Adam Robinson: Positioning Yourself For Success

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/0498892804728230

Chess is an amazing game that I love.
One thing is to to be aware of
Positions.
That you excel in.
I'll steer the game.
As much as I can from the very opening.

That are of my liking.
So it's important that each of us has an awareness of his or her
The situations that they excel in.
And to steer the game.
Or to steer their life.
to those situation.
Welcome to the Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out, so you can apply their insights into your life.

I'm your host, Shane Perish.
If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear anywhere else, hand edited transcripts, or you just want to support the show you love, you can join at fs.blog slash membership.
Check out the show notes for a link.
Today my guest is Adam Robinson.
Adam is an American educator, freelance author, and US Chess Federation Life Master. He's the co-founder of the Princeton Review, which you've probably heard of, and he currently works as a global macro advisor to the heads of some of the world's largest hedge funds through his company Robinson Global Strategies.
Adam is a previous guest on the show, but we have the most fascinating conversations, so I always really enjoy talking to him again.
In this episode we discuss learning, AI, chat GPT, positional advantage, and what most people get wrong about the real him and a little bit about investing.
It's time to listen.
and learn.
I wanted to start with a bit of a personal question, which is
Uh what do most people get wrong about the real you?
I think they'll think
Then I'm in my head.
But I'm actually not. I'm in my body most of the time.
And I process information in my body.
Even when I'm reading.
Even when I'm thinking, even when I'm calculating.
I kind of feel my way to answers.
And I'm able to reason
I mean
I mean that literally, reason with my body.
Can can you tell me more about that? Like where do you feel it?
How do you feel?
So
George Soros famously said that when his back
Is acting up.
That he knows something is wrong in markets.
And even Einstein wrote about
Having um I
He said his uh
Talked about a kinesthetic awareness.
If you think about human beings as animals
Which we are
We learned to process information.
In our environment.
Way before
The Greeks invented
Logic.
And human beings to survive had to well heck animals to survive.
Process information.
In their bodies.
And we've lost that.
We've lost the ability.
To process information in our body.
When I
Read an idea, say in in one of your podcasts.
Right, I read a transcript, I'm reading something or
or reading a quote or reading anything.
I'll pause.
And I'll process it in my body. So what do I mean by processing?
I'll just
Stop for a moment.
And see how it feels in my body.
When I encounter a new idea
I'll say oh
This feels like not a conscious thought.
But this
Feels like
Another thought that's related to it.
And so I
I navigate
The world
Even of ideas.
through my s my felt sense in my body.
I like that. It's almost like your subconscious is processing the environment.
And giving you exactly right.
that you're not even aware of'cause your rational brain hasn't quite kicked in yet.
Ex exactly right. And you think about it.
Ar species had
Many eons of evolution.
Before we ever came up with
Logic.
You know, there's that great book by uh Julian Janes
The origins of consciousness.
in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
And his thesis
was that consciousness such as you and I experience it.
Like right now, you and I are conscious that we are
On a podcast talking to each other.
Uh but uh if I'm walking down the street
And I have a
a a a bag in my hand.
I'm not conscious of the back.
And yet at no point do I ever let the bag go.
I am unconscious of that. People who
Who commute to work every day.
And anyone who's driven
For more than about a half hour.
You experience this this joint.
Frequently.
And all of a sudden you go, Whoa.
Like I don't know where you realize
I've been totally un oblivious.
to everything around me.
For the last who knows how many minutes.
And you know that you've
You've stopped at lights.
Yeah.
You've avoided
You know, bumping into other cars. You've done a lot of things.
But you weren't aware of it.
So clearly we can function when we are not conscious.
And Julian James.
uh thesis in his book is that
Із да кончоснес
is pretty darn recent in human history.
In the human species, so only about two three thousand years ago.
And he said
I realize what
What I am saying.
I am saying that the pyramids
Встретива урна коншо.
who are functioning, who develop mathematics and were able to put
You know, multi ton
Stone blocks.
Into place.
And they weren't conscious.
Which is
A wild thesis.
Is is consciousness like sort of how we reason with words in our head? What I guess I'm
That was his thesis.
Smart that was exactly his thesis.
А і несен, а конверсій а роз.
In our brain.
At the time we weren't aware of it.
Again, he calls it the breakdown of the by camera mind.
My camera is uh two chambers. Yeah.
And so the
The left and the right brain.
The breakdown.
He said
conversation arose and we didn't know where it was coming from.
And we attributed it.
To the gods.
Та маспі сам вас войс.
Sending us the message.
Right, sending a message. Exactly.
That's something that people should really
Learn to get in touch with.
in a practical way.
Mm.
You know, one of the things uh I wanted to say at the beginning, Shane, um one of the things I
Well, one of the many things I love about you
Is that
You are on a constant hunt.
A safari
For usable information.
Really usable.
Everything here.
The goal is to provide practical useful information not
Well, that's an interesting idea.
This is the uh
The upgrade hour.
With uh Shane and Adam, right, and how to upgrade yourself.
How do we use it? Yeah, that's a key question for me. You know, one thing I've been dying to talk to you specifically about, given your knowledge of chess and decision making, is sort of the concept of positioning.
And I've been
Uh noodling on this idea, I think since we we last spoke, actually, it's been a number of years, and it it seems to me that the best decision makers in the world.
almost always operate from a position of strength. And that that sort of strikes me because when you operate from
a solid position or foundation.
Nearly every move you make is good. It's all accumulative.
Uh, whereas when you operate from a poor position, things almost always go from bad to worse. To what extent
Do you feel that's important and maybe you could explore that with me.
Like you, Shane, I try to reduce uh the world, the complexities of the world to um
Usable little rules.
Maximus.
Algorithms, heuristics.
So that in the real time flux of light
I remember to do something and not
You know, some other time. So one of my principles is um
Never make a decision when I'm confused.
That doesn't sound like such a big deal. But I have made decisions.
When I was confused.
Or tired.
Or stressed.
You and I would call it in in the stupid zone.
And it's important to remember those things.
In real time again.
A feeling state.
Actually there's a great book on feeling states.
The gift of fear.
And it's written by a guy named Gavin De Becker.
Um it was a book on how to be street smart.
Hm.
So if you're walking down the street.
It's
Say it's at night.
In a city you don't really know.
You have a vague sense something is off.
And
That's your intuition tapping you on the shoulder saying
Get out of here.
Yeah.
And yet, we look around our conscious mind.
looks around for
Why am I feeling like this?
And we don't
Act.
In the moment.
And it's really key.
Uh, here's another maxim that I've
uh sort of a riffing on
His point.
Wenever things are a little strange.
They're very strange.
If something is a seems a little bit off.
It's really off, and I don't wait.
to um
Figure out.
To assess the situation, I remove myself from it.
Immediately.
So here we're talking about street smart the same principle can be applied to an investment.
Or a hiring decision.
Getting married, whatever it is.
The key decisions in life
We make them rationally.
And yet our body is giving us information all the time that we ignore.
But we haven't trained ourselves
Each of us as individuals. So you the listener listening to Shannon Adam
Uh riff on this stuff.
The way your body processes information.
And your intuitive insights about the world, about others.
It's gonna have a different vocabulary.
From Shane's or Adams.
And you have to learn that.
One of the most extraordinary experiences that
I ever had in my entire life.
So this occurred about thirty years ago.
Um I'm in New York City.
Seven o'clock in the morning on a Sunday.
And I'm out jogging.
in Central Park.
There are a few people out, but not that many.
I'm running
near the the museum of uh
Uh the the Metropolitan.
Near the the metropolitan on the east side. I'm running
And all of a sudden I go, Ha
I jump and I leap laterally
About ten feet.
Out of nowhere.
And my heart is pounding. I'm going, what the heck?
I'm kind of embarrassed like
Like I did anyone see me do that?
And um
I'm trying to catch my breath.
And my eye scans up the embankment.
So the embankment is about fifteen feet.
And then there's a lot of a shrubbery central park full of dense shrubbery and stuff.
There's a crouching mountain lion.
A crouching mountain lion.
Now it's a statue.
But you can look this up.
It's like it's hunched like this.
About to leave.
It's meant to be hidden.
Now most people when they see it, they look at it, they they spot it, but it's directly.
But I didn't spot it directly.
It came in through my peripheral vision.
So my caveman brain said get out of here.
And
And it was
My first
But
I think I had another experience kinda like that, but

To live
With no thoughts or words.
Self preservation is a powerful instinct.
Yeah.
Well, but see, let's
Let's get away from the word instinct because it was a clear
Um I mean it was an instinct, of course.
What?
That I was acting.
And then I was programmed to act.
Yeah. Before I thought.
Cause obviously
If you were an analytic type.
And said huh.
Why am I dealing with that?
You're that crouching mountain lion's lunch.
It's like we have defaults.
Yeah.
There wasn't even a millisecond.
I just laughed.
Even though the book Gavin's book
Uh Debecker's book.
The gift of fear.
Is about being street smart.
Well, that that same intuition is speaking to you.
All the time.
About
Various dangers in your environment.
Whether they're investing dangers or relationship dangers.
Are contractual dangers, whatever it is.
And to not not ignore that.
And
In fact, the opposite.
Willy
Um
Uh refine that
That instrument of your body.
As an early morning system. I I wanna come back to sort of chess and positioning and how that affects our ability to make
decisions that accumulate or
Um multiply by zero almost.
Chess is an amazing game that I love.
So I'm gonna contrast chess with poker.
And we'll talk about positions.
If you if Shane and Adam are playing a game of chess
We si all the pieces.
It's not like
You've got a a piece behind your back that you're hiding.
You have complete information.
Complete information.
In my calculus
I am taking into account the fact.
That I could be mistaken.
I can make a mistake.
And I would know it. In other words, if you make a mistake in your reasoning.
or you overlook something.
by definition, you're not aware of it.
Mm-hmm.
But in the game of poker, I don't see your full hand.
I don't even know the cards that I'm gonna get.
And so
I'm assessing
Um
All kinds of probabilities.
Right.
And then on top of that
Even if I had all of
All of the cards.
I could also make
An error in my judgment.
One thing is to to be aware of
Positions.
That you excell.
And so when you talk about good positions, let's talk about that notion.
So even without knowing anything about chess or not much about chess, uh you as a listener.
Uh uh the chess board is uh the some pieces are on the board.
And
They're placed in an arrangement which is known as the position.
Think of it as
It's like on the football field with your players arranged or the basketball court, like where's your center, where's your
You know.
All of this.
And
I know I Adam.
No.
That there are certain kinds of positions
I do very well in.
I like kind of getting my pieces.
All arranged.
Just so.
Before
The battle starts.
Right.
And so
There's certain openings.
Like
Anyone who's watched The Queen Gambit. The Queen's Gambit is an opening.
So the positions that arise from the Queen's gambit
You Shane might like those positions, and I had'em just just'cause of my
Yeah, aesthetically it just
I don't like those positions.
Or
I tend not to do well in those positions.
I'll steer the game.
As much as I can from the very opening.

That are of my liking.
Mm-hmm.
And and that also is a really important uh skill for for anyone to develop.
Is
In what kinds of
Uh positions.
In real life, you could call them situations.
Right.
Do you tend to excel?
And in which ones do you not? Uh a trader, for example, might know that a certain kind of
I don't do well the f the opening hour. I'm always messed up and
Or I don't like dealing with uh Fed report days, like you know, when the FOMC is about to make an announcement. I'm just
I'm not gonna look at the markets during those days.
And so we learn the kinds of positions
in which we excel.
And I don't think that um
there's any hard and fast rule'cause the ones that I like
Shane, you might go at him. I I don't like any of those positions.
These are the positions I like.
So it's important that each of us you're you're exactly right, Shane.
Each of us has an awareness of his or her
The situations that they excel in.
And to steer the game.
Or to steer their life.
to those situation.
And then with poker, I guess there there's a lot more uncertainty, but then
uh how you bet and how you place those bets.
leads you to a better or worse position.
So you might have the best hand in the world, but if you have no chips left, you're in a bad position to take advantage of it.
There's two ways to live your life.
One of them is avoiding pain.
Mm.
And the other is seeking pleasure.
Mm-hmm.
And you know, uh uh better than anyone, uh Buffett's first rule of investing.
Never lose money.
Right?
And rule number two.
Never forget rule number one.
Someone asked me
But Adam, you said in chess Fisher always played the win and didn't mind losing.
Versus investing, you say
Don't lose money.
And here's why.
In a chess game
If I lose it.
The next round
Tomorrow.
I'm the same chess player.
Right.
But investing.
If I've lost money today.
I have less money tomorrow to invest with.
And the problem with a lot of people in investing is that
They're l
To become a
A decent investor. I mean just decent.
Z year or two.
That's just
Decent.
You're not even on the J V team yet.
And if you've
Made too many costly mistakes by the time you become proficient.
And now you're really good.
You got no capital left.
Yeah.
But poker is a game of um
Many rounds.
And each round
I'm learning about Shane.
You know, and your your tells and you're learning about me, I'm learning about the hand and
And it's a game of um
Again, always playing the odds.
And
The great players learn to um
The size of your bats.
That's really important.
Which
Comes up.
With another
Investing concept that can be applied
Broadly in life.
Which is the notion of your conviction level.
A high conviction level.
Make a big bet.
So highest conviction, high conviction.
leaning high conviction. I'm not quite there yet. I still need a little more.
And to adjust your bet size.
to your conviction level.
L let's let's talk about AI and chat GPT. I'd love to hear your thoughts on all of these developments recently and and where you see them going and maybe what scares you and and what excites you.
Well, I love Chat GPT, uh, but maybe not for the reasons people think. So um
So I use it as a thought.
To help me ask.
Better questions.
The key thing is not that it can answer.
Questions.
It's that
It gives me a tool to ask.
Even better questions.
In the same way that Yo Yo Ma
Can
Cokes.
More
beautiful music out of a cello.
Then you or I could
And in the hands of a master
What you can do with Chat CPT.
Simple example.
I'm a used car salesman.
I could describe the car.
And say what kinds of questions
Will people ask
About that car.
Mm-hmm. And and and might might say something and go, Whoa, whoa, I I would have forgotten the
To deal with that, I have to have an answer to that question.
So it can train you.
Yeah. Exactly right.
Forget training chat GPT.
It's training Adam.
Like, oh yeah, it's training that, but I I'm getting better and better at asking questions, going, Oh.
That's right.
The way to think about it
It's a super smart
Uh lightning fast.
Research assistant.
Hm.
It doesn't come up with insights.
It's a really good deductive
Analytic machine.
But it's not yet capable
Of making
logical leaps.
That aren't evident.
From
The domain. In areas where you're an expert.
it it's probably not that useful and it's often wrong.
Well but I don't care even when it's wrong
It tells me why would it have fought that?
Right, exactly.
Right.
And so
All right, here. I I I I'll give you a funny example from back in the day.
I was arguing with my then business partner, John Katzman.
We had just started the Princeton review.
We were debating the two of us.
Whether we should include
Definitions in the vocabulary.
Less.
John was of the opinion.
That we should just list the words.
And they should look them up and write the definitions down.
I said no.
We should um provide the words.
Uh sorry, the definitions.
So we were debating this, but he and I always tested
Everything.
And a a a girl walks up.
I I still remember the day. So one of the words on the on the word list was autonomy.
So I pointed to the the the word on the list.
Then I said, Do you know what that word means?
And she said, Yes, I did.
I said, What does it mean?
She said it's the study of the human body.
She misread
Autonomy.
With
Anatomy.
Yeah. But that told me something.
Even there, even though she was wrong, suppose that was Chad GPT.
Right. I'd go, Oh.
Okay, it confuses words that look the same.
Right now, that's a silly example.
The key thing in school right now, this is really important.
It's the key to the future. It's the key for everything, not just school.
Is
When you've got machines
That can answer anything.
The edges
Who asked the best questions?
That's
Hey.
So how do we learn how to ask better questions then? Right. Well let's come back to that in in in in in a sec.
An exercise I used to do with students.
Is I'd give him a statement like this.
Peru exports copper.
So that's a factoid.
Right.
And I'd say
Uh you got
Three minutes.
To come up with as many questions as you can
Based on that fact.
Mm-hmm.
So who imports copper?
Yeah.
Uh what else does Peru export?
Um what is
Peru import.
And I gave it to Chat GBT and boom, it came up with
Some really impressive
questions like what's the trend
Of Peru's
Exports.
All of these things
were conventional insights.
At no point did it say
Come up with a question.
Or an answer.
With that I went
Oh my gosh, I don't see how it did that.
So what chat GPT? I said it's a smart research assistant.
That's gonna go out to the web or the library, as it were.
Mm-hmm.
And do the research and give you
the conventional wisdom
Yes.
Right, that's what it does. It boils down the conventional wisdom.
It's not gonna think unconventional.
I know its limitations.
And it still prompts me to think, oh right, I forgot to ask that.
Or I better refine that question.
Even your question itself.
How to ask better questions.
I can
Get all self referential.
What do we mean by better?
Right? What's a better question.
A good question is one
That prompts
Other questions.
Mm.
Or a good question is one. Here's another uh way to come at it. A good question is one
That
Increases the choices that I have.
That goes back to positioning, right?'Cause if you're in a good position you have more choices than if you're in a bad position. Exactly right. You wanna maximize the number of choices
that you've got always. Now at a certain point you gotta rein that in.
and come to a decision.
And rule out all the choices.
But you want to see the choices.
At least initially.
As long as you're not overwhelmed by them.
Whenever you find yourself asking
How do I
Mm-hmm.
Wait, how do I
Get to uh
London quickly.
Or how do I
Increase
Um, marketing how do I increase sales?
And also increase the sales price of the of the item I'm selling.
How do I do that?
Instead of asking how do I
Ask the following question.
Who knows how?
To do whatever that is.
So all of a sudden
Instead of my trying to figure out how I, Adam, ought to do it.
Mm-hmm.
I've got lots of choices. Now the
It's okay, I gotta find someone who knows that.
So that's
An example.
I often go to Google
And run what I call
Google experiments.
So I will type in
The beginning of a question.
And see what it auto suggests.
Right, it auto completes, right?
If you type in how can I learn to, you'll see
The number one question people ask on on the internet is how can I learn to love myself?
Here's a better question, because we're talking about making questions better.
Here's a better question than
How can I learn to
Love myself.
Is
How can I learn to love?
Hmm. Let's remove yourself and all that judgment around it.
Okay, how can I learn what does loving mean? What does that mean to love?
Hm.
Let's take it away from myself for the moment.
Yeah.
My question.
It's what Google pulls up.
Right.
So to see the kinds of questions that people
Come up with.
It's a really important exercise.
That uh
You know, the problem with the Socratic method.
Yeah.
Is that Socrates, the teacher's doing all the work.
Yes.
Right.
To know the questions to ask, right? Yeah.
It's
Скуцик а бат скол.
The teacher asks the questions and the students, you know, raise their hand and give the answer. That's
Machines are gonna do that.
You gotta know what questions to ask.
It was a general patent.
Who said
Never tell your men
Uh how to do anything.
Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their ingenuity.
Obviously when you're when you're executing a in in a battle, you just gotta execute the command, right?
But um but as uh as managers
As bosses, as teachers, as parents.
In relationships.
The more choice we can give the other person, which is to say the context.
Which is to say to go back to your work.
The position.
Mm-hmm.
I like it. I I wanna I wanna switch gears a little bit and talk about how we become a learning machine.
To excel at anything, to do well in life
describe actually life as
Learning.
As human beings, we
Learn.
And we should be learning.
Every day.
We should be learning every day. Yeah, you want to go to bed smarter than when you woke up.
Yes.
In concrete ways.
Okay, I'm gonna make an outrageous statement.
I, Adam, know more about financial markets than any other living person.
So that's an outrageous statement. How can I make that?
I created software.
To test
Ideas about markets.
Mm-hmm.
Back in the day
If you had a question pre internet days
You'd sit there going, is it worth?
My while.
to make a one hour trip to the public library
Maybe find a book on the topic.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Maybe
That relevant book will have an answer and maybe the answer will be something that I can actually use.
So you're looking at a two or three hour investment.
And most of the time you wind up going
Nah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now on the internet you can do that.
In millisecond.
You go, huh?
Let's just check that out.
Well, what you what you've really accelerated is sort of like the learning cycles.
Exactly. Instead of taking three or four hours to learn something, now it takes milliseconds, perhaps.
I'll bring it back to my old Princeton review days. So
Back in the day, I co founded the Princeton Review with John Katzman.
And when I started off
I was a tutor.
I was tutoring
Ten to twelve hours a day.
Seven days a week.
Do the math.
Yeah.
That meant
I was seeing sixty
To ninety kids.
A week.
That's crazy.
I know.
I've been seeing kids every hour on the hour.
From seven in the morning.
Till seven or eight at night.
Sixty din and I taught each kid each week.
The same test.
Which meant I had sixty to nine di learning cycles.
Yes. On every single question in the test.
So
I would try out
Different explanations.
As I went through the week, by the time it was Wednesday.
You had it.
Yeah.
On that test. I would know on question thirteen.
The kid probably chose C
Is that the key to learning then accelerating the number of learning cycles and getting feedback and then reflecting on that feedback?
Exactly right. So
So with markets, so to go back to markets.
So if I wanna test an idea.
Uh JP Morgan.
An exemplar of
The notion of too big to fail.

Suppose I wanted to test the idea.
If JP Morgan is outperforming
Other banks.
Is that good or bad for the banking sector?
For banking stocks in general.
and over what time frame.
before I created my software, if I wanted to test that question.
I'd have to download the data. I'd have to get JP Morgan
Closing stock data.
For the last, you know, forty odd years.
Then
I'd have to think of all the things I wanted to test it against.
Banks.
Maybe
Ten year yields.
Maybe maybe the broad market.
Put all of that in.
to a spreadsheet.
Set of conditions
Like define outperforming.
Right.
And then set up all these conditions.
I'm saying all this for a reason.
Even if you're not interested in finance.
It take me about an hour to set all that up.
And at the end of the day, I might go, Oh
It doesn't tell me.
Anything.
And I've just spent an hour.
I paid some programmers to
hard code what I normally do using Excel.
So I can answer that question in about five seconds now.
I can answer a question like that on financial markets, and by the way, I will tell you JP Morgan's outperforming.
Does tell you something.
About those who want to look it up.
Does tell you something.
Interesting.
Sorry, it's slightly better, it's not usually so.
And when it's underperforming, it's slightly good.
Now again, you have to define
Just like it with chat GPT or anything, if the def
J
Fine outperforming.
Like so what do I mean by that? Over what time frame is it outperforming, by how much?
But I can
Put all of that in. What you really did was sort of like take away the time to get the learning cycle complete, right? Like you're you're inputting a question, there's almost no friction between the question and the response.
Exactly. And I get then
To modify the question.
Now you can spend an hour modifying the question.
Or even ten minutes, and I keep getting to iterate. And each time I learn something new which suggests further questions.
Right.
So
I'll give you an example. So how does someone apply that in their lives? You want to increase the learning cycles.
So there's a great book.
I think the the talent code.
Yeah.
Brilliant buck.
Great, great book.
And they talk about um
How Brazilians play soccer really well.
I remember that, yeah.
And and one of the ways they play
Instead of playing on a
A field
That's like a football size.
Yeah.
They shrink it down, so it's like
Thirty feet.
Which means
That the learning cycles are much faster. They have to take more shots, they have to pass more often.
It's accelerate.
If you're an organization
You want it.
Find ways to increase
The number of learning cycles
that every one of your employees goes through.
А фі самер са го
I was walking down uh
Fifth Avenue.
And I uh there were three young kids.
Codge kids. They were clearly like, you know.
Late teens, early twenties.
And they were raising money for um
Save the child dot org.
And uh I watched them for a while.
Um
Each one of them.
approached passers by
On a beautiful Saturday, the sun was out, people going about their business.
And they would stop.
Passers by
And say, excuse me, sir.
And New Yorkers are just trained sorry, I'm in a rush right now. I
I gave it the office whenever it is, right?
So I watched them for about
Five minutes.
With my friend.
And I said
I just wanna do something.
I called all three of the kids together.
And I said, I'll give you five hundred dollars.
If you'll listen to me for five minutes, is that a deal?
They said yes it is'cause I'm
made probably their weekly quoting. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
I've been watching you for the last five minutes.
And each one of you
approaches passers by
With basically the same thing. Excuse me, sir.
Excuse me, sir.
Or ma'am or whatever.
And I said, has that been working for you guys?
No, it hasn't.
Well then why don't you try different things?
Walk into some go, I have the funniest joke for you, sir.
Try different things and see what works.
I don't know whether they did.
And I gave them, you know, I signed up and I
Gave him actually more than five hundred.
And I even wrote to the head of
Save the child dot org.
And so you have a network of thousands of
Devoted
Experimenters who are out there who could be doing learning stuff. Find out.
What's the best phrase to get people to
Stop.
Maybe approaching
A couple.
This is the phrase to use when it's a couple.
Always approach the woman.
Or if it's a single person.
Or maybe you approach men and women differently or groups. How do you do that?
And I think people running these experiments, and there's there's sort of like no intentional iteration, and then there's no learning.
After
something is successful, it's not passed on and you not passed on.
At all.
There's a kind of business that does that very well.
Franchises.
Mm-hmm.
franchises there could be a franchisee
Say of McDonald's.
In Buffalo, New York, who goes oh on rainy days.
Use this phrase'cause everybody buys milkshakes.
Mm-hmm.
So when you go into a McDonald's
Pretty much doesn't matter what you
You order they will say
Would you like fries with that?
Mm-hmm.
was discovered by a girl.
I I believe it was a teenage girl, I forget what town.
But she discovered
That a lot of people said
Sure.
Much throw in some fries.
And they discovered seven percent of the people.
Say yes to that.
That's one person in four team.
That's a mecha kick.
In French fries sales.
No. Yeah.
Probably not too good for the health of the nation.
But
Again.
Mature
The number of
of experiments that you do, your learning cycles.
And each one
You have a clear objective.
So right now you see me with my top hat on.
And uh I've taken to wearing this.
I bought it uh
I was walking by a
uh a a hatter in New York.
And I see this hat in the window.
And it just
I just smile when I saw it.
And I walked in.
And uh and I got one.
So this is made to me my head.
Shane, if you were in New York.
And next time you are.
We will do an experiment.
You and I
A walk down.
uh a street say in soho.
And I promise you.
That
At least once a block.
I will get compliments.
And if I'm seated in a restaurant
I'll get approached at least once a meal. I say at least once.
And
Often when people are leaving.
And they'll always have a big smile on their face.
I I got such a good response for this. Why am I saying that?
'Cause they have a a hat, a top hat just like this.
With with
With
A little bit bigger.
That gets no responses.
None whatsoever.
I have no idea why, but I don't wear that one too much,'cause
It's fun for me when people say, Hey, nice hat.
And it's always with a smile.
If I go to a a a a a a social gathering
Then anyone I approach
I'm actually running a little mini experiment in that moment.
Like I'll go, huh, should I tell a joke?
Or sh whatever it is.
And
I'm continually upgrading.
my knowledge about the world.
Everything I do is an experiment and
And and this is the beauty thing also about experiments.
Now you said this, Shane, it's super important.
You need to have an iterative way.
To stockpile the results.
of those experiments, right? Like, okay.
So an organization
Would have to have some formal means of
Of gathering what it's learned.
And and implementing that somehow.
And the beauty thing about an experiment is you can't fail.

You gotta learn something.
By the way, I didn't
Wear this in order to get comments. I didn't think
I just got it'cause it made me smile.
But it makes
Everybody smile.
I think that
That that that's key.
in terms of like uh you're just opening yourself to serendipity, you didn't do it for a reason, but then when you got feedback that it made people smile, it makes you almost want to wear it more. It does, absolutely
Who doesn't like seeing people smile when you
When they see you.
Organizations can do this, teachers can do this.
Um
You yourself as a podcaster, right? Like
Let's
Experiment with the opening or the ending or or
Maybe I s let's try rapid fire. Maybe that works, or
Or whatever it is.
But life is an experiment as a mindful experiment.
And you said this.
Shame.
Um
Treat them as learning cycles.
And accelerating that as fast as you can. One thing we talked about last time I want to get to before we wrap up here is uh we talked about
sort of ways to avoid stupidity.
And you had written a book on how not to be stupid and you haven't published that yet, and I'm wondering why and when that's gonna be available for everybody.
So Shane, I have to thank you for prodding me to
Mm.
to getting it out, but I
So I I haven't released it. So um
So I I wrote the book.
Not intending it for publication, not initially.
Every year on his birthday.
And at Christmas.
I send Buffett a present.
So his birthday is uh
It's the end of August and Christmas is Christmas.
Um
So every year, about a month before that day, I'm like
Oh man.
What am I gonna do this year?'Cause it's not an easy person to
To get a present for it.
It's not like it needs another tie.
Right?
One year I sent him a nickel.
So but it was a special nickel.
To amuse myself.
Over the years.
I've adopted the practice if I have any coins in my pockets.
I spell'em out on a table and I search through them to see if I can find any
Old coin.
And I define an old coin as um
Anything before nineteen sixty.

Hap so far is a nineteen oh seven penny.
It's worth
Three hundred bucks.
Uh uh not like I'm gonna sell it, but just wow, I found an old coin.
It's in it's a little adventure. When I pull the coins out, it's like do I find a new coins? So I happen to have
A nickel.
From nineteen thirty six.
So one year
That was his birthday present.
Buffett was six years old.
In nineteen thirty six.
So I sent him a I wrap the
The nickel up there, like it was a coin collector nickel.
And uh with the birthday card I said, Dear Warren
Uh happy birthday.
Um
Uh, this is your allowance.
Spend it wisely.
Yeah.
Uh and that was his allowance.
Yeah.
It was it was his last. He was also earning money, of course, as you know. And he he s shot me back uh something that very few people in the world have ever gotten. Do you know what I got?
No.
An email.
Oh, awesome.
Those of you who don't know, Buffett
D
religiously does not do email.
He said, Dear Adam, uh, thanks so much. Uh, I'm thinking hard about how to spend my allowance.
So that book
How not to be stupid.
And he endorsed it.
Was his Christmas present one year.
And the and so the endorsement is um
Uh this book is loaded with good ideas.
And appropriate warnings.
Mm-hmm.
And it gave you a copy and
Also gave Tim copy.
Tim Ferris.
And he said, Oh wow.
And I'm just a good book.
But could you shorten some of the examples?
And provide more non obvious advice.
And that rankled a bit. I went
Mm.
What do you mean?
Not obvious.
And Tim is a great
A great friend.
Right.
So you have Buffett who said Adam get this out into the world.
Yeah.
I'm giving you an endorsement. I don't give anybody endorsements. Here. Get the side of the world.
And Tim
Who said um
That seems kinda obvious.
I sat with that.
And I realised
I say this affectionately.
Uh Tim was being stupid about stupidity.
So I define stupidity as overlooking or dismissing.
conspicuously crucial information, and Tim was dismissing it.
He was dismissing it as
Kinda obvious.
What I was saying.
If he had thought a little more
He would by the way, I'm not critiquing Tim on this.
Not whatsoever.
'Cause it sent me down a rabbit hole and I learned a ton.
Tim could have said
Adam.
Buffett said
Get this book out there. I'm gonna give you an endorsement.
And yet it seems obvious to me.
So what am I missing?
He didn't say that.
He assumed he knew it already.
So I realized that the
The key insight was that all
Buffett said this book is loaded with good ideas and appropriate warnings.
Warnings. Mm-hmm.
And I know something that Buffett maybe didn't think about. Human beings always ignore warnings.
Mm. They always do.
And so they dismiss it. I go, Yeah, what if
So I sat with that question.
Why do human beings ignore
Warnings.
And it's a really key one.
And it's key, especially for you, Shane.
Is that all
Advice is a warning.
All wisdom is a warning.
Hm.
If I say the best way
To boil an egg is this.
There's an implicit warning. If you don't boil it like that, the egg is not gonna be as good as it could have been.
Right, if I say the best way to negotiate
A contract is to always let them make the first offer. There's a warning. If you make the first offer
You're not gonna get as good a result.
People always learn the wrong lesson because
They think
Either about themselves or about other people.
They read something in the newspaper about somebody doing something outrageous. They they go, Oh, I would never do that.
That's why people don't learn is they can't imagine themselves
In that situation.
So
You'll remember at the beginning of the book I talked about
Musicians who had lost their instruments Yo Yo Ma
Exactly right.
So those of you who don't know, in nineteen ninety nine Yo Yo Ma
The grey pe uh cellist.
left his cello in the back of a cap.
And this was front page New York Times.
Three million dollar stratavarius.
About nine months later.
Another musician
In exactly the same
Circumstances
Forgets his violin in the back of a car.
Exactly the same situation. And he had read about Yo Yo Ma.
And I did research.
They were like
A dozen famous musicians who all lost their instruments almost exactly the same.
situation.
Always after a performance.
Always when travelling.
And uh
After Yo Yo Ma lost his uh instrument, Shane, I'm asking you.
Let's say you're a world famous violinist and you read about Yo Yo Ma.
Has lost his instrument. Then you read another
Uh tell us.
You read about another virtuoso who's lost.
His Stratovarius.
What lesson would you Shane
conclude. I'm just asking you, don't overthink it. Like
What do you think most people would
Conclude.
Oh, that's interesting. Most people say, Oh, I better be careful with my instrument.
Yeah.
Oh, see you're very smart. Well you're okay, well you're very wise. Most people would go
Oh, I better be more careful with my instrument.
In that situation.
But one of the musicians
Philippe Quint?
Lost his
And he knew about
All the other musicians who had lost theirs.
Do you know what he concluded, Shane?
What he concluded that none of them had lost their instruments.
He concluded they were publicity stunts. He so could not imagine.
That somebody yeah.
crush him, it would devastate him for years. That's crazy. But notice, but it's not so crazy. He
See.
He himself
dismissed it'cause they didn't really lose their instruments.
He should the question he should have said is
If they lost theirs.
Under what circumstances might I lose mine? That's not the lesson he drew.
So I have to write in a chapter.
Into the book.
That
That warns people of that.
So this is something I'm gonna
I'm gonna offer Shane,'cause I know you're a big fan of the book and and um I'm I'm I'm publicly declaring to you and offering to you, we'll we'll have to think of some
Cause
But I'm I'm I'm
Prepare to donate.
All the the proceeds from the book.
To some
Charity.
The book is written. I have to write a
Introductory chapter that warns people
На то дисміс вот у ре
And then raise some money for some worthy cause.
Yeah. And uh so so let's
Let's let's talk about that. That's a great way to'cause it's yeah it should be out in the world.
So let's get it out and let's
Save some lives and
Make people more effective.
That that is a great place to end this conversation, Adam. I'm
So pleased, uh, again to talk to you and your generosity with your time and
And your commitment now publicly to getting this book out is uh is wonderful gift. Thank you.
You're so welcome.
Had a blast, Chang.
Thanks and learning with us.
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Show notes.
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Go to fs dot blog slash podcast.
Or just Google the Knowledge Project.
Until next time.