Mentally Unscripted

 How do you increase your effectiveness as a manager and a leader not only to benefit your organization but to improve your career? Jeremy Thomas, the cohost of Mental Supermodels, joins Paul and Scott to discuss the mental models that will improve your career and personal interactions.

And, yes, there really is a Mortal Kombat mental model.

1. Mental Supermodels
2. Email Jeremy at [email protected] 
3. Ep32 – More About Mental Models With Myron Weber of the Mental Supermodels Podcast
4. Ep24 - A Conversation with George Silverman (MindSkills Creator)
5. Ep35 – Will Bill Gates’ Prescription for Avoiding a Climate Disaster Give Too Much Power to the Government?

1. Mental models will make a big impact when you use them with intentionality. The goal in using them is to make better decisions more quickly.
2.  Jeremy’s core mental models for managers and leaders are: 
   1. Communicate with intention, 
   2. Start with the end in mind, and
   3. Seek out value.
3. Figuring out different ways to use the above 3 mental models in combination will have the biggest impact on your life and career. 
4. The inverse method is a useful mental model to improve communication with others.

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What you don’t see is as important as what you do see. Opportunity costs, costs that you don’t see, lurk in every decision. In this episode of Mentally Unscripted, Paul and Scott explain why missing those costs screws up your decision-making.

Resources

• TK News by Matt Taibi
• Aaron Mate
• How 'do your own research' hurts America's Covid response
• These four words are helping spread vaccine misinformation
• Lex Fridman Podcast #221 – Douglas Lenat
• You’ll Make Better Decisions When You Understand Opportunity Costs
• Confirmation Bias: Why your decisions suck and you fight with your friends
• Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making
• How (Supposedly) Rational People Make Decisions
• America Doesn't Have Enough Hospital Beds To Fight the Coronavirus. Protectionist Health Care Regulations Are One Reason Why.
• How Many Hospital Beds?
• Why Melinda Gates Spends Time ‘Letting My Heart Break’
• “We Hadn’t Really Thought Through the Economic Impacts” ~ Melinda Gates
  
  

Top Takeaways

• Opportunity cost is the benefit we lose by choosing one option over another. It’s a second-order thinking technique that helps gives our decisions more context so we can make better, more informed decisions.
• We often fail to fully account for the costs of our choices because some of the costs are implicit, or unseen, costs. When we make decisions without accounting for those unseen costs, we’re making decisions with limited information.
• We have limited resources. It’s because of this scarcity that every decision we make has tradeoffs. We must somehow reconcile limited resources and unlimited wants.
  
  

Scott was a guest on a recent episode of Unshackled Liberty where he talked to Q the Abolitionist and Crypto Gumbo about the increasing lack of communication in the world and the divisiveness it's causing.

Unshackled Liberty "is a libertarian variety show where we discuss the value of reducing the role of government in our daily lives. We have interviews and news from various sources and evaluate everything from the perspective of Christian Voluntaryism. We hope you stick around for a few episodes and enjoy the content."

Find Unshackled Liberty here and your favorite podcast app.

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In this episode of Mentally Unscripted, Paul and Scott welcome Robert and Wiz back to the show. This time, they take on the growing problem of poor leadership.

Guest Links

• Robert on Twitter
•  Wiz on Twitter
•  Wiz’s website

Resources

• Transcript of Pelosi Interview on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer
• Nancy Pelosi Blows Up at Wolf Blitzer Over Stimulus: You’re a Republican ‘Apologist’
•  Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections
• Comparing Natural and Vaccine Immunity
• The Freedom Cell Network
• RNC says it plans to sue Biden administration over federal vaccination mandate

Top Takeaways

• Leadership and management are different. Leadership is the ability to inspire people to achieve a common goal. Management is the allocation of resources to achieve a goal. One problem with leadership is thinking management and leadership are the same.
• Leadership requires more than technical expertise at a job. It requires trust, accountability, a definable goal, and a long-term focus for the success of the organization and its employees or members.
• People don’t want to step up and be a leader because the risk of failure is too high. A lack of community could be at the root of this failure.   

Timestamps
[01:40] What is leadership?

[10:41] Leadership requires accountability. Leaders focus on the long-term while managers are more short-term focused.

[13:09] Technical expertise at a position doesn’t make someone a good leader.

[15:10] Is offering 2 career tracks the answer to the problem of technical expertise not equaling leadership skill.

[17:19] Is there a lack of leadership in the world? Is the response to COVID-19 and the botched Afghanistan withdrawal two examples?

[25:42] Is Biden’s vaccine mandate an example of good leadership?

[33:00] A lack of trust can destroy a leader.

[33:51] Are these isolated incidents or part of a larger picture of widespread leadership failures? Is the failure in leadership a result of an incentive structure that doesn’t reward leadership? How much does the lack of community contribute?

[43:27] Where is the solution to our poor leadership going to come from?

[47:29] A leader must be able to articulate a goal before people will be inspired to act.

[52:18] It’s hard to lead people who you have contempt for.

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In this episode of Mentally Unscripted, Paul and Scott review How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, by Bill Gates.

Resources

• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change
• Biden administration considers withholding funds and other measures to spur vaccinations
• Pfizer hikes 2021 outlook after vaccine boosts sales, profit
• Pfizer’s full FDA approval could lead to even greater profits
• We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So, Scientific American Colludes with Other Major Media to Normalize ‘Climate Emergency’ Terminology
• US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries
• Elizabeth Warren calls for a crackdown on 'environmentally wasteful cryptocurrencies' to fight the climate crisis
• Most COVID-19 hospitalizations due to four conditions
• CDC study finds about 78% of people hospitalized for Covid were overweight or obese
• Impossible and Beyond: How healthy are these meatless burgers?
• Vitamin D Insufficiency May Account for Almost Nine of Ten COVID-19 Deaths: Time to Act.
• CNN Director ADMITS Network Engaged in ‘Propaganda’ to Remove Trump from Presidency

Top Takeaways

• Gates assumes that climate change is real and that we can do something about it.
• We must get to net 0 carbon emissions by 2050. Gates' position is that avoiding a climate disaster will come through innovation, not from reducing our demand for energy. We must develop greener technologies to accommodate our energy demand.
• Neither Paul nor Scott will give up eating meat.

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In this episode of Mentally Unscripted, Paul and Scott welcome Robert and Wiz back to the show. This time they cast their critical, and sometimes cynical, eye on the shady world of social media gurus. And of course, they have a little fun doing it.

Guest Links

• Robert on Twitter
• Wiz on Twitter
• Wiz’s website

Resources

• Mentally Unscripted Ep25 - A Conversation with Wisdom and Strategy
• Mentally Unscripted Ep28 - Killing Procrastination with Robert
• False Pattern Recognition
• Siddha Performance

Top Takeaways

• There is no shortage of people on social media touting themselves as gurus and wanting to take your money. If you want to learn about something, it makes sense to learn it from someone who’s done it before. But the Internet makes it easy for the gurus to make claims and harder for the rest of us to confirm the gurus are being truthful.
• Gurus try to sell you on an image. Either something you don’t have physically or psychologically.
• A lack of strong leadership and a sense of entitlement is leading to the growth of gurus with outrageous claims and the gullible people who keep the gurus in business.

Timestamps
[1:58] Where we found our first guru.

[5:52] Paul’s thoughts on Naval.

[8:13] Not all the social media gurus are shams.

[10:42] It comes down to the guru’s motivation. Do they want to help you or separate you from your money?

[11:53] There are other social media accounts dedicated to taking down the gurus. “Guru takedown porn,” according to Paul.

[13:15] The guru Ponzi scheme and selling the dream. There will never be a lack of predatory gurus and gullible people to keep them in business.

[19:30] Is it the problem they focus on or their method that makes the fake guru?

[20:46] Social media guru marketing.

[22:32] The consistency principle works in social media guru marketing too.

[24:03] More about exposing fake gurus.

[26:56] We justify our purchase because we spent money on them so we’ll convince ourselves we bought a worthwhile product. False pattern recognition can play a role in this.

[30:13] How to identify a false guru.

[32:07] How the fake gurus use the hero’s journey.

[33:42] What else you should look for?

[41:28] You get what you pay for.

[42:29] Good advice can morph into a parody of itself.

[46:07] The anti-guru.

[50:14] Why there are so many social media gurus.

[53:15] Finally, here’s your Bruce Lee fix.

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In this episode of Mentally Unscripted, Paul and Scott talk about the mental models that we can use to make better decisions in our foreign policy with a focus on military conflict.

Resources

• Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, by Scott Horton
• TK News, by Matt Taibbi
• The Afghanistan Papers
• U.S. Military Pollution, US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries
• Incentives matter
• Begin with the end in mind
• Baselines
• Occam’s Razor
• Framing
• Moral Foundations Theory
• Risk assessment & cost/benefit analysis
• Opportunity costs
• Inertia
• Reversibility
• Disconfirming Evidence
• Bayesian Casino
• Optimism Bias
• Sunk Cost Fallacy
• Shifting Goalposts
• Priming
• Seeing the Front / The Map is Not the Territory
• Base Rates

Top Takeaways

• Mental Models can help clarify complex situations plagued with conflicting information, lack of an objective, and competing interests.
• Our moral foundation may differ from that of another person or group of people. No one has the blanket authority to impose their morality on others.
• Misaligned incentives and hubris combine to create a no-win situation.
• In any case, we must make sure we’ve accurately defined the problem. Then we must seek out the optimal solution for solving that problem.
• Decisions have tradeoffs that we must consider.

Timestamps
[0:20] Introduction.

[1:15] Did the U.S. fail in Afghanistan? Was the only failure for some interested parties that they couldn’t keep the war going?

[3:51] Military as a business.

[5:42] Why we invaded Afghanistan.

[7:01] Did the U.S. have an end in mind?

[9:11] Some models we can use when politicians and media tell us we need to consider armed conflict.

[13:04] Can we impose our morals on other cultures?

[18:21] The lesson is that we cannot and should not nation-build. Nation-building is a failed experiment.

[18:46] Cost/benefit analysis of invading the “Graveyard of Empires.”

[23:16] For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction and reversibility.

[26:49] Framework for rational decision making. Have we defined the problem correctly, and do we have the best solution for solving that problem?

[31:46] Bayesian casino. How much are you willing to bet on a given outcome happening?

[32:29] How over-optimism leads to bad decisions.

[35:28] Don’t keep going because of sunk costs.

[37:40] How shifting goalposts muddied the waters.

[38:55] Models for exiting 20 years of armed conflict.

[41:35] Did Biden make a mistake by not priming the U.S. for the difficulty in leaving Afghanistan?

[43:11] Logistics failures.

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In this episode of Mentally Unscripted, Paul and Scott welcome Myron Weber of the Mental Supermodels podcast. 

In his day job, Myron Weber is the founder of Northwood Advisors, helping clients solve interesting data problems at the core of their business. He is also the cohost of Mental Supermodels, a podcast exploring the theory and practice, the art and science of mental modeling for problem-solving and decision making.

Note: The first episode of Mental Supermodels season 2 is now available. You can find it at Mental Supermodels and on your favorite podcast player.

Myron’s Links:

• Mental Supermodels
• Northwoods Advisors
• Myron on LinkedIn

Other Resources:

• Mentally Unscripted with George Silverman
• Mentally Unscripted with Brandon Wark
• Mentally Unscripted with Wisdom & Strategy

Top Takeaways

1. Mental modeling is simply the discipline of seeking to understand systems in a structured way so that when you act with intention, you increase the likelihood of achieving your desired outcome.
2. People don’t all think the same way. Mental models are a natural way to think for some but not others. We can still use them to bridge the gap with people who don’t think like us or who disagree on important topics.
3. We all benefit from thinking in mental models. We all use them in our professional and personal lives, but we may not know it.
4. We can use mental models to manage our anxiety so we can think clearly.
5. Decentralizing your information sources and avoiding other people’s algorithms (OPA) can help manage information overload.

Timestamps
[2:30] Myron talks about Mental Supermodels season 1.
[5:21] Myron’s mental models aha moment.
[7:54] What is a mental model?
[13:31] Mental models can help you manage your anxiety so you can think clearly.
[16:05] Are mental models flawed because they lack an action component?
[19:56] People can benefit from thinking in mental models more.
[22:29] How we can use mental models to manage information overload – decentralization and OPA.
[32:48] How Myron’s restricted information intake affects his interactions with others.
[34:30] Your engagement level should depend on whether your information is global, national, or local.
[37:28] Using mental models to improve your communication with others.
[39:57] Going meta.
[40:49] What you say vs. how you say it.
[42:26] Question everything.

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In this episode of Mentally Unscripted, Paul and Scott talk about using disconfirming evidence and falsifiability to overcome confirmation bias.

Resources
Confirmation Bias: Why Your Decisions Suck and You Fight With Your Friends

Use Disconfirming Evidence to Make Your Decisions Suck Less

Judgment in Managerial Decision Making

Probabilistic Thinking

Top Takeaways
1.    Humans tend to look only for confirming evidence. But often we need disconfirming evidence to find the correct solution to a question.

2.    Disconfirming evidence is better to use when examining a belief because it uses deductive logic instead of inductive logic.

3.    Understanding the risk posed by COVID is complicated by the lack of unfiltered, scientific data that gives a level-headed view of the situation.

Timestamps
[0:00] Discussion of Idiocracy – is it fiction or a documentary?

[4:42] What is confirming and disconfirming evidence?

[7:07] A study demonstrating the value of disconfirming evidence.

[10:56] People tend to avoid using disconfirming evidence because it takes more resources than seeking out confirming information.

[13:08] Falsifiability, the problem of induction, and deductive reasoning.

[18:03] Unfalsifiable claims may still be true. We just can’t falsify them.

[21:18] Applying disconfirming evidence and falsifiability to COVID.

[21:32] The debate over using masks to protect against COVID’s spread

[25:32] One factor complicating an analysis is that people aren’t good at assessing risk.

[28:35] Statistics are unreliable because they are difficult to measure and driven by incentives other than public health.

[35:05] As a population, we need to ask better questions and be literate in the concept of falsifiability.

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Paul and Scott welcome Brandon Wark of Free State Colorado. Brandon talks about Free State Colorado and gives the inside scoop on some local politics. And Paul makes up a new word.

Resources
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Free State Colorado

LewRockwell.com

Ludwig von Mises

Fredrik Hayak

Henry Hazlitt

Murray Rothbard

Confirmation Bias

Incentives Matter

Top Takeaways
1.    Free State Colorado’s goal is to promote a culture of liberty, individual freedom, and a free market with an emphasis on the state and local levels.

2.    Politicians aren’t as ideological as we think. Most of them only want to get elected and reelected.

3.    Special interest groups aren’t all bad. Good ones can act on behalf of politically underrepresented groups.

4.    People spend most of their time focusing on national politics. But the state, county, and local governments have greater influence over our lives.

5.    The best way to have a positive impact in your community is to show up and get involved. “Don’t wait until you get the bill in the mail.” – Brandon Wark

6.    Brandon’s strategy for communicating with people who have opinions different from his is to take time to get to know the person. He finds where they agree and builds from there to figure out how he can provide value to them.

7.    Make a human connection with others. You can still engage with people even if your politics differ.

Timestamps

[0:29] Brandon’s background.

[02:06] How Brandon got involved with politics.

[04:55] How the sausage is made, what most surprised Brandon about politicians.

[06:30] Incentives matter. Do politicians only care about getting elected and re-elected?

[08:07] How do we get special interests out of politics? Do we want them out?

[11:34] The Westminster, CO water issue

[16:50] How much of a role does political ideology play at the local government level?

[21:15] Truth is separate from what it takes to get elected.

[26:04] How Brandon came to believe in liberty.

[34:21] Brandon’s strategy for having productive interactions with people who don’t agree with him.

[37:47] Information overload.

[40:25] What Brandon learned over the last year.

[42:05] Brandon’s perfect world.

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