Interview With Garbriel Weinberg, Founder of DuckDuckGo

Jason Hartman starts the show with Investment Counselor Adam as they talk about the mindset of investors. In the following segment, Jason hosts Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo and author of Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Customer Growth and Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models. The two talk about mental models to help you achieve your goals. They also go into issues with privacy in today’s world and talk about how DuckDuckGo can help.

Investor 0:00
You’re that kind of person and you’ve got the capital and you’re a great negotiator. You’ve got great people skills. You could probably be a successful flipper, but it’s like a job. Right? If you’re not flipping, you’re not making money. And that’s why I prefer income property because you just make money every month.

Announcer 0:17
Welcome to the creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You’re about to learn a new slant on investing some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world’s most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multi millionaire who’s actually been there and done it. He’s a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who’s owned properties in 11 states had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to your financial independence day. You really can do it. Now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Jason Hartman 1:07
Welcome to Episode 1241 240. Thank you for joining us. Today, we are going to talk about super thinking. And we’ve got the founder of DuckDuckGo, the search engine on the show today. This is a 10th episode show. And when I was in Europe, I finished his book called Super thinking the big book of mental models. It is excellent. And I recommend it. So check that out. I think you’ll enjoy his interview today. But first, I’ve got Adam here with me and Adam wants to talk about how he is getting preyed upon to sell his properties. Right,

Adam 1:46
Adam? A little bit. Yeah, I mean, I

Adam 1:48
don’t know about everybody else. But since we’ve purchased our properties, we’ve been getting phone calls and everything from people who want to buy our properties. And

Jason Hartman 1:57
I get them all the time my mom gets All the time. Yeah.

Adam 2:01
And at first I just hung up on him or didn’t answer their texts because I figured, hey, you know, go away. But then I recently I’ve started answering them because I think, Hey, you know, maybe they’re interested, but I got one the other day, that struck me as something that we as investors need to think about, and change our mindset. And what it was, is this person, his name is or their name is Orlando, I don’t know if it’s a male or female, but I’m just gonna say male for now. And he said, I’m reaching out to see if you’re the owner of the property, if so, are you interested in selling? And for the record, we’re not but hey, why not? And I said, How much are you offering and his responses 20,000 and it’s a sight unseen offer.

Jason Hartman 2:40
And of course, your property is worth way more than 20 grand?

Adam 2:44
And I replied, I said, Absolutely not. This is a rehab, cash flowing rental. And they said, okay, what’s the lowest amount that you would take, which I hate as an offering, they say, what’s the lowest you’ll take? I’m gonna tell you that. And I said probably this amount would get it done. And then this is the comment that drove me up a wall. He said definitely can’t pay that much for the home. I’m an investor. So of course, I would have to get it at a discounted price. How much is it rented for? And my response to him was, investors don’t need to get it at a discounted price. They need to get a fair price. The house is rented for this much. So 1% of what we’re asking. And that was the basic and he didn’t really respond after that. But that was the important mindset that I feel like we as investors need to get rid of. as investors, you don’t have to get it at the discounted price. As long as as the commandment says, it makes sense. The day you buy it, you’re probably not getting hosed on the deal.

Jason Hartman 3:41
Right, right. Well, you know, investors and listen, I do this to myself all the time. People tell me I have the gift of being a good negotiator. And sometimes I negotiate myself right out of the deal. So don’t read too many books on negotiation or become a good negotiator because and I’m not talking About properties. I’m talking about everything in life, you know, because people that try to get things at a good deal, so to speak, or at a discount, usually don’t get anything at all. Okay? That’s that’s the reality of it. I mean, look, occasionally we all get a good deal on something, no question about it. But if your mindset is that you’ve got to buy everything at a discount that you’ve got to be a bottom feeder that you’ve got to win in the deal, and you don’t, as the saying goes, leave a little meat on the bone for the other party. You’re not going to do any deals. I mean, you might do one, but it will be a hard fought deal. It’ll be a hard one deal. You know, if you want to do business, right, you got to come to the marketplace. Thinking about a win win deal. Granted, we all get a little better deal sometimes. Occasionally. You know, you get that once lifetime great deal. But this is not the reality of things. We’ve talked a lot about. Warren Buffett mentality over the years and you know, I have this like love hate relationship with Warren Buffett, I think he’s a bit of a hypocrite for sure. You know, I’m not into the stock market. And, you know, there’s a lot of misnomers about what he says, Does thinks etc. But his concept is that the deal as long as it’s a solid deal going in, he knows that all he has to do is wait a couple years and it becomes a really good deal that you don’t necessarily get the good deal. Upon signing the contract. You get the good deal by waiting a couple of years after you sign the contract and the deal becomes very good if you bought it as a solid deal.

Adam 5:43
And it might have been a fair price had the house just been like a slab with a couple of falling pieces of wood often but once they hear this is a rehab property that’s cash flowing. You can’t expect to get something like that at a lower price. Now our local market specialists they buy Houses are what you might consider a discount. But in reality, they’re not because they have to go in and dump a bunch of money in. So it’s kind of one of those things that if you want quality, you’re probably going to have to pay for quality.

Jason Hartman 6:10
Yeah, good point. And you know, it’s interesting because probably everybody listening, who is a client of ours, they have purchased properties and they’re receiving all the famous yellow postcards, right? I don’t see those as much now, but I mean, my mailbox is full of these things every month, okay. Letters and, and it’s amazing how sophisticated these guys are getting my mom. Just the other day she showed me one that she got. She says Jason, this really impressed me this letter I got or this flyer I got offering to buy one of my houses and she shows it to me and she says look, it had a picture of the house on the front, and I opened the flyer and you know, it just has we want to buy your house but it really made me pay attention because there was a picture of my house on it. So these are these companies that do variable printing. And so it’ll basically pull a database from Google Street View, for example, put a picture of the house on it, and then personalize the mailer. You know, dear Adam, right? For example, dear Jason, and, you know, do you want to sell your house at 123 Elm Street? People will pay attention to that, because it’s really a real house big. It’s big data. Exactly. Big Data. Yeah. How stalking how stalking? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, good stuff. Any other thoughts or lessons? You know, I was just texting with one of those people the other day that was bugging me to sell one of my properties. And it’s kind of entertaining to

Adam 7:43
see, we actually had somebody call me the other day to see if we were interested in selling, and they asked how much we would want for the house. And my response made them hang up the phone.

Jason Hartman 7:56
Yeah, that’s funny. That’s funny. You know, don’t be too anxious to sell Try and keep your investments, you know, do 1031 exchanges, beware of predatory investors out there and don’t fall for it folks obviously, and join us for our upcoming cruise. We can’t go to Cuba because the federal government shut us down. So unfortunately it’s not going to be Cuba but we got something that is going to be even better, much more luxurious better Cruise Line better ship and that is a fall foliage cruise leaving out of New York in October go to Jason Hartman comm slash cruise it’s on a beautiful ship princess cruise lines. We would love to have guests join us that’ll be a venture Alliance cruise but we always have some guests come so that’s why I’m inviting the listeners who are interested. The one thing I do have to tell you is prices for this cruise are not guaranteed because it was booked short notice because we had to make the change. So if you’re interested In cruising with me and the rest of our folks for a week, New England, Canada, fall foliage, absolutely beautiful stunning. I’ve seen the fall foliage before. I love that time of year. It’s just just a beautiful time on princess cruise lines. Join us go to Jason hartman.com slash crews and Adam. Without further ado, let’s get to our guest today you’re really going to enjoy this interview as a 10th episode. And Adam Let’s Duck Duck

Adam 9:31
go to the episode.

Jason Hartman 9:32
duck fat go. Good stuff. Here we go. It’s my pleasure to welcome Gabriel Weinberg to the show. He is the founder and CEO of the multi billion search internet privacy company DuckDuckGo. I’m sure many of you use it. It’s great product. And the number one best selling author of traction, how any startup can achieve explosive customer growth. And the new book super thinking the big book of men Models Gabriel welcome. How are you? Great. Thanks for having me give our listeners a sense of geography where you located.

Gabriel Weinberg 10:06
I’m outside Philadelphia in the United States.

Jason Hartman 10:09
Fantastic is that we’re Dr. NGOs located by the way.

Gabriel Weinberg 10:11
So it’s where I’m located. But DuckDuckGo is a distributed company. So we actually have team members scattered across the whole world.

Jason Hartman 10:19
Fantastic. Good stuff. I was thinking you were gonna say you’re in Silicon Valley. Like, no, that’s too cliche. Don’t think that right? Well, good stuff, super thinking. This is something that I’m guessing you have employed very well and congratulations on your success. What is super thinking?

Gabriel Weinberg 10:36
So super thinking subtitle is the big book of mental models. So the next question is What the hell’s a mental model? Right? mental model is a fancy word for concept. And, you know, we have concepts in every area of life. I was a physics major. So there were tons of physics concepts, most of which you know, quantum mechanics and things which are not relevant to anyone outside of physics, but some really are. So for example, The concept of critical mass came from physics and kind of it’s the new killer material needed for nuclear bomb. But it’s really useful outside of physics and investing in products and entrepreneurship, a product or an idea can have critical mass. And once you know something can have critical mass or critical mass applies as a concept to that business or investing concept. Then you can think at strategic levels about it, you can say, Well, how can I achieve critical mass for that? or How can I achieve it faster? And so a mental models are these broad mental models is there’s a list of about 300 of them that we’ve enumerated. And if you can kind of know them and internalize them, you can be a much better strategic decision maker.

Jason Hartman 11:41
Okay, so 300 mental models, though, that’s a lot to know, isn’t it?

Gabriel Weinberg 11:47
It sounds scary, right? But the reality is that they’re very interrelated. And so what we ended up doing is describing them through nine thematic narrative chapters. And so for example, the first chapter is all about bias. So all the biases, which is very similar comes up a lot in investing, like confirmation bias and availability bias. And all is a theme of how to like, get around the bad parts of your intuition. And then there’s, like, unintended consequences and spending your time wisely. So there are a lot, but they’re very interrelated.

Jason Hartman 12:18
Yeah, yeah. And there are so many of these biases, and we don’t even realize how they run us. Right, Gabriel? I mean, one of my favorites, and I know where runs me is the sunk cost bias, right? You know, you put all this effort or money into a deal, and you just should let it go at some point, right.

Gabriel Weinberg 12:40
Exactly. Yes. Just to put words to that. The sunk cost is let’s say you go to a movie, and you’ve already paid for the ticket. And you’re 10 minutes and it is a it is. Yeah, yeah. And so you’re like, I gotta walk out of there. That’s what the rational move to be. But most people don’t walk out because they’re like, I just bought this ticket. I have to make my money. Worth, but the reality is you already spent the money. And so that happens a lot in investing. And it goes with another mental model called loss aversion, where people are much more afraid of losing what they already have, and they are gaining. And what happens is that operationalizes is so you bought something like a stock, and you want to wait until it goes down, and you just wait and wait until it crosses that original price just to make you feel like you gotta gain. But in reality, you probably should sell it earlier if it’s not worth that much,

Jason Hartman 13:30
right, that really relates to like opportunity cost, doesn’t it? Because I like to talk a lot about how you can’t hear the dogs that don’t bark. And the question of compared to what, right, we never really evaluate what is unseen. Or, you know, what we might have gained, had we done something else and not had all this sunk cost into whatever that deal was right?

Gabriel Weinberg 13:54
Yeah, opportunity costs is one of these models that really was the motivator for writing the book in the first place. And what happened was is I was trying to chain executives at the company, I founded DuckDuckGo. And I started realizing that, you know, executives, their main role, and the industry, if you’re on your own company or running your investments is to make good decisions. And then I tried to do introspection into what makes good decisions, and came upon the realization that you really need to know all these different models. But what really was the kind of epiphany moment for me was all these people coming up to me and saying, we’ve got to do this project, it is the most important project, like here are all the reasons why we should do it. And I kept finding myself saying back to them, okay, I can see why your products important, but is it more important than all these other products we need to do? And you if you’re arguing for we should do X, you really need to be arguing for it, we should do x instead of y and z. And that’s exactly what opportunity cost is.

Jason Hartman 14:51
Okay. So I kind of took you down that track and my you know, I think that’s a good one, for sure. But there were 300 of these, these mental models. Yeah. Okay. So which are the biggies, I guess? Yeah, highlight the ones that are affecting most of us, right?

Gabriel Weinberg 15:07
I mean, opportunity costs. And I want to be clear, it’s like every one of these models like opportunity cost comes from economics, right. And they come from a specific discipline, but they’re really useful outside of it. That’s where the metaphorical value really comes from, that you can apply this across your entire life effort, really any decision. But there are a few, like you said, that really, really carried more weight than some of the others. One that’s counterintuitive, like Target is called forcing function. And what this is, is anything that is really forcing you to critically evaluate things, because ultimately, what a lot of this comes down to is your intuition can be bad, and you want a place where you can check it really systematically. And so of course, the forest helps you do that. Now at a company. What that means for DuckDuckGo is we have for every project, we have a kickoff call, we have postmortems. Ask what went well, and what didn’t go? Well, we have weekly updates that need to be written for every project. And these are built into the calendar. And they literally force people to take a step back and think critically about what we’re doing. Now on a personal level that could be like, every week I evaluate my investments, or every week I go to the gym, or, you know, I look at my budget, or whatever it is, but it’s already set aside by default.

Jason Hartman 16:25
Okay, so really, it’s a matter of scheduling, right scheduling to constantly evaluate progress on something.

Gabriel Weinberg 16:33
Yeah, that’s right. It’s related to something called the default effect, which is basically do what the default is generally. And a good example of this is organ donation rates across different countries, right. Some countries have default opt in to organ donation, and some have a default opt out where you have to actually not right, if you look at the rates across countries, the ones as default, opt in or 90%. And the ones that are default, opt out are like 20 30% So if you have a default that is already into your calendar, then you’re going to have that forcing function to think critically every single week. Whereas if you don’t have that default, you might wait months before you actually think critically. And you know, you’re gonna waste your time you’re gonna waste your money, etc. Yeah,

Jason Hartman 17:18
okay, good. Good. What else? Tell us about some others? Yeah, the default effect. That’s good. By the way, just to comment on that. It seems like a lot of subscription businesses and SAS based services are benefiting huge from the default effect, right? because everything’s on AutoPay. And they just keep renewing you keep renewing you and a lot of people that kind of don’t pay attention to it very much.

Gabriel Weinberg 17:42
Yeah. I mean, all of these can also be used almost adversarially against you, you know, like all your biases. There’s a whole set of models that we cover called infamous models that do that in there things like reciprocity, where if somebody gives you something you’re much More likely to have an innate feeling like you want to return that favor, for example, like high profile ticket items, sales folks will give you free concert tickets or nonprofits will send you free address labels. It’s all in the idea that then you’re much more likely to return the favor. And there are lots of other influences models like that, like social proof. And just you tend to want to agree with people that you like. So then people try to relate to you on a more social level. You know, like you like the same sports teams and stuff like that. And similar to regular byesies, like confirmation bias and availability bias, you want to be aware of these different ways that people or companies are trying to influence you. And like you said, default settings are great one, you know, like I run a privacy company. You can’t get better examples in this and privacy settings.

Jason Hartman 18:48
Oh, yeah. Good point. Good point.

Gabriel Weinberg 18:50
Yeah. Because they’re like five menus down and some right now. nobody reads a sentence. Yeah, exactly. Switching gears I got there’s a whole Also have models around kind of getting better at skills and coaching. And a central one is called deliberate practice, okay. And it was pioneered by a gentleman named Anders Ericsson, who studied professional athletes and experts across academia and musicians. And what do you found at the core are these people practice this one form of practice, which you called deliberate practice where it’s really simple. You really try to practice one skill out of your comfort zone a little bit. And at the same time, you get expert feedback, real time feedback as to kind of what you’re doing wrong. So you don’t want to go way outside your comfort zone because then you can’t really relate it to what you’re doing wrong. But you want to go a little bit and have that kind of coaching session, or a mentor that helps you kind of get better at it. And if you can set this up in your life or whatever it is, you’re trying to do get better at whether it’s investing in or public speaking or coding or Anything like that’s the fastest way to kind of climb that skill ladder.

Jason Hartman 20:04
Okay, okay, good. Good. You talk right at the beginning of the book about being less wrong. What does that mean?

Gabriel Weinberg 20:12
Well, there’s this mental model comes from tennis called unforced errors. And so you testifier by chance

Jason Hartman 20:17
I used to be, really don’t do too much anymore, but

Gabriel Weinberg 20:22
I’m a founder. But in any case, there’s different areas you can make a play in tennis, right? Sure. A lot of errors. People think when they look at watch a sport is like the other player made a really good ball that was hard to return. But turns out a lot of errors in tennis are what they call unforced errors where the opponent didn’t force you to make an error at all. You just hit it into the net yourself, or double faulted, where you hit the net. What do you serve, and unforced errors can theoretically be completely avoided. And so being less wrong, is really about learning these models to help you predict how you might end up being wrong and then avoiding those things. And it’s almost like a checklist. stupid mistakes or anti patterns that you can fall into a good example is unintended consequences. So you see this all the time now with companies like Facebook kind of raising their hand and saying, we could have never predicted that, you know, people were going to use our system to manipulate people or this or that was going to go wrong. But the reality is, is you actually can predict these things, if you kind of know the models around it. And I’ll give you a silly example, but one that comes up a lot, a model called the Streisand effect. And this is actually from the actress Barbra Streisand as part of God’s name. She had a mansion, and she didn’t want in Malibu. Yeah, exactly. They want to like see it, you know, see how ostentatious it was. And a photographer took a picture and put it on the website. Yep. No one had downloaded this thing. And then she sued the photographer, and all of a sudden, it’s a front page news story right now, we want to say,

Jason Hartman 21:53
right, sometimes it’s better to just let it go. Right?

Gabriel Weinberg 21:55
Exactly, but it’s so hard to do, right? But this is kind of the idea of this. thing is once you know that concept and something comes along, and you’re like, Oh, I made a mistake, I put that out there on the internet, you got to stop and think, well, if I tried delete the post or comment on it or sue them, is that going to draw more attention to it? Right? And oftentimes it does. Yeah. So that’s the kind of question you gotta ask yourself.

Jason Hartman 22:18
And I agree with you completely that one of unintended consequences, certainly, but it’s very hard to evaluate. For example, how did Barbra Streisand know that she did, you know, appear to be such a hypocrite, right? In that case. Yeah. Like no one paid attention to the picture of her house from the drone. But then everybody did when she you know, when she sees the guy, you know, like, how do you Those are big ifs, you just never really know. I mean, yes, it would have been something to consider for sure. And maybe she didn’t even consider it. But you know, never knew the magnitude or virality of it, right?

Gabriel Weinberg 22:55
You’re absolutely right. That’s why it’s called kind of being less wrong because you can’t be happy. Absolutely right all the time, right? A lot of this stuff is around uncertainty. And that is actually why it’s very hard to do this over time is it’s it’s, you’re really weighing probabilities, right? But to really help you with that is kind of looking at history. And so I think that one in particular, like, you can’t really say, cuz there’s no counterfactual and other mental model that’s really good is thinking about thought experiments and like, what could have happened, you know, but in that case, there’s a long history of celebrities suing people that look like they’re under them in some way financially. Sure. And it generally doesn’t go well. Yeah. And so in that one, I think the probability was probably decently high that you might want to avoid it. In other ones, it’s very, you know, it’s harder to say you have to make the call, right. And there’s another bias called hindsight bias, where it’s easy to think if things gone well, it’s because of your awesome decisions. But if it things gone poorly, you should have done something better, only in hindsight, right. And we One way, I think to be kind of more objective about that a lot of these mental models and turns to operating them is you kind of want to involve other people. It’s hard to do yourself, especially on your own decisions. And so that could take the form of a call, you can take the form of a spouse and take the form of a coach, but trying to get a little more objective about it. Yeah,

Jason Hartman 24:17
definitely. You talk about what’s interesting. Just one more comment on the Streisand thing. It’s interesting, in a way, a rich and famous celebrity, almost has in that kind of situation, less power, or fewer rights than an obscure person who doesn’t have a bunch of money, right? Because if it were the other way around, the photographer could have sued Barbra Streisand, and maybe no one would have cared, right, you know, but it’s her doing it, you know, and listen, I’m not defending Barbra Streisand. But

Gabriel Weinberg 24:52
you’re right. I mean, you’re right in two respects. I mean, you’re literally right in the sense that there are literally laws that are less for public figures. years, right? Right, like public figures have less privacy rights in the US right there law. But also companies have this all the time. It’s like, big companies can’t play a victim card very easily, you know, because it’s not fair. They’re big and powerful. Right. And so I think recognizing your place is definitely important to like evaluating all these situations.

Jason Hartman 25:20
Yeah, very, very important. That’s one of the one of the important things. You talked about flexing your market power. That’s, in fact, your last chapter in the book. Tell us about that.

Gabriel Weinberg 25:30
Yeah, this is all in the realm of kind of getting something that has a sustainable competitive advantage. And so by that, I mean is something like arbitrage where you’re just, you know, finding a low price here and saw that there and another market, those kind of opportunities are really easy to get into and so don’t last very long. And generally, like people who do that business, say on eBay or whatnot, they have to keep cycling it over and over and over again. Whereas someone or some business who has a sustainable, competitive advantage, once they kind of find that advantage, they can persist for decades even and make profits. And the key to doing that is this idea of market power. market power is really just the ability to charge higher prices. But if you think about it from a personal perspective, we have a lot of illustrations the book and this one my favorites. It’s from the movie taken. If you’re familiar with that, I remember it you know, where Liam Nelson says, Liam Neeson says, I have a unique set of skills, you know. That’s basically what market power is, if you’re somebody with a unique set of skills, then you can go sell those skills in the marketplace, and basically a demand your price or the same if you’re a company and you have a unique differentiated product that people want. Whereas if you have a commodity product or you are a person that has only commodity skills, the market tells you what the price is. And so figuring out how to get that market power. The differentiation is kind of a key set of mental models and one of the ones that center that kind of Peter to As explained really well, actually, there’s kind of two one is this notion of a secret, where something that you believe is true that other people, your society in general doesn’t realize it’s true yet, it’s going to end it often takes a while for it to propagate. If you know one of these secrets, you can often use it to have market power. And similarly, there is another matrix by venture capitalists and a Radcliffe who talks about contrarian versus consensus bets. And this is true and investing. And it’s also true in entrepreneurship, to really get outsized returns, you need to make a bet on the future kind of based on a secret that is different than everyone else’s betting on because if you bet the same as everybody else, you’re never going to get outsized returns because everyone else needs to get a return to so the way to get a real outsized return is to bet on something that’s contrary and be right.

Jason Hartman 27:49
Okay, but is that really such an aha, I mean, be a contrarian, take a risk. And if you’re right, you’re going to score big time. That’s like just taking the long shot. Right, or is there more to it? But am I not getting it? And by the way, before you answer maybe we’ll take that into your own business experience. When was co founded?

Gabriel Weinberg 28:10
2008? And I think it’s a good example.

Jason Hartman 28:12
Yeah, right. Here’s the example I was gonna make out of it. The secret is that everybody was just in this may not be the one you were going to say. But it’s one I thought of as you were talking, everyone was just going along with the standard thing and their privacy is being abused. And, you know, big brother Google is, you know, looking over their shoulder all the time, etc. Now, Google’s not that old, but you know, right around the same time, I guess, you know, that it’s like maybe you brought to the fore, you brought some attention to this thing of Look, your privacy is being abused, and we’re here to fix that. Is that what you were going to say?

Gabriel Weinberg 28:47
Yeah, there were a couple secrets embedded no one is that one, and that’s exactly right, is that one of the things I realized was that privacy was not only being violated, but it was being violated more And more over time right? ads were getting creepier and creepier. And there was no real counterbalance In fact, and that ultimately, people were going to wake up to all the privacy harms, and want an alternative. And so it one of the problem with you know, doing this and making a turn bets and having secrets is it’s really hard to time. Right? So that was 2008. It didn’t even really become more a bigger thing in terms of privacy, whereas until 2013, when the Snowden revelations happened, and that was more focused on government surveillance, and then corporate surveillance didn’t really become huge in the mainstream until 2018. One camera turn on let it happen. So we’re talking 10 years after the vow, right. And that’s part that’s the hard part with some of this differentiation and market power. But if you can kind of stay around and you’re right, then you’d have kind of validation. And we talked about de risking and running experiments. But if you can do that, then you can be in the right place. It seems like you’re in the right place at the right time, right. Yeah, very interesting. You can’t be too early. You know, no prophet is ever revered in his own time or or town As the old saying goes, right? Very good. Wrap it up with any closing thoughts, maybe any questions I didn’t ask you and give out your website to Gabriel, let’s add super thinking calm. But one metaphor that might be useful, which we kind of use the introduction is arithmetic actually, if you think back to when you learn arithmetic, you know, you start out County, and then you do addition, right. And then you eventually learn multiplication and division. Now, multiplication and division are actually just different modes of addition. Because if you do like two times four, it’s just two plus two plus two plus two. But once you know multiplication, and especially if you have a calculator, you don’t go back to addition. So if you’re like 547 times 13, you don’t just do 547 and added 13 times you just do 547 times 13. And that’s kind of the idea with mental models is like once you have the name and the concept, you can skip the addition step and go right to multiplication. So you can just do this higher. Level kind of analysis and thinking of problems just much quicker. No, very good. Very good. Your website super thinking calm. I’m on Twitter at Yag ye GG. And what does that stand for? Just out of curiosity,

Jason Hartman 31:12
that Twitter handle come from your skype question.

Gabriel Weinberg 31:16
Yeah, it stands for nothing. It is a word actually was used in the 1920s in kind of a gangster movement. And the young man was the Safecracker of like the gang. Ah, kind of bringing the young man to help crack the safe open.

Jason Hartman 31:32
Very good. Well, that’s hopefully that’s what we’ve done today with mental models. This is a fantastic book. love to have you back on the show sometime to talk about traction. Keep up the good work. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show’s specific website and our general website heart and Mediacom for appropriate disclaimers and Terms of Service Remember that guest opinions are their own. And if you require specific legal or tax advice, or advice and any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you’re using and write a review for the show we would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.