Welcome to the unmistakable creative and we'll go for about an hour. Yeah, you got it. You got to know a lot of Indians, man. You're at MIT. I'm like, wait, yeah, I'd imagine one of my best friends when I was in my 20s in San Francisco at MIT. And I got to the point where I knew the MIT lingo so well that I would like be able to talk to an MIT student. Like I went there, I was like, you're in course six. He was like, what? Like.

 

Hold on, do I pronounce your name Srini? Srini, beautiful. Ah!

Yep. Yeah.

 

How do you even know that? I was like, well, I'm like, I have two really good friends who went to MIT. So but yeah, anyways, let's rock and roll. All right, Andrew, welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

 

Let's do it.

Rini, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

 

Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So you have a new book out called The Geek Way, The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results, all of which we will get into. And as I told you, I think when I emailed you, what I loved most about this book is that it was a social science book disguised as a business book, which you... Well, like I said, I mean, I think that was the thing that struck me the most about it. I was like, whoa, this is like an in-depth study of...

 

Don't tell anybody. I want to sell lots of business books.

 

human behavior, you approach it almost like a cultural anthropologist. So on that note, I want to start with what is one of my favorite questions, and I think a fitting one given the nature of this book, and that is what social group were you a part of in high school? And what impact did that end up having on what you've ended up doing with your life and career?

 

is none of the above a social group.

 

Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

 

I grew up in a pretty small town in Indiana, and in particular, my family lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of town, so I was geographically a little bit cut off, but then mainly cut off by my, you know, awkward personality and nerdy habits and interests and things like that. So the short answer to your question is none. I wouldn't call myself incredibly well socially integrated when I was in high school. I, you know, I was in the band.

I was on the math club. You're probably getting an accurate picture of what's going on. I was not in attendance at prom. I had a couple of friends who were into the same nerdy things that I do, but, but you know, none of the above is probably the answer there. And like you told me earlier, you had a bunch of friends who went to MIT. I went to MIT and one of the great things about that place is it's where a bunch of, you know, weird, um,

 

Yeah.

 

socially awkward kind of marginal people, they all get together and they all realize that there are a lot more other people like them and you start to form really deep bonds and friendships and things like that.

 

Yeah, absolutely. What instrument did you play? I was in the band too.

 

I refused to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me. I played the French horn and I played it with great mediocrity.

 

Okay. Well, I played the tuba, but I played it with exceptional excellence. I would be able to hit band three times. So, no, but the French horn is a damn difficult instrument. Of all the brass instruments, I remember people always said this is one of the hardest.

 

Nice.

Yeah, and I proved that over and over again.

 

Yeah, well, you know, the thing I wonder about is when you kind of juxtapose this sort of, you know, none of the above personality with the environment that you grew up in, like, what impact that ends up having on sort of your worldview and the way you see things. And because like, based on just sort of, you know, my media perception of Indiana, it seems very Texas like, you know, high school sports being a big deal. Much like yourself, I didn't go to my prom, even though I grew up in California.

 

Indiana is just the heart of the Midwest, right? So I do think that kind that Midwestern niceness and decency that is not just something that you see on Fargo that that's real. And I think that part shaped part of whoever I am today. But I honestly think it's just having these fairly geeky interests myself, more of a bookworm than a computer geek when I was a kid, but out there on the computer geeky side.

And so the great good fortune that I have these days is that I get to write books about computer stuff. And if you had ever told me that I could make a living doing that when I was in my nerdy teen, in my awkward teenage years, I probably would have laughed in your face.

 

Yeah. Did your parents encourage any particular career paths or were you kind of sort of self-directed in terms of going this way?

 

I got crazy, crazy lucky with my parents, who are both decent Midwestern people, who realized that, well, I don't think they were super interventionist anyway, but they didn't try. And even though my dad was super into horses and I wasn't, and my mom was really into opera and I wasn't, they didn't try to force their interests anywhere on me. And when they realized that I was this flavor of kid,

They're like, fine, here's all the books that you want. I remember my mom saying really early to me, I was 10 or 11 years old, and she said to me, I will never censor you. Whatever book you want, whatever material you want, I'm gonna go get it for you. Now, of course, when you're that awkward and you're 10 or 11 years old, the last thing you're gonna do is ask your mom for anything risque, so I think it was a brilliant strategy on her part, but she did mean it.

 

Yeah, well, so you're at an academic institution, you're an academic, and there's no conversation I get out of with an academic without talking to them about the education system at large. But I think the other aspect of this that interests me is that you're a Montessori kid, right? And I'm only really observant of this right now because I have a one and a half year old nephew who seems to just have this insane aptitude. The kid is playing chords on the guitar, literally.

 

Really? Wow. That's cool.

 

Yeah, I'll show you a video after we're done. It's like scary. But the funny thing is, you know, my sister has been talking about like, where do we go to put him into school? And I'm like, there is no way this kid is gonna survive in a normal school. He's gonna get bored out of his mind. But there's something that you talk a bit about Montessori in general, but I think the line that struck me most is the part you transition into a regular school where you see the deepest mystery was why my autonomy and freedom had been replaced.

with so much pointless hierarchy and structure, it didn't make any sense. I eventually learned to get along and go along at my new school, but I never learned to like it or see the point. And as an educator, if you were tasked, especially as an educator at one of the most elite institutions in the world, let's say that you are basically brought into the next presidential administration as the head of education policy, and your job is to redesign the whole thing from the ground up. What would you change?

 

I would encourage more experimentation and I would study the hell out of that experimentation. So Srinu, like you just said, my strong prior is Montessori because I was a Montessori kid and I think it was an astonishing gift my parents gave me. Earliest in my education to have those years be oriented around exploration and poking at the world and going when your interests take you, as opposed to that, hey, here's a grid of desks and a new subject is gonna come at you every hour.

Again, I feel incredibly grateful. But if I'm gonna be in charge of anything as important as national education policy, I am not, I'm gonna try very hard not to let my personal beliefs or my priors dictate. I'm gonna say, great, you know, let's go study Montessori schools versus more traditional ones. Let's make sure we get this right before we go roll anything out that's as important as educating young people in a country.

 

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that there's an interesting sort of paradox here when you think about the types of people end up at a place like an MIT, right? And I've seen this trend of Montessori kids sort of being Silicon Valley CEOs. And yet, as a Berkeley undergrad, I think the thing that struck me most was here are some of the brightest people that you could possibly find thrown together in this university. And over the course of four years, it starts to become a breeding ground for conformity.

 

Ha!

 

Because the thing is, you get these, here are the majors, here are the jobs that those majors lead to. And I've seen this pattern, even if you walk through the bookstore, through a Barnes and Noble, where they have the education section for kids, and you go from kindergarten all the way up to sixth grade, it's like, whoa, the creativity just gets sucked out more and more with each grade.

 

Yeah, there's a lot of that going on and it gets to something very fundamental I think that I talked about in the book Which is that we humans are the most social creatures on the planet and literally you saw this in the book We cannot survive without other people if you put any of us the smartest people out in the middle of any kind of moderate Wilderness without extensive training They're gonna starve because they can't make a fire to cook for it and cook food and keep warm at night My point is that we are in

Hensely dependent on being a member in good standing of a group our evolutionary history is kind of dominated by that And so to think that we're not going to conform or we're not going to be influenced by the people around us and what they're doing That's wrong. It's just not how it works What I what I think places like MIT get right is that that? environment that social environment that I walked into when I was 17 years old celebrated

weirdness and nonconformity in some ways. And I would rather have that be the kind of social norm of the group than everybody better believe the same things and dress the same way and act the same way and try very, very hard not to stick out. I'm glad I've been exposed to some kind of nonconformist environments in my life.

 

Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I don't think this is news that we have this industrial era education system in like the age of AI effectively. Why is it that it's so damn hard to change this whole thing? Like, I feel like, you know, because you think about it, like, I was lucky enough to get into Berkeley, you went to MIT, and I don't know what it was like when you were applying. But I remember applying to college and I was like, okay, I got into Berkeley. That's cool.

But if you watch the, they show these clips of kids who get into like an MIT or a Berkeley nowadays, if you watch the college admissions scandal documentary, and like you look at the reactions where it looks like a matter of life and death, the way that these kids like interpret whether they get in or not. And so I wonder, you know, what do we, like, why is it so, like, if we start to look at it at a foundational level, I mean, talking about it from the social species, like, what is it that

 

Yeah.

 

causes this to persist even though we know that it's not actually designed for the future that's coming.

 

Well, there are a couple of things going on, right? One is that you point out what you saw in the college scandal documentary, which is this intense pressure that high achieving kids, I don't know, you'll call them upper middle class or whatever you want, whatever label you want, the intense pressure they and their families feel to get into a good school, even though they're probably not gonna starve in the streets, even if they don't. And I think that as our society changes,

families and communities go looking for signals about status, about, you know, here's a family that really, that's high status, here's a kid that's high status. Getting into a fancy school is one of those signals these days. And the reason it's a really, really powerful, durable signal is that the supply-demand balance to get into fancy schools is way, way out of line.

So in some sense, it's a meaningful signal. Getting into Princeton means that you survived a very competitive process. We can debate whether or not it's a healthy process or the best one, but it ain't easy to get into a school like that. So it's what economists would call a costly signal. There's some information going on there, which is why we're relying on that. But you also asked another question, which is why are we still educating primary school, secondary school kids?

in this factory method? And the short answer is, I don't know. The little bit longer answer is, it actually worked to generate the workforce that we needed for a lot of the industrial era. We needed obedient people with reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. There were a ton of jobs that needed to get done by that kind of person. So it's not a huge mystery to me that we built an educational system that turned those people out. Like you, I believe that the mismatch

between that system and the workforce needs of today, let alone tomorrow, that mismatch is big and getting better very quickly. In addition to which, it does kind of drive the spirit out of a kid and I'm not being too conspiracy theoretical. I think that was part of the point. I think the job was to turn out obedient people to participate in the workforce and the economy of that time. Okay, look, probably time to do something different.

 

Yeah.

 

I still think we need to be educating kids to have the right values, but the right skills and the right orientation toward work, that's probably different than it was 50 years ago.

 

Yeah, you know, the I love that you brought up curiosity because like the I've been doing these like fun experiments they had with my one year old nephew where I just been keeping a list of all the words that he knows and so for Christmas we took all the words that he knew we put them into his own custom children's book and You know every object was only recognized and my brother-in-law's like this is crazy like he finds these books so engaging because they're designed around his personal curiosity and

I like this is something I realized when I got to college. I felt like I was from day one under the pressure to make some sort of decision about what I was going to do with my life. And it's kind of funny because like, you of course, nothing turned out like that. Like people would ask me in business school, what are you going to do when you get out? I was like, I don't know, as long as it has nothing to do with the Internet. And, you know, clearly the universe has a sense of humor. But like, you know, when you think about that first sort of stage, and I'd love to hear about from your own experience to like.

Why is it that we don't have that room for exploration? Because one of my friends was like, you get mismatched with a talent, when you mismatch talent and environment, you get shitty performance. And he said, that's effectively what happened to you, you is what he told me. He's like, you basically are a creative person who was never in a creative job. So everybody thought you were like lazy and unmotivated.

 

Yeah. Again, the short answer is I don't know, and I don't want to go too far into portraying myself as some kind of educational specialist or theorist. I do think that we have mismatched the environment with how people learn in general, and in particular for kids who are farther out there refer for nonconforming kids for kids with extreme abilities.

That they don't get to go push on all throughout their lives. I think school is a bummer for a lot of people and Acknowledging that and working on that is pretty important homework to do I think I was lucky in that I was a kid who was capable of sitting in that desk in that grid and absorbing subject after subject hour after hour without getting too fidgety or acting out or needing riddle it or anything

 

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, talk to me about the trajectory that has led you to the work that you do and eventually to this book.

 

I think it's risky to ask people about their life trajectory because, like you said a while ago, the universe has a sense of humor. And I think there are so many more random twists and turns in the road that any attempt by me to look backward and talk about a straight path is storytelling. It is me making up things on the fly about myself. But I can tell you about this most recent book because

 

Sure.

 

I have spent most of my career as a business academic with one foot in

 

Hey, Andrew, can I stop you for just a second? It looked like you switch devices and you're a lot like it feels like you're distant now.

 

Oh no, I don't know what happened. Hold on. What the hell? Yeah, well that's bad. Let me go back to...

This is a thing that happens once in a while. Let me try to.

 

No worries, we'll make a note to edit here.

I actually don't hear your microphone is muted. It looks like.

 

Yep. Would it be okay if I dialed back in with my good device? Because I've got a much higher quality mic and I can't do it now. Okay. I'm going to go. Yes. Bye.

 

Yeah, that's fine. You can do that. I mean, you're coming through now. But yeah, if you want to do that, just reload.

 

All right, I'm back. Can you hear me?

 

Perfect, yep, cool. All right, so talk to me about the... Yeah, yeah, it was... Okay, hold on, it says you have Riverside open in another tab. Do you have a second tab with the same thing open? Just check. I mean, sometimes it's probably, it might be already gone. Like sometimes it probably does that, but you're fine now, I can hear you. Okay, cool. Yeah, of course. Well, talk to me about sort of, you know, like what has led you to writing this book? Like what are the inflection points throughout your career that have...

 

Yeah, I gotta troubleshoot this a little bit more deeply. Yep.

Ah crap, I might. Let me nuke this.

Okay, now I think I'm good. Okay, thank you for your patience.

 

and cause you to arrive at this perspective.

 

Um, for my whole career as a business academic, I've spent, what I've had one foot in each economy. And that's a really dumb way to say anything. So let me unpack that a little bit. I have always studied the companies in the economy, the American economy that are producing technology. So that takes you out to Northern California fairly often. I've also been studying the companies as they try to consume technology, just try to bring it in and make use of it. And that's kind of every industry, the entire rest of the economy has been trying to consume.

technology. So for my career, I've been walking around when I say Silicon Valley, I'm using it a shorthand for a lot of things. But I've been walking around the valley looking at technology producing companies and just kind of absorbing them. And then doing the same for, you know, like a cement distributor in Minnesota who wants to profit from technology somehow, you know, again, I'm making all of this up, right. But there's this idea that I was in two different places. And over time,

those two places seemed more and more dissimilar to me. They just felt different. They had a different vibe. They were operating by different principles and one of them seemed to be doing better. Like you know, there's been an astonishing amount of value created in that small piece of real estate in Northern California, especially over the course of the 21st century. By far the biggest companies in the world are based there. There's been extraordinary value creation there. And I started to say, wait a minute.

These two things might not be unrelated. The different vibe, the different culture that's going on that I, that I was kind of trying to absorb out West that might have something to do with the extraordinary performance of these companies. And in particular, we all know that strategy matters and culture matters, but the strategy didn't seem to me to be the differentiator. Nobody that I talked to, no executive group that I talked to.

is unaware of network effects anymore, or doesn't want to build a platform business, or has not heard of Moore's law. That's just not the case. The you know, the entire economy is full of companies that understand that and want to do it. And you know, I've tried to with Eric Brink Olson, I've tried to write books to help them with that. The strategy awareness gap is not a gap. It's just it's not a big deal. But there's something about the ability of a company to execute that strategy to execute on some kind of technology forward playbook.

 

Hehehe

 

that and that gap seemed to be huge and getting bigger over time. So I'm scratching my head about that. And at the same time, one of my geeky habits is I like to read books about other sciences that I'm not part of. And in particular, the science of why we human beings are so weird, why we have these biases, why we do what we do. That's always kind of fascinated me. So, you know, I've obviously bought Danny Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow, and read that, but there's...

a recent development in that line of work that to me got deeper because it said, wait a minute, what if we don't treat all of these human biases as bugs, what if they're actually features? What if we are designed to be biased in this way? And I started to I started to think to myself, okay, now you've got my attention. What are you talking about? And it got back to something I said earlier. We are the most social species on the planet.

We are the only species that interacts intensely in huge numbers with people that were not with individuals that were not related to the chimpanzees don't do that. The ants and the bees don't do that because they're related to everybody else that they work with. So we humans are deeply, deeply weird. And then I start to feel some eureka happening because this science, this emerging science, which I'm going to call cultural evolution, said we humans are we're not badly designed. We're not biased and flawed and all that.

We are exquisitely well-designed, and in particular, we're exquisitely well-designed to be members of the most social species on the planet. So the biases and the bugs that you experience, that we see and that we know about, these are features about what it means to be an individual within this incredibly social species. And then to me, it's just like, aha, okay, this gives me a very, very first principles way to think about a lot of things. And in particular, if what we humans do,

is evolve our cultures faster than any other living thing. Other living things have cultures, chimpanzees have cultures. Chimpanzees are not launching spaceships anytime soon. They're just not. We're the only species that goes from looking at the moon to landing things on it. Then that gives me traction. Like, okay, our superpower as a species is cultural evolution. And it's a very short hop to go from that to thinking, wait a minute.

 

Yeah.

 

What these companies that I'm so obsessed with what they're doing is they're mastering cultural evolution They're evolving their culture is faster than the rest of the economy faster than the competition they figured out a playbook for very rapid cultural evolution and Innovation and agility and execution. These are all just to me facets of this fundamental phenomenon of cultural evolution I'm like, okay, great I've got a bunch of examples and I've got what I think are first principles or a science that explains those examples

now it's time to write a book. And I'll tell you, this was the hardest book, it's the hardest book I ever wrote. It was also the hardest book I ever sold because I kept having to try to explain to people that I didn't just want to explain the things that Silicon Valley does differently. I wanted to explain why those things are such good ideas, why they work better. And it took me quite a while to put that pitch together and try to sell the book.

 

Well, it's funny because I think you answered pretty much every question I wanted to ask about that first section Which is when you said first principle as a school. Okay, that's why you laid the foundation with human behavior I was like as I was thinking I was like Why would you lay this huge foundation explaining human behavior before you get into the four geek norms? But I think the you know a couple things that really stood out to me in this part of the book

And you know, this really comes down to like groups where you talk about norms and you say that we adjust our behavior in all kinds of ways in response to all kinds of cues in order to maintain or improve our position in the group. And when the environment or when the group level environment shifts, we shift right along with it. Sometimes the resulting behavior changes are so big that it seems as if they could have only come about by swapping out the people involved. And then you talk about this idea of, you know, rank and we look at what we can get away with.

which takes us to this rule of thumb where you say observability increases adherence to norms. Talk to me about that and what that means.

 

So the basis for a lot of them, and thanks for reading that passage, because I really do believe that one of the mistakes that I think my community of people who study businesses and the people within them, one of the mistakes that I think my community has made is that we have over-focused on the individual, we have under-focused on the group. Now, of course, everybody in my community knows that groups are important and culture is important, but they think that if you want to change things, the level of analysis, the way to focus, the place to focus is on individuals.

and teaching them to be less biased or more ethical or more moral or lecturing them to be better or educating them or training them. And I'm not saying that's worthless, but I think that pales in comparison to getting the group level environment right. And the example that I give to try to make that point as vivid as possible is this wacky social science experiment that was done in 1970.

on the campus of the Princeton Theological Seminary, not Princeton University, but the Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, where these fiendishly clever people, and I'm honestly kind of frightened of very good social science researchers because I think they're evil geniuses. They figure out these crazy ways to manipulate us so that they can learn. But what these researchers did was they recruited a bunch of seminarians. And these are people who...

 

Thanks for watching!

 

go to school for a long time to absorb the teachings of Jesus and try to propagate them, right? That's what they're there for. And the main, like the most fundamental teaching of Jesus is like, you know, do nice things for other people. And in particular, there's the lesson of the good Samaritan, which is a parable that Jesus tells, where a Samaritan who was not the biblical Jews favorite person, sees a person who needs help and does the right thing.

 

And the parable is incredibly straightforward. And Christ ends it by saying, go and do likewise. So of course, these evil genius social scientists said, hey, let's go to a seminary where people are studying the teachings of Christ and see if they'll be good Samaritans or not. And in particular, they wanted to see if a couple of things mattered. They wanted to see if personality mattered. So they gave a personality test. And they wanted to see if mindset matters. And mindset is a thing we hear all about these days. And again, I'm not saying it's worthless or irrelevant, but these researchers manipulated the mindsets of some of these seminarians by having half of them give a talk about, I don't know, careers or something, and the other half, they said, you're gonna go record a talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan. So get that at the top of your mind. So they could be assured that all of the people who thought they were going to go give that talk had the parable of the Good Samaritan at the top of their mind. This crystal clear lesson from Christ.

help other people go and do likewise, help other people in need, right? Oh, so here's the evil genius part. They had the seminarians walk down an alley where nobody else appeared to be there, but there was a person in the alley who was slumped over, coughing, pretty clearly needed help. So they put an opportunity to be a good Samaritan in the path of all of these Samarians.

seminarians including people who were thinking about the parable of the good samaritan and some of them helped some of them didn't and some of them walked right over the person who was sitting there clearly in need of help and the question was what accounts for this difference and the answer from all of this research was the personality type didn't make any difference the Mindset didn't make any difference. The only thing that made a large measurable reliable difference was whether or not

person felt they were in a hurry. Because these evil geniuses manipulated the amount of hurry out there, and for about a third of them, they said, oh, you're late, you better go right over. Now, if you're in a Presbyterian theological seminary, showing up late to an appointment with a professor is a norm violation. It's a thing you really don't wanna do. And the people who thought they were late, in general, walked right over the person who needed help.

So that's why I see enough examples like that. And I really start to believe that what we need to work on, if we wanna make things different or better, what we wanna work on is the group level environment, the norms, and to be even more precise, the observability. If that person were walking through a crowded courtyard and saw the person who needed help, the seminarian probably would have stopped and helped, I think, but because they knew they weren't being observed, they could let something else dominate.

So to me, that really starts to get me thinking about, okay, if we wanna make things different, we need to shift some stuff. We need to focus on the group and its norms instead of the individual. And we better do things like increase observability so that people can't tell themselves any story retrospectively about why they did what they did.

 

Wow, like hearing you say all that, it kind of makes me realize like, you know, when my friend was asked, did you get straight A's in high school? I'm like, I'm Indian. Of course I got straight A's in high school. But I like, but no, the thing is it's observability of norms. Like that's what we observed from our peers. Like all our peers were straight A students and our parents didn't give a shit if we got straight A's, they were like.

That was just what they expected. The only question was like, why did you not get an A, like if you got an A minus or a B, but it makes now like looking at it from this perspective, I'm like, oh wow, we were adhering to cultural norms.

 

Yeah, and you absorb those almost unconsciously. I bet it wasn't like you guys all sat around and said, okay, well, we're not getting anything below an A minus. The other thing. Yep.

 

Oh, no, I mean, we never talked about grades. Like, I never explicitly had my parents say, it's important to get great, good grades. It was just kind of like, like it was implicit to the point where what started out as like, I was trying to like impress them. Eventually we, I realized what they did was implicitly they were teaching us the value of intrinsic motivation.

 

Yeah, and they were responding to the norms and the signals in their community as well. The other thing that a report card does, it's highly observable and it makes your plausible deniability go way down. You know, Mom, I really got an A. I don't know why they wrote C on the report card, but trust me, it's really an A. No, it's not. You can't wiggle your way out of that.

 

Yeah.

 

And one thing, and it sounds like I'm being super cynical about human beings, and I don't think I am. I think I'm trying to be accurate about our behaviors. Most living creatures on the planet want more benefits at less cost, at lower cost, cost of energy, costs of whatever. That's just good for your biology, right? That's good for your evolutionary success. So when I say that we will take shortcuts if they're available, I'm saying we do the same kind of thing as like a hummingbird will do, or an elephant seal. I don't care.

we wanna improve our cost benefit trade off. And so cutting corners in social situations or telling little white lies or telling retrospective stories, this is part of the human toolkit for improving the cost benefit trade off. Great, we should all realize that and not castigate people for doing it. But if you're designing a group level environment, make it harder to cut those corners. It's a brilliant ground rule.

 

Well, let's get into the very first of the geek norms, which is science. And you start out the section on science by talking about overconfidence, where you talk about this idea of a press secretary. But one of the things that you say is that confident people have an easier time attracting allies, sacking out opponents and attracting mates. And you talk about it from this perspective of what you call Homa Ultra Socialis. First, can you explain that term Homa Ultra Socialis to people and then I think it'll help kind of frame this.

 

Yeah, I made it up, right? And I'm just trying to communicate that we need a, our species needs a label. And I don't like the label that we currently have. Homo sapiens is accurate, but it doesn't really get at what distinguishes us. What distinguishes us is our crazy sociality. And the label that some scientists use for us is, for our sociality is ultra social. So I just Latinized that. Okay, fine, we're homo ultra socialis. One thing that is really highly valued,

in an ultra-social species that does very complicated things is confidence. I mean, do you feel drawn to unconfident people? Will you sign up to be led somewhere by somebody who's like, gosh, I don't know, maybe? No, right? Confidence is a very, very important thing for a member of an ultra-social species to have. And therefore, and this is an insight that goes to Robert Trivers, who I think is the most important biologist since Darwin.

the most evolutionary thinker since Darwin, Trivers says, look, evolution has designed us to be more confident than is warranted in many situations because confidence is so valuable for us as a species. It's very, very elegant logic. I love it, and Trivers backs it up with a ton of evidence, which helps me understand again,

why overconfidence is such a common bias. You can elicit it very, very easily. It's very hard to train away from people. And it feels like this gigantic bug or that you make worse decisions. Yeah, but you're a more highly socially valued. It's not a bug, it's a feature. And so I start the chapter on science by talking about that.

 

Yeah, well, so it's funny because I kind of makes me think it. How do you balance this sort of overconfidence with rationality? And I'm thinking back to an interview that Tim Ferriss did with Chris Saka. And this always stayed with me from that interview where he was asking him. And he tells him a story about meeting Kevin Systrom, where Kevin Systrom is like one guy working in a co-working space after bourbon has kind of gone through their pivot and the thing that he says like this just verbatim, I remember in detail, he's like.

 

Cool.

Oh yeah.

 

The thing that stood out to me was he didn't talk in conditional statements. Keep in mind, this was like before Instagram was Instagram. He was like just saying, when we get to 50 million users, we'll do this. And you know, the, and the phrase that Chris socket use was the, like the inevitability of success was like a common thing to all founders. So of course, like you said, nobody's going to follow somebody who's not confident, but you also need to back that up with something, which it's interesting because like.

 

Ha ha!

Ha!

I love it. Right.

 

In the case of that early moment in the co-working space, it's like, is he really backing this up with anything other than, you know, the fact that he's not speaking conditional statements?

 

Yeah. And in that case, probably not, but he was acting in a very confident manner and it stuck with, um, with, with soccer for, for years afterward. That's the importance of confidence. The reason I lead off the chapter on the great geek norm of science by talking about this is because to me, it, it helps me understand what science truly is. And it's not an attempt to get rid of our overconfidence. It's an attempt to channel it.

and in particular to channel it so that we win at the game of science where we're always going to argue science is an argument about the nature of reality. It's a debate. It's a constant debate with a ground rule. And the ground rule is we're going to settle the debate not based on charisma or seniority or who's got the bigger budget or who's wearing a Nobel Prize medal around their neck. None of that. The rule for science is we're going to settle the disagreement with

evidence and in particular we're going to try to get to the point where if you and I are disagreeing on the nature of reality or what's going on and you believe A and I believe B, you know here's what we're going to agree on. We're going to agree on the experiment, the evidence we're going to go gather to distinguish between A and B and then we're going to go run the experiment and that characterizes some of the huge you know breakthroughs or steps forward in science but the brilliance there is that it doesn't say don't be overconfident that that's a useless thing to say. It's a bumper sticker. It's not going to make any difference.

What it does say is take all that overconfidence and channel it into doing the hard, boring grunt work of producing enough evidence to convince that other guy that it's A not B. It's just, it's astonishing, it's astonishingly clever. And until I started thinking about human beings as these chronically overconfident, ultra social, status obsessed creatures, I didn't have a great way to understand science. And now I understand.

 

Yeah, absolutely.

 

I think Trivis calls it the supreme discriminator. Science is the supreme discriminator of false ideas. The reason we get smarter over time is that we have channeled our overconfidence into I'm gonna do this unbelievably, in most cases, just kind of tedious work, because I'm so confident I'm gonna mop the floor with your worldview. I just adore that.

 

Yeah. Well, you know, I think the thing that really struck me from this chapter was that, you know, what you and I and everybody else needs is to have our ideas stress tested. And that's what other people are really good at, just like we're good at stress testing their ideas. And I mean, you've gone through the book writing process. So you know how like excruciating feedback is, you know, I described this, the process, it's like, oh, working with your editor or publisher is like an emotional root canal. You basically are going to get torn to shreds.

 

Yeah. Yep.

 

And so one of the things I realized is like feedback is really difficult for people like that. I remember fear of public reaction was like one of the number one reasons people gave me when I surveyed my audience for like why they weren't doing this creative thing that they wanted to do. And yet I was like, you know what, like harsh feedback sometimes is invaluable. And often like I have a note literally that says, you know, you know, like what you want to hear, you know, sounds good. What you need to hear is good.

 

I love that distinction. And I do think to the point that you made that evolution is so clever and we're such a groupie species that evolution has designed us to be lousy evaluators of our own ideas and good evaluators of other people's ideas. And the research on this is pretty wild. I talk about some of them in the book, but I'm convinced we're naturally I'm really good at evaluating your ideas. I suck at evaluating that. I'm way too fond of them. And

 

I'm sorry.

 

And so

 

Well, let's get to the second one, which is ownership. And you open the section on ownership by quoting the simple sabotage field manual ideas, which is insist on doing everything through channel, never permit sorrows to be taken in order to expedite decisions, be worried about the propriety of any decision, raise the question of whether such action, as is contemplated, lies within the action of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some echelon, multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on.

 

I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

Thank you.

 

see that three people have to prove everything where one would do. And I'm just thinking, I was like, yeah, this is why I don't have a real job. It was because of bullshit like this.

 

Hehehe

And I thought this story was so good that it had to be an urban legend, but it's not. The quote that you just gave is from a field manual for partisans behind enemy lines during World War II in Nazi occupied territories. The OSS, the predecessor to the CIA and the start of the American intelligence community.

printed up these leaflets called the simple sabotage field manual and kind of drop them out of airplanes in Norway and France and countries like that to help partisans mess up Nazi organizations. And a lot of that book is based on, you know, stopping up toilets and blowing up railroad sightings and stuff like and short circuiting electric circuit boxes and whatnot. But there's a chapter that's all about softer methods of sabotage. And you read it. And honestly that

excerpt that you have is perfect. It sounds like the procedures of a late 20th century, you know, industrial era corporation, just this elaborate thicket of ways to hold up getting things done. If you look at how companies actually go about getting their work done, it looks like somebody sabotaged them. I tell this example, which is apparently a true example.

of a poor woman named Jennifer Nieva trying to get approval inside Hewlett-Packard, which used to be kind of a thought of as a decently managed company in 2005. She was working there and she needed to get approval to spend $250,000. Okay, that's a decent amount of money. Maybe somebody needs to sign off on that. 20 people needed to sign off on that, including people she had never heard of in her life.

She tells a story. She traced them down to an office in Guadalajara, Mexico and called them every day until the last signature was obtained. And she said, she spent so much time with one person down there that when this person updated their LinkedIn profile, they asked Jennifer for a recommendation. This is what companies back themselves into. And it's mystifying at first, right? Why would you sabotage yourself this way? Why would you promiscuously distribute the power to hold things up in this way?

And the very short answer that I give, again, when I think about how we are as a species, the answer is because being involved in work gives you status. And we are the most status hungry things on the planet. We're the most social species. Every other social mammal has a, as an intense status hierarchy. So do social birds. This is where the idea of a pecking order comes from.

Great, we have one too. Ours are more subtle, they're more elaborate. They're not just based on whether I beat you up or you beat me up physically. They're very, very elaborate, but they're real. And if you let people lose all they'll, well, not all they'll do, but one of the things they will, they're guaranteed to do is invent all of these status games and all these status ladders that they can then try to climb. And they will do it even if it drives down the share price of the company, because we are not wired by evolution to care about the share price of a company.

 

Yeah, well, you know, it's funny because I was trying to think back to, you know, interviews I'd done and there was a clip I wanted to bring back based on the fact that you wrote so much about status from a conversation I had with Mitch Princeton. Take a listen.

You know, the reason I brought back that clip is because when you think about geeks, right? These are the people who don't peak in high school per se, right? They're often the. Yeah. You and I both, right? It's just like, oh, well, so this is what happened to the high school quarterback. Like, you know, but I think that, you know, that struck me, you know, in particular, because you're right. Like, I think that at our core, like, even when we think about, like, I see this often with people who.

 

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, personally, I find that super gratifying and I agree wholeheartedly with that quote, right? Yeah, right on. Thanks, man.

 

to select podcast guests. I've seen it in people like, oh, and I realized that often when we judge people entirely based on their perceived status, we miss out on really invaluable opportunities. I had a mentor who literally came up with the name unmistakable creative without a question, the most influential person in terms of where I've ended up and what I've done. And I remember when I met him, he had 150 followers on Twitter. He was six weeks into

And I was like, there's something interesting about this guy. And he ended up becoming like invaluable. And so when you think about status, like what is the role of status as it relates to this geek norm of ownership?

 

One thing to keep in mind is that, as I said, we humans play incredibly rich status games. They seem to be much richer than any other species because of our big brains and big social groups. So we have status based on dominance and that really is chimpanzee status. That's can I beat the snot out of you? And we're still attuned to that. I tell the story about being at a conference and my brain saying, oh, watch out, man. And I'm like, I'm at some kind of tech conference. What are you talking about? And I looked over and there's the boxer Mike Tyson.

who is the most physically formidable person I have ever seen in my life. And I wanna be super clear, Tyson was not being threatening, right? He wasn't coming at me. He was like reading the program and holding a cup of coffee. But that dude is engineered to inflict damage on other people. And my brain saw that out of the corner of my eye and was like, you better watch it. There's a very high status person nearby. I contrast that with Yo-Yo Ma, who I also know a little bit.

The other kind of human status, which is not nearly as widely shared elsewhere in the animal kingdom, is based on prestige, is based on being very, very good at something. And both of those kinds of status work for us in an evolutionary sense. So the story you told about your mentor, he sounds to me like a high prestige person, very good at what he did, might not be universally known, might not be on top of any org chart, but you...

 

Yeah.

 

respected him. He in some social group, he had status and that that's a very, very good evolutionary strategy for people.

 

Well, I

Like I think that people think, wait, how the hell can autonomy and bureaucracy coexist?

 

Yeah, and they can't to a large extent which is why some of the geek companies that I think have gone farthest with this Norm of ownership and I'm thinking of Amazon for example where I talk a fair about it in the book How hard they worked to decouple small teams from each other both technologically and organizationally? So that they really did have autonomy. They really did have authority and responsibility and ownership But

they realize that if you do that and you don't, those teams aren't aligned, they're not all pulling in the same direction, you've just generated chaos, right? You've just generated a swarm of teams during whatever they want. So the geeks are obsessed with one kind of bureaucracy, which is the bureaucracy that makes sure that the work of the team is aligned with the overall goals of the organization, and then sets up the monitoring of that group's performance. How are we gonna see if the alignment remains over time?

We have to increase observability. We have to decrease plausible deniability. And part of the genius of modularity is you can't say, oh, that other group held me up and stopped me from making progress. No, man, you're not dependent on any other group. Your progress is your responsibility. So it accomplishes both of these goals of high observability and low plausible deniability. And it gives people what they want, which is autonomy, which is a sense of agency in the world.

while keeping the groups aligned with the overall goals of the organization. Bezos and his colleagues at Amazon worked crazy hard on that. Benioff at Salesforce, when he started Salesforce, realized how important that could be. They spun up a process they call V2Mom, that's their alignment process. And Benioff credits it with a big part of Salesforce's success. A lot of my California friends have worked at Salesforce at one time or another, and they're like, yeah.

You would go look up somebody's V2 mom on the internet before you'd meet with them. It suffused the organization, it was pervasive. And John Doar wrote books about measure what matters in the OKR process. They're all saying the same thing. If give people autonomy, that's awesome. But you have to increase observability and decrease plausible deniability. And you have to make sure that what they're doing upfront is aligned with what you're trying to achieve as an organization. It's an easy playbook to state. It's hard to do in practice.

 

Damn.

 

But conceptually, it's pretty straightforward.

 

Yeah. Well, it's making me think of two people I hired. One, literally, I remember bringing her on, I was like, this is what I need you to do. I don't have any clue how to do it. I need you to figure it all out. And I literally never had to talk, like I'd meet with her once a week and the meetings were basically, this is what I've done, this is what I'm doing, I'll get back to you next week. That was it. I was like, this is amazing. Like, she set the gold standard for what I look for. And I realized now the second, like the finding that another person was incredibly difficult.

 

Yeah.

 

almost impossible. But that takes us to the next natural evolution of this, which is this geek norm of speed. And I think that it's funny because I remember Ben Fieberg, I don't remember exactly how to pronounce his name, he wrote the book, How Big Things Happen, right? And talked about this as well, like how we tend to overestimate how quickly we can get something done. And even Cal Newport, in his most recent book, Slow Productivity, he actually gave

 

Oh sure, great book, great book.

 

a suggestion which was to double the time estimate on every project in order to work at a more natural pace. But I think the thing that stood out to me here when you talked about speed was that you said, speed here doesn't mean velocity. It's not how fast people and projects are moving toward the finish line, rather it's speed of iteration. How quickly a team can create something that works in meaningful and measurable sense, present it to a customer and get feedback on it. And it got me thinking, I was like, okay, so what does this look like in my writing process? You know, like as a creator, like what does this look like on the company level then?

 

Yeah.

 

you know, let's kind of boil it down to the example of like an individual working on a creative.

 

Yep. And here's, I think, the fundamental insight that I had when I was writing that chapter is that in any big effort, long effort, complicated, interdependent, define big however you want, in any big effort, there are lots of places to hide. There are lots of places to hide the fact that you're falling behind or the fact that things might not be going well. And the bigger the effort, the longer the more interdependent is, the more places there are to hide. And I want to be super clear about this.

I think the person that we hide most from is ourselves. You know, Srini, I wrote a book where I talk a lot about our human biases and overconfidence and how things are laid. Did I deliver this manuscript on time? Did I hit my... You give me a lead up, the answer is no, I did not. We hide from ourselves. And that means, because we're very overconfident, we hide from other people, the true state of progress going on.

 

Yeah.

 

And so I think that's the fundamental phenomenon is that in big efforts, there are plenty of places to hide and we very, very smart, uh, um, strategizing at an unconscious level, ultra social creatures. We take advantage of those places. So to me, my norm of speed is, is essentially about getting rid of those places to hide and a great way to do that is to say, okay, your deadline's not six months from now. No, no, your deadline's next week and you're going to present something to a customer.

and they're going to give the group the thumbs up or the thumbs down about whether you're on pace or not. And by doing that, by chunking up a big project, and by making people show their work, and making somebody give it a thumbs up or thumbs down, again, we're back to our old friends. We have increased observability. We've driven plausible deniability down, and we have shown a flashlight on so many of those places to hide in a big project.

And to me, that's the heart of agile development and all these agile methods that we've been talking about in the 21st century. That's the core of their success. It's one of the really important things they do is they just remove the places to hide on big complicated efforts. And therefore the research on agile is very, very clear. It is that compared to the old fashioned methods of project management, it ain't even close. Not perfect, big things are hard to do, but holy cow, does this agile iterative approach work better?

 

Yeah, well it's funny because I'm...

 

And it was wild because I think Brent was writing his book, How Big Things Get Done, at the same time I was writing the geek way. I relied on an article he'd written, but not the book. But we were essentially writing each other's books using different examples in somewhat different language.

 

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's making me think I'm working on translating one of our podcast interviews into a film for an AI film festival. And, you know, I've been going through storyboarding, but like one of the very first things I did was generate images, throw them into the generator. I'm like, let me just see what this looks like, you know, theoretically. And I went I was trying to do like a Pixar style thing. I was like, there's too much distortion in this. Like, literally, it was one iteration after another. And then finally, when I settled on a style, the speed at which I was able to go was like exponentially faster.

So this question struck me, I love this question so much that you post in the book, why are kindergartners so much better than B-school tycoons in training? And it got me thinking, I remember thinking about this in the context of Congress when we're in the middle of the pandemic and they were trying to figure out whether they're going to do another round of relief. And I was like, a bunch of kindergartners would have come to a decision faster than this. So talk to me about this idea, like what happens to adults that they don't, they lose this ability to act this way?

 

I think on big projects, two things happen to us. Number one, we've already talked about that. I'm sorry, this will be the last time I have to do this. I seem to have like a 25-minute grace period. I'm going to die.

 

Oh, hold on, Andrew, I think your other mic kicked in again.

No sweat.

 

I'm gonna dial out and dial back in, sorry about this.

 

I think your mic is still muted.

 

I'm an idiot. All right, now we're back. Yep. Yeah. I think there are a couple things going on that seem to reliably slow us down as we age. One of them is what we just talked about, which is the quest for status. And when you look at how MBA students start a group project, you see all this status jockeying going.

 

Cool, there we go, great. So pick it up from the kindergartners.

 

The other thing is a flavor of overconfidence. We get really fond of our ability to plan things out, to anticipate all the possible contingencies and roadmaps and find ways around them. We just, we love planning. Danny Kahneman says it's so deeply ingrained that it deserves its own label. He calls it the planning fallacy. Okay, great. Both of those things get in our way of being able to start working and start iterating quickly on a project. Kindergarteners don't have as much of that.

And when you give them a challenge like, hey, build the tallest tower you can out of this spaghetti uncooked and tape and the marshmallow has to go on top. They're like, sweet. And they just start building weird looking things that actually work pretty well. The first ones don't work well, but then the kindergarten is like, oh yeah, I'll try something else. And apparently, I haven't verified this myself. Apparently a room full of kindergartners will do better than a room full of MBAs on average. At

building tall towers of uncooked spaghetti where the marshmallow has to be on top. It's called the Marshmallow Challenge and having done it with a few different NBA audiences, I can attest the average performance is really not.

That's true. I thought again, it was an exaggeration or an urban myth. Now I've done it a couple of times. They do not cover themselves in glory.

 

Yeah. Well, it's funny because I think about, you know, a conversation that I had, there was an aspiring podcaster, I met her at some mixer and she must have asked me like a hundred questions. And I realized I like, I dunno, it's funny. It led to sort of this basis for a blog post I'm writing titled, there's no substitute for knowledge gained through experience. Like literally, she would finally told her, I was like, let me just tell you right now. I don't know the answer to any of these questions. And she's probably thinking, what an asshole, like you're supposed to help me. You're the guy who's done a podcast for 10 years. And I was like,

 

Yeah.

 

you're asking questions that you can only find out the answers to by going and doing something.

 

It gets to another one of the benefits of speed that I didn't understand at all when I started writing the book And shame on me in addition to the cultural The the species superpower of cultural evolution that we talked about earlier Our other superpower is that we learn better and faster than any other living thing on the planet And the heart of our learning especially before we had universities and the scientific method and stuff like that The heart of our learning is watching other

people were really good at it. And in particular, we can observe who's good at the task. Really doesn't matter what the task is. Who's good at it, who are the people who are good at it? And then our brains create kind of a blend, a weighted average model of all the good stuff that we saw. And then we apply that model when it's our turn to do something. It's an absolute human superpower. The research is crazy on this. And so what you are experiencing is that every one of your podcasts is what a...

social scientists would call it generation, another opportunity to learn. And you've listened to other podcasts and whether or not you're doing it consciously, you're observing and absorbing what worked and what didn't. So you've got a lot of models to choose from. So the reason you become a very good podcaster is that you have tons of generations and each one of those generations has several models that you can follow in it. That's how you get better over time. And I think that's partly why you didn't feel like you could offer that person any real help.

because that knowledge is kind of hard for you to get out there and, and make explicit out there in the world. So this agile approach, iterate, do it in public, man, all that's doing is giving you lots of generations and lots of models. You're turbo charging the learning.

 

Yeah.

Well, it's funny. It makes me think of a ridiculous kind of relatable story to this. So like, you know, my nephew was picking up new words, like at an astronomical rate. And you know, so we taught him to say cool dude, and he thinks I'm a cool dude. And it's really funny because he wakes up, he woke up the morning and he was like, he says that he's a cool dude, that I'm a cool dude, my mom, who is kind of the authoritarian, and he knows it like she's, and she's like, is amma, cool, cool dude, and he literally won't say it like

 

Oh man.

 

She cannot get him to say it. And I'm like, whoa, okay, he doesn't think you're a cool dude. And I'm like laughing because I'm like, mom, you're not a cool dude. You're far from chill. Like there's no, and he's a one year old and he knows that.

 

Nice.

Out of the mouths of babes, right?

 

Yeah. Well, let's finish this up by talking about the final piece, which is openness. Like, you know, openness could be in any number of things. And you contrast this with sort of the model one approach, which, you know, you describe in detail, which is, you know, be unilateral and control over things, strive to win and minimize losing, suppress negative feelings. So explain these two difference differences.

 

Yep. Let me, yeah, because openness is kind of a, it sounds the most loosey goosey of the concepts, but it might be the most important. Let me try to explain it with two synonyms and an antonym. So the two synonyms, well, number one is psychological safety, which my former Harvard colleague, Amy Edmondson, has been talking about for her whole career, doing such great research on. This feeling like, can I speak truth to power in this environment? Is that okay?

 

Yep. Yeah.

 

So a close synonym for openness as I'm using it, a psychological safety. Another one is willingness to pivot. Is this not working anymore? Do we need to go do something else? And I think pivot has become part of the lexicon of tech for pretty healthy reasons overall. This might not be working, let's not keep doing it. An antonym for me for openness is defensiveness. Because defensiveness is all about digging in your heels and not giving an inch in an argument.

not giving up any of the turf that you fought so hard to win, not being willing to accept that you might not be correct in this argument. These are all just aspects of defensiveness. And I think one of the greatest and most underappreciated scholar of organizations was a person who was a very senior professor at Harvard. And I was just starting out there, this guy named Chris Argyros, who's kind of a legend, super prestigious in a very small community of organization geeks. And Argyros just said, look, we should expect defensiveness.

of course people are going to be defensive. They're going to want to hold on to what they have and get more of it. Why should we expect anything else? He didn't use evolutionary terms, but he was speaking my language. And so you've got to fight that very deep rooted tendency, which is hard to do. And the great geek norm of openness is all about fighting those defensive tendencies and making people open vulnerable, able to pivot, creating environments of psychological safety.

 

Yeah. Well, let's finish up with two final things. I think that, you know, people are hearing this probably like, okay, well, this makes sense. And I realized this is going to be a very strange question given how much we've emphasized that we're such a social species, but like how do people apply this on a day to day level, you know, in their individual lives? Like where do you see this playing out? You know, we go back to the example, for example, we're talking about speed and openness, openness I get, like I should be asking probably friends for feedback on my articles. Speed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

 

Yeah, and doing it quicker, earlier in the process. Right, yep.

 

Yeah, so talk to me like, let's just use writing as an example of how we might apply these on a daily basis, because you and I are both writers, maybe that's one way we could think about it.

 

Yeah, and I don't do a great job, but I don't to follow my advice on writing. I'm defensive about it. I'll admit that I need to get better at it. Iterate. I do have, I have started doing what you probably know, I've heard of as the vomit draft. Just barf it out for the first draft. Get something on the page because then you can iterate from it. And that means your friends can help you. Other eyeballs can help you. I find that if I go back and look at something I wrote two weeks earlier, it's like somebody else wrote it.

 

I'm sorry.

 

which means that I'm a better evaluator of it. So you can always start doing that. You can not succumb to the planning fallacy you can just start doing instead of planning over time. But more broadly, if you do wanna do self help, you can walk around thinking of yourself as a chronically overconfident person who is defensive, who doesn't wanna give up what they've fought so hard to achieve. You can say, okay, do I wanna be better than that? And you can start to say things like to other people, that's a great idea.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I hadn't thought of that. If you're trying to referee a decision, you can say, what evidence led you to make that decision? All right, you know, Serene, what evidence led you to make that decision? You can try to have a debate that's focused more on the ground rules of science. So we can all get a little bit geekier in the ways that I talk about in the book. I think we can do that in our personal lives. And I think we can do that obviously in our business lives for whatever sphere of influence we have. But honestly, I think when I started to think of myself, not as this

wise, rational, smart individual. But as this super messed up member of a very unique, super weird species on the planet, the most ultra social species with the attendant mental baggage that comes along with that, oh, that's insight. I might be able to work with that in my daily life.

 

Yeah, wow. Well, I have one final question for you, which is how we finish our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

 

I mean, for me, it's are they laying stuff on me that I haven't heard before?

Are they are they showing me something new? I guess I'm a Novelty junkie. I just like being exposed. I just like being exposed to something new, you know, I love excellence Right, but I loved I probably rather watch Roger Federer play tennis because he's like I never thought of that shot before Where did that come from? And that the doll was an amazing tennis player, but he just kind of played tennis better and harder with more willpower than anybody else I have crazy respect for that, but I preferred watching Federer

 

You and me both.

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story and your insights with listeners. Like I said, to me, I think this was a social science book disguised as a business book, which is why I loved it so much. Because on the surface, you might think, oh, just another business book about tech in Silicon Valley, and it's so not. This is something I think that is really relatable to anybody, but where can people find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything else you're up to?

 

Yeah.

I appreciate that.

Um, I'm at Andrew McAfee.org. I'm a McAfee on Twitter, a M C a F like Frank EE, and I'm going to be firing up a sub stack soon and I shoot my mouth off there.

 

And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.