Monkeys and Pedestals

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AstroTeller is the CEO of Moonshots, Google's in-house innovation hub. He uses a mental model called monkeys and pedestals to help people figure out how to approach projects so they can find out what they need to know as quickly as possible. Teller: If you're going to make lots of money by training a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal, it doesn't actually advance you toward your goal because you already know you can do it.

Annie Duke is angry that quitting gets such a bad rap. Instead of our relentless focus on grit and "going for it," the former professional poker player, decision strategist, and author of Quit wants us to recognize the costs associated with sticking to a losing outcome. Listen as she explains to EconTalk host Russ Roberts how society's conflation of grit with character has made quitting unnecessarily hard, and why our desire for certainty harms our decision-making ability. Additional topics include the flawed mental accounting that makes us confuse wins for losses, what we can learn from ants, and the tragic story of how the refusal to quit cost 16 lives one terrible night at the top of Mt. Everest.