Welcome back Annie to the show and I have to kick this conversation off This was something that I was thinking about in reading the book So your new book is called quit and had AJ and I gotten a book from somebody that we didn't know with the title of quit I wouldn't have read it because it goes against my Midwest sensibilities and there is no quitting and Unless you're trying to quit smoking cigarettes and then it's don't quit quit Right, so I realized that I was triggered right out of the gate just by that the title of the book and However, you've been on the show before We're familiar with how you write and how you look at things So I was and of course your background Right of being a professional poker player and of course everything else you you have done So I was intrigued then of what does Annie Duke have to say and we knew that you would look at this one very analytical Way and which you have and and and reading it of course I went into it I guess with my own biases of is this a book telling you when they're quit and With all the work that AJ and I have put in over the years in just the way that we go about things That's the last thing on our minds So with all of that my question is why Did you take on this topic? Okay? Well first of all, let me just say like there I did have some people say to me. Don't you want to title it something? I Could be one of the gazillion books that are named pivot, but I didn't want to for the reason Basically for the reason that you just said right like I maybe some people won't read the book because they're gonna have a bias against the title But I want people to stop having a bias against the title like I want people to stop having a bias against this word quit and That the reason that I so want to do that is that I'm not taking an anti grit position I'm taking a you have to have both Right that just sticking to things for them just because you think that sticking to things is good Is not going to create success for you. You have to stick to the right things So we can think about during our lives We're sampling a whole bunch of different stuff right like we're trying out a lot of different things think about it like dating Right like you go out on a lot of dates But you quit most of them so that you can stick with with the person or you know that that you would like to actually Commit to and it's true of anything whether it's like careers or major majors Relationship jobs projects products that you're developing Success actually comes from mostly quitting and then being very very picky About what you really put your time and energy into and I feel like the dialogue around Grit has gotten to this point where it's just like oh I stick to things and so I'm awesome because it's this amazing character trait And yes, it's a great character trait but not across the board absent context Like why would you stay on a road where there was an accident if you could exit it We have to learn that it's okay Not only is it okay to exit things But it's necessary to get you to where you want to go on the Really the fastest that you can what's funny that you mentioned that because that's what I came away With at the book however when I first got into it. I don't know why that word Triggered me so much because when I started reading it I started looking for examples Of why what you were trying to present in the book was wrong or the one example where that would have backfired Or that person wouldn't have been successful if they would have quit and I was like I'm like she's trying to present this idea in some some ways that you can Look so when you get into deep that you can back out or that you don't mess up too bad Because you have to understand that and poker and once I just let go and just read the book for what it was and then I was able to like Happily and go along for the ride and look at all the points that you made in the book But as I mentioned I was surprised to find myself so triggered That's part of the reason why I think that the last sentence Of the prologue is it's time to rehabilitate quitting Well, we don't have any great examples of quitters that we view successfully So you write about this early in the book about the Everest expedition And they're not names anyone's ever heard of right we only celebrate those who have the grit to stick it through But there are so many quitters who go on to do great things But they often themselves don't even see the quitting as part of them achieving great things right There's a bias against our own Quitting in the way we view quitting that doesn't allow us to even share that story with others And then of course it doesn't get made into the Hollywood movies and those names are never attached as wow Quitting is something admirable that can open new doors and opportunities for me. Yeah, actually so to that point. I think You know the average age of a successful entrepreneur when they start their company is 42 I think that people would be pretty surprised to hear that statistic because we all think about Mark Zuckerberg But they're 42 and they're they're usually on their third startup now when you ask those people I think aj that your intuition here is correct If you ask those people to tell their story they would tell a story about grit getting knocked down and getting back up and sticking to it Um until they finally found success And then they would be encouraging other people to just stick to it as well Except that that's a story of successful quitting. It's both grit and quit right because if they're on their third startup It means there were two that didn't work that they stopped that then got them to the thing that actually Helped them to succeed. But that piece of the story Abandoning something that isn't working so you can turn your time and attention to something that will gets lost in that And it just becomes sort of keep trying And I think that the the one of the big problems that we have Is that there is no doubt that someone who is successful something at something has stuck to it Right, I mean you read a book that I wrote. I stuck to it. I finished the book ironically called quit But I finished it right so so here's the successful thing that I did And you can look back and say look that's the power of grit, right? She stuck to it even though writing a book is really hard The issue is that what's true in retrospect, right that if someone has been successful at something They will have stuck to it is not true prospectively that if I stick to something I will succeed And that's where we really get confused, right? So Like I saw a piece of advice on twitter about three months ago I think it was and you know, we're in a very bad macro environment for fundraising for entrepreneurs right now And I think it's getting tough for people to raise at the moment and someone said They they posted it took me 16 months To raise my seed series. So never give up. What horrible advice, right? Like, okay, you you ended up being successful after 16 months Like how long do you think they should keep doing it?  What about 24 months? What if they're still out at 36 months later toiling away trying to raise around Don't you think at some point they should take a signal from the market and walk away? um And I think that this is where Things get really hard because of course the question is how would you tell the difference between the two? When should you keep going and when shouldn't you? How do you not confuse get confused by someone who has a very small chance of succeeding actually succeeding because you know If someone has a 0.5 Percent chance of succeeding that means half a percent of the time they'll actually succeed It doesn't mean that it's worth pursuing Those questions become very difficult And so what happens is that we end up just with like this simple rule of thumb just stick to it You know, and I think it's terrible advice to counterbalance johnny I would actually argue that we're excellent quitters Running this company for 16 years. There's been a lot of projects. We quit There's been a lot of things we walked away from That had we not might have handicapped the company might have even bankrupted the company had her own hubris gotten away And you write about this in the book around a lot of us don't have the ability to sort of analyze those losses in the same way that a poker player does or a cab driver And experience going through this decision-making process can actually season us to be better quitters And I found that so fascinating looking at cab drivers and how having the wrong frame of reference setting a daily goal for fairs Can actually lead you to making less money than relying more on Going after things when things are actually hot But many of us have this intuition of like well quit while the going's good Or set goals that actually lead us away from real expected value So I'd love to unpack some of these biases that are covered in the book for our audience because Many of them. I think we might have heard of but we're not using them Officially in our daily lives and of course it leads us into those situations where we stick it out When we really should walk away. Yeah, I mean, I love setting the stage with with the cab drivers Here's what our goal should be right? We should stick to stuff that's worthwhile and we should quit everything else So that that should be our goal And you know the question is how do we tell what's worthwhile and you just mentioned it It's it's something positive expected value or not meaning For every bit of effort or every dollar that I invest am I going to get a positive return on it? Not just on its own but in comparison to other things that I might be doing Right, so I could have my money in an investment that's earning 1 but there's another investment over here That's earning 5 and if I don't switch that's really bad Right, so we want to be thinking about expected value relative to other opportunities that are available to us So so we can sort of set that stage. I think that we also Really have a very strong intuition that when The world delivers us a message that the thing we're doing isn't working that we will pay attention and we will walk away Right, because here's the thing when you decide to start something you're doing that under conditions of uncertainty There's a whole bunch of stuff You don't know and then luck is also going to have an influence on the outcome And we certainly have had all that all had that feeling of I wish I knew then what I know now That's that sort of, you know, oh gosh I had to start under conditions of uncertainty and then it was information discovery afterwards and Would have been nice to have that information in the first place, but we don't okay So that's fine quitting allows you to react to the information So and we think Not only does quitting allow us to react to that information But we think we'll pay attention when we see it and that kind of leads us to the cab drivers Which I think is a good way to set the stage to start talking about this So calling camera along with a variety of collaborators including Richard Thaler who's Won a Nobel laureate in economic sciences. We're looking at trip sheets of cab drivers from the 1980s Um, so this is obviously before uber and the way that cabs work is that uh, the cab has a medallion It's basically like a license from the unit municipality. It's quite expensive So most people don't actually own their own medallion instead They're renting the cab from somebody who does own the medallion And the rentals work that they have to rent the cab for 12 hours So they're paying for the use of the cab for 12 hours But like johnny you can decide when you want to drive within that 12 hours. That's your choice Now, I think that we can also agree That it seems like optimal behavior for a cab driver would be when there's lots of fares They should be driving and when there aren't any fares, they should just stop because why why waste your time Um, and you can tell that from the trip sheets because you can see the time stamps on the trip sheets So you can see how quickly the fares are coming in and so that's what they wanted to see Right, these people are driving in the cab When they're getting lots and lots of fares, are they staying in the cab and continuing to drive? and when there's very few fares and they're very far between are they actually quitting and Deciding not to drive. Um, so that's what they looked at and what they found is that The cab drivers actually had the opposite behavior of what would be optimal meaning When there were lots of fares around they were quitting really quickly like really early into the 12 hours that they had the cab for And when there were very few fares around they were just driving And you know until forever and this was so bad That they were earning 50 15 Percent less 15 15 percent less than they would have Had they actually been doing what you can sort of tell from the outside looking in would have been optimal behavior In fact, it was such a bad choice that if they had just been random like oh, I'm going to drive six hours a day They would have made eight percent more than they actually were right So that's that's pretty bad So the question is what's going on because they're obviously not listening to the signals in the world And aju alluded to this Um, it turns out that what they're doing is they set an earning score So i'm going to rent the cab and um, my goal is to make 300 dollars today when they hit the earnings goal They're done So what does that mean when there's lots of fares around they get to their earnings goal really quickly and they stop And when there aren't very many fares around they drive around forever trying to to reach the goal and this obviously is just Terrible right so so I think that when you look at something like that where it's so clear that the incentives are there For them to have rational behavior all the information is available to them For them to behave in a much more rational way And they're not you can start seeing how bad we are at this particular decision about When do you stick to things and when do you walk away from them and that that by the way that that research that was done on In the 80s was replicated with a huge data set of cab drivers in singapore Who were doing the exact same thing? So it's not like something particularly american even like it's this is just something that humans do And thinking about our company and all and as ajay mentioned all the things that we had started and quit Just due to it not working or it wasn't worth the effort or whatever.  I love it I was laughing because in the book you had mentioned that for a lot of people they end up quitting too early or a feeling of of being too early and I know in our company that Usually when I give up on something when I was like, I've had it. It's the the thought of doing it makes me sick at that It was like well, probably didn't have to go that long Yeah, so For most things that we do Assume so so the cab drivers obviously in some cases are quitting too early, right? Meaning they've achieved their goal So so when we've achieved a goal world will often quit too early So let's assume we're not talking about kids. Let's assume we're not we're instead talking about adults When we're talking about adults the usual case is actually that we quit too late and That at the moment that quitting would be like objectively the right choice if we were omniscient It will feel way way way too early. So let's think about why that is so we talked about the fact that when you start things It's a decision made under uncertainty. So here's the rub When you stop things that's also made under uncertainty exactly What happens at the moment that you're deciding whether to quit is that Usually there's some if it's objectively the right time, there's always going to be a good chance that you could turn it around Right, like like I said, like even if you only have a half a percent or a one percent chance of making it work Maybe you could now we're having to do like this expected value or forecast, right? We have to forecast the future and what we have to say is the thing that i'm doing Is not worth it compared to other things that i'm doing Right, but I don't know for sure Because the only way for me to find out for sure whether the thing that i'm doing is going to work is for me to stick to it And what that means is that we're trying to Gather up so much certainty to the point where it's making you sick, right?  That we don't have any other choice and that's where we can get into some of these problems Like there's this issue of what's called external validity, which is how do we think other people are going to view us? Well, it's a lot easier if I can be like yo aj like I didn't have any choice.  So so now i'm going to get you I'm not going to have you sort of looking sideways that may like wondering like why i'm such a quitter So that's helpful. Um, there's also internal validity the way that I view myself And it's going to be the same thing and then if we go back to the cab drivers that which you had alluded to There's an issue of goal setting Where if we're short of a goal, we don't like to walk away And so this this also goes back to something that Richard Taylor talks about which is the way our mental accounting works We open up a mental account for something like our days Driving in the cab or heading up everest where the goal is obviously the summit We now have an account for that. We do not like to close accounts in the losses. What is in the losses means? Well, in this case, it's short of the goal We just don't like to do it and if we feel like there's a possibility that we could not have to do that Not actually have to close the account in the losses We'll really work hard not to do that and that's separate and apart from Um issues like sunk cost, which is we feel like if we walk away from something short of the goal That we've wasted all the effort that we've put into it thus far Or all the money or or whatever and all of this stuff makes us end up On the top of everest in the middle of a blizzard. I was just gonna say we've all fallen for some cost At some point and I could see being on that hill going. Yeah, I've been training for how long.  There are three climbers Hutchinson was tasking and kisitski are these three climbers who are part of an expedition of eight eight clients three climbing Sherpas and an expedition leader.  So that it's a pretty crowd of mountain. So but these these are just these three guys who are climbing with this one expedition So they leave for for the summit on summit day and you leave it like midnight from camp four And they have something called a turnaround time and a turnaround time just basically says no matter where you are I don't care if you've made the summit or not If it gets to be 1 p.m You'll have to turn around and it's to stop you from descending the mountain in darkness Which is really dangerous in fact eight times as many people die on the way down As on the way up So they're really trying to sort of protect you from the way down And one of the ways to do that is to make sure it's light out When you're when you're coming down the mountain. So 1 p.m. Is the turnaround time Again, there's like over 30 people trying to get up in the same day So it's super crowded and super slow And their expedition leader comes up to them and they say oh just it seems like we're moving really slow Like how long do you think it's going to be until we get to the summit? And the expedition leader says I think it's going to be about three hours And then scrambles ahead to try to make up some time So so Hutchinson holds tasking kisitski back And says oh we have a problem. It's already almost 11 30 And so by my count like we won't get to the summit till 2 30 even if we really sped it up We're not getting there until 2 so that's well past the turnaround time already So I think we should turn around now they have a little you know, they have a chit chat about it But um, they all end up in agreement and they turn around and just so you know Separate and apart from one other person They're the only three people who turned around and the other person turned around because They were they became blinded So so it wasn't even their choice. They just couldn't continue up So these three people out of all of these people turn around because they realize there's no way they're going to get it in time think about how heroic that is right like 20 something people are heading up the mountain And maybe they're going to make it to the summit and you're going to be sitting there left with like the Why was I such a coward? I should have kept going They all made it to the summit. I just paid $75,000 and trained for like nine months to do this And now I'm not going to make it to the summit. So I consider this like an incredibly courageous act Which I think is counter-intuitive most people think that sticking to it is courageous. I think this is very courageous, right? Um, so the question is like, okay, so why haven't you heard of them? Well, it's probably pretty obvious because it's not a very interesting story unless you're really obsessed with the topic of quitting Right like nobody's going to make a movie out of it Except there was a movie made out of it and there was a book made out of it And there was a documentary made out of it and it was all you know It was into thin air by john crack hour and the movies the documentary in the movie everest Where rob hall famously ends up on the top of the mountain getting to the summit at 2 p.m Waits for his client Doug Hansen to get there who doesn't get up to the summit until 4 p.m Notice now we're three hours past the turnaround time. Doug Hansen collapses immediately and dies And rob hall at that point has no Energy whatsoever and can't move down the mountain at all and he dies on the summit as well So here's the rub these three guys Hutchinson tasking and kisitski were part of rob hall's expedition Rob Hall's the one who told them it was going to be three hours until they got to the top of the mountain The other person who couldn't get up because they became blind was beck weathers It's quite famous. And so the the question is why is rob hall the protagonist? Why is he the hero of the story? Right, that's kind of the question that we have to ask ourselves And i'm not trying to knock on on him because he you know He was obviously waiting up there for Doug Hansen But the problem is he knew the turnaround time and its single file up the mountain And he could have turned back around and gotten Doug Hansen on the way down But he didn't do that right so he he got what we would call summit fever like by proxy Right because he he wanted Doug Hansen to summit so badly But I think that when we think about that year we think about that that is the act of heroism But i'm wondering why we don't think about these three people who turned around because they were supposed to You know and got back down the mountain safely. Why aren't they heroes? Right, that's the question that I have and in terms of the way that we think about this stuff Well with it being the new year This idea of goals and how these goals create finish lines and myopia towards things that actually lead us astray from quitting You know, I think it'd be helpful to really discuss that as people are thinking about resolutions and thinking about setting themselves up for success But not realizing that these goals whether it's summiting Mount Everest or whether it's completing the marathon Can actually lead you into places that might be fatal in the case of Mount Everest, right? You know, I mean and and I just want to say rob hall was like a An elite alpinist up until that moment had made amazing decisions There were some forces working against him particularly that Doug Hanson had been in an expedition the year before and the whole expedition had failed to summit He spent a lot of time trying to convince Doug Hanson to come back So this sort of piled on a lot of cognitive debris that I think affected his decision making negatively So i'm not trying to knock on him. He was he was great. I just wish that people would see these other three people as heroes Um also Yeah, so so the thing about goals is they're they're really funny things, right that we know that they're good Right. I mean this is the thing like everything nothing is I you know I said the opposite of a great virtue is also a great virtue. So um, you know grit is a great virtue But so is quit um goals are great, but they're also bad And understanding what what can cause them to be bad can help you to make them better. I think so Goals are really good motivators, right because they give you a finish line A very clearly defined finish line that you you're heading toward and we know that that's going to cause people to achieve those finish lines More often and actually it can help. It's I mean it's a really good motivator The problem is that goals set a very clear finish line And they can cause you to continue to head toward the finish line So what's good about goals is also what's bad about goals Because if the finish line is still the right place for you to be running toward Having that goal is amazing Because it will get you to keep running toward it Right, but if that finish line is no longer the right place for you to continue to be running toward It's going to get you to keep running toward it. And I think that one of the most amazing Examples of this comes from this woman shavono kief Who was running the 2019 london marathon and on mile four She started having this really bad pain in her foot and then on mile eight her fibula bone snapped Spoke her leg So obviously like the medical tent was like stop running, please Please stop. You shouldn't run anymore Um, but she did she she didn't pay attention. She ignored them and she finished the race 26.2 miles she broke her leg on mile eight So I think there's a couple of things here, right? One is like, let's just step back and be logical about this She's a marathon runner. She loves it. She's obviously jeopardizing the chances that she might ever run a marathon again In order to just complete that one Right, like and who knows when she's going to get back and she could end up with like a compound fracture Or maybe need surgery or whatever like really not be able to run again Because she's continuing. So I think hopefully hopefully we can all agree on that But the second thing that's really interesting is like Tell me if you share this intuition because like I've written about this and I wrote a book about quit And I'm still like what a badass, right? I'm still like, uh, I wish I were that gritty man That's amazing that she kept running except it's not But I can't help but think it is because that's the way that we view that kind of thing, right? Like We view it as this amazing, you know feat of mental and physical Toughness, but it's kind of it's dumb to keep running And you should actually walk off the course or have the medical people carry you off at mile eight To the hospital to go get your leg attended to and yet we think she's such a badass Well, there's people who've built their career on grit I'm not sure if you're familiar with David Goggins who is another guy with a story of just grit and determination And his whole thing is never quit And he has run ultra marathons and have put himself In the medical tent and has busted multiple bones in his feet And I remember when I first heard his story how enamored and just Awestruck I was of that guy and thinking if I could just get a A spoonful of that how much better I would be and then and then of course chasing that and looking to acquire that and wanting to acquire more than that teaspoon but Yeah, at some point Do you have to look out for Future you and what you want to be Accomplishing and certainly if you love something like that such as running so much You're going to want to take precautions. So you're able to do that for the rest of your life Yeah, I I think that's right and and I think that the thing that we forget is that we lose sight of The other things that we could be doing whatever it is that we choose to do which was chosen under conditions of uncertainty It may be the best thing at that time, but it could turn out You know over time the world could change or your preferences could change and it's not the right thing for you to Be pursuing anymore It could be that it turns out it wasn't the right thing to pursue in the first place It's just that like it was a good decision at the time because you didn't have all the information But now you've collected a lot of information and you know You've realized it's not the right thing to do and you ought to go switch to something else And I think that there's a lot of I know there's just a lot of examples of people who quit well I mean, so here here's kind of the opposite Of david goggans and it's alex honnold. So alex honnold is a free climber If anybody's seeing the movie free solo, they're familiar with him He he summited el capitan with no nothing No ropes nothing. It was just like climbing with his fingers in his toes, you know, obviously an incredibly gritty human being But he gave up people just kind of don't remember it He was he was climbing for the film and you know when we were talking before about These issues of like external validity. How are other people going to see us right now? So think about like you've got cameras now pointed at you. Yeah, they had to set up the cameras They had to climb ahead of them. They had all of these people on board delight everything to get this production underway So his quitting didn't just impact himself and his internal goal But everyone who took time off to do this. Yeah, by the way, I think that's totally badass That he did that so what happened was if you watch the movie And this sort of gets lost because we think about the fact that he did successfully end up summoning But the year before he actually summited he had been practicing his climbs and he slipped Uh and he messed up his I think it was he messed up his foot So he's you know trying to get himself back and it's now sort of the last moment where he can attempt to climb He decides that he's going to try it And he gets up to pitch six And he just he purposely fouls his climb because he just realizes like his body doesn't feel right And obviously this is a really dangerous thing to do. He doesn't have any ropes to catch him at all So, um in the face of a bunch of people hanging off a mountain who are friends of his Who had invested a lot of money in this project, which may never be completed I mean, obviously there's no movie if he doesn't actually make it to the top, right? He just purposely fouls his climb because he realizes the expected value has gone against him I mean for me free climbing the expected value would always be against me But but not for him like he's like david goggans, right? Like he's he's amazing, right? He's doing something that almost no humans. Well, this thing he's trying to do no human has ever done But he he has the wherewithal to say no, I need to turn around. This is bad if I keep going I'm going to fall off this mountain and then I'm never going to get another try So he goes back and he heals and he comes back the next year and he successfully makes it to the top So I think that people would see that as a story of grip But I see it as a story of successful quitting and I think that that's the thing is that it's to distinguish grit about the long the long haul Right, like what's the long cause but like lots of quitting along the way To make it so that thing that you're trying to actually achieve will will be successful And I think it's such a good I mean in a lot of ways I think alex honald ends up being like an allegory for the way that we should be thinking about these types of decisions I think a blind spot for us around quitting Is there feels like there's a finality to it and there's almost nothing to be gained so the founder of slack and that story of creating the video game and pushing and pushing and and finding some success and even investors cheering him on and saying stick with it And him looking at the expected value saying well the amount of effort we put into this marketing effort And the rate of decay of people staying on and paying Was going to be a herculean effort for them to keep this game going to keep those employees paid and to keep investors happy And he pulls the plug when everyone around him. I mean the staff wants to stay They're excited about the project the investors have money staked in it They're excited about the project and it would have been very easy for him to just walk away quit But he was able to find a tool that they had built internally had value and bringing that tool into the world created slack Out of quitting But yet for many of us when we think of quitting we're like well There's nothing to be gained. We see bumper stickers around this idea of like it's final. It's over I'm never going to summon again. I'm not going to get this opportunity to make the documentary I'm not going to get another investor But that's really not the case and that's a blind spot that we have Yeah, so that blind spot is called opportunity cost neglect There's we have a name for it I'm giving you the cognitive science like behavioral economics term for it. It's called opportunity cost neglect So this is what we can think about basically an infinite set of opportunities that are available But you can't do them all at once because we're human tried Multitasking is not really a thing So you like it look if you're in a monogamous relationship You're in a monogamous relationship, right? Like all the other people that you could be in relationships with aren't available to you in that case if you're in a job That's you know, say a nine to five job during that nine to five period that you cannot be in another job Right because we just physically can't do that So what we have to think about is when we choose to engage with something Then we're also choosing to not engage with all the other opportunities that might be available to us Some of those opportunities have costs associated with them In other words, if we did them our life would be worse But lots and lots of opportunities have gains associated with them and when we reject those there is a cost to that We're rejecting the gains that are associated with the other things that we might choose to do Right and this is what we lose sight of right is we think when we quit hard stop final We're stopping our progress But that's not true because you don't really quit things in general to not start something new And if you're starting something that's better Then you're actually going to speed your progress up So like contrary to popular belief quitting gets actually speeds you up It gets you to where you want to go faster And I think Stuart Butterfield is such a great example of this because so he has his company tiny spec the game that he's developing It's called glitch, which is this big world well building multiplayer cooperative online situation It's a critics darling and he has some diehard users He sort of has this, you know, he really has the suspicion that not enough diehard users to make the game actually worth The time of the people who are working for a lot of equity And he has six million in the bank I mean so so Johnny when we when we were talking before about like you have to be so certain to walk away He's got six million right like he can go for a very long time at this point So they do this big marketing push They are really growing their users and they actually have in november of 2012 They have their large, you know, largest weekend ever like their biggest weekend ever for user acquisition and Butterfield goes to bed on the sunday after that last weekend push and He really can't sleep and it's because he's doing an expected value calculation Which is oh my gosh, it's going to be 31 weeks to break even if we can maintain this growth Which as you said aj no, right? You're just going to get obviously attrition So he just realized like that's completely absurd and at that moment He realized it wasn't a venture scale business and he returned the capital to the investors Now here's what I think is really interesting. He didn't quit to go develop slack He quit because He realized that this was not worthwhile and he actually said something really interesting when I talked to him about it He said he felt he had a moral obligation a moral obligation to his employees Which is the opposite of the way that most people would think most people think I have an obligation To continue to employ those people They have worked really hard. I I need to let them keep their job And he said no I have a moral obligation to let them go because they're brilliant and they're taking Much less cash than they could get on if they went out onto the market into another job In exchange for equity that I have now determined is not worth their time And the minute that I know that equity isn't worth it I need to let them go. I have a moral obligation to do that Which is one thing that I think makes him such a special person that he was able to see that framing So anyway, he shuts it down. Then he says, hmm, you know, I'm an entrepreneur at heart So this is now going to be his third try which we talked about It's gonna be his third try says I'm an entrepreneur at heart And I want to develop something and he starts thinking about this internal communication tool that didn't even have a name And here's the thing it had been there for two years So when we think about opportunity costs think about the fact that slack Was under his nose for two years and he never considered it As a product it took quitting the other thing for him to turn his attention and say You know, people really like this thing Maybe that should be the product and that's the problem with opportunity cost neglect, right? Like when we start something we get so myopic And then all of a sudden when you quit sometimes that's when you see all those opportunities that would have been available to you And that's when he saw it. He switched Obviously developed slack. We know he sold it to sales force for over 20 billion And by the way just just I think it was this month. He just quit again I'll be interested to see what he's going to do next I want to jump on this part around the sunk cost fallacy and and then bring it into endowment because I think many in our audience are aware of of sunk cost fallacy But you point out in the book even being aware of it doesn't help us break that cycle and not even in the least little bit You know the high speed train project You know hit a nerve for me because I've been here for 15 years They're going on and on and then reading in the book just how far off we are from this But yet more and more billions are being put into a project. That's a train to nowhere You know when when I published the book the budget was up over 80 billion It's now up over a hundred and five billion dollars like just even since I I know right so that was just the latest revision. So they're trying to connect san francisco and la basically right and It's a disaster. So if the budget was supposed to be 33 billion dollars with a completion date of 2020 at the or 2021 it was like right around now Needs to say that no part of the line is operational at the moment And the budget has now been revised to over 105 billion dollars And here's what the amazing thing is So they approved the bond in 2010 they they start building their first section of track Which is a section between madera and fresno in 2015 very highly trafficked route. Yes, right Exactly on flat land So so here's here's the thing that I think is so nuts somewhere. I think it was like 2016 Some genius says I think we might have a problem And the problem was that there's two huge mountain ranges in california One is to the south of san francisco Right, it's called the diablo range and the other is to the to the north of la Which is called the top tata choppy mountains Okay, so they're both like these big mountain ranges So there's a reason why the central valley is not really connected to san francisco in la in the first place Right, because like if anybody's ever driven from san francisco into the central valley, it's like a very precarious path It's really slow. It's hard to get through Um because they're mountains Right, and we don't we we build trains on flat land a lot in this country But we don't really build trains like we haven't really figured out the mountain thing and It's in a seismically active area. So the problem is they're like I don't know if we can actually blast through these mountains without like starting an earthquake Like it's it's actually quite bad. So they say we have this we have this engineering problem So so first of all you should say to yourself. Well, did they start in the wrong place? Right if the problem is really the mountains, why are they building track between madera and fresno? But here's what happens. So that's the moment where they say it's not going to cost 33 billion It's going to cost like 80 billion And we're not even sure if it will be that low because we really don't know what's going on with the mountains So this now gets shot over to nuisum in 2018 and they're like, look I think we might have a problem because we really don't know what's going on with the mountains Seems like a perfect time to go. Uh, it seems to me That we could use that at this point they had spent about seven billion dollars, right? It seems to me that we could use that 73 billion dollars for something that would be greater good to the taxpayers of california and instead nuisum approves two new pieces of track sections of track one between bakersfield and merced which Again, doesn't traverse any mountains. It's on flat land. And then the other one. This one's really good It's between sim francisco and silicon valley, which is like, I think that's already pretty well connected, right? So so none of them are like addressing the mountains So why aren't they stopping? Well, it's pretty easy to see why they're stopping because they don't want to waste the taxpayers money Right, like we've put seven billion into it now. I think it's up to nine And if we abandon course now, then we'll have wasted All of that money that we put in and that's where we can really see the problem with the sunk cost fallacy because it We cognitively we're thinking about the it backwards We're thinking about like I spent nine billion and I don't want to have wasted that So I'm going to take that into account about whether I continue instead of thinking about as a forward-looking problem Should I at this point now spend a hundred billion dollars more? In order to complete this thing because if you shouldn't if And this is how you would get to the answer, right? Let's imagine that we had spent zero dollars in taxpayer money And I said to you it's going to cost over a hundred billion dollars And we have no idea if we can blast through these mountains The question is would you start it today? And if the answer is no Then you shouldn't keep going Because every dollar that you put in after the point that the answer would have been no Is a dollar that you're actually wasting In service of trying not to have wasted the nine billion that you already spent And we see this over and over again not just with public works projects But but with like investors who don't sell investments that there's a lot of people in crypto right now who are refusing to sell Right and because and I've seen them say like I bought it at 50 and it's trading at 23 I can't sell because I won't get my money back. What but that money's gone, right? Would you buy it today at 23? That's the question that you should ask yourself, right? Well, I think that's a great point to make for those who are now A little chagrined over all of these biases that we're hearing about and recognizing in ourselves because even the professionals The best investors as you talk about in the book who have access to all of these numbers On the gain side looking at what to buy they do really well They analyze the numbers they crunch everything and they outperform But on booking the losses That's where the bias comes up Out of sight out of mind And they're not actually tracking the losses in a meaningful way that would allow them to gain even more reward So even when we have all the facts and data, you know, my wife was laughing while reading in the book She's like we'll have these politicians never driven between LA and san francisco Of course you crossed two mountain ranges It's like well, they're probably flying in private jets so they've never really thought about it But anyone has seen those mountain ranges. You've taken that route The investors have this data the crypto investors have the data But they're not acting on it. So Barry star who was like He really was like a giant in the field at starting in the 70s Started doing some very foundational work on this issue of what this broad problem is called escalation of commitment So you can see that umbrella term very easily applied to the to the bullet train, right?  So so he he really was thinking about that actually in terms of the vietnam war Which was he had he had come of age along with people like howl arcs and uh, jeffrey rubin drill brockner Um come of age during the vietnam war where they saw the united states get really stuck in that war despite the fact That was very clear that we were losing Um and just seeing you know throwing not just like money at the problem But more bodies at the problem, right? You can see this with putin and russia right now, right? I mean the same thing like 300 000 conscripts. Let's just throw them onto the front line, right? so You know he was thinking about this escalation commitment and and this is where that intuition is right that We have an intuition that we're going to stop that when we have the information That we need to know like should we keep going or shouldn't we that obviously we're all going to stop But I think it takes you know two seconds to see that that's not true. All you have to do is say look Raise your hand if you've ever had a friend Who's been in a relationship where you can very clearly see that they're unhappy and they ought to break up And yet it goes on for months or years After the point where it's obvious to everybody else So do you think for a second they're special and that's not happening to you? Of course, it's happening to you It's happening to all of us and to your point a j professional investors fall fall into this trap as well Not just some of these other fallacies, but there's also this kind of out-of-sight out of mind Which we really started this conversation with right which is we don't even hear about the people who quit And in the investing world once you sell something you don't track it So we create all these shadow books of like DCs that we might want to trade and if something's in our portfolio We're obviously tracking it because it's in our portfolio. We can see what our p&l looks like on a daily basis if we want to right? We can watch that thing tick up and down So we're getting all sorts of feedback about it, but once you sell it It's gone So the amazing thing is that they're not even checking So they're looking at how their buy decisions are doing against You know what like a random strategy or beta or indexing the market would look like and they're really good at that They're like a hundred and twenty basis points better than that. This is work that's been done by alexa imas Imas and a bunch of his collaborators, but when you look at the sell decisions, they're doing 70 basis points worse than A random benchmark, which is just free the capital up from anywhere in your portfolio randomly Right and but they don't know it because that's a problem with all the quitting right is that you don't see the quitters for every person who Doesn't give up and spend 16 months To raise their seed round. You don't see the hundreds of people who kept going and never succeeded We just don't see them And so it's impossible for us to actually sort of try to make a reasonable decision If we're not even tracking it last point I want to make one of our biggest frustrations as coaches is watching people stick to the status quo And this is so powerful that many of us feel stuck even though we have these large goals And we know what's better for us. So I'd love to just discuss the omission commission bias Because it impacts so many of us and It's so easy as you say to see it in others, right? We could see the status quo impacting our friends and family members and get frustrated But when we're faced with it ourselves, it's a really powerful bias in order to talk about status quo bias and omission Co mentioned bias I think we need to step back and talk about loss aversion for a second because this is where the interaction becomes really bad So loss aversion is foundational work originally from 1979 from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky Daniel Kahneman also Nobel laureate in the economic sciences Amos Tversky wasn't alive at the time that was awarded. So he he didn't receive that but this is part of prospect theory and loss aversion basically says that We really don't like to Start things that that are associated with some chance of loss and in fact we over index on the losses in comparison To the winds. So this actually becomes a really big problem in enterprises, right? Is that if you swing for the fences, there's a really high chance that you lose In the short run, right? But if I do something that's an incremental change even though the expected value is lower There's just a lower chance of any kind of big loss that's associated with it And so what you'll see in enterprises is that you get a lot of incrementalism And consensus driven decision-making over the these sort of big swings that people are willing to make Which is how a startup can beat an enterprise because startups are taking more big swings, right? Okay, so that's that's loss aversion and then there's another concept which we called shore loss aversion Which is also from Kahneman, which is when we have a loss on the books We don't like to convert it into a realized loss, right? So we don't want to take a paper loss and turn it into a realized loss or a sure loss So you could see this it's related to sunk costs So if I buy a stock at 50 and it's trading at 40 If I sell it then I have to realize that $10 loss, but if I hold it I could maybe get the money back Right. So this this also so that makes us not want to convert. Okay So now we've got this stage set with loss aversion and sure loss aversion So now let's think about how that interacts with status quo bias, which is a preference for the status quo and then also omission Co-mission bias so omission co-mission bias. This is something from John Barron where we see failing to act In a different light as acting, right? So I'm sure you're familiar with the trolley problem. This is kind of an omission co-mission problem, right?  There's a lever you can pull it But if you pull it, it's going to be diverted onto a track where one person Is going to get hit by the trolley and people are very Redicent to pull that lever because one is sort of like the state of affairs. Like it's just what can I do? It's just nature And the other is an omission a co-mission whether it feels like an act And and we don't want to do that because I'm going to act So another place where this omission co-mission bias And this is where some of the original work was done is on vaccine hesitancy if like It's the plan of nature for you to get measles or covet or something like that Um, we'll prefer that to a possible Bad outcome that could come from the vaccine itself Even if the chances of harm from the vaccine are much much lower than the chances of harm from the disease It doesn't matter. We'd prefer to allow nature to run its course basically as opposed to do something where we change the state of affairs All right, so now we've got that all figured out, right? Okay, so let's say let's bring them all together now. Whoo It turns out that uh loss aversion Is asymmetric in the sense that where we're recruiting that fear of Things going wrong that fear of realizing those downside outcomes is when we Start something in other words when we change the state of affairs So if we switch from the status quo And sticking with the status quo is an omission, right? If we switch from the status quo to something new in other words Like I quit my job to start a new one or I quit my relationship to start a new one Or I shut a project down to start a new one As we're trying to navigate that decision We get hyper focused on the losses that might be associated with the new thing that we're doing in a way that we aren't Hyper focused on those for the thing that we are already doing So I'll let me give you an example to make this clear because that was a little bit eggheady So i'm going to make it less egghead of you right now. Thank you So there's this woman that I was talking to named, uh, dr. Sarah Olston martina. She happened to write me When I was about six months into writing this book and she had a decision about quitting So I got on a zoom with her right away. I was like, listen, I'm writing a book I want to talk to you So she had been an er doc for a really long time and then it got promoted to be a hospital administrator And for a wide variety of reasons. She had just was not happy in her work like at all It was particularly was interfering with her Relationship with her kids her she had a two-year-old and a four-year-old So she gets offered a new job Evaluating cases for an insurance agency So she gets on the the zoom with me and she's really just telling me like how incredibly miserable she is in her work She just really hates it and she's been miserable for a very long time. So that goes back to like We really quit kind of too late. Anyway, because she'd been miserable for like three years She'd been considering quitting for three years So I said so a little confused. I said to her, okay, so you have this other job offer already like Why aren't you taking it? and she said the sentence Because what if I hate that job too like that's the sentence, right? I sort of paused and I said, oh, right because loss aversion is asymmetric Here she is in a job which she freaking hates and she's not thinking about But what if I continue in this horrible job that I know I'm gonna hate and instead She's not focusing on the good that could come out of the switch instead She's focusing on the fact that maybe it wouldn't work out too So now I need to get her to stop doing that So I just asked her basically the expected value question Which was I said it's a year from now. You've stayed in the job that you're already in What is the probability you're happy and she immediately said zero Like it's a zero percent chance that I'll be happy. I've been miserable for three years Like at this point nothing's going to change So I said, okay So imagine this new job and you take this new job and I understand it might not work out But what do you think the probability is that you'll be happy in that new job? And she said 50 50 and I just said it's 50% greater than zero, you know, and she was like Yeah So I got her to focus on the upside like again when we think about that opportunity cost neglect, right? I got her to think about the gains that would be associated with that new path with that switching Committing an act severe from the status quo to something new And I got her to think about the gains that she was giving up As opposed to that fear that loss aversion being recruited that fear of it not working out And this is something that I've done with like C level executives that I coach where they're really reticent to fire somebody What I've actually started doing is just saying to them imagine nobody's in the role Is it worse because they're always saying to me, what if we hire someone new and they don't work out? What if and then I just stop them? I say, okay Maybe not but what if nobody's in the role? Are you better off? And the amazing thing is that when they're at the point where we're having that conversation The I've never had them not answer. Yes every time It's a powerful way to look at things But it's hard for us to get there on our own And it's really the value of coaching and consulting to come in with that perspective Because we get in our own way in a lot of these matters Uh, especially when we feel like we built it we own it our action is what's going to steer us the wrong way When in actuality we're sitting in the status quo. We're veering way off course But we're likely to enact to change any of it. This is exactly right. So The issue that we have and we can just go back to this idea that we need to collect so much certainty before we're willing to walk away, right? That Who who does the sunk cost belong to it belongs to me? Right. I'm the one who put the time and money and effort into it, right? If we think about endowment, which you just mentioned, which is our ownership over things like if I built it, I built it So these are things that I'm carrying around is my own debris So that then can get us to this place where we can start to say how can we get better at these decisions, right? And there's basically two strategies One is to not make the decision in the moment when you're facing it down Right. So in other words think in advance about what what could occur in the world That would make it so that you would want to quit. So that's something I do with like if I'm working with somebody who's having trouble letting An employee go who's having trouble exiting somebody. I'll say, okay So I know that you don't want to exit them today How long are you okay with the situation as it stands? And they'll usually say something like six weeks and I'll say great So imagine it's six weeks from now. What would you see from this employee that would tell you you should keep them on? What would you see that would tell you that you ought to exit them? So though that that would be called kill criteria that will allow them when six weeks passes to actually be more likely to exit them Because it stops you from saying well, it's sort of that idea of tomorrow is always tomorrow You know where it's like, I know they can turn it around and then they say I know I can turn it around and then it's six weeks later and they say I know I can turn it around to you again And you don't want to exit them because that feels like your failure If you actually write down what the criteria would be it's going to help you exit them So that's like one strategy But the other one you just mentioned AJ, which is get yourself a coach someone from the outside looking in Because that's that thing that I said about we all see it in other people. We can see so clearly When they're just like pursuing something that they ought not be pursuing And imagine then that everybody must be seeing that in you also But nobody's opening their mouth because you you didn't set up a relationship that allowed them to open their mouth And if you just gave them permission or sought out that advice in a real way Whether it's a mentor or therapist or an executive coach or whatever They're now going to be able to help you through these decisions, right? They're going to help you see Going back to that original question of what's worthwhile To stick to and what's not and they're going to be helping you parse that apart a lot better And friends and family aren't comfortable pulling that trolley lever either Right. So like they don't want to be responsible for you breaking up that relationship or quitting that job Or making a decision and they don't want to say it because what if you stay with them, right? The other part that goes with that as a coach When you're able to pull these out you have an opportunity to get buy-in from the other person That buy-in is now an accountability between two people That person and their coach and it's been brought out when you're looking at the problem yourself And we've and you wrote about it in the book that we've talked about on the show You will rationalize every decision and so it's all just swirling around So the pull these patterns on go, okay You've noticed as a pattern you've come to me because this is the pattern that you wanted to break Here we are What happens if we allow this pattern to play out again and we get to the end of this And we're sitting here having this conversation. How are you going to feel? Well, if that's the case that i'm going to feel really dumb or i'm going to i'm going to be very harsh with myself I'm going to be depressed right okay So we're going to get buy-in that that is going to happen if we do the same thing the status quo That's always been all right So now we are going to change this and the procedure that we're going to do you're going to have buy-in An accountability on what we're going to do and then we can adjust and make an assessment now that we've done this differently And we can make tweaks to that and we can see where we are If that doesn't happen That pattern will continue that pattern can continue for years. I mean Years So this is this is the thing It's like we we've all had those friends who come and complain about the relationship that they're in And then it's a you know and and they're saying things like but i've put so much time into it Right like we can just go back right back to some costs, right? I've put so much time and effort into it and I don't want that all to be for not And then a year later they're still in the relationship and you're just it's rinse and repeat and you can go out You know now they waste five more years of their life Not happy Because they're trying to protect the time they already put in so if you can get someone to stop and say Okay, I understand that you're unhappy and I also understand you're not going to break up with the person today But how long are you okay with this like you have to set a deadline? I mean, I think this is really important to have some sort of deadline. How long are you okay with it? Okay, well, I can do this for six more months Okay, so in six months What is it that you're going to see that's going to tell you that this is turned around? What is it that you're going to see that it's going to tell you that it hasn't And what would be the inputs to get you to a good version of the future that might be like counseling for example, right? And then once you've done that Now notice i'm not saying here here are the inputs. They're saying that i'm not i'm not saying you should only be okay with this for six months They're saying it I'm not saying i'm going to give you a list of the things that would tell you this isn't work out anymore They're generating that for themselves. So all it's doing is basically taking that that intuition from barry star, right that he sort of blew up We think that when we see the signals that we're going to react to them It's saying okay We now know we're not going to react to them well if we're trying to deal with it in the moment when we're in it When we're in the midst of the decision But if we can identify those signals in advance Then maybe we can do that particularly if we have someone who we're accountable to Someone who's helping us to think through the problem somebody who's coaching us through To help us get to the ability to set a good deadline to be able to think through what those kill criteria are And they're going to hold us accountable to it, right? So like let's take the simplest sense of a kill criteria turn around time on mount everus So here's what we know about these kill criteria They're not going to be perfect because only three people turned around that day But you know what that's a lot more than zero if that's way more than zero I'm going to take those three and if you think about like your life is sort of a compounding of You know a little bit better decisions that are compounding on themselves if you have an employee who's underperforming if it takes you Three months instead of six months to exit them Think about the effect the positive effect that's going to have on your business Over time are you going to exit them at the exact right moment? No, they're going to you know If I know you should exit them today is the person that i'm working with Going to exit them three months longer than I as an outside observer would have them do it Sure, but it's going to be six months before they are you know otherwise would if I weren't doing that and I have buy-in from them It's their decision that so they they're not going to come back to me and say well You told me to fire them because I'm going to say no I didn't you said you were unhappy and we set a deadline together And then you talked about objectively speaking what the signals were going to be that would tell you that you ought to Leave so I just helped you through that decision And so it's just like it creates no conflict It makes it much more likely that the person's going to follow through on it And I think we look Daniel Kahneman was the one who said to me Uh, I think everybody needs a quitting coach and that guy literally wrote the book on cognitive errors So I'm going to go with if that guy needs a quitting coach. I need one too Well, I think there's a certainty that we ascribe to the past Right, so you were talking earlier about seeking out certainty in a lot of these situations You know the dating example Well, if I break up with this person I know before I found them that search was tough. There weren't a lot of options There wasn't things going on I didn't have a lot of dates and we ascribe certainty to the past and we look at the future of being single with All of this uncertainty so we default to the status quo But if I were to tell you yeah, the reason you're not meeting people is because you're with this dud of a person You've robbed yourself of all the other outlets and your social life Your passions your hobby is that you could be meeting that great partner for you You might see things a little differently But it's really hard to get there on your own without a coach And it's really hard for you to see through the fog of war in the moment of these decisions That were faced with and and I think that with relationships It's it's the exact same question that I ask of the executives that I work with When someone's really unhappy in a relationship the thing I always ask them is Would you be happier if you were alone? And the thing is that like again because of this issue of loss aversion and omission comission bias They're they're focused on what if I never find somebody else? Okay. Well, that may happen, right? What if I find someone new and they're not great Okay, you know, so now you're sounding like, you know, all of us do Sarah Ulster Martinez fell into this trap, right? So I try to get that away from from there and I just say would you be happier alone? And I just make them confront that and the thing is that again when you're in the state where you're actually having that Real conversation the answer is always yes I'm miserable. I don't want to come home from work because I don't want to be with my partner I dread having to to socialize with them You know so and so forth and when you say would you be happier alone? They all say yes, and I say, okay. Well, then You know, why are you so afraid? Like what if I end up alone for the rest of my life? Well, what if you end up alone for the next month? Would you be happier, right? And and that that helps them step in and apart from exactly what you said Which is and this is something in the employment relationship too Is the fact that that person's in the seat means you can't hire someone new into it So there's a lot of opportunity costs associated with that So in order to have this like c player or d player in the seat Because of all the things that you're worried about like what if I you know the next person I hire isn't any good You're blocking yourself from the opportunity to go hire somebody new, you know You have answered this question the last time you were with us, but let's see if things have changed So any we love asking all of our guests What is your x-factor? What is that quality that makes you unique and special? You know, this is such a hard one for me because I I mean, I think I'm a weirdo But at the same time I don't think I'm special So this is like a really hard question for me in particular to answer You know, honestly, I think it's just that like I'm a thread puller You know, it's like I think that a lot of people think that if you get distracted by shiny objects It's a bad thing and I just think it's a really good thing And I get distracted by shiny objects all the time Like there's just things that sort of catch my fancy and I'll just sort of go and start pulling on the thread and seeing if it interests me. So I think that In that sense, I'm like I'm a good explorer Because I love I love to just go like look in nooks and crannies and that kind of thing. So You know, I mean that that's how I ended up writing all of these books was I just wanted to go like explore some stuff You know, and I guess like if you look at my life It's a lot of that kind of thing It's like, you know, I was in graduate school and then I got really interested in poker So I went and did that and then I got back into cognitive science But I was thinking about poker and cognitive science together and that was really fun And then I was like really wanted to start doing some You know speaking so I did that and then I really wanted to you know speaking was like great But it was like an hour and sort of very light touch and I wanted to do something really deep with clients and so I started developing a consulting business with like, you know Where I wanted to have long-term relationships with people and I did that and then I wanted to write about all of that And so I did that and now I'm getting my phd. I'm finishing So I did five years worth of graduate work at upan stopped literally abd like all but doctored I just didn't defend the dissertation and now I'm back doing that now because I just got interested in something that I was doing with philtel lock and barb mellers on forecasting that I did during the Pandemic where we were training people to be better forecasters and who wasn't that fun? So I think that's it. I think it's like I'm maybe it's I'm very distractible Maybe that's the way we should put it. I'm like a super distractible human Well, it certainly has shown up in your career I mean for anyone who even goes to wiki you like to see everything that you have So has anybody said ever said like I'm really distractible. That's what that's what my superpower is Is I'm very distract a distractible weirdo. We got it. Yes a distractible weirdo. That's it We love it. And where can our listeners find more of your work in book? So you can always go to annaduke.com, which is my website All the stuff is there. I'm on twitter for the moment I don't know if I'll stay there I'm also on post social so you can find me find me over there as well Yeah, so that those are the main places But the other place I would love people to a few things that I would love people to explore if possible the alliance for decision education, which I co-founded Where we're really trying to think about like the topics that we talked about today And how important it is what we know For adults who are really trying to become better decision makers just start to bring that knowledge into k-12 education So we want decision education to be like a field like social emotional learning or a stem that's really taught from the time that you enter school Until the time that you you leave high school. And so that's what we're trying to do there So really hoping people will go check it out super passionate about it Also after school all stars, uh, which I'm on the board of and then the last thing is renew democracy initiative Which is just a really cool organization It's a lot of people from the left and right coming together all with the same value that democracy liberal democracy is really good and So you've got people ranging all the way from like, you know Michael steel who used to be the chair of the rnc, you know and bill crystal, you know Obviously coming from the right with like heidi heitkamp who was the democratic senator from north dakota so So it's really crossing the political spectrum It was founded by gary kasparov. I'm just super passionate about democracy So hoping that hoping that people will go check that one out too. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us and writing this book It inspired johnny knight had taken new lens at quitting and in our career and in business and Start to look at some of these cognitive biases that I wasn't even aware of going through the book So it was a great read. I'm glad johnny knight didn't quit reading it Thank you. Well, I'm glad I didn't quit writing it at you know But uh, I did quit a book in front of it though I wrote a proposal for another book before quit and then decided I wanted to do quit instead So I quit the other thing in order to write quit. It's like who's on first Love it. Thank you, annie Thank you so much for having me back I really appreciate uh the chance to come and talk about my work and i'm very very grateful to Everybody who gives me a platform to do that. Well, it was great having you. We enjoy it


Now China's Sinovac biotech is in talks about setting up a vaccine production facility in South Africa. It will supply the African continent with shots against a range of diseases. Nomalux Group CEO Hilton Klein made a comment. It was at the launch of the South African leg of a global phase 3 trial of a Sinovac's COVID-19 vaccine in children and adolescents. Sinovac did not immediately respond to a request for comments. Sinovac and Nomalux are rolling 2,000 participants in the South African leg of their study evaluating the efficacy. Also, the immunogenicity and safety of the coronavirus vaccine against COVID-19 on children and adolescents aged 6 months to 17 years. The global trial will enroll 14,000 participants also in Chile, the Philippines, Malaysia and Kenya. So far, more than 10.5 million of the country's 60 million people have received at least one dose of vaccine equivalent to around 17 percent of the population. Take a listen. At the moment, in talks with Sinovac to set up a vaccine manufacturing facility, a phase one where we will do bottling and labelling so that we can get vaccines out to the people of Africa as soon as possible. We say as Nomalux vaccines in Africa for Africa. This clinical trial is a precursor to the establishment of a South African vaccine manufacturing facility partnered by Sinovac and Nomalux Group that will cover the entire spectrum of vaccinations beyond just the COVID-19 response. Hello. Hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Welcome to Toffy TV, it is the Everton News Daily. Everton have agreed a deal with Leil centre-back Gabrielle Maga Hales for a fee of around 30 million euros, that's according to Andy Hunter in the Guardian today, so that a deal had been agreed between both clubs in Everton that are very, very confident that the centre-back will move to Godderson Park, 22-year-old Brazilian. Gotung's wagon by commenting on Andrew Gomes' chat on Instagram and then with Charles and posted a video of him scoring a Godderson with the atmosphere in Gabrielle for a flames emoji underneath the video as well. The player has got 50% clean sheet of the games he's played in this season for Leil. Good player left-footed said it before but the only thing that seems a little bit fanciful, not fanciful but a little bit doubtful to me is the fee. I think maybe when Everton initially sat down with Leil in February to discuss this maybe then that kind of numbers were right, but what's happened in the world since, I'd be amazed if it ends up being around 30 million euros for this player. I'd say more likely to be if a deal is done possibly around 20 million. I think there's a lot of money being cut off transfer valuations since the Covid pandemic, so I'd be very surprised if Everton got them for that price. Possibly what may happen is there may be some renegotiation now between the two clubs, but it'd be a very, very good face sign for Carlo Ancelotti. Great age, good pace on him, good ability and what's fitting as a left side of the centre back as well, so it'd be a very, very good sign for Everton. Let's hope we can get it done. There is a video on our YouTube channel as well that myself and El Pavotti Andy did about Gabriel, so have a look at that if you get the opportunity to. Everton had also been linked with another Leil player today, Victor Osreinei, who's got 13 goals in 27 games for Leil this season and four assists. He's a 21-year-old striker who was pictured on Instagram in an evidentiate given to him possibly by Alex O'Wobee. He won the golden boot at the under-17 World Cup in 2017 and Arslan Wenger tried to get him to Arslan and he also had the opportunity to join Barcelona into Milan, Juventus and a few other clubs. Went to Wolfsburg then on to Leil, very, very highly rated, quick, you know, again, good age, brilliant age really to be coming in to England and Everton and Arslan are two of the teams he has been linked with in France. He said he's just quite happy where he is at the minute but wants to play in the Premier League, so we'll have to wait and see. Maybe that story's born out of this story, which is that Moise Keane wants to return to Italy that's according to the Italian media. They say that he's got a pact with his friend Nicola Zaniolla, who's a midfiel player at Roma and Roma are speaking to Mini Raiola about getting Keane to Rome. Everton wants to stay, he's only been here not even a year yet, he hasn't had a very good season in terms of opportunities, he's only scored one goal in five Premier League starts, but Carlo Antialotti's come in Keane had shown some improvements since the Italian manager had come in and I think for Everton he'd want to look at him for another 12 months before thinking about moving him out. I think if Keane just gets his head down and listens to Antialotti and keeps working hard, he can force his way into this evidence side. It may mean that it's at the expense of one of the two strikers we play with, or it may mean that someone like Britialising goes back out wide and Keane plays through with Domso. He's got the opportunity playing in a young forward line to really force his way in. Hopefully this is just paper talk because I still think he's got a part to play at Everton and obviously we'll see what happens with this season. The nine remaining games looking increasingly lightly that they'll be played, so it's his opportunity and them I suppose to try to force his way in. Just on those nine Premier League games, there is a Premier League meeting tomorrow to discuss what to happen with the rest of the Premier League season. It's been announced today that they will be locked down for another three weeks at least, but there's a growing number of Premier League clubs according to Sky that want the season finished by June 30. Where David Moyes this week speaking about what he thinks should happen in terms of when the players go back, there should be basically like a pre-season for them for three weeks at the very least before they start playing games again. So, if you're just doing time scales, if you've got a lockdown till the seventh and then a three week kind of pre-season for those players, then you're at the end of May already and then it's a case of trying to fit nine games in in four weeks then. There's contracts that end on the 30th. There's things like kit deals, new manufacturers taking over contracts in the first of July. The sponsorship deals if they're still a thing now given the world economy at the moment due to this pandemic. So, lots of variables once you get past June 30, lots of complicated conversations needed to be have over the next six weeks and we may know more after tomorrow's Premier League meet. But the mad thing about this is people are still dying at an increased rate in the UK at the moment. There's another 870 people yesterday. So, you know, this pandemic that's hit the UK at the moment as well as the world isn't showing signs of easing yet. So it's very difficult to make any plans past probably the next three weeks which the country's in lockdown for. But just obviously keep an eye on this and we'll bring you anything that we hear on Everton News Daily. Make sure you give the video a thumbs up, subscribe if you haven't and if you want more great videos, join us over on Patreon. See you.


Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast where we're covering the latest stories, trends, and innovations with leaders in global connectivity, real estate, and the networks within. I'm Emily Scherer for JSA, and I am joined today by Stephen Sprockhold of EdgeConnex. He is the Vice President of Program Management for AMIA. And EdgeConnex, of course, a data center leader reimagining the future of hyperlocal to hyperscale data center services. Stephen, it's great to have you here this morning. Thanks for being here. Thank you very much, Emily. Yeah, it's great to be in Oslo today, although it's a little bit rainy outside. Yesterday was a much more beautiful day with great sunshine. That's so true.  Yeah, in the evening we took a small stroll. Oh, good. Yeah, we did the same thing. So, yeah, and got dinner down by the water. It was really nice. Yeah, Oslo is a great place to be. It is. It is. Great. And you're in Amsterdam. We were just talking about this. Yeah, I'm usually based in Amsterdam if not visiting one of our project sites. Excellent. I love that. So, not far travel here for Stephen today. Having a great time in Oslo. And Stephen, tell us a little bit about your role as Vice President of Program Management for AMIA on the EdgeConnex sustainability team. Yeah, sure. So, as a Vice President of Project Management for AMIA, I oversee our data center builds across Europe. Right now we are building seven data centers. So, yeah, that's quite the pipeline that's going on. But how does that relate to sustainability? Well, in my day-to-day work, I see what it means to build a data center. The amount, the sheer amount of materials, effort, labor, all that sort of stuff that goes into the build. And that also poses the question to me of like, how can we do better? How can we take better care of our environment? And what can we implement to get the results that we want to become carbon neutral while also at the same time growing our data center business? Because everybody's coming to us with, hey, could you build us a data center or hey, we want to go there. So there's a significant demand for this. At the same time, another challenge that I'm really excited about in how can data centers help there is you see many congested electricity grids out there. Getting grid connections is more and more of a difficulty. So thinking about ways how what sustainable solutions are out there that we can help resolve this make me very excited to also be part of the EdgeConnex sustainability team. Absolutely. It sounds like you guys have so much going on. Seven data center builds. That's huge. And I'm worrying about the sustainability aspect. You are a busy man, I'm sure. Oh, no rest for the wicked. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, great. Thanks for sharing that with us. And in 2020, EdgeConnex launched its customer people planet strategy by implementing its holistic ESG sustainability policy. Could you explain a little bit more about EdgeConnex's path to sustainability and that carbon free energy pilot plan? Yeah, so one of the important key drivers of our sustainability is not only look towards CO2 emissions. Yes, CO2 emissions are very important, but let's say we live in a world where there are no CO2 emissions, but people are still not making a fair wage or there are still many accidents on job sites. Then I don't know if that's still the place I want to live in. Yes, the weather outside is probably nice, but it's not the world where we want to live in. So our holistic view is to incorporate social elements as well in our sustainability policy. And more importantly also to be transparent and accountable towards the results that we publish. So if there's something that's not going all right, we will publish that. We are accountable for those results and that's more of the G of governance where we really strive to improve our policy and achieve our 2030 goals. Absolutely.  So transparency is just so important and if you look at all the various sustainability reports that are out there, I think one step as an industry that we can take is just make sure that we report all the same metric. Right, yeah. Well, yeah, that might take a while, right? That might take a while. A lot of stuff to be done on that level. But you also see is that this is slowly also with European regulation and many other things slowly moving towards a common standard. So that will be a great result to get that accountability and accountability and transparency. Absolutely, yeah. And so much of what's been talked about here today. So it's great to get everybody in the same room talking about what those metrics look like. Absolutely. Now let's talk about the social component of ESG policies and engagement. How does EdgeConnect work with local communities to become a good or better neighbor? Well, what we do is, and I think one of the examples is with one of our data centers that we had in Amsterdam. It had a permit, everything was done, but the local residents had an issue with the noise coming from our data center. And in that case, it is easy to say as a company, hey, I've got my permits. Hey, the municipality cannot enforce because I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. We felt that that is not the proper way how to deal with your neighbors because you're the one who is benefiting from the data center. And they're left with all the negative externalities of noise, light, and that's pollution. So we took their message to heart. We started the projects to see how can we reduce noise levels. Of course, the local residents wanted it to go faster, but there's also due diligence from our end that we need to do. We can't just simply put up a screen or just simply change settings because that can have unintended side effects to our operations. But during the summer, we were able to reduce noise by about six to eight decibels depending on the frequency. So that's an 80% reduction in perceived noise. And we need to see how the results come in over a year's time, but likely we're able to reduce the mechanical energy consumption by about 5%. Wow, that's great. Still fingers crossed on it. After full years of operation, we can accurately, transparently and accountably report on those numbers. But that would be a great benefit to the local community. And I think that is for an existing data center. What we have all experienced here is that data centers are not looked at as favorably as maybe 10 years ago. So that means that you need to get the support of the communities to build a data center because otherwise you're not going to get a permit. And we have seen examples of those I think across Europe where companies were like, hey, I can build a data center in India. Yes, you could. But then the local residents revolted and said like, no. Yeah, let's push back. So that means that you need to think about how do you share the benefits of that data center? How do you make those benefits tangible for those residents? Because simply saying jobs is not sufficient if you have a local artist living nearby because there's just not that much of a perceived benefit. Reaching out, creating a park, creating a more interesting building that they can look at. Those are items where you can look at how to make sure that the community benefits district heating could also be one of those items. And even as you said, just being a good neighbor about it, being transparent, listening to them about what their concerns might be. Let's say that you test your generators. If you test your generators every Monday morning at 6 a.m., yes, you could do that. But I'm sure a lot of people will wake up. Not very happy. Not very happy. So if you say like, what we have done anywhere where we are, local residents have our operations team phone number. If for some reason they had a late shift or whatever, they can tell us, please don't. And we can adjust the testing schedule. Absolutely. And just being there, picking up the phone, so important. Absolutely. And it sounds like that's what you're doing, the 80% noise reduction, huge, and fingers crossed on the final numbers. So that's great. Now let's talk trends a little bit. Through your experience, how do you see the industry evolving as sustainability shifts to the spotlight? What do you think will have the biggest impacts? I think what we have is two trends at the same time. So one is more focus on sustainability. At the same time, what we referred to earlier is the tremendous growth of the industry. Right. Right now we are seeing the results from machine learning and automation of business processes, all going to the cloud, requiring more data center space, and we're building those data centers today. At the same time, I'm sure that everyone has heard, or at least the listeners have heard of chat GPT and AI. Yeah, of course. Which will mean an even further growth in required data center capacity. Right. So that means that the materials that we need to build those data centers will exponentially increase. Well, at the same time we want to reduce our carbon emissions and footprint. So those are two tangents that are opposing. But I think as we are at a crossroads, I think the industry will come up with solutions and together, sometimes just small changes, continuous improvement like we did at the site where we were at noise reduction and reduced the energy use of the cooling machines. And sometimes it will be more fundamental shifts, but I think those two will come together somewhere later this decade. Absolutely. And we'll see that the data centers of 10 years ago are vastly different than the data centers that we will build in 2030. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that we need to wait until 2030. We should get started now. We need to start improving every iteration. And even the incremental change, like you said, and just, yeah, there's so much that can be done. I feel like conferences like this, data cloud ESG, important conversations happening, people coming together to figure out what those changes need to be. I mean, there are manufacturers here still have a couple of meetings planned here with those to talk about, hey, how can we together collaborate in improving the existing machines? And also what do you need from us to design this new silver bullet machine? Yeah, absolutely. No energy use. Fantastic cooling. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully that's where we'll be by 2030, right? That's where we're headed. Yeah. And I think one thing that one part of a question that we missed earlier on was the carbon free pilot plan that we have. I think that is also an important driver based on accountability and transparency that we mentioned before. Yes. What you see now is that companies report zero kilowatt hour emissions because their facility is connected to a solar park or they have a solar PPA. Unfortunately, solar PPAs don't work necessarily in the Northern Hemisphere's winters because there's not much sunshine. Yeah. But you can offset those. You can act like the solar facility according to the greenhouse political produce power throughout the year. Yeah. Our carbon free energy pilot program is trying to meet on an hour by hour basis our consumption with renewable energy sources. Those can be hydro, sun or solar and wind. Right. That means that at any time during the day there's renewable energy source providing us with the electricity. So we can truly say then that we had zero fossil fuel powering us through the winter. There are still challenges because we run two successful pilot programs. Challenges are still related to regulation. We do that according to current energy laws in all the various geographies around the world and sometimes within a country itself. Yeah. But this will be a major step for the industry and also a major driver to the flexibility that grid operators want to see. Yes. On how are we going to power our data centers through the winter or power our data centers through that misty cloudy wind still. Right. Right. What do we do when there's no sun out? Yeah. Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing that with us. Thank you for being here. It's been great to have you and hear all of these insights. So we thank you for joining us today. Yeah, no problem. Absolutely. And to our viewers, we remind you to stay curious, stay connected and happy networking.