ARI

Now am speaking with Hunter Maats, he’s the author of the straight A conspiracy, and something of an expert on how people achieve the things that they actually achieve in life. Thank you for talking with me.

HUNTER

Thanks for having me on Ari.

ARI

So let’s stop writing, what is this straight-A conspiracy?

HUNTER

It’s really simple, it’s the idea that people are born smart is the worst idea ever.

ARI

Though, I have three young boys, and by young boys, I mean I have a 2 1/2 year old and twin 15 months old, so this idea is something I actually think quite about is some of them are born with ability, you know when twin, when one of them picks a color correctly, we say oh wow, he’s so smart, I think we are set up to fail on this in some ways.

HUNTER

Yeah! Certainly I mean there are a lot of one of the things that we really realize in the last 40 to 50 years, it’s just how much we are not rational creations, you know our minds are pretty set to think in particular ways and in particular I mean Daniel Connell and Amos Chesky, who are really responsible for figuring out that human beings are not rational actors, like we preferences avoid losses, you know the decisions we make, are anchored in what people have already told us, you know in the same way, we have the tendency to a tribute success to some inherent characteristics of someone rather than circumstances, because circumstances are really difficult and complicated to trap.

ARI

And you think this further you know, because I have heard a lot of talk about not been good at or having a math thing, what is that really like? Am sorry, can you hear me?

HUNTER

Yeah! I can hear you.

ARI

So, this idea that people are working harder, trying harder, it’s very frustrating and someone spoke to me personally, because, I have never been an academic person, and in addition to this, with the business I have, I have been a real sentimental for the last 12 years, I have gone to see minors in college, though it is you know, what is it about system that sort of created this syndrome for somebody?

HUNTER

Well it’s really simple, it’s a motion , you know, when you are doing your website which is not something that is really existed before in history of human kind, you are not seating around and comparing yourself to, you know like the great maker of the art of less doing website, the Victorian age, the this this this this...... You know and even the ways that you do compare yourselves to people who are doing this things now, it doesn’t lead to feeling and adequacy, it leads to the feeling like ah, he did that, that was really smart, I should do that more or he had this guest on, that was really good guest, I don’t like the way that he’s doing that, I would do that differently, and so you engage in figuring out the work, figuring out how to do it better, how do they engage in figuring out, what is my potential in this area, can I really run this, and in the same way when you are in a class, there is something really messed up about the class, especially you know when you have the abilities to know who the people are and you sit there in the lecture hall of a 100 people or you sit there in the class, something of ten people and you are like Solo and So, always knows the answer, it’s like comparing yourself to that other person, plus when you are in the real world, you are not focused on you, you are focused on the deal, you know, I had to figure out, oh there is a really safe development, I also have to figure out, is this property good, you know is this soil contaminated, you know its very task oriented, it’s not you oriented.

ARI

Right of course, but so how do you shift that, how do you deal with that?

HUNTER

I think that’s the thing, I think most of these things, you just have to realize you are crazy, and once you state the fact that you are crazy and your mind is just going to go to all sort of weird places, and you are going to start inventing the idea that you didn’t get the math thing or you don’t have the natural aptitude for real estate development, or all these sort of things which does not help the brain works, it obviously not a real estate gene, so, I mean these are ideas that we come up with are nut, the trick is to realize that they are nut, and we do not give them any credit and instead take our mind off those ability things that you don’t really know about, you can’t really control and just focus on what needs doing. And just take it apart one task at a time, you know, I think the other thing that’s really important is emotions, which is something that is really funny, I mean i caught up with a book by Katie O’Brian, and Katie was always working about this kids, she was focused on how stressed out these kids are about school, you know how much they hated life and all that stuffs. And you know to me, I was like emotions, it’s like that’s kind

of silly, let’s talk about the science, I want to go out there you know and am going to figure out some sort of evidence that I can tell these kids that shows defendable that there is no math gene, well that evidence doesn’t exist, you know, there is all sorts of stuffs that adds up to the idea that you know practice makes the difference and you know it’s not so much for the math gene or not, it’s much more about what you believe you have a math gene, which is a huge effect on your choices, it turned out that Katie was 100 per cent right, emotions are huge, they have massive effects on how our decisions are made, because that’s what emotions are supposed to do. You know when you are afraid, you know people say I was so scared, I couldn’t think, literally true, you know what happens is that you are mentally fires up, tiny little thing in your brain shuts down your attention, which is a great strategy in evolutionary context, because you get afraid of the tiger and then you get stupid real fast and rather than thinking about like what gene of tiger is that I wonder, it looks like you know, south Asian tiger, but there seem to be other influences they are, you know, you just get really dumb and you run away, and there is also a strategy when you dealing with things that are large and have teeth, but it’s a terrible strategy when dealing with math or a book about something or anything like that.

ARI

I have heard that before and that makes sense, but it’s almost surprising to me, I realize that we are like what we are as human beings and sort of a blink on the map of time, but I feel that that evolutionary should have been reeled out by now.

HUNTER

The problem is that evolution loose very slowly, you know, we are a bilge, but you know we are very exciting mobile bilge, because I mean within, maybe there is aliens or maybe there is process all over the universe, but in times of our own experience, I mean the changes that we have undergone in a tiny fraction of time, culturally, are so vast, I mean our diets have changed, the way that we live our lives have changed, you know a lot of people debate on the stuffs all the time, it’s sometimes hard to tease out, you know thinking in general seems to be something that is done casually and occasionally, it was like basically a crisis solution, you aren’t supposed to sit around and think all day, and now that’s primarily what we do, you know there is a whole movement against chairs, also we are not supposed to sit around all day, very basic aspects of our lives have changed on such a fundamental level and so, you know the art is basically taken what are exists, we are not going to change that biology by large and making it work in this new context, it’s just something we have done very well in these last 10,000 of years.

ARI

Right, by then I mean other than we realizing we have this issue that we have over here, there has to be other sum action, am thinking this more often for kids because they sort of like keep me up in the night am really worried because my wife also had issues in school and this like was basically had problems and they thought she was stupid basically, which she certainly is not, and

it’s something I worry about for my kids, like the system is not going to change in the next 10 years.

HUNTER

Well, I will tell you that am making predictions on this podcast, the system will not change in the next ten years.

ARI

Yeah! So that’s scary, it’s like because of the whole thing that you are not supposed to tell kids that they are so smart, you are supposed to praise the effort of what they did rather than just the general thing because they are afraid to fail right?

HUNTER

Right exactly. That’s the point, I mean, that was the point of the straight A conspiracy and mostly like yeah, you can worry about all these things, there is a million different phenomena and they are all interesting, and they all point out to one idea, which is, throughout the idea of people are born smart, don’t waste your time thinking about it or worrying about it, really just focus on what you are doing, and you know, if you can create your environment, you know not just within your home, with you and your wife, but also you know you can get your grandparents involved, you know to get their parent's friends involved and you create a little community and a little cluster around them that says, you know you really can’t do anything you don’t know how, but you can figure it out, you know then you can really teach them how to teach themselves, I think that’s the most important thing, because the strength of school is, it can’t be empowering but very often it’s very disempowering, because you know you feel lost and you feel as if and then it all becomes a pentagon, you know does my teacher like me, does my teacher want to help me, does my teacher believes in me, and you know I think especially in the 21st century when things are constantly changing, ability to teach yourself is really important and getting kids to the place where it’s like my teacher is good, my teacher is bad, its fairly irrelevant, because they just read the textbook or just use the internet and I use all these resources to teach myself from martialing, if you understand a material, you can get on right on the task and it doesn’t really matter whether your teacher is good or bad.

ARI

That’s a really great point, and the idea of wanting to teach yourself, because like I said, I was really like kind of start over school, I actually had okay grades in high school, then in college, it was like I was in another place and I didn’t care about the academics, and when I left college, I got out of it and I wanted to fortunately, but this idea of not only teaching yourself, but also wanting to learn, I always wanted to learn it was very important, but teaching yourself thing

always struck me because, like for me personally, when I was in high school, I was in this international career program, and what we had to do was pretty extensive and long essay, like basically like a thesis and it’s a lot for high schools, mine was on crime and probation, and to research it, I watched like ten DVD series on probation and then I wrote the paper, and then that was the first time I realized that there was another method for me to sort of gain information and understanding and digest it, I found out that I was a very audio/video kind of person. I can see a movie, I can watch in YouTube and I can remember every line from it once, which is weird and generally kind of useless, but then with me, it helped and French is another one, this is a crazier one for me, my wife is French, and I speak French pretty conversationally well at this point, I took French for fourteen years because I went to an international school, I took it from first grade to high school and then two years in college, and I really could not speak French, like it was pathetic, and I really always felt kind of crappy about it, but then I married a French person and I started speaking French in contacts on a regular basis and I am about to get my French citizenship as adult citizen, so its finding that method that like the door way into the room is I have been fortunate, I feel like it’s not that clear for a lot of people.

HUNTER

It’s not, but I think also that there is one other factor which is that you know she’s your wife; the point is that you had a reason, like you had a strong reason to want to learn. You know it became fun and am not going to ask all the details of what French was used for, but clearly like, you know it’s not just there is a context to it in speaking, it’s also an emotional context and emotional context makes all the difference, and you know when you talk to kids, like it often they have bad experience all the time, in Europe its funny because where I grew up, Spanish is cool in the Europe, like it’s not a language that all the people get to take, you know it’s really exciting, they think of Barcelona, you know they get really excited about it.

In southern California, Spanish is the worst like every kid knows or are supposed to take Spanish, but the associations with it are not cool staying in it, you know like Mexico, it’s not something that generally help southern California excited. So you know that emotional context makes a huge difference, and I think if you are totally honest about your college experience, as you have painted that, the reality is not that you are a bad student, you just weren’t fired up or as you said you were focused on other things.

ARI

Well its so, for example I had a C- in most of all my, but I became very friendly with the professor who’s a really big deal and I am still in contact with him, and there is probably people in the class who got straight A's, but I never had a conversation with them so I got what I wanted out of him, he actually told me, he said do not go and work for a company, because they will fire you in a week, do your own thing. Again, I got what I needed out of him, the grades then reflect back.

HUNTER

Exactly, I think that the point is a part of it is we just start to lighten up on ourselves, you know rather than beating yourself up, about that oh, you didn’t get this grade great, and that. The reality is like I was more focused on cedar, you know I have been shown experience in high school, like I worked with a lot of people you find them worked so hard in high school, they stress themselves out so much to get into college and then they get to college and they’re like am do me, I have no desire to go to graduate school, am not trying to become a doctor or lawyer, I may just feel like to relax and so you know they get some things out of there classes, but they were really interested in the broad ideas rather than wrapping up a perfect GPA.

ARI

So here is a million dollar question for you, do you have kids?

HUNTER

No, not yet. But I am an inspiring parent.

ARI

Okay, so you want or you care or you will just push your kids to go to college?

HUNTER

I think I actually want an interesting transition moment, there are two functions to college, and you know, I think the education one is currently the least important. Really what college is about when you’re paying you know 200,000 dollars a year for is basically for them to be in the guilt, you know the guilt system if you went to certain fancy school, you are like oh! You are a smart person, and I take you seriously and am going to listen to you and end up either some professional person are working for you or working against you, but it’s the sense of identity to belong in the cultural group. I think the reality is that, that’s going to start to fall apart, but I think that what’s really going to happen for that have to happen for that to happen is we are going to have to become much better at measuring scales.

Currently, there aren’t really good test to measure how you will really understand how science works, like can I call you into a lab and assign you to work on a topic and you are going to know how to do that, that test doesn’t exist, you know in the same way that even the language test have a lot of problems, you know they don’t really measure languages in contexts, you know they have these form of weird exercises that don necessary measure efficiency or fluency. So I think that the thing is, it won’t surprise me by the time the decision happens that college is not that relevant.

ARI

I think that’s a good report there, it just won’t be that relevant, because it pains me and all the way to see the lack of real life skills that a lot of people have or don’t have rather. You know one of the things that’s always been important to me and right before my first son was born, I took a welding class, I have worked in constructions for years, but I never did something like artistic welding, and one of the things I did was I welded what his name was going to be and then we changed his name after having like steel sculpture ready to go on the lob, but I think will I ever weld again, I don’t know, but I think there was scales that was really important, and there is Robert Aldine quote that I love, do you know what I am talking about?

HUNTER

I don’t know what the quote is, but I do love Robert Aldine.

ARI

Okay so, it goes like this, if anyone doesn’t know Robert Aldine wrote a number of books like stranger to stranger, he’s one of the fathers of science fiction and he wrote ''A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher an ark, con a ship, design a building, write a solid, bounce accounts, build a wall, set a bomb, comfort and dine, take orders , give orders, co-operate, act alone, solve equations, analyze new problem, pitch manure, programs a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly, specializations is for insects.

HUNTER

And I think it’s for the last century, which is a particularly weird century in human history, you know, everything that we now know about creativity is about cross pollination, it’s about taking different fields, and putting them together to create something that has never existed before, and I think the year of the specialist is over, we look at people like Da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin, who did a million different things are we are like oh my God they are so brilliant, how did they do a million different things, I can’t even do one well, and what we don’t realize is the reason why they did a million things well is because they did a million things well, because it is far easier to be amazing a million things than to be amazing at just one, because, that one exists out of context, and without anything to relate to or connect to.

ARI

And I think that is also a really good way to put it because, yes, Da Vinci was an artist, an engineer, an adventurer, and I probably can make a ball past the tip, but in a way, it’s also why won’t you learn those skills rights because there were things that needed to be done, actually a friend of mine who came for friend visiting last weekend and they have a kid and he was saying how he was shocked that more schools are not teaching coding to kids as a language, its behind so many things now, we have a lot of adults who are pursuing careers by learning to code, but

it’s really not being taught in our son's school, but I think that’s a really good point like that, but it feels like so many things we do now, you know our computer is programed, mobile apps, video games, animations, movies, there is coding behind it and it’s something that is not being taught on a wide basis.

HUNTER

Yeah, but that’s most of it, it is a really simple economic problem, problem is that anybody who knows coding well enough to teach it to middle school, you know by the way, one of the best way to learn is to teach, you can teach it to someone who is much more younger, that has less knowledge than you do, that you have level of clarity that enables you to do things differently, anybody with that level of clarity is going to be in stoking barley, or they are going to be in you know New York or somewhere, like Ohio, I mean they could be doing it anywhere, you know, they are not going to be teaching, and the problem is that, the adoption is going to be all wrong, you need a bunch of teachers to do it in the traditional way, who are then going to create the next generation, but that’s not going to happen, like it just doesn’t work economically, and that’s why am going to think that all of these things that’s great now its coding then it will be the next set of languages which new program in languages come out all the time right. The problem that really solve all of these is that, you know kids are waiting around to be taught, then intimidated by the stuff, they think it’s not for them, they think you have to be some sort of freaky genius to figure out these things, and if you teach the kids how to teach themselves, and there are more resources online for them to teach themselves, and there are online as well, there are a lot of soft teaching things in code academy which is very good, and a whole set of others. I recommend this blog as well by the way especially for parents, because you know we grew up in a generation when programming is not for most people, if you start to go in and you know, even W3 schools.org always play good, but if you go and play around, you are going to start to realize oh, this is just a skill like any other, and there is no reason why I can’t get my kids comfortable, with how the stuff works, they can get excited about it, and them they will go off and then teach themselves, you know whether they choose to do anything about it in the next eighteen years, or you know when they later start to pick up the programing and whatever it is, it will just be comforting the intimidation will be gone.

ARI

Okay, so then, basically, we should be focusing on helping people remove the barriers through being interested in the subject for years.

HUNTER

Yeah! I mean most of the barriers are you know fear, intimidation, you know feeling stupid, like that, and that’s the stuff that gets into the way. Because as you have said, like the system is not going to change in the next ten years, or rather you can say I don’t think it is, when I said so dependently, but it wouldn’t, and I thing for too long you know to reference the document,

eventually we will be waiting for superman, even hoping that some figures needs to come around, but there is a school for president or something like that, who’s going to fundamentally alter the way that education was done, magically, funding will appear from you know a budget that is already broken, and you know we are going to be able to have this perfect amazing schools in the future, and teachers are going to be enthusiasm engaged and properly paid, you know all these cool stuffs, units will be stronger, you know all units disappear, we will have school vouchers, that is the thing, nobody can agree to what is it that we really want and a talk down solutions is not going to solve the problem of a parent with three kids.

Apparently three kids on the other hand, however can change the way that the kids think today and you know if you get your kids thinking in the right way, then what happens is that the broken system actually becomes an advantage for them, because it’s going to develop there resourcefulness on how to succeed in the system that sucks.

ARI

I always ask in the podcast injuries the question is just, what are your top three personal tips for being more effective, usually most people use this to getting things more done, but what are the top ratings that make you more effective?

HUNTER

Well I will back out and first you know a lot of people focus on getting more done, but the reality is you know you are going to get far more out of life by you know been really discerning about what is worth doing, right, so for example, I mean one of the questions I ask myself all the time is, how am I going to feel about this one when am eighty years old. You know am I going to look back on this and feel real good on this, is it something that is going to build and create value for a long time, or is it something that’s only valuable in the next 5 minutes, right, there is a very big difference between paying your bills and building your business or building your brand or anything like that. Though I think that people tend to think about like forward, but I think backwards is also really useful. The second things I will say is that you have to through up the idea of people are going smart and really realize that. The third thing that I will say is that you know, humans aren’t that good at thinking, you know we are not computers, we can’t just shut dead in there, we like stories; you know we are bias in our thinking. When you look at experts, the basis of their expertise is not that they know so much more as if they have taken these very complicated things and simplify them down to what they are probably do able.

So most people think about being smart is being complicated, but it’s actually not, it’s about being as simple as possible. So I will say simplifying throughout the idea that people are born smart and then delete my first one and replace it with, you know look at mistakes, really look at what’s not working, because that’s the basis of getting better, but people go to all sorts of lengths you know to, mistakes are uncomfortable, but leading into discomforts and what’s not working and figuring out that you can change it through your actions. That’s how you actually move

forward, then there is huge amounts of resource on that, its Herders Eriksson the guy who made the 10,000 in an hour role thing, you know we have been talking about the hour role, that’s not the most interesting work, his interesting work is on the kind of practice that allows people to make people to become good, it’s all about they sit around and they analyze their mistakes until they figure out what they need to do differently to improve, which as a side note is what the FAA does when a plane crashes. You know if they can get out the wreckage, they look at the wreckage and use that to improve that for a mile to mile you are safer flying than when you are walking, that’s is close to what the Russian Aviation Administration will just do, bury the wreckage and fill the plastic stand and shoot everyone who’s involve.

ARI

Well thank you very much, and where is the best place for you to find out more about you and your book? We have links on your website, but just tell us any ways.

HUNTER

Yeah! That’s the thing, you know we use, there is a website for straight-Aconspiracy.com, there is a twitter handle which is str8conspiracy and then Facebook is available on Amazon, on ITunes, on Nuke on Kobe, its available on kindle line amazon and all of these things, and yeah.

ARI

Well thank you Hunter, this is an awesome, I really appreciate it, it’s hardly reassuring for my keep what I have to do with my kids.

HUNTER

Yeah! I think that’s the thing, I mean you know it’s so, you know am only an inspiring parent, I can only imagine the levels of the anxiety and worries and when you actually have kids, you will love and care about and you are worrying about their future, and I think that the thing is, it really is straight forward, it all just comes down to letting yourself be human.

To be honest with you, the fact that when I am on board, I might get disengaged and that’s okay. I will have to figure how to make myself engage, you know.

ARI

Absolutely

HUNTER

I like stories; I don’t like boring facts, human being.

ARI

Thanks again.

HUNTER

Perfect, thanks so much Ari.