Gabriel Weinberg: Practical Steps to Safeguard Your Data and Identity Online

I am joined by Gabriel Weinberg, founder of privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo and author of Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models. Our conversation will help you upgrade your thinking, prepare your kids for the future, and protect your privacy online. Gabriel shares powerful mental models like ‘thinking gray’ and ‘foreseen function’ that you can use today to make better decisions, avoid mental biases, and get to the core of any issue. He also reveals his secrets for raising curious, creative kids who love learning – including the surprising technique of discussing adult-level podcasts and debates with his children. Finally, Gabriel reveals the hidden ways companies track your data online and shares simple, practical steps you can take right now to protect your digital privacy without sacrificing convenience. Whether you’re an executive looking to sharpen your thinking skills, a parent trying to set your kids up for success, or just someone who wants more control over your digital footprint, this episode will give you the tools and strategies you need. Don’t miss this masterclass on upgrading your thinking, parenting, and privacy from one of the sharpest minds in tech. -- Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Newsletter - I share timeless insights and ideas you can use at work and home. Join over 600k others every Sunday and subscribe to Brain Food. Try it: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/shaneparrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You don't need to track people to make money because it's all based on the contextual advertising. So the better user experience would be like not track anybody at all.

• 0:16Shane Parrish?

  Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish and this is The Knowledge Project, a podcast exploring the ideas, methods, and mental models that will help you learn from the past and what other people have already figured out. You can learn more and stay up to date at fs.blog/podcast. We also have a newsletter. It's called Brain Food. It comes out every Sunday. It's short and sweet, contains recommendations for articles we've found online, books we're reading, quotes we find interesting and worth thinking about, and so much more. It's all signal, no noise, and it's one of the most popular things we've ever done, and it's free. You can learn more at fs.blog/newsletter. That's fs.blog/newsletter.

• 0:59Shane Parrish?

  Most of the guests on this show are subscribers to the weekly email as well, so check it out. On the show today is Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo and author of Super Thinking, a giant book of mental models. We're going to explore data privacy, touch on a bit of cybersecurity, go deep on mental models, and explore how you can help your kids think better. You don't want to miss this. It's time to listen and learn.

• 1:31Shane Parrish?

  Before we get started, here's a quick word from our sponsor. Farnham Street is sponsored by Metallab. For a decade, Metallab has helped some of the world's top companies and entrepreneurs build products that millions of people use every day. You probably didn't realize it at the time, but odds are you've used an app that they've helped design or build. Apps like Slack, Coinbase, Facebook Messenger, Oculus, Lonely Planet, and so many more. Metallab wants to bring the unique design philosophy to your project. Let them take your brainstorm and turn it into the next billion-dollar app from ideas sketched on the back of a napkin to a final shipped product. Check them out at metallab.co. That's metallab.co. And when you get in touch, tell them Shane sent you.

• 2:15Shane Parrish?

  Carol, man, I'm so happy to be sitting here with you.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  I'm happy to be here.

• 2:20Shane Parrish?

  When did you know that you wanted to go to MIT?

• 2:23Speaker 00

  So I grew up in Atlanta, which the closest thing I had to kind of the engineering world was Georgia Tech. I went to like a engineering summer camp there and I thought at an early age, I wanted to be like a computer engineer. But I honestly had no knowledge of the different schools. So I think I had an irrational want to go to MIT, but didn't really understand the landscape of the schools. But around like in maybe freshman year of high school, I had my mind set for some reason, I'm going to MIT.

• 2:53Shane Parrish?

  And that was the only school you applied to?

• 2:55Speaker 00

  I, so I applied early to MIT and got in early. And then I was going to apply to a bunch of other schools, but I just stopped to blind because I figured I'd just go.

• 3:05Shane Parrish?

  And you, you did a double degree. What was your degrees in?

• 3:08Speaker 00

  So I was an undergrad in physics and I met my wife there. She was a grad in math. And then I started a company right out of school, actually graduated early. That's another different story. And did this company for a few years and then went back to graduate school at MIT and technology and public policy, which is like this interdisciplinary economics, law, public policy degree.

• 3:33Shane Parrish?

  You couldn't get enough?

• 3:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Well, my wife stayed there for nine years. She got a PhD in operations research. So I was already like hanging out at MIT. So even after I graduated, I was running my company like based out of the library and I would go audit classes and her department was in the interdisciplinary area. Operations research is like statistics and logistics. And so there happened to be this other cool interdisciplinary program in her building. So I was like, I'm going to apply here and I actually ran my second company while I was doing this degree and just still work in the library, that kind of thing.

• 4:05Shane Parrish?

  What was the company that you're?

• 4:07Speaker 00

  So that company, the first company I started was a social, I mean, a educational software company right out of school. The idea was to help use the internet to increase student achievement by increasing parental involvement. Good in theory, 15 years too early.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  That stuff's still just happening now. I know you have kids and it's still hard to get what they're getting in school electronically.

• 4:30Shane Parrish?

  Oh, totally.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  So that's what we were trying to do. We put this whole like portal and system for lesson plans and things like that. So that ultimately didn't go anywhere. Second company was a really early effectively social networking company that we eventually sold to classmates.com. It's kind, it was kind of the almost antithesis of Facebook and their privacy practices. Like we had a paid business model. We didn't collect much information. It was mainly about getting in touch, you know, with old friends, but we also just got destroyed by Facebook. And so eventually sold it and then moved on to current company, which is DuckDuckGo.

• 5:10Shane Parrish?

  And so let's dive into that. I mean, let's start with the privacy issues online in terms of not just DuckDuckGo, but in terms of Facebook. And what should people understand about this that they don't understand about online privacy and like just something as innocuous as a search and what happens behind the scenes?

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's so many aspects of privacy and harms. And I think it's interesting. Awareness has really started increasing over the last two years, but it's all over the map in terms of what people really care about. So in 2013, when our company started to take off, that was a Snowden revelations.

• 5:50Shane Parrish?

  That was DuckDuckGo.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:52Shane Parrish?

  Do you want to explain that just for a second?

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. So DuckDuckGo is a search engine that doesn't track you. So it's an alternative to Google. And then in the last couple of years, we've expanded and now we offer a suite of privacy tools. We call it's one download. It's called Privacy Essentials or Privacy Browser. And it includes private search, tracker blocking. So it blocks like Google and Facebook trackers across the web and encryption, which helps stop your ISP from snooping on you. But in any case, it wasn't, even though privacy like was a main thing for our search engine, it wasn't the main attractor to it until 2013, when the Snowden revelations happened.

• 6:30Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  And then that was all about

• 6:33Shane Parrish?

  I remember this.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Government surveillance, right? So it's like, is the government spying on you? Which is now becoming more an increasing thing. China's doing some crazy things. But in the intervening years, corporate surveillance has really spiked and they're actually related because government surveillance actually uses the data you give to corporations. That's where they're getting most of the data from anyway. And so they're linked. But corporate surveillance, namely like corporations tracking you all over the web and building big profiles about you, has additional harms.

• 7:04Shane Parrish?

  So we're talking about corporations tracking you as you go along the web, not corporations tracking employees?

• 7:09Speaker 00

  That's right. Effectively, as you browse the web, there are hidden trackers on all the pages that you visit.

• 7:15Shane Parrish?

  What's a tracker?

• 7:16Speaker 00

  A tracker is, so you go to say a random site, say the New York Times or something. You expect to interact with the New York Times. But in reality, there are about like 30 other companies sitting on that page that the New York Times embedded into it. Now, some of them are for like analytics, like who's looking at this page. Some of them are for advertising, like they run Google Ads on their page. Some of them are to help them run their site. But the privacy policy of these companies are generally, they can use your data for whatever they want. And so they may help the New York Times in X, Y, or Z purpose, but then they're aggregating all that information into big profiles that they can go sell.

• 7:53Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  And ultimately, this comes in large profiles about you that are being bought and sold kind of in the

• 7:58Shane Parrish?

  So something is like simple as Google Analytics can then be used to affect your search engine ranking because Google would know that the page on the site is popular and therefore it could bump it up.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so there's a few kind of negative effects of that. One is all the creepy ads that follow you around is one that people notice. A second one, the one that you just mentioned is called the filter bubble. So when you're on search results, say on Google, or something happens on Facebook News Feed, or even things like Netflix and whatnot, they're using your search history or Your profile information or your browsing history to show you certain things they think you're going to click on. But by doing that, they have to hide things that they don't think you're going to click on. And that can end up being opposing viewpoints. And if you, we've done several studies on political terms and people in different areas are seeing completely different results when you search for things like gun control or political candidate name or something like that.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  And effectively, especially in search engines, your expectation is you're seeing the results, but you're not getting the results. And it effectively biases you when you're doing research. That's, that's one harm. The other harms that people are justifiably really upset about are things like data breaches, which relate to identity theft. And so people would just like to reduce their digital footprint online, kind of block all this extraneous information that's getting out there about them. And that's kind of what we allow them to do.

• 9:20Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that everybody should have the same search results?

• 9:24Speaker 00

  So yeah, I think by default.

• 9:26Shane Parrish?

  Because with DuckDuckGo, that's what you.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So on DuckDuckGo, we don't have a filter bubble. And so if you search for the same topic at somebody else at the same time, you'll get the same results. I think that things can be made opt in. So like we have a region setting where you can say, I want more Canadian results if you want.

• 9:45Shane Parrish?

  Everybody wants more Canadian.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Exactly. Or do they? You should opt into something like that, right? And so there are some notions like that, but I don't think it should be personalized in the way it is by, without you opting into it.

• 10:52Shane Parrish?

  Do you think we're moving to a world where the least of our worries is sort of like personalized search and we're moving into more personalized content where you have almost the same fundamental content, but now you can shift perspectives based on if you're Democrat or Republican and you can sort of play into that? Or is that too sci-fi?

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Say that again. I mean, I think that's generally the danger of that I that I see coming is I the correlation causation piece is hard here, but polarization has just increased, at least in the US. And it's relatively, you know, correlated with all of this social, right? Social media and tracking. And so the thought is at least they're interrelated in the sense that people are just in their own bubbles, you know, and they're not really seeing these opposing viewpoints.

• 11:41Shane Parrish?

  Is exposure to opposing viewpoints enough?

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Probably not, but it's like a necessary but not sufficient condition.

• 11:49Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  If you don't have any, you're definitely not gonna, sorry, engage with the other side.

• 11:54Shane Parrish?

  And so aside from the annoying ads that we see that like follow us around, is that the Facebook tracking pixel sort of?

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. So on the, all these sites that are lurking behind webpages, right? If you go and look and like analyze which companies are there, Google's on about 80% of the top million sites. And a lot of that's Google Analytics, but also like the Google Ads and stuff like that. Facebook's on 25%. And that's this Facebook pixel where it could be the Facebook login or just sites run Facebook ads, or they want to just track what audience and then serve ads on Facebook. And so Facebook and Google are the biggest trackers.

• 12:34Shane Parrish?

  I remember last year, we took the Facebook tracking pixel off.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Good for you.

• 12:38Shane Parrish?

  I was tired of people like targeting our audience.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:41Shane Parrish?

  And I was like, oh, that's really weird. When somebody pointed it out to me and then I was like, okay, we'll just delete that. That'll be.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  That's the, that's the key thing you're getting at is like, you put it on for your purposes.

• 12:50Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  But it can be used for everybody.

• 12:53Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  That's the real problem. If it was, if these companies are just a service provider for you.

• 12:57Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  That would be fine.

• 12:59Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  But it's that the data is leaking beyond the use that you set up for it.

• 13:02Shane Parrish?

  Yeah. I remember the first time I went into my parents' Facebook account and tried to create an ad targeting Front Street Peters. And I was like, what? This is crazy. Like. My mom is not connected to like Farnham Street at all. So it was a little weird. What do you think sort of like, how do you think this plays out over the like this Snowden stuff came out, uh, which is more about sort of like what governments were doing to protect themselves. Actually, maybe that's a good discussion. What do you feel the role of government should be in data privacy?

• 13:33Speaker 00

  So we're having kind of a moment now in the US at least after. So what happened is, is Europe kind of took the lead on this and they made something called GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, which is actually a restatement of something else they made in 1995. They've been kind of advancing this for decades, but they're really putting in some rights and saying privacy is a fundamental right that should extend to online and you should have the right to know what companies are tracking you and know what information they're collecting you and have a right to opt out of them sharing it. Um, among other things, it's a long regulation.

• 14:09Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  So then California, um, in the US, there hasn't been a general privacy regulation ever. There's some specific ones like, um, there's HIPAA for medical data, uh, and there's stuff for financial data, but there's nothing like general like that. So California, um, through a ballot initiative, uh, last year passed the first, uh, one, which goes into effect in 2020. And that set a clock for the federal government to either, um, make their own and preempt California, um, or have to deal with California's law. And so that's kicked off this process which is happening right now over the next, you know, nine months before that law goes into effect, to think about what federal privacy legislation should look like. And I think to answer your question, um, that yeah, I think the government needs

• 14:53Speaker 00

  to play a role here because I mean, my general proposition, I've said for years is if the data can be collected and if it can be used to make profits, it's going to be used for that by people unless. The government stops it. And it's an externality in general. Like the, it has a lot of, data breach is a good example. All these companies are collecting information about you. They generally have terrible security practices, Equifax, et cetera, et cetera. And eventually they get hacked. All the data gets out there. Tons of people have identity theft and they didn't really pay to protect the data. It's an externality for everybody.

• 15:31Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  And so the government definitely has a role to clean it all this up.

• 15:35Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that the data collected by these companies? And maybe I'll add some context to this is like, the way that I'm thinking about this problem is if you're a company like Google or Facebook or Amazon, you get a lot of data that other companies don't have access to. That data can be used to extend your competitive advantage. It can be used to provide better recommendations that the guy in their garage can no longer do. Does the government have a role in equalizing the playing field? And what does that mean? And how does it look? Does it mean that like data becomes a public good? Like a public utility? Or does it mean, like, how do you see that?

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you're asking a clever question. So independent of data privacy legislation, which gives individuals rights over their data. There's a whole antitrust competition question going on. I actually recently testified in front of the US Senate on this notion about general privacy legislation, but my message was exactly what you're saying is that in the world, there's a duopoly in digital advertising and it's Google and Facebook owns basically all the digital advertising on the web, which relates to all this data profiles. And the more data they have, the better advertising they have, the more targeting they can do.

• 16:48Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  And so they're locking up all the growth in the industry. And that's what's putting out a business, things like media companies as well as small business, ad tech players and other advertisers. No one can really compete with it. So yes, I think if that, that has a inherent network effect in it because you know, they're getting all the data and all the eyeballs and it just is a feedback loop that is getting more and more. And so unless the government breaks that feedback loop, I don't see another way out of it. What I suggested to the Senate was a few things. One is, So they're collecting all this data from different kind of business lines like Facebook bought Instagram, they bought WhatsApp, Google runs Google Analytics, you know, they run DoubleClick, they run a bunch of other things.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  The government and Germany is starting to do this already can prohibit them from sharing data across their business units.

• 17:39Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  That's kind of a

• 17:40Shane Parrish?

  Kind of like a lot of financial firms.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  Exactly, kind of a Chinese wall situation. That's kind of a weaker argument, which I think would work of the get to break them up kind of argument and spin off some of these different business units. And then there are other things that you can do too, but like if fundamentally you don't kind of break up these data monopolies in some way, then I don't think there's, I think it has reduced competition. There's no easy way for other people to compete.

• 18:07Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that the solution is making the data, bringing up the data monopoly over sort of like the monopoly writ large in terms of the size of company and maybe the scope of their influence?

• 18:21Speaker 00

  It's funny because I think that there are, I think this is where it gets complicated. I think there are actually different issues like so. I think you have to do something about data monopoly, but independent of that, some of the companies have had bad practices within their core markets, right? Like we've had some trouble competing in search.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Just because of search issues that are specific to search and nothing to do with the data monopoly. And Europe has come out and, you know, find, say, Google a bunch of times related to those practices. So I view them as independent and generally they've been independent agencies pursuing them in the government. The government has, the, the, the reality is these companies are huge. They do a lot of different things. And so the government, different government agencies need to be kind of on top of it.

• 19:07Shane Parrish?

  I want to push back just a little bit on like whether they're independent because maybe I'm thinking about this wrong and you can correct me, but like one of the reasons that they get so big is because of the data.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no, they're related.

• 19:18Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just think that there are.

• 19:20Shane Parrish?

  You can address them separately, sort of.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Well, also if you clean up one, it won't necessarily clean up the other.

• 19:26Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  Because like, say you, say you regulated privacy, data monopoly piece. They're already so big that they can still use their weight to do other monopolistic practices, which would be bad for competition outside of the data monopoly piece. So you need someone else looking at those competitive issues.

• 19:44Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that like Apple's strategy is to be more privacy focused? Do you think that that is? A good business strategy?

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Yes, I do.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  I think that in general, so people have had this misnomer that like, you know, people say they care about privacy, but they don't really care or they won't do anything. We've been running our own kind of research data on this for years now, really trying to dig into what people are actually willing to do and what people do. And there's kind of two realities in there. One is as awareness has increased, people's willingness and interest in doing something has greatly increased. And we've seen about a third of people take some actual significant action to reduce their digital footprint online in some shape or form.

• 20:32Shane Parrish?

  Like a third of all people?

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Third of a subset. No, third of all people, like, well, our polls are in America, but we think it's related similarly to other major developed countries.

• 20:41Shane Parrish?

  Across socioeconomic, across gender.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  That's a whole other interesting thing is like another people think it's like, oh, young people don't care about privacy and old people care or vice versa. And we didn't find that to be the case either. It's like across all demographics, a decently similar percentage have been taking action. I don't know what exactly threads them. It's not education. It's not income. It's not age. It's not political affiliation. None of the main factors that we get on like the general survey stuff like spiked. But we consistently see this growing percentage of people taking, trying to take at least actual action. Some of the actions they take, they don't realize actually don't help them, but they did try to take an action.

• 21:17Shane Parrish?

  But they're trying to.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  But they're actually trying, exactly. And Apple recognizes this. And I think they also view it on principle that, kind of like we do, that privacy is a fundamental right and people deserve it therefore. And if there's no alternative, then people have no choice. And that's kind of what I was getting at. And so people had wanted to take action. There just was no action for them to take.

• 21:41Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Right? If you have two options and both of them are bad, you still have to pick one. People want a smartphone, you know? But now that Apple say offering a smartphone that has privacy, those group of people can now choose Apple smartphone or they can choose DuckDuckGo as a search engine. I think that people need like actual tools that work. So if our search engine was terrible, like they're not willing to have too much sacrifice.

• 22:05Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  But let's suppose it's equal. And at that point, it's somewhat a no brainer, at least for this group. You get to switch, you get to reduce your digital footprint. And you still get all the tools and good search results.

• 22:17Shane Parrish?

  Okay. Do you think people will pay for privacy? Like, is this the future where like Apple, for example, and their integration and their solutions, you tend to pay a higher price for that? Do you think we, like DuckDuckGo, do we end up paying for that in the future? Or is that?

• 22:34Speaker 00

  So there's kind of two ways to look at this. And so in the Apple case, yes, I think people are paying for, you know, additional services that are private. In search, you're already paying for it in Google already because you're paying with your data.

• 22:51Shane Parrish?

  It just doesn't come out of your wallet.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. And in fact, it does because there was a real interesting story the other day in New York Times about one of the reporters quit Facebook for five months or has quit four or five months and they're kind of recounting their stories for doing so. And one of the things that happened is he started spending 50% less.

• 23:13Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:14Shane Parrish?

  Because he wasn't being exposed to the ads.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Exactly. And so I think there's two components there. One, he wasn't being exposed to all the ads. Two, some of the ads are just purely manipulative. I mean, if you think about A/B testing, and it's hard to know where this line is, but they're manipulative in two ways. One, advertisers target, hyper-target, so they find the exact group that is, you know, willing to buy this thing, whatever it is. And two, they test different messages over and over and over again, different images, until they find what is the exact emotional trigger, all these different influence mental models, if you will.

• 23:47Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Of like things that'll actually get you to buy. So some of those things, he maybe didn't buy because he just didn't see the ad. Some of those things, maybe he didn't buy because he didn't see the right manipulative message. And so that manipulation piece, which is probably, I don't know exactly what order, but let's call it 50%, that was money directly out of his pocket, right?

• 24:05Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  And so he did pay for that. He was paying for that, just he wasn't, didn't sign his credit card up to them.

• 24:11Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  But some decent portion was because of using that free product.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  So one answer is you're already paying. The second answer is for something like Google, if we charge for our search engine, I just think a lot less people would use. There would be some people who would pay for it, and maybe we'd make the same amount of money, but we just expose less people to it because it is a big friction to take out your credit card, free versus not free.

• 24:36Shane Parrish?

  There's this competing interest, almost like wide influence versus like running a profitable business in a way.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, so I could see some markets, the direct answer to your question is some markets definitely that already have a precedence of paying, pay a little extra for more privacy. That one's fine. On a market that is already free, it's hard to see a mainstream provider go paid on it because there's so much friction going from free to paid. That said, we, just to be clear, then the question is like, how do we get money? There are, advertising in and of itself, this is a good thing to say, is not bad. We make this distinction, this is what I also said to Senate, between contextual advertising and behavioral advertising. So contextual advertising is just advertising based on the context of the page. So like, you search for something on DuckDuckGo, you search for car, you get a car ad, right?

• 25:26Speaker 00

  I don't have to have anything about you to serve that ad. That's different than the ads that follow you around based on all of your history. That contextual advertising, it used to be the way the internet worked, and it could go back to that. And if you imagine like you're on New York Times again, you look at an article, it's an ad just based on that article.

• 25:43Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Or an ad based on the video you're watching, the content of the video, nothing to do with you. And so that contextual advertising doesn't have all these privacy problems of manipulation and filter bubble and all these things.

• 25:54Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  And my argument is, is basically, we've been up this feedback loop of trying to improve behavioral advertising for the last 10 years, but no one's been doing that for contextual advertising. If we had been doing it for contextual advertising, it might be just as good right now. And in fact, there are some decent experiments that have just come out, like after GDPR in Europe, the New York Times Decided to ditch all the behavioral advertising and put up contextual advertising only and they increased revenue. This is like one of the first data points out of this. And so I think this actually has legs and that you could return to a world of contextual advertising. And that's all DuckDuckGo does. And if you think about it, that's really still what Google does most of the time on Google search. Cause all the search ads are still bid on keywords.

• 26:38Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  They're just using your search history in addition.

• 26:41Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  To target ads of you on YouTube, Gmail and the rest of the internet. But they don't really have to for the search ads where they make most of their money. It's still all contextual.

• 26:49Shane Parrish?

  Why do you think revenue went up at the New York Times?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  So I think.

• 26:53Shane Parrish?

  That strikes me as surprising.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it went up probably because I don't know the whole story, but my guess is they their first party ads now they're selling it themselves.

• 27:03Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  And so.

• 27:04Shane Parrish?

  Instead of using a broker.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're cutting out a whole middleman at that point.

• 27:08Shane Parrish?

  So if you even get near the same advertising rate, then you're.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:11Shane Parrish?

  Cutting out the 15 to 20% you're paying to a broker.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, sometimes the rate, the splits could be worse for, you know, for different advertisers, depending on the network.

• 27:21Shane Parrish?

  I know like we get less money on Front Street because I mean, we charge a sponsorship, which isn't based on page views is. And there's no tracking code. There's nothing embedded in there where companies get information on you. Whereas if we use like Google AdWords based on page views, we'd probably get more money. But then you tie into this whole like tracking.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:39Shane Parrish?

  Contextualization and it would be kind of creepy to go read an article on like mental models and see this book that you searched for like last week pop up in the sidebar.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Exactly. I mean, for, for you in particular, you, you know, there's a good, um, you know, Darren Fireball and John Gruber.

• 27:54Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  He sells his own ads directly. And, um, I think if you have a niche audience like you do, you might actually make more money if you, you know, start selling them.

• 28:03Shane Parrish?

  I gotta talk to.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  High price.

• 28:05Shane Parrish?

  Oh, my price. Yeah.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:07Shane Parrish?

  I want to come.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  We've bought his ad before.

• 28:09Shane Parrish?

  Oh, cool. I want to come back to the privacy and hardware and I want to, I want to take the role and expand it. So thus far, we've sort of been talking about the individual in the role of the ecosystem and sort of like e-commerce. I want to talk about. How that role shifts as you think we move up in the stack and by up in the stack, I'm talking like you have a local government, you have a state government, you have a country and then globally, do you, where do you, where do you stand on privacy? Should the government be able to break into your phone? Do you think that those companies should make that physically impossible or should the government have a key? Like walk me through.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I, there's a lot of nuances in here, but I'm of the view that privacy is kind of two fundamental principles, right? Privacy is a fundamental right. You have a right to have kind of private communications. In the past, that was you could write a letter, you could kind of write things down on paper. Now it's in your phone. I still think you have that, should have that fundamental right.

• 29:16Shane Parrish?

  So just to be clear, that's not like a US right? You believe that's a fundamental worldwide. So you should be able to like send an email to somebody anywhere in the world and have that?

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not currently the case on email. But yeah, I think so. I mean, this, this gets into, you don't want to tell other countries how to run their government. So maybe it's too, you know, maybe it's crossing some line, but at least in the US, the idea has always been like you have a private thought space. You know, you have, you should have private space. Your home is your home and without kind of really good cause, no one should invade that privacy. I think if you start invading privacy in that way, it leads to all sorts of bad effects. Chilling effect is a big, big one, which is, you know, people change

• 30:09Speaker 00

  their behavior once they feel that they're being watched or they don't have privacy. There's all sorts of good examples of this. To give you, to really back to search, right after Snowden, there were two studies that were really interesting. One is people stopped searching terrorists and related terms because presumably they feel that they might have been investigated if they searched. So terms like Al Qaeda and stuff like that went down. Wikipedia also saw lower amounts of their articles. Being looked at.

• 30:37Shane Parrish?

  That's interesting. I never knew that.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Additionally, someone did another same time analysis and found that health-related terms also went down on Google. So people stopped searching as much for their own like health symptoms and things like that. And the thought was now that they aware that governments or their data was generally being tracked, they're worried about leaking either and coming back to haunt them either from maybe insurance companies or other things. And so it went down. But that is just immediately harmful for people because they're not searching about their health information. Those are two minor examples. But when you get into things like China and stuff like that, you get into much more major ones that people are afraid to, you know, say anything bad about the government and things like that

• 31:22Speaker 00

  or have public discourse. So I think that you want a private space and able to be able to communicate with people completely privately. And so I do think that end-to-end encryption, which is kind of what you're talking about, like built into iMessage now, that was the Apple FBI case, you should be able, I should be able to send you a text message and no one should be able to read it except the two of us. Now, the counterargument to that is, well, what if they're sending really bad things and stuff like that? I think that is a bit of a distracting argument for a couple of reasons. One is they act, there's actually more data about you online than ever before. So

• 32:02Shane Parrish?

  What does that mean?

• 32:02Speaker 00

  Like, there is, you're putting out all sorts of data online. It's much easier to surveil you than it has ever been in the past. Like, your phone's sending out location information, which isn't necessarily encrypted. You're even on the text that we send each other, there's a record that it went through the internet at least.

• 32:19Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  And so maybe you can't read the message, but you can probably figure out the metadata that we talked. All this information didn't exist in the past. And so if you look at like the overall information law enforcement and government has to surveil people, even with End-to-end encryption existing, it's way higher than it was 10 years ago and way, way higher than it was 20 years ago before.

• 32:41Shane Parrish?

  So you believe the government should be able to use metadata?

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Oh, I think we should restrict a lot more. I'm just saying that the general argument of that, I need every last piece of information, is not a good one in their own argument because they have more information and all the tools that they have exist are much better than they were 20 years ago. No, I think the metadata should be restricted too. I really think we should be able to communicate privately without anyone knowing. But the reality is of the current tools, that is discoverable.

• 33:11Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Because when we send a message across each other to the internet, unless we're using even more sophisticated tools, it's figure-outable that we talked.

• 33:19Shane Parrish?

  So if the government had the capability, I'm just trying to think through this. So like if individuals could communicate completely privately, governments could communicate completely privately?

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Well, this is your other point about the key. If you enable a backdoor, which is what some governments are requesting, it is really naive to think that that backdoor would only be accessed by that government who wants it. And that was one of Apple's major points is that if I build this backdoor for you, US, China's going to use it, you know? And not only that, it's probably going to get leaked and all sorts of bad actors are going to have it. So like, for example, I don't know how familiar you are with any of this stuff, but the NSA made all sorts of hacking tools. Those eventually got leaked and they're all floating around the internet now. Tools that the NSA made for themselves are now available to all sorts of other people. And so all this stuff has a tendency of coming

• 34:16Speaker 00

  out and being used and exploited if it exists. And that's Apple's point. It's like, the only way to protect against that is to have no backdoor.

• 34:23Shane Parrish?

  So do you think that that will be fundamentally impossible? I mean, so I think in the San Bernardino case with the iPhone, Apple basically said it wasn't possible. Then they admitted it was possible, but they weren't going to do it. Do you think we move to a world where they actually want to be able to say it's impossible for us to do it?

• 34:46Speaker 00

  I think that would be ideal. I don't know how possible that world actually is because you have to manufacture the phones and things like that.

• 34:57Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  But it's become harder and harder, like built into hardware and things like that. On the internet wise, the closest thing we have to that is Tor. You know, you can basically go into-

• 35:11Shane Parrish?

  Can you explain Tor?

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could basically go into a special browser that kind of works like it did the movies where you know where it bounces off things before it gets to the other person. And so it makes like three hops into random places before it gets to the other side.

• 35:26Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  And so if both of us are using Tor to communicate, it's extremely difficult to break that. And as far as we can tell, Tor itself isn't really broken. There have been some exploits in the Tor browser, like using Flash.

• 35:41Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  But, but things like the news organizations now, to give anonymous tips to them, they use something called SecureDrop, which works over Tor. And it's worked decently well. And so that's what you need to do in the non hardware world-

• 35:56Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  -to communicate. You can do that on any device.

• 35:58Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about government's role, not with their citizens, but government's role in terms of like the world? And like walk me through your thinking, should, I don't want to use specific countries, but should one country be able to eavesdrop on another country that they feel might pose a significant threat to their citizens?

• 36:24Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't think there's any stopping countries from doing that. They've done that from the beginning of time. And so they're going to have an incentive and desire to have espionage agencies. I don't think there's much possible to prohibit that.

• 36:39Shane Parrish?

  But then the tools exist, right? The very tools that you would use against your citizens, you would be using against foreign entities.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  They're making all the tools they can in that process. What I'm suggesting is people like Apple should be the opposite of that and or DuctGo and enable citizens to do the best they can to avoid that kind of surveillance, either corporate or government.

• 37:05Shane Parrish?

  What got you so interested in privacy?

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Interesting. I'm interested in general public policy of all kinds. So I, you know, you talk about the mental models book, I'm interested in like everything and have, you know, this degree in general public policy and technology policy. I started this company and kind of backed into search privacy in particular. I had, I had sold my other company and was trying to find something that I really wanted to do. And I got really interested in search in general and eventually started this search engine that wasn't initially private. I hadn't thought about it. It was more just trying to make better results. And then I got some initial messages after launching about like, well, what's your policy on search privacy and stuff? And so I, myself, out of just interest, took more

• 37:54Speaker 00

  of a deep dive on it and decided, oh, wow, this is really personal data, arguably the most personal, like what you search, you kind of give your financial problems, personal problems to your search engine. You don't need to track people to make money because it's all based on the contextual advertising. So the better user experience would be like not track anybody at all. And, and so just made that unilateral decision. It was just me at the company, who's a one person company. And that's basically how I fell into it.

• 38:23Shane Parrish?

  Funny aside, we used to, do you remember when Gmail used to display ads based on what was in your email?

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 38:30Shane Parrish?

  So a couple of friends of mine, we've, we figured this out and what we would do is we put keywords at the bottom of the email, but put them in white text. So people would get ads that would have nothing to do with the email, but we could control what ads they were seeing based on the keywords we were putting there.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Very funny.

• 38:47Shane Parrish?

  How does search work? I'm really curious on the backend, like, how does, like, walk me through, we can geek out on this and go into as much detail as you want, like, walk me through. How DuckDuckGo builds a search database, how it determines relevance for a search term at a particular time, and then how that relevance changes over time?

• 39:09Speaker 00

  So I started out originally doing all the build your own index kind of stuff. And then quickly realized it is really expensive. And also

• 39:22Shane Parrish?

  Building your own index is like going out, touching every website, keeping a copy of it, like somehow sort of

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:28Shane Parrish?

  Creating metadata based on the site.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:31Shane Parrish?

  I just want to make sure that we're like, everybody understands the terms again.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. I crawl in the whole internet, basically. And I realized a few things. One is there were a bunch of companies who raised a bunch of money, all trying to do that, basically compete with Google at their core game. And realize it's somewhat, it was somewhat unnecessary because there were a few different web indexes at the time that existed. And they had reached diminishing returns in quality. And so you could get good web index results from Google, from Bing, which wasn't Bing at the time, it was MSN, you get it from Yahoo, E-Index was at the time. Ask G's was still crawling, there were a bunch of, a bunch of ones. And I realized that it was unnecessary then to focus on that.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  And you could treat it as a commodity and instead try to differentiate on other things. I also realized that we were one of the first people to instant answers. And so what's happened major in the last 10 years in search has been when you search, about half the time, you don't click or use the actual

• 40:33Shane Parrish?

  You just start typing.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  Web results.

• 40:34Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Well, not the autocomplete stuff like the, you get weather or product instant answers or sports scores or local

• 40:44Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  restaurant listing or whatever it is. Those are not full web indexes. Those are Wikipedia information, you know? Those are very verticalized indexes. And so

• 40:57Speaker 00

  No one was doing that when we started. So what I originally figured out was I'll just try to not spend all my time on the web index and focus on instant answers. And so the first thing that I focused on was indexing Wikipedia and getting really good knowledge graph answers. And over time, so the other thing I ended up doing, this was way back in 2007, there was a lot of spam in web search back then. There was like all sorts of content forums and things like that. So we did crawl the web and looking for spam results and then remove them from the index. It was like a negative index. In any case, what's basically happened is we're a small

• 41:36Speaker 00

  organization. So we're like 65 people. And, you know, now it's gotten so much more expensive to crawl the web and make that deep index is probably hundreds of million dollars a year.

• 41:48Shane Parrish?

  Just to maintain it.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Just to maintain it, arguably maybe a billion. And most of the indexes went away. And so what we've decided to do, also the individual verticals have gotten more expensive. So like Yelp is like the best in class for restaurants and you have Maps. There's only a couple of Maps providers. So we've decided to do instead is maintain privacy at all costs, but try to work with the best partners in all these different verticals. And so then our basic technology therefore is getting a query, trying to figure out what is the best instant answer provider and who are all the providers we need to work with to get to deliver you the set of results. And any given search, it might be two or three different providers, you know, to like to get the web.

• 42:33Shane Parrish?

  So this is like Google give you access to their sort of like?

• 42:36Speaker 00

  We currently don't work with Google at the moment, but there's still Yahoo, Microsoft. We worked with Google on YouTube because it's the only place where the videos are.

• 42:44Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  So video search is another big one. You know, we work with Yelp and TripAdvisor. And there's literally like 400 different partners because it goes into all the different long tail stuff. Some of the stuff we still have to build ourselves. So like we still build, use Wikipedia and build it ourselves. You know, like Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, that kind of stuff. We build our index to that. So we have a bunch of these we actually have to do ourselves. But we also work with all these other partners and then try to on any given search, figure out, is this a local search? Is this a programming search? Is this a, what kind of search is this? And then give you results back. And then we have to make decisions of like,

• 43:20Shane Parrish?

  How newsy is this search? Like, where should we display news results? Should it be at the beginning? Should it be in the fourth result? That kind of thing.

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• 44:22Shane Parrish?

  So you mentioned indexing Wikipedia, and then you mentioned knowledge graph?

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:27Shane Parrish?

  What does that mean?

• 44:28Speaker 00

  So Wikipedia...

• 44:30Shane Parrish?

  Like, you read this page programmatically on Wikipedia?

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, Wikipedia is somewhat unstructured. It would be better if it was way more structured.

• 44:39Shane Parrish?

  What's the difference? Like, what, like...

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Structured would be, is like, you know, here is the person's name and their age and everything like that. Wikipedia is, you know, edited by anybody, and it's got all these different rules, but it's basically just a lot of text with some markup on it. And so if you index it, you have to, like, figure out all the different edge cases for all the different markup. And somehow extract, you know, your name and age and all that stuff.

• 45:07Shane Parrish?

  Right. How do you do that?

• 45:10Speaker 00

  A lot of, there's a lot of code.

• 45:12Shane Parrish?

  So you do you literally just write like for one off exceptions or is it?

• 45:16Speaker 00

  There's a lot of edge case exceptions. Yeah. They've they tried to standardize it, but there's it's not very standardized as well as it should be. Yeah, it's a large code base.

• 45:26Shane Parrish?

  But but you're effectively standardizing it for them in a in a weird way, or am I misunderstanding?

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're kind of reverse engineering it, if you will, you know, like turning it into a standardized format.

• 45:38Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, right.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  For our own purposes.

• 45:39Shane Parrish?

  And then could you give that information back to Wikipedia and like have them adjust the page at least in like metadata or something?

• 45:45Speaker 00

  There have been some projects like that that haven't gone very well. Yeah, other people have tried. There's like a one called WikiData and such. But yeah, that's effectively what we do for Wikipedia.

• 45:55Shane Parrish?

  And so the graph then is like the author is this.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:58Shane Parrish?

  Relevant dates are this, the and then how do you pick out like when you read text through the computers? Like, what is the what is the algorithm considering in terms of trustworthiness of the site? What is the algorithm considering in terms of like, how do we find the relevant passage in the text we're reading for the query that you're?

• 46:22Speaker 00

  It it really depends on the vertical. And so like.

• 46:26Shane Parrish?

  Can you walk me through a couple of them?

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like local search, for example, like restaurants and whatnot.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Really focuses on like when you when you do a local search, you usually have a what and a where clause. So it's like, I want pizza in New York or whatever.

• 46:42Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  That'd be too broad, but.

• 46:45Shane Parrish?

  Eight million.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so like for that one, once we hear those local search, we have to pull figure out like the what and the where and like pull that out kind of semantically from the query and then do different things with them, like figure out what the location is. And even that gets more complicated because if you like Paris, something in Paris, are you talking about Paris, France? You're talking about Paris, like Indiana, and there's a bunch of Paris's in the US. I don't know if I have an idea.

• 47:10Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  And and same thing with the what, like, is pizza a category or is that a name of a restaurant? And so on these verticals, you have different indexes and different rules. And so for like Stack Exchange, for example, the Stack Overflow has another example, which is programming instant answers. Like that has a lot of special characters that you have to do stuff with, like people type in programming. Like pluses and and less than greater than signs and in other contexts, you would ignore those.

• 47:42Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  But in the

• 47:43Shane Parrish?

  They're super relevant.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're super relevant. So it what ends up happening is you really need to first decide what domain this thing is in and then apply different rules, different relevancy rules.

• 47:55Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  And search rules per that domain and kind of do different things with it.

• 48:01Shane Parrish?

  How should we think about search moving forward? Like, what is it like? I'm just trying to contextualize a couple of things here, one of which is like, an argument that Google would probably make is like, if you're standing in New York and you search for pizza, like, you probably want local contextualized results without your permission. Like, we'll just give it to you because that's giving you a better.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Well, one thing about local, which is interesting, is you can do that so without tracking people on DuckDuckGo because your location is generally sent over by your browser automatically. And we can also do that contextually and throw away the location after that query.

• 48:34Shane Parrish?

  So how does that work? Like, your location is sent by your browser?

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's kind of.

• 48:39Shane Parrish?

  So no matter what browser you're using, Chrome, Internet Explorer?

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Well, there's some location built into your IP address. So when you ever connect to anything, you're sending your IP address over. And so you can get a rough location based on that. You also have something called the browser location and like sites request, you know, can you use your location, you know, with this app or this site? That'll send a more granular location based on GPS on your phone. And so on DuckDuckGo, if it's a very hyper local query, we'll ask for that. Would you allow us to use the location? But we promise to.

• 49:11Shane Parrish?

  Throw it out right after.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Immediately. We don't store it at all. We just use it to bring you back the local restaurants around where you are, and then it's gone. So there's no location history or anything like that.

• 49:21Shane Parrish?

  And then where's search going? Like, in your mind, in the next five years? Like, is it going to voice? Is it going more mobile? Is it going to like, you search based on images? Are any of these trends that we sort of like hear about a little bit in the media? But are they are they what you're witnessing?

• 49:38Speaker 00

  So what's interesting about the history of search is. Those trends are real, but they they've never supplanted earlier search queries. So like the rise of mobile search queries has been great in the last 10 years, but desktop search queries actually haven't decreased. And so it's just like people are searching more. So that's

• 49:57Shane Parrish?

  And more of that new share is mobile.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely mobile. Voice has been slower than I think people predicted, but it's definitely a new thing. Like, people aren't searching less on mobile and moving to voice. It's just like other queries. So that's one thing. The second thing is it's the the rise of instant answers and just like more instant, more like not waiting through results has just continued and continued. And I imagine that'll keep continuing.

• 50:25Shane Parrish?

  Does that mean that like Google, Facebook, Amazon, to some extent, DuckDuckGo, you get to play gatekeeper? Like, do you get to pick winners?

• 50:34Speaker 00

  There's a big gatekeeping role, and I think that's that's been a bunch of the competitive complaints. You know, that's an argument in search right now of like, the user experience is arguably better if you give somebody one result, but it's a gatekeeping role.

• 50:51Shane Parrish?

  How do you think that that should be handled?

• 50:54Speaker 00

  So we've been trying to do, but we haven't had the luxury because we don't make our own ones all the case, all the time, is try to give people choice. And so like, when we have map results, for example, people can choose which provider they want to do the directions when they go off of DuckDuckGo onto a directions provider. And so that's the model I think would be good is giving people more choice. But even that has its own problem because there are hundreds of providers. You can't give, you run into the paradox of choice model, just like, or Hicks Law, it's like, You give people a billion choices.

• 51:35Shane Parrish?

  Yeah. What if I want to start up a company?

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Well, then it's like you can't, you give a Dropbox of a hundred things because you'll just confuse people. And so at some point, you you do have to make choices.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  We've been trying to work with the biggest partners that have the most breadth and best results.

• 51:52Shane Parrish?

  And so the way that you think about making that choice is like, who's the biggest partner? Who's got the better sort of results for?

• 51:58Speaker 00

  But even then, like if we're not here yet, because it's not this case in every country, but you can imagine, like, if you were really into Amazon versus Target or something, and we give you a choice, would you rather prefer Target results or Amazon results or Yelp or TripAdvisor results? You had, you had like a favorite.

• 52:15Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  You could choose and then be like, okay, see more of that on when you get those kind of instant answers.

• 52:21Shane Parrish?

  But then we're still like sort of anti-competitive to new up and coming.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's inherently a problem with instant answers.

• 52:30Shane Parrish?

  So do you think like in in a weird way that we haven't had before? And I'm just like thinking aloud and throwing this out there, but do you think like bigger gets bigger?

• 52:40Speaker 00

  I mean, I think in general, when you have data, network effects, you have winner take most markets.

• 52:47Shane Parrish?

  Because I'm thinking like I used, like, if I wanted to compete with Walmart, I could open a store and I can compete with them. And people would see my store and they would find it and they would drive by it. But online, that's not necessarily the case, right? Just because you create a website or you have a better product, doesn't mean that you actually get noticed.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  No, I mean, there, there are, there definitely are equivalent ways to get noticed. But what you're basically saying is, which I think is generally true, is our, your capitalism in general has scale effects in a number of ways, you know, just economies of scale, network effects, et cetera. And that is a feedback loop that makes things bigger, unless there's some disruption that happens. And I think that naturally happens. And there's, there's a good argument to show that that's happened a lot, at least in the US markets in the past 20 years.

• 53:35Shane Parrish?

  So if you put your.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Not even online, just even offline in sorts of industries.

• 53:40Shane Parrish?

  Like, for example, what comes to mind?

• 53:44Speaker 00

  So, oh, man, I just read this book that was The Myth of Capitalism that had all sorts of examples. And now they're kind of like.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Don't know, I'm escaping me, but there was like from eyeglasses was one of them.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  I think it was like oil refinery.

• 54:03Shane Parrish?

  Oh, because they're just controlled, they're effectively like the lenses are controlled by one.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, it just ends up being scale. So like, it's all the same effects, like people get bigger, they buy up other companies. There's been a lot of acquisitions, you know?

• 54:15Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  And nothing nefarious necessarily.

• 54:18Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  But just.

• 54:20Shane Parrish?

  But the concentration.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, over time, the concentration becomes more and more and more, and that creates less innovation. And, and that's kind of the general argument.

• 54:29Shane Parrish?

  That's interesting because as you're talking about that, I'm thinking like one of the big national debates is sort of like this wealth inequality.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:35Shane Parrish?

  But we don't necessarily.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  They directly tie this in that book to the same.

• 54:39Shane Parrish?

  Okay, yeah, because I was gonna say, we don't tend to talk a lot about like company inequality where you have this big disparity between the sort of, I don't want to call it winners and losers, but the bigger companies get bigger, almost as a necessity of them being bigger. They can make more acquisitions, they have more preferable terms with people, they can be front and center, they can buy advertising more than other companies. They can generate more data that they can use to make their products better.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a direct tie to inequality there in a couple of respects. The, the biggest one is that a lot of the newer companies, especially online companies, have a lot less employees than the older line companies. It's taken less, there's just more leverage online because digital has no marginal cost generally.

• 55:26Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  And so it takes less employees to reach the same market cap.

• 55:30Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  And so there's less people benefiting from that.

• 55:33Shane Parrish?

  Right, like comparing Berkshire Hathaway, which has like 400,000 employees to Google, which I don't even know what they have, but it's nowhere near that.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And then even that, the subset of the, you know, employees who are making lots of money is lower. And, and that's very different than say, like a Walmart who employs like a million people or something in the US, you know? And so over time, the rise of online and bigger companies has created some of the wealth inequality, at least that's the theory.

• 56:02Shane Parrish?

  What are, before we move on out of this area, I want to talk about what are some of the things that people can do to reduce their footprint tangibly if they want to do it without downloading anything or like Dr. Go is obviously one of them, but what are the other things people can do to like reduce their or increase their privacy online? And let's start there.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Dr. Go wise, that's been our goal is to give like the one download you need.

• 56:30Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  And so on iOS, Android, Chrome and Firefox, you can download either browser browser extension or our browser and it has all the kind of essentials for search and browse.

• 56:41Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  In addition, we have a blog at spreadprivacy.com that has a device tip section.

• 56:49Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  And so for any major device you have, could be laptop, desktop or phone, there's a set of settings that you should probably change, you know, on your iPhone or your laptop that would generally help you. That kind of helps you on the main search browse, use the internet side. Then there's like all the other services that you use that kind of aren't search browse like email. And for all these services, there are generally like more private alternatives, sometimes really private, but also just getting off of Google and Facebook.

• 57:27Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Helps you not put all your eggs in one basket.

• 57:30Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  And so for email, there's like Proton Mail, we use something called Fastmail. Proton Mail is very private. Fastmail is not just built for privacy. They're, they're just an alternative paid email provider.

• 57:41Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  You know, and so moving your email off of Gmail on something else.

• 57:45Shane Parrish?

  The company that provides search.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, you want to separate your kind of data as best you can.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  Independent of all of that, you know, there are a bunch of all these like people sites, you know, that like you look up your name and you see like Shane Parrish or whatever, age, whatever, you know, you can opt out of most of those.

• 58:09Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  There are some services that will do it paid, but there are some lists where you can just go through and just request your removal.

• 58:16Shane Parrish?

  I'm, I'm super happy to have Shane Parrish. Google that, there's this guy in Australia, Dieter Berman or something. He was like a TV star and so the number one result for Shane Parrish is like this. It's great.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  That's awesome. Yeah. So, I mean, those are the things I, I think if you want to get more extreme, there are other things like we talked about using Tor or something like that. But in terms of just like no sacrifice, very seamless, you know, I would, you know, use something like Tucktack, go like tracker blocker, private search, encrypt more encryption and then tweak your settings.

• 58:52Shane Parrish?

  Do you have Instagram and Facebook yourself?

• 58:55Speaker 00

  No. So I, I quit Facebook, I want to say like seven years ago, maybe a lot, maybe more, it could have been like 2010.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  And I don't use Instagram. I don't really use my social media, except I use Twitter.

• 59:11Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that there's a correlation between unhappiness and the use of social media?

• 59:18Speaker 00

  So I do. I will say that I haven't, this is some more mental models, but I really try to go with the thinking gray model of like, not totally making my mind on anything, but all the research that I've seen and I haven't like in-depth read all the studies, you know, show that, yeah, quitting Facebook has had very positive effects for people. So not only the, the ear wallet effect, which we talked about earlier, but just people feel less isolated, you know, they feel less lonely in a counterintuitive way when they quit Facebook. And so I

• 59:56Shane Parrish?

  What explains that? Like in your mind, like, what are the the probabilistic reasons that are the majority of like, what would explain?

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think it would be interesting. So I'm not the expert. I've done the research. But my guess is twofold. One is there's there's just an opportunity cost of your time. So

• 1:00:16Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Like you were just spending a lot of time wasting time on Facebook. That time is substitute with something else, which is probably better time spent that makes you happier. Whether that's talking to other people or, you know, reading something, something else that's better. Though at least that was certainly the case with me. The second is the actual content that you are engaging with is sometimes pretty toxic. And so like, there's kind of two effects of that that have been talked about a lot. One is like you're seeing this kind of Instagram, other people's awesome life effect. You're seeing other people being seemingly happier than you or something like that. But it's it's often a kind of a ruse because they're posting like the fake photos are the best things that are coming out of their life.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  The other is just like, you know, I remember just seeing endless political debates. That were very

• 1:01:10Shane Parrish?

  Like you get emotionally charged.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And it was just like, it wasn't constructive debates. It was like ad hominem attacks and things like that. And that's just a lot of negativity. And so it's like, you're cutting out negativity. I think that's always a good idea, you know, it's kind of like the, there's another metaphor, like the, you know, you're the closest of the five friends you hang out with kind of thing. You are what you eat in a way. And so if you reduce negativity and replace with positivity, you're just going to be happier.

• 1:01:45Shane Parrish?

  Do you think we can have constructive online debates? And what do they look like?

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  I think so. I think it's possible. Um, you ever listen to Intelligence Squared, that podcast? It's pretty good.

• 1:01:57Shane Parrish?

  I only listen to one, the Knowledge.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough. Uh, it's a, uh, they've done maybe 200 of these. It's a structured debate podcast. They have a topic. I've had a bunch of social media ones, like is social media good for you, bad for you, kind of thing? They have four really good experts on.

• 1:02:16Shane Parrish?

  And then they play both sides of it.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  Play both sides. Moderate debate. It's really good and it's totally civil discourse. We actually listen to with our kids a decent amount.

• 1:02:27Shane Parrish?

  How old are your kids?

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  10 and 7. And, uh, and yeah, so I think something like that would be good.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  I've worked on a project with, with somebody else who's been working for a couple of years on this very topic. And I've been going back and forth with different ways you can kind of do that. I don't think he's really hit the nail on the head yet, but I do think it's possible, to your point.

• 1:02:55Shane Parrish?

  Do you think it's possible to have a national conversation?

• 1:03:01Shane Parrish?

  About a topic in a constructive way?

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know exactly what that means because it's just so many people, you know?

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  What we were kind of envisioning is, uh, part of the problem is, and there's kind of a bunch of mental models in here, but like people effectively just talk past each other in a lot of these kind of debates. And so take something like climate change.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  There's actually like, you know, 10 different debates within climate change, probably more. And I made a flow chart one time to try to isolate. Okay, if you're gonna argue about climate change.

• 1:03:36Shane Parrish?

  Individual arguments?

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  Yes. Which part of the argument are you in? Like, okay, do you believe it's man-made? Okay, if you do, do you believe it exists? You know, if you believe it's man-made, do you believe we can do anything about it? You know, do you believe it's, if there's harm, you believe it's imminent harm?

• 1:03:50Shane Parrish?

  You're sort of bringing it down into his fundamental.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  And so like in any particular argument, what you really want to do is, or what I try to do at least is, if you're really want to have an engaging debate with somebody. You want to start with the premise that there's suppose that you think you disagree on something. You want to find, break down the argument into premises and find which one you actually disagree on. With something like climate change, there's like a ton of different underlying premises. And so you have to go down and be like, oh, do we agree on that? Do we agree on that? Do we agree on that? Do we agree on that? That's not generally what happens when you have a public debate. What happens is people throw out their fact and maybe someone else throws their other fact. And they're arguing like totally different things.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  And so that's, you can't have a productive debate unless you're arguing on the same premise. And so that's what I was hoping this kind of software or ultimate debate would do. Would help people zoom in and figure out, what do you really believe on this topic? Which premises do you believe or not? And then if you're going to engage in an argument about it, let's define the scope of what premise we're arguing over. Like.

• 1:04:57Shane Parrish?

  Could a search engine do that? Like if I Google climate change, like, why couldn't you take that? You had broken that down into like 11 different things. Why couldn't the result be sort of like one, on the left, you get sort of like one side. And in the middle, you get the argument and on the right, you get the other side. And like that is your result and you can click through to.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  That would be kind of ideal. That would be like embedded of this software that this gentleman's building. He was calling a context, you know?

• 1:05:22Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  Cause to really give you context on the argument.

• 1:05:24Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  And then once you get into a premise, then it's like, okay, well, what are all? Then you can have more reasoned discussion because you can be like, okay, what are all the evidence? Pro and con or different aspects of this premise? And then you can cite where the sources come from.

• 1:05:39Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  And people can comment individually on those sources and say like, okay, well, the main fact that everyone's behind on this is here. And then people can be like, well, I don't, I disagree with the methodology of that study or whatever it is, you know? But you're having a much more reasoned debate. And if you, if you approach a topic, you can come in and say, okay, here's all the different parts of this. I can get up to speed on this topic.

• 1:06:02Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  Really easily.

• 1:06:03Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  And that's kind of the idea. Whereas some of these topics now, it's just, you don't even know where to start.

• 1:06:08Shane Parrish?

  Why, why don't newspapers do that? And sort of like, instead of publishing, like publishing sort of like simultaneously. Both sides of an issue with the middle.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  It would be great.

• 1:06:18Shane Parrish?

  Explaining the issue.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  There's a few sites online that I've tried. There's something called like ProCon when we were kind of researching for this. Vox does it interesting. They have these explainers, you know, which is pretty good, but nothing really captures this the way I think it should be. So to answer your question, I think, yes, I think it is possible.

• 1:06:37Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  But nothing's really hit upon it yet.

• 1:06:39Shane Parrish?

  All right.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  If I wasn't doing this, I might work on that problem.

• 1:06:44Shane Parrish?

  Maybe you should do both.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 1:06:47Shane Parrish?

  Let's talk mental models. You have a book coming out, Super Thinking. I've read it. It's great. What? What made you create the book?

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  So in a way, it's been ruminating for like 20 years. Like I had wanted to and started writing different versions of this book for a while. But it would literally lapse for like five years. I could get into it if you want. But then what happened was maybe four years ago, Dr. Go started a more takeoff and we have not really hired a lot of people from outside the company. We've really tried to grow people within the company. And so we have this executive team that was, you know, needed to step up and learn more. And I was trying to understand, okay, how do I train our executives?

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  Like, what do they need to do to really actually make good strategic decisions more of the time? Because that's really what executives do. And I got to thinking, okay, what I really think it is, is, which is really counterintuitive, is I think they need to know like these 300 different topics. These 300 mental models, which I think you've come on to the same notion. It's like if you knew all these things and internalized it and could pattern match relatively effectively, like the situation applies to these three mental models, then you can skip lower levels of thinking and have this whole like higher level conversation really quickly.

• 1:08:19Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  Whereas if you don't know these mental models, you're like starting from scratch every time. And you may, you kind of don't know the design patterns of strategic thinking. And so I started making a list. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna make a list and I list, I initially made a list like a hundred things and I asked somebody and I was like, how many of these do you know, you know? And they were like, I know like thirty of them.

• 1:08:42Shane Parrish?

  Were these a hundred things that you applied or did you make this list like you went to university one on one and you're like, what are the big ideas?

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Out of my head. I was like, these are the hundred things that keep coming up again, canon again.

• 1:08:53Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  Mental models that I continually use. And so.

• 1:08:58Shane Parrish?

  Did you always think like that? Or was this something that evolved? Like, did you come into school going like, oh, I'm gonna think about this and mental models? Or did you come like, did you?

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  This is the more the longer term history. So I came out of school, my undergrad, I took a lot of courses in different disciplines. And so the original book I wanted to write was like this kind of interdisciplinary like guidebook.

• 1:09:20Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  You know, and I was like, I think a lot of people would benefit because they only have one major.

• 1:09:25Shane Parrish?

  Right. You specialize.

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, you specialize immediately. But then that totally kind of ruins your education in a way. And you really want, you know, all these things across disciplines. So I was like, what if we just made this like interdisciplinary textbook, like a survey course of everything?

• 1:09:40Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:09:41Speaker 00

  And I eventually gave up on that.

• 1:09:44Shane Parrish?

  Why?

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  I don't know, it just wasn't coming together and I started my company and other things. And then maybe like five years after that, I was like thinking about, I had come on to Munger at that point before though, and I hadn't come on to him. And then I was thinking, well, another formulation I had of this concept was, you know, I keep coming back to problem solve, like I have problems in front of me. And when you solve them, you want to like, run down a list of mental models, like, is this a critical mass problem? Or does this have to do with power law?

• 1:10:15Shane Parrish?

  Is that how you solve them? Like you have a mental checklist that you iterate through?

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  Well, I was doing that at the time. And I was like, wouldn't it be cool if there was something like a problem solvers handbook? And I was like, You know, when you're faced with a problem, like here's like a checklist or help jog your memory to see if you can think of many solutions. So I started on that road and then that I that didn't, I couldn't get that to work either. So then five years after that was like more like this problem. And then I end up with this list of a hundred things. And I asked the guy and he's he knew like 30. And I was like, okay, well, that to me is what people's core curriculum should be. They should learn the rest that they don't know. So then I went and I tried to more systematically list all of them. So like, I went back to Munger and, you know, he has that quote about 80 to 90 models, but no

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  one ever lists them all. Right. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm gonna list them all. And then I more systematically tried to brainstorm my own. And then I went and started going down the rabbit hole of looking in depth at each one and like, what are the related articles on Wikipedia and all these different things, just jogging my memory of other things, most of which I already knew, some of which I learned from from scratch. And then I put out a blog post, mental models that I used repeatedly and ended up being about 250. And that did really well, like people really took to it. And for a while I was just using that as like in our reviews internally and saying like, you should go, anything you don't know on this list, you should go.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  Go read about it. Yeah, go read about it. And I looked at all the Wikipedia articles. So it's like, here's a starting point, you know. And then internally, we use them, you know, consistently when we're faced with different problems. And then our my publisher from my first book reached out and was like, well, this post is really successful. Would you consider writing a book on this? And I was like, I just wrote a book and it was really difficult and took me five years to write. That was the previous book. Right. And so I don't really have time for this. But my wife had just kind of left her job as a statistician and was interested in doing it. And so we decided to do it together. Ended up being extremely long amount of work. And I somehow like forgot how much work it

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  was. And it took two and a half years, basically, to turn that list into an actual book. But now it's done, so I'm happy about that.

• 1:12:39Shane Parrish?

  I have so many questions here. Let's start with like, what are the big five sort of mental model? Like, say 100 carry the most weight. Well, what are the five out of those 100 that you think?

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm curious what you think about that too, because you have also a big list, right? And so, so what we ended up doing is, you know, the list was like, the original list was like a big list and I organized it by discipline.

• 1:13:02Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  And then when we started on the book, we realized that's actually not the best way to do it. Because they're, even though they came out of one discipline, they're actually interrelated, often cross-discipline.

• 1:13:15Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  And so, we set out, organized.

• 1:13:16Shane Parrish?

  They're all connected.

• 1:13:17Speaker 00

  They're all connected, exactly. So, we ended up trying to group them into like, really, how are they connected?

• 1:13:23Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  And so, we ended up with nine chapters that relate all about 300. And so, there's like, you know, 48 inch chapter roughly, but they, but they're in a narrative-related fashion.

• 1:13:34Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  And so, those like, general chapters end up being a lot of the general formulations of things you should know. So, like, the first chapter is on bias in general, and second chapter is on unintended consequences, third chapter is on using your time wisely, that kind of stuff. So, within all of those, though, if you're going to like boil it down, and some of those are on like, business and management. And so, some of that doesn't apply to everybody all the time. But the ones that really come up a lot to me are opportunity cost, which is where I started.

• 1:14:06Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  Which is that, you know, I would just tell the executive people, and I still do, is that like, you shouldn't argue that something's important and therefore we should do it. It should always be, it's important and it's more important than all these other things, you know? And that just frame of mind is like, changes almost everything, because it's almost every decision you ever make about how to spend your time. Is like, am I spending it in the most optimal way, relative to my other options?

• 1:14:31Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  So, opportunity cost comes up. Another one that comes up a ton, which is more rare, that I don't think people mention as much, is forcing function, to me.

• 1:14:39Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  So, like, forcing function is the idea that it often operationalized as something in your calendar, where you've preset a time or mechanism where something's going to happen, and it forces you to think critically about something.

• 1:14:54Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  So, like, in a company, that can be a one-on-one standing meeting that you have every week to talk about something, you know? Or it could be, you know, board meetings often serve this function, because... It's a forcing function to get you to compile all your metrics and stuff, you know? Even if the meeting is not that useful, compiling all that stuff is that useful.

• 1:15:12Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  You know, and you can just, in all sorts of ways, like schedule a time to go to the gym or whatever it is, you know?

• 1:15:17Shane Parrish?

  What's an example of a forcing function you use that you find super valuable?

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the, another amount of model that we kind of run through that is this one-on-one standing meeting. So in our company, everybody has a career advisor and there's a, they have to have a one-on-one with them every week.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  And that's a unstructured meeting that the advisee, it's their meeting, but it's a forcing function to get them to think about anything that is going on that week, what's really on their mind. Another one we use is every project needs to have a summary update at the end of every week, kind of like what happened, what's next?

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  And it's a, you know, it's again, it's a forcing function to get people to think critically about kind of what's going on. We have kickoff calls and post-mortems for every project. Also kind of-

• 1:16:14Shane Parrish?

  And are you doing like agile sprints in the background or like how do the projects get run?

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  No, that's a whole different subject. I mean, we've kind of, because objectives and projects can be more exploratory and not, or may have external deadlines or not, we try to stay away from deadlines if we can.

• 1:16:29Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  But we do have these like kickoff, sometimes mid-mortem or pre-mortems where it's like a forcing function to get people to think critically about what's going on.

• 1:16:39Shane Parrish?

  So we had opportunity cost forcing function. What would be next on your like intuitive list that I put you on the spot for?

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  Probably one I, I mentioned earlier, which is thinking gray.

• 1:16:53Shane Parrish?

  Yep.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  And so-

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. I should have probably brought a list.

• 1:16:58Shane Parrish?

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 1:17:00Speaker 00

  But I actually did. But maybe that's more realistic because it's the ones that pop in. But I think that comes up a lot. The idea there is like, you know, you could view this as confirmation bias too. But once you commit to a decision, it's really hard to escape confirmation bias.

• 1:17:15Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  And you're you're like committed to that decision. Your psychology wants you to look for things that confirm your decision. If you force yourself to actually not make a decision or not not not commit to absolutely believe in something.

• 1:17:29Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:17:30Speaker 00

  Say like, I'm leaning this way, but I'm willing to entertain other evidence. It doesn't become part of your identity.

• 1:17:36Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  And then you're you're you're a freer thinker. And so that's this concept of thinking gray. There is another people sometimes mean something else slightly different with that, which I also agree with, which is this notion of, but but I categorize something else in the book of called black and white thinking.

• 1:17:55Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  Where it's like, things are either, you know, zero, one way. There's only two options.

• 1:18:01Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:18:01Speaker 00

  Usually that's completely nonsense. I mean, usually there's lots of options and there's there's a whole degree of things. It's usually not. Nothing's usually black and white, you know?

• 1:18:10Shane Parrish?

  And in the podcast we did with Annie Duke, she had a really interesting sort of way of thinking about this, which was like, just by default, say you're 99% certain on everything. Never 100%.

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:18:22Shane Parrish?

  And the reason.

• 1:18:23Speaker 00

  I love her stuff. Yeah.

• 1:18:24Shane Parrish?

  Right. It's like, well, you signaled to the other person that you are open to changing your minds. Now the conversation becomes like, what would cause you to change?

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:18:32Shane Parrish?

  So you get a more productive debate out of it, but you're less likely to sort of like ignore things that are contrary to your beliefs.

• 1:18:40Speaker 00

  I love that. That quote from Munger one is my favorite one is like, you know, I always know the other side, person of the argument.

• 1:18:47Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  You know?

• 1:18:48Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  And and that's what I think thinking gray is all about. It's like you want to understand all sides perfectly for the argument.

• 1:18:56Shane Parrish?

  Right. And do you use these terms internally?

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:00Shane Parrish?

  Do you actually use the term? And do you have like a?

• 1:19:04Shane Parrish?

  I wouldn't say a checklist, but do you have like, um, what is your decision making sort of methodology? Or is there one?

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  It really varies. So what we do is we have a, um, we have some unique way of running the company because it's all remote. So we're not, everyone's remote. Uh, it's a remote first company. Um, and so as a result, there's a lot, uh, and also people are in way different time zones. And so there's a lot of asynchronous communication. And the way we run effectively is to make everything really transparent. So all the projects are all open to anyone to follow. And to make all that work effectively, that isn't chaos. Um, every project has a standard scoping template. And so it has like a background, objective, uh, impact and complexity assessment.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  And, um, and so when we have a project and have a kickoff call or postmortem, it's in that framework of like, what was the objective of this project? Like, what are the success criteria? It's another way we define the objective. And we can talk about like what it should be. Did we meet it? You know?

• 1:20:08Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:20:09Speaker 00

  There's like a way to frame that.

• 1:20:11Shane Parrish?

  And you do that before you start the project?

• 1:20:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, before we start the project.

• 1:20:14Shane Parrish?

  That's rare.

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, the other thing is like, we're, we're a small company. I mean, I think a lot of companies are like this, but we're competing against companies that have infinite resources relative to us. And so, um, this notion of opportunity costs, there is, we don't have a lot of resources to waste.

• 1:20:30Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  And so, um, one of our kind of core values, we have three articulated is question assumptions. And so.

• 1:20:38Shane Parrish?

  What are the other two?

• 1:20:39Speaker 00

  Validate direction and build trust.

• 1:20:41Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  And so with question assumptions, like we're basically looking like, are, should we be doing this at all? Like, is there a simpler way to do this? You know? And so, um, we're asking right from the beginning, almost trying to like, say, maybe we shouldn't do this project, you know? And so the only way to do that is to write out all the reasoning and then kind of discuss it. And then really question, well, maybe we could do this a different way. That's cheaper, better, faster, you know?

• 1:21:11Shane Parrish?

  Okay. And so there's no list of like mental models on the office wall that you're like walking through?

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  Well, it's funny because I do have a, I, I, I got to be friends with a guy who runs School of Thought.

• 1:21:24Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  Have you familiar with that?

• 1:21:25Shane Parrish?

  No.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  So he's got, he's got some, um, Websites, one's called like Logical Fallacies. And it's like a list of all the biases kind of thing. And then he's got another list of logical fallacies. And so I have two posters of his on my door.

• 1:21:41Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  And so those are lists of mental models, but they aren't the list like from the book or anything.

• 1:21:46Shane Parrish?

  Do you, do you think awareness, or maybe to what extent does awareness of, because I think people get this list of cognitive biases and their, their inclination or default is to be like, oh, okay. Well, I'll have a list of them and I'll go through this checklist, but they're, they're really good at explaining like why we, why our thinking leads us astray, but they seem less good at being able to in the moment or with foresight, avoid those thinking errors. They're really good at explaining why we were stupid. They're really bad at sort of like preventing stupid. And my, my experience has been a lot of times, not always, but if you have a list of them,

• 1:22:28Shane Parrish?

  the smarter you are, the more you just convince yourself that they don't apply. So like, you're actually not even open them anymore because you go through this list. And the smarter, more intelligent sort of that you are, the better the story you tell yourself about why you're not overconfident.

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, so I think there's something real truth to this. I mean, this is why we have the core value of question assumptions.

• 1:22:49Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:22:49Speaker 00

  And so I think what you need often is somebody else to call you on this.

• 1:22:56Shane Parrish?

  Your stuff.

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Shane Parrish?

  And then be open to.

• 1:22:59Speaker 00

  And then the organization or you need to be open to, you know, thinking gray about it and, and changing your mind.

• 1:23:05Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  And so what, that's what we've tried, that's the culture we've tried to create. And so I do think it's actually pretty hard to do on your own, to your point.

• 1:23:13Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Speaker 00

  You know, I think it's better if you have somebody, you know, to talk to. And so like, for example, I am lucky in that I, I walk pretty much every morning with my wife for an hour. And that's also how this book got started is we were, we talk about all sorts of things, so company things, but also just current events and we apply these models and stuff. But she helps, you know, call me on my bullshit.

• 1:23:42Shane Parrish?

  Dinner table conversations must be awesome.

• 1:23:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, and vice versa, you know.

• 1:23:46Shane Parrish?

  Cause she's got a PhD, but she's got a double degree from MIT too.

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, she is. Well, there's a whole chapter in this book about statistics, which you read. She was, she was the main one on that.

• 1:23:59Speaker 00

  And to make, she was worried that she'd get something wrong, you know, she'd say something wrong.

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  Cause what's funny about these mental models is you don't need to be the world's expert to apply them.

• 1:24:08Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:24:08Speaker 00

  You know, but if you're going to write a book on it, you also don't want to get.

• 1:24:11Shane Parrish?

  You have to be accurate.

• 1:24:14Shane Parrish?

  What is the validate direction? What is that? And how does it relate to feedback loops? And what sort of feedback loops do you set up?

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. So validate direction is, you know, this gets to your point about like decision and like, is the project going in the right direction? And so what we basically try to set up is another mental model, we use really heavily at DuckDuckGo. It could be in the top five is directly responsible individual, DRI, which we really took from Apple, which is that, but really expanded it, which is that every task, every project, every objective has one person who owns it. And they are the directly responsible individual and it avoids this diffusion of responsibility and the bystander effect, other mental models, which basically like,

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  if you're on a email with five people and no one responds, it's because no one felt they were like, it was stressed to them.

• 1:25:08Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:25:09Speaker 00

  Same thing in a meeting. If you have action items and no one's assigned the task, it often doesn't get done because people are like, well, I thought, I thought he was going to do it.

• 1:25:17Shane Parrish?

  Exactly. Right. That's the worst meetings.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19Shane Parrish?

  Spend an hour in a room, everybody walks away going, oh, we decided what, but nobody knows who's doing.

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  Exactly. So to avoid that, we assign a DRI for everything. And projects also have a DRI. So someone will go on in their task and we have the kickoff call and they're like, okay, I know what my objective is. I'm going to go off and do this thing. But they could go off and spin their wheels. They go off in the wrong direction. They could do all sorts of things. And so what we try to say is there are a lot of other smart people in the company who may be able to do things faster, better, know the right answer. And so generally you should be coming back and validating your direction.

• 1:25:55Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:25:56Speaker 00

  And so the easiest way to do that is to just write what you're doing.

• 1:25:59Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:59Speaker 00

  And say, not stop yourself.

• 1:26:02Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  Just say, look, I'm going to go do this. Does anyone have any ideas or object to what I'm gonna do? If no one objects, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna keep moving forward.

• 1:26:10Shane Parrish?

  The default is this is gonna happen, but you can.

• 1:26:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Chime in if you want. And that works really well because it doesn't stop people in their tracks. But anyone can follow anything. And if, sometimes people will call out certain people that they know might have information about this, you know, or knowledge. And if they do, they can chime in. And if not, they're not. And so that's really like the core operationalizing of the valid direction.

• 1:26:34Shane Parrish?

  I like that. How do, how does this relate to being a parent? Like, how do you teach your kids about not only mental models, but sort of like preparing for like general knowledge about the world in multiple disciplines?

• 1:26:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was one after we, so the original ambition in the book was train executives. But then when I got into it, especially with my wife, our impetus was more, we think that all kids, including our kids, should learn all these things. And they generally don't learn them in school. And so.

• 1:27:06Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, they learn a lot of the concepts at school, but in a domain dependent.

• 1:27:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, they don't learn how to apply them. And then even half of them, they literally don't learn.

• 1:27:15Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  Like, half of these things, I either had to come across randomly, or I was really lucky to go to this interdisciplinary graduate program where I was exposed to a lot of these things.

• 1:27:27Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:27:27Speaker 00

  But had, had I not done that, I would have been stumbling along not, you know, knowing these things for a long period of time. So we've been, with parenting, we've been trying to be like, really explain things to kids and our kids in an adult way. So like, I mentioned, we were listening to this debate podcast with them. And it's an adult show. It's nothing to do with kids, you know? And really complicated topics. And we just play it and pause it and. Ask the kids what they know and what they think about it, you know? This morning, I've been, so I've been driving the kids to school every morning and they're just like random examples, tactical examples.

• 1:28:10Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, more examples, the better.

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  We've been, I've been listening, we first came on a bunch of kid podcasts that we listened to. But then I realized like, my kids like listen to the adult podcasts as much. So we start, I usually listen to the daily. Okay. It's the New York Times Daily Podcast about things and they, they do a really good job of like having kind of deep dives on historical topics. This morning's was about Brexit and Theresa May and all the situation going on there. And so we just listen to the daily on the way to school and talk about it.

• 1:28:43Shane Parrish?

  What, what do you talk about? Like, what does that look like?

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  It talk, it's like, do you understand what's going on is the first level, you know, then it's like, okay, why are they wanting to leave? Why do you think they want to leave the Arabian Union? You know, like, what are their options? Why is she resigning? You know, all that kind of stuff. Just trying to like, pick apart things that we know more intuitively as adults.

• 1:29:07Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:29:07Speaker 00

  Or, or we're told in the podcast in an adult way and trying to make sure they understand it and the logical chain into like, okay, well, how did they get to this decision point?

• 1:29:19Shane Parrish?

  Do you sort of like nudge them to multiple perspectives to you? Like, how does the EU feel?

• 1:29:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's why I like the debates in particular, because you get really intelligent people talking on both sides.

• 1:29:29Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  And you get like, well, what do you like about their argument versus their argument? And it's like, well, what about what this person said versus that person said? Yeah, agreed.

• 1:29:37Shane Parrish?

  And so are you ever like, are you, are you trying to resolve things or are you just leaving it open?

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  Open, generally open. Yeah.

• 1:29:44Shane Parrish?

  And do you follow up?

• 1:29:46Speaker 00

  Not really.

• 1:29:48Shane Parrish?

  What are, what are the other things?

• 1:29:49Speaker 00

  Maybe we should follow up. I don't know.

• 1:29:51Shane Parrish?

  I don't know, man. What are the other things you do? Sort of like maybe around the dinner table or with your kids to get them just thinking in different sort of ways?

• 1:30:01Speaker 00

  So.

• 1:30:02Shane Parrish?

  That schools don't teach.

• 1:30:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I'm really lucky. We just switched schools and I really love our kids' new school. So I feel like happy that our school may actually start to do a lot of things that we want to do now that we're not going to stop. But so one thing I'm more encouraged about the kids' school at the moment. But, so my kids are two very different. I don't know about your kids.

• 1:30:22Shane Parrish?

  Same.

• 1:30:24Speaker 00

  So there's different strategies for each. So my oldest is really into movies. And so one entry point to him, I also like movies a lot, is we've just been watching a lot of movies and then talking about them in the same way. Movies are great because they're they're the production like value or thought put into every minute of a good movie is really, really high. You know, it's a really well-produced thing. There's a lot going on there that you can like talk about. And they're also very entertaining. So we've been watching a lot of movies and then kind of talking about them, all different kinds. My youngest.

• 1:30:59Shane Parrish?

  Is seven, right?

• 1:31:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, seven. He has gotten, he's really into math and really, he's gotten into programming a bit. And into watching like science podcasts and things like that.

• 1:31:10Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:31:10Speaker 00

  And I mean, not science, but science channels like on.

• 1:31:13Shane Parrish?

  Okay, on YouTube. Are you doing like scratch programming?

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, he took a, they're in like this Johns Hopkins correspondence courses. So he took a scratch one. Yeah, this last semester and now he's taking a cryptography one.

• 1:31:28Shane Parrish?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  And my.

• 1:31:29Shane Parrish?

  That's seven.

• 1:31:29Speaker 00

  Oldest is, yeah, he's.

• 1:31:31Shane Parrish?

  He's gonna come out with like a blockchain company.

• 1:31:34Speaker 00

  He's definitely more advanced than I was at this age. I'm super jealous of what the opportunities they have.

• 1:31:38Shane Parrish?

  Oh, yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:31:39Speaker 00

  And yeah, my oldest is in a Python one. And but he he's more wants to talk about like the YouTube videos he's watching.

• 1:31:48Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:31:49Speaker 00

  You know, and so like I tried to, I guess what I'm trying to say is I try to engage with them at what they're interested in.

• 1:31:54Shane Parrish?

  Right. So you try to bring it back to them and in terms of like whatever they're interested in, but relate the concepts to.

• 1:32:00Speaker 00

  Exactly. Let's talk about that.

• 1:32:04Speaker 00

  The other thing we did relatively recently is I put all the, you ever watch Crash Course?

• 1:32:09Shane Parrish?

  No.

• 1:32:09Speaker 00

  It's so, it's really good.

• 1:32:13Speaker 00

  It's a, it's not by PBS, but two brothers, they basically made online animated, but but them talking, tugging heads to like courses on economics and biology and chemistry and film and all these different things on YouTube.

• 1:32:30Shane Parrish?

  What was that called again?

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  Crash Course.

• 1:32:32Shane Parrish?

  Crash Course, okay.

• 1:32:33Speaker 00

  It's really well done. I put them all on DVDs. And so we drive to school every morning.

• 1:32:39Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:32:39Speaker 00

  It's like 30 minutes. And so, you know, not every day we watch the podcast. Sometimes I'll watch Crash Course, you know, and do the same thing. I guess it's all the same kind of general concept is find really good content.

• 1:32:49Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:32:50Speaker 00

  And then talk about the content with them.

• 1:32:52Shane Parrish?

  Right. In a way that reflects.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess it's all the same really technique, whether it's the video or a course or a movie or a podcast. You know, it's like, find something really engaging you can talk about and then relate things back to it.

• 1:33:04Shane Parrish?

  What made you switch schools? You said you switched school. What was the criteria for the new school and like, what made you leave?

• 1:33:10Speaker 00

  We were, we were at public school and it was, it was generally a good school. They both have, I don't know what it's like in Canada, but it's in the US it's state by state, but they have gifted programs. And, and they had something called GIAP, which was like an individualized education plan for their kind of gifted cent and sender. But it just, things were moving really slow. They were bored a lot. They, our youngest, who's really kind of good at math. You know, he skipped kindergarten and then skipped another grade in math and then passed out of that grade. And they didn't really know what to do with him. And, and it was just kind of bored, I guess.

• 1:33:54Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:54Speaker 00

  And so this new school is, is kind of brand new. It was only four years old. It is a, it's a, it's a school for gifted education totally. But it's not like you have to be super smart to get in. Like they're willing to take a lot of people who I think are willing to just engage with the idea. And it's more project-based learning. And so they, they do two things I like. One is they don't waste any time during the day. It's just kind of like, so they do way more. And so they have all the regular stuff, but they also have coding every day. They have a project class every day.

• 1:34:28Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's so cool.

• 1:34:29Speaker 00

  And, and then on regular things like science or something, they're, they're doing a project related to that thing. And they also kind of force the kids to do it and they have, they fail if they fail.

• 1:34:39Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:34:40Speaker 00

  And they don't, they don't like huddle them with it.

• 1:34:42Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:34:43Speaker 00

  And.

• 1:34:45Speaker 00

  And then they had all these other kind of random things like, you know,

• 1:34:48Shane Parrish?

  Do they do things to like build resilience? Like as you're saying that, because a lot of, a lot of gifted kids, like things come very natural to them and then when they're faced with a struggle, like what do they do to build grit or resilience?

• 1:35:01Speaker 00

  They, the main thing they do is let them fail at things and just make them try again until they get it. And I think that goes a long way seemingly, although we're relatively new, so we'll.

• 1:35:13Shane Parrish?

  And are the kids liking it?

• 1:35:15Speaker 00

  Kids love it. Yeah. Because they, um, they're both like super creative and love projects. And so it's like half the day is like doing different projects. Like Eli's in the fourth grade, they're building an escape room in their project class.

• 1:35:29Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:35:30Speaker 00

  For the, this semester that they are like two, they split their, uh, the fourth and fifth grade actually runs like a middle school. And they split them into two groups and they're like making escape rooms for each other. And they have to like build it and like do it.

• 1:35:43Shane Parrish?

  And they test it.

• 1:35:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so they're just like doing that and he loves that kind of stuff.

• 1:35:48Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's so cool.

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  And so I'm excited for them. I wish I would have been a code school.

• 1:35:52Shane Parrish?

  Oh my God. Yeah. Like seriously, we didn't start programming in school until grade 12 and it was like Pascal.

• 1:36:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was, I mean, yeah, I'm 39. So.

• 1:36:04Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, we're the same age.

• 1:36:05Speaker 00

  That, that was exactly my experience as well.

• 1:36:08Shane Parrish?

  But it was great. Cause I mean, I started much earlier than that. So like the coding class became like super easy. It's a great way to get my grades up for university.

• 1:36:17Speaker 00

  I'm with you. That was my path as well.

• 1:36:20Shane Parrish?

  Listen, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I want to thank you for taking the time and maybe we can follow up.

• 1:36:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Love to again.

• 1:36:32Shane Parrish?

  Hey guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at farnamstreetblog.com/podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G.com/podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnamstreetblog.com/newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening.