#119 Todd Simkin: Making Better Decisions

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/884ef2f0597f0545

There are definitely places where we know that we
Enjoy.
To search for answers.
Nobody ever goes out.
And buys a printed book of Sudoku puzzles that are
already printed and completed.
But there are other contexts where you're absolutely right, where people say
I'm afraid that if I don't
Know the answer here. I'm gonna make mistakes.
In
The world that I live in
We know that we're gonna make mistakes all the time.
that we are effectively just running experiments and getting feedback and then updating our approach and running a new experiment again the next day.
And experiments fail.
Like that's one of the ways that they eventually succeed is because you found enough ways that
That they fail.
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Todd Simkin is here today.
Todd is a traitor at Susquehanna Group.
Having also worked as a general operating handling personal hires, compensation, and most importantly for this podcast, he was the cohead of SIG's educational department.
Where he taught people how to make better decisions.
As you can imagine, this podcast is a deep dive on decision making.
How we make them.
How we calibrate them.
How we make different types of decisions from trading

Teaching other people to make better decisions individually and at scale.
What the biggest bang for the buck is when it comes to making better decisions.
Identity.
An early encounter with his father that still shapes how he thinks about quitting something.
Being a contestant
And
Winning on Jeopardy.
And so much more.
It's time to listen.
And learn.
I'm really excited to talk with you about a lot of things, especially being on Jeopardy and working through depression.
But I wanna start with
Why we're here, decision making.
As a trader at Susquehanna.
I did I even say that right? How do you say that?
Uh S I G is uh is is the way to say it to uh to to get away with it.
Uh Susquehanna, I think is the uh accepted pronunciation, but we've got people around the globe.
Who've all tried their own way of pronouncing it and
S. I G seems to be the safest way to go.
All right. So that's one of the more secretive and successful investment outfits. You make a living though, effectively.
Making decisions.
I wanna dive into that. What's your process for making decisions?
The products that we're trading are
pretty much any financial product that you could that you can think of being traded. So equities, fixed income products, currencies, commodities,
Uh and we've really got our start in derivatives, so equity options.
Uh and then index products.
And um our approach is to
To recognize that uh we
We are often uh on the bad end of informational asymmetry.
that other people who are looking to trade in the markets
Frequently know more than we do.
And as a as a result, we don't want to back our own
Limited opinion.
Against
A more informed counterparty.
Instead what we want to do is take the information that we have coming from
outside sources and there are multiple outside sources, different types of products that are being traded.
different option series uh if we're trading uh derivatives.
And use that information to improve our own information set.
to then be able to allocate our capital in a way that we think we'll
uh lead to a return.
So how do you deal with information asymmetry? I mean that's a common thing for everybody in making decisions where one party knows a lot more.
And then another party.
Yeah. Uh there there are there are a few ways that that that we've tried to to handle it. One is to
Is to build out
uh research capabilities internally so that we do have
So some basis for
Uh our initial opinion.
But m the most important thing
uh from our perspective is to be willing to update
That opinion in a Bayesian way.
Two
Uh use approaches that are uh that that are going to be
um inclusive of all the information available to us and only when we get to mutually exclusive information
Or m mutually exclusive signals, can we say
Something here uh doesn't jine.
Right.
It's
Totally fine if somebody says they think that the stock price is greater than a hundred.
Knowing nothing else, I think the stock price is gonna be greater than a hundred.
Somebody else says they think the stock price is gonna be low than one oh five.
I say okay now I've got
A market. Now I've got
uh two sides. And then someone else says they think the stock price is going to be lower than ninety seven.
Now we don't have
um information that can coexist in the same universe.
I don't need to know who's right.
But I do know
that it can't both be above a hundred and be below ninety seven.
W what does that mean, Beanzian thinking? I mean we all have this idea of it. What does it mean to you?
So I'll I I guess I'll take a uh step back and just make sure that we're on the same page with with Bayes theorem. Um
Bayes theorem is is a probabilistic approach to
Updating probabilities based on new information. So
Yeah, in a simple example, if I said
Um, what's the probability that I rolled
A four
on a six sided die
It would be w one sixth.
But if I said what's the problem that I rolled a four, given that I rolled an even number.
Well now I can eliminate
half of the uh the possible outcome. So if I know that I rolled an even number
Now
the only numbers I could have rolled were two, four, and a six, so the probability I rolled a four
is now one third. So I can update
my original um probabilities, my priors
With this new information. The new information here being that I rolled an an even number.
In the same way when we're looking at
Option pricing, one of the big determinants of
of the fair value
Of an option.
Is
Options derive their value because
Um the future stock price is not going to be the same as what it is today.
And there's some probability that it's going to be
Higher or lower, and knowing what that forward looking probability
distribution function looks like
leads to the ability to price the options to to come up with the fair value
Based on their expectancy.
And one of the determinants of
sort of how much a stock
can move is what we call its volatility.
the volatility is just the annualized percentage return uh on the stock.
Uh
in any given year or or or really for a time slice because it can change.
That can change over time.
So
If I think that the fair value of an option is, say, three dollars, because
Of all of the assumptions that I have built into that.
And then someone comes and wants to buy ten thousand options.
from me for a price of three dollars and ten cents.
There are two things I could do. One I could say
Well, I know that all of my assumptions are
Grounded in truth. I know
The future better than anybody else.
So I know that over the long run, if I sell these options at three dollars and ten cents, I'm gonna make ten cents
And an expected return.
Over and over and over again.
That is not the approach.
That we take at Susquehanna.
Uh instead, I would say this option can be worth
More than three dollars, given some
some possible s sets of of information about the future.
Maybe this person knows something about
The fair value of the underlying of the stock. That's different than what I know.
looking at the stock market.
And I can test that by going out and trying to trade stock.
maybe they know something about the forward looking volatility, the the forward looking probability density function.
And I can say, Well, if that's the case, how wrong would I need to be
to now be losing if I if I entered this trade.
And this is where where Bayes theorem comes in.
Because I can say I have my prior assumption set, my my
prior probability distribution.
Now how much do I want to weigh this new information?
to come up with a new d a new distribution that will allow me to to come up with a fair value.
And it again in isolation, it's really hard for me just to say this person's wrong.
But if I have a similar looking option, similar because it's the same
Expiration or because
It's the same strike and a different expiration, or
That there's something about the option that looks
close enough to this, I can say I can find disconfirming information.
And only when I find disconfirming information
Can I feel more comfortable about
Um taking the other side of this trade.
Walk me through a little bit about why we struggle though, because this happens in all different types of decisions, right? It's not just sort of buying stocks or or trading. We we get new information, but we don't appropriately weight it or uh update our priors. What contributes to that and what can we do about it?
The the what contributes uh to that is covered by a whole host of literature.
And you've had some of the luminaries uh in this field as guests on your show before. So I I certainly uh can't speak
more articulately about this than Danny Kahneman could.
But the types of things that that Kahneman Tversky uncovered
Forty five years ago about the the failings of of our ability to
look at and process
and update information is exactly what's happening here. So
So things like confirmation bias and hindsight bias and attribution error and we've got all of the all of the decision biases that
That had been covered in
Behavioral economics.
come into play here. So
If I for some reason have
Some
stake in believing that
The fair value of this option is three dollars.
Then I'm going to discount this new information that
Um, that someone wants to buy it for three dollars and ten cents and say
You know, high fives all around. I just made
an extra ten cents that that the rest of the world missed out on.
If on the other hand I am
Able to
have have better second order knowledge. So knowledge about what I know and knowledge about what I don't know.
Then I can appropriately
weigh this information and act accordingly.
And
Yeah, the price of an option doesn't feel like something that anyone's gonna have a very strong personal tie to, but certainly there are lots of other things in your life
Where
You're you've got ego tied up. You've got
Some part of your personality benefits from
sort of the truth value of whatever position it is that you're taking.
So when
when you get this confirming information.
You're gonna discount it.
I've been thinking so much about tribalism lately. Like this is just something that's been showing up in conversations I've been having uh all around. The thing that that's very clear is that when people
hear information that
comports with whatever their tribe believes or whatever their tribe
Support.
They're willing to accept it without doing a lot of
Taking
uh into the the quality of the source, the quality of the information, the sort of the implications of the rest of the information that goes with it. And anything that challenges
With their tribe.
believes
Uh they are
going to be more dismissive of
Whether or not it comes from a quality source.
I've got children that that
feel very strongly aligned with
Political parties.
And
And I also have a quote on the wall in my office.
That I think is just a i a good important quote to
To help remind me about the importance of
Habits leading to
To behaviors.
I shared the quote with with one of my daughters, my my sixteen year old.
And
Uh and she said that sounds
That sounds kind of interesting. Like I sort of like
Yeah.
Like that. And then I shared with her
Who the quote was from, and she's like, Yeah.
All right, I don't need it.
And it was because it was from
Uh somebody in the
In the other camp.
The wrong political party.
W what is the quote? Now we have to know, sorry.
Uh the character that takes command in moments of crucial choices has already been determined.
It has been determined by a thousand other choices made earlier.
In seemingly unimportant moments.
It has been determined by all the little choices of years past.
By all those times when the voice of conscience it was at war with the voice of temptation.
Whispering the lie that it doesn't really matter.
It has been determined by all the day to day decisions made when life seemed easy and crises seemed far away.
The decisions that piece by piece, bit by bit
developed habits of discipline or of laziness.
Habits of self sacrifice or of self indulgence.
Habits of duty and honor and integrity.
Or dishonor and shame.
And who said that. In order for this to be acceptable to your entire listening audience, I'll tell you that that was either Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter.
I like it that way. You can you can ascribe it to who you want. But it it was Ronald Reagan.
There's a lot that Ronald Reagan did.
And uh over the course of his life, not only in his presence, see that I
I don't particularly
respect or honor. There's other stuff that he did that I think was great and full of honor and and and stuff to support.
But either way, I think that the quote
Holds water.
that the that the quote is still, you know, a a pretty good
Lesson to live by.
It now talk to me a little bit about why that happens. Is that because we see our identity as the tribe or uh and then anything that goes against that is now challenging our sense of self?
Th the short answer is I don't know. And and and I'm afraid that I might say that phrase more than
a lot of your previous guests because because that is a part of what I value.
I I mentioned Conneman, I've got heuristics and choices within
with ar within arm's reach of me, uh where I'm sitting here.
And I think that this is a heuristic and and heuristics
Are the uh
Yeah, the the shortcuts that we take that are
mentally free, right? It would be really hard to always
to always work from first principle. So it's so much easier
If you can have uh a heuristic that you can fall back on that just sort of tells you
What to do next without having to stop and think through
Think through the process. And when that heuristic is
I'm gonna find people who are like me.
And
If I do what they do, then I'm gonna
sort of maintain
my integrity. I'm still gonna be like me because
This is what people like me do.
uh then it's very easy to fall into the trap of of never contemplating or n or not sufficiently contemplating
uh each of those uh each of those actions, each of those different behaviors.
So the same thing can work for us, right? Like if you make a a personal rule in a way that's like I'm not the person who eats dessert, so I'm not going to eat dessert. Well, no, I don't have to think about it. I just don't eat dessert. So it can serve you, but it also
Uh it can prevent you from
accurately weighing new information or contemplating in this case we're just
It sounds like we're inherently lazy.
And we just want if we're part of a tribe, I don't have to digest every little new piece of information.
I can sort of just go with the flow and fit in. And plus we wanna fit in. We wanna be a social member of something larger than ourselves, I would imagine.
So there are a couple of distinctions I want to make.
Uh one thing that you just said that uh I like a lot.
Is that it's so much easier if you have a rule than if you try to have a principle, right? That I don't eat dessert is so much easier than each time that you have the opportunity to to have dessert to say, well,
I don't eat a lot of dessert. Is this one of the times that I'm that I'm making a change there?
And and and I'll I'll tell you that I get up and do some type of exercise every morning.
And I find it easy.
To exercise seven days a week.
I found it really hard to exercise five days a week.
And the reason was because
Yeah, every morning it's you know, the alarm goes off at five AM. It's really easy to not have your feet hit the ground and get going. It's really easy to say
Well, I need to take two doll two days off anyway.
This can be one of the days that I take off.
So
On the I don't eat dessert.
Raw.
I think that's a a great way to to pre decide.
And and lazy has a lot of value.
But
in it, but but to lighten your cognitive load, right? I don't have to stop and think about everything if I've already
spent the time thinking about it and and it's led to
this conclusion that I've reached, which is this rule that I can that I can follow.
So
So I love being able to do that.
Uh, but you're not part of a group of non dessert eaters.
Right, that this isn't part of a
A broader identity.
that you're now wrapped up in
Where if you decide to change that rule and you have dessert, you don't have
Other people
calling you a dessert denier name only.
Right? You're a D Dino.
Who cares, right? Okay. So Shane used to eat dessert or used to deny dessert and now he's having an ice cream Sunday.
Good for him, maybe it's his birthday, w whatever it is.
Uh, this is a decision that's totally fine with him.
And you don't have to worry that you have now also contradicted
all of the other tenets held by the people in the non dessert eating group.
If it's something that is
More tribal.
Where
We are the type of people that
Do this and don't do that.
a a violation of one part of that.
removes you from this group that you're you know
We just saw yet Liz Cheney who voted
the party line something like ninety five percent of the time
be drummed out of a of her seat because
Of one thing that she said that
that most Americans think is is right. And in fact
It doesn't even matter what most Americans think that you know that that's sort of what the
experts in the field say is right, which is that the elections were
By and large
Barely executed. So we don't think that
Trump isn't in office because of a lie, but because
Biden got more votes.
Yeah, that's really difficult, right? Because if you go against the tribe
Especially in a world where uh we have a call out culture almost too.
Not only are you going against the tribe, but you sort of like
Can't go against the tribe quietly, I guess, in a lot of ways. You're going against the tribe in a very visible signaling way, which adds another layer of complexity to it, I would imagine.
Yeah, and this is this is you know again
Uh I'm a I'm a fan of the show, so I I've listened to uh to to to many of your guests. John Hight talked about this when when he was on. He said
uh that the big problem with call culture
is that we're rewarding people just for the call out.
That it doesn't matter.
what their other behavior it is. It doesn't matter what other positions they have, what knowledge they have, what expertise they have.
They just get the reward of of pointing the finger.
And that's exactly
The difficulty with going against the tribe is that
Someone is standing there.
ready to get the gold star for saying
You did it wrong.
W what I I don't like about cognitive biases
is that they seem to be
Poor uh
preventing us from making poor decisions in the future. What I do like about them is they seem to offer a language and a framework for thinking about why we've made poor decisions in the past.
How do you use that information to make better decisions in the future?
Th this is a place where uh may maybe not so much call out culture, but being able to see other people's behavior
uh really comes out as a as a strong positive. It it is definitely true that it is sort of descriptive.
of the past. Um
uh a lot of these heuristics and biases
Things that we
That we can see when we
after we've already identified that a mistake has been made and we say, okay, well why was the mistake made? Say, oh because I was anchored or oh because uh of the way the question was framed or or whatever it might be.
We have a really hard time seeing it in ourselves, but a really easy time seeing when someone else is is making that
that type of stupid mistake.
A big part of our
approach to education is to teach people to talk through their decisions.
Um and uh to and to talk about
Why they're doing what they're doing.
With
their peers, the other people on their team.
If we can do that real time, that's great.
Uh often in trading you don't have that opportunity because things are just too immediate.
Uh but
Certainly any time things have changed, if you're doing things differently, it's a really good time to turn to the traders around you and the and the quantitative researchers around you and the assistant traders and sort sort of your team and say
Huh. It looks like all of a sudden
GameStop is a whole lot more volatile than it was a week ago.
Here's how I'm uh uh positioning for for this trading. What do you guys think?
and have someone say, Oh, it seems like you're really anchored to last week's volatility.
If things have changed that much.
you need to move much more quickly than you're moving right now.
So you don't realize that you're anchored. That's the whole nature of being anchored.
is that you don't recognize the outsize importance that the anchor has on your decision.
But somebody else who's a little bit more distant from it can.
So
If we're good at at encouraging the communication.
then we're gonna be really good at getting other people
to to help improve your decision process.
Yeah, I I know that that you were fond of pointing out that that uh that you are the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with.
So if the people that you're spending the most time with are your co workers who are thinking about trading the same way you are, then maybe you're gonna make
you know, combine the same types of errors.
It's certainly better than than trying to act on your own.
And even better if you have a culture.
That rewards
Truth finding.
As opposed to rewarding
Action.
If nobody feels personally attacked.
because of the of somebody else pointing out their error.
But instead feels like
we together have now done more to to get closer to
to some truth to the better way to act or the
Yeah, the more
accurate fair value of this asset that we're trading.
Then
Everybody feels like it's a win and and they'll they will therefore encourage
the the involvement of the people around them.
I I like that a lot. Truth finding over action.
Um I w I wanna get into the training at SIG, but before we do that, maybe you can give us just this uh
Two minute vignette of how we get here and I think that this will be good uh for my uh
parents who will certainly be listening to this uh podcast when it airs to figure out what it is that I do for a living. Um
A question that they've been asking me for.
Uh for a couple of decades now.
I joined Susquehanna in nineteen ninety seven.
uh straight out of college. I went to University of Virginia undergrad.
Unlike
sort of the stereotypical finance background, I studied a combination of anthropology, psychology
Linguistics and education.
And I it was combined into a major that focused
on deaf culture and language. So American Sign Language and uh and deaf communities.
So I I came into the firm
not knowing the difference between a call and a put.
Which turns out to be s pretty significant when you're trading options.
But knowing a good amount about um uh about how people act and about mistakes that people make.
And about how to um encourage
uh this truth finding.
Started off working on the floor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, trading equity options.
And then uh after going through our training program and returning to the floor for a little while, I then moved on to trade American depository receipts, which are uh an international
uh equity arbitrage so
Foreign companies listed in the US denominated in dollars in the US, but also traded in their native currency.
uh in their home country.
Over time I moved to Europe when we were setting up our operations in Dublin, Ireland.
I moved back to the US um after a little while in in Dublin to work on the business side for a while.
uh to work on on some new business development and some
uh of the business administration part of the business.
Then move back to trading uh in two thousand seven to trade fixed income.
few years after that I moved back over to
uh the education side of the business. So I move from trading
Which I where I'd been for
over decade to

our junior traders, uh teaching them what we know about decision making under uncertainty, the fundamentals of
of option pricing and finance
Um and
how we apply that to the markets.
Talk to me a little bit about that experience. Uh, how do you teach somebody to find the truth? Like how much can people improve as they come in the door to where they what they're capable of?
Susquehanna has always had
uh a very growth mindset.
perspective on
On teaching trading, yeah, before Carol Dweck.
uh had even shared her her views on growth mindset. That is that has always been
uh the company's uh position is that traders are made, not born.
Yeah, we're now over two thousand people uh worldwide and we still have a small company mindset of
you know, we gotta you know we we've gotta make the best of what we have and we're competing with the world. Let's uh you know, let's
Uh let's figure out how to uh how to improve our uh our employees uh the best way we can.
And
The way that we're training people today has certainly changed from what it was originally, but there are a lot of things that have stayed the same. And among that is is this idea that if if we have smart people
Better educable.
and vocal about their thought process so that we can uh improve it, and willing to be wrong.
Then we can teach them about trading.
Part of my background is studying education.
And as I moved through
My time at uh S I G as an educator.
I was finding that I was applying things that I had learned in the classroom
you know, over a decade earlier, in a way that I hadn't anticipated. When I was originally you know studying education, I was thinking that I might be teaching sixth grade deaf kids how to do math.
Instead I've got MIT graduates who
certainly understand math, but don't know trading. And I'm teaching them how to make these asset allocation decisions uh with imperfect information. But the approach is still
the same. The approach is still this one of
Modeling the process, finding out where somebody is.
Uh
and finding out what they can grow to and providing the appropriate support so that they can grow to to be a better decision maker.
The uh the philosophy that always comes to mind when I think about it is I I'm not sure if you're
Familiar with Lev Vogatsky.
Yeah.
So Lev Vogotsky was a um Russian psychologist. Uh he was born at the in the eighteen nineties.
Grew in prominence in Russia pretty quickly through
mid nineteen thirties. He died young. He he ended up dying when he was thirty seven years old. So in
nineteen thirty four.
And and the idea is that
uh that Vygotsky had around education.
were
Contrasted with
Another prominent psychologist of the day, Jean Piaget. So Piaget
had this uh perspective about stages.
of receptivity to d to different types of education.
that you cannot teach somebody anything until they reach the appropriate developmental stage to be able to learn it.
And then uh and then they can
learn whatever's uh sort of presented to them.
Before moving on to the next stage.
And BJ had, you know.
a pretty rigid framework for the stages that you move through, how you move through them.
And that education effectively ended at adolescence.
And Vygotsky said, No.
That's kinda bunk. That that's not how any of this works.
All of education is sociocultural.
All of education comes from interaction with others.
And those others in order for them to be educators
have to be more knowledgeable than you are.
And that when you have interaction with
More knowledgeable others.
What those people are able to do is recognize
your zone of proximal development.
You have a zone of things that you know.
And then you've got a zone that is just too far out of your reach that
Yeah, no matter what, if I were to
sit down my six year old uh nephew
And try to explain
um linear algebra to him, he's not gonna get it yet. He just doesn't have
the fundamental tools to do that.
But somewhere outside of your zone uh of mastery is this zone of proximal development. The the zone that that you can move into with appropriate support. And that support.
Uh in
The Vygotsky in literature is referred to as scaffolding.
And you want it to be the the
The minimal amount
of support necessary.
to appropriately move somebody
Be able to handle.
uh the the next level of mastery.
Over time.
You can dismantle that support.
dismantle that scaffolding and that zone becomes part of their zone of mastery and you've just pushed out where their zone of proximal development is. So that
over time you can you can move them into an area where they're learning more and more and they've got greater mastery and competence
uh in whatever area it is that uh that you've been teaching them.
And eventually they become
more knowledgeable than other people around them.
And they can provide.
the scaffolding as the more knowledgeable other for
for their peers as well.
How do you identify that tipping point between
Competence.
And okay, now we're into
educated incompetent in a way because you're just outside of your competence.
Especially in a field where you have imperfect information and uncertainty.
One one important thing that we don't do.
Is look at
the results of the trading that they've had and say, Well if they're winning
Then they've got it.
And we can leave them alone and and uh and assume that they figured things out.
And if they're losing, then we need to step in and and and intervene. Panny Duke, another one of your former guests, talks about that as resulting. Kahneman refers to that as hindsight bias.
is something that we we look to avoid as frequently as we can. When people talk about trading decisions that they've made.
to more experienced traders or to to
to peers who can give them feedback on it.
Uh we do everything we can to shield
the person giving feedback
From knowing the results.
I'm not gonna tell you whether or not this trade worked out. I will tell you the information that was available to me at the time that I made the trade.
And then what I did, and you can give me feedback on that process.
So the identification
from i in sort of this less formal setting comes from from knowledge about
About how
Uh how trading works or how
this particular risk taking works or whatever it might be.
In our education setting
It's something that we control a ha a whole lot more cleanly.
Right.
We don't have to present
a very complex trade and and see who can figure out sort of the the pieces of it until everybody's ready to to
Everybody knew who's
in the trading class is ready to get there, we can build from s from smaller pieces up to up to the the larger concept.
And see who along the way
isn't processing that smaller piece appropriate.
And a big part of how information is passed from the mentor to the mentee.
is by modelling the decision process.
It is not
Enough to say
You should have raised Vall.
by two points when this trade came in.
Instead, it's so much more important to say
Okay, when this trade came in, I remembered that
earlier in the week
somebody had traded this other structure and when they did
I I I updated my you know possible outcome space to look different.
This trade confirmed what that other trade did. So so now I was I just more heavily weighted this other outcome.
And the result was that I took volatility up two points.
Then someone knows not only what to do, which is really not
The important thing to take away.
But how to do it, which is very much what we're looking to teach.
It sounds like what you're really doing is knowledge transfer through sharing of reflection. So you you you're you're opening up people's mind and you're saying like
Uh you have an experience.
Tell me how you process that experience, which is the reflection angle.
Which comes to an abstraction or sort of um
Which is what you would do in this circumstance.
Which becomes an action. And I I think of this as the learning loop, right? So you start with an experience, you have a reflection.
you you draw an abstract and then you do an action.
so often we're just drawn to the abstraction. What should I do? What should I do? But I don't see the thinking behind it. I don't see the then I can't match the patterns. I can't see the nuances. I can't encode it in my brain about when I should deviate and when I should follow.
Yeah, you know, we're we're really discussing how we would
behave in a situation and modeling what the conversation really should look like.
And we'll disagree with each other.
Yeah, the the answer to just about every trading question is it depends.
Which is a really hard thing for for someone to hear when they're first learning because they want the answer. They want
To know when I'm in this exact situation again.
What is the optimal thing to do?
The interesting part of the conversation comes in the what it depends on.
All these questions lead to the
some type of answer of of what you could do or what should be in your
uh in the in the actions that you might take here. And there's some things that are clearly wrong.
And it's important to talk about that too.
So
When we're talking about it uh in a trading context.
Um, it's really nice that one teacher can say
I think that I probably would have shown a bid for this price and this amount.
And someone else says
Well, I don't know that I would because this broker's behaved this way before. So I think that this might be a time where uh I'd be afraid that.
uh I'm opening myself up to selection bias if I if I were to price it that way and I would do this. And
You have these senior traders who are
Disagreeing.
And so there's this really nice modelling of
of how to think about how to improve the process.
Uh so that uh you can reach an answer that you
are tentatively more comfortable with.
There's something you said earlier that stuck with me about answers and when we're given the answer, we sort of stop thinking, but we're we're
We go through life and we're told the answer to problems.
And the thing that happens is when somebody doesn't know the answer, we're stuck because we forgot how to actually problem solve. We've forgotten how to reason through things. We've forgot that we can solve these problems on our own and we have our own way of thinking. And these tools are rusty because we've just gone through an education system that's like, this is the answer. This is how you think about it. This is how you do it.
And when the answer doesn't appear, we're just we we we're paralyzed almost, right? And we don't know what to do. So we wait for somebody to give us the answer.
And there there are definitely places where
We know that we
Enjoy.
To search for answers.
But there's they tend to be
separate and self contained. Nobody ever goes out.
And buys a printed book of Sudoku puzzles that are
already printed and completed.
But there are other contexts where you're absolutely right where people say
I am afraid that if I don't
Know the answer here.
And I don't know who to ask for the answer that I'm gonna look foolish.
By trying to figure it out on my own, I'm gonna make mistakes.
uh as I try to go through this and
In
The world that I live in
Yeah, for better or worse.
we know that we're gonna make mistakes all the time.
That we're effectively
just running experiments and getting feedback and then updating our approach and running a new experiment again the next day.
And experiments fail. Like that's one of the ways that they eventually succeed is because you found enough ways that
That they fail.
The other thing that
That happens when people want answers.
Is they want certainty.
Five years ago.
Nate Silver was was everybody's favorite punching bag because
This moron
thought that Trump wasn't gonna win the election and then he did.
Which is of course never what Nate Silver said.
Right, Nate Silver said there's a twenty percent chance he's gonna win the election.
And twenty percent chances happen.
And we don't think through things probabilistically.
Right. The world is just not set up.
For for probabilistic thinking.
I think it was Phil Tetlock.
Who I heard say that we talk about, you know
Things with with probability numbers, but what we really have are three probability states.
It certainly won't happen.
It certainly will happen.
Or it might happen.
And those are the only three things that we can process.
So when people hear that five thirty eight had Trump at twenty percent to win
They say okay, that means it's not gonna happen.
And then it did, so you were wrong.
Yeah, it's really hard to say anybody's wrong about a single
uh probability prediction unless they said
That something was zero percent or a hundred percent.
T two things about that strike me interest uh as
Um interesting. One
Is that why you use poker?
to teach decision making is because you're dealing with probabilities and uncertainty.
The second is
How do you calibrate like if you're Nate Silver?
And you live in this world where uh you put this out there and you say, you know, eighty percent of the time it's gonna be Hillary Clinton, twenty percent of the time it's gonna be Trump.
How do I look at that?
In the face of Trump winning
And
Say was I right?
Or was I wrong?
Given that information, how do I update?
Yeah. So t two really good questions. Um
I think I'm gonna take him the opposite.
in the opposite order of what you gave them to me and st and start with the uh
How do you calibrate one?
If the only thing that you predict are very hard to predict outcomes and you predict them very rarely
you're not going to be able to calibrate very well at all.
On the other hand, if you predict
Many different things.
Yeah.
particularly if they're uncorrelated. So you have
a lot of repetitions where you're gonna get feedback.
Then you're gonna have learning.
And
It'd be great if
If you could look back at all the times that you said something had a twenty percent chance of happening.
And see how many times it happened.
And if it only happened ten percent of the time, you're also making a mistake.
It's it's certainly a mistake if it happened seventy percent of the time and you said it was twenty percent.
But importantly.
You might be making the mistake of being
Two
conservative in your in your estimate, not discriminating enough in your in your
in in using the probability distribution available to you.
Till Tetlock.
has built an entire solution around this, which is to to look for super forecasters. And the way he measures the performance of the super f forecasters is by giving them lots of things to predict.
And to come up with probability assessments on it.
And two.
be able to change their probability assessment as the information set changes, which is a really important thing in decision making, and really avoids
the the binary it will or won't and and leads uh to a much better
nuance uh uh in the middle and and really understanding the the the probabilities. And when you have lots of of measurements
then you have feedback that uh that that you can use to to improve the quality of of your predictions.
Weather forecasters are really good. I mean just stupid good.
And if you if you were to plot how often it rains when they say there's a thirty percent chance of rain, it's like thirty percent of the time.
It's not twenty five or thirty five. That would be a pretty bad
weather forecasts, but that's because they get daily feedback, right? They are making predictions all the time and they always know whether or not their prediction came true. And sometimes they say there's a tw a thirty percent chance of
Rain and it rains, and that doesn't mean they were wrong.
It does mean that the people who are talking about them the next day are gonna say they were wrong. They're gonna say, you know, I was listening to Andrew Friedman, my local news
weather forecaster and he said it was thirty percent chance of rain. So I didn't bring my umbrella. Now here I am all wet. Thanks, Andrew. Right. But I know that if I listen to
the local forecast over and over and over again.
That
that prediction is gonna be uh is gonna be pretty accurate.
The places where
Where people are terribly inaccurate are places where
They're making
Predictions about
about things where they either haven't had the opportunity for a lot of feedback or where nobody's gonna hold them accountable for for being wrong.
And the and the worst forecasts.
Are often
from people who are experts who make extreme forecasts. You know, when they're right, they're gonna look really right because they said something extreme.
And that means that they're gonna get on the news program. That's you know, they're gonna be
Uh interview on the cable program that night because
They were the ones who said
There's a hundred percent chance that
you know, Chelsea wins the Premier League.
The and then the people who have the more nuanced view and say
Well, this is what I think the probability is, but if things shake out this way then the probability's gonna shift.
Um those people don't get
Don't get the spotlight.
And then poker as an aid to teaching decision making.
So part of this is uh
The
Phylogeny of
of Sasquehanna.
The founders of Susquehanna were in college together.
And they studied
Yeah, a an array of subjects. But what really brought them together was that they played poker together.
And we're able to talk about
The decision process in their poker game.
In
in a uh in a really nice way. And they said
Yeah, we shouldn't just be you know shifting
our own money uh between ourselves, let's go to Vegas.
And let's see if we can apply these decision principles.
At the poker table table in Vegas.
So they went out to Vegas one summer and did and did very well.
And a big part of the reason they did well is exactly the principles I was talking about earlier that
that they were thinking they were updating their probability space in a Bayesian way.
In very importantly
Um, you know, they weren't able to talk about hands real time with each other.
But they would finish their session and c and come back to
Yeah, their hotel room and they said.
Yo, so here's the situation I was in. I had I was on
Fifth Street and I had
uh a fluster on a pair of kings, the other person made an open pair of aces
Um yeah, he bet out on Fifth Street and I thought about it and decided to fold. What do you guys think? And they would
You work through the numbers and talk through
So they would work it out quantitatively, which is certainly something that it's important for us to do on the trading side.
And they would also talk about the decision process and the information set that was available.
And they realized that
that they were benefiting a lot from the uh the interaction they were having together. And they said
This same type of of decision process is something that we could apply to the markets.
And then they went into uh into business.
First individually and then they came back together and and in nineteen eighty seven formed
susquine investment group at the time was the
It's sort of the the first company that came together in May of of eighty seven.
Uh yeah, I I mentioned
the phylogeny. So this was sort of the the evolutionary development of the uh company and and I'm sort of referencing
uh Ernst Hakel's uh recapitulation theory that uh ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that the development of a fetus
uh over time looks a lot like the evolutionary development of that species over time.
Yeah, totally debunked. It's not the way
Vetuses actually developed.
But the idea of
um works really well for the for the passing on of of the thinking around uh around how to trade, which is that if we think through
trading and build up our our understanding of risk
and asymmetric information and
The difference between selection bias
uh and noisy outcomes, you know, that you can make the right decision and still get unlucky. Yeah, all these things apply to what we're doing as traders.
I is it fair to say that
Probabilistic thinking is probably the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to improving
Your decision making ability.
If you had to isolate that into the top three variables that you could teach somebody to improve their ability to see reality or truth finding, what would they be?
Talk more.
Is number one.
That beats probabilistic thinking. That you know that that beats
sort of anything else in truth finding is is being able to
to bring in other people in the decision process in a constructive
Way.
So finding good ways to communicate to improve
um the input from mothers in your decision process.
I think is pretty important.
Thinking probabilistically, I think is is definitely a very a very important piece of that. I'm trying to sort of diagnose this what works by trying to think of where where things fall apart, where people fail.
the other place that people fail is really falling
falling in love with their decision process and not being open to being wrong. So
An openness to
to feedback, to finding disconfirming information, to actively seeking out disconfirming information, which is really uncomfortable.
Uh but uh that that I think is the other piece that is uh
uh is super important for for being a good trader.
There's something you mentioned there that that I thought was really important in the constructive versus non-constructive ways of talking.
L let's dive into that. What does that mean?
Yeah. Um
Adam Grant recently was talking
uh talking about how to get feedback from people who are sort of lower on the the corporate echelon. So you know your direct reports or their reports or whatever.
And one of the things that he talked about
was by leading with
An honest acknowledgement of
Your shortcomings.
That's really constructive, right? Because that
Allows for
Feeback.
It in it invites it in an open way where you're clearly challenging behaviors and not the person. And then has the open ended
um you know piece of of asking the important what else question. Non constructive ways are
Seeking out yes man answers, right? Like, hey, I just won, you know, ten thousand dollars on that last trade that I did. Seems like that was pretty good.
Can you think of any ways I could have improved that?
It's really hard to follow that up with.
Yeah, I think you probably should have won a lot more, or you could have done it in a much less risky way, or you won because, you know, you flipped a coin and it came up heads. Stop patting yourself on the back. Like this was not
All that impressive.
the you you haven't really opened up for that if you
If you frame it as
Tell me why my trade was good.
Or tell me why this piece of my decision process was good, where where you
to the framing of of of what to focus on.
And and the and the other important thing is to actually change your behavior when you get the feedback, right? If
If you get feedback and then don't do anything with it, people are gonna stop giving you the feedback.
It's not just not helpful.
to to ask for feedback and not change it's it's actually hurtful.
Are there ways that you teach b I mean, you mentioned sort of
what constructive versus non constructive is. But how do you teach people to communicate?
in a constructive way when it comes to decision making.
Or when it comes to life. Yeah. So so part of that again comes from modelling it.
um and modeling it intentionally in the Vygotskyan sense of the the more knowledgeable other conveying information through language.
Yeah, is by
By saying you're not gonna get this unless you hear
how I'm approaching this decision.
I think about this a lot more.
uh with my own children. That this is something that I yeah, I think about a lot as I'm as I'm raising
uh adults into the world.
They frequently come.
to to me and my wife and ask for advice and
The important thing for us to sh show them is not what the answer is because we're gonna be wrong.
But
how we think about the answer, which is which is probably going to be much more or I know it's going to be much more important for them as they go forward making decisions when I'm not going to be standing next to them, but they can have sort of the the proverbial dad on their shoulder whispering in their ear.
Have you thought about this? Did you consider it this way? What is the cost of this? What are the benefits of this? Um, is this a decision that you can change after the fact because you didn't like the outcome, or is this one that you're sticking with?
All those questions that that I that I would ask in trying to reach a decision.
Instead of just sort of asking it to myself and then
And then handing over
the the outcome.
I share the process, and sharing the process leads to to more constructive conversations.
With my children and with the and with our traders.
Are there other things that you do to help your kids learn how to make better decisions that other parents can be like, Aha, I wanna do that too.
Uh one was something that I learned
while I was in college, uh, from a book called Teacher Effectiveness Training. When I read it in the book and we talked about it in class, I said this is the dumbest piece of advice anybody's ever put down on paper.
And it was around reflective listening.
And the idea
was that instead of trying to step in and problem solve, instead of trying to
reframe instead of trying to provide context or or dig deeper
All you do
is tell the person what you heard them say.
And that night
A friend of mine was over at my apartment for dinner.
And she was talking about a problem that she was having with her roommate.
And I was like
Just for kicks, I'm gonna give this a shot.
And she's you know I'm
sauteing the chicken or whatever it was, and she's like, and then my roommate never puts her dishes uh away and it bugs the hell out of me. I said, sounds like you're really bother when she doesn't put away her dishes.
She's like, Yeah, and it's not just that, it's also that
Um, she doesn't appreciate it when when I do clean up. I said, Oh, so it sounds like you know, a part of the problem here is is that you're not feeling appreciated.
She's gotta think I'm the dumbest guy that she's ever known, right? Like all I'm doing is
Is repeating what she's saying and
I was like, Well, this this certainly feels dumb. I and I guess at some point I gotta call myself out on it and point out that I'm just doing this stupid thing from this stupid book. And that's and then she turned to me and said,
Tod, this is the most beneficiation I've had about my relationship with my roommate ever.
I
feel like I'm coming away with this understanding myself better and her bet and you know and her experience was totally different from mine.
She felt heard, she felt sine, and she felt like she now had.
the power to make a better decision about her relationship going forward.
And I thought, okay, well maybe this guy's not so stupid. Maybe this book isn't so stupid. And maybe these methods work.
in places that I wouldn't have thought they would work. And it's not always the solution, but it's a much better solution than than I would
Would have thought it would be.
Um and it's something that I find myself doing with my kids.
Um all the time.
And it no longer feels forced to me. It no longer feels fake to me. It's very clear that what I'm doing
is allowing the space for for them to finish their own thought.
Uh, that's one of the things that I do with my kids that I think has been
uh been really beneficial. Another one that's sort of related, uh, that was pointed out to me yesterday uh by by my 16 year olds
friend who was who was over in the house. Her friend
Um
Had said
something that was happening with uh with
with her parents. Her parents were were away and and she was talking about an argument that she had
with her parents and something that her father said to her. And my daughter said, Well how do you feel about that?
And and her friend said
That is the most simkin thing.
That I could hear you say at that point.
Instead of asking what I wanna do next, the then you start with how do I feel about it, which is you know
And
And it's it's something that that she is that you know the friend and my daughter have heard from me and Shelley uh my wife.
Over and over again.
Because again, it's really hard for us to jump in and start providing advice if we don't even know where the child is coming from. You know, if we start saying, Well, it sounds like that, you know.
That other kid was being a jerk and they're like, No, that's not what I was saying at all.
How do you not get me? How do you not
understand what this is. So starting with
How do you feel about that, which
Again feels like
the Freudian psychologist sitting back, you know, while you're lying on the couch just, you know
mumbling something so you'll keep talking, turns out to be pretty beneficial. Turns out to be really helpful.
Is there a different process we use when it comes to uh things that would be more feeling based, like maybe interpersonal relationships?
When we're making decisions.
Yeah in some in some ways I could definitely see uh that that it might feel that way, but I think that a lot of it is
It's really very similar. A lot of it is still
Understanding truth.
that that if you don't have an understanding of of what's really happening as a starting point, if if we can't sort of agree on the facts, then
that th then we're not gonna be able to to reach a good decision, trading or interpersonally.
Something else that I haven't talked about uh yet, but that definitely comes up a lot when I'm
modeling for my kids and when I'm modeling decision processes uh for my classes.
is uh the principle of charity.
When somebody says something
assuming that they're not an idiot, assuming that they're coming from from a uh a a place of sincerity and good intentions.
And giving them the benefit of the doubt in the in the conversation.
On the trading side
sort of this principle of charity is really giving somebody credit for knowing what they're doing when they're trading against you.
Uh th this is what
sort of protects you from from being run over by somebody who has better information than you do.
On the interpersonal side, this allows for
This gift to the other person
Of an assumption that that they are
Well intentioned and smart and approaching this.
For the same purpose that you are.
And therefore you're gonna end up being aligned in your process to to
reach a a resolution to a conflict or to
to come to an agreement about whatever it is that you guys are are talking about.
Every single negotiation is a cooperation and a collaboration.
But there's there's not a single time
Well
I'm almost never, and really, you know, probably never.
where the other person has to negotiate with you.
They have some alternative, they can walk away.
Which means that the only reason anybody's going to engage you in in uh negotiation is because by doing so, they're going to get a better outcome than by not doing so.
If that's the case, then every
Every negotiation is collaborative.
Which means that a lot of these principles of how you treat other people in an interpersonal way so that
you'll end up having a a favorable outcome.
for yourself means that you have to have favorable outcome for them.
uh as well. Otherwise they're not gonna be part of this conversation and definitely not future conversations.
We're both believers in looking for people that challenge ideas and not the person. I'm curious as to what that means to you as well as how you identify it.
in other people and nurture it.
So we've been talking about what we've been doing with our employees once they're on board and we're we're we're training them, we're teaching them how to do what we do.
In that hiring process
The best outcome.
For me, for an interview.
is if the candidate walks away and wishes they could have part of the interview back.
That means that I did not spend the entirety of the interview in their zone of mastery, where they just got to
show off and and print and print in front of me, and then I'm left to decide whether or not
They would have the skills to to do more.
And I did not spend the entire time in the in the zone of frustration.
Where they couldn't do anything and
It's like okay, like you know
I didn't expect you to anyway, but you know, if you could, that would have been great to see. And I still make a a hiring decision.
But instead on
on multiple dimensions
I've been able to find the place where with a little bit of support
They could do a little bit more.
A big part of the reason that I like that.
Is exactly this
thing that we're talking about, which is this this openness to feedback.
Because when I'm giving them feedback in
uh because I've I've successfully mapped out there's no proximal development.
And now I'm providing a little bit of scaffolding to see what they can do with support.
You will find
That some people
Embrace it.
And say oh
I think I see where you're going. Let me see if I can take it from here.
That's a great answer.
You will find
Some people
True.
are just waiting for you to give them more of the answer.
who will just say okay what else? Like you know the the way for you to map out the entire solution
process and then they'll just fill in the numbers.
I think you'll find some people who are totally resistant to it, who will shut you up, who will, you know
put their hand up and say, No no no but let me work on it my way and their way's not working.
Yeah. And I know why it's not working and I can help direct them away from it, but they don't take the feedback.
I don't want the person who doesn't take the feedback. And I don't want the person who's waiting for more feedback. I want the person
Who is hungry and eager
to use the tools that are presented and available to them.
to then do the work themselves. That's what's going to be successful when they're trading and they get to
have a small opportunity of doing that in the interview process.
When you were younger, you had an early morning experience with your dad where you told him you were gonna quit playing lacrosse. Tell me about that conversation and how it still helps you to this day when it comes to stopping
Or quitting something. Yeah. I went to high school uh in Baltimore. I I believe that my high school might have been ranked number one in the country in lacrosse uh at the time that I was in high school.
So I was I was very much at a at a a lacrosse centric high school.
No so the requirement for all the boys there
Uh was that they they have an activity
uh in athletic activity.
For three seasons.
I played football.
pretty well when I was in high school. I wrestled
really poorly when I was in high school.
Uh and and I played the cross, but I really wasn't great and I really didn't love it. And and there were other things that I wanted to spend my time on.
And I decided that I was gonna quit.
So I I woke up
Oh, or I got home after practice, after having
uh you know had enough of of my coach one last time
And you know, at dinner that night I said
I'm quitting the cross. Tomorrow when I go into school, I'm gonna quit the cross.
And and my father was clearly irritated by it, but didn't
Know how to express it.
And the next morning
Uh I I went and I showered like I always did in the morning and I came out of the shower.
And I remember that I was just wearing a towel because I remember how
How vulnerable I felt'cause I was
I was just wrapped in uh a towel around my waist and my father said
Uh Todd, come into the living room. Uh sit down. I wanna talk to you.
So yeah, I sat down uh in my towel and
thought that this was gonna be a couple seconds of you can't quit the cross.
Um which
Which would have made some sense, sort of a you know, a a a heavy handed
E dict.
But instead.
Uh he said, Yeah, I've been thinking about it all night and it's really been bothering me.
Thinking about the fact that you're quitting, it really bothers me because I haven't heard why you want to quit.
other than the fact that you've been frustrated with your coach. There's not enough here.
Like it doesn't make sense. So you're gonna have to to explain to me in a way that it makes sense in order for me to be supportive of this.
And in hindsight, I recognize that this was such great
parenting happening here, which was not saying
Here's what you have to do. Here's what you
Can't do.
But instead it said
If this is a reasonable and rational choice
Oh, even an even an emotional choice, which you know isn't necessarily rational, but it but it's an emotional and and consistent choice.
I'll back you up on on doing this.
If it's not, if this is rash.
And it's going to have long term implications for you, which is that you can't quit the team and then three days later go back and say you've decided that you want to rejoin.
Then there are big implications here. So y you need to make sure that you've given this appropriate weight and appropriate
Thought
before following through with the decision that you can't change.
Tell me what you're thinking and tell me what your plan is.
You know, if you do this, you're gonna have an extra two hours every afternoon. You're gonna have an extra ten hours a week.
What are you doing with that time? How are you better off
Having that time
Not on the lacrosse field than when you were on the lacrosse field.
And it
The way we left it at the time was with me still dripping wet, holding my towel.
Feeling a bit frustrated that I was not able to convince my father
That this was the right choice.
And
Because I couldn't
I realized that maybe it wasn't the right choice. Maybe what I needed to do was wait.
And waiting was the low cost option, right? That at the time I didn't know what options were. But
in you know the way I sort of frame and think about the world now, I recognize that that this is what we would refer to as a real option, that that there is a cost to it. It does cost me something. It costs you know something in terms of
My frustration level and the fact that I'm
Tired after running for two hours straight, and I'm not as fast as the other guys on the team. So I've got to play catch up a lot. And you know, all the stuff that's going to
But that's day by day. And in return, I get this upside of maybe there's some benefit to me sticking with this longer term.
I ended up reaching the conclusion.
A coup weeks later.
But I wanted that to be my last lacrosse season.
But I would finish out the season. I would finish out both the commitment to the team and also
Find the opportunity to to to fill that time with
Uh with something else that was going to
Also be productive.
and ideally more productive than playing the cross, which I couldn't do mid season. I couldn't
switch over and start
start playing on the baseball team mid season.
But
The process of having my father model
Deliberate decision making.
for something that was consequential was really was really pretty beneficial early on.
And how do you use that today?
Um
I hope.
With the same care that my father had then, which is that
That he never erupted.
Yeah, yeah, his his reaction was never
emotional, it was purely inquisitive, right? It was like you know, help me understand better. And the and the the question of help me understand better
Is
is exactly the way I approach decisions that my children are making is to say, look
You know that I love and support you with whatever it is that you're doing.
But I can either provide context or at the very least more support if I understand better where you're coming from. So so help me get this.
Uh one of the one of the other teachers of the class at Susquehanna has such a lovely touch.
He just says, Tell me more.
And tell me more.
Doesn't have any value laid in it. It doesn't have any
Any judgment in it.
It's just saying
Go ahead and s and and add more words to
To what you've already shared.
You wanna take this action against this type of order flow.
Why?
Tell me more.
And effectively what my father was saying
It's the same as what
Uh as what Mike, my
Yeah, my my co teacher says when he's talking to our students, which is just
I cannot reach a conclusion about what you're saying.
Until I understand it better.
So help me understand it better. Tell me more.
I think that's really effective. And one of the things that I like about your father's approach is that it started with I want to support you, but in order to do that I need to understand better.
So it comes from this sort of like unconditional love and no judgment about your decision.
but not being able to connect the dots for yourself, which I assume would help you communicate constructively about your decisions and communicate how you're thinking about things, which is the beginning of sort of
Um getting better at them.
Yeah, I I think that's exactly right. That
Um and the other thing that it does.
is that it establishes very early.
That we're on the same side. That we have
If not all of the same goals.
We have alignment.
uh with our values and our goals.
I want to support you says
All I'm looking for is an excuse.
to make sure that you and I are facing the same direction and and and facing the world together.
Help me get there.
Bring me into alignment with you by
By telling me more.
You've struggled a bit with depression. I'd love to learn more about your struggles and how you overcame that.
I was but when I started college
Uh I started off as a uh pre med.
And I found that um I hated it. I hated uh the classes that I was taking and I hated
That
idea about medicine as a career, I would like it I just felt
Unmoored and and
unsure about how to how to get back where I wanted to be.
As a result did some really unhealthy self destructive things both
both educationally and
And sort of in my in my personal life. So I was
Uh so I ended up sabotaging myself academically.
I and I sabotage myself.
uh interpersonally that yeah, I I was I was doing stupid things like drinking too much alcohol in the middle of the week and you know uh and doing things that that were not going to be productive toward
toward any goal because I felt like I didn't have a a goal at the time.
I mean it ended up manifesting uh in a in a pretty bad way uh in college that you know it it got to a point of of uh a a pretty dark
uh deep depression that
ended up with me withdrawing from from classes.
Working for a while to find
the right therapist to work with uh in school.
And then
Maybe amazingly, or maybe
Yeah, in a totally expected way, writing the ship that once I had the uh you know, the appropriate support and
conversations with people who loved loved me and cared about me, uh around me, who were supportive
Uh of of me sort of
Finding
Finding my own way.
all of a sudden I didn't feel the pressure that I was putting on myself and I was uh able to succeed. And I didn't feel
not like I needed to fulfill anybody else's desires for where I was gonna end up. So I was able to
to chart my path and start doing things that I really enjoyed. And instead of being pre med,
I said I really love
these different topics. And that's when I created my own major, uh, which focused on, you know, of all things deaf culture and language, which
Does not l
Is not
a pre vocational path, but instead um you know uh education for uh for the sake of education.
Uh, which allowed me to sort of demonstrate to the world that I was able to learn.
And it also
provided a lot of tools that I've been talking about and how I deal with my children and how I deal with my students, uh, which is that, you know, I I learned a lot better uh how to handle interpersonal relationships and and how to communicate more clearly.
How how do you reflect in yourself? Like are are you do you catch yourself
prone to depression, or do you catch yourself sort of falling into the the that way of thinking?
And then move yourself out of it, or is it something that's uh sort of
Uh not there all the time in the back.
background.
It's it is definitely not something that
I feel like I live with and struggle with this definitely feels like a a
uh much more of a footnote in my history than it is a
uh you know, uh uh a a description of s of something that I
Uh that I fight.
Um, I do know that
that there are certain behaviors that I tend to fall into when I'm feeling uh overwhelmed that are nonproductive. That is I I don't feel depressed, but I know that there are better ways for me to to to approach
Either the way I'm
caring for myself or the way I'm interacting with others.
And importantly, it's given me a lot of of good tools um for
For handling
uh issues that that my loved ones face. That I feel like, you know, when my when my children are facing um issues with depression or
unproductive. I feel like I've got better tools now to uh to be able to uh to help them.
out of wherever they are.
And the other really important thing that I think goes
Is is still stigmatized, uh, broadly.
is is using mental health
uh professionals that
Just before we started uh this conversation, I got a phone call from my dentist to set up my annual cleaning.
So in two days I'm having my annual cleaning, which most of your
listening audience is gonna think you know, so what? Okay, great, he's getting his teeth cleaned.
If I were to tell you that instead it wasn't my dentist that called, but it was my therapist who called, and in two days I'm gonna sit down with her and and just talk through what's going on in my life.
Not because there's a problem, but because it's part of my mental health hygiene. I think that there might be some people who sort of bristle at that a little bit and be like, what are you seeing a shrink for? You know, why why you're sitting down with a therapist? Like, what's going on? What's wrong?
But I do regularly check in with a therapist.
Um not because there's anything wrong, but
Uh, but for the same reason that I get my teeth clean and for the same reason that I see my doctor every year uh for a check in, just to make sure that things are staying on track and that
that I'm catching anything that might be bubbling up as a problem before it becomes a problem.
I think that's really powerful not only individually, but for performance too, to have somebody to talk to and talk through things with. And I don't know why I get stigmatized or sort of uh thought down upon, um
Yeah, I don't I don't quite understand that.
I have to ask, uh, tell me about your Jeopardy experience. And we were talking before, you told me you were a contestant on Jeopardy. I wanna
Wanna hear about this.
Yeah, this was a while ago now. This is uh
Yeah, soon after my my oldest was uh was just born, there was an an open audition for Jeopardy and it was a a show that I had watched
you know, a as a family and I was always so amazed by the fact that my father
would be able to answer like two thirds of the questions uh before the contestants got to it and I thought, man, this is this is pretty cool.
Um, and then uh there's an open audition. So I I went to the Baltimore convention center and you know signed up for the audition and did well on the test. And then they have you you know play a practice round and I ended up getting invited onto the show.
And before I went on the show, I I knew that there were some things that I needed to really brush up on. Shakespeare comes up in ways that I knew that I I didn't have a deep enough knowledge of.
I wanted to make sure I knew all the presidents and vice presidents and order things like that.
And uh Jeff Yoss, the founder of of
you know, one of the founders of Susquehanna, the chief risk manager at at Susquehanna.
Um came into my office.
before I went and he said, Todd
Nobody cares if you know anything about American history.
But if you screw up
The the betting?
on the on the final Jeopardy and Daily Doubles, don't even bother coming back.
Yeah.
Uh.
Which was a lovely
Uh uh
A lovely reminder that I couldn't embarrass myself by not knowing trivia, and a and a very good reminder that what I do as a profession
is put money at risk. So I should probably make sure that I'm thinking pretty clearly about
uh about how I'm gambling, uh uh in the game.
And when I got back
He uh
Came in my office, closed the door behind me, said I know that
That you're not supposed to share the results until the show air, but
Tell me how much money you had.
Tell how how much money everybody had at Final Jeopardy and I'll tell you what you should have wagered.
Oh, that's interesting.
And that was all that he wanted to talk about when I uh when I got back.
Uh I I I won one night, so so I yeah, I've I made it to two final jeopardies and he approved of my w of my wagers on both.
I I wanna end with uh some of the lessons that you learned from your parents growing up.
Th the first thing that that I thought of when I thought of kind of what my parents taught me or showed me
Something that I misunderstood when I was little.
And when I was little, I noticed that
They would sleep late on the weekends.
Yeah, w when I was in college, I knew not to call my parents on a Saturday before noon because they might still be asleep.
And
I interpreted that.
incorrectly when I was little as
Them being
Sort of lazy.
And what I realize now, uh, as they're septigenarians and still working, is that this was totally the result of the fact that they worked.
their tails off for my entire life and still still do work incredibly hard.
And that the conversation that I had with my father that morning when I wanted to quit the cross.
was really one of making sure that it I wasn't picking the path of laziness, but that I was picking a path
for good, well thought out reasons because there's value in doing work, value in doing hard work, that there's payment that comes from that in the long run.
So so my parents did a really good job of showing me that that being dedicated to a purpose and for them the purpose was so very clearly providing for me and my brother and my sister.
and providing the the life that gave us opportunity uh was important to them.
And I realized that the reason that they were working so hard is because they valued education so highly. So this is sort of the number two that I got from them.
was was the very clear of education. Uh my siblings and I um had private education. We went to private schools when uh when we were uh younger because they saw some failings in in the um in the public education that
that we were getting.
Uh and they saw
uh that there's greater opportunity, uh, if they could provide us with
Uh with a better education.
So they made sure that in spite of the fact that it was
More of a financial stretch certainly than pen sending us to public school.
uh that they were willing to take on
you know, the the additional mortgage to pay for uh uh for us to be uh uh appropriately educated.
And in talking to my kids about sort of how that shows
Up for them. Uh I I sent them
A group text and just said
Hey, I'm gonna be talking to Shane.
Uh I know that this is something he's gonna ask about.
What did you guys learn from me?
And and the way uh they responded was that I've done a really good job.
of modelling for them acceptance and love.
My youngest.
daughter, my thirteen.
uh said that uh she knows that it's important to leave saying I love you.
But
That the end of every conversation
uh is I love you. And it's not
Performative it is, um, she didn't say performative, uh um
I'm using the word. And you make sure that that's the the purpose with which
you end a conversation. And that was always my interaction with my parents that
Uh I remember so very well
them coming to see me sing in college.
Uh so I sang in uh in
uh the Virginia Glee Club.
And uh there were sixty five men standing on stage in rehearsal, and my father showed up.
trying to figure out, you know, where he was supposed to, you know, leave my tuxedo or whatever it was. So he walks onto the stage in as we're rehearsing before the final performance and he
came on and I went over and greeted him the way I always greet him, which is with a hug and a kiss hello.
And then I talked to him and then he gave me another kiss and he and he walked away.
And
I I always knew
That
With disagreements, with fights, whatever, that that my parents always loved me.
that the that was sort of the the the baseline understanding.
Uh
Of where I stood with them.
And
Yeah, as a grown man I was able
than and still am to um to hug and kiss my parents hello and goodbye. And
Only later when some of the other guys in the Glee Club said to me, Like, Yeah, it's sort of
It was that was nice to see you give your father a kiss. I was like, What the hell are you talking about? Of course I would. Like, how else would I greet him? Um and realize that that wasn't everybody's norm.
Um and that's something that
that I've certainly taken from them and passed on to my kids.
Thank you. That's a beautiful way to to end this interview, Todd. I really appreciate the time.
Thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it.
The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Furnham Street.
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