#127 Best of 2021: Conversations of the Year

0:16 Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parish. The goal of this podcast is to master the best of what other people have already figured out, so you can unlock your potential. We interview world class doers and thinkers so that you can better analyze problems, seize opportunities. and master decision making. Every episode is packed with lessons and insights that never expire.

0:39 If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member only episodes, access before anyone else, transcripts, and other member only content. You can join at fs.blog slash membership. Check out the show notes for a link. This is a very special edition of the podcast in the final episode of twenty twenty one.

1:01 We're looking back at some of the very best conversations that we had on the Knowledge Project this year, covering a wide range of topics with some fascinating guests. There are 10 different conversations in this very special episode, and I think you'll find there are lessons to be learned from all of them. To start us off, we're going to hear from Cat Cole, who appeared on episode 117 in August. Kat spent nearly a decade in leadership roles with Focus Brands, the global multi-channel franchiser that operates Cinnabon, and a few other brands like Anti Anns and Jamaju's, she started as a waitress at Hooters and climbed her way through the ranks of leadership to eventually become the COO of a global brand. I asked her about the first person to ever bet on her, and our conversation took off from there. She outlined how her belief in the power of possible shaped her incredible career arc.

1:50 It's time. To listen. And learn. Oh Who is the first person to ever bet on you?

2:04 Wow. Um I would say my mom Maybe By default I had to watch the girls.

2:11 I was nine years old and she was working three jobs. She fed us on a food budget of ten dollars a week for three years. Uh, which meant she wasn't home. a a lot and so she trusted me Outside of my mom What feels like the first person to bet on me was Bonnie.

2:28 Who was the person who hired me at Hooters? She hired me as a seventeen year old hostess. Uh, and she was the general manager at the store. She herself had been A waitress, a Hooters girl, then moved her way up to running the restaurant. And She is the one who

2:45 gave me the ability to move into being a waitress. And she's the one that came to me when the corporate office called and said we're looking for really great employees to travel around the world to go launch the franchise. And and maybe as importantly, she's the first person to call me out. And treat me

3:02 Like an adult. I was working three jobs in the early days and I was late pretty often because I was working three jobs and it was impossible to juggle getting from one place to the other given the shift time. And she sat me down. I'll never forget it. I remember the exact words. You're great with your peers. I'd love to give you more shifts. I would love to give you more opportunities. But I depend on you showing up on time.

3:26 And if you're late. Other people have to stay later. And I need to know that I can depend on you. And if this isn't a enough of a priority for you, that's okay. We can scale back your shifts. Uh or you can quit and work other jobs, but I need to know where you are on this. And it was the first time I was eighteen.

3:43 And it was the first time that I really felt. Like an adult. Like a working adult. Ever it was just a job. You know, these were just jobs up to that point, and she's so skillfully with so few words said so much

3:59 And it I quit my other two jobs. I never thought I knew what I was doing. Never. Not once did I think, yes, I'm gonna do that because I know what I'm doing. What I thought was I can figure it out.

4:10 You also believe in people, and I I thought that this was interesting. You called yourself a positive no it was an optimistic what was the w the term you used? Uh I I've used a few terms, but uh either a pragmatic optimist or Or an optimistic pragmatist, or a practical optimist. You know, any of those things that don't seem to belong together. I thought that was really interesting because uh I also uh sort of like by default believe in people and sometimes it comes with a cost and Um, you know, you called it a tax earlier. I'm wondering if you can expand on that a little bit. Yeah.

4:45 I really do believe. Humans Are Mostly magic. And that

4:54 That we are all just unfinished. magic and were more likely to be the fullest extent of our magic if other people see us that way first and Um I've certainly learned that when I see people for their potential and their possibilities that they seem to live up to that more quickly. than when they interact with others, and I have felt

5:14 that benefit of being looked at as my potential and felt the need and the ability and desire to grow into that. So The the upside of believing in people is so high. And not but And some will let us down. And the frequency that I'm let down.

5:32 is so low compared to the frequency. That I'm proven right in people's potential. And so it just feels like this tax. It's like a single digit percentage tax. That is a small price to pay for getting all the upside. That comes from looking at people as the the great things that they are and the possibilities that they have in front of them.

5:54 One of the stories that you told that I really want to make sure that we draw out when you mentioned the positive intent before was about chicken wings. And I love this story, so I'm gonna get you get it. I've only told it once. Yeah. So I I wanna hear this story again. I think everybody will benefit from this. Yeah, so I was a waitress, uh, at Hooters. And

6:19 There was a customer. А та старте камин від сам френд. Every Friday. And he would order Fifty chicken wings, which is one giant

6:29 plate of a mountain of saucy chicken wings. And a couple pitchers of beer. For he and his friends. And He would eat them all, they would eat them all.

6:41 And then call one of us over and say, excuse me. There were only forty wings here. And You need to take it off my bill or give us a discount. And I remember thinking, what do I do in this moment?

6:54 Because if there were only Forty Maybe we screwed it up. So having that default of, yeah, okay, that can happen. But then he did it again the next Friday and again the next Friday. And it became apparent that this was either A game or a scheme to get a discount. And so instead of fighting with him, which some managers and servers

7:15 We're starting to do because there's no way. That was happening. so consistently to only him on a shift. Um Instead of fighting with him, I just decided before they finished the plate of fifty wigs.

7:29 I rang up and with my employee discount a plate of ten wings. Had the kitchen produce that, and before they were finished. brought them a plate. Of ten wings. and smiled and said, I'm sure we got it right this time. I'm sure there's at least fifty here. And his friends who clearly knew he was being a bit of

7:49 A difficult. Customer. all laughed and like oh she got you man and And it was the first time someone didn't fight him. It was almost like Customer service judo, where I was using his energy in a way to play the game.

8:05 Back to him, but in a giving way. And uh he never complained again and he gave me a really big tip. Movie from the restaurant world to the world of professional sports. We're going back to episode number one twenty to hear from Chris Bosch.

8:22 Bosch is a two time NBA champion and was inducted to the NBA Hall of Fame earlier this year. He played on some of the most iconic NBA teams of his generation. One of the most interesting things he shared in our interview were some of the subjective factors that separated the championship teams he was a part of. With the other teams he played on. what made a good coach, and the difference between losing and being beaten.

8:49 That was the main thing that I found, like Pat Riley said at best, it's either win winning or misery. Coming with that idea from the first day in camp. And then you know. The day to day work.

9:02 Knowing that We need to win, we're gonna win, and this is how we're gonna win. In having that attitude. And even for myself as a leader in Toronto, those were things that I had to learn eventually. You know, setting the tone.

9:16 uh being that person, you know, that that has to lead these uh group of teammates into into something hopefully uh that'll materialize into something. But I saw how The attitude, just the attitude. In embracing the tough situations.

9:32 If you watch the finals or watch play off basketball, any championship Any in any sport. Any every team goes to a moment where they want to quit. Every time. You know, that that is indescribable.

9:44 How about not quitting? How about you keep doing your job and matter of fact, let's do it even better. Let's turn it up a notch. When it gets hard. That was the main uh difference that I saw. That was really a a a huge, huge huge

9:58 had a huge profound, you know, impact on me. You know, just seeing like okay. I've learned to use cliches, right? I you know, used to hate'em, now I love'em. When the tough get going. Going get tough. Boom. There you go. Take that with you.

10:13 I gave that to you for free. Take heed to that one, man. W what do you think makes an effective coach? Being prepared, being ready, um, having a game plan. And being ready to deviate from that game plan whenever if it's not working. There's that fine balance of s sticking with what you said you were gonna do.

10:35 And just all right guys, hey, that game plan, throw it out. This is what we're doing now. You have to know You know, you kinda have to know in my opinion. Um when to deviate from that. But I but I think overall just someone who

10:48 Can connect. With their team. Can uh communicate. uh effectively which with each member of the team and that's including uh their staff as well.

11:00 And that can get everybody on the same page and keep everybody on the same page. I think uh You know, that's really what a coach does,'cause at the end of the day the players are gonna go out there and it's about the players. It's nothing a coach can do. outside of saying the right things to get the right response out of their players. Other than that

11:20 It's just all preparation and and and you know, thinking ahead. Is there a difference in your mind between losing and being beaten? It's all the same to me. It's all the same, a loss is a loss, man. And that's to say You know, I never'cause I I remember this this thing, it was a couple of years ago.

11:43 That uh and I I forget what happened, but It's sort of like Losing is, you know, you didn't put in the work. Getting beaten is like the other team was better than you. And like, yeah, objectively speaking, you're still losing either way. But is there a difference between like, Man, if I practiced harder this week, uh, we probably wouldn't have lost that or I mean, you said the word already right there. You said we wouldn't have lost. We lost. We are losing.

12:12 And there's nothing wrong with that. I don't want That to have a negative connotation on the thing. Um, you know, and it I was brought up in a harsher reality. when I was um you know uh being taught the game of basketball um around extremely competitive people. So there are very extreme

12:31 Competitive thoughts that I have in myself, but this is how I think. Loss is a loss. You know, but whether it's by one or one hundred, I've You know, one of that makes me think like somebody like would you rather lose like on a last second shot or just like lose by a hundred?

12:50 They said lose by a hundred. I said, Man, I'm losing on a last second shot. That don't even mean you had a shot. If you didn't have a chance, like you won't even want a chance. You know, I'm that person and yeah, a loss is a loss. If you get beat, okay. A loss. And that's okay. And that's okay. You got beat. That is a loss.

13:11 It's a win column and a loss column. At the end of every game, you either win or you lose. You can take whatever you want to, whatever lessons you want to afterwards. But let's not let's keep it let's keep apples to apples, oranges to oranges. Loss and wins. Okay. That doesn't mean that doesn't

13:31 unnecessarily uh uh You know, speak to your character. Or speak to your approach. And yeah, if you're not successful if you lose, that doesn't You know, meaning that you can't take away, well, if I would have done those things No, no, how about we do those things this time?

13:46 And how about we don't lose the game this time? How about we win that jump? That's what I love. And then win it. You know, that's the attitude that's required. to be successful in my opinion, to go for the win. And if you don't Alright, I'll be back.

14:01 You know, until I win. And then when I win, we're gonna keep it going. Next up we come to a more touching subject that I'm sure has affected a lot of us in some way over the past few years. Loneliness Back in episode 114, I spoke with Norina Hertz.

14:20 Who is honorary professor of the University College of London and the author of many books. One which came out in twenty twenty called The Lonely Century. I asked her what the difference is between being alone and feeling alone. and how you can still be lonely in a marriage or relationship. And also about the role technology has played in causing loneliness.

14:39 but also helping to cure it. And loneliness shaming, we explore that too. Being lonely. has a sense of powerlessness attached to it. It's a sense uh you lack agency, it's about wanting.

14:56 To feel connected to Typically, we think of loneliness as being wanting to feel connected to friends and family, but I actually broaden it to include also feeling. wanting to feel connected to your government, wanting to feel connected to your employer. So loneliness for me is about feeling disconnected in a much more existential state, about

15:17 Feeling the You're not cared for. That you're not supported whether it is by those closest to you but also whether it's by your government or your workplace. And is it technology that's causing us to feel lonely, or do we go to technology because we feel lonely and we we seek out sort of technology as a way to feel connected or find people like us? So when I started my research I was

15:42 agnostic about the role that technology and social media played in today's loneliness crisis. But the more I dug into the academic literature, and there's by now of course a vast body of this, The more I came to believe that technology was net a problem. Here. Up until about a year and a half ago, it was hard to actually establish definitively

16:04 Whether It was just Correlation. That people who were lonely were spending more time, for example, on social media.

16:12 Um, or was it causative? And there was a landmark study that was carried out by Stanford University about a year and a half ago, a real gold stand of a of a study where they had three thousand um participants, fifteen hundred in a control group, and the other fifteen hundred were expressly charged To go off. In this case Facebook.

16:34 The results were very clear. The group who went off Facebook for two months were significantly Less lonely. significantly happier. And interestingly spent significantly more time doing things in person with friends and family. So it wasn't that they just migrated.

16:51 um onto um other platforms. And since then there have been a few other studies which have supported this, saying that showing that social media Actually Makes people feel more lonely. But e even our devices play a part here. We've all done it. We've all been

17:08 in a room with our partner. Or our family, heads and our fans, not even really hearing them. um not present with them. And there was a study which where they put a smartphone on a table between the couple, even when the smartphone was turned off, even when neither person was touching the smartphone. The couple felt less empathetic towards each other, and And less connected.

17:33 And so there's lots and lots of research on why technology N Is making us feel less connected to each other, although I'm actually quite optimistic about the role that

17:46 social robots And um virtual assistants will be able to play In alleviating loneliness. And in my research I've kind of looked into this a lot, and one example is

17:59 an Israeli startup. It's a company called LEQ. They have a social robot specifically designed uh for elderly people. And During the heights of the Covid pandemic, they shipped thousands of these um LEQ robots. to the United States and the stories of um people who are Hold up.

18:19 Isolating self isolated and Saying I would be feeling so lonely if I hadn't found a companion in my LEQ. And w and of course we know from Japan where this has been going on for much longer that people can be really become very attached to their robot friends and carers, even even knitting bonnets for them in elderly people's homes. So it doesn't it doesn't mean that we need to have a relationship with people to feel less lonely.

18:47 Go deeper on that. So That's a very interesting and important question. How I see it is that

18:57 On an individual level. Social robots technology can help alleviate our loneliness, for sure. But what does this mean for society? Because if we Cheers. to hang out with our Alexa.

19:12 Rather than Alexis. If we um choose to spend time with LEQ Rather than Eliane. We're on we're not going to invest in

19:23 our human well the danger is we won't invest in our human relationships. Moreover, the danger is that we'll get very used to having relationships with Essentially. servants who do what we want and laugh at our jokes and

19:37 are much more submissive than any human relationship would be. So Whilst I do say it is a Cure for loneliness at an individual level, I do worry about the ramifications for society. Should we wish to migrate our friendships? to um social robots and virtual assistants.

19:57 I I wanna come later to a little bit of the implications of loneliness on society with or without robots, but it seems like one of the major problems with loneliness is that there's so much shame in admitting that you're lonely. Why is that? There is a stigma. Um it's I'd say especially nowadays when popularity when the market for popularity has never been more visible and again

20:22 Social media clearly playing a role. in that it's you know, you scroll on your feeds and everyone looks like they have more friends than you and is having more fun than you and is more popular than you. And so it's easy to believe that others are more popular than you and there's something that feels quite shameful about feeling Like no one wants to be your friend. So I think there is a stigma. I do think something one of the positives that has come out of the our shared COVID experience is that we are talking about loneliness.

20:53 much more today than we were in the past. And we should be, because uh the scale at which it's affecting us, um, collectively is immense rich, poor, young, old, male, female Are lonely people. Is this a Western Eastern culture thing too? Like does this transfer across all these cultures?

21:15 It does. Even though the more individualistic society Is The

21:22 Lonelier. It's likely to be. And Also, uh I argue that the neoliberal capitalist mindset, so the dog eat dog

21:33 Ah me first self interest first mindset. Is also Inaimicable. ultimately to a world in which we

21:42 Feel. connected to each other and feel part of a community. Um And and of course The

21:50 East as well as the West has been becoming No uh neoliberal. and more individualistic. You even see this in pop song lyrics. So there were studies done with pop song lyrics which show that in general in the West, pop song lyrics from the nineteen eighties to today.

22:05 have become increasingly individualistic with words like we us and are supplanted by words like I mean my. And this is even going on in China, fascinatingly, where you're seeing um a lag, but you're also seeing this trend. So More individualism. Mullenes.

22:22 more neoliberalism, more loneliness, and um The West doesn't have the monopoly now either. That's really interesting to think about how how this will play out. And I mean we can anticipate some of the consequences. I I just want to go back a little bit more to the individual and acknowledging loneliness. And I was talking to a friend about this and You know, she said simple things like filling out a form made her feel lonely when it asked like who's your emergency contact or who's your next of kin. What's your response to that?

22:52 I think We have come to see The family As as the all important support network in our lives.

23:02 And I would argue that we really need to redefine support networks for the twenty first century so that friendship networks Yeah, are viewed as meaningful. As ones where we have blood ties.

23:17 And that ideally we should be moving To um t to to a whole system where by this whereby we're able to invest in our friendships. As much as in our blood relationships and

23:31 You know Wouldn't it be fantastic if at work People Didn't just have Mothers and fathers increasingly now

23:41 Getting um paternity and maternity pay when they have children, but also if people were allowed Not only to take off paid time to care for an elderly relative, and some companies are pioneering this, Um But also if you were able to take time off to help out a friend in need.

24:00 Um Help out a neighbor, do something for your community. So I think part of our challenge and part of the reason your friend probably felt so lonely is because She

24:11 You don't really think I'll I'll put down my friend as a next of kin or as my emergency contact, and yet And yet, how great would it be if we could. But of course In order to do that, it's not just about companies doing things, it's also about us prioritising our friendships more ourselves and It's hard to do that because we're

24:31 Many of us are so busy. Working all hours. So overstretched and Care takes time. sí

24:39 Nurture relationships don't just happen on the fly. So We're partly culpable, of course, too. Rethinking. is something more people should do, which is why we had to include a section from episode one twelve with celebrated psychologist Adam Grant. Grant is Professor of Psychology at the Wharton School and the author of five books, including his most recent Think Again.

25:02 In this conversation, Adam explains the importance of rethinking ideas, separating what we believe from who we are, and what happens when we get into an overconfidence cycle. The conversation picks up after I ask him why it's so difficult for us to rethink our ideas. There are probably multiple reasons for it, but I think Two of the reasons why people are really hesitant to rethink things are one, it makes the world feel much more unpredictable.

25:32 Uh you know, if if if my views aren't fixed. then who am I? And How do I navigate a a really confusing and often turbulent world? And two It makes me feel like I am not an expert. Right. And a lot of us take pride in our knowledge.

25:50 You know when when I think about power. There's a a classic French and fr uh French and Raven framework. Uh where they said look, you know, there's There's expert power. There's what's called referent power, which is basically being liked and respect.

26:04 And then there's coercive reward. And legitimate power. And most of the bases of power that people have in life come from a position. that they happen to hold. Right. So my ability to reward you or punish you My ability to get you to listen to me because I have a role of authority is not something I can carry with me.

26:22 And so the knowledge I have is is one of the few things that I get to hold on to. And the idea that that might be fragile. It not only questions my identity, it also, I guess, questions my status and my standing in the world, which is something pretty uncomfortable to do. Let's double click on that identity concept because I think that you sort of said our views are almost tied to our identity and that gets in the way sometimes. This is this is something I'm always puzzled by and I I feel like I see it in every field. There are professionals in almost every field who not only are interested in in particular ways of being or particular practices, but they actually define themselves by living those practices.

27:00 You you know this already, but when I was writing the book I I started thinking through, you know, how how terrible would the world be? If some professions had not rethought some of their convictions. So imagine for example that you went to a doctor Whose identity was to be a professional lobotomist.

27:18 Right. That would that would be extremely dangerous. And yet, there was a time when a lot of physicians define themselves by that method, by that set of tools. Um we've seen the same thing with you know with police officers, right, who uh who identified themselves as the kinds of people who would stop and frisk because you never know where a criminal could be. Um and we know from the evidence that that that just had horrendous effects. Uh particularly when it comes to, you know, disproportionately um

27:45 Arresting and uh and prosecuting people of color. Uh particularly black people here in the US. Yeah, we've we've had teachers and parents who identified with with practices that were just highly ineffective and maybe even harmful. And I I think that it's dangerous, right? I think that

28:03 For me an identity is not about what you believe, it's about what you value. And so I want to have a set of principles. For me, my highest values are generosity, excellence, integrity, and freedom. And I am completely flexible on the best ways to live those values. And so you might come tomorrow and tell me, you know what?

28:22 The randomized controlled experiments that you do, the longitudinal studies you do, there's a fatal flaw in them and there's a better way. to be helpful and excellent at your job. And I would be skeptical because I believe in science. But I would be open to hearing the idea. How did you get to that point? Like how do we convince ourselves to attach our identity to values and not beliefs? Like that's a that's a tricky path, isn't it?

28:46 Do you think so? I don't know. Like how do you well it seems like it is, otherwise we'd just be rethinking all the time. I mean th isn't that part of the fun of being human though? Re to me, rethinking is it's code for learning, isn't it? Well, it is, but we don't update our views very often. That's that's part of the issue. Our own and others, right? It's it's hard to see it when we don't do it.

29:06 It's really easy to see when others don't do it. What is the process by which we update our views? That's a great question. The the way that I've I've landed it thinking about this is to say, look When When you have a belief. You have two options.

29:21 One is you can subject it to a rethinking cycle. The other is you can fall victim to an overconfidence cycle. So an overconfidence cycle is you know something we've all both committed and uh uh and witnessed probably too many times. But The basic idea is we start by being proud of something that we think we know.

29:41 And that leads us then to feel a lot of conviction. that kinda launches us into confirmation bias, where we look for information that confirms our expectations, as well as desirability bias, where we look for information that that basically reinforces what we want to be true. And then we see what we expected to see and what we wanted to see, and we get validated, and that only makes us prouder of what we know. And less Open to rethinking.

30:07 The rethinking cycle is is very much the opposite. It starts for me with intellectual humility. Which is about knowing what you don't know. you know, no matter how much of an expert you are in a given field or a given topic, uh you have a long list of things that you're clueless about. And being aware of of what your ignorance is.

30:25 leads you to doubt your convictions. It makes you curious about what you don't know. And that opens your mind to new discoveries. And then every time you learn something new. It's not this sign that oh Now I'm an expert. It's this sense that

30:39 Well, there's so much more to learn, right? And I've I've made a tiny, tiny dot of progress. in you know a whole universe of knowledge. And I can't wait to to see what I learn next. And so I think one of the things we need to do is we need to give ourselves permission to enter rethinking cycles. And there are a lot of ways to do that we could we could talk about. But Shane, I I'm gonna ask you about this because Couple a couple of years ago, you wrote a post about how we should have more second thoughts.

31:07 And I had literally started writing about that. I think it it must have come out around the time that I was writing the Think Again book proposal. And I I had proposed a tentative title for this book as Second Thoughts. It's like this is amazing. You're on the exact same wavelength as me. And this is what you do for a living, right? You you rethink things. You also ask the Farm Street community and your whole audience here at the Knowledge to rethink a lot of their convictions. So where do you start your rethinking cycles and how do you know when it's time to enter one? I I think like I I've just summed this up as like outcome over ego. And so I usually try to wrap my outcome. uh or wrap my my sense of identity or or ego in the outcome. And that's something I learned when I was working for the intelligence agency, right? Like it wasn't about m me having the best idea. is like who's got the best idea because that's gonna get the best outcome and then

31:55 You sort of grow up in an environment where that becomes, I would say, the norm by and large. It's hard in a knowledge environment though, right? Because you have so much of your your worth. You you wanna contribute to something. I think there's a biological need to contribute to something larger than us. And if your identity you're not mechanically making something, you can't see there's nothing tangible to what you're producing. then you you you effectively are a knowledge worker in one way or another, and then you're paid for your judgment. So if your judgment isn't right, what is it? And then what you do is you you You force your way, right? Like you

32:29 You don't intentionally sabotage other people, but you only look for confirming evidence. You you're not open to changing your mind because your sense of identity is tied to being right, because that's how you contribute to the organization. It's it's interesting, but not at all surprising to me that that you really learn this in the intelligence community, because the way you're describing your process of rethinking is exactly what what I learned from studying super forecasters. Right, which is they they will often come in to making a judgment and say, Okay, the only way to to have a better shot at at being right. is to recognize all the places where I'm wrong. And I I love this practice in particular if the they came from one of the super forecasters in the book, Jean Pierre Bagom.

33:09 Who when he forms a tentative opinion will actually make a list of the conditions under which he would change his mind. And I've actually started doing this over the the past few months because I don't want to get locked into something that was, you know, maybe Sort of a a a soothing belief, but ultimately one that's not gonna serve me well. One of the I wanna end with sort of like this question that people say a lot in organizations, because I think you'll have a good response to this, is people say

33:34 I'm entitled to my opinion. And you know, that's their way of ending the conversation and saying, you know, you can't change my mind on something. How do you respond to that? Yeah, you're entitled to your own opinion. If you keep your opinion to yourself. If you decide to say it out loud, then I think you have a responsibility to be open to changing your mind.

33:54 In the face of better logic or stronger data. And so I think if you're willing to voice an opinion, you should also be willing to change that opinion. The next conversation comes from episode one oh eight of the podcast, which is one of my personal favorites with Dr. Thomas Zerbuken. I call him Doctor Z. He's currently the associate administrator for the science mission directorate at NASA.

34:18 Where he seeks big questions about the universe and our place in it. When something goes wrong with a mission, he's the one answering to Congress about what happened. So naturally, I had to ask him about his decision-making process. The conversation picks up. After I ask him how he manages a three billion in public resources and what strategies he uses to decide when to launch and when to stop a mission from deploying. So first of all, uh you recognize that the launches are irreversible. That's that's.

34:50 Like and off the moment I say go, it's done. You don't get it back. It is over. Right. So it's irreversible. So so basically

35:01 When you ever you make a decision like that, and many people do that in the business world too, right? Kind of these kind of one way doors, I think. Uh As otters call like I don't feel You only go through it once. The way you do it, I believe, is is you recognize do you want to make the decision well informed?

35:18 And with all the scrutiny up front. So so The way I make that decision is first of all, I don't make it alone. I put in the room. The people

35:31 The best people that I know. kind of from the engineers, but also the policy people and you know And I actually have people who are don't report to each other. Like I have an engineering organization, just the way we build NASA or we're decades that we have an engineer organization that talks about just engineering without any other encumberences, right? The question just is

35:53 Will it work? What's the likelihood for it to work? There's one that talks about safety just that way. Is it gonna be safe, right? And of no other No other if then s that's their focus. And so you basically the way you make the decision is you

36:09 you bring together that kind of of course you work. You recognize by the way the most important thing is to empower the team, right? Kind of I mean, frankly, I'm not the most important guy and just I'm just making the decision to live with it. You know, and I'm the guy. in the congressional hearing. Right, if something goes wrong. So everybody knows that, right? So I will make the decision. And it's one it's not a vote.

36:31 It's one decision by one signature. The only signature that matters there for most of these missions is mine. Right, kind of because I take the accountability. Right. But I would be a fool.

36:43 to Nautilus and to the otters. So for me, you you really get to know with with big decisions. I actually spend a lot of time Meeting the teams. I want to Yeah, I've built space hardware. I can sense how good a t you know, I listen to the team. I listen to the things that are not sad. I listen to

37:01 I I basically figure out whether they're scrutinizing each other. Whether we have a lead that squash us. uh opposition. You know, those are all warning signs. You want to see whether I look at mistakes people are making. Are they by the way, I don't care if they make a mistake. But are they making stupid mistakes and over and over again? Are they are they disciplined, right? So So all that stuff.

37:24 I don't know if it's it's years of work. that come together to that decision where I said, yes, we launch. Where are you when you make that decision? Are you in a room with other people? Are you alone? Are you walking? Are you running? What are you doing when you actually make that call? In many cases I'm in a room with other people. But if I'm not sure I will take a break. Uh and I I think well when I run.

37:47 I think well in a shower in the morning. So I mean that there are kind of points of clarity. If I'm not sure I will never push into a decision. I mean I The way I always go is I go backwards, right? Suppose I'm sitting in the congressional hearing.

38:01 And I just blew up X and Y. Can I explain how I made the decision in a way that it made sense there. Space is hard, and by the way, every once in a while we will fail. And I remind everybody of that. If if you want to not fail, you're in that safe space over here. That's irrelevant. That's not how NASA got to where it is.

38:19 It's not because people split it safe. It's because we do take risks. We do leave the launch pad, even though we know it's dangerous. you know, with one point five to three percent likelihood it will not make it. out of out of the earth's gravity.

38:33 Statistically speaking. So so we take that risk, right? So just that itself. I will never one of the things I really believe in is don't don't get pushed. I I If I'm not sure, I don't mind being the only guy who's not comfortable.

38:49 You know, and and I will I will back off. I basically said uh Thanks, we're stopping the meeting. I appreciate that. If anybody has anything that is not being said, uh I will not make a decision for twenty four hours. Send it to me by email. And I will

39:03 go back and if I if I find that there's more information I can gain. that really is relevant, I'll do that if I find you know, like you get into a place where More information actually doesn't help you because it adds ambiguity to the team. I make uh the decision right on the spot because frankly I'm I'm ready for it because I I did the work. So it's not because I came in unprepared. I did the work for years in advance.

39:29 I know kind of have all these data points and I've discussed them with my with my group of uh look at them from different perspectives. Is there examples where you you've made that call and it's turned out to be wrong but you got a good outcome? Yeah. Uh so so I wanna I wanna I I I'll talk about two discussions. The first one is

39:49 Uh I was the one of the first decisions I made is a billion dollar assets. It's the June on mission. I was in orbit uh or is in orbit around Jupiter. And so we were in an orbit of a fifty day orbit and we wanted to drop the Fire the engine and drop it down. to have fifteen uh day orbit, what that does. Um

40:10 And I may have to date slightly wrong, but you get the point. I wanted to to get uh yeah, I have a over a hundred missions, so sometimes I mix up dates. I did not wanna think we're gonna talk about this, but but anyway, I wanted to kind of increase the frequency of encounters by a factor of three. That that's what I wanted to do. The question was, do we want to do that? So with the entire team Uh look at them uh from their point of view. There.

40:35 uh frankly perfectly fine in a slow orbit. They say we need twenty fly bys. It costs a taxpayer fifty more million dollars. uh to to stay where you are The principal investigator, everybody's like, let's just leave it where we are. There's risk. We want the minimum risk.

40:52 And I'm like, Well, what's the opportunity cost? You're spending fifty more million dollars to do the science. And so what I had to do is is unentangle that kind of natural inclination, which I understand because I was in his role before. from the actual technical question. Is it is it Uh is it important. So In that room there were very few people wanted to fire the engine.

41:13 But I Took the decision to fire the engine. And then we prepared for it. And as we prepared for it. All of a sudden we realized that the engine had a problem. It had a leak. It it was something was

41:27 Wrong with it. And uh And frankly What we needed to do is can basically look at the you know, as we prepared for this exact what what I believe is the exact right decision. uh we actually realised that uh

41:41 that we couldn't do because now we would have to fire the engine. So I made a second decision. We would have to fire the engine in a state that it had never been tested. Now a half a billion dollar asset that's basically working. And I need to take a risk. Is it worth that risk? So so actually the second decision had to reverse. uh that the first decision to fire. I actually decided not to fire.

42:07 Because of the Because of that kind of enhanced and unknown risk. Uh, we thought that the ancient people said we could probably do that. We just have never done it. And there has never been a burn that long in that configuration in any test environment. Okay, that's crazy, right? You don't I mean, of course I'm boiling it down to the the quintessential thirty seconds of the meeting, right? Once you learn, I just like you don't fire. So ultimately

42:32 We ended up not firing. Because we did the scrutiny in the first and the second decision, we set ourselves up in a way that actually made the science Way better because we actually We actually had I had asked him to

42:45 You know, yes, there's opportunity cost, but tell me what you can do extra science that you weren't able to do. So we actually moved it up. So so by failing in my first decision, we enhanced the mission significantly. I appreciate you uh sharing the details of that. You said there was two decisions a that you recalled. What was the other one? So the first one was let's fire, even though everybody opposed it. The second up uh was uh Let's not fire because you know, even though some of the technical people said we could do it, but we put enough scrutiny together that basically uh Basically again, I was wrong on the first decision. I you know, kinda if you could say, Well

43:24 You know, I'm sure somebody says like well, you could have just not fired and we're exactly where we are. It's like no, that's exactly the right scrutiny because in a congressional hearing I could actually now explain to you How I cautious I cautiously spent that extra fifty million dollars. It's not because I just I'm not handling that that pressure. Well

43:42 we actually learn something that really matters. Learning is an important part of innovation. How do you disseminate what you learn within the organization? Like how do you share that knowledge? That's actually a really good question and I struggle with it. And uh basically what happens to me on a given day, I make Multiple decisions, right? And and

43:59 And for me, what I've started to do is sit down and talk people through the decision. Kind of it's almost like see what I'm seeing. This is what you know, and really create that ricker in the organization and kind of show where W how the decision path goes, right? I I asking questions out loud and talking through it. And and so that's what I'm sharing in the leadership team. I worry sometimes just because NASA is so

44:29 Hierarchical, right? matters, you know, kind of my schedule is always subscribed by a factor of ten every every week. Right. So so I say no a lot more than yes relative to my time. That's my most impression most important good, right? So so for me the question I'm asking, I'm I'm spending enough time to actually disseminate things into the organizations because I'm s you know, it will be helpful for them to actually know this is the scrutiny we're putting on it. I try to do it and I ask people to do it, but I just want to tell you it's a question on my mind that I'm currently thinking about.

45:04 You know, I just I'm not And that reason I'm saying it, it's like I see some of the same mistakes over and over again. It's like no, no. I don't want like for me what I really hate, if you really want to tick me off. Come show up and tell me everything is low risk.

45:22 That makes me believe you haven't understood your job. Right? Don't make me laugh. Don't make me feel good. Make me feel scared and then make me feel comfortable because you're dealing with all the risks.

45:35 Don't come and say it's all raw risk. It is not low risk. It's rocket science. So for me it's like you know, and at the beginning everybody came with this because you know you know, these Organizations have their histories, their leaders, you know, like some leaders don't sleep well if they have problems. You know, so they have pain aversion. It's a big leadership weakness. I you know.

45:55 Did no not be able to carry worries with them? You know, and Those worries. pulling them down. So you know, that the whole organization behaves in a way that they never bring a worry to you.

46:06 You still have'em? But you don't know him, right? So you get surprised. You know, and then I'm like, No, no, no, I won't Y I need you to be worried more than me. Then I'm feeling comfortable. I don't want you to be calm.

46:22 I need you to be worried. That's what I want. From Astrophysics and NASA to video games, our next conversation from episode one oh one features Jane McGonagall. A world renowned designer of alternative reality games and a New York Times best selling author. In this conversation, she shared the three questions parents should ask their kids about the video games they're playing.

46:49 as well as the ideal amount of time we should spend playing video games and how gaming at night. Can help with nightmares and even certain traumas. This conversation picks up as she starts explaining how most video games can help people learn tangible life skills. The most important thing is this this is my life researching. you know, the potential benefits of games played, you know

47:12 By the right person at the right time for the right reason. And the number one thing we know, any game that you love, I don't care if it's League of Legends, it's Fortnite, it's Candy Crush, whatever. Whatever you feel drawn to, um We know that there is a transferable benefit, which is You get better at learning new things. At dealing with systems that are frustrating and having to adapt. You know, you're learning new rules, you're learning new interfaces.

47:37 It's designed to frustrate you and you have to adapt and get better. And you build confidence in your ability to get better. And every game does this. And it's it's something that we shouldn't trivialize. We shouldn't pretend that that games are, you know, just escapists or just a pastime. that they actually build you know, this kind of growth mindset. They build this resilient way of dealing with challenges. And they, especially for young people, for kids who grow up learning game after game. I have five year old uh twin daughters who just got their first tablet this year and they've already taught themselves to play over a hundred different games on this tablet. And every day they come and show me like Mom, look at this game I learned. Wanna watch me play this game? And

48:22 The just the confidence that you can build in I can learn anything. I can teach myself. I can get better. I can develop new skills, even if I'm terrible at this the first time I tried it. Um, that's something your whole life until you're like a hundred years old and desperately trying to keep that neuroplasticity going. And how do I keep my you know brain healthy and active and where's that gray matter gonna grow? You can grow it by learning something new that's hard for you. So from you know five years old to a hundred years old. Any game. that's designed to be challenging, it's going to give you that benefit. So how should parents think about that with kids? Because there's a lot of

48:58 questions around screen time and whether I should let my kids play certain video games or not. How do you think about that? Okay. So the number one thing is you have to be in conversation with your kids around what they're playing. And there are three really powerful questions that I ask my kids and anybody I'm trying to get to know better and like understand their relationship to games and understand their personal strength. So you ask them about whatever their favorite game is right now. Um, what does it take to be good at this game? What skills does it require?

49:28 Um, what kind of personality or temperament does it require? You ask them, what have you gotten better at since you started playing this game? And you ask what's the hardest thing you've accomplished in this game. And Ask them to tell you about how they did it, you know, um, what what did you have to do in order to meet that challenge. Um, because it turns out that people who can talk about what they've gotten better at, what real skills, whether it's you know being able to can manage my breathing under pressure, my heart rate under pressure, if they're a competitive esports player, or if it's um creativity, um, maybe it's

50:05 Uh, I don't give up when things are hard. It's communication, stressful situations with my teammates. It's I can get I know where to look whenever I I don't know what to do. I'm a really good information finder. Whatever it is. People who can talk about that, they tend to bring those skills to their work, to their learning, to their relationships, to their hobbies. Um, and all you have to do to get somebody to transfer the benefits of games to real life is just have that conversation. And you can do it with yourself too. Like just have a little game journal. Every time you play a new game, you're like, What am I getting better at by playing this game? What's the hardest thing that I have achieved by uh when I've been playing this game and what did it take to do it? Um, and so if you're having those conversations with your kids, I don't care what they're playing, I don't care if they're playing Fortnite, you know, for 20 hours a week and that stresses you out. Um, by the way, twenty one hours a week is like the tipping point where we do start to see it can get in the way of physical health or mental health. So you know, okay, less than twenty one hours a week. But other than that, it can be anything that killing zombies, you know, like it's stuff that you don't understand why they enjoy it. You can still ask those questions and you can still have that conversation and you can reflect back.

51:14 um to anybody. Like when I watch my husband play a game, you know, I can I can tell him what I think what strengths I think he's showing and I can Show him that I see all of those great things and and those great qualities in him. Games are just a great way to tell each other You know, what we're good at and what we want to be appreciated for and what we value in each other. And so we should just have more of those conversations. Are there better times a day for kids to play? Mm. Yeah. So okay, there's a really counterintuitive study that um I parents always like, oh when I tell them about it, because it's it showed the opposite of what most parents assume is true.

51:52 Um, which is if you want kids to retain what they study. Better You should have them play video games first and then do their homework and then study before they go to sleep because if you Study first and then as your reward you get to play games. When you go to sleep, your brain is gonna focus on the most salient problem it was recently trying to solve. And I'm sure I don't know if you've ever had this experience. You go to sleep and your brain starts like.

52:18 Just it's working. on whatever you were just really fixated on. So you one that brain to be fixated on, you know, the calculus or well, you know, the the whatever the foreign words you're studying are um not on the level that you were trying to solve in a game. So actually reversing the order is is a really good tip. Um the the key is just to setting a hard time limit so that, you know, they play for ninety minutes and they switch to work or

52:47 Whatever it is. Um, but yeah, you don't you don't wanna have the game right before bed unless You're you've recently been traumatized, which is this is like, can we do a PSA little public service announcement? Um, if you're having flashbacks of a traumatic event or You're ruminating on something that it's making you crazy. Like you can't get this bad experience out of your mind. You're you can't get this you're replaying this conversation over and over again because you you feel like you said the wrong thing and you just feel fixated on it. Playing a game right before bed.

53:19 Will uh essentially hijack. the attention center and especially the visual centers, if it's a game that's very visual. I mean, Tetris is like the golden game in in clinical trials when they study this effect. It's like Tetris is the best option because Um it it literally hijacked your brain like you Close your eyes and you see the falling, you know, Tetris blocks. Um, but any game that can really focus your attention will um make it less likely for you to be then lying in bed.

53:48 trying to fall asleep with all these negative thoughts or having nightmares and flashbacks that you can't control. So yeah, you should play the game right before bed if you're if you're dealing with that problem. But otherwise, you know, do something else like your learning or your you know, whatever your growth stuff is, read, do that before bed. Instead it'll stay in your brain better. Is there a difference between the benefits we get from single player games versus multiplayer games? Yeah. It's you know, I say right game, right time, right person. You know, if you're trying to control your attention, you might have an easier time with a single player game. Um if you're trying to manage anxiety or you wanna, you know, slow your heart rate down, or um you you need some you need a positive emotion because you're having a hard day.

54:30 You know, just pull out your phone or your switch or whatever and do a little solo gaming that gets you in the right frame of mind. Um And then, you know, social gaming I mean We know that people who spend a lot of time playing the same game with the same people, um, report getting more social support in their everyday lives. So even if it's a game like Pokemon Go where you might not

54:54 see the other player. You might not be speaking to them. Maybe we're doing remote raids together. We're just sending each other virtual gifts every day. Um, you're more likely to Text somebody that you've had an interaction with in the game or pick up the phone and ask them for help with a problem, or just feel Like you have a rich network of support if you need it. It's sort of that safety net that you feel like you have in your life that makes us, I don't know, less anxious or feel less alone. If you play the same game with the same people, League of Legends, whatever it is.

55:24 And so yeah, y you know, I try to have a balance in my life. You know, if if I'm super anxious, I'm not gonna And I'm trying to like Focus my mind. I'm not gonna do Pokemon Go because that's not quite stimulating enough. I might need to do something a little more challenging, but you you start to learn and curate a set of games in your life. That plays the right role for you, and I you know I think the more that you can articulate

55:49 This game gives me this benefit. And I play this game because, you know, it helps me in this way. Um, we don't see people like that. Developing You know. pathologies around gaming. They're they're not the people who are feeling overwhelmed, they're playing forty hours a week, sixty hours a week, it's taken over their lives. Um

56:07 You know, the people who t run into the problems tend to be escapist gamers. who just feel like games are the only thing that, you know, keeps them sane. They want to avoid Reality, but they're not thinking about the benefits that it can give them to make them, you know, stronger in real life or more capable of meeting those challenges. Next up is episode one oh eight with my friend Nir Iwal. That was released in February, nearest the best selling author of Hooked and Indestractable, and he was named The Prophet.

56:39 of habit forming technology by MIT. Here Nir explains the leading cause of distraction. And it's not what most people assume it to be. This conversation picks up as Nier starts to explain the moment he had an epiphany about distraction. There was one seminal moment that really made me reconsider my relationship with distraction.

57:02 Uh it was when I was with my daughter one afternoon. And uh we had this just Daddy daughter time plan, just this afternoon to play together. And I remember we had this activity book. That daddies and daughters could could

57:15 you know, play different games. So there was Sudoku, make an air paper airplane And there was to get to know each other, ask each other this question, like a conversation prompt. And the question was If you could have any superpower. What superpower would you want? And I remember the question verbatim.

57:31 But I can't tell you what my daughter said. Because in that moment For some reason I decided to look at my phone and have to check something. And my daughter got the message that I was sending that whatever was on my phone

57:43 was more important than she was. And when I finally look looked up from my device, she was gone. She'd left the room to play with some toy outside, and I'd blown it. And Shane, if I'm really honest with you It didn't just happen once. It would happen on multiple occasions. Not just with my daughter. It would happen

58:00 when I said, you know, I would go exercise and I didn't. Uh I was gonna eat right, but I wouldn't. Uh I would get to my desk and say, Okay, I'm gonna write, I'm gonna work on that hard. Uh project I've been delaying. And yet twenty, thirty, forty minutes I'm checking the news or scrolling Twitter or doing whatever else. That's not the thing I said I would

58:18 was going to do. And so that's when I I decided look, I really have to reassess this problem, and my first instinct was to do exactly what most people do. Well It's the technology distracting me. You see, I was looking at my phone instead of being with my daughter. It must be the phone's fault. And I and I actually I I read every book I could find on this. I I did the digital minimalism. I did all that stuff. I got rid of it. I did the digital detox.

58:40 And it's amazing, you know, I I I I got myself a flip phone. uh from Alibaba. I had to have it imported from uh from uh China because I don't really make it with the nineteen ninety style. Exactly, exactly. This flip phone with no apps. Uh no internet connection. I even found on eBay a word processor that a library was selling from the 1990s, no internet connection, just an Ethernet cable. That's how you like downloaded whatever you typed into the word processor. And I sat down at my desk and I said, Great

59:08 No internet, no apps, no Facebook, no Twitter, no email. Now I'm gonna write. And I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, You know Before I start writing, uh, there's that book that there there's that chapter in the book. I think this might be helpful with my writing. And Uh boy, my desktered. Let me let me just clean up my desk real quick and you know the trash the trash needs to be taken out.

59:29 And I still got distracted because What I discovered was that distraction, the leading cause of distraction, and research bears this out. The leading cause of distraction is not what we call external triggers. It's not the stuff outside of us. But rather distraction begins from within, what we call the internal triggers. That is the leading cause of distraction.

59:50 Borom, uncertainty, fatigue. Anxiety. If you don't understand this principle that I live by that time management requires pain management. Time management requires pain management.

1:00:02 You'll always be distracted by something, right? If it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, it doesn't matter. something is gonna distract you unless you understand what feeling you are trying to escape. Procrastination, distraction. It's not a character flaw. Not some kind of moral failing.

1:00:18 It is the inability to deal with emotional discomfort. go deeper on that. Like why are we unable to deal with emotional comfort? Where does that come from? Yeah. Yeah, so fundamentally, um Is there gender differences too? I I haven't seen gender differences, but I think the reason why we uh why distraction

1:00:36 And procrastination is always an emotion regulation problem. Is because the root cause of all human behavior is not what most people expect. that most people subscribe to this this pop psychology notion that has you know Freud actually proposed that uh he called it the pleasure principle, that everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure.

1:00:56 And the avoidance of pain. Right. Uh Jeremy Bentham said something very similar. We all know it as carrots and sticks, right? This is how you motivate. Turns out, neurologically speaking, this is not true. that uh human motivation is not about carrots and sticks. It's not about pain and pleasure, but rather it's just about one thing. All human behavior is spurred by the desire to escape discomfort.

1:01:18 Everything we do, we do for just one reason. the desire to escape discomfort even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations. If you think about it. Craving. Desire, wanting, lusting.

1:01:30 These Sensations are themselves psychologically destabilizing. They feel bad. In fact, the brain spurs us to action. By creating this discomfort that gets us to act. So this is called the homeostatic response. We know this to be true physiologically. It's pretty much common sense, right? If you think about how Uh if you go outside, you know, you live in Ottawa. If it's cold

1:01:52 Your brain says, That doesn't feel good. It's it's too cold. You should put on a coat. If you come back inside with that heavy coat, your body says, Oh, this is uncomfortable, it's too hot, take it off. If you're hungry, you feel hunger paying, so you eat. And if you're stuffed, you ate too much. Oh, the body the brain says this doesn't feel good, you should stop eating.

1:02:08 So those are physiological responses to discomfort. The same holds true to our psychological responses. So for example When you feel lonely. Check Facebook. When you're uncertain before you scan your brain to see if you know the answer.

1:02:23 Google it. When you are Uh board. Oh my goodness, tons of solutions for boredom, right? Sports scores and stock prices and the news, right? Let's think about somebody else's problem halfway across the world so we don't have to think about what's going on in our own lives. Right. So lots and lots of solutions, commercial solutions are offered. For these emotional

1:02:42 uh discomfort that we seek to escape. So that's why the first step to becoming indistractable is not to blame the technology. It's not to shame yourself. It's to claim responsibility for these uncomfortable sensations. by mastering the internal triggers. And and this is this is worth talking about for just a minute.

1:03:01 that most people out there When it comes to distraction, they tend to fall into these two buckets of what I call Blamers and shamers, right? The blamers They say, it's Facebook, it's the iPhone, it's my boss, it's my kid. That's why I I I'm not doing what I said I was going to do. I I don't accomplish my goals. I don't you know, I I missed this deadline or I did this and I didn't do what I said I'm going to do. It's because of this stuff outside of me. They blame. Or this is what I hear all the time these days.

1:03:27 It's the modern world, right? As if you can do anything about Any of that stuff. You you can't change any of that stuff. There's no magical time machine to go back into in time before these these technologies existed. So that's futile. The other extreme, and this is the camp I used to fall into, is what we call the shamer. The shamer doesn't blame things outside themselves. They shame themselves, right? They say, Oh, there I go again getting distracted.

1:03:53 I have a short attention span. I have an addictive personality. I'm a mor I'm not a morning person, right? They label themselves. With all of these Uh self defeating uh images of themselves, self images.

1:04:07 That that make it even worse. Why? Because the more shame we feel, the more of these internal triggers. Shame is a very uncomfortable internal trigger. The more we feel of that internal trigger. the more likely we are to seek escape with guess what? More distraction.

1:04:24 So we don't wanna be a blamer, we don't wanna be a shamer, we wanna be what we call a claimer. A claimer claims responsibility. Not for how they feel. This is a really important point. You cannot control your feelings. This is a myth. Right. You can't control your urges any more than you can control the urge to sneeze. If you feel the urge to sneeze,

1:04:42 It's too late. You already felt that urge. What you can control. Is how you respond to that feeling, how you respond. to that urge. So when you feel the urge to sneeze Do you sneeze all over everyone and get them sick?

1:04:55 Or do you take out a tissue and cover your face so you don't, you know, you don't uh infect others. So That's where the word responsibility comes from. It's how we respond to those internal triggers, to those uncomfortable emotional states. So that when we feel boredom, anxiety, fatigue, loneliness, whatever the case might be. Do we Escape that discomfort in a unhealthy way.

1:05:16 by getting out of our heads, turning on the TV, uh, you know, reading the reading the news, uh going on email or Facebook or whatever. Or do we deal with that discomfort in a healthy way? that that propels us forward. A couple of things you said there strike me as really interesting, and maybe you can pick up on one of these threads, which is like one, we we sort of have habitual responses to things, even though we control them you know, when I'm looking at Facebook in line at the supermarket or something, that's a you know, it develops a habit. And and then the other thing that you said that really struck me was how

1:05:48 When we shame ourselves. Our identity becomes within that shame. And then that becomes self reinforcing because if you tell yourself You're always distracted. You're always the person uh that does this. I mean that just becomes more and more of the case. That's what you see, what you expect.

1:06:06 And you become powerless in a way. I'd I'd love to hear you sort of like riff on those two things. Right. And and and this is definitely something that the tech companies take advantage of. That the internal triggers Our part of the hook model that I described in my book hook that They attach themselves.

1:06:25 to that uncomfortable emotional state, the boredom, the uncertainty, the fear. They know that you are looking for a south. You are looking for some kind of solution. And so whatever you habituate to. Whatever you turn to with little or no conscious thought Will be uh w what your brain will look for to solve that problem as quickly and efficiently as possible.

1:06:45 Which is something to be aware of. We have to be careful with that. Now the way we short circuit that is to understand what is that discomfort. And this is of course nothing new. Plato talked about this twenty five hundred years ago, the Greek philosopher, he called it Acrasia. the tendency to do things against our better interest. And he he asked this question. He pondered. Why is it that

1:07:05 Even though we know what to do. Why don't we just do it? This isn't a modern question. This is an ancient question. This is this wasn't a question that just came up with Facebook and the iPhone. People have always been distracted by one thing or another. And the answer is it's always this inability to deal with discomfort in a healthy way. And I think Part of the problem.

1:07:25 Particularly today, it's a it's a relatively modern phenomenon. Is that We have this This авержен to

1:07:34 Discomfort. in in an unhealthy extent. What do I mean by that? Of course You know, pain doesn't feel good. It's not meant to feel good. It's meant to spur you into action. But that doesn't mean

1:07:45 That Feeling bad is bad. that in fact feeling bad can be very good. That if we think about, you know, how many books today have happy in the title and preach contentment and you know tell you that if you follow this five point plan, you're gonna reach Nirvana. As if

1:08:01 If you're not constantly happy Something's wrong with you. And that's totally ridiculous. That I would argue that from an evolutionary basis You wouldn't want a species of Homo sapiens. to be happy and contented all the time. If there was ever a group of Homo sapiens

1:08:18 That was happy continuously. Our ancestors would have Killed and eaten them. Right? That would not be A beneficial evolutionary trait.

1:08:27 You want. People to be perpetually perturbed. You want them. To want more. That's g what gets us to hunt, to invent, to create. That that discomfort

1:08:39 Uh that wanting more. can be rocket fuel to propel us forward. And so that's why it's very important not to run away from that discomfort. But to harness it. to lead you towards traction rather than distraction.

1:08:51 How do we learn to deal with that discomfort? Like how how do you teach your daughter to deal with that rather than solving her problems? How do you teach adults to deal with discomfort instead of running away from it or thinking that it shouldn't happen at all because a lot of people seem to grow up at least in the Western world where they feel like uh you know, it's somebody else's responsibility to make them happy or take care of problems for them. Right. No, I think that this is this is I think the the aid the the question of our age. Um and I think

1:09:21 You know, this is a this is a good place'cause we I I realized we jumped into the conversation without kind of defining some terminology. I think words are really, really important when it comes to this subject. So let me just back up just for a quick second and talk about what is distraction, really. I mean, we use this term, but what does it actually mean? And I think the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. So most people will say, The opposite of distraction is focus. Right. I don't want to be distracted. I want to be focused. But that's not actually the opposite of distraction. The opposite of distraction. If you look at the origin of the word, the obvious distraction is

1:09:54 is traction. That both words come from the same Latin root trahare, which means to pull. And both words also end in the same six letters. A C T I W that spells action. So traction by definition is any action

1:10:09 That pulls you Towards what you said you were going to do, things that you do with intent, things that help move you towards your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. So those are acts of traction. The opposite of traction Is This

1:10:23 traction. Distraction is any action That pulls you away from what you plan to do, anything that is not done with intent, anything that moves you away from your values and pulls you further away from becoming the person you want to become. So This isn't just semantics, this is really important because I would argue That any action

1:10:40 can be traction or distraction. What do I mean by that? Let me give an example. I would sit at my desk every morning. Before I embarked on this line of research. I would sit at my desk and I would say, Okay

1:10:52 I'm gonna work on that big project. Gonna finish that blog post. I'm gonna work on that proposal. I'm gonna get to work at that thing I've been delaying, no more procrastinating. I'm gonna do it. Here I go. But first let me check some email.

1:11:04 Right. 'Cause that's a worky task. Right? That's something I have to do at the end of my day anyway, right? So let me just go do that right now. And what I didn't realize is that I was letting distraction trick me. Into prioritizing the easy and the urgent work.

1:11:20 as opposed to the important work. Yeah. This is the this is the most pernicious form of distraction, the kind that we don't even realize is pulling us off course. Because if I sit at my desk and I start playing Candy Crush, well okay, obviously that's a distraction. But if I'm checking email thinking I'm productive, but really I'm not working on that thing I know I should do that's more important, that is also a distraction because it's not what I plan to do with my time.

1:11:43 Conversely Anything can be traction. So don't believe these chicken little tech critics that say video games are melting your brain and Facebook is melting your brain and everything is melting your brain. Ridiculous. The science doesn't support that at all. Right.

1:11:57 That if you plan To spend your time playing a video game. Or scrolling social media or watching a YouTube video. There's nothing wrong with it. As long as it's done on your schedule.

1:12:09 Not the tech companies. So the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. Any distraction can be turned into traction. by simply making time for it in your day. So back to your question about how do I teach my daughter this, there's a whole section in the book about how to raise indestractable kids. And this is something I feel really passionate about because. If you think the world is distracting now.

1:12:31 Just wait a few years, right? It's only gonna become more distracting with virtual reality and augmented reality and who knows what else reality. It's only gonna get worse. Mastering distraction is the first step to creating great work, but once you've mastered that, you have to actually start creating. For advice on that, we took to episode number one oh five of the podcast with Seth Goden. Which was our most downloaded episode of twenty twenty one.

1:12:58 Seth is the author of 20 best selling books, founder of the Alta MBA, and runs one of the most popular blogs in the world where he's written thousands of entries every single day of the year. The most interesting part of his episode begins as I ask him to expand on something he said before, which is creativity is a choice, it's not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else. What does it mean that creativity is a choice? Well, first thing. Have you ever been creative once in your life?

1:13:28 Have you ever solved an interesting problem, told a funny joke, said something to somebody else that needed to be said? I've never met anyone who said no. Everyone has been creative at least once. So what does it mean to be creative more than once? It means

1:13:43 Do you have to Extend yourself. With empathy. to the person you are seeking to serve, to the person who the work is for. And

1:13:52 You have to extend yourself not just through space but through time. Into the future. Announcing something That might or might not work, you don't know yet. That's what makes it creative.

1:14:04 If you exert the emotional labor to do those two things Sometimes you will have a successful creative outcome. That's a choice. So

1:14:15 The people who say, I don't have any questions. Well No, it's impossible you don't have any questions. What you're actually saying is I don't care enough.

1:14:25 To ask a question that might embarrass me. That's what you're actually saying. And That's a euphemism for I don't want to make the choice to be creative.

1:14:35 I have this theory that one of the biggest things that holds us back in life is that we're unwilling to look like an idiot in the short term. To be successful in the long term. Yeah. That's brilliant. You should write that one down.

1:14:46 What does it mean to trust yourself? So the original title for my book was trust yourself. I even own trustyourself.com. Which is lying mostly dormant and it wasn't inexpensive.

1:14:58 When we say I am talking to myself. Nobody thinks that's a weird thing to say. Who is I? And who is yourself?

1:15:09 Why does it feel so normal? To have Two voices in our head,'cause we all do. One voice. is hyperliterate.

1:15:18 and voc verbal and vocal and a critic. It is responsible. for getting us to fit in all the way. The other voice. Not that good at being verbal.

1:15:30 Yeah. Self. is the one that wants to make things better, that's curious, that's inquisitive, that might color outside the line. And it's The first voice that is mostly in control.

1:15:44 And so when we look at great shortcuts and hacks like Morning Pages. They exist to bypass The first voice. Yeah. So many of the things

1:15:54 that creative people do. as part of their practice exist. to make the first voice the monkey mind Be a little calmer. So that the other voice can be trusted enough.

1:16:05 To speak up. That doesn't mean that's not true. It will always work. And it doesn't mean we should let that voice do whatever it wants to. But it should at least be allowed to present its agenda.

1:16:15 So that our more a cognition focused brain. can make a decision. What does it mean to be a professional? You said um doing what you love is for amateurs and loving what you do is for professionals. Can you expand on that and then explore some other differences? Okay, so

1:16:32 There are very few amateur surgeons, right? You want a professional surgeon, you want the surgeon to show up And do her work. Beautifully, even if she's in a bad mood. Uh And you want her to keep going to continuing education classes to be

1:16:46 I stand understanding the state of the art, not because they are fascinated by how the knee works. But because they said to you I'm really good at knee surgery and I will take care of you. A professional makes a promise and then keeps the promise, whether or not they feel like it. Amateurs

1:17:05 Get to be authentic. Whatever that means. Amateurs show up when they want to. And make what they want to make. I love being an amate at some things.

1:17:15 Don't sell your hobbies. Do your hobbies for you. But if you're gonna be a pro. It means you need to understand the state of the art. Needs

1:17:24 Means you need to raise the bar, you need to understand who it's for and what's it for, what change do you seek to make. There's a whole bunch of obligations. that go with being a professional. That put you on the hook. And For years I've had

1:17:36 Uniforms at work. I don't usually wear them in public. They change from time to time. The beginning was a lab coat. Uh lately I've just been trying the uh Japanese volunteer fireman hopy coat. 'Cause when you put on the uniform

1:17:51 You've just sent yourself a message. Do your work. At your work space. Do it at the appointed hours. Невер.

1:17:59 Ever. Miss a deadline. Never. ever go over budget. Cause professionals Don't miss deadlines.

1:18:06 Don't throw tantrums. and don't go over budget. And every once in a while a creative breaks through'cause they're doing their hobby for money. And they do those things, they miss their deadline, blah, blah, blah. And people Applaud them.

1:18:17 And then eventually they fade away. Mm. Because the industries we work in They want to work with professionals. How do we define work? Well, there's the work and then there's work the verb.

1:18:29 For me the work is what the professional Said they would do. And There are

1:18:38 Definitely times that I the permission marketing, the phrase that enabled me to be an author. Came to me in the shower. Right. But it didn't come into the meeting shower. Accidentally it came to me in the shower with intent. Went into the shower.

1:18:52 And I was Getting close to the Self appointed deadline. And I said, I'm going to stay in the shower. Until I have a name for this thing we do here. Even if the water gets cold.

1:19:03 And we only had a forty gallon hot water tank at the time. So I knew I didn't have a lot of time. I was in there to do work. And I think as We get more and more privileged. Where our work looks so much more like what people used to think of as hobbies.

1:19:21 We can get confused by the fact that our work is a hobby. It's not. And treating it like our work, I think helps us make it better. You you mentioned earlier something, um, and I forget the context, but uh maybe you can expand on it about meeting the spec. Talk to me about that.

1:19:38 I I know I've been ranting, so thank you for giving me this platform. This is beautiful. Keep going, man. There's there's lots to be said about spec. First, let's talk about uh Edward Stemming and what spec and quality mean. Quality is not luxury.

1:19:53 Quality is not expensive. Quality is not that you love it. Quality is just one thing. It meets spec. So if I look

1:20:02 Under an electron microscope at any part of a Lexus. Which is by any measure the highest quality car there is. Under an electron microscope it's filled with defects. But they're not defects that matter because they're defects that are within spec.

1:20:17 And so We begin by understanding what is the spec. of the work we're going to do. If it meets spec, not only is it quality, but it is good enough, and good enough is not a slur. Good enough is a definition.

1:20:31 It met spec. So once it's good enough. We ship the work. If you're not happy with that. Change your spec.

1:20:39 But let's be really clear about what the spec is. That what it meant for a Lexus to be good enough when they first came out. was it had to be a standard deviation better. Than a Mercedes.

1:20:51 That was their definition. If someone's gonna say no no We can't ship this Lexus because it's not perfect. The product manager should say, No, no, no, no. It was never supposed to be perfect. It never can be perfect. It simply met spec.

1:21:04 The hard work was in defining the spec. A spec that will get you to the next step. T two questions about spec. D do you think that applies in a world of leverage? Where the difference between something that's, you know, meets spec and something that exceeds spec. can be massively disproportionate.

1:21:23 Yeah, no, I think that we're having a semantic Discussion here, but If The massive Shift.

1:21:31 That you're looking for. That comes from leverage is important. That should be part of the spec. Okay. And do you think we hide behind perfection?

1:21:39 Oh yeah, all the time. Talk to me. All the time. Double click on that. So if we've had a hundred years of industrialism And industrialism has been all about. Don't ship.

1:21:51 If we have Brainwashed every human being who is alive who has been through organized schooling into understanding that an A is better than a B.

1:22:02 And there are wrong answers and right answers on the test. Well then it's super easy. to say good enough and perfect are the same thing. So when I was in college

1:22:12 the uh logic symbolic logic was one of my favorite classes. The symbolic logic exam was not only open book, open note. It was unlimited time. In the room. So you got there at eight AM and you could say as long as you wanted. I decided when I got to college I would take as many classes as I could.

1:22:31 'Cause it was all the same price. And I wasn't gonna care about my grades'cause I didn't want to be tempted to go to law school. And so if I could take a class path fail, I would, because spec was easier to meet. Right? And after three and a half hours at the in the logic exam,

1:22:48 I said I could probably get a few more points here. But I have met my spec. And I left. And

1:22:56 I was one of the first people to leave, but someone stayed there for I think it was eighteen hours. And the question is What did they get? In exchange

1:23:05 For that. Focus on perfectionism. 'Cause I know what I did in the other fifteen hours that were free to me. And I think Unless you believe you're immortal.

1:23:16 Using your time wisely is probably a good practice. Continuing with the theme of choice as an adult, we look back on episode one oh nine of the podcast with Angela Duckworth. Angela is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder and CEO of a nonprofit whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development. Our interview covered a wide variety of topics, including the mindset we need to take on challenges in life. and how to teach those strategies to our kids.

1:23:48 But this portion of the conversation picks up after I asked her about the things we can control versus the things we can't control. and how those affect us. Let's start with the mindset of like, hey, I can change something. I've done these research studies on this self-control technique called situation modification. And this work was done with um collaborators, including James Gross at Stanford. James Gross actually originally and mostly studies emotion. And one of the things that's interesting about regulating your anger is if you have a bad temper. or your sadness, if you tend toward melancholy, or your happiness, if you want more of that, or I guess if you wanted less of that, is um that people can, you know, use these like sort of mental strategies like what I pay attention to, how I'm gonna frame things, my self talk.

1:24:37 But also you can just change your actual situation. So for example If you Constantly get into arguments at Thanksgiving with your brother in law. then maybe you should sit at the other end of the table or like not go to Thanksgiving with your brother in law, or like make sure that like you're watching football while your brother in law is like cutting up the pie, right? So we extended that in a study of um uh middle school actually we've done it in all different age groups. I'll tell you about a study we did with high school students where we randomly assigned high school students to watch this little video was about five minutes long. Um, and then we told some similar things, but the intervention wasn't very long. And we were like, you know,

1:25:16 You can change your situation. You know, like people think when they have to exercise self-control to like study or do all in school, they think it's all willpower. But like actually, like you could, for example, put your phone in another room. Like you could make sure that you study in a place that like people aren't walking into and out of all the time. So in that study, there was a control group that um learned about willpower and how important it is to like, you know, use willpower to accomplish your goals. And then there was a a neutral control group. And what we found is that the condition that increased academic Goal attainment best was the one where you just explained to kids like, hey, you can modify your situation. And I think that. idea that like your situation isn't just like

1:26:00 fixed or set, um, but something you can agentically intentionally modify is one of the most important lessons that you could learn in life. I love that. I think that they're there a lot of people are passive about life. It's like life just happens to them. And things just happen to them and it it it it's sort of like you can you can put that in the victim mentality sort of mindset, but it's really it's deeper than that, in a way, right? It's like I have no agency over anything. It's not necessarily but the story, it's just sort of like this general passiveness to and I I

1:26:34 I believe in a very active life. Where did you learn that? Like why do you think you have come out on that end of the continuum? I don't know. I mean I first got that phrasing, I think it was from Graham Duncan. uh in a conversation we had in New York, and he just sort of recounted this story to me about Um one of his friends actually was driving with this portfolio manager and they I think he actually wrote about this on his blog too. Um, but they were driving and then this car swerved out and almost hit him. And the guy driving the car was like, Why does this stuff always happen to me? And it was just a very revealing sort of mindset, right? And it comes back to sort of that question, which is like

1:27:11 What are the mindsets that are gonna enable us to capitalize on life in part in bad situations, capitalize on bad, capitalize on good, intelligently prepare To put us on the path to success. I think you're on to something very important. And I guess I have a fondness for like, you know, great psychologists in their nineties. Um, because I have been calling Al Bandura a lot. Um he is the psychologist at Stanford, I think he's ninety-six now, who um Coin the term self efficacy.

1:27:44 to describe the belief that you can do something if you try. Right. So self efficacy about physics would be like I can learn physics if I tried. And I had this conversation with him, you know Well, a couple weekends ago, actually, where I asked him, I was like, um, Al, you've spent your whole life studying self-efficacy, but there was this other person um whose like name is spelled R-O-T-T-E-R, but I think it's like Dutch or German. Anyway, so I'm gonna mispronounce it as Roder.

1:28:16 But Roder studied locus of control and locus of control was uh to me like super similar. So I asked Al like what's the difference? Because in locus of control theory, you either have an internal locus of control or an external locus of control, right? So life kind of happens to you or Um that would be the external or like, you know, you're in control. And he said, Oh, there's a very important difference. I'm more interested in saying that like I can control, you know, my behavior, not necessarily that that behavior is going to like. magically make everything the way I want. What what locus and control is about is more just like In the grand scheme, is the actual outcome gonna be, you know, my doing or not? Because like I all I wanna say is that people have agency.

1:29:00 Over there. behavior. uh over their um performance, not necessarily like that you're gonna get hired just because you are the most qualified candidate, but that you could control like your own behavior and performance. So I think that's a very important um nuance here um because I don't think that we want to teach our kids that they have like control over like

1:29:23 whether the coronavirus vaccine is going to be made available in their municipality, you know, in one month or another, or you know, or whether they're gonna get into a certain college, um, because those things are a bit downstream. But where I really agree with Bandura First of all, that we do have control, we do have agency, and that it's dramatically more productive to when you think about your own behavior that you think about you that you you you really pay attention um to the things that you can control. And I I wonder you probably haven't, or maybe you're more well read than I have you ever heard of Howard Thurman? No.

1:30:01 Okay, we need to resurrect Howard Thurman even before Freud. Okay. Right. So Howard Thurman was um uh like the mentor and the Pastor um for Martin Luther King, Junior and Howard Thurman I had never heard of because I'm Deeply illiterate, but I was reading Arthur Ashe's memoir. So Arthur Ashe, for those who are younger than us, maybe the you know he's a great uh tennis player and I believe the only

1:30:28 black male to win Wimbledon. So he wrote this memoir called Days of Grace, which I recommend. And in it he talks about how so important in his life was Howard Thurman. So that led me to Howard Thurman. And the reason I bring it up is that Howard Thurman has all these sermons about how there is um the final consent. It was like you know you cannot like change that you were born into a racist society. You cannot change that you are born into a certain family, but you can always

1:30:56 Change how you react to it. Right, like you and you're responsible for how you react to it. And in Victor Frankel said the same thing about his experience in the concentration camps, right? That that terrible things can happen to you over which you do not have control. But you can control your reaction. And and I don't want to even say that you can control it a hundred percent, but I do think you have some control over your reaction. And I I I think this agentic view is um accurate and adaptive. How do we as parents Instill that mindset in our kids.

1:31:28 I asked Al Bandura this, um I said, you know, do you think that you could learn as much from failure? as you could from success, right? Because there are all these like a dodges and aphorisms about failure, especially in startup land. And he said, Oh This one I a hundred percent believe is

1:31:46 mastery experiences, success success experiences um are what really build Mm. you know sense of agency If your kid has like a Teflon life where you know everything comes easily, in part because you make it that way, and there are a lot of parents who like sort of just make their kids' lives frictionless, right? Like, oh, you know, you're struggling for 10 minutes, like I'll get you a five hundred dollars per hour tutor. Like, like, oh, your your teacher's not so great. I'll get them fired. Like that's not the kind of success experience that Al Bander is talking about because he's talking about um success after challenge.

1:32:21 success after struggle. So um I think Al Bandura's advice is the best advice, which is the the number one thing, and there's more than one thing, but the number one thing is that people develop confidence when they have Um struggle to overcome something and They have come out victorious, um, and the the engineering problem for a parent is then to figure out the right size of challenge for the kid, like in the next moment in time. And I think that we often get it wrong. Like the challenge is just too big or the challenge is too small. It's sort of monitoring and adjusting based on your particular child and the circumstances involved. How do we do it as adults? Do we seek out these opportunities to be challenged? Do we

1:33:04 I think that we are benefited um in large part by having a um surrogate parent. I mean I I I what I mean by that is, you know, whether you're fifty or five, right, it's good to have somebody who is a little older and wiser than you who is like helping you figure out the next challenge. Um and and most of the people that I study, like they never get out of being mentor, you know, like they they have a they have a management coach, they have like a personal coach, they have Therapist, the ones I'm most jealous of have a peer for whom they coach each other, right? They have somebody who's like, You know, you should write a book. It's like oh no, I can't write a book. No, you should really write a book. Like and you know, it's that it's that kind of um

1:33:46 challenge setting that of course you can try to do it on your own, but I I think that we're always benefited by having like another human being um who's advantages are multiple, but one of them is that they're just not us. Right. So they have a psychological distance um from our situation. They have a better a different aperture into our situation, one that removes a lot of the nuance, and the nuance in our case might be holding us back, right? And the ego, right? And sometimes, you know, the people who are looking at us have a better sense of our strengths as well. Finally, we go back to one of my favorite interviews. of twenty twenty one and hear from a guest who came on for a reappearance, which is Jim Collins.

1:34:27 Jim Collins is a renowned business researcher and author, but beyond that he's a deep thinker about his personal relationships, and he's thought hard about what it means to be a great friend and live a meaningful life. This conversation from episode one ten picks up after I ask him to explain a lesson he's learned from his late mentor, Bill Azure. on the importance of building relationships. And not.

1:34:48 transactions. If I stand back and I think about what are my absolute most primary values, um, and and particularly ones that I got from Bill. Uh, they are curiosity and relationships. And the curiosity I think has kind of been with me all the way along, but the relationships when I got from Bill. Bill's basic view of the world.

1:35:09 was Number one, life is short. Uh, you never know when it's gonna go away. And in the end Um

1:35:16 What is that up to? What is meaningful. And Bill believed that People Break into two buckets.

1:35:24 There are those who kind of come at life as a series of transactions. And there are people who come at life as building relationships. They'll believe that the only way to have a great life You can have a successful life doing transactions, but the only way to have a really great life. is on the relationship side.

1:35:41 And so Bill Just pounded in me, instilled in me, modelled for me. In the end, it is really deep relationships and doing things you love with people you love and those connections. And so we got into this conversation though about relationships one day.

1:35:57 And I asked Bill. So Okay, but so what makes for a great relationship? And Bill said oh A really great relationship.

1:36:06 Is one where if you ask each person Independently. Who benefits more from the relationship? They would each say, Well I do.

1:36:16 And I said, Well, isn't that a little bit of a selfish way to look at it? And he said, Well no. Let's think about this for a minute, Jim. Let me ask you. Jim, who do you think benefits more from our relationship? I said, Well clearly I do. I mean with everything you've done for me. He said, Well, isn't that just great? Because I would answer that I do.

1:36:35 And he said, See, the reason both people can answer that way is because both people are putting into the relationship not for what they're going to get from it. for for what they can give to it. And because both people are doing that. both people would feel that they are the ones who are the ultimate beneficiary because of how much the other person gives. Everything we do here

1:36:59 The Good to Great project is relationship oriented. I mean, there's not a single day that goes by that we don't think about What is the relationship element of this decision of how we handle something, of whether we sit how we say yes or no? Everything goes back to relationships. One of the other lessons you you learned from Bill Um was the trust wager. Talk to me about that. Bill had this.

1:37:23 really interesting stance on trust that ultimately affected me. And so let's make this both human and and and intellectual. When I left Stanford to launch out on my own and in our last conversation, you know, I described launching out on my own and the the fear of that and the commitment and so forth and And and when I sort of left.

1:37:42 The relatively cloistered world of a place like Stanford. You kinda hit a broader world and Um certain assumptions about how trustworthy people are might get dashed by events. And I I don't want to call people out on this, but just suffice it to say that

1:37:59 To my great shock. I discovered that some people actually genuinely weren't trustworthy. I was um just naive in some at some level, right, but you know, when I've had people like you know Bill Dezeer in my life or I've met people like Jim Stockdale or you know, uh Peter Drucker or people people that just you're they're just of such a character caliber that

1:38:19 I was in a very rare group of of folks. And so I asked Bill. Uh have you ever had your trust? Yeah.

1:38:28 And said, Oh yeah, of course. I've been I've I've had my trust abused. Uh it's just part of life. But then he gave me this you know, it's this one of this great mentor moment. He said, This is Jim, this is one of Now that you're starting to have this experience or really experience it. You need to decide. What is your opening bid?

1:38:45 When you are Establishing a relationship with someone when you're interacting with the world. Is your opening bid To assume. Trust.

1:38:55 To assume that someone is trustworthy and to grant them the full benefits of that. That's your opening bit. And that trust can be lost. But the bid is trust. Or is your opening bid

1:39:09 To not trust. But the trust can be earned. So many aspects of your life will be affected by which fork On that you take. That's a stance on life.

1:39:22 And I said, Well it seems to me, Bill, you've chosen the Trust bit. as the opening bit. And he said yes, I have. I said but but Bill

1:39:32 Brutal facts. Not everyone is trustworthy. And the brutal fact is some people will abuse that trust. So have people abused your trust trust and he said, Of course they have. And he went on and he described a situation of somebody who was quite close to him. uh who um had abused his trust and it had cost him enough

1:39:52 That he said it hurt. Right, not just emotionally, but financially as well. And then there's this little kind of cul de sac on the whole thing that Bill has. Which is the notion of You don't leave yourself exposed to

1:40:04 A a catastrophe. Right. If you trust your let's say you're you're CFO and you never look at the books and then you discover one day that you had a problem and your you know your company is bankrupt. You know, you you always pay attention to the cash flow. You always watch the numbers, you always keep an eye on things like you you don't it's not like you become disconnected from reality, but he said, but you know

1:40:27 I never left myself open to catastrophe. Beyond that, yeah, that that one hurt. I said, Well, did it change your your approach to trusting people? He said, No, it's just part of the cost of living. And then he went on. And he described it as upside and downside.

1:40:43 And this is it sort of gets into the you know it just simply hardheaded. This was a hard headed view. He said I've come to the conclusion when I think across the iterative relationships and interactions and aspects of life. That there is far more upside.

1:40:58 In an opening bit of trust. And there is far more downside. In an opening bid. Of mistrust. It all goes to the question of people.

1:41:11 If you really basically wanna have your life, whether there be people in your company, whether they people in your life, whether they be your friends, whether they're people you rock climb with, whatever it is. The very, very best people. Will respond To the bid. Of trust.

1:41:28 The best people will be attracted to that and and you want the best people to be attracted. And the second is he said, Have you ever considered the possibility, Jim, that your opening bit affects how people behave? If you trust people you're more likely that they will act in a trustworthy way.

1:41:48 So it's a double win. It's the best people and they'll behave in a trustworthy way. The flip side is if you have an opening bit of mistrust. the best people will not be attracted to that. If if you have this opening sense of you have to earn my trust. Now, you may have to earn my trust how good you are at something.

1:42:06 Right, or earn my respect for your performance or that sort of thing. But if you if I basically like I don't trust you, you have to earn it. Well, some of the best people are gonna be like, I don't need to put up with that. I'll go do something else. And for Bill it was always about again. people and relationships. Right. That that's where the trust trust comes from.

1:42:23 And and he just came at it as a As a very hard headed And warm hearted approach to the world, and that's why I think there were so many people Whose lives were affected by Bill Azir, he trusted them and they responded. In very trustworthy ways in the world.

1:42:40 The the other thing though that on an intellectual front on this is I uh as I I I think you know, I'm a huge fan of this thing called the Great Courses series, where you get college level courses, sixty lectures, forty lectures, whatever, and I've been doing them for years and years. And there's one called Games People Play, and it's a course on game theory. And of course I know you know game theory well. If I remember it right, the essence of it was that the best strategy is an opening bit of cooperation. Yeah. the game can unfold. From there.

1:43:11 Right. But that that is A good place to start. So I was very sort of like Bill had this sense of game theory. that was in his approach to relationships and humanity. I don't know if he ever took a course on game theory. I think that's a really Interesting way to approach it. And I definitely agree with with that personally. And my my friend Toby has this concept that I think might help people. It's very visual. It's called the trust battery.

1:43:36 And you can do things that increase your trust or decrease your trust. But if you start that trust battery at the say the seventy fifth percentile. Um, then you know, you're starting from a different place and if it's the fifth You know, you're five percent. uh your trust battery's full and it's been my experience that the benefits of reciprocal trust and the speed and not living with your card up all the time is more than worth letting yourself occasionally get screwed

1:44:03 another friend of mine had this really good concept about when to forgive and when to sort of like And he said as long as it's not malicious. Just always forgive. One of the things that Bill always emphasized was

1:44:17 that sometimes you don't know the whole story. He said sometimes It may not be mit ill intent. It could just simply be a misunderstanding. Or it could be Just incompetent. Right. Somebody might not actually be untrustworthy. They might just be incompetent. Or they made a mistake, right? And so be careful. Uh there's this um

1:44:35 Uh this moment I I call it Seeing the hat. It's a it's a weird thing, but uh Driving down a road in in Boulder. And and and imagine a car all of a sudden veers into your lane from the the lane next to you. You're but you know, both going the same direction and you're like oh you know, the idiotic driver or whatever. And then um

1:44:54 You notice that what had happened was uh when you went on pass further is somebody's hat had blown off into the middle of the road and they were gonna maybe step out and grab it. And but you couldn't see that. I I think Joanne had this experience and you sort of think about it as like, Well, wait a minute, you know, maybe you don't see the whole situation. You're jumping to a conclusion about why somebody is doing something. When actually if you can see the hat.

1:45:17 You'll look at it a little differently. I think that's a great place to end this conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time and explaining it and I think it's perfect perfect point to leave on. Till next time. Yeah, no, I appreciate you, man. I appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.

1:45:38 I've really enjoyed it. Oh, my pleasure. This was great, Shane. So good to see you again. No, we can't end it. You haven't told me what I should rethink. I'm gonna push for this. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Furnham Street.

1:45:53 I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to. Email me at shane at fs.blog. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs dot blog slash podcast. To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog slash tribe or check out the show notes. Can you do me a small favor?

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