The Surprising Ways We Fool Ourselves!

Thinking Fast and Slow Book Discussion

Romana: [00:00:00] Which system is actually in charge? 

Romana: That was my first impression in terms of where is the hard part that actually leads some of our decisions as well. 

Romana: My second insight was again, a confirmation.

Romana: How great coaching as such is being able to uncover the blind spots of the system one or system two, actually that are in charge of the biases we use during the decision making. 

Romana: These were the actually two main insights I got from the book. Where is the position of a hard brain, the decisions that are led from our heart and how great coaching is offering a mirror and a space to explore the biases of both the systems.

Eduardo: This is a book I read long, long time back. I think it was even one of [00:01:00] my first summaries as my LinkedIn articles. It tells a very short story. You’re always wrong. You just don’t know how yet but you’re always a hundred percent of the time wrong.

Eduardo: And then it goes through the several possibilities. He, Daniel, with a lot of studies, a lot of research, a lot of evidence. People talk so much about data driven decisions nowadays, right? It gives a lot of possibilities. All the data, hey, this is how you’re wrong when you’re thinking like this. This is how you’re wrong when you’re thinking like that.

Eduardo: And then this is how you’re wrong when you’re thinking this other way here. And thinking a lot about his message and these differences, it reinforced to me the importance of building diverse teams in order to tackle complicated matters. Because honestly, the only way to get rid of not all the biases, but a number of them at once, is if you are collaborating at the same [00:02:00] level with people that are bringing different backgrounds.

Eduardo: And for me, this was such a big realization. We have been giving so much power and maybe attention to individuals that can be quite logical or can solve certain problems in certain specific ways along history. But we never thought about all that, that Daniel had to share with us on how this.

Eduardo: Also being wrong, not that it’s a bad thing to be wrong. I think this is another thing that he’ll highlights, right? It’s actually good. We wouldn’t be able to live to survive if we didn’t have this system one that is reacting to things. But. As human beings, we can take a little bit of a step back and then rethink how we are making decisions or thinking processes and so on using a little bit of his framework.

Michael: I suppose I felt it should have almost been entitled reading fast and slow. Because I find myself doing an awful lot of skimming, and [00:03:00] I didn’t take that as a good sign at all, really, in any way, not for me, not for him. 

Michael: If I compare it with two other books I think I mentioned on LinkedIn a while ago, Rolf de Belli’s what’s it called, The Art of Thinking Clearly.

Michael: He just takes a bunch of things like, sunk cost or halo effect or whatever. And he just goes down them and does a little thing. And engagingly as we think of him as the prototype of the Swiss, rational thinker he’s quite clear that even if you know about these biases, they’re still going on and you still make the same mistakes.

Michael: You’re just more aware of things really. So I find DoBelli much easier, far more digestible. really than this. I also, when I was a kid, there was a book by a guy called Thouless, strange name, Thouless. was called Straight and Crooked Thinking. And I think his were much more about logical fallacies, really, but it was all getting the same message as you say, Edwardo that we assume we’re thinking clearly, and we’re not.

Michael: So anything that dissolves that false certainty is a good thing. I suppose I just [00:04:00] feel 500 pages, And it was everything. It reminded me so much of my early experience of psychology and why I left psychology really. Because I was very much aware that, it’s very male thinking for a start as you’ve said Romana, there’s no female sense in there really.

Michael: There’s no group sense in there of how we change when we’re around other people. It’s very much a kind of rational entity in a lab and showing us. So he does talk about the Israeli army and stuff. So what am I saying? I’m, I guess I’m saying I’m a bit confused. That’s what I’m saying. 

Rob: I can echo that what I found I found the first bit frustrating.

Rob: I’d read it a long time ago, but I had to read it again. And I’m reading this straight after anti fragile, which there is some crossover, but they’re both 500 plus page book. So it’s a thousand page that I’ve read quite quickly. So I got frustrated with the system one and the system two. I think it’s poorly labeled for me, I didn’t feel like I was learning.

Rob: I thought that was quite obvious for me. In my understanding. I think of system [00:05:00] one is like the operating system. It’s all the unconscious stuff that we’ve laid down. 

Rob: System two is when we have to consciously think of something. So for me I found that quite frustrating and I was Trying to get through that bit.

Rob: The part that really stuck out to me though, that was worth the read of the book itself was the regression to the mean. 

Rob: That’s a concept that I’m familiar with. And I can remember years ago playing golf and I was playing golf with someone who’s much better than me and I was beating him by quite a bit.

Rob: And we were going around and you have banter and I’m like regression to the mean here, the longer we play, the more he’s going to catch up. So I knew what it was, but Thinking about it, the examples he gave were really enlightening. 

Rob: That when you look at football, for example so often a team will buy someone who’s had a great season and then they’ll never perform again like that.

Rob: It’s an example of regression to the mean. So I think that concept of regression to the mean I would have developed that because I would have thought about the quality of someone is going to be their average performance. Every now and then someone’s going to win Wimbledon out of the blue or someone’s going to win a golf tournament or [00:06:00] whatever it is.

Rob: Over time, it’s always going to regress the mean. So that was a really big concept for me. 

Rob: The rest, I thought it was really well done. I would echo what Michael said. It’s psychologically very sound. The research is very good, but it’s quite boring. And those biases and things, I think they’re so important, it’s good to be aware of them.

Rob: And there are many other places that have covered them. But also we’re limited even when we’re aware of the bias. Like they say impacts scientists and so on that it’s still impacts on us. And also even, I think the diversity is so important. We’ve gone over that with Matthew Syed books and that as well. 

Rob: The problem is that a lot of these A lot of these biases are universal that we all tend to fall for unless we’re hypervigilant. For me, the key was the regression to the mean, which I never seen stated as clearly as that.

Rob: We’ve got a few points to pick up on here. I think Romana’s point about the head, heart and gut, isn’t it? The three brains Wouldn’t the heart and the gut [00:07:00] be considered system one? 

Romana: Yes, I guess so. Or that would be my very automatic reaction. And that’s what made me think through while reading the book that if I would be still saying yes system one is gut and heart Aren’t those sending us valuable signals?

Romana: Because they often do. It’s just only when they are aligned with head, then the decision we make actually feels and sounds logical, and we are fine with it.

Romana: So when we say that the system, when I was reading and that the system one is wrong, and then system two is wrong, most of the times as well, I wouldn’t actually say so I wouldn’t probably label it that they are both wrong. I would say they are sending us part of the message that we need to learn [00:08:00] to understand.

Romana: So there, I wouldn’t say so much clearly that both systems are always wrong, I would just always say they are just sending us a message their own specific way, and we may probably not be always equipped well enough to read what’s the signal saying.

Eduardo: I’m just reflecting on what you said. I think reading the book, the impression I’ve got is that he rather claims both systems are useful. In different ways, right? And I never made this interpretation that he would attach what we call heart and gut with system one. Actually, I feel that he permeates that within the two systems.

Eduardo: If anything the system one is more of a reaction. And when I think about other examples, I would guess, being a parent like you, sometimes my system one where the kids doesn’t react in the way that it’s aligned with my heart, it aligns with [00:09:00] the noise that they are making in the bedroom, and it’s a completely different thing and it’s rather me putting the system two to work that brings the heart component into it. So I wouldn’t make This linkage, also not with system two between heart and gut and system one or system two, I think it’s completely different models. What I feel he’s alluding to is decision making processes and logical thinking.

Eduardo: In a way, he’s completely out of this game and maybe he would benefit from pairing then all this study and everything that he thought about with the kind of systems that you’re talking about, Romano, to make it more powerful. I think in that sense, and not in a bad way, because he narrowed his scope, it’s just narrow or just limited in a sense compared to a broader thinking compared to something I would, for [00:10:00] example, more effectively use in coaching. I would definitely use his work way more into the context of corporate into decision, making into thinking strategies and stuff like that. I don’t know if that resonates.

Michael: It does. 

Romana: Yeah, it does. 

Rob: Yeah I think the research came really as a response to economists, wasn’t it and the rationality of economists in decision making. They wanted to bring more of a psychological view to that. 

Rob: We’re all coming more from a more psychological viewpoint. Whereas he was really, Trying to over show that we weren’t entirely rational as economists suggest.

Eduardo: I feel that’s the point. I feel that’s exactly the point, especially if you are a person that is following more the logic and you want to convince yourself that you are on top of things is basically telling you, no, you’re not, but it’s in that narrow field.

Michael: But it’s still a [00:11:00] pretty good lesson for us all. 

Eduardo: That is a passage that he talks about. It’s the optimists and the entrepreneurial delusion where he’s explaining how that is a tendency that is very visible, very vocal, very mediatic CEOs to being doing shit with their companies and that’s going to blow up at some point in time.

Eduardo: If we go back to Jack Walsh. Or what happened? What was the story there? And we can keep coming back to it and back to it. And I think these kind of lessons to the point that Rob made with examples, right? With the evidences that he shared made the book powerful, made the book really insightful for me.

Michael: I think there’s some gems in the book. It’s just, 

Eduardo: it’s difficult to read. Yes. 

Michael: 500 pages. So what do we got? 300 words a page, maximum 150, 000 words. How many people actually get to the end? 

Eduardo: I don’t know, but I wouldn’t expect to be many, to be honest. 

Michael: In the 1960s, 1958 actually, [00:12:00] there’s a book called Dr Zhivago published which became a film, it’s critique of communism.

Michael: It was published by the CIA in Italy actually, but anyway when I was a little kid in the 60s, it was on everybody’s coffee table, and I do mean everybody’s. You couldn’t go into a house without seeing that book. Now somebody did a study about 20 years later, don’t ask me why, but they went around asking people, and only 15 percent of people who’d had the book said they’d actually finished it.

Michael: Now, if it was 15 people who said they actually finished it, I’d say the true number is probably 12 or 10 or whatever, but I was pretty shocked because I read it three times and still didn’t really understand it. But if I’m the guy that, persevered with Dr. Zhivago, maybe I’ve got lazy and I was skimming, I was reading fast and slow.

Michael: Would I advise that approach to any of my clients? And the answer is no, I just wouldn’t. I’d say don’t write, don’t go over 100, 000 words, don’t go over 70, don’t go over 60 if you want people to read you. So there were some nuggets, there were some nuggets. There was an awful lot of other stuff, really.

Eduardo: It reads quite [00:13:00] academic, right? And I feel that. In a way, this is his audience, maybe to whom he wanted to write this book. Not that these people are going to read whatsoever, but at least from an audience perspective, I get this feeling that it was also written to impress in that sense. I can read something this large and with all this content.

Romana: What I found interesting because what I would agree with you, Michael, on this, that it’s a heavy book and yes, it a lot reminds me the books from when I was studying psychology. 

Romana: Full of research out of interest. I looked up I looked up the author online and found a lecture he was giving and explaining what his book is about.

Romana: And he’s actually quite funny. So I was actually surprised by how heavy the book can be. But when he’s telling the stories, there is actually [00:14:00] a lot of laughter coming from the audience. Maybe he needed a different editor to tell him, maybe more stories into one topic would make it slightly more easier to read and cut it into several parts.

Romana: I don’t know, but that there was a difference that I noticed that when he was telling the stories himself, they were very entertaining and many people could relate because these are stories we can relate. Having the biases, most of us encountered them through our lives, not just once, many times.

Rob: Yeah, I think I don’t think he expected it to be as popular as it was. I think he wrote like for economists and I think Michael, there’s scope there for you to rewrite it and make it an even more bestseller 

Michael: I don’t know if it’s sold. It’s sold.

Michael: Hey, good luck to the guy. Good luck though. It’s sold.

Rob: Something I Found in reading it Is I’ve got frustrated with the system two parts, when it’s this statistics and I realized I read a lot for system [00:15:00] one, I read to make what I would call the operating system to make that better so that I don’t have to consciously think.

Rob: And that’s maybe part of a key to making reading more digestible and bestsellers, when you can read fast and not introducing the system two elements. 

Michael: I think, the more palatable the reading is, the more people are going to read it, the more benefit they’re going to get out of it.

Michael: It’s just easy. When Rolf de Belli says yeah, I know about this bias, so how come I’m still making the same mistake? Or he says, I know about this bias, and I explained it to my wife, and what a surprise, we’re now doing exactly what she says! You get some humor in it, and the lesson goes in better.

Michael: Maybe he was imprisoned as this economist, but do people still go for these sort of weighty tones or impressive because To me, they’re not, 

Romana: On the other hand, maybe he was just meeting the people where they are. In a sense, if he would be writing it differently, maybe those who are highly rational [00:16:00] using their heads and logic most of the time, they wouldn’t be willing to listen and hear the message. 

Michael: There is that, but he does say in the book, as he quotes somebody saying the emotional tail wags, the rational dog. Yeah. I’d say even with very logical people.

Michael: How many of those are there around? Academics, yes. But was it written for academics? I don’t know. It’s too boring. He needed to make it a bit more exciting. 

Eduardo: I got curious just to see when it was published. 

Michael: That’s a good question, because 

Eduardo: That makes a difference, but it’s actually recent.

Eduardo: It’s 2012 at least what I had. Yes. Is it 

Romana: recent? 

Eduardo: Recent, right? It’s not it’s not. Is 10 

Romana: years back recent? 

Eduardo: That’s recent, Romana! Hey! You thought you were a little girl then? Come on! When I first met you, I was reading War and Peace, right? That’s not recent.

Romana: Oh, 

Eduardo: wow! Look 

Romana: at him! 

Rob: He’s been a lifelong psychologist and he’s a lifelong academic. He’s 90. So is he dead [00:17:00] now? 

Rob: Oh, he died last year.

Rob: I think the success of it surprised him. I didn’t think he ever thought it was going to be popular, but I’m quite interested to read Noise, which is his follow up book. 

Rob: I have a friend that told me, 

Eduardo: She read it as maybe something she did after he died as a way to share her feelings and yeah.

Eduardo: And she said it’s good.

Rob: Think that would be interesting. 

Eduardo: I try not to keep reading the same author all the time, but this conversation is trickling me because That is this angle. Maybe he’s writing changed because that book was successful and maybe he changed the audience or his target for the next one. So you got you guys got me curious to read it now.

Rob: I’m assuming noise versus signal. I could imagine that being interesting, particularly in today’s world where there’s so much information. Looking back at his other books, none of them were popular. They were very academic. It’s attention and effort, heuristics and biases, choice values and frames.

Rob: They’ve all [00:18:00] been quite academic. 

Michael: There are some gems in the book. For me, early on, he mentioned Herbert Simon talking about intuition, saying that, people think of it as this magical thing, but he suggests very often, it’s not, it’s just you’re accessing information you got, which is self evident to me, but it’s only because I’ve thought about I’ll give you a very simple example.

Michael: Years ago I went climbing one day with this guy, Wayne, whom I’d never met before, and he was a nuclear physicist, very logical, very System 2 kind of guy, probably in Wayne’s case, System 3, 96, 98, whatever. Anyway we went off to this cliff, which is just up the road from me, actually, Castelletic Hill, and we’re trucking along through this undergrowth.

Michael: We came to a state with very heavy rucksacks on looking for the cliff. And we came to a steep bit, now I have no memory of this Wayne mentioned afterwards. He said we got to a steep bit, we’re dropped away to get to the cliff, proper cliff. And I said, oh we’ll just go back we’ll just go back and leave our rock sacks there and come and have a look.

Michael: And he said that gave him complete confidence in me, because people think in [00:19:00] terms of risk assessment, climbers become fixated about the cliff and what’s going to happen there. They don’t think about getting there safely. Getting away safely, but I do and I do because I know people have been killed getting to the cliff and leaving the cliff There was a particular lady called Rachel Farm a terrible example.

Michael: She was only 18. She died. I suppose Wayne probably felt I had good intuition. But of course it was unconscious competence. When I thought about it, I realized exactly why. I don’t want to go along with muddy boots and a big sack on. It’s dump the damn thing and come and look.

Michael: That seemed to be a kind of classic example of what Herbert Simon was saying. There’s nothing mystical or magical. Most of the time people are just accessing stuff they didn’t know they knew. It’s just in there. He returns to that idea later on in the book. But I just think there’s gems like that, that he could have brought on it.

Michael: That’s all. But in 500 pages, what could he do? So I don’t know. I don’t know. 

Rob: There’s so much, when you read anti fragile Kahneman’s often quoted. Yeah, I suppose that’s [00:20:00] really the popularity of it is because it’s at the intersection of economics, psychology, growth and happiness is underpinned by that theory.

Rob: And also the whole development of behavioral economics. 

Eduardo: In a sense, because he’s so academic, Rob, I think it makes it easy for you as an author to just mention him. It’s all there you don’t have to keep chasing where people get their ideas from or how their ideas are backed up by science or not, because he cataloged everything and he created all the links.

Eduardo: For example, the law of small numbers. I use that quite a lot when I’m mentoring, not coaching executives or when I’m discussing strategy. 

Eduardo: It’s so easy to just pull it from the book and this is what I mean. Here you can see why that and what other people did to prove that this is how things are working.

Eduardo: And I think that is a merit on that. Also, when I look at my books, at least half of [00:21:00] them mention either Kahneman or his partner that I never can get to pronounce the name correctly. 

Eduardo: One of the two, they are always there because it is such a robust work academic work that they did in the end.

Rob: I found that quite interesting as well because he talks about his work with Amos Tversky, if I’m saying it right. It’s interesting that in his whole career, which is a long career, he reports that particular period when he was working with Amos that created the best of both of their work, which is again, as you say, Eduardo, about diversity, it’s about the right chemistry, the right situation and the right diversity of thinking can enhance what we do individually. 

Eduardo: He dedicated the book to the guy is quite beautiful. 

Michael: In a way, I wasn’t absolutely convinced about system one and system two, this inconvenient labels, but he gives a classic example of. 25 times 17 as System 2. And because I was brought up by these maniacs who gave us [00:22:00] 10 mental arithmetic problems every morning, you got cane for each one you got wrong, I could pretty much do that in System 1 because I had they taught shortcuts really.

Michael: They just taught shortcuts to do it. So it seemed to me, sure I can accept most people who didn’t have my enlightening experience, it would be a System 2 job, but because of their helpful coaching. It was system one. So there were good labels, but that’s all. Are they actually qualitatively different?

Michael: I don’t know. 

Rob: Isn’t it really unconscious and conscious? 

Michael: I don’t know. I don’t think it’s probably unconscious and conscious, but it’s also shortcuts and pattern recognition. 

Michael: If without boring you to death, we do 25 times.

Michael: If we do 24 times 17, it’s one it’s all, it’s 25 times 17 minus the 17. There’s 4 25 and a hundred. So you divide the seventh, the first thing by four, you get 425, drop a 17 off, you got 408. And a good mathematician can see that. He can see it. They can see the numbers, the blocks of numbers. He can see the, almost like a child with blocks, he can see that really.

Michael: So people can learn in different [00:23:00] ways, really. The people who taught me didn’t teach me to see, but I was probably as a child on the verge of it. But I, my guess is that good mathematicians can see things. You’re 

Eduardo: right. You’re right because everybody’s a good example of that. We go through school and we learn the multiplications from one to nine, or here in Switzerland, from one to 12, right?

Eduardo: And what happens after three or six months is that all kids can just reply the number without thinking is this shift from one system into the other, it became something visual, right? You’re not making, I was just having this conversation with my wife the other day, you’re not doing math anymore, you’re just retrieving the memory.

Eduardo: What advanced mathematicians do very often is that they already have all that in their mind. They already did it so many times that they can do this. I love that you said shortcuts. That’s how the minds are working and that’s why they can do it so quickly. And it works in any [00:24:00] domain.

Eduardo: We are all examples of that. 

Michael: Yeah, I agree. Without boring you too much about maths, there was a story, I think it was Gauss, but I’m not sure, there was some famous mathematician, and when he was a little kid he was sitting in class and the teacher asked him to add up the numbers between nought and ten, and he’s, everybody’s, adding them up, and he’s sitting there, and she’s why you adding, he said, I, because I’ve done it in this.

Michael: I’d be popular. And she said, OK, smart clogs, what is it? And he said, 55. Now, I don’t know, but my guess is that he saw that, those numbers from, if you take 0 to 10, if you think of it as a pyramid and fives on top, four is one less, six is one more. So you’ve got a kind of cascade of fives, as it were, in that pyramid.

Michael: And I think he saw that as a pyramid. I think he just instantly saw it as a pyramid. So he just knew. There’s 10 fives, one on top, 55. It didn’t matter that he was right. It didn’t matter the computation. I think he saw it as a pyramid. And I think that’s what scientists do. They find patterns.

Michael: Obviously, you have to test them. But I think the really great people [00:25:00] or the people that, what makes them great is pattern recognition. They can get the patterns and then they look to the wall. 

Eduardo: And that’s the warning that Kahneman is sharing in his book, right? Because then you can do that, and you know you can do that, and you’re going to get the right answer.

Eduardo: And because you were given that problem, you’re going to jump into the solution quite quickly and provide us, which means you’re not even thinking anymore why you’re working in that problem,

Michael: Which works with mouse, but might not work. So things 

Eduardo: right? Exactly. I think this is a big warning, a big alert that he’s trying to share. We are going to jump into solution mode. And I have been given this feedback like a bazillion times. So I take it. We need to take that step back and to take that step back, it requires energy.

Eduardo: And because it requires energy, we also have to start making choices when we are going to take that step back. If we do that all the time, it’s not going to work. That triggers, at [00:26:00] least with me, a lot of reflections, whereas that I am putting my energy on when is that I’m shifting from one system into the other, if we want to go with the system terminology.

Michael: Certainly got us thinking anyway. He’s achieved that. I was very struck in the corporate world by how instinctive and misleading many decisions were and how obviously affected they were by groupthink and the politics of the day and this, that, the other, people’s egos. I always felt That once people became arrogant and complacent, then the decision making ability was reduced to next to nothing, really.

Michael: It didn’t matter how bright they were, once they got arrogant that was the end. It wasn’t when the disaster would happen. Which is a long way away from his kind of economic rational point of view really, because in the real world people can just be unbelievably stupid, me included.

Rob: What’s also interesting is that so basically the heuristics are algorithms that we run. And then w what [00:27:00] makes this interesting is now we’re in a time where AI algorithms are going to become the pattern by which a lot of work and a lot of life is conducted by. 

Rob: AI can be more rational than we can. And so it’s those algorithms probably should be more consistent less emotional but it’s the extent to which the data that they take in is going to be tainted by our heuristics and biases.

Rob: It’s the consciousness of how we cater for that. So it uses in the later examples, it uses isn’t it in treating sickness about the different percentages and how we weight when it talks about it’s not rationality. It’s not utility, but it’s about there’s an emotional weighting a sense of how companies operate, what is fair and unfair.

Rob: Oh yeah. There’s examples here. And companies are punished when they’re seen to be unfair by people disengaging.

Michael: Yeah. We have very definite notions of what we feel is fair and unfair, 

Rob: But it’s unspoken, isn’t it? It’s just something that we emotionally [00:28:00] react to. We often don’t consider. But that’s what’s weighting our decisions. 

Michael: It’s also culturally driven because here in Spain, people are culturally different to people in the UK, which is the way it is really.

Michael: Things like patient queuing isn’t quite done the same way. Let somebody, ahead in the supermarket and somebody else will just come straight in. That’s not fair. But that’s not how they see it. They just said, Hey, get in mate, fill your boots.

Michael: It’s just the way it is. It’s a culture. 

Rob: That’s something that’s going to become interesting as globalization continues because cultural differences then have to become weighted.

Rob: One of the things I think, in terms of the readability, is looking at a summary of the book. Someone’s gone through and listed how many, listed the biases and heuristics by number, which I think would have been more, made the book a lot more readable, whereas Kahneman didn’t actually do that. 

Eduardo: If I would be sitting with him and suggesting him, I would say, yeah, write a short chapter for each of them with [00:29:00] one of your brilliant stories, but that would be a completely different book.

Rob: Yeah. Which would be more like a Malcolm Gladwell or Matthew Saeed book. 

Michael: But it would have been read more and if people don’t read it, they ain’t going to use it. 

Rob: That’s an interesting dilemma actually, because like you talk about Dr. Zhivago would it have, it might have read more, but would it have sold more?

Rob: Because a lot of people, I think, buy for the coffee table effect without actually reading it. 

Michael: People just bought it, the fact is they didn’t read it. And I’m guessing they bought other books, which they did read. Really? I mean there was a book I don’t know, from the same period, much shorter, there was a guy who wanted to, he wanted to get a film made and somebody said write this book first, which became Love Story, which is a very short book really.

Michael: Oh no, hang on. He wanted the book and then they did the film first, so I’ve got the wrong way around. But the book is very short, it’s very readable. I’m guessing most people finish that. Once you go above 60, 000 words, I think readability has always dropped off. Now it’s probably more like 40, 000 words, [00:30:00] really, because I think people’s reading ability is plummeting, really.

Michael: Things are getting more and more soundbity. And I 

Eduardo: think we have to consider the different media Michael? What’s happening now is that it’s not only your book, you have eventually a movie, a TV series, the audio book that is completely different from the book itself. And then there’s several sites and services that do summaries of the books.

Eduardo: That’s also a way of consuming them. 

Michael: There is that, but the summary of this that I read, I found this, great. Was it Neil? I think it was Neil did the summary. Great. But even the summary was pretty hard. I thought, and I like reading, I read, I can’t stop reading, and so I think if I’m finding it hard going, most people are going to bail.

Rob: It is. The last two books anti fragile was quite You know, it was a long rambling book. And this and it takes discipline.

Eduardo: We will talk about it next time. But just because you have mentioned. I did have this problem, even more with Antifragile and Black Swan.

Eduardo: He keeps talking [00:31:00] about himself every few sentences and how he is either misunderstood or gringes or, that’s oh my god, how can I continue reading this? Though the book is very good. Yeah. 

Rob: Yeah, I meant, anti fragile. I don’t know if you’ve read it yet, Michael.

Rob: Can I tell 

Michael: you my, quickly, my story, right? When I was struggling with this book, I thought, Oh, I’ll just have a break and I’ll just nip through anti fragile. Wow, I got about six pages. Oh holy, I’ve gone back to what’s his name?

Rob: I love the book.

Rob: I love the ideas. And because I’ve got the concept of antifragile was quite simple, but reading it in more depth really breaks it down, but distinguishing between he’s bragging and his all of this stuff is what’s true. What’s not true. And the, yeah, he just doesn’t take any criticism of himself is valid.

Rob: I followed him on Twitter and I’ve seen his tweets, which are, this bloke’s an idiot because he says this.

Eduardo: To and I think you’re bringing a great point because I have seen some of his [00:32:00] presentations and stuff also on the web and comparing the two, I would much rather have a coffee with Khanemann 

Michael: I think it wasn’t just the density. I start to feel very quickly the weight of Taleb’s personality as well. I felt he was dragging his ego behind him. And I thought, Oh no, I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I just want what you think. I don’t want your ego in it though.

Michael: I’m sorry. 

Rob: It’s it’s interesting in terms of all of us have an interest in sharing ideas and writing books. And yeah, it’s interesting to see like Talibs is, much worse for his ego. Khaneman’s is stripped of ego, but it’s also stripped of the story and making it more relatable.

Rob: It distinguishes between professional writers like Gladwell, Syed who can make a book just, it’s so easy to read and academics and wherever you class Taleb. But I think one of the, one of the problems of reviewing thinking fast and slow is it is [00:33:00] so well argued. There’s nothing to argue about.

Rob: There’s not anything controversial. It’s just work too see the thinking behind it. I find it much more comfortable in the system one of updating your what I would call unconscious or your operating map rather than the conscious, you like to be able to zip along and when there’s A few key points that you can use system two, which then upgrade system one. One of the things I noted is he seems quite pessimistic about the ability to change system one.

Rob: Whereas I think when you learn something new, when you learn something surprising, if you give energy to that and you work in system two, you then upgrade system one. So that’s my whole Operating basis whereas he seems to be more of the view that system one is pretty much set, which I suppose if you look at the mass of people in economics on a broad scale, people probably often don’t read, put in the effort to do that.

Rob: And so many people do stay as they have always [00:34:00] been. 

Eduardo: You said something so interesting, Rob, and I’d like to ask further, you said upgraded. Upgrade system one would it be the case that we are capable of upgrading it or we just change it meaning that we Get something but we let go of something else in exchange 

Rob: My operating principle has always been some of what I know is true Some of what I know is false, but I don’t know with between the two.

Rob: I think you have to test and You have to take feedback from life from other people And when you have a problem or a conflict, in resolving that, you’ve identified what’s false and what’s true. And it’s not necessarily definitively true, but it’s not been disproven. And so for me, that’s where the system becomes more anti fragile as you upgrade, your map based on getting things wrong.

Rob: So for me, the system one is expanding and becoming more accurate and you’re weeding out problems over time.

Michael: Oddly enough, I was talking to my partner about this a couple of days ago. I’m not sure [00:35:00] she found it very interesting, but one of the things Because I’ve climbed for so long, virtually all my life, I’ve had a chance to review people’s decisions and, what were good decisions, what were bad decisions, because it’s I know the evidence, I know who lived, I know who died.

Michael: Very little isn’t known in the climbing world that doesn’t come out. So it’s not like the kind of corporate world where things can be brushed over. In the end, if you’re in the know, so you can look back at all your own mistakes. You can look back at other people’s. And there’s learning curves that some people never got through.

Michael: And so they died, basically. And the people who did get through them can look back and actually look at their learning. 

Michael: So I suppose that system too, Constantly upgrading, and then upgrading again into system one. I can instantly, I’ll give you an example. Very simple example a guy I know went off to do this ridge, the Cullen Ridge in Skye in winter, about three weeks ago, for Christmas actually.

Michael: It’s a long ridge, Eduardo, and in summer it’s pretty challenging. In winter it’s really challenging. He went on his own. So he goes all the way up, he [00:36:00] drives, I don’t know, seven, eight hundred miles, something. Gets up there. But he said there were 55 mile an hour winds. So to me, game over.

Michael: That’s it. Goodbye. Straight system one. Don’t even need to think about it for a second. It’s driven 800 miles, tough. Go to the pub, get pissed, go home, end off. Have a walk round the place. But he carried on. He got halfway along and then bailed. And I thought, oh, good effort, but, did he make the right decision?

Michael: In my view, no, he didn’t. He made the wrong decision. And then he said I had to bail. So bailing was the right thing to do, but getting halfway along wasn’t. And then he said, I didn’t conquer it, but, maybe next time. And I thought, conquer? The red flag just went off the flagpole.

Michael: Because it’s not just a semantic thing, you don’t conquer mountains, you get up them, you get down them, you think jobs are good, and you think that went well, but you never ever have. And I thought, I could just see those two red flags shooting up there. To me, there were deficiencies in his thinking.

Michael: Great that he’s [00:37:00] gutsy. Great that he made a good decision, but I’m pretty worried about him, really. To me, that was something that I wouldn’t have known 50 years ago, but I just thought, oh, good effort, man. 

Rob: I think there’s, I think there’s a parallel in leadership as well, because often it’s about conquering, you’re going to get this done, we’re going to get it.

Rob: I have a question that you based on your climbing experience, Michael, so you spoken about you said about, you lost about 50 friends to climbing and about 40 to climbing accidents. And I know very early on you had a an experience when you were 14 that you just survived and i’m wondering you’ve been in so many life and death situations and You’ve made it through all of them and yet you’ve so many friends do who haven’t. What do you see as what kept you safe? How did you survive when others didn’t? 

Michael: Oh, good question. There’s a system one, a system two answer actually. One is that initially I was very lucky. So the first few times [00:38:00] should have taken me out, but didn’t. So I was a bit like the guy that places a bet and just wins every single time.

Michael: So that bought me time to get some sense really. Does that make sense really? 

Rob: It does, which immediately comes back to the regression to the mean. Yeah, some people are lucky. Some people aren’t the first go. So it’s whether you get to learn from that. 

Michael: I’ve never thought of it like that before.

Michael: It probably was regression to the mean actually. In normal day to day things I’m horribly unlucky, generally. But in the absolute critical things, I’ve been unbelievably lucky. Just unbelievably, really. But then I walked away from it. Because a relationship broke up, so I stopped being a leading climber.

Michael: I think the regression would have definitely taken me out, because I would have just pushed it, really. So I learned enough. It’s a very good question. It’s a very good question. It’s almost like you need experience. Experience is the name we give to our mistakes, but if your mistakes are going to get you killed, then how do you survive?

Michael: Climbing’s a lot safer now and there’s much more [00:39:00] known, but in my day it was pretty much like going to war really, not knowing anything. So yeah, regression to the mean, 

Rob: so when you say it was pretty much like going to war and it’s like conquering I saw your post this morning. Has that idea of climbing changed as it’s become more popular.

Michael: Oh, God, totally. Yeah, totally. Yeah the limits the people are much stronger now, but they don’t push things psychologically. People say the risk has dropped much. 

Eduardo: Everything humans touch we try to make it more comfortable anyways, right?

Eduardo: Safe,

Michael: I’m totally aboard it. Climbing, there’s huge forces for it to become sanitized. Massive forces. You’re absolutely right, you’re absolutely right. But I think also people recoiled from the death toll, in the 70s and early 80s. It was like, oh my God, shit, everybody, yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Michael: We make everything safer. Martial arts are comparable with what it was, 

Rob: just a quick recap before you leave, like a sentence or two, just what you’re going to take from the book.

Rob: Any last thoughts? 

Eduardo: I definitely take, and I use it continuously, the different biases and examples and studies that are [00:40:00] associated. For that, I find it to be a good reference. Maybe that’s the word guys reference that how it works for me. And I definitely take out of our conversation. The aspect of the audience who we are writing to and how do we want the books that we write to be used?

Eduardo: What is the true value that they are bringing other than some weight? Into the reading table. So very good ones. I really appreciate you guys for that. 

Michael: Okay. 500 pages, some gems in there, just takes a lot of effort to get them.

Michael: For me, one gem was Herb Simon’s notion that intuition very often isn’t anything mystical or magical. It’s simply cues and accessing stuff that we really know but don’t know that we know. I know, Rob, you’ve got regression to the mean, so I think anybody reading the book could get gems. It’s just 500 pages, 

Rob: I think Eduardo sums it up. Reference. That’s what it is, because so many other Ideas and books are referenced the work of [00:41:00] Kahneman and Tversky. The standout for me is going to be Regression to the Mean. I love that intuition about being pattern recognition, but I think it was Malcolm Gladwell I got that from first.

Rob: So that’s one that was already in there. A great book, It was just a lot of pages to get through and I don’t know it needed all of that But yeah, i’m glad i’ve read it. 

Michael: I think when I was a, when I was a kid, I remember Wittgenstein saying what can be said at all can be said clearly.

Michael: And that just stuck in my mind. It just stuck there like a kind of measuring rod, really, in my mind. Because he is absolutely right. What can be said clearly. 

Michael: I always feel that if something’s really dense or tricky, I think could, if he’d worked at this, could have been made better.

Rob: Yeah, definitely. It’s a bit like there’s the hurdle to get over. It’s the psychologically pushing yourself to, to get through it. And not everyone’s going to have time for that. 

Michael: But also I feel that academic writing is the antithesis of popular writing. 

Rob: I know when I was studying psychology I would sit down with my books and the very first thing I do is fall asleep

Rob: [00:42:00] And then you’d have to get through that and then eventually you’d find something that was interesting And then it would take over from there, but it’s just that ramp up And I don’t think there is the attention span for those books