Shane Parrish: A Former Spy On How To Think Smarter

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down, like, what am I actually going to make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:05Speaker 01

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

• 1:48Speaker 01

  And no matter what's happened to me, it might not be my fault that I'm in this situation, but it's my responsibility how I handle this situation going forward. It's my responsibility to respond to the situation in the best way that I can. And I own that, and nobody else owns that for me, and I can't blame my past. But everything in my past has got me here, and that's okay. That past has put you on this trajectory. It's put you at this moment in time. Where you go from here is completely up to you, though, and you control that, and nobody else controls that.

• 2:16Rich Roll?

  That's Shane Parrish, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:31Rich Roll?

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

• 3:12Rich Roll?

  What we do, what we decide, quite literally defines who we are. And despite the consequences of many decisions we are now faced to make, like how long to sequester? When is it okay to return to work or visit a loved one? I suspect now, more than ever, we are primed to respond to our quickly shifting environment, not from a stance of mindful, reasoned objectivity, but rather from a place of reflexive reactivity, driven by unconscious impulses rooted in emotions like fear.

• 3:53Rich Roll?

  And this is to say that it is both important and incumbent upon all of us for the sake and welfare of not just ourselves, but our families and our communities, to optimize those decision-making skills. So, how precisely do we do this? Well, this question became an obsession for today's guest, Shane Parrish, a former computer scientist and spy for Canada's version of the NSA, who began to ply his curiosity and copious analytical aptitude to create a canonical roadmap to drive better judgment,

• 4:34Rich Roll?

  better decisions, and ultimately, better life outcomes for himself and others. The answers are coming soon, my friends. And a conversation I should mention was recorded pre-pandemic on February 11th. But first.

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  Okay, Shane, one of the biggest influencers across Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and professional sports, Shane is the founder of Farnam Street, which is, in my opinion, one of the best online publications when it comes to sharpening the mind. In addition, he hosts the Knowledge Project podcast, which I highly recommend, and is the author of The Great Mental Models, Volume One, General Thinking Concepts, which is the first release in a series of books designed to improve your decision-making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world. Shane has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Economist, and now, my friends,

• 5:38Rich Roll?

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

• 6:22Rich Roll?

  His wisdom, his experience is both timeless and timely, and I think you'll find this conversation instructive and, at the same time, highly applicable to our current situation. Finally, Shane recently imparted some pandemic-related thoughts on Farnam Street in an excellent piece entitled, "What You Truly Value," and I'll link that up in the show notes. It is well worth the read. So, without further ado, this is me and Shane Parrish.

• 6:55Rich Roll?

  First of all, welcome. Thank you for doing this today.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 6:58Rich Roll?

  I appreciate you coming out here. When I think about you, I think about somebody who spent a lot of time, basically, thinking about thinking. Somebody who is trying to divine the difference between knowledge and understanding. And to kind of coin a phrase used widely by Yuval Noah Harari, perfecting or optimizing this idea that clarity is power.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  I totally agree with that. Thanks for having me here.

• 7:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Rich Roll?

  Where to begin? I mean,

• 7:32Rich Roll?

  I think that we're in a very unique and unprecedented time right now, where we've never been so distracted and so tempted by distraction. So much so that we have to erect all of these boundaries and go way out of our way to protect and construct time to reflect and to kind of engage with solitude. Whereas that was just a byproduct of living in a bygone era. And you're somebody who's kind of at the bleeding edge

• 8:12Rich Roll?

  of this idea being of paramount importance if you want to be able to make the best decisions and live the best life that you're capable of living.

• 8:25Speaker 01

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

• 9:11Speaker 01

  We're stupid, we're incompetent, we're lazy, whatever. Or we blame other people. Oh, they're wrong. They didn't give us the right advice. And then we sort of like, we lose the responsibility angle to controlling our own lives. And we're not exploring, I mean, traditionally, I think what we're going to miss out on is exploring what it means to live life and what it means to live a better life. And it's too late that we realize that we might have been distracted through all of life. And then we want to redo, but there's no, there's no window at the end of life. Like you get one life and so you can't walk up at the end and go, oh, you know what? I wasted that one. Let's do it again.

• 9:45Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I think in tandem with that, like looking at it from 10,000 feet. This is only accelerating this, you know, this, this pace towards maximum distraction. And we become habituated to it, so much so that, you know, even myself, who, you know, I'd like to consider myself, you know, a little bit, having a little bit more depth than somebody who's just scanning headlines, but I'll, I'll catch myself doing that and thinking, I got it. Like I'm moving on to the next thing as I'm scrolling through my Twitter feed. And I have to have this refrain, like this reminder that I need to step outside of that silo in order to be, you know, a fully, you know, educated person.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we all do it. It's how we respond when we catch ourselves too. And if we want to do it, that's fine, but are we consciously doing it or are we unconsciously doing it? And I think part of what I would like to encourage is that we're more conscious about how we spend our time and what we're distracted with and how we go about learning from our experiences. Like if you think of learning, going back to that again, most people think that you learn just from experience. You have an experience and then you learn, but that's not how it works. You need reflection and from reflection, you create an abstraction. The abstraction is what will I do differently next time? And then, once you have that, then you put it into action and you have this loop of learning, right? So you have experience, reflection, abstraction, or what will I do

• 11:11Speaker 01

  differently next time? And then you have an action and that action comes to an experience. And now you have this circle that's full, but if we're not taking time to reflect, we're not learning. And so we're not sort of progressing in life and we're not thinking about, what are the things I want to do next year that are going to make my life better? How can I live a better life next year? And we're always looking for that sort of like quick win instead of like, what's the process to just continuously like consciously think about what it means to live life?

• 11:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I think the action piece is the hardest piece. You know, when I, when I reflect on my own decision-making patterns, I think I'm somebody who has a pretty well-developed self-awareness. Like I, I know when I'm making the wrong decision and I'm aware of the patterns that lead me astray. And yet I will catch myself perpetuating them despite the self-awareness.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Can you like, but you quit alcohol? Like, have you relaxed?

• 12:07Rich Roll?

  I mean, I have, no, no, no. I mean, there are certain, yeah, I have, you know, I have made significant changes in my life and, and I believe myself to be on a, you know, a trajectory of personal growth. But when I'm honest with myself and objective about what I'm doing and what I could do better, there are glaring examples of where, you know, that growth, there's still tremendous growth that remains to be, remains to be manifested.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  But isn't that our like perpetual state, like state if we want to get better? I mean, I think happiness is sort of like the absence of desire in the sense of like, we don't want to get better at things. We don't want more than we have. We don't crave these external validation. We, we get it from the inside. The flip side of that is like, we do strive for progress. We strive to get better and we sort of like, we want to live a more meaningful, a better life, whatever that means to each of us. And there's no one answer to everybody. It's like, here's how you live a better life. It's a question you have to explore inside you. And that pushes us forward. And it's sort of like, yeah, sure, we catch ourselves doing something or doing a behavior that we might not want

• 13:16Speaker 01

  to do. And then we have to let it go and say like, do I want to do it again? Or do I just want to leave it there?

• 13:22Rich Roll?

  Right. In looking at kind of the work that you do and, and what you put out into the world.

• 13:32Rich Roll?

  To me, it feels like here's a guy who has this prodigious computer scientist oriented brain that sees things, perceives the world in a very logical, rational way. And you've taken that acuity and you've placed it on top of something that is extremely diffuse, amorphous and ephemeral and attempted to create a roadmap to canonize the best ideas out there to create this lattice work to help us make better ideas. Is that a fair representation of how you approach your work?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, like, I did a computer science degree. I went to work for an intelligence agency. And then I realized quickly, over the years, maybe two years passed, that my computer science degree became less and less relevant. And as I made decisions that were less and less technical and more people involved, I didn't have this sort of canon of knowledge from other disciplines or domains to factor into how I was making those decisions.

• 14:37Rich Roll?

  Right. So let's take it back. You graduate university and you end up as a cybersecurity computer scientist that essentially Canada's equivalent of the NSA.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:49Rich Roll?

  Right? Right before 9/11.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it started two weeks before September 11th.

• 14:55Rich Roll?

  That is crazy.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a terrible time, right? A lot of things happened, a lot of... I mean, we were super small at the time. We grew rapidly. You ended up getting promoted just because you were in the building, you're a body. We need this work done. And so you did it. I mean, I worked probably six, seven days a week, eight hours on the low end, 10 to 12 on the high end for seven years straight.

• 15:24Rich Roll?

  And can you talk, can you speak to what your role was there? Or is that shrouded in?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  No, I think they would prefer I don't do that.

• 15:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, essentially trying to make the world a safer place, I would imagine, right? But I can imagine what it must have been like. I mean, how old were you, like 23, 24, or something like that?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, 21.

• 15:42Rich Roll?

  Right, this young person who gets thrown into this situation. And suddenly it staffs up rapidly because of the escalating threats and the attention that this kind of work requires. And you find yourself in a management position, having to deal with other people when you're used to ones and zeros on a keyboard.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, computers are great because you tell it to do something, the computer always does it.

• 16:08Rich Roll?

  Why doesn't the world work like that?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  People are different, right? Like, we're biological, so it's a very different sort of thing for us where you can sort of tell people, like, here's what I want to happen, and it doesn't necessarily happen. And then you have to think about, well, this affects their family. And a lot of the decisions we were making not only affected the family of the people we worked with, but they affected our country, they affected our country's relationships with other countries, they affected troops in the theater, they affected civilians in war zones, they affected a lot of people. And so you have to consider this dynamic to a lot of the decisions we are making. And I do want to say it was a great place to work, right? Like, I get to work with some really amazing, world-class people. And it's very rare that you get to work with some of the best in your field.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  And they're there because they love it, not for the money, obviously, because it's government. But, yeah.

• 16:57Rich Roll?

  But most people in that circumstance would just, they'd try to make the best decisions they possibly could. They would run those decisions by perhaps a trusted few mentors or advisors to make sure that they're kind of on the proper trajectory. But what you did, I think, is unusual in that you had the audacity to take a step back and say, wait a minute, like, am I making the right decision? Even if I'm being told that it's fine, like, is this correct? And how can I, you know, create, you know, for lack of a better word, like a better algorithm for how I'm making these decisions that factor in all of these variables that

• 17:38Rich Roll?

  I'm trying to, you know, grok and track as I move forward and upward?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  I felt, I mean, I felt the responsibility of the decisions we were making at a very personal level. I mean, my parents are in the military. I could easily envision them overseas in a war zone. And what obligation do we have to make great decisions? And is good enough, good enough? And what obligation do I have as a person? Is there a stone that I need to unturn? Is there something I need to learn so that I can get comfortable with it? What blind spots do I have so that I'm, you know, sort of getting better at making decisions or trying to? And granted, all the decisions are somewhat imperfect, right? And then judging yourself on the outcome is really hard because sometimes you, it's like playing poker, right? Like sometimes you play your hand perfectly and you can

• 18:27Speaker 01

  still lose. And then how do you not take away lessons from that where you get scared? And that also affects future decisions, right? So it's a very complicated environment to learn about decision making and exploring. I ended up going back and doing my MBA. So after, around 2007, I was like, I need to learn how to, I need to get comfortable with these decisions. I need to get comfortable with my process. I need to sort of do the work that I need to do to make better decisions. And for me to feel comfortable, the decisions might be the same, but I'm not, I'm not comfortable that I sort of fully understand. And nobody did, right? Like, we're all just doing the best we can, given the environment.

• 19:06Rich Roll?

  So the decision to get an MBA wasn't motivated by some sense that you were gonna become an entrepreneur?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  No, not at all. No.

• 19:14Rich Roll?

  I was like, I need to figure out how to like manage these people better. Like, what does that look like?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Well, I did definitely want to learn how to manage people and relate to people better and do all that stuff. Stuff you don't necessarily learn in computer science, right? Like you, I was, I spent years debugging and coding and assembly and doing all this stuff. So I was very good with computers and less good with people. And the MBA definitely helped with that, but the whole point of that was like, I went around the organization, I started following people to meetings. I was like, I need to learn how decisions are really made and how I can make better decisions. And then I was like, okay, I've done that. Now I like Googled, I did what everybody does, you know, I Googled like, okay, what do I need to know? But MBA came up and I was like, I'm going to go back and do my MBA. And then that proved simultaneously, I would say fruitful in the sense that it put

• 20:01Speaker 01

  me on the path of Charlie Munger and mental models. And the flip side of that was the degree I found, you know, pretty useless in the schoolwork also.

• 20:11Rich Roll?

  Right, we're going to get to Charlie Munger, but, but prior to that, like, you know, the joke that I was going to make is, well, of course, you then enrolled for the class on how to make great decisions and they had to do a textbook and it was all laid out.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  That's it. Yeah, yeah. Wouldn't life be awesome if there was a class on like,

• 20:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Here's everything you need to know about decision making.

• 20:30Rich Roll?

  And, and if your work highlights anything, it's this, you know, incredible lack of attention to this very important skill in our educational system that's premised on memorization, you know, very much, you know, breadth over depth and moving forward quickly, that doesn't really prepare somebody for how to best navigate the real world, whether you're in a job scenario or otherwise. Like, how are you thinking? How are you making decisions? Is there a better way to think about, you know, these things that happen in life so that you can set yourself up for success?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:09Rich Roll?

  And it seems obvious that that would be, you know, something worthwhile for young people to ponder and study.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting, right? Because there is no class on decision making. There's no skill called decision making. Decision making is a subset of skills, just like there's no skill called reading. Reading is a subset of skills, right? You take words, you put them into sentences, you take sentences and you form meaning. And there's a whole bunch of different skills involved in sort of reading, same as decision making. And nobody's laid out, I mean, there are sort of curriculums at Stanford and all of that for classes on decision making, but they get very analytical. Very quickly and real world decision making often involves sort of analytical side, but there's also emotional side. There's also sort of like second, third order consequences you need to think about that don't necessarily stem from the decision tree that you're creating.

• 22:00Rich Roll?

  Right. And the interdisciplinary approach that you've taken by looking at physics and biology and, you know, these, these somewhat seemingly distant, um, um, uh, you know, ways of looking at the world and leveraging the wisdom and the laws of those, you know, of those disciplines into how you make decisions in the real world.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a work in progress, but still definitely trying to incorporate that.

• 22:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because this wisdom is out there. It's, you're not inventing these things out of whole cloth by performing experiments on human beings. You're just sort of looking, canvassing the world and saying, here's what the smartest people in the world have said over the ages, dating back to, you know, the Stoics or, you know, I don't know how far back you've gone, you know, all the way back through, you know, mythology to the latest and greatest of, you know, physics and biology to kind of divine greater truths that can inform how we navigate the world.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think anything I've done or we've done on the website or anything that we've made public is original content. It's sort of like we are just going back to these sort of timeless ideas. And one of the reasons they're timeless is we keep, keep being able to apply them to everyday life, right? And if we can learn the timeless ideas, that knowledge doesn't expire. So much of what we consume today is no longer valuable in a week. So what if we just build more depth around the things that are timeless? Because those are the things that are likely to impact us again in the future, likely to come up.

• 23:31Rich Roll?

  So enter Charlie Munger.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Charlie Munger. So, uh, the, the, the version of how I got put on to Munger, I think I had read something about Buffett in like 2000. And then during the MBA, we, we end up doing a case study in class and there's like six groups presenting and we're the last group and all of these other, I'm like panicking because all these other groups have a very different answer on this case study that we do. And we get up there and our team leader sort of like speaks and he's like, well, you know, we thought about it differently and gave our sort of response to the, the position we were put in and the teacher, the professor, I guess, would said. You didn't do the work. And he's like, no, actually, we did do the work. We just sort of like, had a different interpretation of it. And here are all the reasons that we

• 24:17Speaker 01

  had a different interpretation. Here's why we think all the other five groups' answers would not work. And they got into this like a verbal spat. And he, I remember, he just walked out. Like, he said, I'm done.

• 24:29Rich Roll?

  The professor?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  No, no, the student, like our team leader. So he walked out, he said, I'm done. And what he meant was, he was done with the MBA program. He literally went back to like his, his room, packed up his bags. And I ran, ran into him in the cafeteria after that. And I was like, how did, like, what we did made sense to me, right? Like, I don't understand how they, like, what did we do differently? And he just put me onto Charlie Munger. And I remember going back to my dorm room that night and just Googling Munger. And then that was the next.

• 25:00Rich Roll?

  Went down a rabbit hole.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I stopped doing schoolwork, basically, and just started diving into Munger's way of thinking, which is sort of, how do we apply these natural laws to give us a tailwind, right? And how do we work with the world instead of against the world?

• 25:16Rich Roll?

  A couple of things. I mean, first of all, it's not surprising that, you know, thinking outside the box was not rewarded. But it is, I think, noteworthy that, in the context of an MBA program, you would think that a creative approach to problem solving would be something that would, that, you know, would warrant recognition.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  So here's my theory on this. And I don't know if it's accurate. But the MBA programs are so expensive now. They're, they're, you know, seventy five, $200,000. A lot of them are paid by corporations. Corporations.

• 25:51Rich Roll?

  Right. That's why they're so expensive now.

• 25:53Speaker 01

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

• 26:37Rich Roll?

  I think that, that means that that's a system that could use a little first order thinking.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  It, it could definitely use a lot of improvement, but I noticed last year, I think, uh, MBA enrollments went down for the first time in a long time. So maybe, maybe that'll be a cause for them to rethink that.

• 26:52Rich Roll?

  So this discovery of Munger puts a chilling effect on your enthusiasm for your MBA program.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it also, I mean, it made it more valuable in a lot of ways, right? Because when we were doing accounting, you, you start connecting everything together. Instead of just learning these separate subjects, you start realizing that the world is just connected, like everything is connected. You can't, you can't work in an organization or lead somebody and ask them to do something without recognizing that that might affect their home life or without recognizing that maybe they're in a bad mood today because something happened at home and they're bringing that to the workplace. And if you're asking them to stay late, you're borrowing from the future. And when you borrow from the future, you sort of like have to give that back. And like how you accomplish things matters too. And so you, you start sort of like connecting all these different subjects, which is like, the map is not the territory, which is one of the mental models we have in the book is like.

• 27:41Rich Roll?

  Very first one.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Right. So financial statements are a great example of sort of maps, right? They, they point out sort of how a business is operating, at least on the surface, but it doesn't tell the real story about what's happening below the surface. And we've seen this from the likes of Enron, right? Where all these financial statements are public and they look great, but below the surface, the terrain, not the map, the actual terrain is much different. And it speaks to sort of problems. And so you, you, you learn how these things can sort of like play out. And then you sort of watch organizations that are run on dashboards. And it's really interesting because dashboards are maps, right? They just want all the indicators to be green or the numbers to be a certain number.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Uh, and that doesn't necessarily, like a lot of the times what's happening below the surface is you're borrowing from the future. And you don't realize you're borrowing from the future. So the terrain is actually different than the map that you're seeing.

• 28:37Rich Roll?

  Right. And the utility of the map is directly related to your understanding of its limitations and pitfalls.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Right. And a great example, if you want to conceptualize this as a set of financial statements, is online dating, right?

• 28:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  You get a profile of somebody, that's a map of who they are, and then you meet them in person, and it's often a very different story than the impression you get.

• 28:56Rich Roll?

  Often?

• 28:59Rich Roll?

  You're single now, right?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  I am.

• 29:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, I'm not on those apps, but it seems like that's sort of the unanimous case.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  It's a crazy story. It's like, people show up, they're like a different race than they indicated. It's like, you're like, what the heck?

• 29:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  I need to do a better job, Phil.

• 29:19Rich Roll?

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

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Right. Definitely.

• 29:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, so I take it then, that the fascination with Munger isn't just, you know, sort of his, his, his individual, unique insights about business and investing, it's this, it's the connectivity of all of these ideas and how they, they can work together to create, you know, you use this word lattice work, you know, this interplay of ideas that create almost like an assembly line for how you engage with decision making.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Munger was the first person to point it out, but there's others that have sort of like taken up the mantle since him, like Peter Bevlin and Peter Kaufman, and to some extent Warren Buffett, although he doesn't talk in that way, he definitely thinks in that way. And I think what's happening is, here's an example of people that are applying this in the real world, not in the theory, not in sort of like a classroom, they're actually using this information to make better decisions. They're not perfect, but they're using the information to make better decisions about what matters.

• 30:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  And like incentives would be a great example. So incentives drive a ton of behavior. We spent about 12, 13 minutes on incentives in my MBA program. But if you were to talk to people and you were to talk to anybody who runs a business or an entrepreneur and they know just how valuable incentives are, that would be something worth exploring, like what type of incentive systems should you create? How are they gamed? What does it mean to create a good incentive system? Should you have different incentive systems for different levels in the organization? Should everybody be able to articulate the incentive system? How do incentive systems go wrong?

• 31:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think unhealthy incentives are at the heart of so many systemic ills right now, politically, financially, socially, et cetera. And they're perpetuated to, I think, at great cost to everybody.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. And I mean, changing incentives is hugely powerful, but you can also unleash potential, right? If you give people freedom.

• 31:39Rich Roll?

  Redirecting those incentives.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they know what the incentives are and that your incentives are aligned. And you often get into problems, right? Because it's easy to create financial incentives and a lot of organizations are purely financial. But what if your organization values other things too, right? Like they value the environment or they value all of these other things and then you have multiple, I wouldn't say conflicting incentives, but people are overthinking and it's not clear what they need to do.

• 32:06Rich Roll?

  You can't talk about incentives without talking about bias.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Right, definitely. And then bias is an interesting thing because you have Daniel Kahneman, who's won basically, you know, a Nobel Laureate out of this, and he studied bias his whole life. And when I was talking to him on our show, like on the podcast, he basically said, like, I'm no better at avoiding bias than...

• 32:25Rich Roll?

  This is the great disheartening irony in all of it. Like the guy who's sort of this pioneer of exploring the limits of rationality in human beings and has a tremendous amount of self-awareness around it, still is the first to say that it has had very little impact on his own decision-making.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of scary in a way, right? Because what we do is we convince ourselves that, oh, if I just create a list of biases. And this was something that came up at my MBA program and something I've seen people apply to varying degrees of success, but they create a list of biases, like, am I overconfident? Am I using short-term information versus long-term information? Did I recently acquire this information, therefore I'm more prone to overvalue it, et cetera? They think that if they go through the checklist that they they avoid the biases. But what really happens is usually if you're intelligent enough to create the checklist in the first place, you just start telling yourself better stories about why that bias doesn't, I'm not overconfident in this case because, right?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  And then that story gets better, the smarter you are and more convincing you can convince yourself. And so it doesn't actually sort of help us avoid that.

• 33:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and intelligence becomes an Achilles heel in that in that context.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah. In in 12 step, they always say like, you know, the the the hyper intelligent people have the hardest time because they they just come up with a million reasons why the steps are bullshit and how they're not going to work and all of that.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 33:52Rich Roll?

  As opposed to just just surrendering to it and just doing it and realizing the results of that. And this is like an analogous case where if you're hyper intelligent, you're going to be able to do perform the mental, you know, gymnastics required to rationalize whatever it is you've already decided to do.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  I think I remember listening to you as prep for this, where you you had said something along the lines of it was only when you you followed the directions sort of like blindly.

• 34:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like let go of all of that. And you have to, there's a, you have to really humble yourself, I think, to get to that place.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:29Rich Roll?

  And when you're in pain, it's easier to do that. But but yeah, if you go in and you think, these people don't know what they're talking, you know, like, I know, this is nonsense or whatever, and you're going to, you think you have a better idea.

• 34:43Rich Roll?

  That's where you see a lot of unnecessary struggle.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Well, that's the curse of sort of intelligence in a way, right? It's like you're in a meeting at work and you always think you can improve the value of the idea. And I remember one of the things I had to learn as a manager was somebody would come up with an idea and the idea would be 90% correct. And I would spend a lot of time, and this is my failing, right? I would spend time going like, oh, well, here's how you make it from 90 to 95. But what would happen, I didn't realize that at the time. At least not the first few times is that the motivation on the person's part would fall from 100% motivation where they own the idea and it was a 90% solution to maybe like 50%. But we, the solution would be sort of like 5% better, if you will. But the outcome would be way worse.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  And so what was happening is that you're adding too much value to it. And it's sort of similar to what you're talking about, right? Where you're trying to add value to the process, but the process has proven to work. The motivation of the people that are in the meetings is here's my idea. I want to do it. And maybe you get to that 90% and then you can add value to it. But you sort of like have to let them run with that and you have to let them go with that.

• 35:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 36:01Rich Roll?

  So you finish your MBA, you go back to the intelligence agency.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:06Rich Roll?

  And you're leading the Charlie Munger fan club at this point.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Definitely, definitely.

• 36:11Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Actually, I had an anonymous blog at this point, too, right?

• 36:14Rich Roll?

  When did, when did you, did you start the blog when you were still in, in business school or when you returned to intelligence?

• 36:21Speaker 01

  No, I started.

• 36:22Rich Roll?

  You were, you were working in tandem when you were going to school.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I was working full time, going to school full time. Because, I mean, why not?

• 36:29Rich Roll?

  Right, of course.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  And I started the, the website as a means to keep track of what I was learning. And so the original website was 68131-dash, I think, 1440.blogger.com. And the reason it was that is 68131 is the zip code for Berkshire Hathaway and 1440, I believe, is their unit number in Q at Plaza. And it was never intended for anybody else.

• 36:53Rich Roll?

  Only a computer scientist would come up with that URL.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Well, it was like, only I would type that in, right? Like, nobody will find it.

• 37:00Rich Roll?

  Then why not just journal? But why even make it publicly available?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Because I like computers and journals, like I had to take with me and then I would have to like look up things and I couldn't hyperlink and connect ideas. And the whole point of Munger was sort of like connecting the world.

• 37:13Rich Roll?

  Got it.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  The flip side of this is I worked for an intelligence agency and having any public profile is sort of not a good idea.

• 37:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  To varying degrees.

• 37:22Rich Roll?

  Was there even like a little bio blurb that said, I'm anonymously writing this because I work in an intelligence agency?

• 37:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 37:30Rich Roll?

  That would be catnip.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  No, because it wasn't for anybody else.

• 37:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Right? It was literally just for me. And it was, so there was no information about who was behind it. It was just this anonymous website. I would say almost completely anonymous at the time. And then over the years, people found it and then it became sort of non or unanonymous, if you will.

• 37:51Rich Roll?

  Was there an inflection point where suddenly you realized like this is being consumed by a bunch of people?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  I think like 2013, 2014, I started to take it a lot more seriously.

• 38:03Rich Roll?

  And you still had the zip code URL?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  I think we changed that in 2012, maybe 2013 to frontstreetblog.com and now it's fs.blog.

• 38:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  But yeah. Yeah, there was a moment where I sort of, I knew I had to put a name behind it to do the things I wanted to do.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  And that was a big turning point, right? Not only because I was still working for an intelligence agency and I was basically like about to cause a ruckus on the inside because I'm going to have a very.

• 38:36Rich Roll?

  Did they know, did you have to tell them that you were doing this? You need a, when you're working in that kind of a place, do you need approval to even speak publicly at all about anything?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  They definitely prefer that. It's a little murky as to whether you need approval, but I mean, I wasn't talking about anything to do with work, nothing.

• 38:53Rich Roll?

  No, I got that.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  There was no anecdotes, no stories, no, it wasn't what I did.

• 38:56Rich Roll?

  Were they aware that you were doing it or were you just keeping that on the DL?

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of people there used to read it when it was anonymous, interestingly enough, right? And so I had this weird backdoor influence into the organization where the most senior levels of the organization were reading my website.

• 39:12Rich Roll?

  And having no idea that they.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  And having no idea.

• 39:14Rich Roll?

  Down the hallway was.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  That I was like, I remember literally my boss came to me one day and he was like, you should read this article. He sent me, he sent me my own article. And I was like, yeah, okay, he seems pretty switched on.

• 39:31Rich Roll?

  That had to be, I mean, that's somewhat surreal, but also that had to arm you with confidence that, you know, perhaps you could take this leap and go do this thing.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's also a testament to the people I was working with, right? Where they're always looking to get better and they're always looking to grow and make, make better decisions. And the website turned out to be sort of about decision-making leadership and to some extent innovation. And now it's morphed into more of like all of that plus like, how can we live a better life because they're all incorporated into that.

• 40:02Rich Roll?

  And when you, when you, you know, really cottoned on to this way of thinking, like, did that, I presume that had a positive impact on how you were managing people and you were, you were able to kind of see and perhaps even quantify the results.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Uh, I think I got better as a manager, but I mean, I started out from a terrible base here, right? I was a terrible-

• 40:23Rich Roll?

  This guy can only go up.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much. Like, I don't know where bottom would have been from that, but it's interesting sort of getting better as you go along and just, if you think about it, you're, you're sort of like, your slope or your trajectory matters a lot more than where you start from. And so my, I started from way worse spot managing. I didn't have any of the people skills that other people come in with. I didn't have that thinking by default. And so I started from a lower base, but I think I got to a better place in the end because of just constant progress.

• 40:58Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think, uh, all of our brains function and operate on, on a set of models that, that we're largely not consciously aware of, right? It's not that, it's not that they're, they're, we're just free associating and making decisions willy-nilly. We're defaulting to a set of pathways and parameters that we've, we've sort of habituated to over time, based on experience or school or what have you, that almost seem like there, it's just, you know, it's on kind of an autopilot.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:33Rich Roll?

  As opposed to taking a beat and, and really stepping outside of that and, and trying to deconstruct how you arrive at a certain decision and then, you know, questioning or, or applying that to a different set of parameters to see if you get a different outcome.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  So much of decision-making is pattern matching.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  And you match the patterns based on the information you have in your head. And so much of a better decision making is delaying that intuition of pattern matching or recognizing it and sort of like not acting on it in the moment.

• 42:05Rich Roll?

  So when did you arrive at this idea that you were going to try to take all of this information and try to create, you know, a better pattern or latticework out of it? As opposed to, I'm posting blog posts here and there, but actually looking at it from a broader, you know, perspective to say, there's a bigger, there's a bigger opportunity here to do something substantial and meaningful that it seems like no one else had really ever done.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Probably 2015. I mean, the idea sort of wasn't mine. It came from Munger, right? He's like, you just need to learn the big ideas from all of these different disciplines. And I was like, oh, and then I Googled that and it's not available. And I'm like, why can't I make that available, right? Like, this is the education that I want to do for myself over time. And obviously, it's a, it's a destination you never really reach. It's just something you sort of like get better at incrementally. And I just thought I would sort of create that for the world.

• 43:07Rich Roll?

  And at what point do you get in your car and drive to Nebraska and knock on Charlie's door?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 43:12Rich Roll?

  Go to Farnam Street.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Funny. That'd be awesome. Yeah.

• 43:17Rich Roll?

  Have you met him?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  I have met him, yeah.

• 43:19Rich Roll?

  You have met him? Okay, good. I'm glad.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm actually going to see him tomorrow at the Daily Journal meeting.

• 43:24Rich Roll?

  So what does he, what does he think about?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  With a thousand other people.

• 43:27Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's cool. What does he think about all this stuff that you're doing?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I have no idea. He's probably not even aware.

• 43:32Rich Roll?

  Really? Oh, come on.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:35Rich Roll?

  I'm sure he does. Well, he knows that you're, you've written this book and that you cite his work and all of that, right?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  He's got a copy of the book, so.

• 43:44Rich Roll?

  Okay, all right.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  I think he's just, you know, he's 97 now or something.

• 43:50Rich Roll?

  Right, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  As a reverent and sort of as ever, but.

• 43:55Rich Roll?

  Right. So at some point, you decide, I'm going to put.

• 44:02Rich Roll?

  Cybersecurity and intelligence in the rearview and I'm going to do this full time. And I think it's interesting to kind of spend a few minutes talking about how you

• 44:16Rich Roll?

  reckon with what could be considered to be, you know, an intuitive decision or one coming more from the heart. Like I think about some of the decisions that I've made that have had the biggest impact on my trajectory for better or worse. And, and many of them were made, you know, without a lot of information and, and no conscious modeling, but really were kind of heart centered, you know, like I have a passion for this thing and like, I'm going to go for it and it doesn't make sense. Like if I was to map that onto your, you know, models, it would have seemed like a terrible idea. And yet in retrospect, perhaps it was the, the best thing that I could have done. And you kind of walking away from a secure

• 44:59Rich Roll?

  career path to, you know, step into this new vocation, this Wild West space, I would imagine, you know, how did that map on to how you think about decision making?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Well, everybody else thought I was crazy, right? So my parents are like, you're walking away from not only basically a predetermined career path that'll get you wherever you want to go and a huge, like a great salary in comparison to anything they ever made and a stable pension and security and, you know, it's a government job. So it's very hard to sort of like lose your job. And you're just willing to give all of that up to pursue your dreams. And I think the answer to that is yeah. I mean, I would rather sort of my personal take on this is I would rather fall short in life pursuing my dreams than spend

• 45:52Speaker 01

  the rest of my life regretting not pursuing my dreams. And I think that I believe in myself and I also believe like I didn't, I didn't have a lot as a kid. I didn't, I mean, I didn't want for anything. And there's kids who had way worse lives than I did. But I knew I could always go back to zero and I would be okay. And if it meant that I had to go get a job, um, working for somebody else again, I would figure it out. And I believe that. And I also knew, um, at the end of the day, I could go back to the intelligence agency within a reasonable time period. So I took a year off, a leave of absence for a year.

• 46:26Rich Roll?

  Oh, so you, you could have gone back if it.

• 46:28Speaker 01

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

• 46:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Right?

• 46:44Rich Roll?

  And that, that, that superior who said, uh, hey, you should read this article. At what point did you tell him that that was you?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it was a few weeks later.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  It wasn't long because then I had felt bad, right? Like, I felt like I was sort of, even though I wasn't in on it, I felt like I was deceiving him and I didn't want to be in a relationship where I felt like I was deceiving him. Because I knew something he didn't know about it. And then it was at that point that I think he unsubscribed after I told him to be honest.

• 47:15Rich Roll?

  He started second guessing his own.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, his own judgment. Yeah.

• 47:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's funny. Um, well, what you build is amazing. Your, your, your website is an, you know, it's just an absolute treasure trove of incredibly valuable information. That's just freely available, including all of the mental models. Like, you've got this beautiful book out now. The Great Mental Models. It's like volume one, you know, starting with general thinking concepts. It's like nine of, you know, nine of the initial mental models in this, but you can get blurbs of all of them on your website currently, right?

• 47:48Speaker 01

  So what's going to happen is, uh, we, we decided to undertake this project. It's a three to four year project. We're sort of in the middle of it right now. We're going to release four volumes of the book. The book is going to contain the big ideas from all the disciplines. There'll be about 113 of them at the end of the day. We summarize them on the website. We're going to release the books and then at some point in the future, we'll make all the content freely available for everybody. Because one of the things that I believe in is sort of like equalizing opportunity, not necessarily outcomes, but opportunity. And I think making that thinking sort of like available free online is a good thing to do for the world.

• 48:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  But it's been, I mean, as we were talking about earlier, publishing a book has been quite an ordeal.

• 48:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Because we're acting as the publisher, our small team.

• 48:37Rich Roll?

  You're doing it all.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Right? Like we have a graphic designer and we have a creative director and we have a printer in Latvia that we're dealing with. And then we have Amazon issues where, you know, we have a distributor, but Amazon's trying to order more copies. And we're like, well, that's all we printed and like, don't sell more than that. And you go to the Amazon and it's like, yeah.

• 48:55Rich Roll?

  Well, you did, I mean, you did a beautiful job. I had, you just handed this to me before the podcast. I was, I have the Kindle version, which I'm about 45% into at the moment and I'm really enjoying it. But the tactile experience of this book, like it's, it's, it's beautifully put together. And, you know, a couple of observations. I mean, first on the subject of self-publishing, which I think is absolutely the right decision for this kind of book. People think, well, remove the gatekeepers and you can just, you can just put it out there, which is true. But you also have to understand that you're going to, this is a, you're starting a new business and you're going to have to project manage like a million variables in order to like make it happen. It's not, it's not a small thing. And especially to create a book of this, you know, caliber.

• 49:38Rich Roll?

  I mean, there's, there's a lot of, you know, very detailed design aspects to this with, you know, inserted color pages and tons of illustrations and, you know, color lithographs and things like that. Like it's, it's unique in that on the one hand, it's, it operates sort of like a textbook, like, and the title kind of lends itself to that. Like it's, there's nothing, there's no clickbaity, you know, title or anything to grab you. It's like, this is sort of a manual, a primer, and yet. It's also very easily digestible, like it's very plain spoken. It's not difficult to read. You illustrate these principles, these models by way of, you know,

• 50:20Rich Roll?

  historical anecdotes, et cetera, to elucidate the concepts. And that makes it like fun to read, but also like it's like this perfect combination of,

• 50:34Rich Roll?

  you know, the sweet and the sour, like giving you your vegetables and your dessert at the same time.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. I had somebody email me and say it was the most boring title ever to make the Wall Street Journal bestselling list.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  The great mental models, general thinking.

• 50:51Rich Roll?

  And no small thing to make, to make the Wall Street Journal bestseller list as a self-published book. Like not very many people accomplish that.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're lucky to have a big audience. I think what it's a reference book, right? So just to put people in the context of it, it's designed to be a reference book. It's not designed to be sort of like a popular book. It's not designed to be something you sit down and read in an afternoon. It's meant to be, it's almost like a testament to the old Encyclopedia Britannica or something, right? Like it's beautifully designed and it's meant to be picked up and sort of explored as you need it and when you need it. And I'm glad you like it.

• 51:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, it's really, it's really cool. So the idea is you're going to do five of these?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Four, I think. We're going to do five, but I think we're going to condense the last ones together.

• 51:37Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, I think it would be good to kind of go through maybe a couple of these sure, mental models so that we can better understand them first. But why don't you, you know, it probably would be good to define what you mean by a mental model.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, a mental model is just a representation in our head of how something works. It's not a testament to whether it's good or bad or true or false. It's just how we, we conceptualize an idea and use it to think. And it helps us determine, if you think about how you approach problems, you're using this toolbox of mental models that you have in your head. And it determines what you think is relevant, the variables you think are relevant, how those variables are going to interact over time and what the likely outcome is going to be. And so the better the tools you have for the particular situation you have, the better your thinking is likely to be, the better you're going to interconnect those things over time. And the better you'll understand sort of the second and third order consequences of the decision.

• 52:32Rich Roll?

  And it's kind of a tiered setup, right? Like, this first book is about, you know, these general thinking concepts, which are kind of required to fully understand before you can drill down into some of the more detailed models that come from a variety of different disciplines.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the next volume is sort of physics, chemistry, and biology. And then we're going to go from there. But we're not connecting them yet. So the point of the books is like, the models are pretty independent. They're connected a little bit. And then after the books are released, we'll use the internet to connect them. Because we want people to connect them themselves. Because when you do the work yourself to connect the ideas, it has a more powerful bond than if I point them out for you. I mean, we'll do the work for you, but we're sort of like doing it in stages with the goal of having people learn how to apply them as they go along.

• 53:26Rich Roll?

  How do you think about not being overwhelmed, though? Like, you have 109 of these, and then within them, there's corollaries and like, sort of sub-modes within the models.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:39Rich Roll?

  So, all right, I have to make this decision. Like, what am I supposed to do? Like, run this through 109 different ways of looking at it before I have clarity that I'm, you know, conviction that I'm making the right decision?

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Well, that's an interesting question, right? Because I think to some extent, the answer is, depends on the decision, right? And how much you, like, so often today, we put weight into being decisive. We put weight into being a knowledge worker. We put weight into deciding on the spot, no matter the type of decisions. But if we're making sort of an irreversible consequential decision, then, yeah, I mean, we want to take our time. We want to go through, maybe we do want to go through a checklist of 109 of sort of like, the big ideas in the world, and see which ones apply and which ones don't, and then use those to remove our blind spots about the idea. Or, another way to phrase that would be, walk around the problem in a three-dimensional way.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  But if we're making sort of an inconsequential reversible decision, then we probably just want to go with our gut, or we want to delegate it to somebody else, or, those decisions don't matter as much. So the way that we approach each decision should vary. By the weight of the decision or the consequences or the reversibility of the decision itself.

• 54:51Rich Roll?

  But the first decision would have to be, is this a consequential decision or an inconsequential decision?

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:57Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Is it reversible or irreversible?

• 54:59Rich Roll?

  First principles.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  That's sort of like how I approach it. Patrick Collison approaches it the same way. I think he talked on our podcast about how they make different decisions based on reversibility of the decisions. Jeff Bezos calls it a one-way door versus two-way door. And so like, they're all thinking in terms of like irreversible decisions need to be made in a different way, right? Like if you're, if you're making a decision that you can't back out of, then you probably do want to think through it. You want to take, I mean, one of the pieces of advice that we give people is like, just take 30 minutes and go for a walk and just think about it. What is that doing? It's delaying intuition. If you have the models in your head, you can sort of like think through it. Well, am I using a map here?

• 55:46Speaker 01

  What's the map mean? Am I like familiar enough with the train? Is it within my circle of competence or outside of my circle of competence? If it's outside of my circle of competence, do I know somebody who has that in their circle of competence? Can I talk to them about it? And when you talk to them about it, the way that you talk to them about it, coming back to how we learn again, you want to talk to them about it from the point of understanding, not from a point of what to do. So often we approach people and we're like, what would you do in this situation? And I think that there's value in that, but there's a lot more value in saying, how would you think about this problem? What are the variables that come to mind for you? How do those variables interact? And then what would you do?

• 56:24Rich Roll?

  And how competent are you in this, you know, in this specialty?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:29Rich Roll?

  To evaluate the weight of that advice that you're going to be given.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Right. But one of the models in the book is circle of competence.

• 56:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Right. So if the decision is within your circle of competence, trusting your gut is probably reasonable. You want to check it, but your gut is probably right. If it's outside of your circle of competence, then you, your gut probably has less.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Relevance than if it was within. I think it obviously has less relevance than if it was within. And so now you want to, instead of checking it, you want to go, oh, well, who do I know that has more information or better information on this than I do? How can I approach them? And are there three or four people? Because if there's three or four people, now I can triangulate, right? So I can ask you what variables matter. I can ask somebody else what variables matter. And I can ask somebody else. And then between them, where's the overlap? And where are they different? Those are probably the areas to explore about what's going to impact that decision and what you have to keep an eye on. And then you don't always have to make decisions in a way that you're making a full decision. So often we look at the decision as the decision, but you can often break decisions into smaller decisions and gather information.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  And that information can change the path, right? Like you, you don't have to do, decide to invade a country, right? You can decide that, oh, we want to scope out information. We want to scout. We want to do all these other things that are short of sort of like the big decision. But we, we wrap a lot of our ego up into making those big decisions because we want to be the person who makes those big decisions.

• 57:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and the ego creates a gigantic blind spot.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:01Rich Roll?

  For a lot of people, probably most people.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  All of us to some degree, right? Like Ryan wrote, ego is the enemy, but it's also your friend, right? Like there's two sides of this ego coin, which is it propels us to do things that have never been done before. I mean, the reason that you want to put people on Mars is because you think you can do it, but nobody's ever done it before. So there's a large component of ego there. But when is it serving you and when is it getting in your way?

• 58:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah. When you think, I mean, you know, obviously Elon Musk is the embodiment of many of these models, you know, first principle thinking and also somebody who's, who's, you know, circle of competence is, is very wide. And yet, you know, to land a rocket, you know, that, is that inside his circle of, you know, these things become blurred. I would imagine part of this is, is having self-awareness around the boundaries of that circle in order to, you know, properly, you know, calibrate when you need to, you know, check your thinking with somebody else.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  So your circle can expand and it can become irrelevant too, right? So you can grow it, or if it's a rapidly moving field, if you're not keeping up to date, it shrinks. And so I think Elon's a great example of somebody who's grown his in multiple domains over the year. Probably in ways that most of us would never would never do, right? He's slept at his office. He's dedicated his whole life to these things. He's he's all in on these projects and he's been all in for years. Right? I think he's been basically Tesla and SpaceX for the past 12 years. And there's not much else. And most of us, when we look at that, were, I wouldn't trade. I wouldn't do that, right? Like, I want to have more time with my family. I want to sleep more nights. I don't want to be jet setting around the world and always jet lagged.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  I don't want to be doing all of these things. And I think I think the world needs more people like Elon.

• 59:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Thank God we got Elon.

• 59:54Rich Roll?

  But we also can't sit back and just expect he's going to do it all for us.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Right? I don't know, man. I'm waiting for his next project.

• 1:00:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know, right? Let's talk about inversion. That's an interesting one.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, what do you want to avoid, right? Often, we don't know the we don't know the answer. We don't know sort of the best path, but we know the outcomes we want to avoid. Right? So let's get rid of the bad outcomes and we're only left with the good outcomes. Or another way to think of that is often organizations work on stories. It's the story we tell that gets us promoted. What are you doing? So it's an addition thing. It's like you're in charge of innovation at the organization. So you have to tell a story about all the things you're doing at the organization that are making the organization more innovative. And it becomes about that story. When becoming more innovative, might be asking yourself, what are the things we're doing that are getting in the way of innovation? And then removing those.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  We don't feel respected. And that's communicating with our subconscious. So why would we, how do we sort of like go all in on this project? Or for this organization when we're getting this, these mismatched signals? And a large part of life is sort of like, I think Charlie Munger, who phrased it like, I just want to know where I'm going to die. So I never go there. And that's inversion, right? Like, how do we avoid that outcome? And you can also imply inversion to life, right? If you, it's a great thought experiment to sort of think about where you, like, close your eyes and think about where you are when you're 90. You're sitting on a bench and you're at the end of your life. It's your last day. Like, what do you want your eulogy to say?

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  What do you want people to say about you? Do you want people to say that you, you were the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but you had no friends because the way that you attained that was mutually exclusive from meaningful relationships with others? Do you want people to say that you were always there as a father, a spouse, a partner? And then are you living a life in accordance with that, right? So how do I avoid the outcomes that I don't want, right? So now I know what I do want, have a vector. How do I get there? Well, I just start dropping away these things that are getting in the way of that, right? Maybe I don't. I give up sort of trying to make partner at a law firm. And that's okay, because that's not really what I want.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  It means that we're living towards that goal. So we can filter on a day to day basis and avoid the stuff that gets in the way of where we actually want to go.

• 1:03:55Rich Roll?

  Right. So inversion, bringing clarity to all of this by, by basically forecasting all the way to the endpoint and moving backwards from there to better understand the steps that you want to take that are going to move you in the direction that you want to go. The, the, the kind of bug that I see in the system that you kind of touched on here for a second is I think that most people really don't know what they want.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Rich Roll?

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

• 1:04:44Rich Roll?

  you know, expectation on your part. And so much of, I think, proper decision making is rooted in the internal process of, of, of self-reflection. Like it's a, it's an emotional, spiritual journey where you have to become adequately integrated and self-actualized in order to even set that vector to begin with.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Rich Roll?

  In the appropriate direction.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  I don't know if I can add to that. I like, it's true, right? Like, nobody's ever taught you how to reflect. Nobody's ever, or very few people ever sort of like sit down in life and say like, where do you want to go? Like, are you doing the things that you are going to, we're so busy, we're so focused on speed. And the difference between speed and velocity is velocity has a destination and has a vector attached to it. So you're going somewhere. You're not running around in circles. And we're so busy up until the point where it's too late. And then we realize that we sort of often realize that we. Didn't spend our time the way we wanted to spend it, but if you know what you want people to say when you're 90, you know what that outcome is, you know what that destination

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  is, which involves sitting down and thinking about it and struggling with it and knowing that that answer is not the same for everybody, right? There are people who want money, power and fame and they'll walk over other people to get there. So it's not a judgment on that, but do you know where you're going? Do you know how to get there? Are you thinking about it consciously and are you living a life that's in line with that? And I think that those are really important questions to explore and not just once, you explore them as you live, right? Like as we were talking about earlier, some things change, right? What you think you want when you're 20 is very different than say 30 or 40 or 50 or 60.

• 1:06:28Rich Roll?

  Right. So you always have to be checking in with that. But back to incentives, I think that we're, we're in a culture where those incentives are misplaced. We're not incentivized to do that kind of internal reflection, you know, short of suffering a personal crisis that compels us to look in the mirror in a different way. It's the rare individual who will step outside of the, you know, structure in which they find themselves in order to really take stock, you know, in a very honest way of where they're at and where they really, really, truly want to be.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  What bigger incentive though, can you have than you get one life and the opportunity cost of life is like, you only get one.

• 1:07:10Rich Roll?

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

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's easy to live your life by somebody else's scorecard.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  It's hard to live your life by your own scorecard, but only one of those is likely to make you satisfied.

• 1:08:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I think it's a personal responsibility thing. It's incumbent upon all of us to take responsibility for wrestling with those questions for ourselves.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  But it's in plain sight, right? If you do the research on regrets of the nearly dead, the people in old age homes that are at the end of their life, they all sort of regret the same things.

• 1:08:26Rich Roll?

  I know, but we all know that, right? So this elucidates another thing that you talk a lot about, which is the difference between knowledge and understanding and the gap that exists between understanding and action. We all know that story of being on the deathbed and how the person never says, I wish I worked harder, right? But does that really impact how we're living our lives on a daily basis? What is the trickle down impact of that? And I think it speaks to another model, the specific title of which I can't recall, but it has to do with when the outcomes of your actions are very distant from... Yeah, what's that one called?

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  First order to second order to thinking.

• 1:09:09Rich Roll?

  I think so, but maybe it's a corollary that where the further away the impact of your actions are, the easier it is to absolve yourself of responsibility for those decisions.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:42Rich Roll?

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

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and tying it back to... The elderly person lying on their deathbed. Yeah, I get that, but like, you know what? Like, I got this deadline and, you know, the boss is waiting for this thing and I'm just gonna have to pull an all nighter.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:58Rich Roll?

  Right. One of my favorite of your models or sub models is this idea of, of first order negatives in exchange for second order positives.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like going to the gym is a great example, right? Like, I don't like going to the gym. Some people like it, but it's not my, you know, it's not my favorite. I don't wake up and go, yeah, I get to go to the gym today. But it's something I do because it's gonna, it increases the odds that I'm gonna have a happy, healthy, longer life, right? It releases stress. It has numerous health benefits to not only my brain, but my body. It increases the odds that I'm gonna be healthy. But for me, it's a first order negative. I don't want to go to the gym. And I do it because I know that the payoffs are sort of positive in the end, or at least they're probabilistically positive.

• 1:11:47Rich Roll?

  I got a pithy retitle for that.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Okay, what is it?

• 1:11:50Rich Roll?

  Pay now, love it later.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great, yeah. I like it a lot.

• 1:12:02Rich Roll?

  One of the interesting things about your work is that it has captured the fascination of not only your boss back at work, but, but Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and professional athletes, right? Which is super interesting. It's not dissimilar from, I mean, Ryan Holiday finds himself in the same position.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:06Rich Roll?

  Right. When did you first realize that that your work was connecting with those communities?

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:13:13Rich Roll?

  Start getting some interesting emails.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Wall Street was sort of the first one. Silicon Valley was the second and now professional sports has been the third in a sort of major way. I think it just resonates with people who are looking to get better in a non self-helpy way. Like, we're not prescribing anything. We never tell people what to do. We just sort of like, here's a model. Here's how you can apply it. Here's how you can use it. And here's how you can connect it to something else. Or here's a passage from a book that we're going to contextualize for you and sort of like, connect to another idea that you've already learned. So we view Farnam Street as sort of like building on existing knowledge. The longer you read it, the deeper you sort of like, get in the rabbit hole of what we're doing. And

• 1:13:58Rich Roll?

  Compounding.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Compounding your knowledge, right? So we're not talking about things that change. We don't ever talk about politics or anything topical. It's just sort of like, we don't want to tell you what to think about the election. We want to offer you the tools about how you could possibly think about the election if you wanted to.

• 1:14:15Rich Roll?

  Right. In turn, one of the things that you're doing now is you basically provide coaching services to individuals too, right? Like, that's part of a small part of what you do?

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  We, I do two clients a year.

• 1:14:29Rich Roll?

  Two clients?

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Rich Roll?

  Right. So walk me through like, how you advise, I mean, without, I'm not asking you to, you know, tell me anything that's confidential, but, you know, so and so calls you in and says, I love what you're doing. Like, I need some help. Come and come and help me. Like, how do you begin the process of trying to guide or advise somebody like that?

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Well, interestingly, like, we only take on, I only take on projects I want now because we only do two a year. So it's pretty easy to say no to most things. And then it's a match between what is the person one for often, I mean, what we've had the last Year and a half is basically I'm just on retainer and then people will call me when they have a major life decision and all their fly in and we'll talk about it or we'll talk about it on the phone and a lot of it is just being an outside view into their decision making. So I don't have, I'm not their friend in that sense. I'm not their coworker. I'm Their shrink. Their shrink, right? Like I have a vested interest in sort of like them seeing the

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  problem for what it might be more accurately than everybody else in their life. And if you think about that, when's the last time somebody came up to you at work and was like, here's the one thing holding you back. But I guarantee you, if you're listening to this at work now and you look to your left and right, those people know what's holding you back, but they've never told you why, because everything's relative to them. So information gets filtered, right? Information about ourselves, our blind spots get filtered and we can't see it because we're in the system. It's just like, how fast are we moving right now? And you're like, we're not moving at all. We're sitting here, you know, in your studio in LA and but if we were on the sun, we're moving at like 19,000 miles an hour or something around there, around the sun. And if we change our reference point to the galaxy, I mean,

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, to have that that outside perspective. And also, somebody who can say, in your case, under your specific set of circumstances, these are the models that I think are most relevant to like, run this decision through. And then kind of being a sounding board for that like volleyball match.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  And then are often, it's also timelines, right? Like, in the real world, people are under pressure to make decisions. They feel like they have a short tenure if they're the CEO. If you're the head coach of a professional sports team or the general manager, you have a short shelf life. You have a short expected shelf life. And so you often will take from the future to try to improve the present. Sometimes you want to do that, sometimes you don't. And walking through people like, are you really, are you setting yourself up? Because that you eventually have to pay that and you have to pay it with interest. So are you are you setting yourself up in the way that you want? And the difference between the sort of like the CEO and the owner is the owner is often always thinking long term.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  The CEO is a very win now mentality and sort of bridging that gap. Are you on the same timeline and making sure that everybody's on board with those decisions?

• 1:18:56Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, that would be a scenario in which the incentives aren't necessarily aligned. Like, one is looking towards quarterly earnings and the other one is thinking about where they're going to be 10 years from now.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Right, well, think about most shareholders, their incentive is, if we assume that most shareholders and corporations want to own the company for a long period of time, their incentive is mismatched from the CEO, which has an average tenure of like, I don't know, three to five years, I would imagine, in the SMB.

• 1:19:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How do you think about the difference between failure and success?

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  Often luck.

• 1:19:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  I don't know, I mean, I've had a lot of failure. I'll let you know when I get some success, but I think from a decision making point of view.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  You're never, the decisions where you know the outcome or you can't fail are not really worth thinking about. And you have to determine if failure is something you can handle or not. And often, we are going to fail. And how do we recover from that is super important to achieving success, because the odds that you succeed the first time you try something are pretty slim. If you look at like, we're all walking today and we fell down walking hundreds, if not thousands of times, but we got up and we did it again. And so often, life is just getting up one more time than you fall down. But going back to decision making again, reversible, irreversible. Like, where can you fail? Where can't you fail?

• 1:20:26Rich Roll?

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

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Well, that goes back to sort of like how we're living our life. Like, whose scorecard are we using? Are we using an internal scorecard? Are we using an external scorecard? Am I failing to meet up to somebody's expectations of me? Is that something I want to do? Or do I want freedom? And the freedom in this case would be freedom from living up to other people's expectations, freedom from sort of feeling the need to fulfill society's obligations to me. And I'm not saying like, break the law or anything like that. But we're so often driven by like, you're subliminally and otherwise told that the people who attain power, money, and fame are the sort of the people to emulate. Like, my kids come home from school and they start talking about all these celebrities.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

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

• 1:22:16Rich Roll?

  Right. Heroes walk amongst us. We just don't do a great job of shining a light on the best ones. And in order to do that, you have to do a little counter programming against what mainstream society is feeding all of us, not just young people.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  But I think some of that comes from just, we were talking about this earlier, reflection, right? Like where do I want to go in life? And that comes from being alone with your thoughts and working through your thoughts and having many false steps and sort of being conscious about, am I working towards those goals or am I not working towards them? Is this where I actually want to end up? Because so many of us reach our destination and we're like, oh, this isn't what I thought it was. This isn't where I wanted to go. And part of the problem is we didn't check in on the way. And maybe that's a weekly check in. Maybe it's, I mean, I do it sort of like twice a year at this point, but maybe it's monthly. Maybe it's sort of like something you you book a holiday with yourself for a, you know, a day every, every year. And you sort of like go to this isolated area

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  where you're not around people. And maybe you walk in nature, or maybe you sit in a hot tub, or you do whatever you need to do. And you think about, am I living the life that I want to be living? What are the things that I'm doing that are leading me to where I want to go? What are the things that are getting in the way of where I want to go? And what would I regret if I died today? Is there a relationship that I want to repair? Is there somebody that's not serving me that I need to get rid of because I don't like their anger? Those are the questions that we can sort of walk through mentally. And then we start, you know, once you realize it, then you put it into action. And as you said at the start, action's really hard, right? You might have a really close friend who's always angry and it's affecting you and it's affecting your health. But at the end of the day, you know, you need to let them go because they're not going to get

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  you where you want to go. And you can't help them.

• 1:24:07Rich Roll?

  What does that daily practice look like for you?

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  there was a wrong answer, it would be like, I'm just not thinking about it because it's hard, right? It's hard to be like, I don't want to be where I'm at. It's hard to absolve or hard to take responsibility for being in that spot, right? And we're all born into a set of circumstances that we don't control. We don't control sort of our parents socioeconomic status. We don't control our zip code. We don't control how much they care. We don't control the trajectory we're put on. But at some point in life, you take control of that trajectory. And maybe it's 18 for some people, maybe it's 25 for other people. But at that point, you're in control. So you don't control what point you're at, but you control where you go from there. And you do that through

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  your habits. You do that through your thinking. You do that through your decision making. And the question that I want everybody to ask is like, where am I going? Am I going to get there? Is what I'm doing today going to get me where I want to go? And if not, what do I need to do in order to get where I want to go?

• 1:25:53Rich Roll?

  In order to do that, you do have to create boundaries around that solitary time to allow yourself that level of reflection. And I agree that it doesn't have to take a certain form. Like, I know you're a meditator, like, I'm a meditator. I could, I could do it a little more consistently than I do. All of that. And if somebody's saying, that's not for me, I'd still encourage them to try it. But even if you're dismissive of that, finding something that you connect with, that you can consistently repeat.

• 1:26:27Rich Roll?

  With relative frequency, I think is critical.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30Rich Roll?

  To being able to have confidence that you're engaging that aspect of your consciousness.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  But so often, like I was on the airplane yesterday, right? We get this alone time away from our partners, our spouse. Usually the person beside us doesn't want to talk to us. And what do we do? We immediately distract ourselves, right? We put on a movie. We order a drink. We do all of these things to sort of like, I don't want to be alone with my thoughts. I don't want to think about these things. And that's not to say that you need to think about them every day because they're pretty heavy weighty thoughts. But they are something that I think a lot of people will regret not having thought of toward the end of their life.

• 1:27:08Rich Roll?

  So this New York Times article came out about you. What was that, like a year ago or something? It wasn't, or nine months ago or something?

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  November 11th, 2018.

• 1:27:18Rich Roll?

  I like that you know the date.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:19Rich Roll?

  I appreciate the honesty on that. That had to be, I'm sure that, you know, resulted in a lot of attention suddenly coming in your direction. Like, I've been following your stuff for a while and, you know, there's certain corners of, of, you know, the digital space where you've been a celebrity for quite some time. But that's very different than, you know, the white hot spotlight of the New York Times.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  It was definitely an interesting experience.

• 1:27:46Rich Roll?

  It had to be kind of surreal, right? Like, how did this happen?

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:50Rich Roll?

  I was just writing my little anonymous blog.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, I didn't think the story was going to happen. And I would say I probably wasn't exactly cooperative with the story for a long time before. But it ended up.

• 1:28:03Rich Roll?

  Not cooperative, why? Because?

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  Not, not huge on the attention.

• 1:28:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  I mean, I did work for an intelligence agency, right? I'm used to being in the shadows and like, this is, you know, a big spotlight.

• 1:28:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah, it's a, it's a different world, right? And it's changed a lot of things. I mean, for Farnam Street and not necessarily for me, but I mean, it's. A lot of attention.

• 1:28:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How many people do you have working on Farnam Street now?

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  We have four, full-time. Yeah.

• 1:28:38Rich Roll?

  And?

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  That includes books, the workshops, the website, all the stuff that we do.

• 1:28:44Rich Roll?

  And these retreats that you do, they're limited to a relatively small number of people, right?

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  So we teach decision-making for two days. We limit it to 50 people. Last time it sold out in like 17 minutes. And we just do them a couple of times a year.

• 1:29:01Rich Roll?

  And what is the structure of that? Like, what is the program that you're taking somebody through?

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  Well, sort of talk about, what does it mean to make decision? Well, A, I mean, the whole thing is orchestrated around the experience, right? So the content is part of the experience, but you can't just put people in a room and expect them to reveal information about each other or help each other get better. So it starts sort of like on a Wednesday night where we have an open bar and everybody comes in and so we do selection to begin with. So it's not selection as in you have to apply to get in. It's selection as in the webpage is pretty sparse. You can't copy and paste something and go to your boss. Tickets are non-cancelable, non-transferable. So if you're, you bought a ticket, like you have a ticket, you can't give it to somebody else. So nobody's there who doesn't want to be there.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  Nobody's there who's not familiar with us. Nobody's there because somebody told them to go. I mean, you're all, so when you come to the open bar, you have this social event, you have a little bit of lubricant. And if you will, to, a lot of people are introverts, so it helps them

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  sort of talk to other people, but you all have something in common. And not only do you read Farnam Street, you find out like you share similar values. And politics, we sort of like cover the spectrum, but on a value basis, like people tend to value the same thing. And then the next day you come in for the first day of the workshop. And then that is oriented around, oh, how do we get to know each other better? So the first thing we do is sort of like walk through. I remember that the New York Times had that 35 questions to fall in love article. So we did a ripoff of that, which is like, I think we did fifteen questions, but elevating intimacy. And so you, so when you walk in, you've already got familiar faces. You sit down at a table with people and then you go around, you find other people and you start asking these questions

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  and you're only allowed to go deeper. So whatever number you start at.

• 1:30:53Rich Roll?

  Forced vulnerability.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's sort of like getting you used to getting to know people on a real basis, right? So many times you go to conferences and you get to know people, but you don't know anything about who they are, what they care about. And so like, we're just, that's, that's all bullshit. So like, how do we actually get to know who you are? And it doesn't mean you're going to be best friends, although we've had tons of friendships created at these workshops that span the globe. But it does mean that we're going to help you get to a position where you feel comfortable talking to people about your decisions. And then we sort of walk you through individual decision making and group decision making, how you respond physiologically to decisions, how you go about thinking about them. And so it's, it's a different experience than sort of the website.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  And it's very organic. So you can come to the conference like two or three times, which often we get about

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  20% repeats and it's just a completely different experience because you're with a different table, you're with a different group and the content changes. I would say probably about 25% of the content turns over. But most of the experience is like, what am I learning from other people? How am I helping them? How do, how are they pointing out my blind spots to me? And how can I use that information to make better decisions? And all of that leads into, you have to trust the person. And so then on Thursday night, we'll do dinner and we do a big group dinner. And again, you're sitting with different people. And so we found with more than 50 people. You can't get to know everybody and 50 is really tough, but like we found with, we did 50.

• 1:32:30Rich Roll?

  50 is a lot for like two and a half days.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  We did 58 once and it's a different experience. So 58 people showed up and they clicked. And so what happened is like Wednesday night, you formed a clique and then you just hung out with that clique.

• 1:32:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  And so when we sell 50, we really get like 48, 45 to 48 people show up. And then that's a smaller number that you can sort of manage. You at least get to know everybody's names sort of. And you learn something about them and you're always changing seats and sort of. So again, it's about the experience and then we, we sort of connect people at the end. You can opt out of sharing your contact information. And then we just share everybody's contact information. We've had people change careers. We've had, like I said, incredible friendships. I think we even had one couple start dating as a result of like these things. And I think it's really neat, right? Like it's a good environment to, but we have

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  And we, we cross all political socioeconomic boundaries.

• 1:34:09Rich Roll?

  Right. But all super high achieving people who have been very successful in their respective disciplines to be able to then like for a professional athlete to say, look, here's what I do to get that extra edge and, and relay that to a CEO or, you know, somebody, I mean, that's like invaluable. I mean, if you're sitting atop. You know, a massive decision that you have to make like, should I sell my company? Should I get divorced? Like these kinds of things like I can see it just being incredibly valuable.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so people, I mean, the feedback is really good from the events. We never use sort of like the attendees for marketing. Often it's just a surprise and we sort of build the community out of that. So it's like, now you're part of something, you're part of something bigger than just showing up to a workshop on decision making. You're part of the Farnam Street community of people who want to improve, want to get better, help each other out. And that comes with obligations.

• 1:35:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I'm interested in, in some of the decisions that you made about how you've constructed the model for your digital empire, right? Like you've, you've produced a lot of freely available content, but you've also, you know, four walled some of it. And you've developed like a very, you know, strong following, a lot of people who care deeply about the work that you do. And it's really essentially looks like it's moving more and more towards a subscription model type of endeavor. And I'm interested in how you think about, in a broader sense, about the digital landscape from a creator's point of view, because it's something that obviously I spent a lot of time thinking about.

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think I have a lot of rock solid answers. I mean, I can walk through some of my thinking, which is, um, I need to make a living, right? So we need some sort of-

• 1:35:55Rich Roll?

  It has to be a self sustaining thing.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:57Rich Roll?

  What's the best way to do that?

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  So there needs to be some sort of element where there's an exchange of, like we're creative. Like somebody pointed this out to me a number of years ago and they said, you're creating so much value and you're capturing so little of it. And I was like, isn't that the way it's supposed to be? Right? Like-

• 1:36:19Rich Roll?

  Capturing meaning monetize.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  Monetizing so little of it. And I've been thinking about that statement ever since, right? Like, so if you capture more than you create, you go bankrupt. If you create more than you capture by wide disparity, you can also go bankrupt, right? Like you're creating a ton of value for people, but if you can't pay the bills and put the lights on, then you won't be able to do this thing that's creating all this value for people. And so I've just adopted this model of-

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  Content will mostly be free and we will find other ways to monetize. And if we can't monetize other ways, we will charge for content. But content being free means like our podcast is free, but you'll be able to soon pay to subscribe to the podcast and get an ad free version or get extras to it. And so we're not preventing people from listening to the content, but we are sort of like giving them a value add where you want the transcripts, you want the ad free version. If you value your time, it's probably worth it. And if you don't, then if you have the time, then by all means like you, there's no obligation to sort of subscribe. You're not going to miss out on that part of it because you know, we're not going to

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  hold an interview with like Jim Collins back because you don't pay us money.

• 1:37:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  I don't think that's the solution for me personally. The flip side is we have a community of people, we call it the learning community. A bunch of like minded people who want to help each other get better and we need to add value to them. And how do we add value in a way that is different from what's freely available? Right? One of the big feedbacks, if you read the Amazon reviews on our book, and this sort of like struck me because I was like, huh, I wonder if people realize what incentive they're creating. But one of the big feedbacks is like, a lot of this information is already on the blog. The book is a waste of money, like you don't have to buy it. And the byproduct of that is we've stopped putting up new models on the blog. Right? So we've stopped publishing them because, oh, okay. Well, if, you know, if that's the biggest piece of feedback we're getting, then we

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  just won't publish them. We'll publish the books and then we'll publish sort of like, and the ones on the blog are different, right? The content in the book is all new. It's not the stuff on the blog. It's talking about the same models, but people feel like they understand.

• 1:38:33Rich Roll?

  You're going way deeper into these subjects.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  And then, you know, there is an obligation to sort of like, I support people that I value, like I want them to exist in the world. I realize running a business is inherently complicated and it's okay to pay for content. The flip side of this is like, we're not going to end up with 50 monthly subscriptions. Right? Like you're not going to Netflix, Disney plus like.

• 1:39:01Rich Roll?

  That's the thing.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  Right? So you, and so one of the things that we did that was really.

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  Controversial is we don't do monthly. We might do it for the podcast, but we don't do monthly for the learning community. It's yearly. Like you give us a year long commitment. There's no cancellations, no refunds. Again, it's on the website. There's no fine print. It's just like.

• 1:39:20Rich Roll?

  But you've built up enough credibility where you can do that.

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I hope so. Right. And we're always trying to get better. But what I didn't want, we did monthly for a couple of months. And what I realized was like, we almost had to build this system where people get the receipt and you have to send them a piece of content like right before they get their receipt because you get your receipt. And then what instantly triggers in you is like, what have I got from this guy?

• 1:39:44Rich Roll?

  I haven't gotten anything for 28 days.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  Right. I haven't gotten anything for like two weeks. Like, why am I paying this thing? And it's like, well, that promotes more content, more content. Like, I don't want to be on this content treadmill where we're constantly feel like we need to.

• 1:40:00Rich Roll?

  More, more, more faster, faster, faster. It's antithetical to the whole ethos of what you're doing.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  Right. More content's not better content. Right? More content's often just more content. And you feel like you're getting more as a reader sometimes, but you're not. Right?

• 1:40:17Rich Roll?

  Well, the experience that I have receiving your email and listening to the podcast is refreshing in that it's clear a lot of thought went into this. And this is timeless, evergreen content. And it's been, you know, it's been, you know, proofed and created in a way to position it in that manner. Like, I know when I get that email that like, a lot of people thought about this before it got sent to me. And I appreciate that in this transient world of like, content digestion where everything is a toss away. And I do think it's interesting that, you know, you've had incredible conversations with a wide variety of people on the Knowledge

• 1:41:00Rich Roll?

  Project. And I think that's another treasure trove of just unbelievably helpful elucidating information. But in, in the way that our culture.

• 1:41:13Rich Roll?

  Digest that there is this sense nonetheless that like a podcast you did a year ago. Well, that's, that's old news.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:41:22Rich Roll?

  Which is weird because it's not like.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:41:24Rich Roll?

  If you're looking at a set of encyclopedias, like A and Z have equal footing on that shelf. And they're always sitting there ready for you. You know, if they wrote the Z version of the encyclopedia after the A, it doesn't mean it's any less valuable.

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  I remember a comment on Twitter last week was like, somebody was dismissing something we wrote in 2013. Cause they were like, that was written in 2013, as if like, that was the reason to dismiss it. Without any sort of coherent argument as to why the date of something timeless would matter.

• 1:41:54Rich Roll?

  So how do you, uh, how do you, you know, try to maintain the salience of stuff that, you know, was posted a while ago? Like that's, that's a challenge. I'm not saying you have the answer to that, but I think that that's a, that's something that, that I think, you know, is a challenge that requires a little bit of thought.

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  So we're not perfect. There's some stuff that we find that, you know, we, we pair, but we take the summer every year, June, July and August. We release no new content and we spend those months updating old content. So we just sort of like go through, uh, sometimes we.

• 1:42:29Rich Roll?

  Why do you need to update it if it's evergreen?

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  Well, cause you update the wording, right? You updating the connectivity, maybe you have a better way to phrase things. And so we're, uh, occasionally we pair things, like we'll remove an article, but not very often. And, but we'll make subtle changes to articles or we'll link it to newer articles that we've written. That might expand people's worldview of it, but we're taking the time to sort of like, oh, maybe that was a little bit more of a topical reference than we wanted to, right? Like we mentioned Bitcoin in the book, right? But we were conscious about mentioning Bitcoin. Because it's like, well, that's.

• 1:43:01Rich Roll?

  It's an ever evolving.

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  It's an ever evolving thing. And like we, we aim to be evergreen. Like you should be able to listen to any episode of the knowledge project. And we never talk about politics. We never talk about anything sort of like topical of the day. And you wouldn't know if it was released yesterday, or if it was released four years ago. And that's the goal, right? Because we only want to talk about the timeless things.

• 1:43:24Rich Roll?

  It seems to me that the the the heavy lifting in your work is this interconnectivity piece between all of these models. Like I, you know, I'm envisioning like a giant white wall where there's like, you know, you're drawing lines in between these ideas. There's some kind of insane Venn diagram that looks like somebody, you know, some schizophrenic that went off their meds is trying to construct. Like, what does that look like? And that is an organic

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:49Rich Roll?

  breathing thing that I would imagine is very much in gestation and always changing.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  And the king, the emperor said, no problem. And then realized that that was more rice in the world, right? So on the 63rd day, you have half as much rice as the 64th day. And so, but think, how does that apply to relationships, right? So we know we need to survive and we know most of the gains come at the end. So when a relationship happens, you can think about, there's four permutations of a relationship. There's win, win, win, lose, lose, win, and lose, lose. But only one of those relationships will survive over time. And only one of those relationships will take advantage of compounding. So now we've connected a whole bunch of different ideas and we've done it in a way that can direct how we engage with not only friends and family, but customers, suppliers, everybody in our lives, right?

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  How do we make this relationship a win for them? Because we know if it's not a win for them, it's not going to survive over time. If it doesn't survive over time, it can't compound. And if it can't compound, we're not going to get all of the gains at the end.

• 1:45:32Rich Roll?

  Right. It sounds like you're aiming towards some kind of unifying theory of the universe, ultimately.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  I don't know if I'm that.

• 1:45:40Rich Roll?

  It is very like, like, I'm here listening to you and I'm like, this is amazing. And I'm also like, I'm noticing my resistance also because I'm like, this guy's trying to write a computer program for, you know.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  An operating system for life.

• 1:45:55Rich Roll?

  For living, you know what I mean? And I'm like, I'm a very emotional, sensitive person and I'm, I'm like, where does, where does intuition, you know, where does that, that, that like?

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  I'm a huge believer.

• 1:46:05Rich Roll?

  Spark where you don't know where it came from and you're like, I'm channeling something where I don't even know the, you know, from whence it arrives. Like, is there a place for that kind of spirituality to live in the work that you do?

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  Totally. Uh, I believe that that's a huge component to our lives, right? So I'm not, um, I don't believe in just pure rationality. I don't think that's the way we should live lives. And I think that emotion and sort of spirituality and community and all of those things are also part of it, right? We're part of an ecosystem, but individually, um, we have emotions. We need to sort of not deny them, not suppress them, right? I think so many problems in society today, from my vantage point, is people over analyzing their feelings, trying to suppress them and not actually feeling them, delaying the feeling instead of just being present with the emotions. I think that there's a lot of studies that say if you actually feel the feelings when

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  you first feel them, they sort of last 90 seconds to sort of like three minutes. Like if you're angry and you don't suppress it and you don't sort of like analyze it and you just feel that anger, it'll go away pretty quickly. But it's when you suppress it that it starts to crop up again and again. You become passive aggressive and then you become aggressive aggressive. And.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  I think that we need to feel this feeling. And there's decisions that you're going to make in life that are not rational. And that's okay, right? They don't have to be rational. I think what you want to do is just be aware that you're you're conscious of the fact that you're not making a rational decision, or you're you're okay, sort of like throwing the rational side of your brain out. Like quitting a great, high-profile job to start a blog is, you know, not necessarily the most rational decision you can make. Who you marry, who you're in a relationship with, what that connection is like. Those are those are not purely rational decisions. Those are very emotionally driven chemistry, physiological, response-based decisions. And I think that those are equally powerful, if not

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  in some cases, more powerful than rational decision making.

• 1:48:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think they can be channeled to great effect as long as you have a healthy understanding of that emotional landscape. Like, when am I feeling a spark of inspiration? Or when am I experiencing some kind of overwhelming emotion that I that I know is is driving me towards making a certain type of decision? Versus, oh, I'm just repeating a pattern as a result of my childhood trauma. And, you know, I've got to, this is going to take me down the wrong path. Even though I feel strongly about doing this, I know well enough to know that that's not the right thing to do.

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  But so often that becomes an excuse today, too, right? Like, we we sort of like, oh, I was brought up that way. And but going back to what I said.

• 1:48:53Rich Roll?

  This is what I do.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

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

• 1:49:36Rich Roll?

  Boom, powerfully said. All right, well, let's end this. I think I think a good way to kind of. Have people walking away from this with a sense of empowerment? If somebody's struggling with a decision, like, what is the first line of inquiry? If you're sitting in a conference room and ideas are getting thrown around, or there's some type of decision table to be made, like, where do you begin trying to deconstruct that? And, and get people thinking, you know, right minded?

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  Two things stand out as really fun to do as an exercise that's clarifying. So the first thing is have everybody write down what the decision they're making is. Most of the time, people don't even agree on what decision they're making. So they're all in the room-

• 1:50:23Rich Roll?

  That's super interesting.

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  -to make a decision and nobody agrees on like what they're actually-

• 1:50:26Rich Roll?

  There's even a consensus on what it is you're actually making a decision about.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  So like clarity around what you're deciding. And then are we actually deciding the right thing? Like, is this the right problem? The two different things, right? Like, do we all agree on what we're deciding? And is that the right, right, like, level of the problem to solve? The second thing that I find really helpful in these meetings is people often go around and they signal that they've done the work. They've done the work to be in the room. They've read the briefing. They've read the executive summary. They've sort of like done all of this work. And so they end up repeating the same things over and over again in a way that signals how much value I'm adding and that I did the work. But there's not a lot of depth in the thinking. And so one of the ways around that is just to ask people to, don't say anything about what you've read or what you know.

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  Just contribute what you know about this problem that nobody else in the room knows.

• 1:51:20Rich Roll?

  What about asking them, once they, if they, if they're, if somebody's saying, I think we should do this, asking them to say, walk me through how you arrived at that decision? Or what were the factors that contributed to you leaning in that direction?

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  Right, so what are the variables? What are the key variables that you think govern this situation? How do those variables play out over time? Do we all agree that those are the relevant variables? No, okay, let's have a discussion around what are the relevant variables, right? And then you can sort of play out the, the mapping over time, right? Like, how do those variables interconnect? What assumptions are we making? Can we do this in a more- Often you're just trying to remove blind spots, right? Or you know what you want to do and you're trying to make it more likely that it's going to happen, which you can come from, like, what are the bad outcomes that we can envision happening here? If this project fails, what does it look like if it fails? How do we avoid those as we're going into it? There's a whole bunch of discussions that you can have around it. One of the reasons nobody's written the book on decision making is there's no one way to tackle this, right?

• 1:52:18Speaker 01

  There's sort of like a way that fits with your team and your process that's existing, but there are things that you can do, such as surfacing how people think, surfacing what the variables are, and not just getting in this discussion of sort of like solving different problems.

• 1:52:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well said, my friend.

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:52:37Rich Roll?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:52:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, that was really fascinating. I think the work that you're doing is really important. It's certainly making an impact on people and please keep doing it.

• 1:52:50Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:52:51Rich Roll?

  I think it's, I think it's much needed in a, in a confused world. And as you say, it's sort of your tagline, like you are the signal and the noise. And I celebrate you for that.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much.

• 1:53:02Rich Roll?

  Thanks. So for everybody out there who's listening, go to fs.blog. You can spend hours going down the rabbit hole there. Immerse yourself in the mental models. Pick up the great mental models, volume one, general thinking concepts. Are you sold out in the hard copies now?

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Hard copies are done.

• 1:53:18Rich Roll?

  Right. So Kindle.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Kindle and audio are still there. Volume two comes out next month.

• 1:53:23Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, you got to sign mine since this is now like a prize.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  You get the OG copy too. Like that was never, that was never the one for sale. You can tell by the cover.

• 1:53:31Rich Roll?

  The cover on Amazon is different from that.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  That's what I mean. So the one on Amazon has a different cover. We've never actually sold that version of the book.

• 1:53:38Rich Roll?

  Even more.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:39Rich Roll?

  Special then. Thanks, man. All right, well, uh, come back and talk to me again, man.

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  I'd love that. Thank you so much.

• 1:53:45Rich Roll?

  People want to find you on Twitter, Instagram, stuff like that. Where's the best place to go?

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  Shane A. Parrish on Twitter, Farnam Street on Instagram. Yeah. Love to chat.

• 1:53:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Thanks, man.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 1:54:01Rich Roll?

  What do you think, you guys? Pretty smart guy, that Shane, right? I will admit, straight up, I was a little nervous and a bit intimidated about this one. Shane is a prodigious intellect, a sort of Yoda-esque figure. But also, I found him to be grounded and low-key enough to put me at ease. I think it went well. What do you guys think? Personally, I'm grateful for this exchange. I'm better for it. My hope is that you found it as dynamic, as instructive and helpful as I did. Please let Shane know what you thought about today's exchange by hitting him up on Twitter at Shane A. Parrish, Parrish with two Rs, and at Farnham Street on Instagram.

• 1:54:42Rich Roll?

  You can find Farnham Street at fs.blog and you can follow them at Farnham Street on Twitter. Pick up Shane's book, The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts. Whip out your notebook, take it in. It's a game changer. You can find a link to the book, along with copious other resources to more deeply immerse yourself in Farnham Street and Shane's work, in the show notes, of course, on the episode page at richroll.com. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media, and you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com/donate.

• 1:55:24Rich Roll?

  Thank you to my team for helping me produce today's wonderful show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes and interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing and editing today's podcast for YouTube. Jessica Miranda for graphics, Ali Rogers for portraits, Georgia Whaley for copywriting, DK for advertiser relationships, and theme music, as always, by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Hari Mathis. Thanks a lot of love, you guys. I hope you are all maintaining your physical distance from your friends and loved ones, and yet also engaging in social connectivity. I hope this helps you. Think more deeply about the decisions that we're making, very difficult decisions, as we try to figure out

• 1:56:09Rich Roll?

  the best trajectory and course of action, while managing the stress and anxiety of what we're all facing right now. My heart is with you. I love all of you guys. I appreciate your attention. Thank you, and I'll see you back here in a couple of days. Couple of days? Yeah, I think a couple of days, at least a couple of days, with another great episode. Until then, peace. Good plans. Allah's dead.