, but we're going to have, I think there's two professional sports people at our next conference. There's a couple of Wall Street people.

There's bankers. There's doctors, there's lawyers. Like the variety of people that you're gonna come across is just outside of your normal scope. And we cross all political socioeconomic boundaries. Right, but all super high achieving people who have been very successful in their respective disciplines to be able to then, like for a professional athlete to say,

look, here's what I do to get that extra edge and relay that to a CEO or somebody. I mean, that's like invaluable. I mean, if you're sitting atop a massive decision that you have to make, like, should I sell my company? Should I get divorced? Like these kinds of things, like I can see it just being incredibly valuable.

Yeah, and so people, I mean, the feedback is really good from the events. We never use sort of like the attendees for marketing. Often it's just a surprise and we sort of build the community out of that. So it's like now you're part of something. You're part of something bigger than just showing up to a workshop on decision-making. You're part of the Farnham Street community of people who want to improve, want to get better, help each other out. And that comes with obligations. Yeah. I'm interested in some of the decisions that you made about how you've constructed the model for your digital empire, right? Like you've

produced a lot of freely available content, but you've also, you know, four-walled some of it. And you've developed like a very, you know, strong following, a lot of people who care deeply about the work that you do. And it's really essentially looks like it's moving more and more towards a subscription model type of endeavor. And I'm interested in how you think about, in a broader sense, about the digital landscape from a creator's point of view, because it's something that, obviously, I spend a lot of time thinking about. Yeah, I don't think I have a lot of rock-solid answers.

I mean, I can walk through some of my thinking, which is I need to make a living, right? So we need some sort of- It has to be a self-sustaining thing. What's the best way to do that? So there needs to be some sort of it has to be a self-sustaining thing right what's the best way to do that so there needs to be some sort of element where there's an exchange of um like we're creating like somebody pointed this out to me a number of years ago and they said you're creating so much value and you're capturing so little of it and i was like isn't that the way it's supposed to be right like capturing meaning monetize monetizing so little of it and And I was like, isn't that the way it's supposed to be? Capturing meaning monetizing.

Monetizing, so a little of it. And I've been thinking about that statement ever since. So if you capture more than you create, you go bankrupt. If you create more than you capture by wide disparity, you can also go bankrupt. You're creating a ton of value for people, but if you can't pay the bills and put the lights on, then you won't be able to do this thing that's creating all this value for people. And so I've just adopted this model of content will mostly be free. And we will find other ways to monetize. And if we can't monetize other ways, we will charge for content. But content being free means like our podcast is free, but you'll be able to soon pay to subscribe to the podcast and get an ad-free version or get extras to it. And so we're not preventing people from listening to the content, but we are sort of like giving them a value ad where you want the transcripts, you want the ad-free version.

If you value your time, it's probably worth it. And if you don't, then if you have the time, then by all means, there's no obligation to sort of subscribe. You're not going to miss out on that part of it because we're not going to hold an interview with Jim Collins back because you don't pay us money. I don't think that's the solution for me personally. The flip side is we have a community of people. We call it the learning community, a bunch of like-minded people who want to help each other get better. And we need to add value to them.

And how do we add value in a way that is different from what's freely available, right? One of the big feedbacks, if you read the Amazon reviews on our book, and this sort of like struck me because I was like, huh, I wonder if people realize what incentive they're creating. But one of the big feedbacks is like, a lot of this information's already on the blog. The book is a waste of money. Like you don't have to buy it. And the byproduct of that is we've stopped putting up new models on the blog, right?

So we've stopped publishing them because, oh, okay, well, if that's the biggest piece of feedback we're getting, then we just won't publish them. We'll publish the books and then we'll publish. And the ones on the blog are different, right? The content in the book is all new. It's not the stuff on the blog. It's talking about the same models,

but people feel like they understand. You're going way deeper into these subjects. And then there is an obligation to sort of like I support people that I value. Like I want them to exist in the world. I realize running a business is inherently complicated. And it's okay to pay for content. The flip side of this is like we're not going to end up with 50 monthly subscriptions, right? Like you're not going to Netflix, Disney plus, like that's the thing, right?

So you, and so one of the things that we did that was really controversial is we don't do monthly. We might do it for the podcast, but we don't do monthly for the learning community. It's yearly. Like you give us a year long commitment. There's no cancellations, no refunds. Again, it's on the website. There's no fine print.

It's just like. But you've built up enough credibility where you can do that. Yeah. Well, I hope so. Right. And we're always trying to get better. But what I didn't want, we did monthly for a couple of months. And what I realized was like, we almost had to build this system where people get the receipt and you have to send them a piece of content like

right before they get their receipt because you get your receipt and then what instantly triggers in you is like what have i got from this guy i didn't get i haven't gotten anything for 28 days right i haven't gotten anything for like two weeks like why am i paying this thing and it's like well that promotes more content more content like i don't want to be on this content treadmill um where we're constantly feel like we need to produce more content. It's antithetical to the whole ethos of what you're doing. Right. More content is not better content, right?

More content is often just more content. And you feel like you're getting more as a reader sometimes, but you're not, right? as a reader sometimes, but you're not, right? Well, the experience that I have receiving your email and listening to the podcast is refreshing in that it's clear a lot of thought went into this. And this is timeless, evergreen content. And it's been proofed and created in a way to position it in that manner. Like I know when I get that

email that like a lot of people thought about this before it got sent to me. And I appreciate that in this transient world of like content digestion, where everything is a toss away. And I do think it's interesting that, you know, you've had incredible conversations with a wide variety of people on the Knowledge Project. And I think that's another treasure trove of just unbelievably helpful, elucidating information. But in the way that our culture digests that, there is this sense nonetheless

that like a podcast you did a year ago, well, that's old news. You know what I mean? Totally. Which is weird because it's not. Totally. If you're looking at a set of encyclopedias, like A and Z have equal footing on that shelf

and they're always sitting there ready for you. If they wrote the Z version of the encyclopedia after the A, it doesn't mean it's any less valuable. I remember a comment on Twitter last week was like, somebody was dismissing something we wrote in 2013 because they were like, that was written in 2013, as if that was the reason to dismiss it without any sort of coherent argument as to why the date of something timeless would matter. So how do you try to maintain the salience of stuff that, you know, was posted a while ago? Like that's a challenge. I'm not saying you have the answer to that,

but I think that that's a, that's something that, that I think, you know, is a challenge that requires a little bit of thought. So we're not perfect. There's some stuff that we find that, you know, we pair. But we take the summer every year, June, July, and August. We release no new content, and we spend those months updating old content. So we just sort of go through. Why do you need to update it if it's evergreen? Well, because you update the wording, right?

You update the connectivity. Maybe you have a better way to phrase things. And so occasionally we pair things like we'll remove an article, but not very often. And, but we'll make subtle changes to articles or we'll link it to newer articles that we've written that might expand people's worldview of it. But we're taking the time to sort of like, Oh, maybe that was a little bit more of a topical reference than we wanted to.

Right. Like we mentioned Bitcoin in the book. Right. But we were conscious about mentioning Bitcoin because it's like, well, that's an ever evolving. It's an ever evolving thing. And like we aim to be evergreen. Like you should be able to listen to any episode of the Knowledge Project. And we never talk about politics. We never talk about anything sort of like topical of the day. And you wouldn't know if it was released yesterday or if it was released four years ago. And that's the goal, right? Because we only wanna talk about the timeless things.

It seems to me that the heavy lifting in your work is this inner connectivity piece between all of these models. Like I'm envisioning like a giant white wall where there's like, you're drawing lines in between these ideas or some kind of insane Venn diagram that looks like somebody, you know, some schizophrenic that went off their meds

is trying to construct. Like, what does that look like? And that is an organic breathing thing that I would imagine is very much in gestation and always changing. It's always changing. An example would be sort of like time, right? So we have this concept of time.

What does that mean? Well, let's think about biology. Well, biology teaches us that survival is everything. So we need to survive. So to survive, you need to adapt. Compounding teaches us that most of the gains come at the end, not at the beginning. So over time, all the gains come at the end. So you have to delay gains at the beginning. You get massive gains at the end. all the gains come at the end. So you have to delay gains at the beginning. You get massive gains at the end. I think, you know, the story was the guy who created chess, I think. I think it's a legend. I don't know if it's true or not, but he asked for, he showed the king the chess and the king was like, what do you want? He said, well, one grain of rice for the first piece on the board, two for the second, four for the third, all the way up to the 64th. And the king, the

emperor said, no problem. And then realized that that was more rice in the world. Right. So on the 63rd day, you have half as much rice as the 64th day. And so, but think of how does that apply to relationships? Right. So we know we need to survive and we know most of the gains come at the end. So when a relationship happens, you can think about, there's four permutations of relationship. There's win, win, win, lose, lose, win, and-lose. But only one of those relationships will survive over time.

Only one of those relationships will take advantage of compounding. So now we've connected a whole bunch of different ideas and we've done it in a way that can direct how we engage with not only friends and family, but customers, suppliers, everybody in our lives, right? How do we make this relationship a win for them? Because we know if it's not a win for them, it's not going to survive over time. If it doesn't survive over time, it can't compound. And if it can't compound, we're not going to get all of the gains at the end. Right. It sounds like you're aiming towards some kind of unifying theory of the universe, ultimately. I don't know if I'm not.

It is very, like, I'm here listening to you and I'm like, this is amazing. And I'm also like, I'm noticing my resistance also, because I'm like, this guy's trying to write a computer program for, you know. An operating system for life. You know what I mean? And I'm like, I'm a very emotional, sensitive person. And I'm like, where does intuition, you know, where does that like spark where you don't know where it came from? And you're like, I'm channeling something where I don't even know, you know, from whence it arrives.

Like, is there a place for that kind of spirituality to live in the work that you do? Totally. I believe that that's a huge component to our lives, right? So I'm not, I don't believe in just pure rationality. I don't think that's the way we should live lives. And I think that emotion and sort of spirituality and community and all of those things are also part of it, right? We're part of an ecosystem, but individually we have emotions. We need to sort of not deny them, not suppress them, right? I think so many problems in society today from my vantage point is people overanalyzing their feelings, trying to suppress them and not actually feeling them and delaying the feeling

instead of just being present with the emotions. I think there's a lot of studies that say if you actually feel the feelings when you first feel them, they sort of last 90 seconds to sort of like three minutes. Like if you're angry and you don't suppress it and you don't sort of like analyze it and you just feel that anger, it'll go away pretty quickly. But it's when you suppress it, that it starts to crop up again and again, you become passive aggressive and you become aggressive aggressive. And I think that we need to feel this feeling. And there's decisions that you're going to make in life that are not rational and that's okay, right? They don't have to be rational. I think what you want to do is

just be aware that you're conscious of the fact that you're not making a rational decision or you're okay sort of like throwing the rational side of your brain out. Like quitting a great high-profile job to start a blog is not necessarily the most rational decision you can make. Who you marry, who you're in a relationship with, what that connection is like, those are not purely rational decisions. that connection is like, those are not purely rational decisions. Those are very emotionally driven chemistry, physiological response-based decisions. And I think that those are equally powerful, if not in some cases more powerful

than rational decision-making. Yeah, I think they can be channeled to great effect as long as you have a healthy understanding of that emotional landscape. Like when am I feeling a spark of inspiration or when am I experiencing some kind of overwhelming emotion that I know is driving me towards making a certain type of decision versus, oh, I'm just repeating a pattern as a result of my childhood trauma. And this is going to take me down the wrong path. Even though I feel strongly about doing this,

I know well enough to know that that's not the right thing to do. But so often that becomes an excuse today too, right? Like we sort of like, oh, I was brought up that way. But going back to what I said. This is what I do. This is what I do, right? So we tell ourselves that narrative and that narrative becomes reality when another narrative you can replace that with. And often we have to replace narratives to get

sort of better narratives is that I'm in control of my life. And no matter what's happened to me, it might not be my fault that I'm in this situation, but it's my responsibility how I handle this situation going forward. It's my responsibility to respond to the situation in the best way that I can. And I own that and nobody else owns that for me. And I can't blame my past, but everything in my past has got me here and that's okay. That past has put you on this trajectory. It's put you at this moment in time where you go from here is completely up to you though. And you control that and nobody else controls that. Boom. Powerfully said. All right. Well, let's end this. I think a good way to kind of have people walking away from this with a sense

of empowerment, if somebody's struggling with a decision, like what is the first line of inquiry? If you're sitting in a conference room and ideas are getting thrown around, or there's some type of decision table to be made, like where do you begin trying to deconstruct that and and get people thinking you know right-minded two things stand out as really fun to do as an exercise that's clarifying so the first thing is have everybody write down what the decision they're making is most of the time people don't even down what the decision they're making is. Most of the time people don't even agree on what decision they're making. So they're all in the room to make a decision and nobody agrees on what they're actually. There's not even a consensus on what it is you're actually making a decision about.

It's so fascinating though, right? So clarity around what you're deciding. And then are we actually deciding the right thing? Is this the right problem? Two different things, right? Like, do we all agree on what we're deciding? And is that the right level of the problem to solve? The second thing that I find really helpful in these meetings is people often go around and they signal that they've done the work. They've done the work to be in the room. They've read the briefing. They've read the executive summary. They've sort of like done all of this work. And so they end up repeating the same things over and over again in a way that signals how much value I'm adding and that I did the work.

But there's not a lot of depth in the thinking. And so one of the ways around that is just to ask people to don't say anything about what you've read or what you know. Just contribute what you know about this problem that nobody else in the room knows. What about asking them once they, if somebody's saying, I think we should do this, asking them to say, walk me through how you arrived at that decision or what were the factors that contributed to you leaning in that direction?

Right, so what are the variables? What are the key variables that you think govern this situation? How do those variables play out over time? Do we all agree that those are the relevant variables? No. Okay. Let's have a discussion around what are the relevant variables, right? And then you can sort of play out the mapping over time, right? Like how do those variables interconnect? What assumptions are we making? Can we do this in a more, often you're just trying to remove blind spots, right? Or you know what you want to do and you're trying to make it more likely that it's going to happen, which you can

come from. Like what are the bad outcomes that we can envision happening here? If this project fails, what does it look like if it fails? How do we avoid those as we're going into it? There's a whole bunch of discussions that you can have around it. One of the reasons nobody's written the book on decision-making is there's no one way to tackle this, right? There's sort of like a way that fits with your team and your process that's existing, but there are things that you can do such as surfacing how people think, surfacing what the variables are

and not just getting in this discussion of sort of like solving different problems. Yeah, well said, my friend. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, no my friend. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, no, that was really fascinating. I think the work that you're doing is really important.

It's certainly making an impact on people and please keep doing it. Thank you so much. I think it's much needed in a confused world. And as you say, it's sort of your tagline, like you are the signal and the noise. And I celebrate you for that. Well, thank you so much. Thanks. So for everybody out there who's listening,

go to fs.blog. You can spend hours going down the rabbit hole there. Immerse yourself in the metal models. Pick up the great metal models, volume one, general thinking concepts. Are you sold out in the hard copies now? Hard copies are done. So Kindle. Kindle and audio are still there volume two comes out next month all right well you got to sign mine since this is now like a prize you get the og copy too like

that was never that was never the one for sale you can tell by the cover the cover on amazon is different from that that's what i mean so the one on amazon has a different cover we've never actually sold that version of the book even Ooh, even more special, Ben. Thanks, man. All right, well, come back and talk to me again, man. I would love that. Thank you so much. If people want to find you on Twitter, Instagram, stuff like that,

where's the best place to go? Shane A. Parrish on Twitter, Farnham Street on Instagram. Yeah, love to chat. Yeah, thanks, Ben. Peace. Plants. What do you think, you guys? Pretty smart guy, that Shane, right?

I will admit straight up, I was a little nervous and a bit intimidated about this one. Shane is a prodigious intellect, a sort of Yoda-esque figure. But also I found him to be grounded and low-key enough to put me at ease. I think it went well. What do you guys think?

Personally, I'm grateful for this exchange. I'm better for it. My hope is that you found it as dynamic, as instructive and helpful as I did. Please let Shane know what you thought about today's exchange by hitting him up on Twitter at ShaneAParish, parish with two R's, and at FarnhamStreet on Instagram.

You can find FarnhamStreet at fs.blog, and you can follow them at FarnhamStreet on Twitter. Pick up Shane's book, The Great Mental Models, General Thinking Concepts, whip out your notebook, take it in. It's a game changer. You can find a link to the book along with copious other resources to more deeply immerse yourself in Farnham Street and Shane's work in the

show notes, of course, on the episode page at richroll.com. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. Thank you to my team for helping me produce today's wonderful show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production,

show notes and interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing and editing today's podcast for YouTube. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Allie Rogers for portraits. Georgia Whaley for copywriting. DK for advertiser relationships and theme music, as always, by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Hari Mathis. Thanks for the love, you guys.

I hope you are all maintaining your physical distance from your friends and loved ones and yet also engaging in social connectivity. I hope this helps you think more deeply about the decisions that we're making, very difficult decisions as we try to figure out the best trajectory and course of action while managing the stress and anxiety of what we're all facing right now. My heart is with you. I love all of you guys. I appreciate your attention. Thank you. And I'll see you back here in a couple of days. A couple of days? Yeah, I think a couple of days,

at least a couple of days with another great episode. Until then, peace, plants, namaste. Thank you.