Transcripts For KQED Charlie Rose 20161208

Lead to things like Baseball Players being misjudged and political candidates being misjudged and doctors misdiagnosing diseases. Rose Michael Lewis for the hour, next. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by the following and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose Michael Lewis is here. His books have sold more than nine million copies. Three have been adapted into successful feature films. His new book is called the undoing project. It tells the story of two israeli psychologists, amos tversky and Daniel Kahneman and their groundbreaking work uncovering the human biases of the human mind. New york times says the book combines law electual rigor with complex portraiture. Hes written a hell of a love story and a tragic one at that. Im pleased to have Michael Lewis back at this table, welcome. Thanks. Rose its worth noting how you came to know these two guys. Yeah. It was accidentally. Most of the folks are but i had written moneyball, which was about the way in my mind, the way markets misvalued people. In that case baseball player. Misjudged these players so there were cheap expwuns and expensive ones and so on and so forth. My interest was kind of that. Why if Baseball Players can be misjudged, who cant be. I never asked the question of why it happened. In a review after the book came out in the new republic, they said basically Michael Lewis has written a good story but he doesnt seem to understand theres a source for all this stuff. Actually these two israeli psychologists who did work on the biases in the human mind, the targeted biases that lead to things like baseball layers being misjudged and political candidates being misjudged and doctors misdiagnosing diseases. Rose and most importantly how the my works. And how the mind works. And he said these two guys are named amos tversky and Danny Kahneman. I went and read some of the stuff. I was embarrassed i never heard of them. Kahneman just won the nobel prize in economics even though he wasnt an economickists. Finally what happened i was having drinks with a psychology professor friend of mine. It never would have happened without him. This had been irking theres this story to moneyball ask i dont know what it is. He says Danny Kahneman has a house just up the hill from you and hes a friend, ill hook you up. It turned out amos tversky had died in 1996 but kahneman was still before. Before the no well prize. Well before the nobel prize, six years. I went up and met danny and we ars and i would listen to him talk about this relationship with amos tversky. It didnt take long i realized the one term i had taught at the university of california berkley, one of my favorite steurchlts was a kid name owner tversky who happened to be amos tverskys oldest child. And we had a friendship and so the tversky family was very generous, kind of opening up his papers and his life to me. To the extent they could. And danny, after oh it took him two or three years to get his mind around the idea i was going to write a book about him. It was pretty organic and it took quite a bit of time for me to see just what this story was and how to tell it. So i took time before i said this is a book. Rose in fact, you were not sure you were up to it. True. Its not the first time i felt that but i felt more that way than i ever felt before and there were a couple reasons. The superficial reasons at the heart of the book youve got an intellect cull psychology i had to teach myself about. And you had a back drop of israel in the early days which is a really peculiar interesting place and i knew a bit about it but i didnt know enough about it to feel authoritative about creating that setting. But the biggest thing i think, the source of hesitancy was the, i normally feel intellectually equal to my subjects. I can get my mind around my subjects. And what theyre talking about. In this case, the firstility and the power in these guys minds was daunting. I knew that basically i was going to be in the position of the b student trying to write about the a students. I felt like, i said this, i felt like a gnat trying to hug two elephants. I wasnt sure i could get my arms around them. I also new in the back of my mind, Danny Kahneman is the worlds sharpest critic and doubter of things. No matter what i did, he was going to find it wanting. So i knew i had a living subject with whom i had failed before i had started. Rose hes the great doubter but go back to how israel had shaped him and how their experience in the military had shaped who they were. Theyre very different characters, and in fact the New York Times quote i had in the introduction said combines intellectual rigor with complex portrait architecture. Mr. Lewis has written one hell of a love story. A tragic one at that. They felt how . It wasnt sexual. When they traveled together they were occasionally mistaken for a gay couple because they were inseparable. Rose one could finish the others sentences. They clearly were in love with each other but they were heterosexual men. So as danny put it to me once, but he said it in very many ways he said you know you go through life and youre in love with women and so on. But with amos i was wrapped. And i think he felt, i know he felt that amos understood his mind better than anyone understood his mind, better than he himself understood it. I knew he felt, like an old jerry mac wire thing. They both felt there was a piece of themselves missing in the other but they were so different. They were even to their friends in israel the least likely people to even be friends. And nobody could imagine what was going on behind the closed door when they were working. So it was a love of people who are very very very different from each other. And if they dont have that, they dont bother even to work. In fact at some point it was pretty clear that the work is an excuse just to be together. Im serious. Its an excuse to be together. They are exploring human nature and how the human mind works but joint of being there. Did they work with one typewriter. In the beginning, they worked, they didnt have a typewriter. But they fit side by side and write it together. And one of the people who happened to catch a passing glimpses of them working together it felt like someone brushing each others piece. You cant imagine how they did this. Side by side, do whatever they were doing and theyd write a sentence a day was fast. And the, so, and the character as you say, i mean tversky, he is a literary, theyre both literary characters. Tversky, anybody who encountered him came away with a sense they had met somebody unlike any other person they ever met. Someone wanted to design an intelligence test and the intelligence test was the longer after you meet amos it takes you to figure out amos is smarter than you, the stupider you are. Everybody said thats the smartest man in the world and he was not pretentious about it. He was kind of a normal guy who happened to be endowed with this incredible brain. He had been trained by society to be a spartan warrior. He was a killer and without a shred of doubt, totally self serving. Danny was a holocaust survivor. He was a small child. He spent hiding in barns and living in chicken coops watching his father die. For the rest of his life these kind of an evasiveness about him. Its almost as if hes still in hiding. Like he doesnt, people always felt kind of removed. He was all at some removed, some formal distance from him, from them. And also from his own mind. He never became wedded to anything or committed to anything. He would have all these ideas. What he is is an incredibly fertile poet novelist kind, he has startling insight after startling insight. He was the idea generating machine. He never had the confidence. Rose he was the idea generating machine. Yes, i think so. I mean amos rose youre not saying one was smarter than the other, they had different kinds of intelligence. Different kinds of intelligence. It gives to the idea life and art is Different Things. They have a stereotypical scientific mind someone with not quite stereotypical but artistic mind. Science is a product, theres a lot of creativity in good science. Rose they had the same curiosity. Absolutely. They were jews after world war ii living in a state of israel that looked like it could be extinguished at any moment. They were naturally interested in how the mind deals with uncertainty and how it makes judgments and decisions when the situation is inherently probabilistic. Life depended on it i think. And they thought they were getting at something because everything in human life goes through the mind that if you can describe the kind of the tricks the mind plays on you in different situations, you are describing something really fundamentally human nature. They were getting at i think the spirit that really informs them is their sense that humanity, human beings are inherently fallible. They are wired for certain kinds of mistakes. And its not shameful. We shouldnt be ashamed of our fallibility we should seek to understand it and try to adapt to it rather than pretend were infallible. That was at the center of all their work, that was one of the ideas. Were going to demonstrate the inherent nallability of man so we can start to deal with it. Rose is that one of the things you can make a long stretch here and say thats one of the thing that can happen in the u. S. Election. Fallibility, you know whats going to happen. You can watch whats going on through the length they built. They say a few things at once about the election. One is frightening thing about donald trump is the insistence of his own fallibility. We know now that the mine is capable of doing all kinds of strange things. If youre not suspicious at all of your own mind youre way way oof confident about your judgments. His inability to modulate his judgment is to just think hes right and he makes up a story why he was right. They also described this. They call it hindsight that i knew it was comingnt when i didnt know it was coming. Thats their phrase. Thats one of the students actually dreamed up the phrase but thats their insight that people seek to make the world seem more certain than it actually is. One of the ways they do it is they still stories about what happened and explain what they could never have predicted because it was unpredictable and some ways inexplicable. So they would have had things about trump and have things to say about trumps voters. The way people are attracted to overconfidence. Obama has this problem. Hes had this problem from the very beginning. Hes actually intellectually honest and hes aware that thinks judgments might be wrong. But you cant as president come up to the podium and say i might be wrong here. You have to project total certainty and thats false. Rose what is it obama said he was wrong about. What has he said he was wrong about . I mean hes done it often. I have to start thinking about but its enabled him to change his mind. Gay marriage. What he actually thought and what he said he thought maybe are two Different Things but he pretbledded to be, have problems with it and he allowed the country rose that might have been a political. It might be the spirit he operates. Rose it is not politically viable to do it. He was able to do it politically because he persuasively is a person who does change his mind and is capable of changing his mind. Facts change i change my mind. Rose the opinion on the ground changed too on that case. Thats right. So he could do it. But im just, the, so this and what they would also say is that whether knowingly or not, trump successfully exploited the weaknesses in the human mind. The ability to prey upon these kind of, he had an ability to prey upon the kind of case in mind. So for example if you want to, if you give people a really vivid story about an immigrant who happened to murder somebody, you can whip up a general idea that this is what mexican immigrants do and people dont stop to think well actually, we can deterministically whether mexican immigrants are more likely to do this more than the average person but people dont think that way. They think of vivid examples. Rose they can give power to a narrative that had nothing to do with statistics. One of the great points is that the mind thinks in stereotypes. That stereotypes are a tool for the mind. Classification the mine makes. Very crude stereotypes, and you can get people to make the mistake of taking someone as a really great baseball player because they look like a great baseball player or make a mistake they are a good basketball player because they are a 6. 82 guard. And he can think in terms very crudely in terms of leaning against it in terms of stereo types and prey on peoples mind. Rose the essential idea they had was the mind was fallible. Thats a good start. Rose thats at the core. Fallible i systematically fallible. But we all make the certain kind of mistake. If our unreasons are not just kind of random fierg of emotions or whatever because whole markets can make a mistake because we all go in a different direction. Thats a mistake. Thats one of the ideas at their core. They explored it in some deal what those mistakes were and they did it with kind of a curious kind of science. Rose if you look at all these discoveries that they made about the human mind and how it works, can you go and attribute that to one of the other or do you have to say in every case it is something that they came through, that they came to together. Thats the question. Thats the question that unraveled the relationship. Everybody asked that question. Who did it. That sounds like amos. Because amos was so breathtakingly intelligent on the surface. People saw the work and they said well we could see how amos might have done this more than we can see how danny might have done this. And so long as they were in israel people didnt pay much attention to who did what. But the appears is you cant. The answer is, the work they did separately from each other was nothing like the work they did. The work they did together was had its own voice. And neither one of them would have been able to do it alone and they both acknowledged that to themselves and to each other and to the world. World didnt want to hear it. So a amos got given for the joit work a macarthur award. The fastest tenure appointment in the history of Stanford University found out he was available maybe in the market in the morning and that afternoon they gave amos a job offer. Danny, they didnt think to give danny a job offer. So the world corroded, as amos said, he said for some reason the world hostiled the collaboration like a hostile marriage. They needed to assign individual credit but the couple from the outside especially the academic world to kind of say who did what. That was a horrible mistake because when they were together, danny actually said in an interview that never got published in the early 80s, he said you know together were separately were okay, together were a genius. And the idea that you have to take it apart is such a shame. Let them just stay together, the magic there. Rose why did they break up . Three they came back together when you read the story danny pushed him away. A number of people felt amos to the course of amos life that amos voice was so strong he drowned out them. He felt they were consumed by him. The you spent a lot of time with may must you couldnt get amos out of your head. And danny could deal with that but so heres what i think happened. What happened on the surface was amos got all the credit. Danny got very little of it. Amos status went through the roof. Hes like a Global Academic rock star. And danny was maybe a little envious but i dont actually think thats what drove them apart. I think what drove them apart was dannys perception their situation their status became unequal. That amos feelings for him changed that amos started to believe rose thats what danny thought. Right. And he felt maybe a little condescended to or that amos became, danny became just another person amos could be slightly contemptuous about. I dont know if thats true, danny felt that way and it was incredibly wounding because they were in love. And he pushed him away. He fled. So he ceased to collaborate with amos. Rose amos must have seen it coming and he couldnt extraordinary intelligence overwhelmed you must have seen couples. The typical, the stereotype is like the powerful man and the woman thats actually very important to him and he doesnt acknowledge and she just gets sick of it. The dynamic is kind of that. And amos, theres a line that amos writes to danny to me captures the spirit of amos inability to deal with dannys emotion. He says i dont get your sensitivity metric. So i think there were limits. There were limits to amos Emotional Intelligence with danny. I think he thought just judging from the correspondence which i had my hands on that danny should not need the bucking up that he seemed to need. That it would be insulting to danny to condescend to danny to make him feel better. Rose how long did you work on this. Eight year. Rose its now 2016. I met him in 08. The honest answer, i met him in 07. Rose you met amos i met danny. Rose amos died in 1996. I got, i saw the book in my head by about 2010. And told danny and took me another couple years to kind of make him feel okay about it and then another year before i felt had the nerve myself to write it. So i really worked on it exclusively only for a couple years, two or three years. Rose did he say that he thought that a book about the two of them would overexaggerate the difference in their characters. Yes. He said in order to make it work on the page you have to exaggerate our differences. Now i didnt. Anybody who knows them and reads that will not say i did it. Because the differences were, they were already so striking. Danny is mow invested than anybody would imagine in that he was more similar to amos than understood. They were similar this some ways but not in ways and i point that out but not in the way that people around them really noticed. Rose go ahead. So he was, he justifiably had concerns that i would have to write them with caricature. There are concerns its going to force him to relive the most painful, i mean it was wonderful too, relationship in his life. Because two incredibly, i mean World Historic intellect, i think its almost like a physical pain. Rose theres intense pain, its no longer there. His intense sense of loss. Yes, and regret. I think he has huge regret. Rose but he walked away. What they might have been able to do. He was working. There were two things they were working on. The undoing project is what they called what they were working on when they broke up. They were working on exploring the way the human imagination operated. And danny was also had this great idea really interesting idea to explore the difference between the happiness people anticipate from some good or experience compared to the happiness they actually experience in the moment compared to the happiness they remember from the experience. How different forms of what economists would call utilities. So theres not one utility, theres like experience and expected and remembered. He wanted amos to do to work on this and its work that didnt just get done. Rose the love that they felt simply love of one mind for of the and understanding i have met something really special. My mind has met another mind thats really special or did it have to do with a broader sense. You know i like everything about danny and danny thinks i like everything about him its not just this sort of giant intellectual connection. No, it was more than intellectual. There was a very emotional connection. Rose what was that . Well, i think for these kind of people, the intellectual connection is emotional. That the discovery of things in their own minds is as good as sex and maybe better. And the feelings it generates when they realize the value of there own thoughts is intense. But i think, i mean they manage to laugh constantly. They made sense of the world around them together in a way they couldnt do it individually. Rose they did things together they couldnt have done separately. Right. In terms of the way they looked at the world, in terms of everything. Yes. In israel, they arent just a couple of academic sitting there, theyre glowing off fighting in a war and theyre informing how their pilots and the arabs in their border. Theyre putting in practice things theyre thinking. So its real and relevant at the same time. The thoughts, this isnt too much of a stretch that the thoughts they have might help preserve this society and their culture. So rose without together they felt incomplete. I think thats true. I think they discovered something of themselves that they couldnt define anywhere else. You see both of them seeking spotterships after they split and none of them are even close. Rose this is from you what they were engaged in right from the beginning was undoing a false view man has in himself. The false view man has is hes always right. Its more that people are basically rational and the mind is a highly, is an exquisitely evolved tool that solves problems, is designed to solve all the problems. Rose what is it they found about the irrationality. If its not rational its irrational. Irrational is produced by what, they didnt want to use the word rational they didnt want to get into a debate what rationality was. Its suboptimal. Maybe show how people say they prefer a to b and b to c but turn around and save they like c better than a. They would show the way people respond when they chose between things. They didnt choose between the thing they chose between descriptions of the things. Can i give you a terrifying example. They did a study, amos did a study where the doctor illustrate the point the day amos had made that if a patient, you charlie, i tell you are, im the doctor youre the patient. We just get news that you have terminal cancer, youre going to kill you in six or seven years. But guess what, theres an operation we can do right now but weve got to do it now. But its risky. And we got to decide whether were going to do it. And if we the way this is presented to us, patient and doctor is that theres a 10 chance youre going to die during this operation, we are half as likely to have the operation than if its presented at the 90 chance youre going to survive the operation. Rose 90 one is a loss and one is basically a gain. You described the same thing, this is exact same thing. A chance of survival, 10 chance of death. The doctors changed their mind about whether to do this operation. So, i think its fair to say thats irrational. Rose the frame of assumption in the question. Frame the question the choices and decisions people make are heavily influenced bient kind of turk around they are making it. Rose for example when you go on holiday, the first two days are rainy and awful of the first five days and the last two days are sunny and wolfed. You can remember the sunny and wonderful. So if you go in the first two days. This is a reviewer actually who said that. But this is danny did study, i mean who does this stuff. Danny studies with people of colon os copies when they were painful. They were studying the question, they had this idea which turned out to be true. You and i go but the same colonoscopy and it takes two hours. We endure exactly the same amount of pain for those two hours. But at the end of those two hours they just say, at some intense level of pain they say charlie youre done you can go. But they keep me on the table for another hour enduring some pain but just less pain. I will have indured more total pain because i had that extra hour. Because it end on a less miserable note i will remember it more fondly than you do and im more likely to go back for of the clock copy. You gave an example with pleasure i was giving with pain. He called it the peak end rule. The way things end have a disproportionate influence over the peoples experience of the event. Movie makers know this. The ending is more important than the movie. How can people feel whats on the theatre with whats on the screen. Thats why they test all the endings and not different middles. So this rose is it a if im trying to get you to come back for another colonoscopy in five years, what i should do is make you string it out and make it worse than it has to be in order for it to end you can manipulate people choices and peoples experiences that way. Rose what was startling that you discovered about what they knew. Theres so many different little insights. They have nuggets. There are a bunch of a lot of little nuggets they find along the trail. So the big thing thats hammered home from spending a lot of time with him how hard it is to preserve a proper sense of uncertainty about the world around you. How hard it is to not leap to conclusions, leap to overconfident guests, predictions about whats going to happen. And realize that there are so many different paths reality can take and as amos says, amos says reality is not a point, its a cloud of possibilities that in any given time the world can go in lots of different directions, small and big ways. But we dont want to see it that way, we want to see it having been much more deterministic than it is. Rose one might listen to their own personal characteristics with the nature of amos and the nature of danny, danny being more doubtful and say that this is, this shows that dannys personality is the prevailing question about the mind. It is more doubting. It is less certain. It is less whereas amos had gone through life totally certain. Rose totally certain. Being viewed as the most brilliant, the most right. And he was insufferable this way. Rose therefore danny is more reflective of the result they determine with the most accurate picture in mind. Danny lived his life much more true to the work. Thats absolutely right. This is absolutely true. But danny was the human embodiment of the work and amos was not. Amos was jolted. It took dannys incredible capacity talent for doubt and questioning to jolt amos self certainty. And amos, just amos had a sense that whatever his instincts were right. And in amos case he was right. He was right about so much. But when he was wrong he didnt handle it well. He was not as the embodiment of the work that danny was. Rose we live in Digital World today in which there is so much data out there. And theres a human giant industry growing up in terms of individual companies, individual institutions which is the capacity to analyze data gives you decisionmaking ability that youve never had before. Thats data. The power of data. Yes. The power of technology. Rose what are they saying about that . They would say its all good in that they would say, its partly a response to what we know. If human kind of government instincts were really great. Like if they were right on all the time, you wouldnt need moneyball. You wouldnt need Statistical Analysis of Baseball Players. Rose because moneyball was based on using statistics rose as much as you could know. Looking for knowledge about the player in the performance statistics. And the idea is only valuable if you can find things in the performance specifics that the human eye is missing. And the human eye was missing quite a bit. So the, their relationship to the Big Data Movement is they kind of explain partly the power of big data, its partly in response to the partly human intuition. Partly. But partly its actually being able to create new information but partly its a response to human limitations. Rose take the people you wrote in moneyball. Did they know the link when what they were doing and what danny and amos had done. This is funny. I wouldnt have known, i wouldnt have thought to ask them. It turns out yes. Paul depodesta who was the stack geek that brad pitt brings in, billy bean brought into the oakland as. He was steand in behavioral economics, self taught which was responded by danny and amos work. What interested him, they are taking advantage of these mistake in the marketplace. And he realized they were categories of mistakes. There were kinds of mistakes there were particular biases that they were exploiting so they needed to kind of know what those were so he was very aware of the work. The behavioral economics. Funny enough the other channel of influence in moneyball was bill james. He was the original kind of questionerhe was self published and world famous and works with the boston red sox. He was just looking at Baseball Players in new ways leaning a statistics. When i went through amos file cabinets i found letters from bill james. Rose asking what . It was bill james interacting. Amust was interacting in a three way conversation with a statistician at yale named robert ableson. And james and ableson were going back and forth and they were referring to amos and amos work. It was in the air. They were present and i didnt realize it. So i think it was a very small world when james starts writing in the late 70s and early 80s people who are saying a lot of conventional wisdoms wrong and now we have tools with Computing Power so we have tools for kind of showing how its wrong. Rose does that scene from the cubs at the red sox was he a disciple of this. Oh my god. Hes a child. He would say im sure he would distance himself a little bit because politically you cant weld together the old baseball world with the new baseball World Without some deferences to the old baseball world. He had a different kind of tight rope to walk than billy dean did than to just smash everything. There was theo epstein. There were things in the play offs general managers too heavily reliant on sophisticated Statistical Analysis. Thats not to say theres not a role for human beings. Its just the role is differ than historically its been. Rose whatevers the role for human beings. Gathering information that its not in the algorithm. Its like youre about, its nice to know when youre looking at say the performance statistics of a College Player and he looks like hes great, that he has a cocaine addiction or that he got in a car accident the day before the draft. Rose have anything to do with the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Funny you ask that because amos was asked that very question in 1981. And he turned to the interviewer and he said my work has less to do with Artificial Intelligence than it does natural stupidity. So i dont, i mean you can make an argument that the reason Artificial Intelligence is supplanting human intelligence and weakness for human intelligence is the argument for big data but they didnt see their work that way. Rose called the new field of behavioral economics. It drives psychologists crazy because rose exactly. Its cognitive psychology. Rose exactly. Economists are really good at branding. Thats why theyre really good at branding. They grab the stuff. I mean look dick sailor is the bridge in economics for their work. And he has a lot of interesting ideas of his own. He gave it the name behavioral economics. There was actually a discussion what are we going to call this. Its a fine name but its not anywhere to psychology. Rose do they teach this at the Harvard Business school or Stanford Business school. Oh my god absolutely. Its cat nip for these guys. They show them, actually interviewed a professor at the Harvard Business school and didnt find his way into the book because it wasnt part of narrative. What they do in the very beginning some of these teachers, they want to show the people with incoming class their minds are not as great as they think. And so what they do is, i mean this is one typical thing they do in Harvard Business school beginning class. They say everybody write down your the last two digits of your cell phone number on your may and tuck it away. Turn it in. I want you to estimate the percentage of countries in the United Nations that are from africa. They this show the people who have high digits on their cell phones estimate higher numbers for the african rose the last two digits are 78, say or 98. You might say that 28 of the countries in the un but the last two digits on your cell phone are zero two you might say 5 . Rose it tricks on i dont remember mind. They call this anchoring. I took a completely irrelevant information introduced before the question youre asking clears the answer to the question. Rose whats scary about this. Its very scary. Theres a lot thats scary. Rose exactly. A lot of this stuff is in fact irrational. The mind that can do crazy things. Rose were talking about all kinds of decisions that are made every day that may be life and death, that may have to do with the future of nations. May have to do with sentencing criminals. Rose have to do with great discoveries. All kinds of things. Its touched, they have touched so many spheres of human activity. And this is why i fell in love with this story. This relationship starts with the fire of the relationship leads to all that. Rose you quote voltaire. Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one. I mean a loud condemnation of certainty. Yes. Right at the center of what these guys are introducing into existence. If you ask like what advice can i get from your book. Heres a piece of advice. My piece of advice if youre looking for people giving you advice whether es your political leader or your doctor or your financial advisor, if they are really really confident and totally sure what theyre telling you in the direction of the stock market or the diagnosis of your disease or how theyre going to fix the economy, counted against them. In fact, dont hire them. What you want is someone who has the capacity to doubt his own predictions because they are inherently, inherently fallible. They are not, we do not live in a deterministic world. Something you can always come along and viz them and to retain hat capacity, that understanding that you cant, they might be wrong, thats a sign intelligence and honesty. Rose does what they discovered give you metrics or an understanding how to make wiser decisions . Theres two answers to that. One is no and the others yes. So the no answer is they would say, i think that these cognitive illusions, the tricks of the mind are all optical ill looks. And that the way the mind fools like the way the eyes fool when you offer an optical illusion. Even when someone shows you that the water on the desert highway is not water its a mirage you still see the mirage, you dont stop seeing it. The cognitive ill look is like that. Nt when theyre pointed out pea still, it doesnt change. However, i tell you what i think. I think that they introduced paths to dealing with the weaknesses. And one of them is other people are good at seeing your his takes. You made these tricks of optical illusions but they can see you being tricked. So creating a decisionmaking environment we have checks on you is a really really smart idea. And in practical ways they introduce that too lots of places. Rose Malcolm Gladwell said about that, hes a pretty good writer. Great writer. Rose says hes in awe of you like watching tiger woods. Are other People Better at understanding your magic than you are . Is it more simply industry for you rather than poetry and rather than do you know what i mean. Its not work for me so its not industries because that implies work. I get enormous pleasure out of what i do, enormous pleasure. Rose you understand it. You understand what it is you have. Im not an idiot savant. I do basically understand what im doing when i do it. I dont feel, malcolm likes my books more than i do and i would actually, malcolm might have done a better job with this i think. I think my limitations as a writer and i bump up against them. I can see what ive got going for me too and i try to play to my strengths. Rose how do you define. Im good at discriminating characters on a major and propelling a narrative for it that once you get them you can take them anywhere. And the feeling that trust that you create between writer and reader so they say well this is awfully weird theres algebra in the footnote on page 242 but im going to trust this is something i need to get through. You create the feeling theyre not going to waste the readers time and energy i think i do that pretty wrel. Rose take a look at this list. Liars poker, the money culture, pacific grip, loses the new new thing, next, moneyball, the blind side, home game, boomerang, the big short, flash boys and now this. The undoing project. Where do you put this . You know i never said this about a book before but its the best book ive written. Rose because its done better. The degree of difficulty was high. And also the quality of the teller and importance of the material its off the charts. Rose when amos died what did he know . Did he feel like oh may god, were just getting going and here i am going away. The last thing he wanted to know was whether and i think theres some evidence that he kept himself alive just to find out was whether netanyahu was going to went his first election. When he waited for the Election Results heard them said i wont see peace in my lifetime but i never was going to anyway. And so rose he was of the labor side. That he and, they wrote about this, they wrote about the bias for hawkish behavior. Rose bias is something, thats part of what they said too. Biases were the mistakes that the mind was, that the mechanism generated. You could know the mechanism by the mistakes they made. There are gazillion biases that have names but the ones they are responsible for naming like recently biased which means youre overwaiting the likelihood whats going to happen is happening again. If a hurricane hits new orleans and floods it, everybody for several years is thinking thats the thing thats going to happen next is another ter cane, terrorist attack. Youre worried about the same terrorist attack instead of worrying about whats actually probably more likely have. Rose did danny give you access to his letter the same way you had access to amos letters. He didnt have any. They were all burned in the open fire of 89. He lost everything. So he gave me access to what he acknowledge was i think what hes actually saying was much worse than it actually is, prevend he had pretended he had a fallible memory. He had some stuff but amos papers were the only papers i had access to. Rose what did you get from amos papers. They were wonderful. Rose because. Hes such a clear, he was such a clear personality. Everything he did just expressed himself. Every note he made on the major. He was still alive on the stuff but he kept letters between him and danny including both sides of the correspondence. That was really help 23678. Helpful. Rose did he ever use the expression i love you . No, no. Theres a manly reticence as danny put it. No. No but its between every line. And amos had a thing with his papers. Someone described the way he handled his mail. Amos didnt do anything he didnt want to do including opening a letter he didnt want to open. And he would have his stacks of mail for a week on the table. Heres monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday. When new mail came, anything he hadnt opened from a week ago he just threw in the garbage can including dinner invitations, bills. He said if i hadnt owned it in a week it must not be important. He just cant keep stuff. So what he kept in those file cabinets was just, it was, there was it had meaning to it, there was a reason he kept it and so it was letters. It was letters and notes to himself about work he was doing. He did notes when they were breaking up. I have notes that he made in preparation for the phone call with danny, defending himself. He had lists of things danny was ker and he would make a list,t hes making a list of the charges dannys going to level at limb in the phone call and his responses. Yes. And even though it was all kind of shorthandy, a word here i knew exactly what he was talking about. Rose why did they say that the military would shape and influence their life. Well, young men facing those kind of circumstances. I think more particularly, in danny, the vulnerability of the state, yes. Amos found himself having to be very brave. He had shrapnel in his body whn he died. He said its odd these kinds that are random acts of bravely when i was 19 defined me for the rest of my left. Because everything thought i was brave i had to be braved for everything. Dannys by nature, he would have been, if not for world war ii, he would have been an ethereal french intellect which and he would have been happy in the academy and never out of it much israel forced him, the army forced him into the world. The first thing he does of real substance in the army in his early 20s, he does moneyball for israeli military. He redesigned the officers selection system and had he still use the algorithm that he created to slick officers. So he got a sense of himself at a very young able at one who had big practical consequences. Rose whats the undoing project. Its what they were working on when they broke up. Rose which is. Which is the danny had noticed after his nephew beloved nephew two weeks before his release had flown his fighter jet upside down in the ground and killed himself by mistake. He thought he was going up and something happened and he flew down. The way everybody has grief stricken, danny, big danny didnt experience the grief he experienced he watched the grief. He stepped back from it. If only he had been released two days earlier. If only the flare hadnt gone off and blinded him in that moment. And he noticed there were rules to the way people undo the death of his nephew. They didnt say only if there wasnt an israeli air force. The imagine ace didnt go all the places it could go it followed some very specific channels. He and amos began to study the way people undid tragedy as a way to get at the human imagination worked and they started to establish some rules. If you wanted to do something and created an alternative reality you pick the thing that happened at the end and the first thing you work from the back in the end and you work backwards. The first thing you undo the change. You want to do this election much everybody went right to those emails. One is to Goldman Sachs or campaign strategy. Rose she went right thats the mind, there are a million things that could have happened to change that. And people go, the macation as danny said is lazy. This is why when people watch sporting events your Football Team loses when the field goal kirk misses the 38 field goal. You blame the field goal kicker. He gets fired. Bill buttner was ostracized in boston because he lost the game. He didnt lose the game. A thousand things could have happened that would have representeddered that ground ball meaningless. So they were explaining that. Rose finally what does danny think of the book . Mixed emotions. But in the end, i think warmth and gratitude, thats where we are. That he said its painful to relive the whole thing. I think he finds it painful to revisit his character before he wins the nobel prize and but generally i mean its a loving project and its an admiring work. Fine, were having lunch in a couple weeks. And rose first time youve seen him since the book was published. Yes. Rose did hity it beforehand . I dont mean to no. So all the subjects of the books ive told him its going to be a drawing experience because someone else recording your life and even if i get it exact here right youre going to feel the way you felt when you heard your voice on a tape recorder for the first time. It feels alien thats not me. I would just ask you to left people who know you well judge whether thats off or not off. And of course theres going to be some, its not going to be perfect. But i think my sense is he thinks its pretty close. At least he knows how hard i tried. Thats the big thing. He knows i gave it the Old College Try and thats not much else i could have done. Rose you had some doubt at the beginning. Absolutely i had doubt what i was up. Rose he understands that. Yes, he would. Rose thank you michael. Thank you charlie. Rose the book is called the undoing project, a friendship, listen to these words, a friendship that changed our mind. Michael lewis for the hour. Thank you for joining us. Well see you next time. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Announcer a kqed television production. Its like sort of old fishermans wharf. It reminds me of old san francisco. And youd be a little bit like jean valjean, with the teeth, whatever. Worth the calories, the cholesterol, and the heart attack you might have. Its like an adventure, you know . You got to put on your miners helmet. It reminds me of oatmeal with a touch of wet dog