Таким образом, они намеренно пытаются создать сплоченность в команде вокруг людей, имеющих одну и ту же точку зрения, одни и те же убеждения и одинаковую приверженность одним и тем же идеям, и это на самом деле… Я понимаю, почему люди интерпретировать командный игрок таким образом, но такой тип командной среды создаст эхо-камеру, где люди не будут чувствовать себя обязательно свободными, чтобы предлагать альтернативные точки зрения или своего рода вызов группе, потому что они будут казаться несогласными. , или скептиков, или кого-то вроде Дебби Даунерс.

Стив: Ага. Полностью.

Энни: Нет.

Стив: Я поняла.

Энни: Верно.

Стив: Да, и некоторые компании, и я знаю, что в некоторых фирмах они действительно стараются поощрять людей к здоровому обсуждению и сильному голосу, другим мнениям. Некоторые люди говорят:«Эй, спорить — это здорово. Меня не волнует, будем ли мы обсуждать это на этих встречах, потому что мы хотим принять наилучшее решение», и вы должны решительно отстаивать свою позицию. Но я думаю, что это, вероятно, исключение для многих фирм. Я думаю ты прав. Куча людей собирается вместе, чтобы поговорить об этом. У кого-то есть сильная идея, и все как бы набрасываются и говорят:«Хорошо, отлично. Давайте сделаем это».

Энни: Ага. И я думаю, что слушая Шейна Сноу, который написал Dream Teams, он говорил о том, как это зародилось. Было какое-то исследование, так что я чувствую, что это то же самое, что и некоторые исследования самооценки, и как это развилось в то, что каждый получает трофей. Именно такая интерпретация этого доказательства превратилась во что-то, что, я не уверен, было настолько полезным. Но он сказал, что есть только одно исследование, которое показывает, что люди счастливее на работе, когда чувствуют, что они на одной волне. Но есть разные способы, которыми вы можете определить, что вы находитесь на одной странице, например, мы можем быть на одной странице, потому что мы чувствуем, что в нашей команде мы находимся на одной странице в отношении процесса, и мы согласны с тем, что лучший процесс - это способствовать здоровому обсуждению.

Но простая версия того, что мы на одной волне, заключается в том, что мы согласны друг с другом. Это своего рода простой способ интерпретировать нахождение на одной волне, и когда они увидели, когда вышло это исследование, что люди счастливее на работе, когда они находятся на одной волне, это было интерпретировано как «Ну, это означает, что мы должны способствовать этой ситуации, когда все как бы соглашаются друг с другом». И, конечно же, проблема в том, что подумайте о том, как это может противоречить стремлению к разнообразию, верно? Вы говорите, что хотите привлечь в команду разных людей. Я предположил, потому что у них разные точки зрения, поэтому у них есть разные точки зрения, которые они могут предложить.

Я думаю о том, как это будет сочетаться с этой идеей быть командным игроком или быть на одной странице, что означает, что вы согласны друг с другом, и теперь вы привлекли кого-то, потому что у них другая точка зрения, но они чувствуют, что их точка зрения замалчивается или что они каким-то образом не являются хорошим командным игроком, если они выражают это несогласие, которое должно быть довольно плохим. Так что мне очень понравился его взгляд на происхождение всего этого.

И еще, что я хотел бы сказать, это то, что одна из вещей, о которой мы как бы не знаем, это то, как внутри команды, особенно с руководящей позиции, мы можем создать ситуацию, когда мы все вроде того, что нас загоняют в этот подтверждающий стиль или в этот эхо-камерный стиль просто потому, что мы на самом деле группа со своими собственными убеждениями, верно? Итак, вы можете подумать о разнице, и это то, что люди даже не осознают, что они делают. У них есть намерение провести здоровую дискуссию, и все же они как бы заражают процесс, потому что они не понимают, что такие вещи, как, например, простое высказывание своей веры первым, когда вы занимаете руководящую должность, на самом деле заставят других людей чтобы теперь рассуждать о том, во что вы верите.

Так, например, если у вас четыре разных человека проводят собеседование с кандидатом на работу, а затем вы все соберетесь в комнате, чтобы обсудить это, все будут как бы влиять друг на друга, и это будет не так продуктивно, и это мнения не будут такими точными, если вы действительно позволите каждому человеку написать отчет независимо, прежде чем посмотреть, что думают другие люди. Потому что происходит точно так же, как это перекрестное заражение, так что это еще одна вещь, на которую вы должны обратить внимание, и это направлено на то, чтобы на самом деле допустить разногласия. Вы можете как бы ликвидировать разногласия, даже не подозревая об этом.

Стив: Верно. Я думаю, что это довольно интересная идея… Мы боремся за работу на ферме, типа:«Хорошо. Мы хотим быть на одной волне, верно?» Но также, я поддерживаю идею здоровых дебатов, и я думаю, что нужно переформулировать ее, поскольку мы собираемся согласиться, что мы все будем решительно отстаивать наши позиции, и это нормально, и это не фокус на том, чтобы просто всегда быть в идеальном состоянии. соглашение. Это своего рода интересный способ взглянуть на это. Интересно, сколько компаний на самом деле думают о принятии решений так же много, как и вы. Что вы думаете о взаимодействии с этими компаниями?

Энни: Ну, да. Бриджуотер точно знает, верно?

Стив: Ага.

Энни: Они просто читают «Принципы», чтобы вы могли увидеть такой подход к стероидам.

Стив: Ага. Я читал некоторые его работы (Рэй Далио).

Энни: Ага.

Стив: Ага. Он там думает об этом.

Энни: Ага. Итак, я имею в виду взгляд. Я думаю, что почти любая компания думает о принятии решений. Вопрос только в том, думают ли они об этом с точки зрения науки, верно? Так, например, большинство компаний, с которыми я работаю, когда они просят меня прийти и поработать с ними, например, над стратегическим планом, и я начинаю работать с ними над возможными результатами, верно? Итак, мы как бы выясняем… Это что-то вроде сценарного планирования, да? Вот возможные результаты решения А, вот возможные результаты решения Б. Очевидно, что они могут пересекаться.

И тогда я задаю им этот вопрос:«Хорошо. Итак, давайте начнем вычислять вероятности результатов». И большинство людей, с которыми я работаю, такие:«Что? Нет, я не могу этого сделать». И я такой:«Ну, почему мы согласны? Можем ли мы согласиться с тем, что существует какая-то вероятность каждого из этих исходов?» А ответ в том, что они боятся ошибиться. Другими словами, они говорят:«Я не могу знать наверняка, какова вероятность того, что это произойдет в будущем», и поэтому по умолчанию они говорят:«Я отказываюсь давать вам один».

Итак, как только вы видите, что то, что вы видите, это да, они привержены принятию решений, но явно с точки зрения процесса они на самом деле не знают, как перейти к правильному процессу, потому что они не понимают, что весь смысл в том, что делать предположения о том, какова вероятность того, что что-то произойдет, лучше, чем вообще не гадать. Итак, даже если все, что вы можете сказать, это то, что этот конкретный сценарий, который может произойти, произойдет в 30% и 70% случаев. Они вроде как думают:«О, я не хочу этого говорить, потому что это неправильный ответ». Потому что они неправильно об этом думают.

Но я им говорю:«Это лучше, чем притворяться, будто в этом нет никакой вероятности, и просто оставлять это в неведении», номер один. Во-вторых, вы знаете об этом больше, чем кто-либо другой, поэтому ваша догадка будет лучше, чем у кого-либо еще, и тот факт, что вы догадываетесь, уже будет верным. И номер три заключается в том, что сам процесс попытки приписать правдоподобие или вероятность конкретному сценарию на самом деле заставляет вас по-настоящему, когда я возвращаюсь к этому исходному выводу, действительно принять неопределенность, а неопределенность исходит из двух мест. , верно?

Один от удачи. Итак, когда вы думаете о вероятности какого-либо результата, вы должны признать элемент удачи, верно? Вы должны начать думать о том, «Ну, а какие вещи после решения, которые я не могу контролировать, могут повлиять на то, как это может обернуться?»

Стив: Это возвращение к той неопределенности, верно? За исключением того, что вокруг витает неопределенность.

Энни: Верно. В яблочко. И вторая форма неопределенности — это скрытая информация. Чего я не знаю? А для того, чтобы правильно оценить вероятность того, что что-то получится, вы также должны думать о том, какая информация, которая у меня есть, является основой для предсказания, которая дает информацию для прогноза. И это заставляет вас на самом деле стать очень информационным голодом. Если вы думаете:«Ну, наше лучшее предположение — от 70% до 30%», это на самом деле заставляет вас начать спрашивать себя:«Ну, как я могу сузить этот диапазон? Что я мог узнать? Какую информацию я могу обнаружить, что могло бы заставить меня немного сузить это, потому что чем больше я могу сузить это, тем лучше я буду?»

Итак, что я хотел бы сказать, так это то, что я думаю, что абстрактно я не думаю, что вы найдете кого-то, кто не скажет:«Да, я управляю этим бизнесом». Я очень много думаю о принятии решений. Но я думаю, что для большинства людей это не особенно связано с наукой, с реальным вероятностным мышлением, построением таких деревьев, реальным отображением будущего, я думаю, что большинство из них делают это. решения, когда они пытаются добиться консенсуса в комнате, номер один. Итак, они считают, что это действительно важно. Нам нужно прийти к консенсусу, а затем остановиться на одной возможности.
И как только мы это сделаем, мы будем уверены в этом, и я думаю, что именно так выглядит процесс большинства людей.

Стив: Да, и у меня так много комментариев. Но некоторые быстрые мысли. Во-первых, я думаю, что большая часть нашего образования связана с тем, как мыслить критически, что важно, верно? И еще, я был инженером, верно? Как решать проблемы и строить вещи, а не думать о том, как вы принимаете решение? А когда вы посмотрите на свою жизнь, верно? Результат вашей жизни — это сумма решений, которые вы приняли, и независимо от того, сработали они или нет, верно? Часть удачи и неуверенности.

Возвращаясь к покеру, о котором, чем больше я слышу, чем больше вы говорите о нем, я думаю, что он может дать много уроков для принятия решений, связанных с концепцией риска/вознаграждения, верно? Итак, каждый раз, когда вы принимаете решение в покере, вы думаете:«Хорошо, сколько я рискую?» Верно? «Сколько денег я вкладываю в банк? Каковы мои потенциальные преимущества?» Верно? «Какого размера горшок?» И стоит ли это того, особенно с техасским холдемом, возможно, многие из наших слушателей не знакомы с ним, но в основном вы платите по мере того, как получаете больше информации, потому что есть карты, которые переворачиваются во время игры. Таким образом, вы должны решить, будете ли вы делать ставки, будете ли вы коллировать, чтобы получить дополнительную информацию.

И эта идея отлично воплощается в бизнесе. Существует такая концепция, называемая бережливым стартапом, где, по сути, вы пытаетесь научиться как можно быстрее и как можно дешевле. Вы выдвигаете гипотезу, вы строите эти MVP. Минимально жизнеспособные продукты, чтобы как бы проверить свои идеи, поэтому вы пытаетесь потратить как можно меньше и посмотреть, что получится. Вы проведете эксперимент и посмотрите, что получится. Это похоже, но когда вы делаете это, когда вы представляете это идеально, вы также думаете:«Эй, каковы потенциальные преимущества этой работы? Какова стоимость проведения этого эксперимента?"

Я имею в виду, что многие стартапы в Силиконовой долине используют это, и я думаю, что все больше и больше новых компаний делают это. Но считаете ли вы, что ваша компания придерживается такого подхода?

Энни: Так что некоторые из них да. Некоторые люди, с которыми я работаю, занимаются agile-разработкой, и это, очевидно, именно такой тип мышления. Так что, опять же, это зависит только от компании. Некоторые из них. Но я думаю, что важно то, что даже в компании, которая не является бережливым стартапом, все еще думают о мире таким образом, что вы можете проводить эти маленькие тесты, эти маленькие подсказки для получения информации и использовать то, что вам не нужно. нужно обязательно остановиться именно на одной стратегии, верно? Что вы можете выполнять такие очень маленькие тесты AB и просто начинать ковыряться, чтобы посмотреть, что работает, а что нет.

Опять же, и я думаю, что это связано с тем, подходите ли вы к миру как человек, который говорит, что мне нужно быть эпистемологически открытым, верно? Как будто мне не нужно чувствовать, что мне нужно знать наверняка, что есть множество разных способов, которыми это могло бы сработать, и у меня есть другие, чтобы попытаться и посмотреть, какие вещи я хочу протестировать, а не принимать решение. правильный ответ.

Стив: Правильно, что является нашим предубеждением, верно? Мы хотим вроде-

Энни: Это совсем другой путь.

Стив: Верно. Я думаю, что очень часто, особенно люди, возглавляющие компании, они привыкли принимать быстрые решения, и они как бы «нутром чувствуют» правильный ответ, который они предлагают.

Энни: Верно.

Стив: И они хотят быстро прийти к такому выводу и, вероятно, повлиять на всех, кто помогает принять это решение, чтобы они сказали:«Хорошо. Вот правильно…”

Энни: Ага. Я имею в виду, что это восходит к проблеме заражения, верно? Когда кто-то входит и говорит:«Вот что, я думаю, мы должны сделать. Это моя вера. Я очень сильно чувствую, что это правильный ответ». Удачи, если кто-то в этой комнате действительно бросит вам вызов, и не обязательно, что он не собирается делать это нарочно. Они такие:«Вау, у этого человека большой опыт, и они действительно твердо в это верят. Итак, все, что я думал, должно быть неправильным». Я имею в виду, что это своего рода естественный способ думать об этом, и очень часто я пытаюсь сказать людям, чтобы они как бы проверили это в своей жизни небольшими способами, чтобы они могли увидеть, как трудно выполнить это. таким способом защиты от заражения.

И вы можете сказать мне, если это звучит для вас. Например, когда кто-то читает статью о политике, как часто вы слышите, как он говорит:«Я читал эту статью о политике. Вы прочтете это?» Как буквально конец предложения. Или они говорят:«Я прочитал это мнение. Я думал об этом, об этом, об этом и об этом. Ты тоже пойдешь и прочитаешь, а потом скажешь мне, что думаешь? И, конечно же, последнее. Это то, как мы общаемся друг с другом, и я думаю, что часть этого заключается в том, что мы чувствуем, что наше мнение или наши убеждения — это вещи, которые, как мы заметили, являются важными данными, которые я должен сообщить вам, прежде чем получить обратно ваше мнение.
Я не думаю, что мы делаем это злонамеренно.

Стив: Без сознания.

Энни: Я думаю, что мы действительно верим в это… Верно. Это важные данные. Типа:«Ну, у меня есть мысли по этому поводу, так что позвольте мне поделиться ими, потому что Стиву важно знать это, прежде чем он даст мне какой-либо совет».

Стив: Ну, да. И я бы сказал, даже тот факт, что вы что-то представляете, вы, вероятно, уже подвержены вашей собственной предвзятости подтверждения, например:«О, я видел эту статью, которая подкрепляет то, во что я верю, и что вы думаете об этом? ” Я имею в виду, что вы не говорите так, словно подкрепляете свои убеждения, а просто представляете это.

Энни: В яблочко. Но я поступлю намного лучше, если скажу:«Эй, я прочитал это мнение. Мне нравится знать, что ты думаешь. Пожалуйста, прочтите его?» И буквально я не даю вам никакой другой информации, и я призываю людей попробовать начать взаимодействовать с людьми таким образом, и они удивлены тем, как это сложно, как часто им приходится как бы утаивать свое собственное мнение, это действительно сложно. чтобы держать его внутри. И еще одна вещь, я думаю, это не только то, что вы чувствуете, что это важные данные. Но я думаю, что у вас есть небольшой страх перед тем, что, если человек подумает, что я согласен с этим, когда это не так? Или что, если человек думает, что я не согласен с этим, когда я это делаю, и что это как-то плохо? Человек неправильно вас воспримет.

Или они могут думать о вас по-другому, и создается впечатление, что вы таким образом открываете себя для атаки на свою личность, а не просто говорите:«Я действительно просто представляю это вам в нейтральной форме». потому что я действительно хотел бы получить от вас обратную связь с высокой точностью, и не имеет значения, согласен я с этим или нет. И, пожалуйста, не пытайся угадать».

Стив: Ага. Это наводит меня на одну мысль.
Я бизнес-ангел в компании Cloverpop. Вся их идея состоит в том, чтобы попытаться улучшить процесс принятия решений. Я заинтересован в этом. Я думаю, что это область возможностей в нашей экономике, где есть все эти инвестиции; как мы можем работать лучше, как мы можем лучше отслеживать вещи, но не так много технологических возможностей для того, чтобы лучше принимать решения. Я думаю, что одна из вещей, которые они делают, это то, что они фактически закрывают глаза на тех, кто вносит предложение. Итак, у вас может быть группа людей, которые говорят:«Эй, мы очень хорошо знаем эту проблему, мы все заинтересованы в ее решении». И пусть генеральный директор представит свою позицию, директор по маркетингу и да, да, да. Тогда от вас исходила информация, верно?

И поскольку мы как раз собирались, если они тоже представляют свое мнение об этом, это всех предубеждает, но если вы придете и скажете:«Я не знаю, чье это представляет». И в идеале, то, что вы говорите, это просто сказать, просить рассмотрения обратно. Надеюсь, вы добьетесь лучших результатов.
Но я почти думаю, что у вас должны быть другие… Нам так трудно постоянно бороться со своими предубеждениями. Выполнение этого с помощью инструментов может помочь. Я не пытаюсь сидеть здесь и накачивать их, но я просто думаю, что это интересная область.

Энни: О, я согласен. Ага. Нет, я полностью согласен. I mean this is what I say, like, I tell people to try this exercise just in everyday conversation and people just fall apart to that. It’s so hard. And, I mean, I love the idea of what you just said because one of the things that I talk about in the book, is how do you implement these scientific norms, like norms for scientific communication into the way that you’re interacting with other people in terms of not just sort of making decisions, prospectively, but deconstructing decisions retrospectively? Both have their own challenges.

There is a wonderful acronym, which is CUDOS. Which was put forward by Robert Murton and he was really talking about norms for scientific communication. CUDOS stands for … The C is communism, obviously not the political kind, it’s that data should be treated communally within the team trying to decide about it. That doesn’t mean I’m supposed to share my data with another company, obviously, but within a team data needs to be communal.

And then the U is basically what you just talked about, which is universalism, which is that the message and messenger should not be equated.

So, obviously there are certain times when you need to know things about the messenger, for example, their level of expertise in something helps you decide whether the information that they’re presenting, it helps you put a probability on whether it’s true or not right? So, if there’s an expert, if I know that you are somebody who’s an expert on East Asia for example, I’m going to trust what you tell me about the population among better than somebody who knows nothing about that.

So, in that case there are certain features that might be important, but outside of that kind of thing the fact is that there are things that are true no matter who says them, and very often we will trust or distrust the information based on our trust or distrust for the person.

So, the thing I say is, like, the Earth is round whether it’s Mussolini, or your mother, or your best friend telling you that right? Or your worst enemy telling you that. The Earth is round none the fact, nonetheless. So, things have trust to them regardless of who the deliverer is, and this is actually really important because otherwise what can happen is that not only on a global sense information can be distorted in a political way depending on who the deliverer is, and I think we see this a lot in these sort of claims now about fake news, and the way that people interpret information if they’re coming from one part or the other depending on who they agree with in a way that’s actually very destructive, but then also you have to think about that in your own life right?

So, when you’re talking about Cloverpop what they’re trying to do is actually implement universalism, they’re to implement that norm of universalism, which is to blind whether it’s a CMO, or the CEO, or an intern who is offering it up so that you can evaluate the information independent of the person who has delivered it.

Just really quickly, D is disinterestedness. So, you want to eliminate conflicts of interest.

And then the OS in CUDOS is objective skepticism, which to sum that up really quickly; approach the world asking “Why am I wrong?” rather than “Why am I right?”.

So, I didn’t want to just leave people hanging as to what the rest of the acronym meant.

Steve: That’s great. Yeah, that’s actually the first time I’ve heard that acronym. So, this is Robert K. Merton right? He was the sociologist?

Annie: Exactly.

Steve: We had his son Robert C. Merton on the podcast.

Annie: Oh!

Steve: He was a Nobel Prize winner in economics.

Annie: That’s amazing. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah, small world.

Annie: Да. But that’s wonderful. I’m a very big fan of his fathers, and him as well by the way.

Steve: Верно. And just a side note, Robert C. Murton is also a poker player. Apparently he plays in a game in Boston. I was going to ask him about it, and then he was like, “I don’t want to talk about that on the podcast.” I didn’t get a chance to ask him, but I think you find that with a lot of math oriented and kind of analytical people, many of them do play poker and they probably take useful lessons from it that they apply in all kinds of places.

Ух ты. So, yeah, it’s amazing listening to you talk about decision making, and just for audience right? Making good decisions, being thoughtful about, or aware of all of the biases that we carry in and how that affects our thinking and our behavior, which ultimately affects the outcomes. You know, that’s how hopefully this discussion is useful to you.

Хорошо. So, a couple of … You know, back to poker a little bit just since its got lessons for us, one of the topics you talk about is, and we touched on it a little bit earlier, but this concept of resulting. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? I think it would be helpful for folks to understand that.

Annie: Yeah, for sure.
So, I just alluded to we can think about how are you thinking about decisions prospectively and also retrospectively right? So, you know, prospectively as in making a decision, and trying to scenario plan, map out the future, figure out what the probabilities of those futures might be. So on and so forth.

But the retrospective problem is trying to figure out what you’re supposed to learn from your own experiences because presumably you should have some sort of feedback loop where the feedback that you get is looping back in so that you can be better at decision making going forward, and so on and so forth. But, what the requires is that we be taking good lessons from the result of our lives, and this is where uncertainty can wreak a lot of havoc.

So, out in the world, in life, and in poker, the connection between the quality of an outcome, and the quality of the decision that leads to that outcome is very loose on one trial. Now, certainly you can run a Monte Carlo and get 10,000 trials of anything where it’s the same decision and you’re just seeing what outcomes happen to fall in some sort of simulation, or you could flip a coin 10,000 times, now you can start to see something from outcomes, but on a given outcome or a small number of outcome where the sample size is very small there is an incredibly loose connection.

So, to sort of get there let’s think about the difference between chess, and then poker, and then a really simple life decision. So, in chess, you can see how decision quality and outcome quality are incredibly tightly linked. So, if I lose a game of chess to you, what do we know about my decision making relative to yours?

Steve: That hopefully I understand, or process the information a little bit better than you did since we all have the same information available to us.

Annie: Верно. Exactly. So, if I lose a game of chess to you it’s because I played worse than you did, and it’s a completely reasonable thing to work backwards from the fact that we know what the quality of my outcome was; it was bad, it was negative, I lost; to figure out what the quality of my decision was and determine that that was also negative, and it was bad, and I didn’t do as well in comparison to you.

And the reason that that’s the case, that we can do that in chess is that you’re eliminating these two sources of uncertainty, so there isn’t a strong element of luck. So, in other words, the pieces stay where they are until someone moves them because of an act of skill right? Not because somebody rolls the dice and now your pieces just randomly move around or something.

So, we’ve eliminated the strong influence of luck, and then we’ve also eliminated most of the hidden information in a sense that you can see my position, I can see your position, so there’s no information asymmetry there, and what that means is that when I’m looking at your board I could theoretically figure out every possible move that you could make in response to any moves that I make.

So, what that means is when you’re reducing the really strong influence of uncertainty in that game, what that means is that outcome quality and decision quality become very tightly correlated.

Now, you can think about a game like poker in contrast. If I lose a single hand of poker to you what do we know about my decision making in comparison to yours?

Steve: Not a lot because there’s a big element of luck in each hand right? But if you win the tournament it’s saying a lot more right? So, if you make a series of decisions really well then you have a much higher chance of winning the whole thing. Is that true?

Annie: Ага. So, if I lose a hand to you we know almost nothing about the quality of my decisions based only on the results right? Now, obviously, if I lost the play, if I can dig into the process I’d know more, but all you can see is the result, we don’t really know very much about my decisions relative to yours.

Even after the end of a particular tournament we don’t know that much. We know more because you had to play more hands, but in order to start to get some kind of clear idea of somebody where you can see what the decision quality is sort of starting to shine through you need to see, you know, 1,000 to 1,500 hours out of a poker player and then you can start to really, really see it.

You know, you can see it after a month you’re narrowing it down as you go along as you add hours in right? But in order for the skill element to really start showing through you need a lot of hours of play. So, that’s assuming you’re at a live game where you’re getting 30 hands an hour or something like that.

And the reason for that, again, there’s this luck element right? I can’t control the cards that are yet to come so the deal is random, and then there’s also now we have this information asymmetry right? I can’t see your cards and so I’m guessing at them. So, that’s what creates this disconnection between outcome quality and decision quality.

Now, we can say is life more like chess or poker? That’s sort of the question, and let’s take a really simple example like driving through a traffic light. Well, you can see more quickly that life is more like poker than chess because if all I know is that you went through an intersection and you got in an accident in that intersection, that’s the only thing I know is that there was an accident that occurred, do I know a lot about the quality of your driving?

Steve: No, because someone else could have made a mistake versus you.

Annie: Exactly. Верно. So, now that immediately we can see, “Aha. Хорошо. So, this is more like poker than chess.”

So, now here’s where the resulting problem comes in. We took a long winding road down to resulting. Going back to that first point I made, people really aren’t comfortable with uncertainty, they don’t like the fact that you can’t really see into the decision quality right? So, it’s like after the fact and you’re trying to figure out if a decision is good when you had no way to observe the process, and so that’s pretty opaque to you, but you want to know, and so you use this shortcut which is called resulting, which is saying “Well, I know the quality of the outcome so therefore I must know the quality of the decision.”

So, if I know that the outcome was bad I can derive that the decision making must have been bad. Now, again, this is completely reasonable in chess, but it’s completely unreasonable if you’re playing poker. So, if life is more like poker we know it’s a relatively unreasonable thing to be doing in life.

So, the example that I open the book with, which I think it’s one of the most powerful examples of resulting that I’ve seen is the 2015 Super Bowl. Pete Carroll, coach of the Seahawks, the Seahawks are on the 1 yard line of the Patriots, and there’s 26 seconds left in the whole game. The Seahawks had one time out, and obviously they need to advance the ball 1 yard in order to score. They’re down by 4 so a field goal will not do the trick right? So, they must score a touchdown at that play.
So, as you’ll recall, Pete Carroll called a particular play that was pretty unexpected.

Steve: That’s right. He called a pass play. I was going to say, and he had Marshawn Lynch as a running back, who is a really good short yardage carrier.

Annie: Правильно, точно. So, exactly to that point. So, he’s got Marshawn Lynch, everybody is expecting he’s going to hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch, Marshawn Lynch will just try to barrel through, and that’s obviously what he’s going to do, and with his one time out he’ll be able to try that twice.
And instead he calls a pass play as you said and it ended in spectacularly bad fashion. Malcolm Butler intercepted the ball and that was the end of the game.

And the end game calling from Cris Collinsworth is incredibly brutal. You know, “I can’t believe this call. This is a crazy call.” So on and so forth. And then the next day, even after people had time to think about it, most people were echoing Cris Collinsworth, and there seemed to be an argument among the major outlets about whether it was the worst play in Superbowl history or the worst play in all of football history, which seems pretty … You know.

Steve: Pretty brutal.

Annie: Pretty brutal.
So, I think this is a really good example of resulting because you can see this very clearly that what people are seeing is that this result was spectacularly bad, and so therefore they are going back in and deriving that the decision quality must have been pretty bad, but we can actually get to the heart of the people by I can just ask you this thought experiment.

So, Steve, let’s imagine that Pete Carroll passed the ball and it was caught for a touchdown in the end zone. What do you suppose the headlines would have looked like the next day?

Steve: He’s a very creative genius for running that play. That was completely unexpected.

Annie: That’s exactly right, and in fact, for those people who are football fans, what did they say about Doug Peterson when he ran the Philly Special which resulted in a touchdown?

Steve: Ага. Exactly. Super clever right? Unexpected.

Annie: Super clever. Out Belichicked Belichick.

Steve: Yep.

Annie: Exactly.
And you can kind of see what’s happening here right? Remember, I said this problem is we can’t see through to what the decision quality is and so we use this shortcut. So, you can kind of see people feel like they know whether the hand off to Marshawn Lynch is good or not. They feel like they know something about that decision process. They feel like they have access to the quality because it’s a play that’s pretty agreed upon you know? There’s sort of consensus around that this would be a good choice.

So, by choosing something that people really weren’t expecting he’s choosing a play that is not well understood, which means that people don’t really understand whether it’s a good decision or not sort of right? Like, they don’t get it. They don’t know ex-ante.

So, now what happens is that because that’s opaque, because the decision is not understood, because there isn’t consensus around it, how do you then figure out if the decision is good? Oh, you use this shortcut called resulting. The result was really bad, so therefore I know that the decision must have been really bad.
Now, one little factoid, the probability of an interception in that particular situation was between 1 and 2%. So, the minute you kind of know that fact it feels like, well, how could you possibly say that was the worst call in Superbowl history? It was only going to turn out the way that it did less than 2% of the time.
So, I mean, that right there reveals sort of the obscurity of the whole bias.

Steve: Ага. It would be interesting if you kind of put football analysts into cohorts, or football fans into cohorts of people who are real, I don’t want to say real, but like in poker you see this right? You’ve got amateurs doing things that are crazy, and then you have people that play a lot of poker and they analyze this and they’ll call him a donkey, or say this guy is doing all of this kind of crazy stuff and that’s why he’s a bad player is because he doesn’t know any better, and giving color commentary on the result because they’re not behaving, quote/unquote, “rationally”.

But, in this case I bet Pete Carroll, and I think you mentioned this in your book right? Later on he was being thoughtful about it. He was trying to out play his opponent right? He was trying to do something unexpected on purpose to try and win. And as you said, his odds were totally in his favor because it was very unlikely that it would get intercepted and he just kind of got, quote/unquote, “unlucky” in that one case.

Annie: Верно. Exactly. And you can actually ask yourself what was he getting in return for the cost of an interception? And what he was getting in return was an extra play. But, you know, there was a clock management problem. He had 26 seconds left in the game with only one timeout. As you know, if you hand it off to Marshawn Lynch and he fails to get into the end zone a lot of time has rolled off the clock, so once you’ve done that you’ve actually only got one play left, whereas if you execute on the pass play … You know, this is where it’s really important to think about the three outcomes that would a running play.

So, not including a sack, or Russell Wilson fumbling the ball or anything like that. So, let’s just put those in the all things being equal category and think about the three outcomes of the pass itself which are it’s caught for a touchdown, okay, so they win the game. It’s intercepted right? That’s going to happen 1 to 2% of the time, but the third outcome is the ball is incomplete, and when the ball is incomplete of course the clock stops on its own, you don’t use a timeout for that, and that play gets executed really quickly.

So, very little time comes off the clock and because you still have that one timeout left you can. So, remember they have three downs. It’s second, third, and fourth down to execute on it. So, he was actually maximizing the number of plays, the number of chances that he would have at the end zone with this particular choice, and in exchange it was costing him that 1 to 2% chance of an interception.

Steve: Yeah, that was the risk. Верно. You know what would be really interesting is has anyone talked to Bill Belichick about how he thought about it? I wonder if he was like, “Oh, okay. They have 26 seconds left. Maybe they are going to run a passing play because they want to do clock management and it’s likely to be a slant because I’ve seen their,” whatever, and I appreciate all of the color on that decision in football.
You know, as you were talking about poker and chess we know that AI is really good at and now pretty much can’t be beaten with chess and also with Go, where you also have information, perfect information. Is anybody working on AI for poker?

Annie: Ах, да. So, it’s getting better at poker. So, there’s an AI that is very, very good at a particular form of poker, which is Heads up poker. So, it’s just one on one. So, obviously that reduces the set of possibilities right? Because I’m just playing against one person, and in particular it’s a form of poker where both players are likely to be playing almost every hand that they’re dealt.

But, this is a relatively recent development, but it’s now very good at that. It seems to really beat the best players in the world at that, and then we’ll see whether it can expand to, you know, how well it expands to a multiplayer situation, but it is getting better, but it’s solving a different problem right?

So, when you look at, for example, these Backgammon computers they can really just brute force the game right? Again, because you don’t have the hidden information, and this is true with chess as well, you can just play out every possibility until the end. So, once you have enough computing power you can solve the game so there’s just this brute force approach to it, which is not something that you can do in poker. You can’t brute force the game. That’s where the difference is, which is there wasn’t really any progress made in poker until you were starting to get machines that were more like deep learning machines.

Steve: Ага. It seems like with poker, I remember we were talking about it, there’s kind of three levels of poker right? You’re playing, at least with Texas Holdem right? You’re playing your cards, just straight up right? And what are the probabilities of you winning in any outcome. And then, you’re playing against what your opponent is likely to have right? And so therefore, then you need the emotional intelligence, and also some math right? And also this kind of, ideally, a history of what they’ve done in the past, which is probably hard for a computer to get right? I mean, if you see the same people in a poker tournament you can kind of study what do they do? How do they behave in certain situations? And that’s the third part right? How is your opponent likely to behave, and that also goes to kind of game theory for yourself, but also for them.

I mean, I think one thing that’s interesting about poker, we’re talking about football, and it’s like, when I play poker, or when people play poker sometimes they’re giving disinformation on purpose right? They’re trying to mislead so you can bluff later, or kind of play a little bit erratically so people can’t quite predict your behavior. I don’t know how that translates to …
I mean, I could see that translating strategically when you’re in business to kind of trying to outthink your opponents in the business arena.

Annie: Well, yeah, I think it actually translates pretty well. I mean, I think this idea that I was talking to about even just thinking about what are the probabilities of different outcomes is something that I find when I’m working with groups that are trying to do strategic planning that they’re just very loathe to do.
You know, I have a narrative in the book about working with a nonprofit just trying to get them to start thinking in expected value about their grant proposal, their grant process, and it was hard. I really had to do some very deep work with them to start getting comfortable with thinking about assigning probabilities to the chances that you get a grant or that you don’t so that you could really understand what the grant is worth because, you know, when you walk around in this world where you’re thinking about things in binary and this is how you’re making your decisions.

You know, when you’re applying for a grant that’s 100,000, and you’re just thinking about it as 0 or 100,000, where obviously if you’re thinking probabilistically and you say, “Well, there’s a 40% chance I’m going to get this grant.” You can now assign a value to it of 40,000, which does all sorts of wonderful things for you right? Certainly it allows you to more efficiently create a work staff. It allows you to really think about when you’re winning to hiring an outside contractor for example. It allows you to be much better at budgeting right? Like, at forecasting what your inflows are going to be right?

I mean, there’s all sorts of really good things that come out of it, but people are very loathe to do even just that step of thinking about, you know, how do I assign probabilities. That’s beyond starting to think about what are the payoffs of it? How do I deal with unknown information in a way that I really think about it? How do I deal with the connection between decision quality and outcome quality? How do I start to try to figure out good process for working back?

And then this sort of basis thing of what you just said, which is; how am I thinking about as a good Bayesian right? Like, what are the base rates? What are people’s natural dependencies? What could I expect them to do in these situations? How could I think about how my actions appear to another person?
So, people also don’t do that as much right? People have this idea, for example, that if you come into a negotiation and you’re speaking very forcefully that you’ll come off as being very forceful, but we know that very often that when people hold a very strong they’re actually less forceful in the way that they present it, and that’s a very, very strong human tendency that you can’t get to unless you think about it from the other side. Unless you think, well, what if you’re watching someone be really forceful in front of you, and if you said to yourself, “Well, wait a minute. If I had a really strong position how would I be acting?” And the answer is I wouldn’t be yelling at everybody telling them this is the final offer right? I mean, just as an example right?

But, you can’t do that until you start to think about how do I look from other people? What is the story that I’m telling? What are their opinions of me? What am I signaling to them with my actions? What are my base rates? How do I incorporate new evidence in order to actually adjust my base rates? These are all kinds of the things that the way poker players are thinking that I think aren’t incorporated into most people’s every day decision making.

Steve: Верно. We’re going to see if this works out for Kavanaugh soon, if his strong position.

Annie: Right.

Steve: I remember I was reading some poker book and it was talking about people that have strong hands tend to kind of act relaxed, sit back, and that’s an indicator that they’re strong, and weak players they’re a little bit more aggressive, or maybe they’re bluffing at it, and very often their actual position is opposite of how they present themselves.

Annie: Ага. I mean, think about it, when was the last time that you sat in a negotiation and you had a really, really strong position in the negotiation and you were red faced, yelling at the people across the table that this was your final offer, take it or leave it?
That’s not the way that somebody who’s in a really strong position behaves. And yet what happens is that when you’re sitting across from someone who behaves in that way, you think there’s a one-to-one mapping, right?

And you’re like, “Oh, they’re behaving in a strong way. They must be really strong.” But if we took a second to step back and say, “Wait a minute, how do humans really behave in this situation?” And the way I can figure out is by thinking about how I would behave in that situation. You get to the truth really quickly.
So we tend to be very reactive. We tend to make snap judgment about what the connection between people’s behavior is, and what their positions actually are in a way that we would be better to start doing some better perspectives making, that would help to actually get to the answer.

Because it seems to obvious once I say it to you, right? When was the last time you had a great position and you were red-faced screaming at somebody that it was your final offer? And of course you’re laughing and saying, “Never.”

Steve: Ага. Right.

Annie: And then you say, “Well, how come you think that that’s the case when they’re doing it to you?” “Oh.”

Steve: Yeah.

Annie: Yeah, right.

Steve: Yeah, never.

Annie: Okay, great. So yeah, but this is the way, this is just human nature, and that’s part of the thing, is that what our gut tells us is often not right, we need to hold our gut up to some sort of rational process, in order to make it accountable to something other than our feeling.

Steve: Yeah, I was just gonna say that … When we were talking here, so much of our life is about trying to make sense of the world, and we try to use these patterns, our brains are good at patterns, right? And pattern recognitions, where … I know you talk about system one and system two, and the emotional side of your brain, and then the more … The limbic system, and then the more rational side, and so much of our life is about trying to bucket things up, put them into … To identify patterns and make it quicker for us to assess things.

But the reality is, we live in a much more complex world, and we need to be much more rational about it. But it’s so hard, because we’re constantly fighting against the desire for our brains to make these snap decisions out of system one, and get the conclusion, right?

Annie: Well yeah, and if you think about it, it’s of course, right? Because if you were to make every single decision on system two, building out some probabilistic decision-tree, you’d never get out the front door in the morning, it would take too long. And the fact is that, most of our brain is this very big, ancient animal brain, and then we have this very thin layer of prefrontal cortex, that is trying to take up this more executive functioning, rational thought.

There isn’t a lot of it. And I talk pretty early in the book, but this is something that Michael Shermer has talked about, that we just have this default toward certain types of thinking, because when evolution was selecting features, it wasn’t necessarily selecting for accuracy, but rather efficiency. So you can think about this pretty simply. For example, we have a bias toward false-positives.

So I’m on this savanna and there’s rustling in the grass; evolution isn’t selecting for the human that now builds out a probabilistic decision-tree, about whether that is a lion. Because that human is dead too much of the time. So instead, it selects for the human who runs away. And sometimes that human is wrong, but it doesn’t matter, because 100% of the humans who’ve run away, have lived, right?

So the wrong ones and the right ones have lived, and who cares? So you have this strong bias toward false-positives, rather than false-negatives, right? So that’s just how it is, and it’s part of the reason why I said right at the beginning, that one of the things is, “Don’t try this at home, folks. Go get some other people to help you with this, because … I have only a little bit of prefrontal cortex, but you also have a little bit of it, and somebody else has a little bit of it, and if we get together, we can get more of that executive functioning stuff working for us.”

Steve: Верно. You’re making me think about … I was listening to Elon Musk on the Joe Rogan podcast, the one where he smokes pot on it, but before all that, I had this really interesting discussion about AI, and how the fact that we’re actually … Companies are actually cybernetic organisms if you will, they’re a bunch of people but also enhanced by technology and we ourselves, with our devices that we’re carrying around, are becoming almost like enhanced … And we are enhanced, essentially, right? Because we can talk to these things, and it can look up any information pretty much immediately, which is amazing.

And you do see … I can see this happening, faster than people think, because take navigation, right? So you can talk in your phone and say, “Hey, I wanna go from here to whatever. Los Angeles, on public transportation. What’s the fastest way?” And it will look at … It does a couple things, right? It finds the different routes that you can take; I mean, you can fly there, you can take a bus, you could drive, whatever, and it’ll solve for that. It’ll also solve for what’s happening right now. So you’re gonna drive, what the traffic patterns are today, and also what they’re predicted to do.

That’s what’s interesting. Google just rolled out, “Tell me when you’re going to drive from here to San Francisco.” And it’ll say, “Oh, the anticipated drive time is, is three hours, versus four hours, versus five hours.” It’s just amazing, right? And you could start to see this with maybe … Based on this conversation, I believe we need help making decisions, and a lot of this stuff may have to be built into computers to get more positive or more optimal outcomes.
At least help us get to more optimal outcomes, to manage against all these system one biases and beliefs that we carry around, that’s baggage, if you will.

Annie: Ага-ага. Exactly. Я согласен. That all happened … Obviously before I decided to. I have no problem with I just thought, given that people were questioning Elon Musk’s judgment, that maybe that wasn’t the best-

Steve: The best example? Ага. Well, he did make … That Tweet he sent looks like it’s gonna cost him $20 million bucks and the company $20 million bucks, plus he lost the Chairmanship.

Annie: Right, yeah.

Steve: Maybe he should be using some AI-enhanced decision for filtering when he sends his Tweets out.

Annie: Yeah I actually just had a discussion on a podcast just very briefly about that, and I think that it sounds like he doesn’t sleep very much, and lack of sleep really has a very deep effect on your judgment. There’s all sorts of ways in which … There’s a lot of research being done, in terms of essentially what happens to your … In terms of increased cognitive load, and what is the equivalent to, in terms of drops in IQ points, for example. So work done in scarcity, where people feel like their resources are not enough for their needs, for example, what happens to their ability to think well, their cognitive capabilities, and it looks like it’s equivalent to about a 13 point IQ drop, which is pretty shocking.

But that also the same as what you get if you miss a night’s sleep. So missing a night’s sleep really reduces your ability to think clearly. I think all of these things are actually really interesting to look at. There’s a great book called Scarcity, actually, that I think is a really great book to read, where you can really see what the cognitive costs of poverty are.

And you also get some of these same effects, for example, if you’re feeling excluded from friend group; that’s another way to end up getting the same effects. So anyway, when we were talking about Elon Musk and what’s happening, it sounds like he’s having some sleep issues, so that makes part of the explanation for what’s going on, yeah.

Steve: Yeah, what is the average IQ? Is it 130 or something like that?

Annie: The average IQ, by definition, is 100.

Steve: Is 100, right. В порядке Хорошо. So if you’re talking-

Annie: That’s definitional.

Steve: So, if you’re taking a 13 point drop, that’s more than 10% loss in your cognitive ability. That’s pretty significant.

Annie: Ага. It’s really huge. When people are stressed, because they feel like their resources cannot meet their needs. And this can be in a relative sense, by the way, this doesn’t mean that you’re living in poverty in an absolute sense. What was interesting is that it’s relative. If you live in a place where people are quite wealthy, and say you’re having trouble paying your mortgage, even though in an absolute sense, you might have quite a bit of money relative to the world, in a relative sense, you do not.

And that seems to be what the trigger is, and that’s outside of, obviously, the other effects of living in actual poverty that you can measure in an absolute sense, relative to anybody in the world. But I think it’s really important for us to think about that, because when we’re talking about … Obviously in order to dig yourself out of poverty, part of what goes along with that is having the … Basically being able to envision what the future is gonna look like for you, identifying what your goals are, and then figuring out how to execute on them.

But what we’re finding is that there’s so much cognitive load placed on you, by being in scarcity itself, that it essentially short-circuits a lot of that ability, and you end up making much more short-term decisions all the time. So there’s some very interesting work in this space, in terms of what it’s doing to people’s ability to think, and how much it reduces people’s ability to actually realize what their own potential is.

Steve: It’s hamstringing us. Well, good, you’re supporting the thesis behind this business, which is we’re trying to help people get control over their future, right? So, feel financially secure, so that they can make the most of their human capital. And this is what I saw with my own mother, where she was freaking out about money, and we’re like, “Okay, let’s try to solve that problem.”

And then once that was addressed, and you’re like, “Okay, I have a sense of stability. I’ve got some money in the bank, I have enough income in my life to pay for my life, so I’m not gonna go broke.” Which is the number one financial worry that everybody has. “Will I run out of money and end up being destitute?”
Once that was taken care of, it created the cognitive space to be like, “Okay, what do I want to do in my life? What could I do, and what’s most interesting to me?” Which, I think then leads you to do hopefully much better work with your life, right? Use your human capital in the best way possible.

Annie: Yeah, and we think about that, from a societal standpoint, right? When we look at this cyclical effect of poverty, when you really understand scarcity, you can start to see where some of that is coming from, right? Same thing with your mother, right? There’s all these different ways in which just having those worries about what are your resources, and are my resources enough to meet my needs?
What that does to your ability to start thinking about the other things in your life, because it just ends up taking up your whole brain capacity. So, from a societal level, how are you addressing that?

Steve: Ага. I think we talked about this a little bit before, but there’s this movement called FIRE, right? Financial Independence, Retirement Early. It’s mostly FI, Financial Independence, and especially being embraced by millennials, where they’re really trying to live much more frugally. And it’s really a mindset thing. So I was just at this ThinkCon Conference, and I saw a panel where they had four FIRE people, and you see people like, “Well, I’m feeding my family of four for $25 or $30,000 a year, and we live a pretty good life.”

I think what they’re doing is … I know what they’re doing, is they’re saying, “Hey, look. I can live more efficiently, and I also wanna reframe how I look at my life very differently, so that I am coming from this place of abundance, and not being driven by what my neighbors had.”

And one of these guys who talked, Mr. Money Mustache, was like the … He’s one of the founding guys that does this, he’s like, “If you reframe how you look at your life, where for most people, they’re in a community and then they see their neighbor or friend drive around in a fancy new car, and then they look at their old 10 year old car, and they’re like ‘God, my car’s a piece of junk, I really need to get a better car.’ If you then reframe that to be like, ‘You know, how awesome is it that I have this inexpensive to insure, and to maintain, and to register car, and I have all this extra free capital. How awesome is that?’ It totally changes your life, because you’re then no longer trying to, ‘Ah, I gotta spend money on this or that to keep up with these people.’ And that creates a sense of freedom and also the sense of ‘I have more space in my life to think about other things.'”
There’s gonna be a movie about it coming out.

Annie: Oh, that’s cool. I think that, that actually is a very good example of what I talk about in my book, which is changing what the inputs are that give you the reward. Верно? So this idea of don’t fight our tribal nature, right? What tribe is giving you, tribe is giving you two things. One is belongingness, right? I belong to a group, and the other is distinctiveness from other people, and this is something that’s actually just very important to us, in terms of our human condition.

And what the general default for that tribal nature does, is it causes you to compare to your neighbors, right, in the way that you’re saying, where, “Oh, they have a really nice car, I need to have one of those as well.” Just like for me in my poker group, the general default in poker is you see these tribes being formed in poker, and I’m sure you know this from sitting at enough poker tables, is people saying, “Oh, I got so unlucky when I lost that hand.”

And other people agreeing with them, and then saying, “Let me tell you about how I got unlucky.” Верно? Where we want to offload that bad feeling of loss, into a way that socializes it to the world, right? As opposed to privatizes it to ourselves, where we’re onboarding the blame. But you can reframe what it is that you get the reward from.

So the group that I worked with said, “Okay, this is our tribe, what makes you belong to our tribe and be distinct from others is we’re gonna try to be the mistake-admitters. Верно? We’re gonna try to be the ones who are trying to poke around into the hands that we want, and figure out all the disastrous decisions we made in those. And when we lose, we’re gonna try to figure out what was our part in it? And we’re gonna challenge each other when we hear people talking in a way that we think is biased.” And all these things, so that we’re still getting that need for tribe fed, and we’re still getting the social approval that comes with being in a tribe. That was all really good, it was just that the features that were being rewarded were different.

And I feel like that’s the same that you just described to me, that most of us are naturally getting our reward from, “I have a car that’s just as nice as my neighbor’s, or nicer than my neighbor’s.” Or whatever. But they’ve created a tribe now where it’s, “We belong to a tribe where we have turned that on its head, and the reward for us is that we have an older car. That our expenses are lower, and that we’re in on a secret that they’re not in on.” Верно?

Because you need that distinctiveness. “We have a secret that they don’t have, and so they’re looking at me in a certain way, like, ‘Oh, look at you with your poor, schleppy car.’ And I’m like the Hobbit, you don’t know the secret. This is the secret to success in my life, right here; that I can resist the temptation to give in to what normal humans are giving in to, in terms of what the comparison is.”

I think it’s a very good example of how you can remold tribe to fit in with what your long-term goals are, by allowing you to still get the short-term reward that we all need. It’s just that, that short-term reward is aligning with what you actually want in the long run.

Steve: Верно. That’s a great … I mean, I love how you analyzed that, because that’s exactly what’s happening, the folks that are in this Financial Independence movement, they totally reframe it to be like, “Hey, I’m proud of how frugal I am.” And they go out of their way to demonstrate that to their friends, but also in their outside lives.

I mean, just quick story. I met the community manager of this site called BiggerPockets, and I’m gonna hopefully go onto their podcast or get them on here as well. They’re real estate. But this woman-

Annie: I just went on BiggerPockets. [crosstalk]. Yeah, you can go listen to me on BiggerPockets.

Steve: Oh did you? That’s awesome. Did you talk to Mindy Jensen?

Annie: Нет нет. Who did I talk to? David and-

Steve: I know they run two podcasts. There’s BiggerPockets, and there’s BiggerPockets of Money, so I’m talking about the one BiggerPockets of Money. But anyway, so I was gonna grab coffee with her, so we’re in this resort and everything’s super expensive, and I’m like, “All right, why don’t we go in here?” And she’s like, “I can’t buy this food. It is just way too overpriced.” And I was like, “I’ll buy for you.” She’s like, “I won’t let you spend the money on this.” So we had this whole negotiation about where we could eat, and what was possible.

She’s like, “I wanna go out to the store and get food.” I was like, “All right. But there’s also the time value of money and everything else.” Anyway, I appreciate that she stuck to her principles. She ultimately did let me buy her a bagel with cream cheese on it, for $4.50. That was the one thing we could find, and we got some water.

But I appreciated the fact that hey, the core founding principle is, “Look, we’re gonna be frugal, we’re gonna be efficient with our money.” And on the other hand, she’s doing huge real estate deals. It’s not like she’s short of money, she just chooses to live her life this way, and it creates this sense of … Because we’re all sitting here worried about, “Oh, am I gonna run out of money, da, da, da …” And then you look around and you’re like, “oh, what are the current costs of my life? What if it was a quarter of what it is? What would my life be like then?” Well it’d be pretty friggin different.
So I think you’re gonna be hearing more about this, but cool.

Annie: Yeah, well it’s a great example. I hadn’t really thought about that movement in that way, but the way that you described it, really triggered that connection for me, as a really wonderful example of how you can create tribe around thoughtfully thinking about how can we use this belongingness, and the distinctiveness, to actually get us toward a goal that we really want to get to?

As opposed to the default of how we normally act, and it’s really a beautiful example, and I mean I know about the movement, but I’d never thought about it in that way, until you described it in that particular way.

Steve: Well, I’m just learning more about it, too. I just think that there’s a lot of lessons for folks from that community, because they have detached themselves successfully from the normal framework. I mean, we’re all conditioned, we grow up, we’re getting stuff, and we’re taught, “Well, the American Way is to buy more stuff.” I mean, that’s our whole economy right? We gotta buy and consume more stuff, it drives the economy and employs everybody.

On the flip side, we’re getting more and more efficient at creating this stuff, we’re realizing stuff doesn’t make us happier, because hedonic adoption, so I do think that there’s more-

Annie: Choice makes us unhappy.

Steve: Ага. Exactly. There’s all the … Now that we have all this stuff around us, and all this information coming at us all the time, now more and more people are moving towards hey, they wanna see people in person. They wanna have more thoughtful conversations. So hopefully, we will get to a happy place in our society where we can have our core needs taken care of, but still have time in our lives for our family and friends, and the things that are meaningful to us, and do meaningful work, right? Which is what I think really is the source of happiness, not the new 911 in your garage that makes you happy for about a week, and then you’re like, “Wow, this thing’s a lot to insure.”

So look, Annie, I appreciate your time. I know we’ve gone way over, but I just wanna … I’m gonna try and summarize what I’m learning here, and feel free to correct me. But my takeaway from your book, Thinking In Bets is one, there’s a ton to learn. You’ve learned a ton from playing poker and you’ve applied … And also, obviously, all the work you’ve done and research about decision-making, and we almost have to be aware of the biases and beliefs that we bring to the table, and how that affects our thinking.

And then there’s a lot of great lessons if you start to accept the uncertainty in life, try to weight the potential outcomes, and make decisions accordingly. So if there’s a high likelihood, you can put that amount of resources into it. Or high likelihood something will happen, and also high likelihood it’s gonna be really influential for your life, or whatever your business, you can put more resources into that. And if it’s low likelihood, or low outcome, you should invest resources accordingly.

And another big thing is, just learning, right? Having a system to get feedback, and welcome that feedback loop in your life, where you … Annie, one thing you mentioned to me that I thought was great, was you wanna have, I think it was strong beliefs but loosely held. Or evolving beliefs, I guess, is how you put it.

Annie: Yes, but I shouldn’t get credit for that, by the way. That’s a common … Don’t give me credit for coming up with that exact thing that you say, I just wanna not take credit for it.

Steve: Хорошо. But I think that idea of having evolving beliefs, right, that the world is changing, we’re learning, and don’t always default back to how you thought about things, it’s an important part of evolving as a person. Anything else that I missed there, in that summary?

Annie: I think that was a pretty darn good summary, I gotta say.

Steve: Я ценю это. I really did enjoy the book, a lot, and I’m gonna share it with our team, and hopefully our listeners pick up on it. So anything else you wanna cover, any big influencers, or things you wanna call out?

Annie: Yeah, I would love [crosstalk] make it, because it sounds like we’re mission-aligned. Yeah, and the second thing I would say is that, I think this kind of thinking, and this kind of decision-making takes practice. So I have a newsletter that I put out every Friday, which is really looking at current events, and it’s four or five pieces in each newsletter, which is looking at things that are happening out in the world currently, and how do you apply this kind of thinking to them.

So as an example, in the last newsletter, I think I had a piece about the Serena Williams to-do, and what the world really tells us about whether there was sexism or not, and what different arguments people were making, and how you can evaluate those. Just as an example, look at things that are coming out in social science, or behavioral economics, and look at some results that are coming out. Looking at things that are in politics, and how to apply this kind of thinking to evaluate things in business.

I think probably in the next newsletter that I put out, I’m gonna do something about what the shift in opinion before and after the Kavanaugh hearings were, on opinion about who was telling the truth and who wasn’t. Not such a surprise, it seems to be aligned completely with what your political party is, and nobody’s opinion changed very much from the new information, which isn’t that surprising.

So I’m gonna talk about that, and talk about how tribe really drives what your opinion is, and affects the way that you process information. So that’s just a flavor, but people can go onto my website, annieduke.com, and they can see archives of the newsletter there, so they can see if it’s to their taste, that way you can try it before you subscribe to it. But hopefully some people will find some value in that, and will subscribe to it.

Steve: Thanks, Annie, for being on our show. Thanks Davorin Robison for being our sound engineer. Anyone listening, thanks for listening. Hopefully you found this useful. Our goal at NewRetirement is to help anyone plan and manage their retirement so they can make the most of their money and time. And if you made it this far, I encourage you to, as you said, check out Annie’s book, Thinking in Bets, and her website and newsletter, and How Do I Decide, as well. And also welcome you to check out our site, and planning tools at newretirement.com, where you can build your own plan for free, and take advantage of our premium advanced tools, and personal support.

We also have a private Facebook group, and you can find us on Twitter as well, @newretirement. The last thing here, which we haven’t asked for it before but if you like this, we would love to … Either way, would love to get reviews on iTunes, or Stitch, or anywhere. We read them and we’ll try to change the show, based on your feedback. It just helps us build awareness for what’s going on out there.
All right, so that’s it. Thanks again, and have a great day.