214: Gabriel Weinberg | How Mental Models Boost Super Thinking

Transcript for Gabriel Weinberg | How Mental Models Boost Super Thinking (Episode 214)

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:03] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFillippo. My friend Gabriel Weinberg is something of a genius, is the founder of DuckDuckGo, the search engine that actually doesn't track you, which even now is a pretty novel concept. Today, though we're not talking about search and privacy but about mental models. Mental models help us understand and internalize complex concepts so that we can use them for ourselves. Today, Gabriel and I will discuss quite a few mental models, teach you how to use them, and give you a lot of tools you can leverage to look at and understand complicated concepts, cognitive biases and problems much more easily giving you a more accurate and comprehensive view of the world around you. It might sound complex, but it's actually the opposite. This episode will help you make better decisions more reliably and see through smoke and mirrors even if someone is intentionally trying to deceive you and that is a skillset worth having.

[00:57:00] I met Gabriel through my network and I'm teaching you how to create amazing connections for yourself for personal and professional reasons. I'm doing it for free over at Six-Minute Networking, which is at jordanharbinger.com/course. By the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribed to the course and the newsletter, so come join us. Enjoy this episode with Gabriel Weinberg.

[00:01:20] We're hearing a lot about mental models lately and your book, Super Thinking--other friends like James clear with Atomic Habits, Shane Parrish with his book, the Great Mental Models, creative title. What are mental models and why are they important? It seems like this is trending up in geekdom these days.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:01:38] Yes, it is trending. Mental models are a fancy word for concept and basically, you have concepts for everything. But there are several concepts and there's about 300 we put in a book that are just generally useful across all sorts of areas. So for example, I was a physics major in college --lots of physics concepts you probably don't care at all about and aren't generally useful-- but one that is critical mass. Critical mass was the concept of a mass of material that needs to be there to create a nuclear chain reaction, very useful in physics and sure in history of the world, but also useful in general in decision making. So products can have critical mass. This show probably got a critical mass at some point.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:21] Is it like before things snowball and take on a life of its own?

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:02:23] That's right. And so it's like the amount of material you need before that happens. If you can recognize that this is a critical mass situation and you can immediately realize that it's going to have a snowball at some point and you can start to ask questions like, “Well how many people do I need to reach critical mass or can I do it earlier?” Or, “Is there an easier way to reach it?” And so these are effectively shortcuts of how to think strategically. And so if you can recognize all of these, like that one's from physics, but there's one from economics and biology and you know all the different science areas, and math--If you have all these in your head and you get a random situation, you can be like I have these three things apply, you can really quickly assess a situation and be a better decision-maker.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:08] Right. That makes sense. So every discipline has its own mental models like you said physics. Law for me, which comes in handy occasionally. When I think of like, “Oh, this is what this weird Latin thing that I've never used before.” It's kind of like that. And people all the time will ask me, how do you come up with these analogies on the show so quickly or these metaphors on the show so quickly to relate one thing to another? It's kind of a sister to mental models.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:03:35] I mean it's just through your coursework, learn deeply ones that you use metaphorically all the time. But then there are some general ones that everyone can use kind of all the time. But yeah, that's exactly the same concept.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:49] Okay. That makes sense. Of course, some being physics only, I can't think of any because I'm not a physicist, but I'm sure there are tons.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:03:55] Lagrange point.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:56] Cool. Never heard of it.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:03:57] You don't have to worry about it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:58] I don’t have to worry about it. I don’t need it. And then we've got like critical mass for example, is the one you gave. Critical mass is a real easy one I think because everyone's heard this term before. I think there's probably a huge percentage of people that don't even realize this was for something like the atomic bomb. All right, this is how much, I don’t know, the uranium we need.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:04:17] Exactly, that's where it actually came from.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:18 It is? Okay. Yeah. So plenty of people don't even know that. They think it's for apps. With these many people using DuckDuckGo browser before they start to tell enough people that we get enough traction every day where we hit our goals or something like that.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:04:31] A party can have critical mass, like a house party.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:33] Sure. I think the classic critical mass illustration is that video where there's a guy dancing on the hill.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:04:40] Oh, I love that video.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:41] Do you know what I'm talking about.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:04:42] Yeah. It's a first follower to a leader.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:45] Yes. So for those of you who don't know this video, there's this concert full of, I don't know, drunk hippies or something and one guy's dancing by himself. Everyone is kind of laughing at him. And then another person probably dares her friend to go dance with this guy, just to sort of probably just a tool in honestly. And then other people are like, “Screw it, let's go dance.” And then suddenly the whole hill is dancing. The critical mass was, however many people, wherever you want to sort of split hairs, however many people that took before everyone went, “Oh, it's okay to go dance now because it's not weird.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:05:15] Yeah. There's a lot of like related mental models. So we tried to do in this book is like relate them all together. So like the tipping point is another one. People have heard of that person coming over where the critical mass point is really the tipping point of like everyone dancing.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:29] Tipping point and critical mass are part of the same.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:05:33] Yeah. A lot of times you'll have a concept and then to operationalize it or to describe it in another way is that is another mental model.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:41] Oh, okay. I didn't realize that. I think the original mental model that you bring up in Super Thinking is math. And I thought, well, okay, everyone has math. So, and it's such an old mental model, we look at like Greek philosophers and things like that who came up with this, and mathematicians. There's a story of this tribe that really only could count to three, which is shocking that even exists.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:06:05] Yeah, it is amazing. Basically, almost no mental models are innate to you. Like you're not born with them. And so there are really groups of people who can't add really.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:18] That is crazy to me.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:06:20] And so we start out with the book with that. But also that everyone can relate to who generally is not one of those tribes can add, but you can't remember a point when you didn't know multiplication because usually, you learn that in like third or fourth grade or something like that. If you know multiplication—Multiplication is just repeated addition. When you do like two times four, it's just two plus two plus two.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:41] That's how I did it in third grade. It was like, “Nine times eight. Uh, if I can just remember this, but I'm just going to do nine plus nine plus—"

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:06:47] Exactly. And you learn the kind of faster way to do multiplication. That's much faster, especially if you have a calculator than doing addition like 30 times like if you have 30 times seven. Once you know multiplication exists, you never go back to doing repeated addition, especially when we have a calculator. That's like what mental models for, we use as a metaphor. Because once you know the equivalent multiplication and all these other scenarios, you don't just go back to repeated addition. It's much slower.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:13] Right. Although I will admit now when I’m multiplying, I'm like, “Okay, six times eight is 48 but I can't remember what the other one is. So I'm going to have to do that one and then subtract.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:07:21] That’s why I use the calculator. Okay. Let's assume you have a calculator. You just don't know what the time symbol, right?

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:07:27] Yeah. Just, oh crap! What was that again? Now division is a whole different thing. It's kind of like me subtracting a bunch of times and it just gets clunkier from there. So thank God for calculators. But the concept of unforced errors is interesting. Tell us what those are and how do we avoid those?

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:07:44] Yeah, this is another thing from the introduction because it's a good way to explain mental models. So unforced errors actually come from tennis. Have you heard this from a tennis player?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:52] No, but I've heard of this and I want to say I'm hearing it more and more now, again, because mental models are probably trending. Unforced error is kind of a—

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:08:00] Yeah, so it's like in tennis, you know, generally, you think in tennis is hitting back and forth and whoever, like strategically places the ball wins the point, but often points they're lost just because someone hits it into the net and or you just serve double fault and hit it right into the net.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:08:15] Those are unforced errors because the other person didn't force you to make the error. You've made it there on your own. And so as a metaphor, if you can make less unforced errors in your life or decision making, you're just going to be better at decision making. And so part of the idea of mental models is to help you make less unforced errors. And so like the first whole set of mental models that we talk about in the book is all these bias models. So your brain has, you know, we call it intuition and it's generally wrong a lot.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:46] Yeah. Thank you for saying that. Let's repeat that. Your brain has intuition and it's generally wrong because there's this whole thing now there's whole field of, “Well, your gut is correct,” and it's like, “No, your gut is loaded with cognitive bias.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:09:01] Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:02] “Crappy experiences you had 20 years ago that you don't remember that are things coloring the way that you think.” Like, “No, your intuition is probably crap.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:09:11] It's not that you shouldn't like use it as a guide maybe or hypothesis, but you shouldn't just go with it without checking it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:20] Especially when it's, “Well, you know, this seems like it's a con and I've seen people get conned this way, but you know, my intuition is just saying, ‘You're a standup guy. Here's all my money.’ ” Right? It's like, “Okay, start there. Don't end there.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:09:33] Right and so there is a lot of mental models about how your mind works that explain why your intuition kind of fails you. Like confirmation bias is a very common one where once you like confirm what would be the term but you agree to something or you believe something or commit to a belief that's something you're like, it's just seeing facts in line up with your belief thereafter. You're not really looking for the opposite point of view. Then you pointed out con people, there are a bunch of just influence models that you have to watch out for like reciprocity. If salespeople often give you like free concert tickets or you know nonprofits mail you address labels, they're doing that because once someone gives you something, you have a real innate feeling that you want to give something back so they use these tools.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:20] There are rules about this in corporations and especially in government. I, I've worked a lot with military special forces and intelligence agencies and sometimes I'm like, “Hey, let's go eat.“ And they're like, “We can but you can't pay because it's over a hundred dollars,” and it's like this whole annoying thing because I'm like I don't want to eat at Chipotle. I want to take you guys out to sushi. But they know that even these razor-sharp thinker decision-makers are subject to, “Well he flew me to Hawaii so I have to give him a contract even though it's $300,000. There's a whole set of regulations behind why companies can't do this. I remember when my dad accepted a gift basket, he worked for Ford. This is like literally with like mustard and sausage in it. And I remember we were eating it and the next year I was like, “Hey, where's the gift basket?” And he's like, “Can't do that anymore. New rule, no gift baskets from suppliers.” And I thought this is BS man. These are awesome. And they find out he had kids and they'd be like, “Hey, your kid like race cars, here's a bunch of cool stuff.” He can’t do any of that anymore because they know that especially when it's corporate money, you're just like, ah, screw it. I liked it. It really gives me a lot of stuff.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:11:29] Yeah, I mean it really does influence people and so you need to kind of be aware of all these models if you don't want to be out duly influencers just make a bad decision.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:36] Sure, sure. First principle is the idea of approaching new or familiar situations in innovative ways and I'd love it if you'd separate first principles with conventional wisdom because the example you gave is job searches. This is a concept I don't think many are familiar with. I hear first principles and videos done by McKinsey and I'm just like sound smart, but I have no idea what they're talking about.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:12:00] Yeah. I mean, so first principle is really just throwing out assumptions. So when you start a job search, for example, you may assume that you need a college degree for that job or you should do the same thing you're already doing or that this job has a certain salary range just because you heard your friend say that. And those are all baked in assumptions that you haven't tested yet. So what first principle thinking does is start from scratch and try to verify that those assumptions are correct. And in this case, it can be as you go all the way back and say, “What kind of career do I really want? What are the like attributes of it, location, salary, et cetera, and try to build up from the bottom?” Or you could say, “I want this job and here are my reasons why I'm going to check those reasons are actually accurate.” And you kind of go from the top down or the bottom up. But either way, you're listing out your actual assumptions and you're going to test them.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:57] Most people never do this, right? So with the job search, how would this work in the context of a job search? What does this look like?

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:13:03] So in the job search, I would suggest the bottom-up approach. So you're really starting from the bottom and try to assess what do I want out of a job? You know what fundamentally you need, you know you need some money, you what you're going to work on, where it's going to be, who your co-workers are. All these different things are attributes of the job and you should define them and try to write them down, prioritize them. And then once you have that, then you can go look and say, “Okay, what jobs might fit that.” And it may be a completely different careers than you had ever been thinking initially once you write that down. That really opens up your ability, like the whole solution space of the job in this case.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:39] It's funny you should mention that because I remember doing some exercises like this as a young person, maybe even in middle or high school, probably even earlier, and coming up with the idea that I wanted to be like Dan Rather if you remember him, like on the news, traveling all these crazy places and reporting, and my mom told me, “Ooh, you don't want to do that. Those guys don't make any money,” which is a huge lie. She just didn't want me to go into a war zone.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:14:00] That’s the perfect example. So if you take that assumption and you're like, “Okay, that career is out.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:03] I was like, “Oh, that's such a bummer because it looks great.” And there were so many years where I thought, “I really want to do that, but I don't want to be poor.” And then as I got older I was like, “I see this guy everywhere. How is it possible that he is poor?” And then in high school, of course, I was like, “Wait a second.” But then, of course, you get sucked into all these other assumptions like, “Oh well that is impossible to attain. You really got to start early and you got to be talented and special and I'm not any of those things.” So my best bet to living a rich life is like to go become an attorney, which I did. And then I went, “Wow, this totally stinks,” and here we are full circle, having not really gone for what I wanted for a really long time because I didn't break things down. I didn't break down these assumptions early enough.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:14:46] Yeah, I mean, it's key if you ever want to start a company too, cause like every company is really built on assumptions. Like I assume customers will want my product. I assume people pay this much for it, et cetera. And all really started a company has at the beginning, it's just testing assumptions and a lot of failed companies, they go in without, first of all, sinking in and they just have some mastermind vision of how it's all going to work. It never works according to that idea they planned.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:14] Yeah. Yeah, good point there. There are so many tech innovations --and I put innovations in air quotes-- that I've seen in San Francisco or elsewhere where you just go, “Okay, why are you making a cup that tells you how much water is in it?” “Well, people want to know how much they've drunk.” “Well, okay, I know this is a 16-ounce cup. Can I just finish it and then resell it and I know it's had 16 ounces of water and I'm about to have 32,” and then they're like, “Well, no, no, no. I mean, it'll tell you like in real-time how hydrated you are over time and all this stuff.” And I'm like, well then I don't really need the cup. I can just enter the data in the app. Right?” So they made a crappy app and a crappy, well, not a crappy, a mediocre cup, but the cup didn't do what it was supposed to and then the app didn't do much at all. So I ended up with a hydration app from a different company and regular cup. That company doesn't exist anymore, as you might imagine. Some other models that I think are really useful Ockham's razor. Tell us about this one because I think this is misused a lot.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:16:08] Yeah. Ockham's razor is, and then there's a sister thing called Hanlon’s razor, which is pretty interesting as applied to people. Ockham's razor is basically just saying the simplest answer is often the true one. Now it's not always a true one, but it's saying that if you have a lot of data and you have a simple answer, you should try to investigate that answer first before you investigate your conspiracy answer basically. That's really complex.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:36] I'm reminded of the whole pyramids are made by aliens thing. Like that is very simple. They came and they just dropped him in the sand. Very simple answer. The other answer with all the slavery and the elephants pulling huge blocks up a hill for a hundred years is more complex for sure, but probably more likely.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:16:55] Right. And it’s the same thing with the assumption. You don't stop at Ockham's razor. You go test all these things. You're going to test your theory in real life. The people counterpart is this thing called Hanlon's razor, which is never to attribute to malice, which can be explained by carelessness. And what that means is in general life is you're often faced with situations where, you know, for the most common places comes up is like texts. So you get a text from your friend and you're like, “What is he saying? Or she's saying?” Like, you think they might be angry at you or you know, they might be trying to screw you or something and you might get angry. But the real answer might be just that they didn't have a lot of time to write the texts. They were careless and that is the most common answer is most people aren't necessarily out to get you. They’re just, you know, being careless. So if you go in with that intention, it can save you a lot of time and effort.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:52] Yeah. You have this sort of practical concepts here. If we want to increase empathy in our thinking, we look at, you call it the MRI technique. I don't know if that's something that you came up with.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:18:01] No, it wasn't me and I'm forgetting the person over them. So I have to credit them separately, but it was a psychologist, most respectful interpretation. That's the way to really operationalize the Hanlon's razor, which is you basically just get everybody the benefit of the doubt. And it sounds like you could be naive, but it's not really because you're not necessarily, you have to do it forever. It's that first interpretation. You're asking to be more inquisitive instead of accusatory. So if someone writes you, just like the canonical example, someone just writes you the text back K or okay --which I'm guilty of a lot-- and people are like, you're being dismissive or whatever. But the real answer is, “No, I'm in the car. I'm not trying to text while I'm driving.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:40] Right. I'm on the 405 Well, if you're on the 405, you have all kinds of time, in fact, you could write a book in the car, you're out on a highway that's moving.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:18:48] Exactly. So the most practical interpretation is maybe they're busy, you know, and then you ask.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:53] That makes sense. It's kind of like the fundamental attribution error.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:18:56] Yes, this is the point of them being interrelated. It's like different ways to look at it of the same thing. And so if you know a bunch of these, you can get your head around the concept.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:19:08] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Gabriel Weinberg. We'll be right back.

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[00:23:32] Don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Gabriel Weinberg. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com/deals. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe. Subscribing to the show was absolutely free. It just means you get all the latest episodes in your podcast player as they're released so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Gabriel Weinberg,

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:07] We wrote an article about the fundamental attribution error. If you want to check it out, it's jordanharbinger.com/articles and what that was about, well, the fundamental attribution error is when you get cut off in traffic and you go, “This person is a bad person and drives like a terrible person and is inconsiderate.” We judge other people based on their actions and we judge ourselves by our intentions. So if we're weaving around crazily and traffic, it's cause we're late, there's an emergency, it's important. Other people do it. It's because we, and then we ascribe all these negative characteristics to them. That seems to sort of hold hands with MRI technique.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:24:43] If you're doing, if you're making the fundamental attribution error, you're not doing an MRI.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:47] Right, exactly. Exactly.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:24:49] If you want to avoid it, you should do the MRI.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:51] The book, the Super Thinking, is full of all these really interesting examples, one of which was nudging and on restaurant menus. I always wondered why some things are in boxes and when I go out to eat with my brother-in-law and my wife, for example, he'll go, “Ooh, this is the house special.” And I'm like, “That doesn't mean anything. It's in a box. It means that this is the highest profit margin thing. Or they can make a huge pot of it in the morning and it stays there all day.” So they're like, “Ooh, if we sell more of this, it's gone. We don't have to throw it away and we make, you know, 30 cents on the dollar for it or something like that.” I didn't know that.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:25:25] Yeah. Restaurants are using a lot of influence models. I'm nudging just as little cues that kind of nudge you into the direction people want you to go in, like specials. Other things that restaurants do often is anchoring. So they will throw out really high priced items that not anyone really buys, but it anchors you to higher prices for the rest of the menu. If you look at a menu, all of these are like embedded on a menu. You can almost take apart a menu in and kind of see these things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:56] That's fascinating. Where does the anchoring take part? I'm trying to imagine where they put super expensive stuff so that you—

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:26:04] It depends on the restaurant, but even on any restaurant, they're often, people aren't necessarily buying the most expensive thing on the menu. And so like the people look at it and then once they look at it, they're like, “Oh, well now I'm buying like the second or third thing less expensive and I'm okay buying that because it's not the most expensive thing.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:22] Oh, right, so it's when there's like, “Hey, this burger has caviar on it. It's $200. There's another burger that—"

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:26:29] That is 20 bucks. It's still a $20 burger, but you're like, “It's not the $200 one.” So they anchored your price of burgers higher than you would normally pay.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:39] That's brilliant. I'm such a sucker for all this stuff. Here's the thing. I've studied mental models, cognitive bias, but when it's in real-time, it is so difficult to go, wait a minute, this is nudging and they're trying to get us to do this and then this is anchoring me to a lower price because it's all happening subconsciously. Your brain is processing all this stuff really quickly because these biases exist. We've evolved all these things. They exist to help us get along better in the world, to make data analysis faster, not necessarily more accurate but faster. So we have to kind of like slow down our natural processing, take a step back, look what lens we might be using, what bias lens we might be using, and then undo that.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:27:18] There was another kind of mental model of reversible versus irreversible decisions and you could also kind of subclassify us as consequential and inconsequential, but reversible decisions are ones that you can change really easily. I kind of think of it as a door that you can walk back through and irreversible decisions are ones that have really high consequences.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:37] Should we have kids or should we not have.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:27:39] Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:39] We don't like test that and then go, “You know what, this is a bad idea.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:27:42] A lot of these are—you know there's the day-to-day decisions and then there are these larger decisions both professionally and personally. And when you realize you have an irreversible decision, then you really want to take a step back and not go fast at all. You really want to slow down and even start to do a bunch more things like that. Or later in the book, my decision making where you're writing things down and you're using various specific processes and even statistics and bigger company decision cases to stop you from making these bias problems right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:14] When I read about how you do that at DuckDuckGo, I thought, “Yeah, I could never run a company like this because it's so complicated sometimes. There's all this data and you have to find it and you have to make sure it's good and then you have to present it and then you have to think about it and make a decision. And then everyone fights you or whatever and you have to convince all of them. And I thought, “What a pain. I'm so lucky I just do this podcast. This is so much easier.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:28:37] One interesting thing, one mental model that we use a lot is this one called forcing function. The reason why it's called forcing function is a function that forces you to do something. But the way that we use it is you schedule different things into your calendar. So if it's personal, it's like use scheduling, going to the gym. But in a company, we schedule in postmortems after all of our projects to be like, what went well and what didn't go well. We schedule in one-on-ones with someone every week and we have like board meetings every 10 weeks where we have a roadmap that we produce. And so all of these are by default scheduled into the calendar to force people to think critically. And by scheduling it in, it forces you to have these conversations --like what you're talking about-- a little more difficult, but at least if you don't schedule it in, people just won't have them because they're difficult. So you have to schedule it and make it the culture and the default. And then people will have the conversations and they'll still be difficult sometimes, but they're not as difficult.

[00:29:44] So here's another kind of subkey to this is we do it for every single project. Whether that project went really well or went really poorly. If you only do it when things go poorly, then there are always bad conversations and no one likes them.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:54] Yeah. Everyone dreads it.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:29:57] But if you're doing it all the time, you have the meeting every week and after every project, then it's not necessarily a stigmatized thing. Because most of it's good. The project one grade, it's like high fives all around and we can still talk about the few things that maybe we could have improved. And it's not like a negative event every time.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:13] Right, if you don't do it when things go well, you miss the opportunity to go, “Hey look, we this went well but we kind of got lucky here, here, and here.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:30:22] It’s actually the best time to improve because when things didn't go well like you're stressed and you don't really want to change your behavior at that point, you want to just climb out of the hole. But when you're doing really well, that's like the perfect time to improve because you're like, ”I have some extra time I can work on this.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:38] Ah, that's brilliant. The idea that we reject new ideas kind of on a reflex, turns out it is a reflex, this Semmelweis reflex. Is that what it’s called? I never heard of this.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:30:50] It's really unfortunate. People think that science is very methodical without emotion, but it turns out when you look back through the history of science, basically, we go way, way far before we believe the outsider and then a change of science. So, this guy, a sad story, he discovered --this was in the 1800s, I think it was 1800s-- that all sorts of babies were dying at childbirth. And he did experiments in the hospital and he found that one side of the wing, they weren't dying as much by like half as much. And the only difference between the two sides was one, the doctors were delivering babies versus midwives. He tried to figure out what is the difference between them. And he finally figured out—

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:39] Midwives had a higher success rate.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:31:42] Yeah, double. And he finally figured out that it was because the doctors were doing cadaver research at the same time with doing delivering babies and not washing their hands.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:54] So gross.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:31:55] So gross.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:56] Like you're handling like this dead rotting body that's not preserved and you’re like “Hang on a second, I got to go deliver this kid.” You're reaching in there, pulling out a kid and then you go right back to the dead body.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:31:07] So he did an experiment and he had people wash their hands and cut it immediately, and then he couldn't get people to do it amazingly, and he couldn't get this to take off even though it literally cut the like death rate in half. And it took another like decades before this work. And the problem was two-fold. One, he didn't really know why. It seemed like it was the doctor's fault. I mean it was, they weren't washing their hands, but he didn't know—The germs weren't invented, like discover.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:38] Nobody discover germs.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:32:39] Yeah. And so it wasn't until Louis Pasteur discovered germ theory that then everyone was like, “Oh, now I can see the stuff under a microscope and I should wash my hands.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:48] I believe--didn't he have the hypothesis that there were small invisible organisms? And they were like, “Oh you’re mentally ill. You have to go—"

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:32:56] They put him in an insane asylum, but the evidence was there like overwhelming evidence where it's just rejected. And that's happened again and again in science. So much though as Max Planck, his famous line that's like, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:12] Oh man, that is pretty dark.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:33:14] Yeah, it's pretty dark. But unfortunately, that happens a lot in companies too and probably in your personal life to family members, you ever try to convince somebody to change their mind about an ingrained political opinion.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:26] Yeah, good luck.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:33:28] . And so you know, it's difficult and so this reflex of to reject something new is really hard. It’s really ingrained. If you want to develop against that, you really have to have a culture that has the ability to kind of embrace new ideas. We've gone so far that like one of our core values is --of only three-- question assumptions. And so we've tried to just build it in that like we're not right at everything all the time in the organization's going to be wrong a lot and we're going to constantly question our assumptions.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:58] I really liked that. In fact, Jen, can you write down question assumptions somewhere? I like that as a core value and I feel like not only do we do a lot of that here, we need to do more of it all the time.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:34:08] Yeah. And you have to make it a value because people, it's so difficult that it's against our innate feelings that if you don't make it something like that, it just not going to happen.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:19] It makes sense because in my own life, in my own head, because when I hear new ideas and I don't want them to believe them or I don't want to do them. Maybe it's a lot of work or maybe it's like, ”Ooh, I have to like take an ego blow and realize that I can improve on this thing that I thought I didn't need to work on anymore whatever.” I always go, “Wait, I don't like that idea, but why?” And if the answer is because it's going to be hard or annoying to do, it's like, “Well, okay.” Or, “Hey, it makes you look bad to think you've been doing this wrong for a decade,” but you have to do that or you'll never improve. It's never comfortable.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:34:53] Ego is at the center of a lot of it. There's another good book called Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:59] Yeah, she was on the show.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:35:00] And she's got a good way to really make this work for people too. We were talking about confirmation bias earlier. A lot of the problem is you started to have a belief and you confirm it's my belief and then it's part of your identity and then you don't want to hear a new idea because it's going to hurt you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:14] Yeah it’s going to mess with the pictures. You already baked the cake.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:35:18] So instead of totally committing to something --in this book the mental models called thinking gray. You try just not to commit to things. What she says --her book is 99 percent sure. If you can say you're 99 percent sure, it's very different than 100% sure. Because you're conveying that you're open to the idea. And so with thinking gray, you can be like, “look, I'm getting a lot of information that sounds like it could be the right answer, but I'm not going to say it's right. Like I'm going to just keep holding out that I could be wrong forever.” You're never totally committing to your identity at that point.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:49] Yeah. What is it called? Is that an asymptote where it goes down but never quite—

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:35:54] Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to picture it. It is like you never get to 100 percent on anything, so you're always willing if the right evidence comes along to change your position.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:03] You talked about confirmation bias and we mentioned that before. It's a common character here on the show. What about does disconfirmation bias? I'd never heard of that. Obviously, it exists. I was surprised when I heard it. I shouldn't have been. What is that?

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:36:16] It happens in both ways, right? You get confirmation bias when you confirm your belief and you're like, I'm ready for that. Disconfirmation bias is you also block out other things. There's something called the backfire effect, which is related to this, which is a good name because basically when you try to convince somebody of something just like the handwashing thing, you want to bring overwhelming evidence to them. You think that that would convince them because you're like, “Look, I know you've confirmed this belief, but I'm going to bring this ever overwhelming evidence to you. Unfortunately through disconfirmation bias, people have a backfire effect on it, whereas people actually get in their beliefs stronger than before, which relates to the whole reflex.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:01] Frustrating.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:37:01] Unfortunately, there are not great structural ways to get people to change. I mean, like we said, you have to not get them to commit in the first place or else you have to connect with them more on an emotional level or get them to become in a vulnerable space where they don't feel it's going to hurt their identity.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:21] I'm reading a book about Cult Mind Control where having the author on it literally teaches people how to get other family members out of cults. This sort of makes an appearance. He doesn't say disconfirmation bias, but it really is that he's like you, what you sell in families. What you think is going to happen is you're going to get them over for dinner one night even though they're supposed to be isolated from you and you're going to go, “Look at all this news about your cult and look at who you are and all your friends and family are worried about you and they love you and we're all panicking and crying and look at all these bad things your cult does,” and what happens is the person starts like chanting or doing religious BS from their call and rejecting it and then runs out of the house and you never see him again. But what he's saying you need to do is you need to go, “Hey, we're really kind. We're going to be really loving what of this person we're going to get their old self to just peek out for a second and then relate to that.” And then gradually we show them like, “Hey, we're still here for you and we're not spawns of Satan like your cult leaders said, and look, the world's not on fire and all these different things.” That you really have to ease into it. Otherwise, you have the backfire effect with a person.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:38:23] You can't attack someone's identity straight away. And then if it's for you, you have to realize like you have to kind of almost get out of yourself and try to reduce your ego and not have your identity attacked the time.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:36] And the reason that we reject these things so that we can't seem to change quickly is something called cognitive dissonance. And we've talked about this on the show before as well, but I'd love it if you'd explain the concept of cognitive dissonance. It is overused a lot, but I think a lot of us don't really know what it actually means.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:38:52] Just to explain that a higher level about all these different names because we've thrown a lot of terms. It's like part of the reason for writing this and thinking about all these terms is once you have a name for something, you can really start to spot it in the real world. And once you start to spot it, then you can really start to use it. And so the names are actually kind of important so you can learn the names, then you can start to really use the tools. But cognitive dissonance, I imagine you'll see it everywhere once you start looking for it. The idea is it is literally painful to hold two opposing ideas in your brain at once.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:27] For example?

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:39:28] Like, I believe in climate change and I don't believe in climate change. Or any of the things we've been talking about. If you've confirmed a belief on something, like, you know, I like eating meat but I don't want her to animals or something. When people put in labs and they actually like do brain scans on them, they can see like a painful center in the brain light up. When you ask people to think of two contradictory ideas at once, even like one plus one equals two and one plus two equals three or something, you know. And so what ends up happening is people don't want to hold, these composing ideas in their brain. But if they're wrong about something and you're trying to convince them about something else, you're basically introducing an opposing idea to them. You're causing them pain. And so this whole process of changing their mind is a painful, literally a painful process.

And so this whole notion of dissonance is like it's the word for, you know, like a dissonant sound is one that you know, you don't really like. And that's what this is going on in your mind. When you have cognitive dissonance, you have one belief and you're hearing information about another belief that's contradictory and it's causing you anguish. And so when people end up doing is they compartmentalize. And so that's why people are hypocritical in all different ways. They think of one thing in this part of the life and the one thing on this part of their life and you from the outside being like, “You're being totally hypocrite,” but they don't see it because they're blocking it out so they don't feel the pain.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:54] I don't hurt animals. I buy my meat from the supermarket.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:40:56] Yeah, exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:59] Yeah. This makes sense. I love the concept of cognitive dissonance is one when I learned it, “I went, oh yeah, that,” and by the way, all these terms, we'll throw them in the show notes. We'll throw even more in the worksheet for this episode. There are worksheets for every episode that people can get.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:41:14] Cool.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:14] At jordanharbinger.com where the show notes are, so don't worry if you're like, “Oh my gosh, there's so much here.” It'll all be in the show notes and/or the worksheet.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:41:24] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Gabriel Weinberg. We'll be right back after this.

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[00:44:21] Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out our amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com/deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. And if you're listening to us on the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Gabriel Weinberg,

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:49] You've got a great exercise here called the five whys and this was used during the challenger disaster. Take us through this because this I think is very wise. No pun intended.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:45:00] Yeah. So I, earlier I mentioned this concept of postmortem and if people don't know what that is, it literally means post-death and so it came from like doctors doing autopsies and trying to figure out what went wrong. But like I said, we do at DuckDuckGo different projects and while we're asking is what went wrong, what went well, what could we do better next time. When you start to go into what went wrong, you got to ask the question, “Okay, well, what really went wrong?” And that's where these five whys come in. It really is asking a series of whys and digging into what they call the root cause. And so you might ask for like, okay, say it was a postmortem because our site went down or something and say, “Why did the site go down?” “Well, the server broke.” “Okay, why did the server broke?” “Well, you know, it got overloaded.” “Okay, why did it get overloaded?” “Because we didn't have good enough scalability. We didn't have enough servers.” “Why don't we have enough servers? “Because we didn't do it, we're not planning ahead of time enough.” And so you get down to the root cause and then you can say, “Okay, the real answer here is not, we just need to add a little more capacity. It’s we need to have a better planning mechanism for the next five years and build out so we don't have this problem again.” And so you're asking this question again and again until you get to the real reason.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:15] Right. So the Challenger example, sort of mirrors yours. It's like, “What happened?” “Well, the shuttle blew up.” “Okay, well, why?” “Something didn't detach.” “Why?” “There was ice on it.” “Why was there ice on it?” “Well—” And then it gets, it's like dot, dot, dot. There's probably more than five.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:46:30] Yeah. It doesn't have to be five. It could be like, I think in that case I put seven in the book. But that's a really interesting example because it illustrates something that's kind of key to everything we're talking about is that, so it was a mechanical problem for the O-ring. It was like a little black thing that was supposed to hold the fuel in. And what happened was as they launched the shuttle way colder than it ever was before. And so the O-ring busted and you kept asking why and it ended up, why did they launch it even though they knew it was out of the range of the normal range. And it turns out that some engineers said they shouldn't watch it, but management said, “You know, you don't have enough data, we're going to launch it.” And so they did a whole report on this. And so the end result here of the root cause was more of a management problem than it was an engineering problem. Like literally, they hadn't tested it fully in cold weather and they, the decision to go and launch the shuttle was not an engineering decision. It wasn't a management decision.

[00:47:27] And so what often happens in the five whys is you end up in a people problem. Like you start off at a physical or an engineering problem and you end up with so-and-so kind of screwed up because their processes are bad.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:39] Yeah, dammit Weinberg.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:47:40] Yeah, exactly. And so the answer ends up being often not just like put a Band-Aid over it, but we got to change our corporate processes or, or NASA processes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:50] Yeah. I think the people problem being at the root of it is why a lot of people are scared to do these things.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:47:56] Yeah. I mean, it's true. We didn't talk about this, but there's a whole notion of how to do this better. We have these things called, we call them blameless postmortems and the going-in position is no one is going to be blamed for the fault. If there's a screw-up, we all screwed up and it's the process that's screwed up. We're going to improve the process. But if people think they're going to get fired at the end of it—

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:20] Right, they're going to cover their asses.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:48:22] And so you actually have to have a culture with us that it’s not going to happen to get to the real answer these things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:27] Yeah. You almost want them to go, “Hey look, I know that I had a big hand in this thing and this might've been part of the problem, so let's save us three hours of digging and start with—"

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:48:36] Yeah, exactly. Let's acknowledge all of our roles in it, but no one's going to get like, like fired for this or a slap on the wrist or anything. We're just trying to improve.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:45] Right. They have to feel pretty safe to raise their hand and go, “I tripped over the server cord and I didn't plug it back in. “

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:48:53] This culture stuff is difficult to get it right, but if you can get it right, it really can accelerate, you know, the whole company.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:49:00] I'd love to blow through a few different concepts, biases, mental models and sort of have you speak to each one in this part of the show so that people can get an idea.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:49:08] Lightning round.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:49:09] The lightning round but not really like not super lightning.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:49:12] Not too lightning. Rolling thunder.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:49:15] Rolling thunder round. Yeah. Optimistic probability bias is the first one. I love this one because everyone does this and I do this and I think, “Oh crap, that's a bias.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:49:26] This is totally true. I mean this is also the Challenger. The management thought, “Oh you know what, the shuttle launch is going to go fine. We don't have—” This never happened before. But what's the probability? It's probably 50-50 even though it was probably one in a million, even though it was more like 50-50 or something. The report actually said they were orders of magnitude off with the probability, which means powers of 10 off. People do this all the time and it's related to something that people call the narrative fallacy is like if you can make up a story for why it's going to go okay or why something might be true, people were like, “Oh, that's got to be true. That's the reason.” Even though the probability may be very small or very high, and so what it effectively is, is people get probabilities wrong all the time.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:08] Right. If you want something to be true, you enhance the probability. If you want something not to be true, you minimize it.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:50:14] Yeah, exactly. And then by extension, there are other biases that creep into this. There's one called availability bias. And the canonical example here is people over underestimating death causes, you know like we see shark attacks on TV all the time and some people think the shark attack rate is orders of magnitude higher than it really is. People think the death rate from like heart disease is much lower than it actually is.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:40] Because nobody reports on it. Nobody talks about it's not news.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:50:53] Exactly. You know, terrorism is overstated. When people write down the probability of actually getting hurt, whereas the other one's car deaths are understated. It's one of the most risky things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:55] I've told this story on the show before. I remember I was getting literally, I was getting kidnapped like 20 years ago in Mexico in a taxi.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:51:02] That sounds crazy.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:03] It was crazy. I was 20 years old. I was really young and I remember thinking, “Well, this has never happened before, so what are the odds that it is happening now.” And I went, “You know what if you get kidnapped and murdered, you don't show up on a spreadsheet and like people are calculating this. You just vanish.” So I remember thinking like, “Oh, well, this has never happened before.” And then I thought, “That is so dumb. This is illogical thinking. The fact that I'd never been kidnapped and chopped into little pieces before, therefore this time it's probably not happening.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:51:34] Exactly. I mean, we say this all the time with like smoking. It's like I know my uncle who smoked all his life and didn't die of lung cancer. Therefore—

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:43] Yeah anecdotal BS.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:51:45] Exactly. And so a lot of this comes down to unfortunate reality, which is sometimes you have to put some numbers to things. Even if it's rough, like another one from Annie Duke, she’s like to say, “Well, give it a number out of 10. You know, at least there’s a probability.” So people would say they’re working out in 50-50 or  99 because people just like to say it's 100 percent once they believe something that could be true. Try to get some actual numbers behind things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:10] That's a good idea. Annie does say, even if you're totally spit balling try to guess lower less sure than you might even be.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:52:17] Yeah, exactly. Put some numbers to it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:20] The tragedy of the commons. This is something that I remember reading about I think in like property class in law school. And it basically was if everyone can graze their cows in the same field, then your incentive is to let your cows overgraze the field. And now we have that but with antibiotics,

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:52:41] What happens is a lot of times as people are making short-term decisions for themselves, but it actually has a consequence for the rest of the population.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:48] So like climate change and carbon emission.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:52:50] Yeah, all of this stuff, climate change, even a privacy violation to your friends. Like if you share your contact book with some service and now you actually violated the privacy of your friends. You're diminishing the resource for everybody else, spam email, Wikipedia, edits that people kind of edit their own articles, all of these things, but they're polluting this kind of --any kind of pollution or metaphor around pollution has this tragedy of the common effect. But it's related to these more general model called short-termism where you may make short-term decisions and generally short-term decisions aren't necessarily great for long term. And so you want to be thinking more long term, but sometimes do short-term decisions also affect everybody else. And that's where this kind of group scenario. So you can think of like changing lanes in traffic. Like everybody, as soon as you get in traffic, everybody starts changing lanes because they're like that lanes better. But as soon as he started changing lanes, you've just caused more congestion of everybody else. And so it just adds more and more congestion.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:53:53] The tyranny of small decisions. I'm not sure if I even remember this one, but the example is splitting the check at a cafe. So I'm like, “Ooh, that's something everyone.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:54:03] These are two sides of the same coin. Let’s simplify it. So you go to a restaurant and there are two meals. You can get the cheap one or the expensive one. You know when you're by yourself you might be like, “Okay, I'm going to go for the cheap one.” When you're with a group you're like, “Okay, well, the group's going to split this check so maybe I'll go for the expensive one.” But if everybody makes that same decision now, everybody just paid for the expensive meal which you weren't going to pay for it if you were there by yourself.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:33] Oh that's so funny. Yeah. I remember going to like some crab place. My friend got a salad and someone else got all-you-can-eat oysters or something and his was like $87 and my friend Dorie Clark, who you might know got like a side salad is price six bucks.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:54:50] It happens to us all the time because my wife and I don't really drink.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:52] Yeah. Worst! Like you guys had three bottles of wine. I had this, “How was my bill $60? Oh right, I'm basically buying a bottle of wine for the table.” Freeriding and herd immunity. This is a vaccine thing essentially, we're talking about this with Dr. McCarthy who's a disease specialist, but free-riding and herd immunity is really apropos ideas

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:55:14] Herd immunity comes from vaccines. And it's this idea that you need to have a certain percentage of the people that population to be get vaccinated or else you can get outbreaks. And the reason is, is because outbreaks spread because there are people to infect, but if everyone's vaccinated, there's no one to infect, and so it turns out some of these diseases are extremely contagious. So like the measles outbreaks, you need 95% approximately of people in the community to be vaccinated or else you get outbreaks. And that's kind of what we're seeing in the country. But as a metaphor, it's really useful well beyond this specific area. So think about the company perspective. If you have a policy or a process and everybody needs to follow it because it's a good practice. Say it's like everyone has to update their projects every week, so everyone else can be informed to them or there's an expense policy and everybody is only allowed a certain amount per day when they're traveling or something, and then someone else starts flaunting that or doesn't do the updates. They're like the unvaccinated person and immediately, you know, if more than a few people do that, you can start to have an outbreak of bad kind of decisions. And because they're like, “Well, they’re not doing it. Why should I do it?”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:26] And then it's like they can't punish all of us.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:56:27] Yeah, exactly. And all of a sudden now it's completely out there. So this herd immunity concept is you got to kind of hold the line at some level, this threshold level or else you risk kind of descending into a chaotic state.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:38] This is a little bit of a tangent, but running a company here and or anywhere in the United States --especially I would imagine with offices in California or something like that and probably not because of the whole medical thing--Are you allowed to say, “Hey, if you're not vaccinated you can't come into my office?

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:56:54] That is a good question. I don't know. We're an interesting company, we're distributed.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:00] So like, “Hey, you can just, if you don't die while you work here.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:57:03] Yeah. We don't come in contact with each other very often. But I mean I think there are laws about that because like schools have it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:10] They do. But I'm just wondering maybe schools are different, I know here you can't go, “Hey, do you have this disease? Are you seeing—"

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:57:23] It's probably a state-by-state. My guess is if the government can do it though because that's a major health risk that a company should be able to do it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:30] Theoretically. But I don't know man, California sometimes I don't get it. Lemons versus peaches. I had never heard this concept and it is so interesting. I never heard of peaches as far as cars. Everyone's heard of the lemon car or the lemon law.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:57:47] And this is the idea of you can have this thing called in a market and it could be any kind of market. This is a used car market, but it could be the healthcare market or any kind of thing where there are buyers and sellers. You have what they call this death spiral where the whole market breaks down. And if you think about it in used cars, a lemon is a used car that’s just bad. It's just got problems with it. Whereas peaches the opposite are good cars. And so if you can't tell the difference as a buyer between lemons and peaches, and let's say there are lemons out there, all of a sudden you don't want to pay a lot for the cars because you could get a lemon. And so what happens is, is the price goes down, the average price goes down as these lemons are discovered in the market because people are like, “Oh, I've just paid $1,000 but this car is only worth 200.” So now I'm only going to pay $400 in the market as the average price starts to go down. The people who have good cars, they don't want to sell on the market anymore because they're like, “I'm not going to sell my car. I know is worth $1,000  for 400,” and all of a sudden the market just completely breaks down.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:58:52] Because it's full of garbage.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:58:53] Because it’s full of garbage. The good cars get pulled out and the only thing left are the bad cars. And so the way to stop this, this is a real problem called asymmetric information. And the basic problem is you don't know which is the lemon and which is the peach. And so something like Carfax is needed to help solve this problem. You need some discovery mechanism either the way to kick the lemons out or to verify that you have different levels of quality. But if you don't have that, then you can't get these markets started.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:23] Got that. And that is that these things exist everywhere and we just don't see them.

Gabriel Weinberg: [00:59:30] Right. And so all of these are like, they come up in different situations. And so like this most recently came up with the US healthcare marketplace. That's what people are talking about. In that case, lemons are people of preexisting conditions and peaches would be really healthy young people. And in that case, you don't want to kick anybody out, but you need everyone to participate for the market to work. And so these recurrent concepts are just kind of adherent to markets and economics. And so if you want to understand what's going on in the policy world and in the business world, you kind of need to understand like these types of concepts.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:06] This Streisand effect is something that is kind of funny and seems to be popping up all over the place, especially with the internet.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:00:13] This comes up more and more. Yeah, it's amazing how much has come up. This is just a funny story. It's literally named for Barbara Streisand who someone took a picture of her beach mansion and she didn't want anyone to see it for some reason. And this photographer posted it to their site and had literally like six views on it and she sued them. And that became news.

Jordan Harbinger:

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:00:39] Right, exactly. And then it became news and then all of a sudden it was a huge news story. The picture is shown everywhere, which is what you didn't want in the first place. And then the photographer who won the suit decided to make it a public domain. And so now the picture can be used for free everywhere. And now there's an article in this whole effect and named after her about this house, which is the opposite of the original goal of it. And so like the picture is now freely available on Wikipedia and you can go see it.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:01:07] I assumed that she sold that place shortly thereafter.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:01:12] So the Streisand effect now generally applies to anything where, if something like bad you don’t want to draw attention to it, but if you draw attention to it, try to get out ahead of it or try to squelch it, it can be worse than actually just letting it go. It's kind of like the cover-up is worse than the crime and so if something bad happens, you really have to make a calculation. Like you just want to just say, “Yeah I'm sorry I'm going to like this happen or I'm going to let it go,” versus draw attention to it because you're pointing the internet. These things just spiral out of control really easily and people love stories like people are trying to cover something up.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:01:48] Especially America loves a story of a rich person trying to maintain some sort of privacy or benefit that is frankly a little unreasonable. And then just getting their ass handed to them. Even somebody who's just universally beloved like Barbara Streisand. Imagine if it had been anyone else, it would have been even worse.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:01:06] And companies fall into this all the time. They tried to cover something up or they put up a tweet and they delete it or put up a blog post and remove it and maybe just leave it up.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:02:16] Yeah. And like the cat's out of the bag can't really mess. Chilling effects and collateral damage, this is something that's sort of in your niche. I didn't know that after Edward Snowden went through his whole rigamarole, I didn't realize that people searched for different things and less online. Take us through that. That's a kind of creepy in a way.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:02:36] Oh, it's very creepy. I mean, the chilling effect is this general concept where you know, you won't do something for fear of retribution. So you know, think about China or other authoritarian regimes where no one wants to speak out and they're effectively their speeches, chilled because they're afraid if they speak out, you know, they might get kidnapped or killed or what have you. But that happens all over the place. So this notion after Snowden, people realize they were being surveilled or couldn't be surveilled by their governments, which came directly from corporations. And so people started searching less. And so there, this came up in a number of ways. People went to Wikipedia topics less, especially terrorism-related ones, but even non-terrorism stuff, people started searching health topics less on Google thinking that the government or even private people that they figured out if their health concerns and that's bad for people because—

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:33] What is this red blotch?

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:03:35] Which could be important to the reader.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:37] Yeah, you should know what that might be. I mean granted searching for something health-related online, it's like three steps and you have cancer or it's got to get amputated. So you should go to a doctor really.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:03:48] But the chilling effect comes up really in any policy, it really is common. This whole chapter is about unintended consequences basically. Oftentimes you hear Monday morning quarterbacking on TV and you're like, I could have never known about that. Like no one could have ever predicted X. Well, it turns out there are a lot of these mental models on unintended consequences that you can predict. Like you can predict this dry sun effect. You can predict this death spiral, the address selection. You can predict chilling effects. You can think of if I passed this policy, what might happen? And it can have side consequences. Like there are a lot of harassment laws that have come out where they set out to have mandatory reporting for harassment. But because of the mandatory reporting, it's actually had a chilling effect where people want to report less because they don't want to be involved in this mandatory reporting process. And so that was clearly unintended consequences that people who set up the policy or law wanted one more importing, which is why they made it mandated, but it had this other chilling effect. And so you have to think about like are the people that I'm trying to help actually going to be chilled by this policy.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:04:57] Survivorship bias. I've talked about this on the show because I think a lot of successful entrepreneurs, they say things like never give up and like follow your passion. It's terrible, terrible advice. And the reason we're hearing it from, I don't know Mark Cuban is because his process wasn't like this sexy commencement speech. It was like all this grind. People don't want to hear that. And then also we're not hearing from the other 99 out of a hundred who are on their mom's couch where like, I don't know, I heard never give up. So I'm not giving up. And their moms like get a freaking job. The aircraft bullet hole example though, fascinating.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:05:35] Let's talk about the airport bullet hole thing. So this was back in World War II and people are looking, you know, all these planes are going out and they're getting shot down and they're coming back. And so what they wanted to do is look at where the bullet holes were on the plane and see maybe they could reinforce the armor of it better, so less planes get shot down. But what a statistician realized is, “You know what? There were whole areas of the plane where there were no bullet holes.” At first, people were like, “Well those, those must've been good. You know, like we don't need to reinforce those.” But it turns out is they're not looking at the planets that got shot down.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:11] Yeah, those that are on the ground in Germany.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:06:13] Those are the dead planes. And so the opposite was actually true. And survivorship bias is what this means is, is looking at only of the things that survived the process and not looking at all the other ones that didn't survive. And so you brought up kind of entrepreneurship, like people like to say, you know, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, they all dropped out of college and became billionaires. And so therefore—

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:34] This is when I got to do.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:06:35] Dropped out of college to become a billionaire, but you're not looking at all the other people who dropped out of college and didn't become a billionaire. And so you have to look at the full set of people to make any conclusion. You can't just look at the few success cases.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:49] Right. That's the survivorship bias. So that's survival bias. You're only looking at the survivors. So the selection of people that you're looking at is bias.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:06:57] Yeah. Another good example, we write about is like old buildings in a city. So I love to go through the city and the best buildings are like the oldest ones with like all this ornate stuff. And so you kind of have the idea, “Wow, old architecture and buildings must've been awesomely made—"

Jordan Harbinger: [01:07:15] Why would you destroy these amazing old buildings. Yeah. They're all gorgeous.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:07:19] But the only ones that remained are the ones that are really awesome.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:07:22] Worth preserving maybe.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:07:23] There were tons of other buildings that have been knocked down that were not necessarily worth preserving.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:07:28] Yeah, or they burned or fell down because they’re pieces of crap. Yeah, that makes sense. That's a really good example because you look at San Francisco and they have this huge fire and it is a shame. We probably lost some amazing buildings, but the ones that remained were made out of stone and yes there are, there's a reason they're old castles in Germany, but not a whole lot of old wooden shacks. Yes. You've got a lot of concepts here on decision making. In fact, the whole book has like just tons on decision making and pros and cons and how to make effective lists and make decisions. One thing, one concept I thought was extremely interesting was when you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where it's like food, shelter, water, I don't know dot, dot, dot, self-actualization. If we have a safety or esteemed need, we actually self-sabotage our success in other areas because we're focused on those needs instead. And this explains a lot of examples that we see in society where you see somebody who's given an opportunity and you go--you ever see, what is it? The Wire, is that what it's called? Remember that show? And the kid is at this party full of fancy people and then he goes out and start selling drugs on the corner. The lesson there is like it's all he knows or something like that. But really he's focused on safety and security so he can't really evolve past a certain point. And we see this with, with ourselves as humans all the time. Can you take us through this a little bit? I thought this is such an insightful point.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:08:55] Yeah, I mean this is, this is a whole area, the whole set of models around unlocking people's potential and unfortunately a lot of psychological and just physical reality things hold people back from reaching their full potential. And what Maslow's hierarchy of needs is really saying and it's been disputed whether it's actually a hierarchy per se, but the concept itself is really good. And it's saying you have these different levels of needs like you need safety, you need food, you need shelter. You also need to feel like you belong and then if you can achieve all that, then you can start to kind of do the rest. But if you're hung up on some of these other basic human needs, you can't really focus on self-improvement and other things. You're going to need to solve that first. So as someone's coach or you know, friend or family member and you see someone kind of struggling with that, you can realize that they're probably not going to get that job that you want to give them if they don't solve this other stuff first and then you can try to help them with that.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:09:57] How do we know if this is us? How do we know if we are self-sabotaging?

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:10:02] You were saying this earlier about the biases. I think it, it is unfortunately really hard to do yourself. And so like the answer is not a great one, but I actually think you need other people in your life who are basically going to call you on your BS.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:10:15] Yes. Yeah, I'm imagining somebody saying, “Hey, you don't have to hoard money and not spend money on yourself or like you don't have to distrust all of our new friends. Nobody's going to sneak in and take away the life that you built for yourself if you grew up in a scarcity place.”

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:10:34] I think it requires those deep conversations. That goes back to the identity thing. It's like if your whole history is one way and your brain is really just like a computer that learns things and if you see it all through that lens, it's going to take a while to change it. And that's going to be, it probably is not an immediate process.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:10:54] Yeah. I'm thinking of this example, there was a basketball player. His name escapes me. I remember reading this news story and there's another more famous player, Gilbert Arenas, who ended up pulling guns on each other in the locker room of an NBA. It's just ridiculous, okay. I know Gilbert Arenas had a problem and got suspended or whatever. The other guy, he was a gang banger, he ended up going to prison for life. He was in the NBA. It's like, what are you doing? And people just couldn't get wrap their minds around it. You're thinking you have millions of dollars. You are guaranteed to be wealthy pretty much up until you stopped getting paid, in which case at which point you can blow it all, but you have a bright future and you're rolling through South Central LA with a MAC-10 shooting other idiots. What are you doing? And the idea is he's probably focused on the survival need, the self-esteem and acceptance of his posse crew and he just couldn't get past that and look higher on the, on the hierarchy of needs where he probably would be making millions of dollars and now he in prison. It's so ridiculous.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:12:00] There are all sorts of other psychological models that kind of hold people back. One that we talk about a lot as imposter syndrome.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:12:09] That’s the staple of the program here.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:12:11] Everyone knows about that already. I mean it comes up all the time in work situations too.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:12:16] Yeah. In case this is your first episode of the show, it's the idea that you think, “Oh I'm the one that slipped through the cracks.” Whenever I go and speak at Ivy League universities or corporations and I bring up this topic, I was go, “Who here secretly thought when they first started,” because you can't ask them who feels that way, “Who here when they first started thought, ‘I can't believe I got a job here. They're going to figure out I don't belong here.’ ” And like the whole room's hands go up and if you're giving this at Harvard, if you're doing it at LinkedIn or Facebook or something, everyone's hand goes up. If you do this at a high school, no one's hand goes up because there are, they know everything or no imposter syndrome at any high schools.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:12:53] That's funny

Jordan Harbinger: [01:12:54] It's a sign of high performers.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:12:56] Yeah. I mean, what people don't realize too when they get into, like on the management side is like people think, “Oh, I'm just going to be coaching people with skills.” But most of a lot of management is helping people overcome these psychological barriers.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:13:10] I know you testified in front of Congress about privacy. How does that happen? Do you just get a call from like Nancy Pelosi and they're like, get in here?

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:13:18] That is pretty much what it was with Nancy Pelosi. But yeah, I mean, they have these hearings and so when would the approximate cost for that one is that I was at another hearing in the California State House on privacy and they were going to have a Senate hearing on privacy and they're looking for experts to talk to various things. And they saw my one testimony and they were like, “Come to this day.”

Jordan Harbinger: [01:13:41] That’s pretty cool though.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:13:43] Oh, it was very cool. Yeah. And it's great to be a part of the process.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:13:47] Sure. Like, you don't have to run for office, you just go and address everyone and now you're on CSPAN.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:13:53] That part of the system is good because legislators have to legislate on every topic. And so they can't be experts at everything. And so they held these hearings to bring in experts to represent lots of different sides because—

Jordan Harbinger: [01:14:07] Did anyone testify against privacy though.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:14:09] Yes. That's kind of what I'm saying is that. So there were representatives from big tech companies and they wouldn't classify themselves as against privacy.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:14:20] Very, very a very bad tack to take.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:14:22] But they, they were advocating for, I would say much, lax privacy regulations or even self-regulation effectively for privacy by big tech companies, which I don't think would work. And right now is, you know, what should the laws actually be like and how strong they should be. I'm on one side advocating for really strong privacy laws and people are on the other side of that.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:14:47] Yeah. I am curious, you have kids, how are you teaching your kids to be better thinkers and parse information

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:14:55] better? The short answer is write this book.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:14:58] Write this book? You think your kids are going to read your book? Get real buddy. Never going to happen.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:15:04] I got to read it to them. So we tried to organize this material, but I mean the way that it has worked best so far is we've been trying to find good content that is kind of thought-provoking. Like we were just talking about it like is hearing like two sides of an issue and then like listen to it with them and then talk about it. And so instead of just trying to like tell them this is the right thing, like, “Look, reasonable people disagree here. Let's look at all sides of this thing. Then I'll tell you what we believe. But before we do that, why don't you say what you believe or think about.” And so we found a lot of good content for that. There's this podcast, Intelligence Squared Debates, and so we listened to that and things like that.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:15:52] I can't believe you get your kids listening to Intelligence Squared Debates. How old are they?

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:15:56] They're eight and 10. There's a lot of pausing, you know, and being like, “Do you understand this or that.”

Jordan Harbinger: [01:16:04] Yeah. I mean I think I often have to do that when I listen to things like that. And I'm 39

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:16:10] And then we listened to a lot of things like, The Daily, The New York Times podcast or just some kind of daily news and then try to explain like, what's going on with this?

Jordan Harbinger: [01:16:21] They don't have any good news for kids or anything that teaches kids critical thinking that I've found.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:16:26] Nothing great like this. No. We've had to like, do this, you know, do this roundabout process. There's a crash course, which is more like knowledge, you know, it's kind of like Khan Academy. That's good. But it's not like sound like critically thinking the thing, it's more like learning a better curriculum early on.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:16:45] Well, this has been fascinating. There's so much more in the book. This was one, we didn't even get through all the notes and all the biases and all the concepts and all the mental models, but two, even if we did get through everything here, I think this is a two or three out of how many chapters are in the book?

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:16:59] Nine chapter.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:17:00] Yeah, there's so much more in the book, especially about running a business or applying these things to corporations, businesses, startups. You really walk the walk obviously at DuckDuckGo. It must be a nice place to work.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:17:13] I hope it is.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:17:14] Yeah. You hope it is. We'll never know. Thank you very much.

Gabriel Weinberg: [01:17:17] Thanks.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:17:19] Great big. Thank you to Gabriel Weinberg. The book is called Super Thinking and links to his stuff. Of course, we'll be in the show notes if you want to know how I managed to book all these great people and manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits. Check out our Six-Minute Networking course, which is free over at jordanharbinger.com/course. A problem with kicking the can down the road is that we're not able to make up for lost time when it comes to relationships and networking. The number one mistake I see people make is postponing this, not digging the well before they get thirsty, and once you need relationships, you're too late to use them and leverage them. These drills are designed to take just a few minutes per day. This is the stuff I wish I knew two decades ago. It's not fluff. It is crucial and you can find it all for free at jordanharbinger.com/course. By the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and of newsletters, so come join us. You'll be in good company. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Gabriel Weinberg. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. There was a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at jordanharbinger.com/youtube.

[01:18:21] This show is produced in association with PodcastOne and this episode was co-produced by Jason The Mental Model DeFillippo and Jen Harbinger, show notes and worksheets are by Robert Fogarty, and I'm your host Jordan harbinger. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, and that should be in every episode, so please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.

[01:18:50] A lot of folks asked me which podcasts I recommend and one that I've been on, and also just find candid in a way that some might even find a little brutal, but that's the point, it's The Mental Illness Happy Hour. It’s run by my buddy Paul Gilmartin. He's got famous comedians like Tiffany Haddish, Mark Marin, Neil Brennan, Maria Bamford, Rob Delaney, Kathryn Hahn, Karen Kilgariff, and authors like Dr. Elyn Saks, athletes, NHL legends, everyday people. There's always something that we have in common and that's it that they've all bared their souls. We've all bared our souls on The Mental Illness Happy Hour. I actually went on this show right after the company split, so I was pretty candid on there. Got a lot of really good emails from people who'd been through something similar and every week since 2011 these people, the guests along with host Paul Gilmartin had been talking about the things that many of us never say out loud. It's sometimes pretty funny. It's sometimes really heartbreaking, but it's always really honest and human. He's been in the New York Times, he's been in Esquire psychology today. Go check out The Mental Illness Happy Hour especially if you want to feel like some of that ish you're feeling is unique to you. You'll find that a lot of the most creative, successful people in the world are on here showing what's inside the kimono and sometimes it's pretty ugly. It gets really real and he's like a funny therapist friend. You've heard this show, haven't you, Jason? Paul is just like a nice, nice guy who is good at listening, but also entertaining.

Jason DeFillippo: [01:20:16] It's an absolutely fabulous show, and I recommend everybody check it out so you can get The Mental Illness Happy Hour wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

[01:00:37] Yeah, five of the people who were her lawyers.