Julia Galef | The Benefits of Seeing the World as It Is

Srini Rao

Julia welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Julia Galef

Hey, my pleasure. Happy to be here.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So I found out about your work by way of your publicist who happens to also be working at the same publisher that we both published books at. And I remember, I think your book was sitting on my desk for a while. And I think I was out of books to read on Amazon that I hadn't nothing I hadn't ordered anything that week. So I just grabbed it and I know it literally was, you know, I'm in a way I'm glad it was sort of the surprising discovery because I had looked at it had just been sitting there and I grabbed it. But

Julia Galef

So mine was the last resort.

Srini Rao

to that point, I actually couldn't put it down. And I'm pretty sure I emailed you right after I finished reading immediately, I emailed your publicist and CC Jones said, yes, we absolutely would love to have you. So, we'll get into the book, but I think given the nature of the book and your work, I wanna start by asking you, what social group were you a part of in high school and what impact did that end up having on the choices that you've ended up making throughout your life and your career?

Julia Galef

Ha ha ha.

Julia Galef

What a fun first question. No one asks me that. I mean, I was a nerd. I feel like that will shock probably 0% of your audience. Yeah, I guess I like bounced around between different types of nerd social group, like the drama nerds and the art nerds and the math nerds. And I'm sure there are other kinds of nerds I'm forgetting right now. But I mean, high school was...

there were more nerds to choose from because I went to a high school for nerds. But even at that high school, I was still in the nerd social group. So that probably tells you something about what I was like.

Srini Rao

Okay, wait a minute. A high school for nerds, what is the sort of social hierarchy like in a high school for nerds?

Julia Galef

Well, it was some people might be familiar with the International Baccalaureate program, the IB program. Oh, really? Cool. Yeah, I mean, they're, yeah, they're, it was like embedded in a regular high school, but all of my classes were with other IB students. And yeah, it's interesting. I had some conversations with people from my middle school or my high school, you know, years after the fact, just kind of reminiscing.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. We had it at my school too. Yeah.

Julia Galef

And I remember bringing up the social hierarchy and with someone who I'm now more friendly with, who was like one of the more popular kids. And she looked at me confused and she was like, what are you talking about? There was no social hierarchy. Everyone just liked each other. We were all friends. And I was like, that must be what it's like being someone who's at the top of a social hierarchy. The hierarchy is invisible to you. So yeah, I think I maybe perceived the distinctions like more acutely because I felt like I was

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

At the bottom? Ha ha ha! Yeah.

Julia Galef

towards the bottom of the heap, but who knows? Maybe it had some positive silver linings for my future development as a person. At least that's what I like to think.

Srini Rao

I mean, I can relate as a band geek. So when you have that... Yeah. Well, when you have this sort of bizarre social hierarchy that's so different than like what sounds like a typical high school...

Julia Galef

Oh, I was never in that nerd subsection, but that's just because I had no talent, so.

Srini Rao

How does it change the relationships you have with people? Because obviously, I think there's something fascinating about the fact that somebody who's at the top of the hierarchy doesn't even recognize that it's there, which I think will really actually have a lot to do with the content of your book. But what are social dynamics and relationships like? Do you have the sort of cool kids and hot girls and jocks and all that kind of stuff? Or is it just a bunch of nerds all trying to be less nerdy than each other?

Julia Galef

Uh, there, I mean, there were definitely, so this was like late 90s to early 2000s. So the, I remember the cool kids were the ones wearing Abercrombie and Fitch. I think, I think we even called them like the Abercrombie crowd. That was like our name for the cool kids. Which is not, I don't think that's true anymore. It was kind of interesting to watch the fall of the brand of Abercrombie over the last decade or so. But.

Yeah, I think one way in which I was fortunate in high school is that maybe because it was an IB program, there wasn't a sense that you had to be bad at school in order to be cool, which I don't know, from teen movies I get the sense is that thing at least somewhere. So yeah, this is this is a common theme that I've noticed and that I wrote about a little in my book actually that your the values and the

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Julia Galef

kind of implicit expectations about how people should behave and what you should aspire to that are just kind of in the water in your social groups. They're just such a huge part of what shapes your behavior and your thinking, like what kinds of thoughts you even feel like you're allowed to have. And at my high school, it was just in the water that yeah, you should try really hard at school and people respect other people who are...

Srini Rao

Totally.

Julia Galef

have smart things to say in class and so on. And so that influenced my behavior. And I see this in lots of other ways too. Maybe at some point in the conversation we'll talk about intellectual honesty and objectivity and all these things that I like to go on about. And those traits as well, I've noticed, are strongly influenced by the implicit values of the people that you hang out with, whether that's in person or...

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julia Galef

just online, like the circles you run in online and the people you follow and just, yeah, the culture that you kind of embed yourself in will shape the way that you think as well. So that's like a pattern that I've keep noticing.

Srini Rao

Yeah. It's funny, I'm so glad I asked this question and that you were an IB student because my entire group of friends was pretty much IB students and diploma students. We always joke that the dumb people in my group of friends went to Berkeley. We were the dumb ones. Yeah, it was kind of like, wow, we're not the smartest ones in the group and we went to the best public school in the country. You mentioned that it, you know.

Julia Galef

Right. No offense, Berkeley.

Srini Rao

impacts what you aspire to. So that to me is actually really fascinating because you based on sort of the experience I had you know between Indian parents and growing up in the Indian culture and then being around pretty much you know honor students as my close friends and then ending it up a place like Berkeley there was almost this sort of predetermined life path that was put in front of us. It was like hey here are the options that have been put in front of you choose one if not you're screwed. It was like doctor, lawyer, engineer and to me what has always

Julia Galef

Yeah.

Julia Galef

Uh huh.

Srini Rao

It's like you put the smartest people, you know, in this like environment that's ripe with opportunity to, you know, explore, discover who you are. And what I realized was that it was a breeding ground for conformity. It was like basically a breeding ground for future doctors, lawyers and bankers. So I wonder how your own high school group influenced, you know, sort of the way that people thought about, you know, the future and what was possible and what they, you know, were told that they should do.

Julia Galef

Mm-hmm.

Julia Galef

Yeah, the doctor lawyer banker track is very familiar to me too. I guess academic was also on that list because a lot of people in my social circle had academic parents. My parents both had PhDs and yes, right? It's maybe less common in the country as an expectation for what you should aspire to but I guess in our circles it was like on the standard roster.

Srini Rao

My dad's a professor, so.

Julia Galef

And I did actually end up going into a PhD program and dropping out after a year because I wasn't happy. And feeling kind of bad that I'd let down the family tradition of going and getting a PhD. And so yeah, that was a bit of an inferiority complex I had for a little while. And then I moved out to the Bay Area. And in the Bay, your status is kind of proportional

how early you dropped out of formal schooling, at least in the, my social circles in the Bay Area. So, dropping out of a PhD was a positive in my circles. It would have been better if I dropped out of college, even better if I dropped out of high school. I never found anyone who dropped out of elementary school, but I'm sure they would have been the coolest kid in town. So that, yeah, that kind of changed my...

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Hahaha

Julia Galef

my feeling about what I had to be ashamed of or proud of, which was kind of nice, and I think a helpful way that people were more likely to judge me based on original ideas or what value I was trying to add to the world, things like that, rather than how many degrees I had.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Well, so I am so glad you brought up the inferiority complex because I think that, you know, that is something that I've always wrestled with when it comes to my younger sister, who is basically as one of my, you know, best friends from college says, every Indian parent's dream come true. And I'm like, well, that makes me every Indian parents nightmare come true, particularly possibly even my own, because she's, you know, basically a doctor, chief anesthesiology resident at Yale, you know, did a fellowship at UCLA. Like she's a badass, you know, in every way possible. And she's wicked smart.

Julia Galef

Hehehe

Ha ha ha.

Julia Galef

Aww.

Srini Rao

social intelligence that's off the charts. I had to do a thousand interviews to function as a normal human being. Like all the things that come naturally to her, I have to read books for and like, you know, basically do all this self-improvement stuff for. But how do you let go of that? You know, for anybody listening, how do you let go of that sense of inferiority that you might feel despite the fact that, you know, deep down you want this thing that is unconventional, that is much more aligned with your values. And at the same time, you're wrestling with the fact that you've been socialized in the culture

Julia Galef

Thanks for watching!

Srini Rao

that expects you to conform to these values and rewards you, you know, for conforming to those values.

Julia Galef

Yeah, well, I think part of the answer is something I was alluding to a few minutes ago, which is that you can kind of curate your group of friends, your peer group, your broader social circles online and in person to be populated with people who are going to look up to you for things that you actually want to cultivate, rather than looking down on you for things that you want to cultivate. And so, yeah, being around people who

kind of respect you for going against the grain is really helpful. It's not that you can't do your own thing and forge your own path, you know, in the face of disapproval from your social circles, but it's just so much harder. It's like a headwind instead of a tailwind. So why not make it easier for yourself and be around people who are going to incentivize the kind of development in yourself that you actually want? And then there's also... Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, anyway. Then there's also...

Srini Rao

now.

Srini Rao

No, no, go ahead.

Julia Galef

You know, people, I'm sure a lot of your listeners have heard the people give the advice that, you know, no one is paying as much attention to you as you are to yourself. And so if you're feeling insecure, anxious, or whatever, self-conscious, don't, you shouldn't worry about it because people aren't actually judging you nearly as much as you think they are as much as you're judging yourself. And I think that's true. But I also think that just hearing that advice is not necessarily that helpful.

Julia Galef

to actually simulate, like to flip the roles in my head and imagine meeting someone, you know, who has the traits that I'm insecure about or who, whatever, has done the thing that I'm self-conscious about and just imagining like how I would react to that and whether I would judge them or even how much it would register on my radar as a thing. And usually my reaction is like, I just wouldn't really care, it wouldn't.

Like, it wouldn't really impact how I see the person at all, and I wouldn't really consider it a big deal. And that kind of simulation is much more convincing to my gut, to my emotions, than just telling myself the words people aren't judging you. And I think that's a general pattern too, that like, you kind of have to simulate the thing and notice how you would react in order for that to really update your emotions, not just the conscious words in your head.

Srini Rao

Well, I think that makes a perfect segue to start talking about the book, because I want to come back to a couple of things you said about the people that we surround ourselves with, but I think I want to save that for later in the conversation because I know you referenced that. But before we get into the actual book itself, what in the world got you into doing this research on this specific topic? And like, what led to this book?

Julia Galef

Mm-hmm.

Julia Galef

Yeah, so I've been kind of engaged with the discourse with a capital D on reasoning and judgment and rationality for over a decade now in the form of, you know, reading books and interviewing people about reasoning and rationality on my own podcast and running workshops, teaching people principles of decision-making from cognitive science and just having tons of conversations over the years about reasoning and rationality.

And I came to feel like there was a really important missing piece, or just very underappreciated pillar, of how to improve your reasoning and decision making, that I just didn't see people talking about very much in the books and articles and conversations on this topic. And that was the motivation behind good reasoning. So what people do tend to talk about a lot is improving your knowledge. Like, like,

sharing lists of cognitive biases and logical fallacies and, you know, cataloging all the errors that we make in our reasoning and so on. And it's not that that's not important, but just as important, if not more so, I came to conclude, is how you are motivated to use that knowledge. So you know, on the one hand, you could be motivated to use your knowledge of biases and fallacies to shoot down other people's arguments.

find new and cleverer ways to rebut arguments from people you don't like or for things that you don't believe in. Or you could be motivated to use that knowledge to turn that lens on yourself and be more self-critical and be more interested in finding the flaws in your own reasoning and finding your own blind spots, et cetera. And so someone with the same set of knowledge about biases and fallacies and logic and science, et cetera, can be...

either really good at seeing the world clearly or really bad at it, depending on how they're motivated to use that knowledge. And so I just wanted to refocus the conversation relatively less on learning about biases and fallacies and more on motivating ourselves to turn that knowledge on ourselves.

Srini Rao

Hahaha. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Well, it's funny you say that because I feel like, you know, that has kind of been the work of my last year is like looking at even, you know, everything I write about talk about, you know, create content about in context of other people's lives. And suddenly, I'm like, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense in the context of somebody else's life. But we'll go further into that. So you open the book by saying, you know, the scout mindset is the motivation to see things as they are not as you wish they were.

Julia Galef

Yeah.

Srini Rao

seek out your blind spots to test your assumptions and to change course, it's what prompts you to honestly ask yourself, was I at fault in an argument or is this risk worth it or how would I react if someone from the other political party did the same thing? As the late physicist Richard Feynman once said, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you're the easiest person to fool. So why is it that we don't even bother to do this in the first place?

Julia Galef

Yeah, so I'll just briefly explain the kind of framing metaphor of the book. I talk about these two mindsets. These two, they're essentially different motivations that guide our thinking. And one is soldier mindset, which is my name for what cognitive scientists call directionally motivated reasoning. It's it's reasoning that's essentially aimed at defending some predetermined conclusion, defending something you want to believe. And I call it soldier mindset because it's very much like.

being a soldier defending the fortress of your beliefs against any evidence that might undermine or weaken them. And so when we're in soldier mindset, which is often, it's a universal and ubiquitous motivation, when we're in soldier mindset, we are essentially looking at things that we want to believe through the lens of, can I accept this? And looking for any excuse to accept them.

And then we look at things that we don't want to believe through the lens of must I accept this? So we're reaching for any justification to dismiss or ignore it. And then scout mindset is an alternative motivation because the scout, unlike the soldier, their role is not to attack or defend, it's just to go out and see what's really out there, to see reality as clearly as possible, including all of the uncertainties. As the scout, you're drawing your map.

of the world in pencil, not in pen. You have the expectation, even the hope that actually you'll learn things that will make your map more accurate over time. And that corresponds to what cognitive scientists call accuracy-motivated reasoning, reasoning with the goal of figuring out what is actually true. And so back to your question of why are we, by default, why are we motivated so often to use our smarts and our knowledge to...

rebut arguments and defend our pre-existing beliefs rather than being in scout mindset. I was really interested in this question. I really didn't want to write a book that was just, people are so irrational, they should be more rational instead of stupid, which is, I've read books like that and I feel like they're missing a really important question which is, okay, if you think people are, we're all making this mistake by being in, soldier mindset as I call it, why is that? Like you have to understand why.

Srini Rao

Hahaha

Julia Galef

an issue exists before you're going to have a hope of changing it or even before you should be confident that it's worth changing. You need to understand why it's there in the first place. And so I spent a long time researching and thinking about why does Soldier Mindset exist? Why is this our default? And the answer is it's complicated. But the simple summary is that the purpose that we use Soldier Mindset for is to feel good and to look good.

Um, and things in the category of feeling good would be like, uh, using soldier mindset to defend narratives in which we are the victim instead of the, you know, aggressor or we, uh, you know, we're actually lucky for, for the misfortune that's happened in our lives and not unlucky. So we don't have to feel bad about it or, you know, whatever went wrong in our relationship or at work, uh, wasn't our fault, it was someone else's fault. There are all these narratives that we use to reassure ourselves and make ourselves feel better about.

ourselves and about our lives that kind of require Soldier Mindset to prop them up. And there's other forms of feeling good too. We might use Soldier Mindset to motivate ourselves, to convince ourselves that this project that we're working on, Startup for example, is going to succeed as long as we work really hard. And that belief is more motivating than the truth that there's a lot of randomness and even if you're really smart and try really hard, you might still fail.

So there's a bunch of things in the category of feeling good. And then the category of looking good includes things like artificially inflating our confidence and our beliefs in order to seem confident to other people. So especially if you're in a role of authority or leadership, you might feel like, you know, I can't allow myself to consider the possibility that this plan might be wrong or that this claim that I keep making might be wrong because.

I need to sound really confident to everyone else that they look up to me and wanna follow me and trust me and so on. And also in the category of looking good would be things like being motivated to defend beliefs that we know we're gonna make ourselves look good to our peers because we hold the right beliefs. Like I need to believe this particular political thing because that's what my friends and coworkers and family believe. And if I disagreed with them, then they might think I'm a bad person or.

Julia Galef

There's tons of things in that category. Politics is definitely one of the most salient examples. So that's just like scratching the surface of the motivations that we have to believe certain things kind of irrespective of whether they're true because they help us feel good or look good. And yeah, so I think it's important to recognize that we're not engaging in soldier mindset because we're stupid. We're doing it for a reason.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julia Galef

I think there are still better ways to feel good and look good that don't involve fooling ourselves. And that in the long run especially we'd be better off if we could shift away from soldier mindset and towards scout mindset. But I want to acknowledge that we have our reasons for engaging in soldier mindset and that's important to recognize.

Srini Rao

down.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, so the this is why I like the book so much because I think that one thing I, you know, when you bring up the soldier mindset, I feel like self improvement is pretty much rampant with the soldier mindset, like self help books for full of exactly the kind of platitudes and cliches that you were talking about here. So, you know, so what role does the media we play consume and you know, the sort of the content we consume, particularly in terms of, you know, personal development in play and

Julia Galef

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

you know, either one of these two mindsets.

Julia Galef

So yeah, like you, I have also noticed a ton of what I would call soldier mindset in the world of self-help and self-improvement. Sometimes it's implicit, like a self-help book will give advice that it just seems really exaggerated to me, really overconfident. If you just wake up early every morning, then you can be successful too, just like all of these successful people who wake up early.

And I read that I'm like, maybe it helps, but I think you're really exaggerating, probably unconsciously really exaggerating, how determinative waking up early is on your future success. So there's a lot of that. And then there's also, I think, a lot of just explicit soldier mindset where, a self-help book will often say, you should believe things that are false in order to help you succeed. Like,

Even if it's not true, you should try to believe that your startup will definitely succeed or even if it's not true You should try to believe that you're 100% Likely to be right and not allow any uncertainty to creep into your mind because that will make you into a more compelling leader Etc. So yeah often self-help books will just explicitly tell you should be trying to deceive yourself and trying to ignore what's actually true and I forget your question, but I agree that this is a very common

Srini Rao

No, no, I mean that.

Julia Galef

phenomenon that I think is misguided.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, I think it's something I see over and over and over again. You know, I mean, this is why I always jokingly say my first book could have just as easily been titled, Everybody is Full of Shit. Although I doubt Penguin wouldn't put that on a... I think it might have sold better, to be honest. Like, you know.

Julia Galef

Do you think that would have sold better or worse?

I kind of think so too, yeah.

Srini Rao

But I mean, I jokingly always say that's effectively what I said, because what I saw when I first started doing this work was I would see people take course after course after course, and suddenly they would go and do the same thing as the person who taught the course expecting the same results. And in my mind, I'm like, how are you overlooking the most giant and obvious variable yourself in this process? You're the variable that is going to throw off every single formula.

You know, it's funny you bring up the, you know, wake up in the morning because you know, Benjamin Hardy was a guest here and he has that article that effectively put him on the map. The eight things everybody should do before 8am. And like Ben, there's nothing everybody should do before 8am. If you're a doctor who just worked a 13 hour shift, there's literally nothing on your list that doctor should be doing other than getting some fucking sleep.

Julia Galef

Uh huh.

Julia Galef

Right, right. Yeah, it's...

Srini Rao

And so context, people are context blind, I feel like, so often.

Julia Galef

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I read a lot of academic papers when I was writing my book. And I feel like this is a mistake that academics make a lot too. It's maybe not as, it's maybe more subtle or more disguised, but there are a lot of academic, like well-cited social psychology, behavioral psychology papers out there that derive this one general rule, like.

I don't know, uncertainty will make people trust you less. And in their particular experiment, they looked at one very specific context, like, I don't know, fake financial advisors giving advice to strangers for 15 minutes in a lab, and the fake financial advisors who said they weren't certain were trusted less by the participants. Okay, well, maybe that's true. Maybe that study will replicate. But to go from that to say, in general, people...

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

I'm going to go.

Julia Galef

don't trust uncertainty is just completely overextending that one case. What about cases where you get to see the person's track record over time and learn that the uncertain people are actually better calibrated? What about people who explain why it's correct to be uncertain because we don't actually have enough evidence to justify certainty? When you add in all those wrinkles, the conclusion often flips. And yeah, as you say, it's very context dependent. So that was one effect of me.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Julia Galef

researching and writing this book is to become much more skeptical a priori of any kind of generic advice both from self-help and also from the academic literature.

Srini Rao

It's funny you say that because I think I wrote an article titled by business school teaches you nothing about running a business and You know having gone to business school and I realized it to your point like in business school You're basically dealing with variables that don't change It's like here's a case study like this case study doesn't account for assholes at the workplace people who are difficult and Variables that don't reveal themselves until you actually are out in the world starting this business

Julia Galef

Yeah. Did you know I spent a year working at Harvard Business School writing those case studies? Did I mention that? I guess I didn't mention that.

Srini Rao

I didn't I may I may have it's funny because I read the book like two months ago and I was wishing I had read it again but I had to like literally scramble into putting together the notes but um okay yeah I didn't know that

Julia Galef

No, I don't think I mentioned it in the book. I don't consider it one of the highlights of my career. But that was, so the case studies I was writing, this was at Harvard Business School, they were more about international economics and politics than they were about specific companies. But even so, I felt really concerned as I was writing them that it's so much more complicated than I'm going to be able to make it sound in a case study.

And I'm really only getting a small slice of the picture here, unless I was going to spend a decade researching this issue and write a 200 page case study. I'm really giving people only a very limited slice of the picture here. And yet classes, all of these future leaders of the world are reading these case studies that people like I write. And they're just taking away this one oversimplified message. And I'm really worried about what I'm doing here.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, you know, so speaking of which you say that being the kind of person who welcomes the truth, even if it's painful, is what makes other people willing to be honest with you. You say that you want your partner to tell you about any problems or relationship, whether you want your employees to tell you about any problem in the company. But if you get defensive or combative when you hear the truth, you're not likely to hear it very often. No one wants to be the messenger that gets shot. Now you wrote a book. So you and I have been through this process. Stephanie, so I had a writing coach. Steph's deal with me was that I had to work

about your ability to finish a book she's like I don't think you know how to structure things in a linear fashion I was like you're right I'll happily work with the writing coach fortunately you know Penguin paid for it you know added the cost of to my advance but I met with three people and one of them the woman I ended up working with was a woman named Robin and she had edited books for Seth Godin and she looked at me she said I'm gonna be tough and I was like okay cool you're the one I want

Julia Galef

Nice.

Srini Rao

And it was a month before I stopped taking the feedback personally. And her feedback was not even like, she didn't sugarcoat shit. It was, and even when something was good, she was like, good, that's it. Usually even the feedback was lazy. Try again. Um, but I noticed particularly with creative people, they really struggle with this. Like to be able to receive difficult feedback on their work and to be able to separate feedback on the work from feedback, you know, on themselves.

Julia Galef

Hmm

Julia Galef

Hmm.

Srini Rao

people do that and you know realize that you know because I realize often in my life the people who have told me the things that I needed to hear have been far more influential than the people who told me the things I wanted to hear.

Julia Galef

Yeah, so it's very easy to kind of agree in theory that it would be good to be able to be open to negative feedback and non-defensive and so on. It's much trickier in practice. And I, you know, I think I'm good at a lot of aspects of scout mindset, kind of, well, not necessarily naturally, but you know, there are things that I've been doing my whole life and I feel like I'm better than average at them, like, I don't know.

being objective about political things. I think I'm better than average. I don't think I'm better than average at receiving criticism or just negative feedback about me personally or my life or what I've done. That is one that I probably struggle with more than the average person. And so a lot of the stuff that I wrote in the book on that topic was born out of my own struggles to become less defensive and more curious about my own flaws.

And one, to kind of continue our, what turns out to be our theme in this conversation of, you know, how context dependent things are and how you can't, there isn't one simple piece of advice that works in every context or for every person. I think that is also true in the case of how do you become less defensive? Because a lot of the advice that I've seen work for other people just doesn't work for me or for, you know, additional third parties that I've seen try to use it.

Like for example, one piece of advice I've heard from some people is to try to conjure up a feeling of gratitude for the person who's criticizing you because they're helping you become stronger, they're helping you become better in the future. And so you should try to feel grateful to them and that gratitude will dissipate whatever feelings of resentment or defensiveness you have.

I can be grateful in some cases in which it's clear that someone is trying to help me, but a lot of negative feedback is not, you know, the person's criticizing me out of, like, irritation at the way I express myself or, you know, at irritation that I'm wrong about something and I just can't get myself to feel grateful for that. What I can do is something kind of related, which is to feel excited about how much...

Julia Galef

better and stronger and smarter I'm going to be, you know, a year from now, if I'm able to get over this hump. So it's a different kind of, it's just a different kind of emotional shift, but it works much better for me than the shift of trying to feel gratitude. And another shift that I think works for a lot of people, if not all people, is to allow yourself to feel kind of smug about your ability to take criticism.

Because you know when someone's criticizing you it's a hit to your pride like you're They're essentially telling you you're not as good as you thought you were at whatever public speaking or writing or art and And that's a hit to your pride and so one way to compensate for that is to focus instead on the trait of Being really good at taking criticism non-defensively and I think you should feel proud of that because it's really hard and it's really important and so

I think some people are reluctant to allow themselves to feel smug because, you know, pride is bad or whatever. But if it works, do it. Like, congratulate yourself, pat yourself on the back for not getting defensive when people criticize you and, you know, asking follow-up questions and so on. So to zoom out, the takeaway message here is, I don't think there's any one piece of advice that works for everyone, but I think this is a really important thing to master and so you should be just trying different advice and seeing what works for you and adapting advice.

to suit what you know about your own personality and your own idiosyncrasies.

Srini Rao

So there's something here that you say about goals. You say that one of the most frustrating aspects of being human is our knack for undermining our own goals. We pay for gym memberships, then rarely use them. We start diets, then break them. We procrastinate on writing a paper until it's the night before the deadline, and we're cursing our past self for putting us in this predicament. The source of self-sabotage is present bias, a feature of our intuitive decision-making in which we care too much about short-term consequences and too little about long-term consequences. In other words, we're impatient

as the potential rewards grow closer. And it kind of made me think I was having a conversation with my friend Akshay the other night who just came back from this ridiculous polar expedition to Antarctica. He does the kind of shit that basically would kill most people like for fun. His idea of, you know, doing these kinds of things for fun. I was like, that doesn't sound, you know, like fun. He made me watch the movie Everest. And I was like, you know what? All I've concluded from this movie is that is definitely not on the list of things I want to do because everybody died. But.

Julia Galef

Uh, yeah.

Srini Rao

He made an interesting comment about the experience of being there. He said, you know, the thing is that life there is really, really simple day to day because it's like 18 days. But he said, unlike day to day life here, which is incredibly complex, you've got all these different things going on. He said that basically you have the consequences of your behavior immediate. He said, like, if you put your gloves in the wrong place, he said, you notice some kind of thing the next day. He said, whereas here, if you screw around on Instagram,

Julia Galef

Mmm.

Srini Rao

at eight o'clock in the morning, he said, you know it's bad for you, but you don't see the consequences of it until way down the road. And so I think that kind of had a lot to do with what you're thinking about here in terms of present bias. Is there a way to actually overcome this? Because everybody knows smoking is bad for you, but it feels good when you smoke a cigarette after a drink.

Julia Galef

Interesting.

Julia Galef

Right, right. Yeah, the reason that I bring up present bias in my book, I mean, lots of people have written about present bias and trying efforts to overcome procrastination and stop undermining your own goals, et cetera. But the reason I bring it up in my book in particular is that I think it also affects not just how we behave and what choices we make about how to spend our time, but how we think and what beliefs we allow ourselves to entertain because just as

you know, spending your night eating chips in front of Netflix is more immediately rewarding than going to the gym, certain beliefs are much more immediately rewarding than other beliefs and that gives us a motivation to try to defend those beliefs, the more immediately rewarding beliefs to ourselves. So to take the example we were just talking about of how we react to personal criticism, the immediately rewarding thing to do when, you know, someone points out a potential

flaw in your work or like a weakness of yours, the immediately rewarding belief is, you know, they're just jealous or they just don't understand my work or they're whatever, they're misunderstanding me. As opposed to the less immediately rewarding but more helpful in the long-term belief, which is, you know, they might be right. Let me try to figure out if they are right. And, you know, I want to discover if they're right, if in fact they are.

that takes much more emotional effort in the short term. And so, over the long term, our choices that are shaped by present bias tend to undermine our goals, which is why we put off going to the gym again and again and again. And I think similarly, our kind of unconscious choices about what beliefs to entertain get undermined by present bias. And over time, we end up building up this

really distorted picture of ourselves and the world and how things work because we keep, again, unconsciously, we keep opting for the immediately rewarding thing to believe. I think that's an important insight that I don't see a lot of people talking about, that present bias really affects the way we think and the way we react to evidence. And in terms of your question of what to do about that issue, you know...

Julia Galef

First, I think being aware of it is helpful, because for the most part, we're not really that aware of how present bias influences our thinking. And then, you kind of need a patch for this bug that we're more motivated by the short term than the long term. And one kind of patch is to feel proud of yourself for being able to do the difficult thing of entertaining the inconvenient or unflattering possibility.

And this was probably the most common thing that Scouts mentioned when I interviewed them about how they manage to do what they do. So over the years I've collected a lot of people who I think are unusually good at Scout mindset, or at least some aspects of Scout mindset. And so in writing the book I interviewed them about like, how do you get yourself to notice that you might be wrong? Or how do you get yourself to change your mind about something that you've been...

you know, claiming publicly for years, or how do you get yourself to take criticism without getting defensive? And probably the most common thing that they said was, you know, I actually just feel proud of myself for living up to this ideal that I aspire to. Like, I have this personal standard for myself of wanting to see things as they are and not as I wish they were. And so in that moment, when I, you know, noticed that I might've been wrong about something, yes, it is kind of

painful or embarrassing or something, but that effect is countered by the fact that I get to feel proud of myself for, you know, living up to the standard that I aspire to. And so that's not always enough to motivate us to do the hard thing in the short term, but it's, it helps. And it's often enough to get ourselves to, you know, overcome present bias in the way we think.

Srini Rao

Well, let's get into this concept of rationality, because I think that this was probably one of my favorite parts of the book, and I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, I'm probably nowhere as near as rational as I think, where you say viewing yourself as rational can backfire. The more objective you think you are, the more you trust your own intuitions and opinions as accurate representations of reality and the less inclined you are to question them. So why is that? And why do people who see themselves as rational actually end up,

Julia Galef

Yeah.

Srini Rao

How do they create this sort of delusion?

Julia Galef

Yeah, so I'm sure that people are familiar with this archetype of the person who declares themselves to be perfectly rational and claims that all of their opinions about politics or, you know, life or morality, they are all based solely on logic and reason and, you know, not the result of subjective bias or error or anything like that. Unlike everyone else in the world who, of course, is driven by

bias and subjectivity and so on. And you know, I think a lot of what is going on there is people, they kind of introspect and they feel like they're being objective. They feel like they're reasoning well and they don't notice any signs of bias in themselves. And so they declare themselves to be rational. And the problem with that is that, you know, everyone basically feels like they're rational. Like from the inside, soldier mindset feels like scout mindset.

It's easy to spot in other people, but in ourselves, it feels like we're being objective. And so unfortunately, that alone, the feeling of being objective and rational is not sufficient to conclude that you actually are objective and rational. So that's the first point. There's just like this error of introspection that we think that we can, yeah, that we can kind of objectively obsess our own objectivity, which we can't.

And the problem with that, like falling prey to that error, is that you become really uncurious about your own blind spots because you don't really think that they even exist. And there are a couple interesting studies that I don't think I ended up keeping in the book, but basically people who...

You know what, actually I'm not gonna try to summarize them because I think I probably don't remember them well enough to do an accurate job. But just to speak generally, if you have an opinion that you know is subjective, then you can do thought experiments and ask yourself like, well, how would I judge this politician if he were from the other party and not from my own party? Or you can seek out different opinions from people who might see things differently from you.

Srini Rao

No worries.

Julia Galef

if you know that there's a risk that you might be subjective instead of, you know, objective. But if you don't even entertain that possibility, then you're not going to do the legwork to, you know, find your own blind spots.

Srini Rao

So let's actually get into this concept of motivation without self-deception, because I think this is another one of those parts that really struck me. And you said the biggest problem with the self-belief approach to motivation is because you're not supposed to think realistically about risk, it becomes impossible to ask questions like is this goal desirable enough to be worth the risk? Are there any goals that would be similarly desirable or require less risk? It implicitly assumes that you don't need to make any decisions, that you've already found the one right path and there are no other options.

out there worth weighing and you say in such a situation where the only path available to you may be having a realistic picture of your odds of success on that path isn't very useful but how often does such a situation actually occur? And it makes me think of a couple of things that I've heard over the years. I remember my dad was like, hey, not everybody can be the next Steve Jobs and I got really pissed off. But there's something one of my mentors, Greg, had said and this has always stayed with me. Take a listen.

Julia Galef

Mm-hmm.

Julia Galef

Um.

Srini Rao

Sorry, go ahead, give me just like for some reason it's not the I'm trying to pull a clip here and it's... Nah, we'll get this edited out, don't worry.

Julia Galef

Okay, sure.

Great, I was just worried I wasn't getting the sound.

Srini Rao

Are you actually hearing that? Uh, that's so weird, it's actually...

Julia Galef

No.

Srini Rao

We'll make sure we edit this out. I'll put a node here.

Julia Galef

Do you wanna just read it to me and then you could just slice in the audio later?

Srini Rao

Um, yeah, actually that would probably be a good idea. Let me do that. Let me just pull up the quote on Descript real quick.

Srini Rao

So he was talking about outliers and people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and Oprah and Beyonce. And he says that they were born in a way that they're just going to win no matter what. And so those people are not good models to follow for the rest of us. What we should be doing is creating the safe environment in which we can be as vulnerable as we need to be to not only hold on to the possible, but actually increase the chances of what's actually probable. And he said there's this distinction that he makes between probability and possibility.

tend to basically focus on the possible and pretty much ignore what's probable.

Julia Galef

Yeah, so he's saying basically that we...

Julia Galef

We don't intuitively make distinctions between, there's a one in a million shot of this happening and there's like a one in three shot of this happening. We just classify all of those intuitively in our minds as well it could happen. Is that, yeah.

Srini Rao

Totally. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it because when you think about it, right, like who are our models in culture? And you know, who gets put on the covers of magazines and gives commencement speeches? It's billionaires, it's Oprah, it's Steve Jobs. And how many of us are realistically gonna become any of those people?

Julia Galef

Right. Yeah, this was another theme that has come up a lot in self-help and especially kind of business books about how to succeed. That, you know, it doesn't actually matter what your odds of success are. You should only be focused on trying to succeed and not on, you know, what is the chance that I can succeed. And I think this has a lot of intuitive pull for people, especially because there's no correct...

objectively discoverable answer about what is my probability of success. Like, it's not like rolling a die where, you know, we can say, yes, you have a one in six chance of rolling a six or something like that. It's a much messier situation to look at your startup and say, like, what is the probability that it's going to succeed? There's not like one true probability that you could discover. So you know, that gives people a lot of wiggle room to say, like, well, you know, since there's no

one correct answer, then that allows me to believe whatever I want. And, you know, if I'm trying to become a famous actor or something, in the book, I talk about how I when I was a teenager, I thought I might want to be a famous actress. And so I was considering like not going to college and instead going to drama school or something like that. And, you know, I got advice from some actors I knew, like community theater actors in the D.C. area where I grew up, who said like, yeah, you know, you really shouldn't worry about.

probability of failure, just focus on trying to succeed, like anything can happen. And they were implicitly doing what your quote is talking about, like trying to encourage me to ignore distinctions and risk or distinctions in different scales of probability. And I think that's really misguided because having a reasonable sense of how probable different things are is what allows us to

make better decisions about which paths to take. Like, the advice they were giving about, don't worry about the probability, just focus on trying to succeed, only really makes sense if you have just one path that you wanna take. Like, if being an actor is literally the only thing that you wanna do in life, nothing else would satisfy you at all, then yeah, okay, sure, throw yourself into that. Don't worry about the, you know, how likely it is that you'll succeed versus fail. But that's almost never the case. Like, almost everyone.

Julia Galef

has multiple things that they could do in life that would make them happy and fulfilled and that would add value to the world. And so in order to choose between them, you have to be able to think as honestly as you can, even though it's not a perfectly objective situation like a die roll, you still have to be able to think as honestly as you can about the relative amount of risk. Like, you know, if being an actor would be really cool, but it's extremely improbable that I'm ever gonna be able to be a famous actor.

And I have this other opportunity where maybe I could be an academic and that would be really cool too. And I'm much more likely to succeed at that. You have to make these relative comparisons even if you can't perfectly and objectively quantify the risk of each thing. You have to at least try to do so on a relative basis. So that's my case for not ignoring probability.

Srini Rao

Okay, let's talk specifically about echo chambers in particular, because I said earlier I wanted to come back to that whole idea of dealing with an inferiority complex. So the funny thing is that to your point, in the world that I grew up in, what I do is basically not a real job. It sounds like total bullshit. And in the world of people like you and me, it's this thing that gets rewarded, respected, whatever.

Julia Galef

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

But it traps me in an echo chamber of people who believe the same thing I do. It's like, oh, everybody should go quit their job and, you know, to hell with the nine to five. And I realize how wildly inaccurate that is. It took me a long time to understand why my parents gave me the career advice they did because they grew up in a time in India where there was no sort of in-between. Life outcomes were binary. It was either poverty or security.

Julia Galef

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

not an option, you know, it was like that sounds like a luxury for people whose parents have, you know, enough money to make sure they'll be fine if their life goes to shit.

Julia Galef

Mm-hmm.

Julia Galef

Yeah, no, I think that's a really good thing to notice, especially because it kind of reminds you that advice that might seem to you, like it's irrational or wrong, might not be, like it might still be wrong for you, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it was irrational for that person to think that was the right thing for you to do. And that's like a mental move that I've been trying to do more often, is when someone makes a claim that seems

clearly wrong or crazy or irrational to me. It might be, like people are often wrong or crazy, but before you immediately assume that that's what's going on, you should first look for reasons that it might not be wrong or crazy. Like are there background assumptions they might have that I don't have that if I had those assumptions, this would actually be very reasonable. And that I think it's valuable partly because it allows you to notice.

nuances and complexities that you weren't aware of that just enrich your picture of the world and make it more fleshed out and accurate. But also because it kind of reminds you, it like breaks down the sense that the things that you believe are obviously true and the wrong things that other people believe are obviously wrong and the fact that they can't see how obviously wrong they are just goes to show how irrational they are and how rational you are. And once you start noticing all of the ways in which like, well, even if I am right

I'm not obviously right. For someone to disagree with me, there are plenty of ways that a reasonable person could disagree with me. Or there are plenty of different assumptions that we have that if you change those assumptions, change is what the right answer is. You stop thinking of the truth as obvious and you stop thinking of yourself as just way smarter than everyone else for having been able to see it.

Srini Rao

So let's talk specifically about identity. I think this was really fascinating. And I think this will also make a nice follow up for what we were just talking about. You talk about this idea. You say there's an essay that you reference, Keep Your Identity Be Small by Paul Graham. And it says, in it, Graham pointed to the problem I described in the previous chapter and warned that the more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you. And inspired in no part by Graham's essay, I resolved to avoid identifying myself with any ideology, movement, or group.

Julia Galef

Yeah.

Srini Rao

You know, this reminds me of the experience I had, you know, I was the keynote speaker for podcast movement. And I remember when they called me and said, will you be the keynote? This was, I think, the very first one. I said, yeah, on one condition. I'm like, what? I don't want to have to talk about podcasts. And like, what? I was like, I am not going to be forever defined by this one thing. Like, I happen to be a storyteller and this is just one medium in which I tell stories. It might be the predominant one.

Julia Galef

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

defined either by labels that people have assigned to us, labels that we've assigned to ourselves, and turn those into identities that become big.

Julia Galef

Yeah, I think this is really important, especially for people who, like you and me, are out there publicly making a case for something. Or telling a story that defines us in a certain way. Because the more you kind of present yourself to the world as the person who defends such and such lifestyle or such and such political belief, the harder it is for you to change your mind someday. Both because you've...

you've kind of gotten used to seeing things in a certain way, but also because your whole reputation and persona is built around, you know, being the person who is a libertarian or being the person who, you know, is child free or whatever the thing is that you've been defending to other people. And it's even harder, I think, when you've gotten pushback for that belief, for that choice. Like, in my book, I talk about some women who were child free by choice, like they decided they didn't want to have children ever.

And of course they got a lot of pushback for that because choosing not to have kids is not a very popular choice, especially for women. And they got a lot of people saying like, oh, you're being selfish or, oh, you'll change your mind someday in a really kind of overconfident and patronizing way. And of course this annoyed them and they argued back. And so, a lot of people who are child-free continued to be child-free and don't regret it. But for the particular women I was talking about in the book,

they did start years later, they started to wonder, actually, maybe I do want kids after all. And that was a really, really hard thing to even entertain because for so long they had been defending their choice as a valid one against people who were unfairly insulting it or putting it down. And so changing their mind, as one of them put it, it felt like letting these people win, which is totally understandable, but isn't the kind of thing you wanna be allowing to determine your...

your life choices about something as fundamental as that. And so it's really to their credit that they were able to seriously consider changing their mind even in spite of all of the strong pressure to stick to their guns. And so yeah, for someone like me who is out there saying, scout mindset is really valuable and people are in soldier mindset too often and here are all the ways that scout mindset can help you. I have to be really conscious of this effect that

Julia Galef

you know, my identity can get entrenched in the particular arguments that I'm making publicly. And in order to kind of remain flexible and hold my identity lightly, I have to kind of consciously correct for that. And for example, remind myself that, you know, if I did change my mind about some part of this thesis, like suppose I, you know, ended up deciding that actually Scout Mindset isn't good in these particular contexts or, you know, well, actually the defenders of Soldier Mindset

have a point in this particular way that I hadn't noticed before. If that did happen, I think it'd be fine. It feels intuitively at first like it would be terrible if I had to walk back something I'd been claiming publicly. But when I actually think about it and not just flinch away from that thought, I think it would be fine. That's my honest opinion. If I changed my mind, people would mostly respect it, and it wouldn't discredit my book or anything like that. So you know.

I guess the takeaway here is just that you should be conscious of the things that are likely to be stuck to your identity and just try to hold them more lightly and remind yourself that you could change them if you wanted to. And your goal should be to say what you actually believe and not to just say what you've been saying in the past.

Srini Rao

Wow, I feel like this is like a very sort of deep rabbit hole with layers and layers and layers where it's just like Alice in Wonderland tumbled down the rabbit hole and we can go as far, you know, there seems to be no end to this.

Julia Galef

You mean to how much our identities affect?

Srini Rao

to dissecting, well, in general, the conversation we're having, dissecting these biases in the way that we see the world.

Julia Galef

Oh yeah, no, that's why the book took me so long to write is just there's endless complexity and I would spend weeks down one rabbit hole and end up tearing my hair out at two in the morning going, but what even is a belief? I'm not even sure I understand what a belief is. And so a lot of the work of finishing the book was forcing myself to pull back from some of the rabbit holes and be like, I'm just going to ignore that thread and write the simpler thing because otherwise I'll never finish.

Srini Rao

I'm sorry.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, so, you know, and that being like one of the questions, you know, sort of two final questions for you is when you're in the Scout mindset, how do you not sort of lose your mind and kind of see this world through this perpetual sense of skepticism and doubt and, you know, you know, questioning everything you see around you? Like, how do you balance both? Like was what I'm saying.

Julia Galef

Well, you know, you can have... yeah.

you can have kind of working assumptions, like your current best guess is that this product is gonna be successful. And then you act on that assumption. It's like your map drawn in pencil basically, and you just remain open to evidence that it might be wrong or that it might need to be revised. And periodically, if it's an important belief, like something that determines the success of your startup or...

something that might determine your life happiness, like, you know, I do or don't want to have children, you maybe periodically revisit that assumption with fresh eyes or, you know, now that you've gotten more information, like maybe every year you ask yourself, like, am I still sure I don't want to have children? Like, let's pretend I'm thinking about it for the first time so I'm not stuck in, you know, just like sticking to my old opinions just out of inertia. So you do, you know, revisit.

old assumptions, but you're not constantly doing that every minute of every day. Like, you have to be able to just act on the assumption that whatever your current belief is, is true. But that's different from drawing your map in pen and deciding it's true and then, you know, never being open to changing it. So there's this kind of balance that you're striking between acting with your current map and questioning everything all the time. I think...

Yeah, I will allow though that Scout Mindset has, it has diminished my enjoyment of some kinds of reading. I was just thinking about this the other day. Like I, well, because there's so many interesting books out there on history and sociology and politics, but I just don't feel like I can automatically trust them. I've looked into too many claims by now about...

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Julia Galef

you know, how people work or how society works. And most of the time, my conclusion after spending the time and effort to look into it is, oh, this is just not, it's so much more complicated than they're making it sound. Or like, oh, the studies they're citing aren't actually good studies. Or, oh, they left out all of this evidence that didn't support their thesis. And if I had seen that evidence, I wouldn't have been nearly as confident in their conclusions. And so I was just noticing, like, it's really, it's hard to motivate myself to pick up another nonfiction book.

Srini Rao

Uh-huh.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julia Galef

because I just, I feel like, well, if I don't even, if I can't even be confident this is true, then what's the point? So I've been thinking about like, how do I filter? Yeah, anyway, gone.

Srini Rao

I well.

Srini Rao

I can relate. I mean, I'm kind of in the same boat, right? A thousand interviews and I read everybody's book. So you can imagine. So it's trying to find how many times do I come across something that has been truth at least. My litmus test is if I can show it to be true at least three to four times from three different sources and prove to my own life, then it's probably got some grain of universal truth, but even then it's nuanced. Yeah.

Julia Galef

Yeah.

Julia Galef

interesting like three different what kinds of different sources

Srini Rao

So here's a perfect example. So let's say there's sort of the, what is it that is one fundamental lesson that I've seen over and over and over again in probably three to five different books about the success of a business is that it ultimately is about solving somebody else's problem. And that's what creates value that people are willing to pay for. That, I was like, okay, I've seen that enough times that I'm willing to say, okay, yeah, this is true. Is Facebook valuable? Not to us as users,

but to people who advertise, yes, you know, from a standpoint of solving a problem. But yeah, so like my that was my sort of thing is like, okay, if I can find four sources of evidence where this is actually been true, this might be true. We had a guy named John Petrocelli here, you might be familiar with his work. He wrote a book called The Life's Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, which I absolutely loved. And you might actually like that a lot, actually, given what you just told me.

Julia Galef

Hmm

Julia Galef

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one approach that I've been using is to look for things that, you know, they would be helpful and interesting and like add value for me even if they weren't as true as the author is claiming they are. Like, this is how I read a lot of self-help books. I do think that self-help books are generally, they're overstating their conclusions and pretending that things are

more solid than they actually are, or they would work for everyone when actually they only work for some people. And that is important to recognize, but that doesn't mean you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can choose to read self-help books as a source of new hypotheses rather than a source of settled science or truth, right? And if you read self-help books and you think, like, well, if this advice is relatively low cost to try, and it would be really helpful for me to solve this problem of...

whatever, procrastination or willpower and so on, then you can get a lot of value out of self-help books as a source of possible things that might work, even if they're not as solid as the authors claiming they are.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Wow.

Julia Galef

And that actually relating to our discussion of identity, that shift in how I read self-help books was, I think I was held back from making that shift out of a sense of like, I'm not the kind of person who trusts self-help books, or like, I'm not the kind of person who reads self-help books or something like that. Like, I'm too sophisticated to read self-help books and follow their advice. But when I actually looked at it, you know, as honestly as possible, I was like, well,

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julia Galef

If the advice in these books could help me, then there's no reason to ignore it just because it's not as perfectly scientific as people might claim it is. So yeah, I think I had part of my identity was built around being too cool for self-help books. That was not a helpful identity.

Srini Rao

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

Julia Galef

Oh.

Julia Galef

That's so tough. I have no cashed answers for that. I actually have to think about it.

Srini Rao

Well, that's why I don't like sending questions in advance.

Julia Galef

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Julia Galef

I guess the people who seem unmistakable to me in the way that you mean the word are people who are not... They didn't choose what they're doing, like their career path or their project, based on a sense of, well, you know, I want to do something like prestigious or profitable or whatever, so I'm going to just find the thing that I can do that will be prestigious and popular or, you know...

increase my status or make me sound smart or whatever. There are people who looked at the world and were kind of like almost irritated by the lack of something in the world. Like people who are irritated by, oh, why isn't there, you know, Give Well is a good example. It's an organization that I'm a big fan of that researches which, they look for ways to help the world.

as effectively as possible in a way that's reasonably backed up by scientific evidence and by logic in a really cost-effective way. So they'll recommend a particular charity that buys bed nets for people to save them from malaria. And this is just way more cost-effective and evidence-based than the vast majority of charities out there. And I think GiveWell is awesome. And the people who started GiveWell...

are unmistakable. And the reason GiveWell exists is that they looked around the world and realized that there actually, there is no, or when they started GiveWell, there wasn't any pre-existing source of information about how impactful charities actually were. There was only information about like how much, what the overhead ratio of a charity was, but that's different from impact and like charities weren't actually measuring their impact. And so they were frustrated by this and irritated by it. And so they started GiveWell to...

you know, fill that gap in the world. And so I guess that is the common factor that I see in the people who you would call unmistakable is that they felt a need for something to exist in the world instead about creating that thing rather than, you know, setting out to do something profitable or prestigious.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything you're up to?

Julia Galef

Oh, thank you. It's been such a great conversation. Thanks for asking original and unusual questions. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm just Julia Galef Galeff, J-U-L-I-A-G-A-L-E-F. My website is Julia Galefgaleff.com. From there, you can learn about my book, The Scout Mindset, and about my podcast, which is called Rationally Speaking. You can check out my whole archive of past episodes at rationallyspeakingpodcast.org.

Srini Rao

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