Bookworm Transcripts

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I'm excited about today's talk, Mike. -You've been thinking about it?

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-Dad jokes? -I guess.

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-Thanks for that. -No, I don't know what to say. Thanks, Mike.

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Let's just jump right in to follow up because I feel like we do and don't know what to talk

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about today because this is an interesting book to go through and it's going to be kind of a

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challenging one to discuss, I think. But before we get too far, you made a thing.

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What was the thing you made, Mike? -I did. I made a course and it is on the sweet setup.

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It is called Mastering Mind Maps and I think it is pretty awesome. There's three different

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sections to it. It's probably the most complete course I have made to date in terms of just like

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attacking every possible angle of this thing. Mind mapping, that's the type of thing where people

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think they know what it is and on the surface it doesn't seem that complicated. But then when you

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dig into it, you realize that why don't you do it because you really don't understand

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how you can apply it. You may know the what, but you may not know the why or the how.

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This course is designed to tackle that. There's a whole section of talking head videos where it

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talks about the science behind mind mapping, how all the pieces fit together. If you're completely

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new to the topic, there's a whole section on screencast videos for how to use Mind Node,

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which I was working on when I was visiting you. Since then, even I've made a whole bunch of

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workflow videos. Here's how you could use this for event planning, for financial planning,

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for meeting notes, for memorization. There were four of those initially when it launched,

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but there's been four more added and I'm working on a few more. It's basically everything you ever

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wanted to know about mind mapping in video format. I'm very excited about this because I have played

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around with the concept of mind mapping a number of times and it has never really stuck for me.

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And whenever you initially, I forget when you told me that you were working on a mind mapping,

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of course, kind of got me excited. Like, okay, if I'm ever going to learn and adopt this practice,

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I feel like Mike is the guy to learn this from. So because you've been doing the Mind Node files

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for Bookworm, like the club members for how long? How long have you been doing these things

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for a very long time? That is a good point. I should look right now how many are in there,

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actually. Because it's a lot. Looks like there are 72 of them, according to the four.

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So you've done this for a long time. So my sense is you know your way around mind mapping. So it

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made me excited whenever I saw the sweet setup was doing this and that you were the brains behind

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the videos themselves. So I'm excited about this for you. I'm glad this exists in the world.

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I need to set aside the time to go through this whole thing because and I'm trying to...

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We were talking about this a little bit before. If you follow myself or Brett Terpstra on Twitter,

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you've seen that he has inflicted pain on me lately with one of his projects and I'm dealing

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with the aftermath of that whole game that he was playing on me with my writing workflow right now.

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So once I get that settled down, I can step into Mike's video course for sure.

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Yeah, well that was kind of the interesting thing about this is this is the first course for the

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sweet setup where I've done the videos, like the screencast videos previously, but this was kind

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of the one that I drove. So if you were paying attention to sweet setup at all prior to launch,

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you saw a whole bunch of emails about my idea system that was kind of the thing that spurred this

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where I would capture things and then when it was time to write something or actually before it

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was time to write something, I would have consistent thinking time on my calendar where I would kind

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of develop these ideas and figure out what exactly this is and then the process of mind mapping the

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article before I would sit down to write it for a longer article, I estimate that an hour of mind

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mapping would save me about two hours of writing because I would never hit those dead ends and

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not know what to do next. The mind map basically eliminated the writer's block for me and this

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is an interesting process because it's cool to work with a team. I'm recognizing from this a

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little bit of retrospective here. I shared this with the Blanc Media team when we had our meeting

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this week that I know how to do all of these things individually and even though it's like my

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face on camera and I wrote the scripts and recorded the videos and things like that, it really is a

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team effort and it's really cool to have somebody that you can fall back on when you need to really

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focus on this area over here and you know the other thing can still get done. So like

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typos in title slides that need to be fixed. Hey Isaac can you help me out with this? Oh yeah sure

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and you know they're all fixed 20 minutes later. That really just speeds up everything and it

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allowed this course to come together a lot more quickly than it would have if it would have just

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been me. So I want to call that out that this is not a Mike Schmitt's production even though you'll

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hear my voice, you'll see my face. There's a lot of people who contributed to the success of this.

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I want to call that out. It takes a village. I don't know. I'm still excited about it. Well it

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technically doesn't because I've done it all myself before with faith-based productivity but

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I prefer doing it with the village. It's a lot more fun, a lot less stressful. Fair enough.

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Fair enough. All right you have a couple other follow-up items here. I have none this week so this

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is just me prodding at Mike Thorne and Rose. What is this? Yes. Okay well I'll explain this but I

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do want to just start with the URL for anybody who's interested in the course. It is the suite setup.com/minemaps.

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You want to go take a look and by the time this will be released, the launch discount I believe is

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going to have passed but it's still pretty affordable. I think it's going to be $57 for 30-something videos

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so not too bad. No not bad at all for sure. All right so now the Thorne and the Rose. This was the

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thing from the Art of Gathering where I wanted to during dinner time talk about like the highlight

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and the low light is another way of saying this from People's Days and I think we did this once.

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I recognize that this needs to change format a little bit for me. People weren't really as

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excited about it as I thought maybe they would be and I think one of the things that contributes to

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this is how do you typically see this playing out? Well you would... a different version of this

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might be how was school today? Well we homeschool our kids so they're not going to say at the dinner

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table yeah my teacher was a jerk or the kids in my glass are jerks because they're all sitting at

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the table with you so I think maybe we need to reframe this a little bit. I do like the idea of

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the highlight you know going back to... as I was thinking about this I was reminded of like the

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gratitude practice and how maybe it's not even worth focusing on the negative but just kind of focus

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refocus on the positive. For one that would take less time and I think with kids especially they

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don't necessarily need encouragement to brood on all the bad stuff that maybe has happened.

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That's probably people in general but it's definitely something we want to be intentional and teach

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our kids is like you don't have to stay in a bad attitude like yeah you don't have to sweep

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under the rug this bad thing happened we can talk about it we can talk about how you really feel

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about it but let's mourn and move on you know. So I don't know exactly what to do with this but I

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would not say that this was a success for me either. I'm kind of stuck. I think my wife and I are

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gonna have to talk about this and identify how we want it to look but I like the idea still. I still

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like the idea of having the intentional conversation at the dinner table and giving people like a

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structure to follow. So yeah I guess this one will be ongoing. One of the things that we do at our

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Sabbath dinner time so every Saturday night we do a big special dinner to celebrate the

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beginning of the weekend and one of the things that we do for that is go around the whole table

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and everybody says what was your favorite part of the week that we just went through like what

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was the best thing that happened to you throughout the week and we focus only on that we don't

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bring up the negative side because obviously with kids like to your point they absolutely

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love that part. I was like I don't want to encourage the bashing of your sisters. That is not what

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I'm after so we tend to just say what was the best part of your week and we just leave it at

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that every once in a while we do that just throughout the week it doesn't have to be at that Sabbath

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dinner but we'll do it ongoing leading up to that sometimes as well. I don't know we have

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good luck with that just doing the one side of it. I don't know if that would be helpful to you or

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not. Yeah maybe I like the weekly review aspect of that too but also I've been working on a thing

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so we haven't had dinner together every single night either. Aw sad day. Yeah I know but it's out

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there now and sabbatical is coming so. Party time. That's right. All right what else you got here

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Mike? So the grand intention for this episode was to have done my thing and I realized I forgot to

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look up how to say this word I've been told I say it wrong. Kibbutts. Kibbutts. Kibbutts.

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Yeah but the thing where I was going to have other couples over to my house and we were going to

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have a meal and facilitate intentional conversation per the inspiration from

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indestractable by Nier Isle. Unfortunately things have transpired to work against me. This one is

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not my fault show. Sure. The first week we were going to do it we actually had a youth camp though

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that ended the Saturday before we were going to do it we were going to do it on Sunday and a lot of

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the people that were going to come were actually at the youth camp and they got back and they were

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toasted so they're like you know what we really just would prefer if we can put this off a week

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is that okay? Yeah no problem we'll put it off a week and then last week when we were going to do

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it we got 10 inches of snow came from Minnesota it's your fault. So sure you blame me we stayed

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home. So did we so did everybody. That was the problem so still needs to happen I think we're

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going to shoot for this weekend. I will follow up on this everybody is excited about it it is

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going to happen but and I will share what I've learned from the process when it actually does but

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sure as of this recording this is also a fail. Sad day you'll get there. I know. I think you know

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one of the things that so with our version of this is what we just call our small group I've

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talked about this I don't know how many times now but we just met last night as we're recording and

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for us it's just been on the calendar every other week for years now and it's just who can make it

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but I think getting that first one organized is always the hard part in this case because you

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have to at least try to get everyone there the first time that way you have a precedent or a

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baseline to start from. I feel like there's some importance and value in that. Yeah and also

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with the way that we're doing it it's smaller so spoiler alert with the interview that we did with

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near I/O he kind of talked about how he's got three other couples that they they do it with we

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have two other couples that we've invited. So if one of those couples cannot make it that is 33%

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of the group that is gone. So it just so happened that the universe is conspiring against us at

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the moment but it's been on the calendar the last two weeks. We are ready for this we even

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redid our living room to facilitate this. I mentioned before that a couple of my words for

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the year are rest in relationships I know that relationships and having people over is going to

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be a big thing. Interestingly the verses that I was reading there's a verse in 1 Timothy 3 where

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talks about the qualifications for an elder which we are now elders at our church is to enjoy having

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people over to their home and I'm like oh got to get better at that one because my inclination is

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give me a book and give me my fireplace and leave me alone. So we got some new living room furniture

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which will allow us to create a space for those intentional conversations and we have people over

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not a small investment obviously. So it's going to happen it just hasn't happened yet. That's fair.

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I think you should just you know slow down do it the right way. I think that's there's a lot of

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value in that I believe. I know like for us we have five different couples that are in our

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group so we have a little bit of flexibility like if two of them can't make it that means we still

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have six people there and sometimes one half of a couple can make it and the other can't.

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So that happens and but again we have more in that group than we probably should have.

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Yeah if two of them can make it for us it's date night.

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Right right and I think in our case that's that's fine because I would say like 95% of the time

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there's at least one couple that can't make it. Sure. And so that means that most of the time

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we have four couples there which works out really well but it also means if you know there are

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the cases where you get to where you don't have enough for that and then you just turn it into

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social hour instead of going through your normal in our case like a Bible study and prayer time

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and such. So yes I am still excited about this. I think you've been talking about a kabats for a

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while and I'm excited to see how the first one goes. So I'm going to continue prodding.

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Yep keep asking I want to share this. So all right all of that said let's step into today's book

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which is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I feel like this is a book that we should have

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done a long time ago. Mike especially having read it now my sense is that this is a book that a lot

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of our other books have been based on just some degree. Sure. Kahneman has a lot a lot of science

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in this and there are a ton of studies and when we were chatting earlier today about how to

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I was putting together the outline for this. Oh my gosh there's no way we can cover every

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chapter like we do occasionally and there is no way that we could truly cover the entire

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like every principle that he talks about. It's just there's no way this would be a three hour long

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episode. The book itself is what 418 pages I think right 38 chapters so lots of stuff in here.

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Yeah and if we you know whenever we do the chapter by chapter thing we usually have around

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seven to ten minutes per chapter you start doing that math on 30 some chapters like that's

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what we call long. I am not talking to you about this book for six hours. Sorry.

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That's a very fair point. So what we're going to do this book is broken into five parts

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and we're going to go through each part. I have some high levels from each of those

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and a number of like personal stories that go with an explanation of what those are. So I think

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that's probably going to be the easiest way to go through this. Mike I know you have some things

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in the outline as well to cover but I just think we're going to do a disservice if we try to

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go too detailed here. Is that fair? We may do a disservice anyway but here we go.

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That very well could happen anyway. So buckle up here we go. First part in the book is two systems

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and the rest of the book is predicated on these two different modes of thinking which is of

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course fast and slow and system one and system two is how he refers to these.

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System one think of it as your intuition or your gut reactions or your instantaneous

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reactions. So these are your instincts. These are your again your reactions that you have two

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circumstances words whatever the situation like that's your instant response to whatever it is

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that's happening. System two is of course the opposite of that. So you're taking the time to

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think through something difficult. You're trying to put together your thoughts on something you are

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trying to decipher what your week is going to look like put together a task list you name it.

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So the two you know kind of examples that I have here is like whenever I was doing a lot of

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freelance work and web development work it was very common for me to be trying to

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into it or use my intuition to guide clients to a solution and that was just based on experience

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in the world of web development and it wasn't very common for me to take the time to think through

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logistically what it is they were trying to do because I had done it so much I could just

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intuitively say well you really should do xyz. So that's system one thinking in that sense.

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System two think of it as like putting together a time blocking schedule for your calendar.

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You really have to stop and think through what's important to you and what is it that you should

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be working on like that's what you need to be when you're using that system to thinking. So

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if you catch the difference there it's kind of your your gut reactions versus the hard work

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side of that system one system two which is where the title of the book comes from fast thinking

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and slow thinking fast thinking being your system one in the example he uses right at the

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beginning as you see a picture and you determine that the woman in the picture is angry slow thinking

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is the process of thoughtful steps like a math problem. So system one is going to operate

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automatically and quickly with little or no effort no sense of voluntary control system two is

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going to allocate the attention and the effort to the mental activities that demand it including

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those complex computations and this is an interesting balance for me with system one in system two I

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have to admit that the longer this book went on the less interested I got they tied together but

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this first section I feel like there there was a lot of notes that I took here and it was kind of

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interesting how you try to balance these there's because the system one system two the way he

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did titles those it seems like there's not one that's preferred over the other but the more he

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digs into this even the things that he uses to describe them like those more like system one he

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says are described as intellectually lazy those more like system two are described as engaged but

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which one do you want to be you want to be system two right so it kind of implicitly here but not

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explicitly is saying like you want to be more like system two you want to let your rational brain

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have control you don't want to be subject to emotional hijacking all of the time and just

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try to read into things and read them wrong you want to let the process work and when you do that

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you get a more complete picture a more accurate picture at least that's kind of the message I got

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from going through this this first section again he's not explicitly saying that but that's kind

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of what I got he also mentions in here interestingly the like one of the things that really stood out

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to me on page 76 he says the perception of intention and emotion is irresistible only people afflicted

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by autism do not experience it and that jumped out to me because I've worked with the family business

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which has sold software specifically to special education for a long time so a lot of our end users

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are people with autism and we used to have apps on the iOS app store which were just like the videos

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that we had created for specifically like an autistic population on video modeling the right

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way to do different things in different situations social situations for example things like that

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well and the idea being that video modeling you could teach these life skills without having the

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person be in that situation and having them be overwhelmed and freak out like for a person with

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autism for example the stimulation as you walk into a department store can be enough to just

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like overwhelm them completely and all of a sudden like they shut down and they don't see or hear

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anything they're just upset and I'm doing a poor job of describing this because there's a lot of

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science of how it gets there it's not just simply like a choice okay so I want to reiterate that

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but it's interesting to me that the intention and the emotion that you would apply to something

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that is something that your mind is ready and even eager to identify those agents and assign them

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personality traits but it's kind of broken for some people and I can totally as he's describing

00:22:01

this section empathize more with them it's like oh wow if you're not able to do that then

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I can see how this would be more difficult for sure yeah I think I'm with you on the

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sense that like trying to put system one and system two together and trying to choose between

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them is kind of the way this whole thing is positioned but and there are some cases where he

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talks about this but part of me wanted him to discuss how how you could use system one the intuition

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side to help your system to thinking like the slower version of that like those two working

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together to come to something to come to a decision and such but he doesn't really do that it's always

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one or the other and how they either compete with each other or how one can sabotage the other so

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it can it can definitely come across as these two thinking models that you have to try to choose

00:23:02

between when you can instead of how do you make them work together maybe that's just my perspective

00:23:08

on it but I'm with you in that it's pretty obvious you should want system two thinking I think

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maybe if my slow thinking works here I think there's a lot of value in doing system two thinking but

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we tend to trust a lot of system one decisions and reactions how many times do you see on the news

00:23:31

somebody's like you know somebody reacted to a scenario or an event and blow it completely out

00:23:39

of proportion because they didn't take the time to think it through or pay attention to all the

00:23:43

detail that goes into what happened so it's pretty easy to see this sort of thing come out whenever

00:23:50

you when you start getting into it for sure yeah it's tough because he says at the beginning in the

00:23:56

first chapter that when we think of ourselves we tend to think of system two but he actually says

00:24:00

that system one is the hero of the story system one is the one that is constantly looking to connect

00:24:08

things and to make a story out of the events that are happening to you the problem is that without

00:24:14

the balance of system two you're making the story without all the facts so it's easy to get it wrong

00:24:19

he mentions the mental shotgun in chapter eight and how that is the difficulty of system one not

00:24:25

to do more than system two tells it to it wants to connect everything and so you got to kind of

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have a balance here you have to rein them in system one is gullible and biased to believe

00:24:36

anything system two is often busy and sometimes lazy so you got a kind of free up system two to do

00:24:42

what it should be doing and focus on the thing that it should be focusing on instead of trying

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to hang on to all the other stuff in the background which as i was reading this first section i realized

00:24:52

right away the value of a system like gtd and why this is so appealing to people because their

00:24:58

system two is trying to collect all the facts about all of the things that they're supposed to be

00:25:05

doing the open loops that maybe are created and then when something happens you know they're

00:25:12

scanning the horizon for the next emergency system one kicks in and so that creates a really stressful

00:25:19

way to live and they want a break from that and so in my opinion after reading this that's exactly

00:25:24

what gtd does is it frees up system two and that provides some relief and that's why people are

00:25:28

like oh this is amazing i didn't make that connection when i read it but i like that that's a cool

00:25:33

cool way to think about it for sure part two on this heuristics and biases there are a lot of these

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and i feel like each of these have either been discussed on bookworm or in other books in some

00:25:49

way but because i feel like again this is one that we probably should have read a while back and

00:25:56

yeah here we are and just to kind of share what some of these are i wrote three down that i think

00:26:04

are of interest uh here's like sometimes we tend to extrapolate small numbers too quickly so

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a good example of this is when i was working as a data analyst it was pretty common in the fall

00:26:19

it worked in agriculture so we followed the the seasonal crop uh flow like the the cycle that we

00:26:28

would go through so they would plant in the spring crops would grow in the summer we would harvest in

00:26:32

the fall in the fall we would start to get a lot of the data back from our testing trials all of our

00:26:38

you know scientific evaluations going on on the different crops that we had out there and it was

00:26:45

not uncommon for a lot of my managers and the folks that were higher up to take two or three

00:26:52

wins like two or three different trials where we had one uh for our company to win they would take

00:26:59

those if they came in first they would take those and show how those particular varieties or hybrids

00:27:07

of our crops were winning and we would promote that in the marketing materials but as the season would

00:27:14

go on we would get more and more data in and as that data would come in we'd realize that actually

00:27:21

that one that we said was quite the winner has lost everything since those two or three wins but

00:27:29

everybody involved just took those two or three small uh successes and blew it way out of proportion

00:27:36

that's just an example of one of these biases that we have in our brains like we have a tendency to take

00:27:42

a few small successes or a few small incidences and then extrapolate that out into something much

00:27:51

larger that's again that's just one example within this yeah the first chapter in this section the

00:27:57

law of small numbers this is where the the thing that i want to talk about in this section comes from

00:28:02

and that is the uh the hot hand illusion he calls it in in basketball and he uses the word cognitive

00:28:09

illusion so basically tricking your brain to think that this person has a higher chance of

00:28:14

making a basket at this moment then uh then is is real and i'm curious what your response is to

00:28:24

this i know you're not a huge sports fan um i am a moderate sports fan and i this feels a little bit

00:28:35

wrong to me but i can't really figure out why so i was a big basketball player when i was in high

00:28:41

school like that was my main sport and being the person who had a tendency to get the hot hand in

00:28:52

this case so the illusion that he's saying here is we have a tendency to say that a certain athlete

00:28:58

is has the hot hand or can't miss in the current you know state of the game like they get into the

00:29:04

flow of that and the illusion that he's the reason he calls it an illusion is if you look at it

00:29:10

statistically he's like that particular athlete the math shows that they are just as likely to

00:29:21

make a shot or miss a shot even in those scenarios and i think some of what he's getting at is that

00:29:27

whenever they perceive like when you perceive that somebody has a hot hand they tend to get the ball

00:29:32

more often sure like that perception happens so the number of touches that that that that athlete

00:29:38

has goes up thus increasing the number of times that they're going to make a basket just because

00:29:46

you're giving them more shots like i think that's some of the thinking there as

00:29:51

like having had the experience of catching this hot hand before and especially in basketball

00:29:59

there's something to that hot hand process because you know you're coming down the court

00:30:07

you get the ball you make the shot and for whatever reason you can just get the feel like that's how

00:30:14

it should feel whenever i make those when i when i make the attempt at the basket like you your

00:30:20

muscle memory kind of takes over when you're doing that and i feel like there are times when

00:30:25

your muscles and your performance you know every time you're making the shot your muscles are

00:30:31

operating in a much higher act with a much higher accuracy than other times like my sense is that

00:30:38

that does happen now i don't know if that's real or not but the the feel of it is that that does

00:30:45

exist yeah and that's the the issue i had with the basketball example is i feel like a hot hand in

00:30:54

basketball has a lot to do with the confidence that comes from having a hot hand because at that

00:31:03

moment your team is on offense you have control of the ball and you can kind of create the the best

00:31:12

shot opportunities for yourself in a way that you can't with a sport like baseball so that's where

00:31:21

i think this makes more sense is you've got a hitter in baseball who is on a tear and they're

00:31:30

crushing it but you know that at some point later on there's going to be a slump because they're not

00:31:37

just hitting off of a tee they're waiting for another variable the pitcher to pitch them the ball

00:31:43

and they are skilled enough that they're going to win that battle actually the majority of the time

00:31:49

a three hundred hitter three out of ten times you get a hit is considered one of the best hitters in

00:31:54

the world but with basketball i think it's a little bit different because you can dribble the ball

00:31:59

up the court you can have additional confidence and you can get to your spot more quickly than

00:32:04

you would have otherwise and that confidence translates into better opportunities which i would

00:32:09

argue give you a more likely chance to maintain a hot hand instead of just eventually this is all

00:32:16

going to average out and we're going to return to the mean but maybe i'm wrong well i think that there's

00:32:24

it takes stephen curry like everybody likes to use stephen curry in this scenario if you take a

00:32:29

small time frame within a game there are times when stephen curry has hit ten plus three pointers in

00:32:36

a row and if you were to take his shooting average in that time frame it could be like 95 percent

00:32:42

but if you took it across the whole game he's going to be much lower at the 30 35 percent range

00:32:50

which is normal like that's going to be a normal across the whole game now granted

00:32:54

across the whole game stephen curry has a higher shooting percentage behind the three-point arc

00:32:59

than than most you know that's kind of common knowledge in in today's world but if you shorten

00:33:06

the time frame that you're looking at there are times when shooters have a higher percentage

00:33:11

than they do across the entire game and they hit more in a specific game than others now

00:33:15

is that because the defense isn't playing them correctly is that because they are more confident

00:33:21

is that because for whatever reason their muscle memory is acting perfectly in that scenario

00:33:28

it could be all of those things there are too many variables being played but i have a lot of

00:33:33

statistical questions on why he's calling this an illusion just having been around a lot of basketball

00:33:39

games and making you know that was the sport that i spent a lot of time with in high school

00:33:44

and in college as well like i spent a lot of time with that one and

00:33:47

i think i just disagree with him i think he's wrong on this one and to be fair he's way smarter

00:33:56

than we are he's got all the research he hangs out with all the the big thinkers but i agree like

00:34:02

this just didn't sit right for me at least the basketball situation now again i totally get this

00:34:08

from a baseball perspective because there's other variables there and i think that's the thing that

00:34:13

that changes it also with Steph Curry i want to call out i think maybe the more you rise in terms of

00:34:19

your professional ability the less is this is a factor so the confidence thing for example with

00:34:25

Steph Curry that almost doesn't matter by the time you get to the NBA Steph Curry maybe is an

00:34:31

interesting example too because he kind of broke the NBA he's launching these three pointers that

00:34:35

are 10 feet behind the three-point arc and people are like oh he's never gonna make that but he has

00:34:40

he does right he doesn't make him in again and again yeah and he practices shots from the tunnel

00:34:45

and the warm-up and yeah so he he believes probably not spoken to Steph Curry myself but i would i

00:34:53

would venture a guess that he has the confidence every single time he shoots that the ball is going

00:35:01

in that's just what he believes i don't think that is the case for the amateurs the the people who play

00:35:09

pick up ball the why at at noon they don't have the confidence in their shot that

00:35:15

Steph Curry does because they don't have the excellence to back that up but baseball again like that's

00:35:20

interesting to me because there's a have you seen the movie money ball i have not it's i think it was

00:35:27

a book first but the whole idea is that there was the the Oakland Athletics baseball team and they

00:35:34

were not very good and they hired this guy who basically just crunched all the numbers looked at all the

00:35:40

statistics identified the the players that were going to that they could acquire cheaply that would

00:35:46

get more hits you know and they didn't look at the the home runs and the the big things like the

00:35:53

home or home run specifically i mean some of that is physical how strong you are but some of it is

00:35:59

just a hot hand with the the bat so they're basically like disregard these numbers focus on these

00:36:04

things and they put together this team of i don't want to say no name players but they weren't like

00:36:08

the big names that you would pay a ton of money for and i don't think they won but they got to the

00:36:14

they got to the the world series and it was like whoa they did this with statistics and so i think

00:36:20

that the law of small numbers this could totally apply as he's talking about the hot hand illusion

00:36:24

this could totally apply in a baseball context but i have trouble translating that to best well he's

00:36:29

probably right it just doesn't feel right to my brain yeah i i think you know you could translate

00:36:34

this to the nfl as well like there was a period when ode el becom jr like he had a long streak where

00:36:41

he just never dropped a ball you know he just didn't or look at patrick mohomes like he just throws the

00:36:48

ball better than a lot of people like these these things do happen and he can get into the zone like

00:36:54

both of these guys can get into this hot hand of sorts and it just seems like they do now

00:37:00

is that because we're rejecting like we have the bias that he's referring to here we just don't

00:37:07

agree with him yeah like maybe that's maybe that's true maybe we should say you know that doesn't actually

00:37:12

happen but you know it if you again if you shorten the time frame and look at a smaller section of

00:37:20

those games if steff curry is hitting has hit the last six or seven in a row

00:37:26

i'm gonna pass in the ball like i i maybe he's gonna miss this time but that's fine he's gonna

00:37:34

in my mind he has a higher chance of hitting right now than than other times but i get the whole

00:37:39

statistics don't add up on that i get it sure all right heuristics and biases uh there are

00:37:46

a few others here like the anchoring concept which we've talked about in the past you know

00:37:50

set a number and then change where you're trying to sell things before like i've done a lot of that

00:37:55

with client work in the past mention a really really high number and then back off of it a little

00:38:00

bit even though the number i've backed off to is still quite high it doesn't feel that expensive

00:38:07

because you anchored them at a higher number that whole concept is in here so there's there's a

00:38:12

number of these i feel like if you want to know all of those details pick up the book and read it

00:38:17

but there's a lot of biases that are played out because of these two different

00:38:22

systems of thinking so that said part three over confidence uh basically you can develop

00:38:32

confidence in something to a fault based on your system one thinking and one of the the class

00:38:42

here is the the concept that hindsight is twenty twenty and how if you're looking at a given

00:38:50

scenario and you are evaluating something that happened in the past it's very easy to see all

00:38:56

of the little details that added up to how you got there and wonder how did they make those

00:39:01

terrible decisions to lead to that catastrophe i knew you were going to say that yes absolutely

00:39:07

and that that is just the way that you know we have a tendency to look at things is just that we

00:39:13

when we know all of the facts it's easy to say well of course it added up to that but when you're

00:39:17

in the scenario it's very very difficult to do the same preemptively so again hindsight can breed

00:39:25

confidence and i think some of that is that whenever you are you know in a scenario if you

00:39:33

have success like say you have three or four successes maybe this plays into the hot hand thing too

00:39:39

if you have three or four successes it's easy to feel over confident and then you could have that

00:39:45

failure coming next i think this is something that i dealt with quite a bit whenever i was doing

00:39:50

a lot of freelance work which of course i'm not doing now but during that time i did a lot of

00:39:56

different pricing scenarios in order to figure out which one would work best and i had a lot of

00:40:00

success with setting a quote a set number keep in mind this wasn't software so i was setting

00:40:08

a single number that i was working towards and the goal was to achieve the inlet in product before

00:40:15

we reached the amount of time i had set on the quote and that was the goal and i had a lot of

00:40:20

success doing that because there were a lot of times when i had quoted it say 30 hours and it took

00:40:25

us 12 but the client was thrilled to death to have the product and was willing to pay for the 30 hours

00:40:30

and you know we did really quite well at that but then i had a couple cases that bit me because i

00:40:38

was over confident in that and misquoted a couple times and ended up putting 60 70 hours into something

00:40:45

that was quoted say 25 hours and guess what you don't last long in software if you're doing that

00:40:52

so basically i had the exact i screwed it up basically yeah the the hindsight bias and this is the thing

00:41:02

you were talking about initially and this is the thing i want to kind of impact here this is where

00:41:06

you you say i knew it all along and uh it's interesting the worst the consequences he says the greater

00:41:13

the hindsight bias and this is under the chapter the illusion of understanding this uh really impacted

00:41:21

me when i read it and challenged me like do i fall victim to this i'm sure i do but i want to try

00:41:29

not to but it's easy to look back at things that have happened and say well obviously this is why

00:41:36

things have have transpired this way he mentions by hearing the details of google's rise you get the

00:41:42

feeling that you understand why it happened but in the moment no one would have predicted that

00:41:48

and as i was reading this i also thought back to principles by ray dahlio it would be interesting

00:41:52

to hear his perspective on this because he mentions that he made a living predicting things

00:41:59

so uh and there were sometimes when he got it right sometimes when he got it wrong i wonder what

00:42:04

what he would say about the hindsight bias and how that applied to how he worked you know how he

00:42:13

fought against that that sort of thing it's interesting you bring up ray dahlio because one of the

00:42:18

one of the chapters a little bit later is talking about formulas instead of using your intuition

00:42:24

yeah because your intuition can you know mislead you if you're just going off of emotion and such

00:42:30

but if you develop formulas for things they're more reliable and that is the exact process that

00:42:38

bridgewater ray dahlio's company went towards it's a core principle that they have in trying to work

00:42:46

through historical information and historical data in order to put together these formulas and

00:42:51

algorithms and such to develop what their predictions are going to be so they're using history and

00:42:58

using that as a predictor but it's all formula based whenever you know you run across investors

00:43:06

and such that say you know i can i can beat the market you know my my intuition helps me beat the

00:43:11

market nope i can't can't say i'd give him any money yeah like that's i have much more inclined

00:43:18

to give ray dahlio my entire life savings to invest than i would somebody who i i run across that says

00:43:27

oh yeah i've i've been beating the market for the last five years you know i'll i'll continue to do

00:43:32

so like no uh-oh i'm not gonna go that route the the interesting thing about that though is that

00:43:39

maybe they have been beating the market for five years and it's based off of a formula that they

00:43:43

came up with but i would argue there still has to be some intuition as to why the formula works

00:43:50

if the formula was so obvious and it was literally just plug and play then i feel like there'd be

00:43:55

more people who would who would use that sort of thing to create a track record of success so that

00:44:02

they could say even if it's just from a marketing perspective look i know how to beat the market

00:44:07

even if they're not the one doing it even if all they're doing is working the formula

00:44:10

why would the formula be so hard to uncover and i maybe that's a very naive question that very

00:44:19

well could be i understand that but it just seems to me that there's there are people like you said

00:44:28

who really do believe that their intuition is going to be better but the people who maybe

00:44:34

aren't using their intuition but still get the success there would be a tendency to frame it the

00:44:39

same way so it's hard from the user side you're trying to decide who to who to work with you know

00:44:46

how you can separate those two unless they write a 800 page book like ritalia did

00:44:51

but see there's a bias in that as well that he talks about with you know true you know

00:44:57

if it's more complex we have a tendency to trust it because if it's more complex it must have had

00:45:03

a lot more thought and time put into it in order to have success as opposed to a simple model yep

00:45:10

which could likely have a lot more value to it because it's simple and more reliable so

00:45:15

so what do you do which way do you go here yeah and in that chapter on the illusion of validity

00:45:22

where he says that picking stocks is like rolling the dice and that two out of three mutual funds

00:45:26

underperform the average on a given year and basically just trust the formula he has a section

00:45:32

on the hedgehog and the fox now i know that these terms come from i believe it's good to

00:45:40

great by jim kalnes which i haven't read i feel like that's another one of those books that we

00:45:45

need to read just to say that we did it right because there's a bunch of stuff in there i know

00:45:50

people have brought it up over and over and over again so i know kind of like the ideas or some of

00:45:54

the ideas that are in that book but i haven't actually read it but the hedgehog in the fox

00:46:00

how this applies to these biases i i think this is interesting too because the hedgehog he says

00:46:05

they know one big thing they've got a theory about the world that's the type of person that you

00:46:10

would typically gravitate to in the financial advisor situation you want somebody who lives

00:46:14

and breathes this stuff right but he's saying in this book that that's actually a bad thing

00:46:19

they account for particular events with a coherent framework they bristle up people who don't see

00:46:23

things their way they're confident in their forecast they basically are

00:46:27

are so trusting their experience that they don't understand the other factors that could lead to

00:46:34

them being wrong and the fox that's the complex thinker they recognize that reality emerges

00:46:39

from the interactions of many different agents and forces they're the ones who are less likely to

00:46:44

be invited to participate in the television debates but they have a more complete picture of the

00:46:48

the world so how do you reconcile that i don't i don't have an answer but that's just what i

00:46:53

was thinking when i read that section and it's interesting too because uh from what i have heard

00:46:57

people talk about the hedgehog in the fox when it comes to business you want to be more like the

00:47:02

hedgehog you want to specialize you want to do one thing really well and uh apparently in this

00:47:08

this section when you're one thing is convincing people that you know how to beat the market at least

00:47:13

you don't want to be like the hedgehog yeah i think david epsstein with his book range would

00:47:19

you know argue with you on the specialization process true true yeah i i understand that and

00:47:25

you know that's probably another conversation for another time as it pertains to to business

00:47:29

specifically but i do think there is some truth in that where if you're going to get a job done

00:47:34

you want someone who knows how to do that job really well and you don't want somebody who knows

00:47:40

how to do a bunch of different things okay you want to solve the problem that you are facing in the

00:47:47

best way possible and so hiring somebody who is mediocre at this and mediocre at that when all

00:47:53

you really want to solve is this you know that that's there is some truth to that as well so part four

00:48:00

choices and probably the the best way i know to summarize this is that we are terrible at making

00:48:08

choices we're we're bad at making decisions you know we read a book on decision-making chip and

00:48:16

dan heath and i was kind of reflecting on that before we started recording here in this particular

00:48:23

part in thinking fast and slow like because in decision-making they're talking about

00:48:32

it's a decision-making or decisions decisive that's what it is and in decisive they're

00:48:37

they're basically counteracting all of the things he talks about here

00:48:42

you know how we we have a tendency to make decisions to prevent a loss even though

00:48:50

you know cutting your losses can be a very good thing at times we we tend to not want to to do that

00:48:58

so it is interesting how we're really bad at this we have a tendency to take

00:49:03

some rare events and think that they are more common just because in our small world they have

00:49:10

been talked about more even though they may only be quite small you know one of the one of the things

00:49:17

i've run across that kind of pertains to this is if you're walking through the mall how many times

00:49:22

have you seen the car that's in the the hallway and you could win the car like if you fill out the thing

00:49:29

you could win the car yeah and you're walking with somebody and you said hey you want to fill this out

00:49:34

and like oh no no i don't want that car well if you had it would you sell it like that that's what

00:49:42

always goes through my mind is like well yes i don't want a Ford Taurus but if someone gave me a 2020

00:49:49

Ford Taurus i would drive it to a sales yard and sell it with a hundred miles on it

00:49:56

and i would end up with more than what i have right now like it's still it's still a good deal

00:50:03

in that sense but yet we don't make that choice because you look at it and you think you don't want

00:50:08

it you know i've seen this also play out in cases where like the radio show has a thing where you

00:50:15

could win and if you win you get the choice between either Caribbean cruise or you know a new car is

00:50:22

a common one or you know some expensive you know whatever it is and a lot of times people like oh

00:50:28

i've always wanted to go on a Caribbean cruise and they pick that not realizing that you know the

00:50:34

cost involved with say the new like the price of the new car is significantly more than the Caribbean

00:50:39

cruise but the cruise sounds more expensive so they tend to pick that so we're not good at making

00:50:45

choices that's my point no another reason that we're not good at making choices is that there's

00:50:52

this loss of version that he talks about the ratio he says typically 1.5 to 2.5 so if you have

00:50:58

something you overvalue it at 1.5 to 2.5 times compared to the cost to acquire something

00:51:06

and that was interesting but i'm not quite sure how to apply that practically the thing that really

00:51:14

got me thinking in this section actually started in the previous section he talks about the intuition

00:51:20

and formulas and he says the public has hostility towards algorithms which is magnified when the

00:51:25

decisions are consequential and then in this section there's a chapter on rare events and this is

00:51:35

the the small risks that trigger things in our brains like he used the example i think this was

00:51:42

a chapter at the very beginning how when he was in Israel and there were um terrorists who were

00:51:49

bombing the the buses and he said that that affected people's behavior even though the chances

00:51:55

of being on a bus that got bombed is very small and the way he framed that is almost like what's

00:52:00

wrong with you people why don't you think about this and rationally in the percent chance that

00:52:05

you're going to die while you're taking the bus and he even kind of told this this self-deprecating

00:52:10

story of he found himself slipping into that sort of thinking and like kind of chiding himself for

00:52:15

doing so and i was like i wouldn't ride the bus yeah for sure and that's a little bit see again

00:52:22

though he would say this is the same thing i think it's a little bit different where like after 9/11

00:52:27

people like well i'm not going to fly i don't really see those as the same thing maybe they are just

00:52:33

a smaller percentage i guess but the thing that the thing that stands out to me around this is the

00:52:42

the pushback that people have to the self-driving cars and i know that uh on cortex i talk about this

00:52:53

fairly often and gray is always taking the side of the algorithm and how it's more safe but we will

00:53:01

focus on the story and the small risk so if there is even one instance of the machine that killed a

00:53:09

person it gets magnified and it has more weight and he didn't speak to the self-driving cars thing in

00:53:16

this particular book but that's the example that i thought of and i think that personally

00:53:25

it's okay to value those things more highly i don't think you have to just take the side of

00:53:33

the algorithm and say well it's a poor choice to to outlaw these self-driving cars as long as there

00:53:40

is a risk that the machines will do the killing instead of other people because it's going to be

00:53:46

significantly less than if we just let people do the thing that just feels there feels like you

00:53:51

the the statistics don't take into consideration i guess the the moral or the ethical aspects of

00:54:00

that which i feel are valid but don't get credit in this discussion i feel like it's very different if

00:54:10

somebody screwed up a piece of code and there's a bug in the algorithm that keeps the car on the road

00:54:16

and it drives the car off the road and kills the people in the car that's different than

00:54:24

if somebody makes a miscalculation in a car and hits another car even if the result is the same that

00:54:32

there is a loss of life correct correct say the same number of people die and have the same

00:54:37

injuries it's different when a computer did it than if another person did it if another person

00:54:43

did it you know who to blame like that person made a mistake they made an error in judgment and

00:54:47

that person is at fault here what does the officer do when he's coming to a scene and it's the car's fault

00:54:55

that someone was killed like what is you know what's his reaction supposed to be his or her

00:55:02

reaction supposed to be to that i don't know i mean that's that's we i mean there are cases when

00:55:08

there's a mechanical malfunction and that happens i mean those cases occur in which case people have

00:55:17

you know the the lash against the manufacturer maybe this is the same as that but it seems very

00:55:25

different when it's a computer versus you know a steering column broke as you're driving down the

00:55:30

road like that feels very different for some reason and i think you're right there is an ethical and

00:55:35

moral aspect to that but i don't know that that is discussed near as often as the sheer statistics

00:55:44

behind the safety on it i know it's safer technically but me as somewhat of a car person

00:55:52

i don't want that car controlling that's i i want control of it so that's but that's me

00:56:00

yeah and i wonder if some of this if we have any international listeners it would be great to get

00:56:05

their perspective on this i wonder how much of this is like an american bias because it's in our

00:56:10

constitution right life liberty and the pursuit of happiness right so we feel that we have a right

00:56:15

to pursue those things and if somebody else makes a mistake and it costs us those things

00:56:21

we'll deal with that but just saying i am a slave to the algorithm and we're here in the matrix

00:56:28

and whatever is going to happen is going to happen feels wrong at least to us i think that's fair

00:56:33

but again i think coming back to your point here like we have to make choices about

00:56:38

if we're going to adopt these things or not being someone who gets kind of into cars and

00:56:46

pays attention to the car community and such the concept of self-driving cars is of very little

00:56:53

interest to me like in driving one and i i know there are people who when they buy a car there

00:57:01

people who can get into the computer systems of those and and tweak them and it's pretty common it

00:57:06

seems like for people to buy brand new sporty cars and one of the first things they do is plug

00:57:12

into computer and disable a lot of the the computer systems that are designed to help keep you on

00:57:17

the road or make sure you don't spin out like they go in and turn all that stuff off so yeah that's

00:57:23

an interesting aspect to this i forgot about because you definitely know all of the stuff that

00:57:31

influences the algorithms and there are many areas in your life where you have chosen to overwrite

00:57:35

them with manual processes anyway yes yes for sure yeah like in in my specific case like there's

00:57:42

there is nothing there's no smart home tech in my house at all i i do not want any of that in our

00:57:50

house and and that's a choice i've made because i don't want these other companies having access to

00:57:56

my day-to-day physical life you know they track enough of my digital presence and i i don't want

00:58:04

them tracking all the stuff i do day-to-day now some people are willing to make that trade off and

00:58:09

they think it's well worth it go for it you know the the more of that data they collect the more

00:58:14

they're able to start changing prices for people based on your living habits and i don't like that

00:58:20

so i'm opting out of it but with the car thing like i love the feel of it like i love the feel of a

00:58:28

hand grinder when i'm grinding coffee as opposed to just throwing it at a machine and hitting a button

00:58:32

like so i do that i love the feel of fountain pens instead of ballpoints like so i use a lot of

00:58:37

fountain pens and now mike has eclipsed me in into the whole fountain pen habit so

00:58:42

this these are things that we have a tendency to make choices on and you know you're reasoning

00:58:49

behind that i you know there is a lot of touch and feel at least for me in a lot of these cases

00:58:54

that we're referring to i have no idea how we got here but making these choices is something it's

00:58:59

difficult and we tend to feel our way through that and a lot of those feels are the the system

00:59:04

one thinking in the the gut reaction type i think that's that's what we tend to

00:59:09

to use for some of those decisions for sure and that's not i would argue a bad thing at this point

00:59:16

of the book it kind of feels like he's saying you should just let the algorithm do its work

00:59:21

and i'm kind of like no i don't want to let the algorithm do its work right maybe that is because

00:59:27

i have not achieved the same intellectual enlightenment that he has but i think there's a lot of people

00:59:35

who would feel the same way and we have to recognize on the other hand though that these things are

00:59:40

happening so in this chapter on the rare events take the technology aspect out of it for example

00:59:45

he uses the small risks triggering denominator neglect where we focus on a single bad event like

00:59:51

a child being disabled from a vaccination does that mean that you shouldn't vaccinate your kids because

00:59:57

one kid got sick and i'm not going to go any further than that with that example by the way

01:00:02

i was like whoo he's being bold here but uh but i because these are things that people need to i

01:00:09

believe identify where you stand for yourself and there should be an aspect of i recognize that my

01:00:17

system one is telling me this story but it's not the whole story but that doesn't mean that the

01:00:22

only right option is to go the other way and say well i'll just trust the algorithm i think that

01:00:28

there is some middle ground here for very valid beliefs in whatever the area happens to be and

01:00:35

at this point in the book anyways it feels like he doesn't really leave any room for that and that's

01:00:40

probably unfair you know but that was my impression from reading the book i think if you're going to

01:00:48

when he's saying trust the algorithms for this you have to trust the people writing the algorithms

01:00:54

too like that that is a piece that we have a tendency to ignore and you know take facebook

01:01:01

sorry to keep bringing this back to tech facebook has a lot of algorithms that they use to decide

01:01:08

what posts to show you do you feel like facebook has your best interests in mind yeah true if the

01:01:15

answer is yes by all means trust their algorithm if the answer is no you're going to completely

01:01:21

reject not only the algorithm but the company that wrote it so i think a lot of it comes down

01:01:27

to that you know whenever they they put together a lot of this it's you have to trust not only

01:01:32

the math model but the people writing it yeah and to to be fair you know the trust the algorithm

01:01:40

that's something that we used here based on the chapter where he was talking about intuition

01:01:46

and algorithms and how algorithms are more accurate and in this chapter really what he's saying is

01:01:52

make rational decisions but rational decisions it seems like he defines as the ones with the

01:01:58

greatest percentage of creating the outcome that you want so the rational decision when it comes to

01:02:06

self-driving cars would be use self-driving cars because you're less likely to get into an

01:02:11

accident and that's where the breakdown happens yeah that's a fair point to make for sure all right

01:02:17

let's step into part five the two selves and the two selves he's referring to here is the

01:02:24

experiencing self and the remembering self and this this is something i have a tendency to use

01:02:32

quite often whenever we're putting together events at our church because i always make the point that

01:02:38

the first impression at the event how you start the event is extremely important and the way you

01:02:45

end the event is extremely important and you could have an okay event in the middle but people have

01:02:52

a tendency to remember the beginning and the end and the experience in the middle doesn't always

01:02:59

matter it does matter but not as much if you're trying to create an an impression and his thing

01:03:06

here is whenever you're looking at something an experience that just happened it's quite often

01:03:13

that the thing that happens at the end is the thing that can trigger our memory of the whole

01:03:20

experience even if 95% of the whole thing was extremely positive and the best you've ever had in

01:03:26

your life like that experience will oftentimes be forgotten because the last five percent was

01:03:33

horrible so so you have to be careful with that but those are the two selves that he's uh that he's

01:03:40

talking about here so you're saying we got to be careful how we end this podcast right exactly

01:03:45

don't screw it up mike all right yeah i like this experiencing self versus the remembering self

01:03:51

he he does a great job of explaining this and i could totally see how this applies in a lot of

01:03:57

different areas he uses the example of pain at the beginning where the experiencing self would ask

01:04:04

would answer the question how much does it hurt now remembering self would remember how was it on

01:04:09

the whole also in here is the the the fact that the remembering self doesn't always remember

01:04:19

accurately but it's also the one that makes the decisions so as you think back on something like

01:04:23

you said how you end it is going to be really important because that's what your remembering

01:04:27

self is going to remember and that's going to determine whether it wants to do that thing or

01:04:32

put you in that position again even if it's an inaccurate representation of what actually

01:04:39

transpired there now there's a story that i heard from somebody at a conference i attended once

01:04:46

he told the story from the stage of how when he was young he grew up in the south he used to catch

01:04:52

grasshoppers in a jar and then when you put the grasshopper in the jar at first it would try to

01:04:59

jump out and it would hit its head on the lid so after a little while it would stop jumping and at

01:05:04

that point you know he'd shake the jar and the grasshopper would go nuts try to get out again

01:05:08

and he he said that if you do that enough times you can take the grasshopper out of the jar because

01:05:15

it's hit its head so many times that's what it's remembering the remembering self is

01:05:20

i try to get away and i hit my head and you do that enough and you can take the grasshopper put it in

01:05:26

the presence of its natural enemy the fire ants and the fire ants will just will devour the grasshopper

01:05:31

even though the grasshopper now is no longer in the jar and it can jump to safety his point was that

01:05:38

we get we get used to the confines of a temporary lid on our lives and then we've we hit our head

01:05:44

enough times we we stop trying to do big things but i think that that's the story that i immediately

01:05:51

thought of when i thought about the experiencing self and the remembering self because the remembering

01:05:54

self for that grasshopper is i try to get away i hit my head it's useless it's pointless but the

01:06:01

experiencing self would look around and see the situation accurately and recognize that i can

01:06:07

totally get to freedom i don't have to stay here and the challenge is me that particular story

01:06:12

as it pertains to the experiencing and the remembering self to look back at things that have shaped

01:06:17

the way that i see the world and was that accurate was that a negative picture that i latched onto

01:06:24

with my remembering self and that's why i don't try to do these things or i dislike these experiences

01:06:30

and if somebody says hey let's go do this thing my natural reaction is like no i don't want to do

01:06:34

that i feel like i need to do a better job and not an action item associated with this necessarily

01:06:42

but fighting back against remembering self and trying to see things for what they really are

01:06:48

i feel like that's really hard to do it is which is why you know i i reacted so strongly when i

01:06:55

when i read that it's like i know that this is a this is a big task but i also feel like it's

01:07:00

important yeah it made me think back to frankly a number of negative experiences i've had in the

01:07:07

past and trying to think through like okay yes that was bad the whole thing ended horribly

01:07:14

and i still remember how bad it was but there were a lot of good things that came before that and

01:07:21

trying to you know force myself to think through you know the positive side of that probably the

01:07:29

the most prominent example of that that i can think of is that you know a handful of years ago my

01:07:37

parents divorced and i was married at the time so it was a bit of a blow to me when it happened and

01:07:47

i have had kind of some less than pleasant opinions on my parents since that time and

01:07:56

it is very easy for me to neglect the decades of positive experiences you know with my parents

01:08:06

leading up to that time yes i had a great childhood i loved my parents still do and i think they were

01:08:14

awesome but for whatever reason that divorce has completely you know it makes it very hard to

01:08:21

continue focusing on all those positives because of that strong negative at the end there now

01:08:27

granted it's not over like my parents are still around i love them dearly just getting that out there

01:08:35

but it does kind of taint things and make things difficult and it's easy to look back on a childhood

01:08:43

and question everything when that happens especially when it's later in your own life so

01:08:49

just you know that's the concept here is that you know the way things in can have a strong impact on

01:08:55

the the memory of the entire whole there yes absolutely another interesting thing in this section i

01:09:04

thought was the the thinking about life at the very end and what i got out of this chapter was

01:09:13

basically his attempt to answer what are the factors that contribute to overall happiness

01:09:17

and one of the things that he mentioned in here is goals and you know how i feel about goals so

01:09:25

you love them oh yeah what was your reaction to this section it kind of justified me in not

01:09:35

wanting goals you know we've we've talked about goal setting and visions and this you know even

01:09:44

with making it all work and david allen like it can become very goal-based and you know when we've

01:09:53

had conversations with authors and we've read a number of systems books and such it seems like

01:09:59

goals are things that people talk about a lot but probably the biggest you know breath of fresh

01:10:06

air that we've had in recent months is uh james clear's atomic habits and how building in habits

01:10:15

can help you achieve those goals and not worrying about the deadlines just letting the habit take

01:10:20

care of it like that has been you know pretty big at least in my own life but it justifies my

01:10:29

lack of interest in goal setting for sure i didn't know what to do with this because on the one hand

01:10:35

i can see how it contributes to overall happiness as he defines it in this book where if you have a

01:10:44

goal if you have a picture of the type of life that you want to live you are more likely to achieve

01:10:50

that state it's not going to happen by accident obviously we take issue with the term goals because

01:10:57

we believe habits are a better way to create that state or that vision but i also think it's not as

01:11:04

simple as just swapping out the terms vision for for goals and saying there i fixed it for you

01:11:10

uh i feel like the way that he defines goals is very much in line with the standard goal setting

01:11:19

framework that people are typically used to and not to rehash everything that we've talked about

01:11:24

with goals but the big issue with that is so you set a goal so what you know every every team in the

01:11:31

mba has set a goal to win the championship this year and only one of them is going to so by having

01:11:38

that goal by definition 31 of the 32 teams or however many teams that are in the mba are going

01:11:44

to fail at their goal so they are failures right but you can change that you can frame it differently

01:11:53

you can say i'm going to create a habit of excellence and i'm going to continue to work on my craft

01:11:57

and eventually that's going to culminate in me winning a championship that's a little bit different

01:12:03

i don't know what to make of this uh had a weird feeling as i ended this book he kind of talks about

01:12:13

the one of the very last things is this focusing illusion where nothing in life is as important

01:12:18

as you think it is when you are thinking about it and again this kind of leads you back into the

01:12:24

story of just trust the algorithm everything's going to even out in the end and i don't like that

01:12:30

i feel like the majority of the personal and professional success i have had has been

01:12:39

the result of creating the motivation to do things that i didn't necessarily think

01:12:47

rationally were possible and that has created a lot of opportunities that i never would have

01:12:54

envisioned and the sense that you get from going through this book is like well i haven't taken some

01:13:02

big chances and this is kind of justification for not doing that because 35% of small businesses

01:13:08

are going to fail within five years anyways so i guess i was right in not trying to launch that

01:13:13

thing and i don't know how to reconcile this i feel like i don't i'm not smart enough

01:13:20

articulate enough to argue back necessarily so it's a good thing daniel conneman isn't on this

01:13:26

podcast or he'd be talking circles around me but that's fair i do feel personally just

01:13:33

there's it's kind of dangerous to to think this way i think that uh what is it tod Henry

01:13:43

in uh die empty he kind of talks about how um like decisive action is what changes the world

01:13:51

and what creates decisive action it's not the average or the mean or the mathematical equations

01:13:58

behind what we do and so i don't know from my perspective i would say check the formula you

01:14:05

don't even know what's possible like see what happens don't just take the safe bet all the time

01:14:12

and maybe daniel conneman would argue that the safe bet is actually to try the things sometimes

01:14:17

and uh we we based on the statistics will be so scared of losing what we currently have that

01:14:25

we won't see he talks about that one of these one of these chapters we get so attached to what we

01:14:29

know that we don't want to change you know that that's an aspect to this but i feel like the overall

01:14:35

message is kind of like just chill and i would say just go for it sure there is there is an element

01:14:44

like anyone who has had any form of success will tell you failures or what drove their success

01:14:52

you know it's it's the constant trying and the constant failing that eventually leads to the

01:14:58

success that they've had i don't feel like he addresses the the value of experience and working

01:15:07

through things that are difficult or that are likely to fail for the experience and the learning

01:15:14

that can come from that that's not really addressed in any form here which i kind of want him to i

01:15:20

i'd be curious in his view on it i don't know why he left it out you know 400 pages you'd think that

01:15:25

would come up but it didn't plus a bonus study at the end yeah yeah there's a couple of those at the

01:15:33

end um there is i think a lot of value in being willing to try something and letting it fail

01:15:41

and being willing to step on beyond that to try again you know maybe there's a 75% chance the small

01:15:50

business is going to fail that's okay i'm i'm all right with that you know as long as you have

01:15:55

you know some some fail-safes of sorts you know you're not going to end up in jail you're not going

01:16:02

to end up without food on the table like as long as you have some of those backups in place an

01:16:08

emergency fund of sorts like i'm fine taking those risks you know i've done it for a number of years

01:16:14

now maybe that's just my opinion on it but i think you do have to be willing to step out there and

01:16:21

take the chance because you know you're not you're not going to get anywhere if you don't at least try

01:16:27

yeah uh so going back to the google example i think this was from the story that he told way back

01:16:34

in part three on overconfidence they mentioned that as google was rising they had a deal in place

01:16:44

to sell the company for a million dollars that fell through the company that was going to acquire

01:16:49

them backed out and isn't that fortunate for the people who grew google to what it is today

01:16:57

and i feel like that's the kind of thing where if you prescribe to the formula or the algorithm

01:17:04

or the rational thinking you will always take that bet and you will never know what is truly

01:17:10

possible if you stick with some things the 75 percent chance that the business is going to fail i

01:17:16

agree like you don't want to bet your family's well-being on you know i want to go try this thing

01:17:21

and it's going to and if it works great but if it doesn't we're in big trouble yeah you don't want

01:17:27

to do that but also as long as you have as long as you have uh as long as you have recognized the

01:17:38

risks and you are okay with them that you are seeing them the correct way that system two is

01:17:43

doing its job at that point don't focus on the 75 percent chance that it is going to fail because

01:17:50

if you focus on that 75 percent chance that it's going to fail it's almost like a self-fulfilling

01:17:54

prophecy at that point because you're not going to sync everything that you have into it in terms of

01:18:01

your energy and like you're not going to give it the the tlc that it needs to really get off of the

01:18:06

ground it's gonna fail you're going to say well there see i knew it was going to fail and you

01:18:11

would be right like there's a different mindset that the entrepreneurs that he talked about in this

01:18:17

section have to have in order for that thing to get off the ground i would argue and as long as you

01:18:23

remain anchored on the percentages you're kind of doomed from the start in a lot of cases yes agreed

01:18:34

so all of this said did you come out of this with any action items Mike

01:18:40

no i did not i didn't either lots of information nothing specifically that i was like oh yeah i'm

01:18:50

gonna start doing this which is kind of interesting because he talks about a lot of different biases

01:18:56

and i kind of anticipated that as i was going through these biases i would find one that just

01:19:00

really spoke to me and i'm like oh this is what i got to do to fight against this one and the only

01:19:07

one that i really really felt like okay i need to do something about was the experiencing self

01:19:13

versus remembering self and as we talked about what do you really do with that right right you

01:19:19

try to correct it when it happens but there really isn't anything concrete that you can do and a lot

01:19:26

of the other ones i found myself saying well i see what you're saying but what about this part

01:19:30

of it i'm not sure i agree so right yeah no action items for me all right fair enough so

01:19:36

style and rating i'll jump in first here i i will say he's a pretty good writer in that this is a

01:19:46

pretty easy i felt one to sit down and read but i think to your point there are a lot of questions

01:19:54

that are left out it's very evident he's a researcher that he loves doing the science side of it and

01:20:02

if you look at the appendices and the the the reference notes that he has in the back of this

01:20:08

it is extensive as you would expect from a scientist so he has a lot of the background there and if you

01:20:18

are a science nerd go nuts i think this is for you i i think that it's possible that he has you know

01:20:29

fallen into one of these biases or one of these thinking models in that he he hasn't really

01:20:36

looked at every single aspect that could have happened in each of those scientific studies this

01:20:44

is one of the things that i tend to get hung up on whenever i read these studies is that there are

01:20:50

a lot of times some external circumstances or outside players in the the view that they're looking

01:21:00

at that aren't considered and when you don't look at every aspect within the study which i will

01:21:07

say is hard to do like that is not i'm not just saying that flippantly like that it is a difficult

01:21:13

thing to look at every single aspect but it seems like a lot of the studies that are used as the

01:21:18

core base here kind of have some flaws to them and have some pretty core things like what we're

01:21:26

talking about you know shortening up the time frame on when you're looking at the hot hand illusion

01:21:32

you know if you do shorten that up instead of looking at the overall there i feel like this

01:21:40

the data changes but that wasn't addressed and at least to me that seems like a fairly obvious

01:21:45

thing maybe that's the hindsight bias coming through i don't know maybe that's me uh but

01:21:50

i find myself disagreeing with him on a number of points which i don't know if that's

01:21:56

a disagreement with the science or a disagreement with the way he presented it or

01:22:05

an argument against the way that he structured the book i'm not really sure what's at play there

01:22:11

but i found myself arguing with him quite a bit uh and wondering and questioning him on a fair

01:22:19

number of points how to rate that with that in mind i i feel like is a little bit tricky if

01:22:26

why are we having all the we've had a lot of books lately that are really hard to rate

01:22:29

i don't know if that's just because we're doing a lot of books we have a lot more that are wide

01:22:34

ranging lately but this is a long one at 400 plus pages this isn't one that is simple to just sit

01:22:42

down and read in a week like the one that we're getting ready to read um it does make it a bit

01:22:48

tricky i think in my case there are a lot of things that i find in this that are helpful to know

01:22:54

he has a lot of things that it spot on like i definitely agree with him he has a handful of

01:22:59

things a number of things that i disagree with but i think as far as an overall book

01:23:04

i think i'll put it at a 3.5 i think there's a lot of value in having read it i will not read this again

01:23:11

i'm probably not going to recommend it in very many scenarios i feel like there are a number of

01:23:17

other books that can cover a lot of the same thing maybe that's because he pioneered it i don't know

01:23:22

i don't know how that actually played out but i don't think this is one that i get super super

01:23:29

excited about but i like having read it but it sparked a lot of conversation here at least

01:23:36

so i i think i'll stop there i i'll put it at the 3.5 all right i had high hopes for this book because

01:23:46

we have heard about it in a lot of other books that we have read i don't know what i expected when

01:23:54

i went into it but i kind of thought i guess that it wouldn't be broken down into all of these

01:24:04

little chunks which told different aspects of the story i understand why he framed the book the way

01:24:11

he did organize it the way he did but i feel like the little things that he talks about in the

01:24:17

individual chapters that's kind of the stuff that people latched onto and i don't have a specific

01:24:23

example of this but from the books that we read and i feel like the the details became a little bit

01:24:32

overwhelming as you went on and unless you were trying to go back and find the coherent story

01:24:40

but between everything that he's saying which is why i take notes in a mind map format

01:24:45

so that i can do that more easily it's easy to kind of lose sight of the system one versus system

01:24:51

two which is really the big message throughout all of this this book especially towards the end

01:24:56

you kind of get into all of the biases and the things that you do wrong and you end up feeling like

01:25:04

well my brain's just working against me there's nothing i can do i'm a slave to the algorithm

01:25:11

again not i'm sure what he intended but that was the emotional reaction i had as i went through

01:25:18

this which that in and of itself he addresses in this book he talks about emotional hijacking

01:25:23

so i i get that you know trying to focus on the coherent message and the details of everything

01:25:30

that he says in this book is hard because there are over 400 pages in it and i i get the the way

01:25:38

that he wrote this if i was trying to accomplish the same goal i would probably tackle it the same

01:25:43

way he in a way this is like his life's work he's done all of this research on the topic

01:25:50

he's worked with all of these crazy smart people they've done all of these tests and he's trying

01:25:54

to condense all of this down into this is everything that i know on the topic of system one system two

01:26:01

thinking fast and slow but for the average person who is not a researcher i feel like i've said this

01:26:07

over and over again the one that comes to mind is like the dan awryly uh predictably irrational

01:26:12

which uh i was not a big fan of this kind of struck me the same way for the right person

01:26:19

this is going to be easy to read you mentioned that it was he's he's a good writer it's easy to read

01:26:24

i agree with that from a researcher perspective but compared to a lot of the books that we read

01:26:28

i honestly had some trouble with this one sure maybe part of that was the fact that i knew that

01:26:33

there were 400 more pages coming and we're going to talk about this and i i dreaded that a little bit

01:26:39

but uh i don't know it's interesting to me when i have a negative reaction to a book like this because

01:26:45

i don't i need to ask myself why i feel like the stuff that he's talking about are things that i

01:26:52

am interested in but i found myself reacting to the way that he presented them by being

01:26:56

disinterested if that makes any sense and i feel like a lot of that is just the total emphasis on

01:27:04

the research and this one it's hard to argue against that because that's basically what he's

01:27:08

saying is like you got to look at the numbers you can't necessarily trust the stories but i miss

01:27:14

the stories i wish that there were more stories he told a couple of stories a couple interesting

01:27:20

ones near the end uh about a discussion he was having with his wife who believed that people who

01:27:25

lived in california were happier and he was basically saying well i don't believe that that's

01:27:30

really the case and talked about the discussion that they had and kind of the findings from that but

01:27:37

i don't know i feel like there's a lot of room for taking the principles here and talking about

01:27:45

them not in a research room context but this is how this person overcame this in their personal

01:27:51

life again that's not his goal but that is what i would have preferred totally my preference i

01:27:56

understand that so it's a definitely a good book and like you i am glad that i read it it's not

01:28:02

something that i will probably read again and i struggle with where to rate this because all

01:28:09

of my negative feelings with it i understand are completely just based on my personal preferences

01:28:13

but also that's what we do on this podcast right we talk about this from our personal

01:28:19

perspective what we thought of the book so i'm going to rate it at 3.0 all right there you have it

01:28:24

and i'm glad to have gone through it but i'm also glad to put it on the shelf so let's shelf it

01:28:31

what's next mike next is it doesn't have to be crazy at work the one that i put off

01:28:36

when we read the art of gathering by jason freeed and dh the base camp guys david

01:28:42

anemir hanson good job yes how do you so proud of you mike did you look that up before we started

01:28:50

i did not oh i'm even more impressed now i'm super proud of you all right so we'll we'll go

01:28:58

through the base camp guys stuff uh next time following that we're gonna go through zen and the

01:29:05

art of motorcycle maintenance what are you getting me into i know i know i know i know i know but this

01:29:10

will be fun like i feel like this is one that i've seen around the block a number of times and

01:29:15

whenever i see like pictures on instagram where people have a stack of books and they're like these

01:29:19

are so the best books i've read this year and you'll have like the one thing and atomic habits

01:29:24

digital minimalism and then they'll have zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance in there like

01:29:29

they they tend to group it with those i don't know i'm super curious like why do they do that

01:29:35

and i figured i would drag mike through the mud with me so looking at the wikipedia page for

01:29:40

this by the way it is a work of fictionalized autobiography interest thing this is the closest

01:29:49

you're ever going to get me to fiction on this podcast i'm trying trying i'm not alone by the way

01:29:55

go listen to the near-eye all interview when it goes up which will be in a week i asked him about

01:29:59

that that'll be fun uh teaser alert there i guess yep uh gany get books mike i do i have this one

01:30:08

this is take the day off by robert morris uh robert morris is a pastor a christian author who wrote

01:30:18

the book the blessed life that's probably the one that people would be most familiar with take the

01:30:23

day off is kind of the whole idea behind the uh the idea of the sabbath and i feel like this is an

01:30:30

idea that a lot of people don't really understand myself included i want to understand it more so

01:30:36

let me see what uh robert morris has to say very interested in that

01:30:41

may have to pick that one up myself for sure i don't have any gap books i'm kind of in that mode

01:30:46

again trying to get a bunch of stuff done there's some a lot of difficult sensitive situations

01:30:53

going at our church i've explained some of that to mike i'm not going to get into it here but it's

01:30:57

been a rough rough couple weeks at the church for sure so no gap books this week but we do have

01:31:06

a special episode coming in a week so stay tuned to the bookworm feed a week from today as you're

01:31:14

listening to this and uh yes we'll we're looking forward to that one if you're interested in supporting

01:31:21

the show that's way to do that is go to bookworm.fm/membership and sign up for the club and join a uh sign up for a membership as well that'll get you access to all of mike's mine node files

01:31:34

and see what he does with his mind maps you know now that he's got a course out through the suite setup on it

01:31:39

you could at least see what he does personally as well so kind of a cool thing there but yes if you

01:31:46

become a member you get to listen to the show's live you get some cool wallpaper you get to listen to

01:31:50

uh if you gapbook episodes see the the mind node files that mike does a lot of cool stuff so if you're

01:31:56

interested in that bookworm.fm/membership all right well thank you everybody for listening and if you're

01:32:04

reading along pick up it doesn't have to be crazy at work and we will talk to you in a couple of weeks