October 19, 2025 • 26 mins
Harry offers a taxonomy of five "social traps" that can keep us from gaining traction.
Show notes:
- Social Traps by John Cross and Melvin Guyer
- Steve Jobs Stanford commencement address
- Matthew Perry
- Frequency Illusion (the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Harry (00:00):
These lenses, if you will, these frames for looking
at the world, become incrediblypowerful because it gives you
more choice.
And I look at this as a way ofevaluating and prioritizing
interventions.
Narrator (00:20):
You're listening to Traction Heroes.
Digging In to Get Results withHarry Max and Jorge Arango.
Jorge (00:30):
Harry, good to see you once again.
Harry (00:32):
It is such a pleasure as is always the case.
Jorge (00:37):
Yeah, it's always a treat.
What have you brought for ustoday?
Harry (00:41):
I am incredibly excited to share with you something that
you cannot buy.
I went to Amazon to see if Icould get this book somewhere,
and it's no longer available.
I made a note to reach out to mypublishing attorney and see if I
can possibly license the rightsto get it republished.
(01:03):
There are a handful of books Ihave on my bookshelf behind me
that I'll never get rid of.
I have two copies of this book.
I have one that is my reader'scopy.
I have another where I cut thespine off it so I could scan it
so I have a digital copy, so Icould print out pages like this.
And this is a book that I wasintroduced to by Frank Andrews,
(01:27):
who is my favorite professor atUniversity of California Santa
Cruz.
He's no longer with us, hepassed away a few years ago.
He taught qualitative problemsolving.
He was an amazing, amazing manand he has a couple of books
himself.
He studied love.
He was a chemistry professor,but he studied love.
(01:48):
And he was one of the I guessthe founding professors at
University of California SantaCruz, and they allowed this kind
of cross-discipline work.
So he taught qualitative problemsolving and love as well as
chemistry.
Very well respected chemistryprofessor.
(02:08):
At any rate, I have a couple ofbooks on my shelf.
This one in particular,absolutely, 100% changed my
life.
And this is from the...
I think this is from theintroduction.
I'll tell you what the name ofit is after I read it.
Cool?
Jorge (02:29):
Absolutely, let's do it.
Harry (02:30):
Alrighty.
Two roads diverged in the yellowwood, and sorry I could not
travel both and be one traveler,long I stood and looked down one
as far as I could to where itbent in the undergrowth, then
took the other, just as fair,and having perhaps the better
(02:53):
claim because it was grassy andwanted wear, though as for that,
the passing there, had warnedthem really about the same and
both that morning equally lay inleaves no step had trodden
black.
Oh, I kept the first for anotherday.
(03:15):
Yet knowing how way leads ontoway, I doubted if I should ever
come back.
I shall be telling this with asigh, somewhere ages and ages
hence.
Two roads diverged in a wood,and I, I took the one less
(03:37):
traveled by and that has madeall the difference.
That was from Robert Frost andThe Road Not Taken, and it's the
opening quote in a book that I'mabout to read from.
Most contemporary economictheory and much so-called
decision theory presumes thateach of us possesses a roadmap
(04:00):
from which we know or at leastcan guess to what destination
our behavior will take us.
These theories then use theproperties of the destinations
to predict the decision pathsrational people will follow.
Learning theories suggestinstead that choices are made as
(04:20):
we go along, that decisions aremade on the basis of relatively
insignificant local details andthat we know only the
destinations after we'vearrived.
It is not surprising that thebehaviors predicted by these two
models can be quite different,or that once we know the
(04:40):
destinations and can reflectupon them, we might regret some
of the choices that led us tothem.
Like their physical analogs,social traps are baited.
The baits are positive rewards,which, through the mechanisms of
learning direct behavior alonglines that seem right every step
(05:02):
of the way, but nevertheless endup at the wrong place.
Complex patterns ofreinforcement, motivation, and
the structure of socialsituations can draw people into
unpreferred modes of behavior,subjecting them to consequences
that are not comprehended untilit is too late to avoid them.
(05:26):
And then I'm gonna jump ahead.
In the ordinary trap, the baitdraws the victim into the
behavior that ultimately leadsto unhappy consequences.
Whereas in the counter trap, theadverse bait causes the victim
to avoid a course of action,which, if followed, would've
brought about a preferredconsequence.
Jorge (05:51):
Wow.
That is really good.
What is the name of the book?
Harry (05:55):
So, the book is called Social Traps, and there are four
authors, but only two are listedon the cover.
One is John Cross and the otheris Melvin Guyer.
And this is a book about problemframes.
And we've spoken a number oftimes about framing and this
book absolutely changed the waythat I see problem framing and
(06:21):
diagnostic thinking and creatinginterventions.
And it outlines five differenttypes of what you might call
"traps" that are effectively setin the context of social
interactions with people.
(06:42):
I think you can safely step backand say, independent of the
social aspect of it, these arelike classical problem frames.
So, for example, I'll just giveyou one right off the top.
A time delay trap is so obvious,right?
(07:05):
Something you do that takes along time to manifest, and then
when it manifests, it's toolate.
And what Cross and Guyer talkabout are the social mechanisms
and reinforcement mechanisms andthe things that cause somebody
(07:26):
to be lulled into this trap suchthat they travel down it far
enough so that by the time theyrealize they're in the trap,
it's too late.
Classic case of drinking toomuch at a party, wake up the
next morning with a hangover,declaring you're never gonna
drink again, and by the nextSaturday, you're out partying
(07:48):
again.
It's a classical time delaytrap.
And it's the primary example.
And there are other examples aswell.
If you think about problems asthings that just show up in
front of you, what happens whenthey don't?
What happens when they emergebased on how you're engaging in
the world?
And so, time delay traps, whatthey characterize as ignorance
(08:11):
traps, which I'll talk about,sliding reinforcers, which is
one of my favorite, externalitytraps, and collective traps are
really the five they bringattention to.
And then they talk about thefact that you can mix and match
them and end up with hybridtraps, but that doesn't really
count.
Like, the biggest light bulb inthe world went on for me when I
read this book.
(08:32):
And it was like,"Oh wow.
I do all of these things in oneform or another."
Jorge (08:39):
I'd like to circle back and, and unpack the five kinds
of traps because when you werereading the passage, I was
thinking,"It sounds like there'sa taxonomy of traps here."
Harry (08:47):
Yeah, exactly.
Jorge (08:48):
And I'd love to get into it.
Let me read it back to you,because I wanna make sure that I
got the gist of the intro.
Harry (08:56):
Yeah.
Jorge (08:57):
When you were reading that, starting even with the
Robert Frost poem, the imagethat came to mind was Steve
Jobs's Stanford commencementspeech.
I realized we talked about Jobsin our last conversation, here
he comes again.
(09:18):
He also brought up this ideathat you can't really make sense
of your life's work lookingforward, I think he said you
can't connect the dots lookingforward, only looking backward.
which in that case I took tomean you have to be open to
contingencies, serendipitousencounters with people and
(09:40):
ideas, opportunities, that kindof thing.
And in the case of Jobs'sspeech, he was talking at the
tail end of a successful career,so he was talking about how he
had made these choices duringhis life that didn't seem to add
(10:05):
up too much at the time, buteventually looking back, led him
to where he was.
But what I heard in your readingthere, is that it's also
possible to end up lookingbackward and realizing that the
choices you made really screwedup your life in some ways,
(10:27):
right?
You use the example of alcoholaddiction and what came to my
mind was like drug addiction,right?
That's something that happens toso many people and it
completely...
I was just reading a few daysago that Matthew Perry's drug
(10:47):
dealer was sentenced orsomething like that.
He's someone who was asuccessful actor, like many, he
became addicted to, drugs, andended up dying from this.
Is that a fair read, thatthere's a positive take on the,
you can look at your life byconnecting the dots when it's a
(11:07):
positive life, but there canalso be this kind of like
warning system where it's like,"Hey, you're potentially making
a mistake here that could reallyderail things!"
Harry (11:23):
I appreciate that the aperture that you've opened to
look at what I'm talking abouthere.
What I would say is it's not a,bimodal, a strict, two different
ways of seeing this, becausetimeframe is so critical here.
(11:48):
I think when you talk about theSteve Jobsian example, you're
really talking aboutsense-making and you're talking
about meaning-making, lookingbackwards, versus being able to
do it looking forward, ratherthan anticipating problems and
recognizing the choices thatyou've made in what you could
(12:10):
arguably say is a much shortertimeframe that have real
consequences.
And so the dimensions I wouldseparate are, this is not so
much about meaning-making asit's about problem framing,
number one.
And number two, this isn't aboutlooking at a lifetime of
decisions as a much as it'sabout looking at the patterns of
(12:33):
leading choices, like theindicators or choices that you
could be making in a muchsmaller timeframe that have a
very specific for lack of abetter terms patterns of
results.
For example, in a time delaytrap, I drink too much, I wake
up the next morning, I have ahangover, then I claim I'm never
gonna drink again.
(12:54):
There are patterns associatedwith that.
Sure, you can do it over alifetime and you can look back
and that plays out one way.
But if you recognize that thedetails around getting drawn
into the social trap of smokingwith your friends when you take
smoke breaks, as you startsmoking, before it turns into an
(13:15):
addiction, there are a lot ofpositive rewards that come from
the choices that you're makingand they may not add up to the
costs associated with what thosechoices ultimately lead to.
And sometimes, and in the caseof potentially drinking and
(13:35):
certainly smoking, these thingscan trigger addictions, which
then make it very difficult toget out from underneath the
options that you have in termsof making decisions, because
once it becomes physiological,the decision process is so
different.
So that would be the firstthing.
(13:56):
When you talk about I'll go tothe third one, like a sliding
reinforcer trap, is a trap whereyou know something that works
brilliantly in one context worksvery poorly in another much
later.
And I think the example in thebook is somebody who sings a
cute little song and does a jigand dance to their family and
(14:18):
they gets a lot of rewards forit while they're young.
And if they keep doing it,eventually they're not gonna get
as much attention.
And if they keep doing it,eventually they're gonna be
dismissed unceremoniously.
And if they keep doing it, theymay get punished.
So the exact same behaviorshifts how people respond to it
(14:38):
over time.
But once you understand the kindof pattern that these things
follow, you can start to seethese things in operation.
I lived in Texas for a while.
And I'd be driving between SanAntonio and Austin.
We had the mothership forRackspace hosting, which is
(14:58):
where I worked at the time, wasin San Antonio.
We had a satellite office inAustin.
I would drive along Highway 35.
And in Texas they have loosertraffic restrictions than they
do in, say California or NewYork.
And one of the things you don'thave to do in Texas is shut the
(15:20):
gate of your pickup truck.
You can drive along at 80 milesan hour with a ladder and it can
bounce around until it fallsout.
And when it lands on the ground,it can cause a horrendous
accident if somebody were todrive over it.
And so there's an idea of anexternality trap, right?
(15:40):
Where this thing has happened.
And...
oh, you know what I have, ledyou astray.
This is actually a collectivetrap.
It's not an externality trap.
A collective trap is one inwhich the collective fails to
act on something like a ladderin the roadway, and everybody
(16:02):
makes their own excuses,everybody justifies their own
action or lack thereof.
And then, ultimately, somebodyhits the ladder and has a
terrible problem.
So that's a situation where whenI'm driving along and I see
something on the road now that Ithink,"If I'm not in a position
to do something about it, if I'mreally not in a position to do
something about it, I can callit in." By not calling it in,
(16:25):
I'm actually contributing to acollective trap and somebody's
gonna pay a price even if thatisn't me.
And maybe down the road, I maybe the unfortunate recipient of
somebody's ladder or somethingelse that's been dropped in the
road because the norm has becomedoing nothing, which might
include calling no one.
(16:47):
So these lenses, if you will,these frames for looking at the
world, become incrediblypowerful because it gives you
more choice.
And I look at this as a way ofevaluating and prioritizing
interventions.
Jorge (17:04):
I can see that.
And yet, what can I do in asituation in which I am facing a
collective trap?
Because almost by definition itsounds like that's a systemic
problem and not an individualissue.
Harry (17:20):
That's correct, but so in just the example that I gave you
a minute ago, you now have adecision to make.
Are you gonna contribute to thattrap being triggered or are you
gonna contribute to that trapbeing avoided?
And as one of the collective,you now have...
there's a choice architecture.
You can pull over and dial9-1-1, and you can report that
(17:43):
ladder in the road.
And before I read this book, Iprobably wouldn't have done it.
I probably wouldn't have thoughtabout it.
It just never occurred to me.
But I'll tell you, whenever Isee a ladder in the road, or
whenever I see something thathas fallen out of the back of
somebody's truck or fallen offthe top of their van, I ask
myself the question,"Is anybodyelse gonna do anything?
(18:05):
And if not, what is myresponsibility?" Whether or not
somebody's gonna do something,what's my responsibility here?
This happened to me just twoweeks ago.
I went around a corner and therewas a tree down in the road and
I stopped and I put my blinkerson just past the tree, and I
dialed 9-1-1 and I flashed mybrights at anybody coming the
(18:26):
opposite direction, because thenext thing that was gonna happen
is they were gonna go aroundthat turn and they were gonna
hit that tree, and the sheriffhadn't had a chance to get
there.
So, I could have just driven on,but I chose not to because I was
aware of the nature of what acollective trap is.
Jorge (18:44):
The collective trap is one of several, right?
I think said that there werefive of them.
And the mere fact that you havea taxonomy of these traps seems
useful in that it would maketraps more top of mind for you.
(19:06):
I don't know how to pronouncethis, but this idea of the, I
think it's the Baader-Meinhofphenomenon, this idea that you
are thinking of buying an AudiQ7 and all of a sudden you see
Audi Q7s everywhere, right?
Because they become top of mind.
I wonder if there's somethinglike that at play here where
(19:28):
with a taxonomy of traps inmind, all of a sudden you are
more attuned to see where thesetraps might be waiting to
ensnare you.
Harry (19:40):
Absolutely.
And because it's not only wherethe traps are waiting to and
snare you, but the trapsthemselves have a set of
mechanisms and you may encounterthe mechanisms and every time
you consciously encounter amechanism, you now have more
choice.
(20:00):
So I think it's a combination ofbeing aware, as you're saying,
of the possibility that thesetraps exist and what they are
and how they work, and thenrecognizing what, in effect, the
mechanistic function of the trapis, so that when you encounter
one of those mechanisms, you canask yourself the question,"Am I
(20:21):
gonna take the bait?"
Jorge (20:22):
So it sounds like there's an awareness angle, but there's
also a skillfulness angle,knowing which species you're
dealing with lets you deal withit better.
Under different conditions,given the amount of time we have
left in this conversation, Iwould've asked again for the
book and where folks can readmore about this, but you've
(20:45):
already said that it's out ofprint, so I'm wondering if in
the last few minutes we havehere, you could go over the five
traps again and maybe just verybriefly summarize what they are
so that folks can get a sense ofwhat the taxonomy looks like.
Harry (21:03):
Yeah, absolutely.
And also, I will commit towriting this up and making it
available so that we can tack itback in, and that way people
have what the traps are, whythey're important, roughly how
they work.
It's something that I feel likeI should have for folks anyway,
and I don't have a good writeupof this, so I will make it
available.
But as we talked about, thereare time delay traps.
(21:25):
And we've talked about the factthat they're things that you're
sucked into where the effect ofthem doesn't show up until
later.
And, the ignorance trap isanother one that is a little
harder to understand.
It seems straightforward on thesurface, but it's also called
(21:47):
the Midas Trap.
And you remember King Midas,whatever he touched, turned to
gold.
And, of course, he was ignorantof the fact that the thing that
he wanted most, I guess was,this love.
And he went and touched her andshe turned into gold and then
she no longer existed in theform that he wanted.
And so being ignorant ofsomething and either the
(22:11):
unintended negative consequencesof what would happen if you were
to engage in that particular wayis a trap that is very
context-dependent, because itdepends on what you're ignorant
of.
And sometimes that's thebehavior that in one context
(22:34):
works really well and in anothercontext works really poorly.
And you have to recognize thatthe power behind that thing or
ignorant of is that it may havedeeply negative unintended
consequences in a context inwhich are very important to you
or other people.
So I mentioned slidingreinforcer earlier, with the
(22:55):
example of a child singing asong.
A real life example for me withsliding reinforcers is, I had a
startup, many years ago, calledPublic Mind.
And really, the first personthat I hired was a complete
savant.
I think he got his undergraduatedegree in computer science when
(23:17):
he was thirteen and then got hismaster's degree when he was like
sixteen from Carnegie Mellon.
It was just absurd.
He was incredibly smart.
And he had a bunch of verystrange and idiosyncratic
behaviors, which were incrediblywonderful when he was nineteen,
twenty, and twenty-one.
(23:38):
And then, as he got older, thesethings were less and less cute.
And in his forties, they aren'tcute at all.
And so, the very same behaviorsthat can generate a set of
positive reinforcement that canlull you into the belief that
these behaviors areintrinsically good over time can
(23:59):
play out very poorly for you ifyou're not aware of that.
So watching for the indicatorsof when your belief that those
things are going to be goodstarts to wane is a very
powerful antidote.
Externality traps.
We deal with these every day.
An externality trap, you couldthink about, like the canonical
example is, nobody reallysuffers from one family doing a
(24:25):
barbecue.
But if everybody in theneighborhood does a barbecue,
you have smog, right?
And so there's an externality ofthe potentially negative effects
of something that when they addup, they start to create a
problem that becomes a problemfor everybody, including the
person who may have started it,but they didn't see it because
(24:45):
it was external to them.
And then we've talked about thisnotion of collective traps
where, either everybody doingsomething or everybody not doing
something contributes to thenegative experience that folks
are gonna have.
So those are the five.
And then of course I mentionedthere's hybrid traps, which are
combinations of these things,which get very sticky.
But let me stop there and, bringit back to you, Jorge.
Jorge (25:10):
This sounds like a, really useful list.
And, again, it's a shame thatthe book isn't available.
Do please write something up.
And, if you do, we'll include itin the notes for this episode.
But this has been very useful,Harry.
Harry (25:27):
Fabulous.
I'm glad I had an opportunity toshare this.
It was an important book in mylife.
Jorge (25:32):
Yeah, I could tell, when you started reading it, your
voice got a little, wobblythere.
I was like,"Wow, Harry's reallyfeeling it!"
Harry (25:39):
That's great.
Yeah, it really changed thecourse of my life.
Jorge (25:43):
I'm very happy that you shared it with us.
Thank you.
Harry (25:46):
Yeah.
Thanks, Jorge.
Narrator (25:50):
Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes
with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.
Check out the show notes attractionheroes.com and if you
enjoyed the show, please leaveus a rating in Apple's podcasts
app.
Thanks.
These lenses, if you will, these frames for looking
at the world, become incrediblypowerful because it gives you
more choice.
And I look at this as a way ofevaluating and prioritizing
interventions.
Narrator (00:20):
You're listening to Traction Heroes.
Digging In to Get Results withHarry Max and Jorge Arango.
Jorge (00:30):
Harry, good to see you once again.
Harry (00:32):
It is such a pleasure as is always the case.
Jorge (00:37):
Yeah, it's always a treat.
What have you brought for ustoday?
Harry (00:41):
I am incredibly excited to share with you something that
you cannot buy.
I went to Amazon to see if Icould get this book somewhere,
and it's no longer available.
I made a note to reach out to mypublishing attorney and see if I
can possibly license the rightsto get it republished.
(01:03):
There are a handful of books Ihave on my bookshelf behind me
that I'll never get rid of.
I have two copies of this book.
I have one that is my reader'scopy.
I have another where I cut thespine off it so I could scan it
so I have a digital copy, so Icould print out pages like this.
And this is a book that I wasintroduced to by Frank Andrews,
(01:27):
who is my favorite professor atUniversity of California Santa
Cruz.
He's no longer with us, hepassed away a few years ago.
He taught qualitative problemsolving.
He was an amazing, amazing manand he has a couple of books
himself.
He studied love.
He was a chemistry professor,but he studied love.
(01:48):
And he was one of the I guessthe founding professors at
University of California SantaCruz, and they allowed this kind
of cross-discipline work.
So he taught qualitative problemsolving and love as well as
chemistry.
Very well respected chemistryprofessor.
(02:08):
At any rate, I have a couple ofbooks on my shelf.
This one in particular,absolutely, 100% changed my
life.
And this is from the...
I think this is from theintroduction.
I'll tell you what the name ofit is after I read it.
Cool?
Jorge (02:29):
Absolutely, let's do it.
Harry (02:30):
Alrighty.
Two roads diverged in the yellowwood, and sorry I could not
travel both and be one traveler,long I stood and looked down one
as far as I could to where itbent in the undergrowth, then
took the other, just as fair,and having perhaps the better
(02:53):
claim because it was grassy andwanted wear, though as for that,
the passing there, had warnedthem really about the same and
both that morning equally lay inleaves no step had trodden
black.
Oh, I kept the first for anotherday.
(03:15):
Yet knowing how way leads ontoway, I doubted if I should ever
come back.
I shall be telling this with asigh, somewhere ages and ages
hence.
Two roads diverged in a wood,and I, I took the one less
(03:37):
traveled by and that has madeall the difference.
That was from Robert Frost andThe Road Not Taken, and it's the
opening quote in a book that I'mabout to read from.
Most contemporary economictheory and much so-called
decision theory presumes thateach of us possesses a roadmap
(04:00):
from which we know or at leastcan guess to what destination
our behavior will take us.
These theories then use theproperties of the destinations
to predict the decision pathsrational people will follow.
Learning theories suggestinstead that choices are made as
(04:20):
we go along, that decisions aremade on the basis of relatively
insignificant local details andthat we know only the
destinations after we'vearrived.
It is not surprising that thebehaviors predicted by these two
models can be quite different,or that once we know the
(04:40):
destinations and can reflectupon them, we might regret some
of the choices that led us tothem.
Like their physical analogs,social traps are baited.
The baits are positive rewards,which, through the mechanisms of
learning direct behavior alonglines that seem right every step
(05:02):
of the way, but nevertheless endup at the wrong place.
Complex patterns ofreinforcement, motivation, and
the structure of socialsituations can draw people into
unpreferred modes of behavior,subjecting them to consequences
that are not comprehended untilit is too late to avoid them.
(05:26):
And then I'm gonna jump ahead.
In the ordinary trap, the baitdraws the victim into the
behavior that ultimately leadsto unhappy consequences.
Whereas in the counter trap, theadverse bait causes the victim
to avoid a course of action,which, if followed, would've
brought about a preferredconsequence.
Jorge (05:51):
Wow.
That is really good.
What is the name of the book?
Harry (05:55):
So, the book is called Social Traps, and there are four
authors, but only two are listedon the cover.
One is John Cross and the otheris Melvin Guyer.
And this is a book about problemframes.
And we've spoken a number oftimes about framing and this
book absolutely changed the waythat I see problem framing and
(06:21):
diagnostic thinking and creatinginterventions.
And it outlines five differenttypes of what you might call
"traps" that are effectively setin the context of social
interactions with people.
(06:42):
I think you can safely step backand say, independent of the
social aspect of it, these arelike classical problem frames.
So, for example, I'll just giveyou one right off the top.
A time delay trap is so obvious,right?
(07:05):
Something you do that takes along time to manifest, and then
when it manifests, it's toolate.
And what Cross and Guyer talkabout are the social mechanisms
and reinforcement mechanisms andthe things that cause somebody
(07:26):
to be lulled into this trap suchthat they travel down it far
enough so that by the time theyrealize they're in the trap,
it's too late.
Classic case of drinking toomuch at a party, wake up the
next morning with a hangover,declaring you're never gonna
drink again, and by the nextSaturday, you're out partying
(07:48):
again.
It's a classical time delaytrap.
And it's the primary example.
And there are other examples aswell.
If you think about problems asthings that just show up in
front of you, what happens whenthey don't?
What happens when they emergebased on how you're engaging in
the world?
And so, time delay traps, whatthey characterize as ignorance
(08:11):
traps, which I'll talk about,sliding reinforcers, which is
one of my favorite, externalitytraps, and collective traps are
really the five they bringattention to.
And then they talk about thefact that you can mix and match
them and end up with hybridtraps, but that doesn't really
count.
Like, the biggest light bulb inthe world went on for me when I
read this book.
(08:32):
And it was like,"Oh wow.
I do all of these things in oneform or another."
Jorge (08:39):
I'd like to circle back and, and unpack the five kinds
of traps because when you werereading the passage, I was
thinking,"It sounds like there'sa taxonomy of traps here."
Harry (08:47):
Yeah, exactly.
Jorge (08:48):
And I'd love to get into it.
Let me read it back to you,because I wanna make sure that I
got the gist of the intro.
Harry (08:56):
Yeah.
Jorge (08:57):
When you were reading that, starting even with the
Robert Frost poem, the imagethat came to mind was Steve
Jobs's Stanford commencementspeech.
I realized we talked about Jobsin our last conversation, here
he comes again.
(09:18):
He also brought up this ideathat you can't really make sense
of your life's work lookingforward, I think he said you
can't connect the dots lookingforward, only looking backward.
which in that case I took tomean you have to be open to
contingencies, serendipitousencounters with people and
(09:40):
ideas, opportunities, that kindof thing.
And in the case of Jobs'sspeech, he was talking at the
tail end of a successful career,so he was talking about how he
had made these choices duringhis life that didn't seem to add
(10:05):
up too much at the time, buteventually looking back, led him
to where he was.
But what I heard in your readingthere, is that it's also
possible to end up lookingbackward and realizing that the
choices you made really screwedup your life in some ways,
(10:27):
right?
You use the example of alcoholaddiction and what came to my
mind was like drug addiction,right?
That's something that happens toso many people and it
completely...
I was just reading a few daysago that Matthew Perry's drug
(10:47):
dealer was sentenced orsomething like that.
He's someone who was asuccessful actor, like many, he
became addicted to, drugs, andended up dying from this.
Is that a fair read, thatthere's a positive take on the,
you can look at your life byconnecting the dots when it's a
(11:07):
positive life, but there canalso be this kind of like
warning system where it's like,"Hey, you're potentially making
a mistake here that could reallyderail things!"
Harry (11:23):
I appreciate that the aperture that you've opened to
look at what I'm talking abouthere.
What I would say is it's not a,bimodal, a strict, two different
ways of seeing this, becausetimeframe is so critical here.
(11:48):
I think when you talk about theSteve Jobsian example, you're
really talking aboutsense-making and you're talking
about meaning-making, lookingbackwards, versus being able to
do it looking forward, ratherthan anticipating problems and
recognizing the choices thatyou've made in what you could
(12:10):
arguably say is a much shortertimeframe that have real
consequences.
And so the dimensions I wouldseparate are, this is not so
much about meaning-making asit's about problem framing,
number one.
And number two, this isn't aboutlooking at a lifetime of
decisions as a much as it'sabout looking at the patterns of
(12:33):
leading choices, like theindicators or choices that you
could be making in a muchsmaller timeframe that have a
very specific for lack of abetter terms patterns of
results.
For example, in a time delaytrap, I drink too much, I wake
up the next morning, I have ahangover, then I claim I'm never
gonna drink again.
(12:54):
There are patterns associatedwith that.
Sure, you can do it over alifetime and you can look back
and that plays out one way.
But if you recognize that thedetails around getting drawn
into the social trap of smokingwith your friends when you take
smoke breaks, as you startsmoking, before it turns into an
(13:15):
addiction, there are a lot ofpositive rewards that come from
the choices that you're makingand they may not add up to the
costs associated with what thosechoices ultimately lead to.
And sometimes, and in the caseof potentially drinking and
(13:35):
certainly smoking, these thingscan trigger addictions, which
then make it very difficult toget out from underneath the
options that you have in termsof making decisions, because
once it becomes physiological,the decision process is so
different.
So that would be the firstthing.
(13:56):
When you talk about I'll go tothe third one, like a sliding
reinforcer trap, is a trap whereyou know something that works
brilliantly in one context worksvery poorly in another much
later.
And I think the example in thebook is somebody who sings a
cute little song and does a jigand dance to their family and
(14:18):
they gets a lot of rewards forit while they're young.
And if they keep doing it,eventually they're not gonna get
as much attention.
And if they keep doing it,eventually they're gonna be
dismissed unceremoniously.
And if they keep doing it, theymay get punished.
So the exact same behaviorshifts how people respond to it
(14:38):
over time.
But once you understand the kindof pattern that these things
follow, you can start to seethese things in operation.
I lived in Texas for a while.
And I'd be driving between SanAntonio and Austin.
We had the mothership forRackspace hosting, which is
(14:58):
where I worked at the time, wasin San Antonio.
We had a satellite office inAustin.
I would drive along Highway 35.
And in Texas they have loosertraffic restrictions than they
do in, say California or NewYork.
And one of the things you don'thave to do in Texas is shut the
(15:20):
gate of your pickup truck.
You can drive along at 80 milesan hour with a ladder and it can
bounce around until it fallsout.
And when it lands on the ground,it can cause a horrendous
accident if somebody were todrive over it.
And so there's an idea of anexternality trap, right?
(15:40):
Where this thing has happened.
And...
oh, you know what I have, ledyou astray.
This is actually a collectivetrap.
It's not an externality trap.
A collective trap is one inwhich the collective fails to
act on something like a ladderin the roadway, and everybody
(16:02):
makes their own excuses,everybody justifies their own
action or lack thereof.
And then, ultimately, somebodyhits the ladder and has a
terrible problem.
So that's a situation where whenI'm driving along and I see
something on the road now that Ithink,"If I'm not in a position
to do something about it, if I'mreally not in a position to do
something about it, I can callit in." By not calling it in,
(16:25):
I'm actually contributing to acollective trap and somebody's
gonna pay a price even if thatisn't me.
And maybe down the road, I maybe the unfortunate recipient of
somebody's ladder or somethingelse that's been dropped in the
road because the norm has becomedoing nothing, which might
include calling no one.
(16:47):
So these lenses, if you will,these frames for looking at the
world, become incrediblypowerful because it gives you
more choice.
And I look at this as a way ofevaluating and prioritizing
interventions.
Jorge (17:04):
I can see that.
And yet, what can I do in asituation in which I am facing a
collective trap?
Because almost by definition itsounds like that's a systemic
problem and not an individualissue.
Harry (17:20):
That's correct, but so in just the example that I gave you
a minute ago, you now have adecision to make.
Are you gonna contribute to thattrap being triggered or are you
gonna contribute to that trapbeing avoided?
And as one of the collective,you now have...
there's a choice architecture.
You can pull over and dial9-1-1, and you can report that
(17:43):
ladder in the road.
And before I read this book, Iprobably wouldn't have done it.
I probably wouldn't have thoughtabout it.
It just never occurred to me.
But I'll tell you, whenever Isee a ladder in the road, or
whenever I see something thathas fallen out of the back of
somebody's truck or fallen offthe top of their van, I ask
myself the question,"Is anybodyelse gonna do anything?
(18:05):
And if not, what is myresponsibility?" Whether or not
somebody's gonna do something,what's my responsibility here?
This happened to me just twoweeks ago.
I went around a corner and therewas a tree down in the road and
I stopped and I put my blinkerson just past the tree, and I
dialed 9-1-1 and I flashed mybrights at anybody coming the
(18:26):
opposite direction, because thenext thing that was gonna happen
is they were gonna go aroundthat turn and they were gonna
hit that tree, and the sheriffhadn't had a chance to get
there.
So, I could have just driven on,but I chose not to because I was
aware of the nature of what acollective trap is.
Jorge (18:44):
The collective trap is one of several, right?
I think said that there werefive of them.
And the mere fact that you havea taxonomy of these traps seems
useful in that it would maketraps more top of mind for you.
(19:06):
I don't know how to pronouncethis, but this idea of the, I
think it's the Baader-Meinhofphenomenon, this idea that you
are thinking of buying an AudiQ7 and all of a sudden you see
Audi Q7s everywhere, right?
Because they become top of mind.
I wonder if there's somethinglike that at play here where
(19:28):
with a taxonomy of traps inmind, all of a sudden you are
more attuned to see where thesetraps might be waiting to
ensnare you.
Harry (19:40):
Absolutely.
And because it's not only wherethe traps are waiting to and
snare you, but the trapsthemselves have a set of
mechanisms and you may encounterthe mechanisms and every time
you consciously encounter amechanism, you now have more
choice.
(20:00):
So I think it's a combination ofbeing aware, as you're saying,
of the possibility that thesetraps exist and what they are
and how they work, and thenrecognizing what, in effect, the
mechanistic function of the trapis, so that when you encounter
one of those mechanisms, you canask yourself the question,"Am I
(20:21):
gonna take the bait?"
Jorge (20:22):
So it sounds like there's an awareness angle, but there's
also a skillfulness angle,knowing which species you're
dealing with lets you deal withit better.
Under different conditions,given the amount of time we have
left in this conversation, Iwould've asked again for the
book and where folks can readmore about this, but you've
(20:45):
already said that it's out ofprint, so I'm wondering if in
the last few minutes we havehere, you could go over the five
traps again and maybe just verybriefly summarize what they are
so that folks can get a sense ofwhat the taxonomy looks like.
Harry (21:03):
Yeah, absolutely.
And also, I will commit towriting this up and making it
available so that we can tack itback in, and that way people
have what the traps are, whythey're important, roughly how
they work.
It's something that I feel likeI should have for folks anyway,
and I don't have a good writeupof this, so I will make it
available.
But as we talked about, thereare time delay traps.
(21:25):
And we've talked about the factthat they're things that you're
sucked into where the effect ofthem doesn't show up until
later.
And, the ignorance trap isanother one that is a little
harder to understand.
It seems straightforward on thesurface, but it's also called
(21:47):
the Midas Trap.
And you remember King Midas,whatever he touched, turned to
gold.
And, of course, he was ignorantof the fact that the thing that
he wanted most, I guess was,this love.
And he went and touched her andshe turned into gold and then
she no longer existed in theform that he wanted.
And so being ignorant ofsomething and either the
(22:11):
unintended negative consequencesof what would happen if you were
to engage in that particular wayis a trap that is very
context-dependent, because itdepends on what you're ignorant
of.
And sometimes that's thebehavior that in one context
(22:34):
works really well and in anothercontext works really poorly.
And you have to recognize thatthe power behind that thing or
ignorant of is that it may havedeeply negative unintended
consequences in a context inwhich are very important to you
or other people.
So I mentioned slidingreinforcer earlier, with the
(22:55):
example of a child singing asong.
A real life example for me withsliding reinforcers is, I had a
startup, many years ago, calledPublic Mind.
And really, the first personthat I hired was a complete
savant.
I think he got his undergraduatedegree in computer science when
(23:17):
he was thirteen and then got hismaster's degree when he was like
sixteen from Carnegie Mellon.
It was just absurd.
He was incredibly smart.
And he had a bunch of verystrange and idiosyncratic
behaviors, which were incrediblywonderful when he was nineteen,
twenty, and twenty-one.
(23:38):
And then, as he got older, thesethings were less and less cute.
And in his forties, they aren'tcute at all.
And so, the very same behaviorsthat can generate a set of
positive reinforcement that canlull you into the belief that
these behaviors areintrinsically good over time can
(23:59):
play out very poorly for you ifyou're not aware of that.
So watching for the indicatorsof when your belief that those
things are going to be goodstarts to wane is a very
powerful antidote.
Externality traps.
We deal with these every day.
An externality trap, you couldthink about, like the canonical
example is, nobody reallysuffers from one family doing a
(24:25):
barbecue.
But if everybody in theneighborhood does a barbecue,
you have smog, right?
And so there's an externality ofthe potentially negative effects
of something that when they addup, they start to create a
problem that becomes a problemfor everybody, including the
person who may have started it,but they didn't see it because
(24:45):
it was external to them.
And then we've talked about thisnotion of collective traps
where, either everybody doingsomething or everybody not doing
something contributes to thenegative experience that folks
are gonna have.
So those are the five.
And then of course I mentionedthere's hybrid traps, which are
combinations of these things,which get very sticky.
But let me stop there and, bringit back to you, Jorge.
Jorge (25:10):
This sounds like a, really useful list.
And, again, it's a shame thatthe book isn't available.
Do please write something up.
And, if you do, we'll include itin the notes for this episode.
But this has been very useful,Harry.
Harry (25:27):
Fabulous.
I'm glad I had an opportunity toshare this.
It was an important book in mylife.
Jorge (25:32):
Yeah, I could tell, when you started reading it, your
voice got a little, wobblythere.
I was like,"Wow, Harry's reallyfeeling it!"
Harry (25:39):
That's great.
Yeah, it really changed thecourse of my life.
Jorge (25:43):
I'm very happy that you shared it with us.
Thank you.
Harry (25:46):
Yeah.
Thanks, Jorge.
Narrator (25:50):
Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes
with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.
Check out the show notes attractionheroes.com and if you
enjoyed the show, please leaveus a rating in Apple's podcasts
app.
Thanks.
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