[The Knowledge Project Ep. #7] Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers

Shane Parrish: I want to talk about your book Tempo, which is on decision making, to start with. That’s about the narrative we frame around decision making. Can you walk us through that a little bit?

Venkatesh Rao: Tempo was kind of an interesting project compared to a lot of my other writing projects, because I think it was the one thing I’ve done that was almost entirely for myself. The work it’s based on was things I did in grad school and my post doc, and it was kind of unsatisfying to do that work and just have it published in the academic literature without exploring the parts of the work which really interested me, which is how does it apply to thinking? A lot of the things I learned along the way to applying the ideas in Tempo to things like command and control and military situations, that was the actual context when the work was done, it was unsatisfying because what I personally enjoyed the most from it was just a chance to sit and reflect and think about how we actually make decisions, how we frame questions and so forth.