So what happens in a world where people don't have to work and that the the utopians go well that's the best of all possible worlds good people are free to pursue their dreams whatever that but imagine the person who loses their job they don't go cartwheeling down the the street going great now I can write
that novel hey guys this is part two of my amazing conversation with Adam Robinson we split it up into two episodes because the conversation was about four hours you're not missing anything by starting here but I'd highly recommend you go back and listen to part one I mean why wouldn't you Adam is phenomenal
and our conversation is fascinating anyway here's part two with Adam Robinson which are the habits that work well in school and life and which are the habits that work well in school and then don't work well in life well if you think about it that's such a good question if you think about it in school
we're graded we're graded and the expectations are set by someone else by the way this is this is a really cool study I did once on school and then we'll get to the other part of your question I was giving a talk in Sacramento some years back to 500 teachers and I said grading is subjective and they
got really kind of like bad grumble grumble grumble right and I said but you don't have to take my word for that right teachers think they're grading is objective right I said oh no like we tell the students exactly what we expect and we're very objective at our grading and I said look you don't have to
take my word for it let's do an experiment so I I took out a box I was in a big gymnasium right with 500 teachers and I put a big box on the table and with great fanfare I held up a bunch of sample tests and I said I had students write an answer to the question is there evidence of global warming and I've
got hundreds of tests here I'd like to pass it out to you guys and you grade it and and as an afterthought I said put down an m or an f if you're a male or female teacher now unbeknownst to the teachers they were all grading exactly the same essay but on some of the on half the tests I had a females
name at the top and on some a male name at the top on half the tests I had the paragraphs clearly indented and on half not and on half the tests were printed and half script and I gave them and I said grade it on an A to F scale F being failing and and put an m or an f if you're and I said I know that you're
all not environmental scientists but we're all adults we know something about global warming just kind of just graded intuitively right and then over their lunch break I fed all the numbers into a stat program and I said I said guys remember I said grading is subjective the number one positive factor on on essay
was a female name at the top of the paper it was worth an extra quarter of a grade on a A equals 4 .0 B equals 3 .0 C equals 3 .0 it was worth a quarter of a grade it was worth a full half a grade half a grade mind you if a male teacher was grading the female huh so male teachers graded female students
a half a grade easier than they graded male teachers both teachers male and female graded the opposite sex more leniently both male and female teachers graded boys more harshly mind you this was on a science test not like you know right some other like this is this is an actual science paper right you
had to like provide evidence and stuff and it was worth three almost three -fourths of a letter grade when you added in the paragraph in denting printing or script was not a factor so if a male student was graded by a male teacher and forgot to indent his paragraphs his letter grade dropped three -fourths
of a point seven three of a grade almost a full grade from content from exactly the same yeah so how do you measure how well students are doing right you know like and how do you measure how well the teachers are doing right anyway to go back to your question sorry I couldn't resist that so skills and life
are following instructions doing what's expected and in life I don't think there are many assignments like that you know even when your boss says do acts they don't really mean just do acts like you're not a robot we're not I mean I imagine certain jobs are like that like if you're flipping burgers
well you can almost make the argument that more increasingly jobs are becoming procedural and the procedures are the mechanism by which you assign people tasks if this situation you do this if this you do this right it's that maybe that's certainly where jobs are going and it's certainly where AI and robotics
are taking things right in another we can argue about whether it's 20 years or 30 or 40 or 50 sometime in the next few decades an algorithm or a robot powered by algorithms is gonna do whatever you do better faster more reliably in every result cheaper and that that isn't terrifying people quit is that scare you
it scares me for the world it it scares me because people define themselves largely in terms of what they're able to contribute economically and so what happens in a world where people don't have to work and that the the utopians go well that's the best of all possible worlds good people are free to
pursue their dreams whatever that but yeah but I don't think logically if you're not contributing to society there's an impact on on you as a person devastating yeah imagine the person who loses their job they don't go cartwheeling down the the street going great now I can write that novel that they're
devastated now imagine everyone's out of work and so so that's a that's a future we really have to to to prepare for that Silicon Valley has begun to prepare the world for that floating notions of universal basic income right that's largely being floated out of Silicon Valley because they see where it's
going they see what the technology is going and even in creative fields AI is is such a terrifying threat Stephen Hawking gave mankind a one in 20 shot of surviving AI or one in 20 shot and you can do the math that means in 1920 shot we don't survive AI that's how serious it is and Stephen Hawking no slouch
in the IQ Department what is it about that the AI that scares us so much or threatens humanity in this case okay so that the real threat with AI first let's talk about how fast AI progresses so right now there is no AI it's not really AI it's machine learning pattern recognition it's not really AI what people
think of AI is an intelligence that left on its own can learn right so let's talk about a domain I know something about chess right so I'm a rated chess master with a life title I'm pretty darn good at chess so I understand the implications of this with AI so the best human chess player in the world
is a 27 year old Norwegian named Magnus Karlsson he has a chess rating of 2820 so 2820 ish give or take something like that the best computer software that had been trained on the best human games right software trained on the best human games has a chess rating now of about 3300 would crush Magnus
Karlsson in a match and that software you can get on your iPhone on your iPhone yeah yeah yeah maybe a little more maybe on your laptop yes your your iPhone software is probably like 2600 your your laptop yeah it crush Magnus Karlsson in a 100 game match Karlsson would be lucky to get five games out
of 100 like it just be a wipeout and he's the human champion right okay that was the best software trained on human games Google's company DeepMind said what if we don't train it on human games what if we just have the software play itself so they gave gave it rules and was just the rules of the game
nothing else just play yourself and in four hours that program leapfrogged all existing human knowledge of the game and has a chess rating of hard to estimate like 36 3700 compared with 3300 it that program mind you it had no human intervention they just gave it the rules and this is what was fascinating
about it it recreated all human knowledge of the game on its own imagine giving a computer the rules of syntax and it creates the English language and Russian and Japanese and just on its own it's like the story of if you had enough monkeys eventually exactly but now so it but also with enough monkeys
you create a lot of gibberish but this it actually created created it replicated all human knowledge any existence of that human knowledge without any knowledge of the game and because after all human beings are pretty smart but then this is two interesting things about this Google which is to say DeepMind
only released 10 of the hundred games this pro this computer program played a match against the reigning software 3300 it beat it 72 to 28 in a 100 game match with no losses 28 draws exactly 56 draws okay right and so the reason is that even if God were playing the software it's not gonna God's not gonna win every
game because some it's like tic -tac -toe if you don't make a mistake it's a raw yeah right you can't so there's a limit actually on how God's chess ratings probably like 3900 okay I'm making that up I'm being goofy now so so what was fascinating is they only released 10 of the games and this is what was interesting
and so scary is that the chess program when you looked at the games and again I'm in a position to assess the the value of the moves that how good they are when I looked at the games I went wow this is this computer so good but then the computer would make alien chess moves surprising moves not just
surprise it just like like you just go what why is it doing that so it doesn't make any sense makes no sense so get this so for example it is a rule of thumb with human chess players that you should even if you don't know about the game you can sort of appreciate this your king is the most valuable
piece you should tuck your king away in the corner and keep it well protected in this one game the chess computer is called alpha zero go sorry alpha zero chess march the king smack into the middle of the board imagine your Napoleon leading your troops and you yourself go right into the center of the battle
and bullets are whizzing by you and nothing touches you and you go how can the computer get away with this like there's no way that's gotta lose like and it won the game like five ten moves later it wins the game you go how the heck did it do that and so it played alien moves so not only did it recreate
human knowledge of the game it then created alien chess now imagine that computer is unleashed not in the domain of chess but in other domains it'll totally recreate everything we know and then go beyond it in hours so the scary thing with AI is this that it will become exponentially smarter than we
are in minutes so imagine the following scenario let's say the current reigning AI has an IQ of say 50 right let's say I'm just picking a number out of the air eventually it'll get to like 150 it'll be as smart as a really smart human being like really super smart then the computer will go oh wait a second
I can do a better job of programming myself it'll then reprogram itself now it has an IQ of 200 and then goes wait a second I can do much better than that and it reprograms itself again now it's got an IQ of 300 it goes oh I was a dummy two minutes ago and it will keep reprogramming itself with alien
AI and I say alien because we won't recognize it we won't be able to even follow what it's doing and it'll control everything that's the problem you know there's the terminator scenario like you know these machines are gonna destroy us and blah blah blah no they're not they're just not gonna care about us
and it's a bit like the genie when you let you get three wishes and the genie will give you three wishes and then it'll say goodbye and it'll control so an alien intelligence will control everything you won't be able to cut it out of the and we might not even understand it oh you won't understand it
right now there are mathematical proofs done by computers that human beings can't understand huh the best mathematicians in the world don't understand those proofs and all they can say is we can't find a mistake in it it's probably right but we're not real sure we can't follow it and the reasoning will be
so convoluted that human there's no way you could even explain it so even now the computer watson ibm's watson can come up with a medical diagnosis the challenge of which is to explain the diagnosis to the doctor because the doctor can't follow the reasoning of the the neural net and all the comms so an accurate
diagnosis they wouldn't have come to through a convoluted sort of mechanism of here's how we arrived at that right you couldn't they couldn't explain it because it's in an embedded neural net and there's with all kinds of feedback loops you wouldn't be able to describe it so that any human being could understand it
it's not a bonus i mean outside of the understanding if we're creating more accurate diagnoses and more sure but now what happens when those machines are controlling not just diagnoses but they're actually controlling the surgeries and controlling weather patterns and controlling tanks because they'll
think that they know best and then automatically they will know best the algorithms are just this is the thing about algorithms and ai it is optimizing unforgiving and relentless because it continues to optimize and whatever values you've put into the into the ai it will just execute that with with unstoppable
efficiency so you got into ai in the 1990s way before any of this stuff yeah how did you get started where did that come right so i was interested in so i saw my interest in the princeland review in in the late 1880s oh 1980s uh early 1990s and i got into ai and um because i was interested in intelligence
and thinking right and the problem with ai back then and even if you had asked a computer scientist you know what you went to he or she would not have said ai because the problem then was the speed of the computers the hardware limitations the hardware limitations so when i wanted to run a neural net
remember remember pentium chips yep right so i'd literally set up the neural net and hit enter on my computer and walk away from it for a week and a week later maybe i'd get an answer and if the result was good i'd go great good model and if it wasn't i'd have to tweak the variables and hit enter again and then
walk away from the computer and and so now ai is done you know you can run the neural net like in minutes or something and soon they'll have quantum computing right that's really scary and what is quantum computing just for people so so right so quantum computing is when you use actually subatomic uh
quantum states to to do your computations and i i myself don't understand the physics and the math of it but evidently you'll be able to do things pretty much instantaneously so for example anything that's encrypted with quantum computing you'll be able to crack that whatever the encryption is in i
don't know seconds or minutes so quantum computing is scary because there are no secrets now now you can't encrypt you can't hide things and i know hiding sounds bad but sometimes you want things hidden you don't want your social security number packable and other things or government secrets um so um
so yeah uh quantum quantum computing is is scary and and the speed with which it will accelerate ai uh is also pretty how how will it accelerate just based on the power of the power right and it's sheer power in the same way that things that used to take me a week on my computer on pentium chips back
in the early 1990s now take seconds and how much in seconds take milliseconds right and and it's a parabolic leap parabolic leap and which fundamentally changes reality it's not just we're doing things faster it's you now you're doing things fundamentally differently you like when information can't
be protected imagine anyone can know anything about everything that's pretty scary i want to come back to something you said about the computers ai and chess and so the first version of the program you mentioned had learned chess from the human games there was data available the second version of the program
didn't use data what's the role in data today in terms of machine learning and ai and then what do you see that role as in the future is are those data sets going to be proprietary or will some guy in his garage be able to compete with google on search so funny you should say that so that's a really
profound question that goes to who owns the data right so so when you log into google when you use google or you use facebook google and facebook are gathering data right when you buy something on amazon when you look at something and don't buy it amazon is gathering data and it's able to use that data and monetize
the data right and so the question is why even by the way when you don't use something that's a data point right if shane hasn't logged into google for three days right google has learned something about shane yeah right um so it's remarkable how much data they have oh it's remarkable and so there was a woman a female
journalist in the united states get this in the united states you don't own your data google does or facebook it's their corporate data but in europe the individual owns his or her data so a female journalist asked tinder the dating app give me all the data you have on me and they gave her i forget
whether it was seven or eight hundred pages of unique information so not seven hundred duplicate pages seven hundred they had seven hundred pages worth of information about her like i'm just making this up they knew her first grade transcript you know they they knew what she ate for lunch five years
ago like they knew so much about her and she was horrified that they were like how could you even get this data like some kind of data you kind of can figure out how they would get but remember the value of your data is when they cross -reference it with other people yeah right the value emerges not just
because shane is using google but lots of other people are and they're able to to to do use statistics and machine learning to find patterns so that they uncover things about shane that even shane didn't know yeah there was a um famous case about five or six years ago of uh target do you know this uh
where target the pregnancy yes yeah right so target's algorithms knew that a young woman was pregnant because she shifted from unscented products yeah so from from presented to unscented they knew before she knew right she didn't know she was pregnant right so the algorithm by the way the algorithm
i'm using air quotes doubt didn't know that she was pregnant they just knew that she would tend to buy something baby products six months later so let's start hitting her up now like the computer doesn't as it were no pregnancy yeah it just knows that when a woman of a certain age shifts from scented
products to unscented x months later if she's buying baby products so let's hit her up right now and so so yes google and facebook and amazon know things about you that you don't even know like for sure and is that a cumulative advantage like can that ever be i don't know how it can be you could ever
compete with that you'd need to find some other way of gathering the data should data be a public good well you know that's a political thing i you it may be there's um aristotle lonassus who was once one of the wealthiest men in the world said the secret to business is knowing something that others
don't well that's certainly the secret to google and facebook and and amazon and netflix they know everything about you and and they can leverage that i'm not making a political statement now but it's something that needs to be examined and and well it's it's almost anti -competitive in a way it's hugely
anti -competitive right there's no way anyone could ever compete with that they know exactly what you'll buy and won't buy they know what price points to offer it to you at how can someone compete with that and and um so the problem is on an anti -competitive level is we're in a global economy and so as
soon as one right a country will offer its own companies a competitive advantage globally right so good use that data for sure um so it's it's tough to argue for anti these antitrust laws because you put yourself at a globally disadvantaged state exactly right so it's tough it's got to be these are really
tough questions we need to work out now and again one of the problems with algorithms is they just get embedded into our daily lives and then they execute with relentless ferocious unforgiving efficiency 24 7 and we don't even know why they're doing the things they're doing again human beings can't
understand the algorithms they're too complex they just execute so so we have some hard choices as a as a not just as a country but as a as a planet we got to come together on these things yeah i want to come back to chess a little bit sure um i know when you were a kid how did you learn chess you went
to school you played this guy at lunch you got beat so my father taught me how when i was a boy i had to be careful the questions i asked my father because i remember one day he was playing chess with a friend i was all of six and a half and uh i said can i watch and he said yeah sure you can but i
had to learn the the rules of the game right and so so that's all i knew about chess i just knew the rules so i wasn't interested at all and then in high school freshman year first day of high school a kid in homeroom had a little magnetic chess set and he turned around in homeroom we had 20 minutes
to kill and he said you know how to play chess and i said yeah i know how to play very proudly like it's like saying i know how to play baseball when you've swung a bat once right and so uh so he beat me in you know four or five moves and i got kind of pissed and i thought okay i'm gonna beat him the next
day and he beat me every day that week and i just thought he was so smug about it i just i was a swimmer and that's really all i cared about was swimming a competitive swimmer right four or five hours a day and i thought i just want to beat this kid i just want to by the end of the year i it's my little
goal so i went to the bookstore and i got a book um of bobby fisher's games and uh called my 60 memorable games and i i played over those games every day after swim practice when i got home and by playing over them you mean mentally or physically oh i'd set up a chess board and his book would play through
you know he would list the moves of his games and with annotations he would explain why he did and did not you know that was a good move here's why that was a bad move that's why so i played over these games over and over until i knew them by heart and i thought wait a second he's been playing chess
at that point let me see 69 really he'd been playing for you know 20 plus years and i thought there's more than 60 memorable games i want to get every game he has bobby fisher bobby fisher right this is before he won the world championship so i went to the library and i got every old chess magazine
i went to downtown chicago on the train i was what 13 and i went to the library people don't remember what libraries were and then uh in this day of the internet but i and i spent weeks going there going through every back issue of every chess magazine globally to find fisher games and if there was a fisher
game that's all i wrote down like i didn't copy down anybody else's games it was just my little mania and uh so at the end of the year and actually i did it in a couple months i had about 700 of his games in a little playbook that i had a little notebook and i by hand had written down all these games
and i played them over over and over and over and he was the most famous chess player in the world but he he hadn't yet won the world championship he was 27 26 26 at this point 26 27 and um and by the end of the year i had beaten that kid this the kid with the smug smile of course yeah and then and then
a couple years later i was one of the best high school players in the country and um and my uh my team this is from evanston illinois we sent a team to new york and we finished second place that year we won the next year um and uh just by chance on easter sunday and i was what 16 i was walking with my
mother and near macy's those of you who know new york it's on 34th and broadway i um across the street i spot bobby fisher which was like he was the most reclusive person in the world and i said mama i'll see you later that's that's my hero over there and i ran across this like dodging traffic to get
to him out of a crowd he was enormous 6 3 yeah like but even still to spot him in a crowd like what are the odds that and uh and he just ran up to him and i said uh mr fischer mr fischer you know in 1962 when you played ruszewski and and the sicilian why'd you play point of king rook three on move six
like what was that about like because i knew all of his games by heart and it didn't occur to me that he would like to get lost kid right and he was a famous recluse like just paranoid about everybody but here's the strange little kid knows all of his games and he just became a mentor he was you know
and again this was in the two years leading up to his winning the world championship and he spent time with him before the yeah i got i got a chance to spend time with him at the there used to be a resort called grossing errs and the cat skills if you saw the movie dirty dancing uh with patrick swayze
back in the day it was where um uh they mohammed ali had trained i guess he was i don't know if it was yeah mohammed ali had trained for one of his boxing matches there so they offered fischer a chance to train for this baske match the world championship and i got to spend two weeks with them watching
him prepare for the world championship which was so cool um what did you learn from watching him prepare well this is interesting fischer fischer woke up at 11 or 12 in the morning and went to sleep at three or four at night so you learn that for him that was the optimal time of day right time of day
and night right where he functioned the best and so you learn to find out like how you function the best we all do that right like i know there's certain times of the day like the first 30 minutes when i wake up or where i get the most creative ideas or after tenet night for me um so each of us learned
so i learned the importance of that i learned the importance of of of pretty much a single -minded focus that's all he did um which was one of his tragedies um he said famously once all i ever want to do ever is play chess and that's great but when you win the world championship now what do you do and um
you know he he sadly was lost his mind to paranoia uh over the years and that was a real shame paranoia is tough because you don't trust anybody and after a while he didn't even trust me um he just fell out of touch with with the world um but on a positive note i learned the importance of focus um of knowing
your opponent he um he had a game of red book of his opponent's games that's all he did he just played over those games over and over and uh and i could tell which is the same way you learned right exactly i just played over fisher's games um now the thing is i played people other than fisher so so it's
not the optimal way i should have studied other people i should have and so did fisher but when he was preparing for the world championship match that's all he did didn't he do like a bait and switch because he assumed yes yes so his whole life so mind you he was a world -class chess player actually
let me talk about fisher because fisher was unique in the world in the following way fisher learned the game of chess at the age of six and by the time he was 11 sorry by the time he was 12 he was a good 12 year old chess player not a great 12 year old chess player he was a good 12 year old player that's
six years later right after six years of playing chess bobby fisher was good at the age of 13 a year later he played a game that some people say was the game of the century as a 13 year old so one year later he goes from good to playing a game people today still play over going oh my god like a 13 year
old played that game at the age of 14 he was the u .s champion mind you at 12 he was merely a good 12 year old at 13 he played a game that some people say is one of the best ever at 14 he was the u .s champion at 15 he was one of the top eight players in the world what happened exactly and he did that on his own
imagine no coach no no coach no nothing now that's not entirely true he had a coach but the coach had a chess rating of like 2000 like not really a coach it'd be like so a decent player it'd be like you pick up a tennis racket and your coach is the best player in your neighborhood okay yep that's not going
to get you too far yep right like it'll get you the rudiments fisher did that entirely on his own and no one in the history of the game has improved like that not just that game in any field on his own and how'd he do it well he was a genius and he was very simple and he played the same series of openings
you know tim asked me that question tim first he said what was unique about him and i childlike simplicity he really did he looked when you looked at his games it was like a child playing them and and everyone else had really complicated games and fishers were always very simple and the thing about fisher
oh this is something really about fisher he always played to win he didn't mind losing actually he hated losing but he wanted to win more and so there were games where anyone else would have accepted a draw that fisher would play to win and in doing so sometimes lost and i think there are two ways to
live your life you can play to win no one wants to lose you can play to win or you can play not to lose and fisher always played to win and you knew even if in a losing position he was looking for a way to win he was not giving up not till you actually totally beat him not that that happened too often
but so there was a ferocious will to win that was something also about fisher and he did it entirely on his own against the russians who were determined to beat him as a group as a block imagine a kid in russia taking up the game of baseball and becoming the best baseball player in history on his own
this was during the cold war right during the cold war politics things going on so many political things and he had the ultimate bait and switch with with spaskey yeah he always played pawn to king four always played the same openings imagine always coming out with a right hook and then in the world
championship switching up and playing something different and spatsky had been going over his games just like he was going over spatsky and then all of a sudden this doesn't look something totally different this doesn't look the same now fisher it was a total bait and switch and fisher set up the russians
for let me just figure this out 10 20 for 16 17 years played exactly the same moves so everyone knew exactly what he was going to do and in the world championship only he did something different which must have been unnerving if you're on the other side you wouldn't know what to do you would have been
flabbergasted like uh -oh all the preparation i did for fisher is useless i thought i was playing one person i'm now playing someone else so so that was yeah an incredible bait and switch that fisher pulled yeah i want to come back to a little bit tie this to ai a little bit but i want to come back to
the role of information in decision making sure computers can handle way more information than we can as humans you had talked about the paul slovak study yes on the phone with me can you elaborate a little bit sure so human beings have a limited processing ability right our brains are have very little
what's known as um working memory right we can't maintain a whole lot of information in our head at any one point and so because of that limited processing ability um we we have a hard time with too much information and so so we like to think that the more information we get i'm using air quotes now
the better informed we are and we'll make better decisions but that's not true and uh a seminal study was done by by a psychologist named paul slovak back in 1974 so paul slovak gets eight horse handicappers into a room and he says i'm going to see how good you guys are right and so he says we're going
to spend today handicapping horse races which is to say predicting the winner of a horse race and these had been races that had been run over the last few decades that slovak had gotten the stats on and he deleted the names of all the horses because if you knew the name of the horse it would give you
an edge right so all you saw was numbers right it's all you saw and so he said we're going to handicap 40 horse races and we're going to do so in four rounds 10 races each and in the first round i'm going to give each of you horse betters handicappers any five pieces of information you want so like
you might want the weight of the jockey but that guy next to you the other handicapper he doesn't really care about the weight of the jockey right he wants some other variables so each of you whatever five pieces you wanted and that guy wanted and each of the horse handicappers wanted they got and at the end
of the the first round with five pieces of information they were 17 accurate right which is 17 or 19 hold on 19 accurate which is pretty good it's twice as good as chance right apology it's been a while since i looked at the study 17 or 19 percent anyway almost twice as good as chance which is pretty
darn good with five pieces of information i say twice as good as chance there were 10 horses in every race so we would expect 10 accuracy just blind guessing just pick one in 10 yeah you got a 10 chance of getting the horse right so if you're betting 19 you've almost doubled your your results that's
pretty good and he also asked each of the betters to rate how confident they are and they are in their predictions and they were oh i remember what it was that's why i was confusing the two they were 17 accurate they were 19 confident okay that was it so almost identical confidence and accuracy round
one round one with five pieces of information round two they were given 10 pieces of information then 20 and in round four they had 40 pieces of information and there were 10 races so this was statistically valid results right their accuracy was still only 17 percent with 40 pieces of information but their
confidence almost doubled to 31 percent it went from 19 percent to 31 percent so they are now almost twice as confident as they ought to be which is to say they're overconfident so all the extra information did was just feed their confirmation bias they had already made a decision based on five pieces
of information and all the new information did was make them more confident in a decision they already made right uh which is why by the way in my investment analysis when i look at global markets i reduce all global markets down to a handful of variables like copper versus gold or investment grade
bonds versus versus corporate bonds right lqd if a ratio i told you about that those are my two of my really key variables to predict not just the stock market but uh interest rates and so the goal is to reduce complexity to a few pieces of information that you can follow and reason with the trouble
with too much information is you can't reason with it and you don't know how things interact whereas if you have the few key variables you can figure out how they interact and that's exactly right that's such a good point chain you can figure out how they can interact and you can figure out when you're
wrong right right so one of my favorite investment questions is what would i need to see to change my view and if you're dealing with dozens of variables there's no way that you can change your view on like there's just too much information to keep in mind right the way they all interact but if you're
dealing with three or four or five variables i can say i'm bullish on the u .s stock market until i see this one variable declined by more than three percent in which case then i'm bearish because now i know i've gotten the feedback i need on the variables i understand do you like i have a hypothesis that um
distilling things down to the the essence or the the key variables not all the variables but the ones that are probably going to govern the outcome sure also helps you with information filtering because now you don't have to pay attention to all of these other things coming at you you don't have to
read every press release you don't have to yes exactly i so you would ask me earlier before we started this you know like how long do i look at markets and i i size up global markets and really in in in 15 seconds or 30 seconds because i know exact and by the way when i say global markets i mean all
global markets including currencies bonds and current commodities it's not to say i look at every single currency but i look at most of the major stock markets and commodities and the major currency pairs and interest rates in 15 to 30 seconds because i know what i'm looking for and i'm only looking
for changes that are unexpected because i've already formed a view right i know how the market should behave and now i'm just looking for deviations so i just have to glance and see if there's a deviation it's kind of like looking at a uh imagine a a classroom of kids and a teacher just scans every
day and just looking for is a kid missing or is there a new kid present and then oh got to pay attention and so i'm able to do that in global markets because i know what i'm looking for which gives me a reasoning edge also how does that give you a reasoning edge there's a saying in uh zen buddhism the beginner
mind sees many possibilities the expert sees only a few think about driving think about when you learned how to drive shane when you first got behind the wheel it's terrifying you have no idea where like what do you look at there are people walking around there's stop lights there are other cars there's
millions of inputs millions of inputs and you have no idea what to look at and the process of becoming a skill driver that all becomes automated right you don't have to look for very much at all you know exactly what's relevant and what's not and so i think that's true with all experts in all fields
is you learn what not to pay attention to so that you can give more attention to what's important right otherwise the person is like looking at a million different things i actually don't understand that about the investing world i look at three or four or five things to understand global markets i
don't understand people who look at literally dozens to hundreds to thousands of things this statistic that government report that annual report how in the world can you possibly form a view of the world that you can test like which variable is having which effect like how would you know you can't you
can't but you have few variables and you know those aren't the variables or at least one of them is one of them is the skew or your reasoning is the skew and like modify and find out what works and that that allows you the feedback to actually get better over time right getting better might just keep
you in the same relative position because the world's always changing but hopefully you can actually accelerate that and break out of i think you can any individual who approaches his or her life in any domain can get better you know what i'm going to tell you something from chess this is an interesting
rule fisher played a very limited opening repertoire which is to say he played very few openings and got really good at those openings before he did anything else so the thing is instead of doing lots of different things get good at a couple so for example if i were a guitar teacher i'm just making
this up i'm not if i were i would have a student gain mastery over a few songs and get really good at those and then slowly build on that expertise to introduce new songs instead what we do is we try to teach a student dozens of songs right and you don't really get any good at any right that's the difference
between the u .s education system by the way and oxford and cambridge oh tell me more about that sure so the idea of a liberal arts education is this if you learn a lot sorry if you learn a little about a lot of different subjects you'll be able to sort of piece it all together it being an air quotes
right if you learn a little bit about a lot of things you'll be able to generalize and kind of think about anything well no you won't because you've never learned how to think at oxford and cambridge the belief is learn one thing really well and then you can learn anything else really well until you've
gone into depth until you've actually done something learned it mastered it exactly gone through the process of learning you probably don't really understand how to learn you don't understand how to learn right because you've only stayed at a really superficial level in the united states you don't really
begin to specialize and to go into depth until graduate school i don't know why they they do that instead it would be much better if you if you learned one or two subjects really well and then branch out from there right i think u .s schools would be much better off if they focused on teaching students
simply how to read well and write well and rudimentary mathematics get that down for the first eight years make sure they're really good at that right and then introduce a subject right one at a time one at a time get get good at that right how much how much do you remember from high school chemistry
i mean i barely remember anything right how much at all right not much at all really a waste of how many hours of my life yeah right there are lots of and college too like you don't really get a chance to to learn much and ultimately it's it's wasted time learn one thing well then you can learn anything
well what is the process for learning is there a process well i think yes there is like how do we learn right so that's such a good question i i wrote a book uh wow 25 years ago called what smart students know and i i did the following i i realized that by the way i'm not plugging the book i am not absolutely
not uh because i can summarize it now and i wish i had the time to rewrite the book but what i did was this no one ever shows us how to learn ever nowhere in school for example imagine shane in french class french 101 your first french class your teacher said everyone you're going to have to learn a lot
of vocabulary in this class so before i teach you any words i'm going to teach you a way to remember vocabulary they never do that they just go we're going to have a quiz on these 30 words on monday good luck right but they don't teach us how to learn actually or remember things like for example they
don't tell students if you want to remember anything create a picture a pattern a story or a rhyme out of it all namamics come back to picture pattern story or rhyme but they don't tell us that so we struggle we you know we create flashcards which are totally ineffective um and we keep rereading our
notes so i wrote what smart students know i i gave students a page from a geology textbook like a sample page and i spent the next 200 pages showing how to actually what it would mean to learn that like i actually that's amazing it's really cool right i mean not that you would do that depth but like
what does it mean to learn that page of information like here's everything that you would actually need to do by the way if i told you all the steps it would take you to tie your shoe it'd be much harder than just show watch this yeah right so so the secret to learning anything is this anything i'm
glad you asked that question rehearsing if you want to get good at football play football if you want to get good at playing the guitar play the guitar if you want to get good at chess you've got to play chess now you want to break that down to certain skills and rehearse each one of them so you see
people playing pickup basketball or tennis and they haven't broken it down to skills and they're just out there playing right you want to break the domain down to sub skills and then rehearse each one now the reason i use rehearse is you want to do exactly what you would do in the actual game right
so for example if you want to get good at taking tests you have to take tests which is to say the following let's deconstruct that so i'm gonna in the next two minutes summarize everything there is to know about learning a subject and it's this you rehearse whatever you were required to do on the test
so think about a test on a test you were asked questions you've never seen before and you have to search your memory for the relevant information right so step one read the question step two search brain for for relevant information step three collate that information into an answer right answer you
have to rehearse each one of those steps to do well in those subjects right so what that means is you need the way to prepare for a test i hate the word prepare or study because here's what most people mean by the word prepare for or study for a test reread my notes if you think back to when you were in high
school in college i looked at most students and what they would do is they would highlight their textbooks and take lots of notes and then reread their high lightings and reread their notes but that's not rehearsing a skill right no one tests you on how will you highlight right no one tests you on on rereading
your notes because on the test you're not rereading anything you're seeing an entirely new situation so the way to get good at at any subject in any domain is to rehearse the skills that you're actually required to do so practice questions practice questions that you've never seen before and you then
have to search your memory for the relevant information by the way it helps what i would do in in college is i would get textbooks the teacher wasn't using and i would see what questions were asked there so i'd really get questions i'd never seen before even from teachers teachers uh authors textbook
authors that weren't my professor and weren't the authors of the textbook i was reading so i'd really get stumped with questions right and so because that's going to happen in the actual game so for example imagine you're a basketball coach right and you want to train your basketball players at certain points
your key player is going to be out of action right fouled out or or injured right i would have them play basketball games where take out one of the players and you're now playing with four right or one of you like i would try to find a way to make their arm a little like wrap it up or something so it
was a little constrained like okay you've got a muscle sore now you're playing the game now practice now practice now rehearse rehearse right so rehearse under varying conditions but a key the key to learning any skill really if there's anything i said today like that was super important the key to
learning any skill rehearse it break it down into sub skills and then rehearse each of those skills if you're doing something other than that you're wasting your time rereading your notes waste of time you want to get good at a job interview have someone ask you questions someone who doesn't know you
ask you questions right i think grade your feedback and listen to it and exactly right and then exactly right with the feedback shane then okay i spoke too fast right i was coaching a young woman she had a job in her view coming up and whenever i spoke she she did the following here talk to me talk
to me right now and i'm going to pretend to be her listening so talk to me right now shane just say anything what i want you to do is uh -huh uh -huh uh -huh she would say uh -huh so quickly and i said are you aware that you are signaling that you're not listening to the other person and she was dumb founded
and she'd gone to columbia university i mean you know good school right great school she said no one's ever told me that before i said you say uh -huh so quickly there's no way you heard what i asked you or said to you and all your signaling is you're not listening to me i already don't like you i liked
her i mean i was right yeah as a mentor right and so so you need feedback and she was stunned she said no one's ever told me that before and i said just talk more slowly don't say aha so quickly listen to the person so let me encapsulate this a little bit if i'm in school i'm in university high school
i'm doing physics the question is at the end of the chapter most people annoy or avoid and teachers may assign the odd numbers or the even numbers right you should be doing them all and not not looking at your notes trying to do them and then if you're stuck go back and look in your book exactly right
if you reread your notes all you're getting good at is like following following problems you've already seen before that's not going to help you when you get a new problem because that's what's going to happen on the test i'll go one better you want to get really good try the sample questions at the end
of the chapter before you read the chapter oh that's interesting now because what that does is it primes you now now all of a sudden whoa how would i there's no way i can answer those questions let's now you're primed as you read the chapter of what's relevant and what's not and you also prime yourself
for the following what happens when i have incomplete information right what happens if i forget the Pythagorean theorem how do i answer the question then that's what i did the Princeton review by the way what happens when you know only two of the five choices what do you do right like there's there's
a whole uh range of things that you can do when you're skilled right so what happens uh in a what happens as a baseball player if i've if i've got sweat in my eye and a fly ball is coming at me what do i do right i mean you need to rehearse for the unusual as well as non -optimal conditions non -optimal
conditions because you can't ever count on optimal ever and uh if you get them great you're lucky so would you organize what's what uh smart students know differently now or would you take this same approach which is like here's a page of geology and how would you update them i would ask them to say
i'd ask them to break down i'd have i teach them how to teach themselves i'd say okay in a little Socratic way will on their test on this material will you have seen the questions before yes or no no like i'd step them through and get them to discover whoa reading my notes rereading my notes is just
a total waste of time right like that's all they do they take notes in class verbatim here's a skill on the test do you pare it back exactly your teacher's words or do you express them in your own words well of course you express them in your own words well then you have to rehearse doing that right
right so when you take notes in school they're probably verbatim just because you got to keep up with the teacher right but then translate those notes into your own words because that's what you're going to have to do on the test don't reread your notes translate them right because you got to do that on the test
and if you haven't done it before you're not going to be able to do it on the test that's really fascinating how does that carry over to adults then who might be working in an organization or need to acquire new skills or ah well to figure out what it is you're required to do and then and rehearse that skill
like let's say it's presentations you've got to give presentations to clients right then you're going to have to rehearse that what if the skill is more murky what if it's like managing people oh how do we go about learning to manage people how do we get the feedback how do that's such a good question i
have to think about that that's a that's a challenging one because after all you're going to have to teach yourself unless you're being coached right here's the way to think about it if you're playing tennis by yourself do you think you shane are going to be able to correct your tennis strokes i don't
think so right because you're not going to be able to see what you did wrong right you're not going to have part of the system you're part of right you're embedded within it it's like a fish like not knowing that it's surrounded by water because it doesn't know non -water right so fissure and chest was able
to do that because he saw the results of his game he could play over the games and go oh that was a mistake i'm never doing that again right right but when you're dealing with people how do you know like what results am i getting and for example people could smile you could be getting totally the wrong
feedback they may be smiling because they don't want to upset you right here's an example when i want to give a talk and i want to rehearse for that talk i need to do it in front of people who don't know me if they're my friends they're going to be smiling and nodding their heads like just because they
know me right when i have to make a pitch it's going to be to someone who doesn't know me right right so i need that feedback right here's something when i want to find out whether i know something i explain it to people that i barely know like i could be sitting next to someone at a restaurant going
this is a new book i'm writing and like would you like to listen and you know if i can engage that person who's a stranger and get them and then get them interested then i know okay good now i'm getting some feedback now that's useful information right i mean i gave you a copy of my book right and i've
given other friends copies of my book to get feedback right and if they said oh i don't you know this one chapter is a little long like then it's useful um and by the way i've given it to people who who like who know me but they're not friend friends like they don't read that well like you didn't know
me that well really and and so i use that feedback to to revise but your question is a good one in everyday life how do we get feedback um boy i think sometimes you just have to ask here's a question i wanted to ask friends what do people know about adam that adam doesn't know about adam oh that's a great question have you
have you asked that yeah i just started to ask you know and be brutal right like i what does adam know about what does everyone know about adam that adam doesn't know and like okay like and be prepared for the answers and be honest really if you wanted to be scientific about that you could submit it
to 30 friends and give them some like online form where like survey monkey or something where they didn't you just like okay by the way someone told me it was really good advice regarding writing he said adam if one person tells you something that's that person's opinion but if three people tell you
the same thing you've really got to listen and and i think that's that's good advice that's really good advice it's hard because sometimes your friends they don't want to hurt i'm using hair quotes now hurt your feelings but they're hurting you by by not being honest with you in a way yeah you know
yeah i think that's boy that would be a great website you know someone could start a website here someone out there listening to shane's brilliant blog and podcast here's an idea you create a website where people can write feedback for people and it's submitted to the person anonymously i like that like
just thought you ought to know yeah like that'd be really cool that'd be a great service for people and like oh wow i didn't realize you know i cut people off right or i talked too fast now you can start seeing things about yourself that you're blind to totally blind to people don't want to bring up
because of social norms or they're your friends or yeah or or they just don't think someone and i know a young man brilliant and he's so brilliant he almost comes across as too slick and i was talking to someone about him who knows the same young man and and they said well adam you should tell him and it
didn't occur to me to tell him that and i and i i said to him i said uh by the way you might want to stumble occasionally right because you're so polished and so slick that you're not approachable right and even there his response was a slick oh yeah the pratfall effect i know that okay i'll do that like
so so i mean he even know where he knew where i was going with that right right and so so yeah i think providing feedback is a is a tough one but i'm sure in the of feedback for for me now and okay bring it on you know and and as long as it's comes from a position of love you know and and and i think
that's important i think yeah i think that's what people know if you if you come up from a place of love and constructive i don't wanna say constructive criticism but just feedback because we're all blind really to the effect we have on people and not totally blind we have some idea but it'd be good
to get feedback and and by the way if i were an employer to your question and i and you asked about managing people i i'd sit down my entire department and say i i have not i i have an online form i want you to tell me ways i'm i could be improved ways i really suck yeah and ideally people would tell
you that but then you also get into this like i don't want to tell my boss they suck right like there's a social dynamic to it or a psychological impediment and there's also like you kind of go whatever you know you just kind of roll your eyes and go whatever but but i think if it were earnestly uh
submitted the the the the petition like hey i need this feedback i want to do better for you guys by the way your bonuses are tied to your performance so help me help make you more money yeah and help our company make more money help us contribute to the world please give me some feedback i found when i
was managing people they would always put their toe through that door but it wouldn't be a foot it would be a toe and how you responded to that first sort of here's something you could do better or this criticism or whatever you want to call it or a fact you you don't know about yourself how you to
that is indicative of whether that foot would come in the door and then you know the body and where they're sort of probing yeah they're probing you and most people and i observed this at work most people have this default response of like oh you don't know what you're talking about or that's not true
or here's a case where it wasn't true and that that's a complete shutdown oh yeah for that other person and they'll never put that foot through the door with you again they and when they by the way i i hear this with investors where i'm trying to to to to convey some information and their their response
is to argue against it yeah instead of going okay well let me see if that's a valid idea let me just explore that let me just entertain it um it's so funny you should talk about this um in um in the middle ages there was an institution designed by kings to provide feedback and it was called the court
jester and the function of the court jester was not to amuse the king the function of the court jester was far more serious than that the court jester was the one person who was empowered by the king always to tell the truth and so the king who might say i was thinking of invading france and the court
jester would go ha good luck with that buddy remember the last time you invaded germany right and and so because he was a jester the court um the king's court could then laugh it off but the function of the court jester was actually to tell the king the truth i had no idea yeah and and he was empowered
to do so because then the king could save face everyone would laugh but the king would go okay maybe i shouldn't invade france maybe that's not such a good idea and so right it wasn't an entertaining function it was the real function tell the truth feedback how do we get that it's so hard it's incredibly
difficult yeah we're switching gears just a little bit maybe last question um what are some of the biggest learnings that you've gotten from other people that were unexpected oh gee that was an unexpected question um i don't know so much that they were this is important we're always teaching on multiple
levels so for example when there's the direct lesson but the teacher's also saying any number of other things right so for example one thing this my students always learn from me is i believe they can improve not just there's the lesson like this is the pathagorean theorem they also have learned lots
of things adam believes i can raise my score raising scores are possible right you're teaching on multiple levels and and so one thing i've learned just from observation and it's more indirect is all the multiple ways we influence others and we're always teaching whether we're aware of it or not we're
always making a statement and by the way not just a statement multiple statements i i was so um not really sad but um a couple of sundays ago i was walking with a friend through a park in sojo new york and uh there was a little stand that was being set up for the afternoon by some musicians and a mother
and i could tell the mother loved her little son very much the son was i'm guessing three and a half four something ish was walking by and the son was wanted to get involved in as it were i'm using air quotes helped the musician set up their equipment and the mother i overheard the mother say to her
son no no you can't play music yet but you can learn how and i just thought how sad that child is now internalized that he can't play and the only he in fact he can't play i'm using air quotes now until he learns so the mother with all the best intentions right was giving him a very bad message right
and if you think back to your life shane i know certainly know in mind the number of offhand comments that an individual said that positively or negatively impacted me to this day i'll bet you you can think of a handful of statements by this teacher or that adult that that you still remember in a good
way or you or a negative or a negative way and it's astonishing that the impact that offhand comments can have on young people and i know one of the the really important things that i'm i'm really worried about the world and i'm worried about young people in particular and uh who's uh the under 25 generation gen
z right there they're inheriting a world that's falling apart and and their brains and attention have been hijacked by technology and it's i'm i'm deeply worried not just about the world as a whole but about young people and i think all of us can what should we do differently to to stem that or abate
it in your mind well for one um see i'm i'm not sure that there's an answer to that question because i think the adults are so embedded adults the over 25s are so embedded in their in their world views i'm not sure that that we're going to change too quickly um and on the positive side young people
the younger generation under 25 gen z the youngest generation is free from many of the the labels that everyone over the age of 25 like male versus female or republican versus democrat or american versus non -american um that bedevil political and social and economic discussions of the adults and so i
i think the youngest generate gen z the youngest generation is more homogeneous in a global way than than all prior generations and i think that's a plus on the minus side they're inheriting a world where there are few positive voices few if any and i think that's what's needed in the world right now
you need beacons of people offering positive visions that others can rally behind and i say positive vision not us versus them positive visions positive inclusive visions and and maybe young people will provide that maybe maybe it'll flip maybe we'll get the leadership from gen z maybe um but we certainly
need positive voices in the world i think that's a great place to wrap up because now we can invite everybody listening we can give them an invitation to the great game yay thank you so much adam shane it was a delight thank you so much hey guys this is shane again just a few more things before we wrap
up you can find show notes at fernamstreetblog .com slash podcast that's f -a -r -n -a -m -s -t -r -e -e -t -b -l -o -g .com slash podcast you can also find information there on how to get a transcript and if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food go to fernamstreetblog .com
slash newsletter this is all the good stuff i found on the web that week that i've read and shared with close friends books i'm reading and so much more thank you for listening
