Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Cloud-Based Mayhem. I have a great show for you today with my friend, Matt Warren. Matt is a journalist with XCMAG. Those of you who read the magazine have seen his stuff a lot. He covered the X-Alps in a couple of races, including 2019. He and Ed were jacked up with my wife and my daughter near Salzburg and Paul Guschlbauer's house. That's where we got to know each other a little bit. But I've worked with him on some articles over the years. And he and his friend, Miriam Frankel, just put out his first book about behavioral science called Are You Thinking Clearly? 29 Reasons You Aren't and What to Do About It. And Matt reached out a few weeks back and said, I think, you know, this isn't specific to flying, but Matt's a pilot.
And a lot of this stuff is very specific to the decisions we make. And why we often make very poor decisions. So those of you who are familiar with Thinking Fast and Slow with Daniel Kahneman will recognize a lot of this. But whereas that's really heavy on science and really just one side of kind of behavioral science, he's obviously the kind of founding father of all this. Matt and Miriam's book is much more wide ranging and covers a lot more topic. Obviously, these 29 reasons we don't do very well. We're not really necessarily in the top. We're not really in the driving seat when we think we are, but it's just we got into some really cool terrain here and obviously just touched on a lot of different things. But and he ties it in really well with
piloting and how it all ties together. So I'm going to read you a little bit here from the summary of the book. Do emotions really cloud your thinking? Are habits holding you back? Is AI manipulating your mind? Does IQ help you think better? Every one of our thoughts, actions, moods and decisions is shaped by thought. By a whole array of factors, most of which we don't pay any attention to culture, time and language to genetics, technology and microorganisms living inside us, even our own unconscious routines and habits. It's clear that we are always in the driving seat, so we start there and get into the book. And I, I know you're going to love it. This was a lot of fun and open to some fun things to talk about and some interesting things to think about.
Enjoy.
Matt. Good to see you here, but it's been a while. It's been a minute and I didn't know you were I know you were a journalist, but I didn't know you were working on a book. So I'm excited to talk about your book and behavioral psychology. And it's not a book about paragliding, but it all definitely kind of fits and why we make bad decisions. But welcome to the mayhem. And it's good to shoot it with you for a
little bit. Great to see you, Gavin. Obviously, we I was there reporting on the X-Raps in 2019, following you along the way. And good to see you're still alive and kicking after that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's it is a little dicey from time to time, but made it through. For those who aren't aware, let's let's just let's start this off by, you know, who are you and in what why did you write this book? And in how long have you been in journalism? But what how do you define yourself?
Well, I left university in the late nineties. Didn't really know what I wanted to do other than travel and do things, but do things was a bit kind of ill defined. But I figured that journalism was a good way to do things, to try different things, to go to different places. So I started traveling around the world. I write seven or eight Lonely Planet guidebooks to Indonesia, South Africa, Thailand, settled into a couple of newspaper jobs in my thirties. And for the part. Six or seven years, I've been writing for Cross Country Magazine and also a site called the conversation dot com. And we specialize in turning academic research into content for the general public.
And that content gets read by about one hundred and fifty million people every quarter. So, yeah, it was big news during the covid crisis. A lot of our content got sent out to the other. Media and you probably read it, even if you went to where you were reading it. And out of that, having dealt with loads of different researchers from lots of different fields, psychologists, neuroscience, climate scientists, I thought, I want to write a book about this. I want to speak to people and delve inside the human mind and how it works and how we think. And so with my co-author, Miriam Frankel, we came up with. Are you thinking clearly?
Twenty nine reasons why not and what to do about it.
Yeah, and I'm looking at the cover right now. I love it. Just a bunch of squiggly lines. And that's how my brain thinks. Most of the time, it's all over the map. You know, I mean, I I rely on Sam Harris and his, you know, his waking up podcast and his waking up meditation app to try to get that straightened out. But when I when I looked through the and I'll just read for the listener here a little bit. But just about the book, the summary on where you can where you can buy it and find out more about it. And it's on all the platforms, Amazon and everything else. But it looks terrific. But it's this the motherhood complex, because it's an eye opening and engaging richness of information that gives us a detailed insight into the strengths and weaknesses of human behavior.
I read that and thought Kahneman. I mean, this is all behavioral science, correct? Is it why our brains, why we think we're making good decisions? And we aren't.
Yeah, I guess to summarize the book, we perhaps often assume that we're the captains of our ship, that we control all our thinking and we are thinking goes in the direction we want it to. So what we did was look at the many reasons external or the many factors, external and internal, that manipulate and influence the way you think. So starting at the bottom, that's genetics. But then it's also things like. Habit, it's intuition, it's heuristics and bias, it's digital technology, it's whether you're in love, it's whether you're hangry, it's whether you're feeling emotion, it's even whether you believe in things like good and evil. So it's the full gamut of things, really. We even did a chapter on your gut microbiome, all the little organisms living in your gut.
They outnumber your own cells 1.3 to 1 on a ratio. And it's it seems it's a growing area. And it's a growing area of research that they're actually, through your vagus nerve, potentially influencing, hijacking your thinking, almost making you do what they want you to do. So, yeah, that bit's probably not so relevant to paragliding. But just to give you a. But
it might be. It sounds like listening to your gut.
Yeah. Yeah. Listening to your gut in both ways, intuitively and what you put in your gut affects what goes on in your brain. Absolutely. Did doing all this
research really help your. Your own thinking, or is it just is it still just it's overwhelming. This is just too much.
We did. We did actually do a an epilogue. The last chapter of the book is how we applied it to our own thinking. So what we wanted to do with the book was not to go down the standard path of you need to think this way. You know, like there's one solution for everyone. There isn't. Everyone thinks differently. Everyone's vulnerable. Everyone's vulnerable to different biases. Everyone has different things, conflicting factors sort of jostling for their attention. But yes, so we applied it to ourselves. And, you know, I, I found that I was I was probably too optimistic. I need to be a bit more pessimistic. That's something perhaps we can talk about a bit later. Yeah. Well, GAD is a big defensive pessimist and I spoke to them about it for a cross country magazine as well.
But also. The degree to which we can manage our emotions, how habitual we are, how many, how much you rely on routine, what you're eating and what that might be doing to your mind, how, how much you how much credibility you give your own memories, how intuitive you are, how good you are at paying attention. So, yeah, I went through everything afterwards and gave myself a good going over.
Is there is there a kind of a test at the back of the book? Where you can, you can go through and kind of find out where you sit on this spectrum of madness?
We include, we include, we reference a whole bunch of tests the whole way through. So things like the creature of habit scale is a 27 point test to, um, to establish how habitual you are, um, is a dirty dozen test, which on a rather darker note establishes whether you may have psychopathic Machiavellian. Um, traits in your character. These are psychological traits rather than like a diagnosable condition. Um, so yeah, there's all sorts of things you can do as you go along to, uh, test your own test. How many,
how many as a percentage, just as an example, how many people would have dark psychological traits? You know, they're, they're like, you said, is it 50 %? Is it 80?
Most of us is a little bit dark. Um, the dark traits. That's an interesting. One obviously was like, there is, there are diagnosable psychiatric clinical conditions, particularly that you might relate to psychopathy, antisocial behavior disorder, for example. So we're not talking about those. We're talking about psychological traits, you know, that would be how psychopathic you might be. I, how, you know, for example, um, how, how much you care about what happens to other people, how much you can. Feel what they feel Machiavellianism, um, how much you want to get ahead and narcissism, how much you rate yourself probably unrealistically.
And all of us are somewhere on a spectrum with all of those three
from your research. Matt, are these, are these things are traits more genetic or are they more learn? Are they, how does the nature nurture side of this really affect things? Yeah.
So the. Um, genetics plays a big part of it. It's about, uh, 40 % and then the rest of it is your environment. What's around you, um, so yeah, both, it's always a combination of the two. So you're not sort of like doomed by your genetics. You can change things. Your environment will turn the volume up or down. If you like.
When, before we started recording you, you started tapping into the 20 something. What
are some of
the 29 things, can we do that and, but take a little deeper dive, you know, you, you were talking about optimism versus pessimism, for example, but the, I know you've got the list in front of you there, but, uh, they were fascinating.
So I guess, yeah, optimism. So. About 80 % of us have an optimism bias. And that essentially means that we're likely to believe that things are more likely to go. Well, Well,
And there's obviously a bit of a cult around optimism. You know, we have the yellow smiley face on everything. We all talk about how we need to be happy and upbeat and stoked, you know, and, uh, we have to look on the bright side and the pessimism pessimists are kind of a downer or a bit of an E or, and you don't really want them around, but in something like paragliding or adventure sports, you do need to be a bit pessimistic. As well. In fact, Pessimism is probably a really good way of staying alive.
Yeah, we will. We'll get is he, he's, he defines this so well. I mean, I remember going to the, our first launch, uh, on that Rocky's traverse and he talked about, you know, that he, he already recognized that I was way too optimistic for his liking. It drove him nuts. And, and he said, Gavin, not only am I not optimistic, I'm looking for, you know, I'm not look, I'm not a glasses half full guy. Yeah. I'm looking for the rock that's going to break the glass and, but, and yet to participate in what he has participated in, uh, you know, he's kind of one of the original, you know, the OGs for Red Bull. He has to be optimistic, you know, but he's constantly just what can go wrong with this situation, which I, in my mind is what exactly what you want to
be an
adventure athlete. You know, you, you want, you know, how, how is this? How is this environment going to kill me?
Yeah. But you don't stop there. Do you? It's not. Yeah. I think people maybe go, well, if I'm pessimistic, I'll never fly. And as, as Will told me, you know, we're all optimists because we're going up under a bit of fabric to cloud base and, you know, getting smashed the pieces on, you know, and meter up thermal. So we need a degree of optimism, but the pessimism comes into play where you go exactly as you just said, where do I end to identify the rock? That's going to break me. And crucially, what am I going to do about avoiding it?
You know,
it's about mapping the terrain in a slightly negative way, you know, and couldn't, how am I going to, could I get stuck in that Valley breeze and how will I avoid not doing so, you know, have I got that Valley looks really bad to land in. If I get stuck in it, what am I going to do? And how am I going to avoid being there at all in the first place? It's about looking for the potential danger. And then actually coming up with a really positive plan for dealing with them. If you go down that route,
is it, is that, is that something that can be learned, Matt? I mean, the, one of the things that I feel I'm not bragging at all in this, but one of the things that I feel has kept me alive for my 50 years on the planet, doing all the stuff that I do is that when I get in those situations, you know, I'm not a freeze, you know, that freeze fly. You know, I'm really a fighter and, and things get very clear for me. And one of the things that I know is not conscious, but is my heart rate plummets, you know, so it goes the opposite of what most people do. My mind goes down to almost resting heart rate and, and I just see the world incredibly clearly.
This is what I need to do. This is how I'm going to survive this situation. And, and it's, but it's, it's instinct. I don't know where that came from. That's crazy. I mean, how, I mean, how can I control my whole heart rate? I'm not, you know, I haven't practiced this at all. It's just what happens.
Yeah. I guess you, you use the words, there were a couple of interesting things. They use the word instinct, you know, that's intuition if you like. So we, our brains don't have time to work like computers. Yeah. And take all, all the inputs and then sort of rationalize them into, you know, a carefully computed answer. We don't have mental bandwidth for that. We'd be there all day working out just whether to turn left or right, you know, we have to make these guesses, you know, these intuitive guesses. When you first start out doing something, your intuitions may be really quite bad. You know, you make bad calls and you do. Yeah. You really need to, in those situations, engage more of your rational mind and actually think through a little more slowly what's going on.
In your case though, you are an expert paraglider, outdoorsman, et cetera. Your intuitions, your instincts in these situations have been honed by years of experience. So you can trust those intuitions much more. So it is learned. It is learned. Intuitions are learned. Yeah. There are subtle patterns that you have spotted that you probably weren't even aware you spotted. And over time, some of those patterns look the same, so they've reinforced themselves. And your instincts, whether you turn left or right in a certain situation, you probably don't know why you're doing that. But there will be bits of your brain that have learned through experience that you should do one or the other.
Make the correct choice. Yeah. So intuition, I think, you know, when you're a beginner in anything, you have to be quite careful with your intuitions. And then you can probably learn to trust them more as you go on. I mean, I think Chrigel talks quite a lot about this. And he now describes himself as a much more intuitive pilot. And that allows him to be a lot more creative as well. Yeah. And, you know, if you can trust those intuitions and follow them, then you've got some mental bandwidth. And then you're just up to think about what your next move might be as well.
I do find that really interesting, you know, talking to… Like
Thomas. Yeah,
Thomas.
You know, talking to him about, you know, back early on, remember when he would take his night pass really early in the race? And he said it was just because Chrigel doesn't like to be around other people. And he wouldn't even typically use it because he'd already be ahead. But it was just enough. It was enough to just get him a little bit more ahead. Yeah. So he could just do his thing and not be influenced by other people even in the air with him or on the ground. He just didn't… He didn't want… He wanted to be out in front and do his thing and, you know, let his intuition rule the game.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Which is
interesting because, you know, we learn as pilots that we're faster and better when we're with other pilots. You know, that's not how you'd win a comp certainly. You wouldn't do that in race to goal. You wouldn't want to lead out all the time. You're going to bomb out all the time. It's not going to work. But it works for him really well in an environment like the X-House.
Absolutely. We… Well, we spoke with the father and manager of one of the world's greatest chess players, Magnus Carlsen. And he's known as a very intuitive chess player. And, of course, humans can't play chess like computers because they don't have the bandwidth to run through every single possible move. So you just have to have a degree of intuition and instinct. Now, for someone like him, who's a very intuitive world champion chess player, intuition works because he's played so many games of chess and he's already a super talent. He knows that probably if he feels he should do this move in a very high-paced, high-stress environment, it'll probably be the right one.
If I suddenly move into chess and try and do the same thing, I'm checkmating two moves, if that. You know?
Right, right, right.
Same here. You know, I've been flying, you know. You just… You just have to be aware of it. Be aware of what your intuitions are and learn to trust them over time, you know, without giving them too much stop too early on.
Hmm. Hmm. So, optimism bias, that's what you call that?
Well, no, that's… No, we're talking about intuition. But, yeah, your optimism bias will be most of us… Most of us will expect things to go better than they… Are likely to.
Interesting. And you said about 80 % are like that?
Yeah, 80 % of people have an optimism bias. Would you… They also… They look… So, you'll also… We're also quite likely to update our beliefs or understanding of things based on good news rather than bad news. So, for example… And you can apply this to paragliding, but the example won't be paragliding. But, for example, if I ask you what are the chances of you getting cancer, for example, and you say 50%, and I tell you it's actually about 30%, and then I leave it for a while, and then I come back to you and ask what your risk is, you'll probably move it pretty much towards the more optimistic result that you've been given, towards 30%.
Hmm. So, if I said it was only 10%, though, your risk of cancer was getting 10%, and I told you it was actually 30%, and then came back to you later and asked, you would only nudge your estimate up very slightly, maybe to 13 % or 14%. Really? So, actually, if I give you good news, you're much more likely to update your beliefs based on it than not. And that, you know, that could pose a problem in paragliding, couldn't it? And how you approach risk and things like that. Yeah. You know…
I'm curious, you know, you're a paraglider, and you've written this book and done all this research. Do you think the 80-20 rule applies to pilots? Or is it more like 95? I mean, why in the world would we do what we do, given what we know? I mean, we all think it's not going to happen to us, but it happens to almost everybody.
Yeah. You
know what
I mean? It's kind of absurd. I totally agree with you. And a lot of pilots, a lot of pilots I know. A lot of pilots I've spoken with say that we constantly con ourselves, lie to ourselves about how dangerous this sport is. And I think that means that we have an optimism bias about it. And in a way, we have to because it spoils the fun when we're constantly thinking about the danger. But, of course, if we apply that Will Gaddian defensive pessimism, we can go, yeah, it's a dangerous sport. How am I going to make it safer? What's my strategy? And run through it in a much more kind of systematic way.
When you did your research with Miriam, did you break people down into different, you know, our adventure athletes, our adventure people? Do they really skew the data in a certain way over just your people that live in the city that don't do anything? You know, that watch sport?
Well… Well, I guess the data is, the data in psychology is skewed towards university students. Okay. Yeah.
Those are the ones you're doing the samples on.
Yeah, exactly. They tend to be the participants in the study. And, you know, and they do tend to be Western as well. Okay. Yeah. Western, educated, intelligent. So, there's
probably some social economic stuff. Yeah.
There's all
kinds of things that are going to affect the… Yeah. It's already very…
It's all very biased already. Got it. Okay. So, then you have to, you know, you can probably guess that, yes, in paragliding, you know, to answer your question, I think there is more… They are more… More optimism
bias in there. Yeah.
Because even when Will Gadd, we've given Will Gadd a lot of name checks here, but, you know, even when he's talking about defensive pessimism, being pessimistic, that's a good thing. We all have to be so optimistic just to do this thing.
Yeah. Right. Let's dive into some of the other 29 things because your list is fascinating. What's…
We could talk about optimism
all day, but…
One of the studies we looked at was by this guy called Peter Johansen, who's at Lund University in Sweden. And he did this brilliant bit of research into choice blindness. And this potentially applies to paragliding as well. So, he applied some techniques he learned from magicians, and it was a bit of sleight of hand involved here. So, for example, I would show you, Gavin, two cards, and it's two different faces. And I would ask you, which is most attractive? And you would go, the one on the right. I would then place the cards down and use a bit of sleight of hand.
I would hand you the other card, the card you hadn't chosen, and tell you it was the one you had chosen. And you would go, yeah, that's the one, and even start justifying the choice that you hadn't made. So, it would be things like… And then he'd ask, why did you make that choice? And they'd say something like, I really like their earrings. When the initial choice, the one they'd actually made, they hadn't even been wearing earrings.
So, this is a really weird phenomenon. Yeah. And then, you know, maybe in that related one, which maybe people have seen, is that on YouTube, you'll find it about all about the basketball players passing a basketball between them. And you're asked to count how many passes they make. And at the end of it, they say, but did you spot the gorilla? And when you replay it, a gorilla walks through the basketball players. And
you totally don't see it. And you don't
see it because you've been asked to look for the passing ball. God,
that shit blows my mind. It's just so bizarre.
You know, okay, we're bad at making, you know, potentially bad at making choices. We don't really know why we make them in some cases, make decisions. We even, we justify decisions we didn't after the fact, potentially. You know, so we make a really bad decision and we land. And then we say, we come up on the fly with our reason for making that decision. Oh, you
justify everything. We're
learning, doesn't it? Yeah, we justify it after the fact. And the gorilla one, I think, suggests that, as indeed the card one might, how much are we really paying attention? Yeah. Flying, what are you paying attention to? Are they,
if they, you know, from the picture one, you know, the two cards and then here's the one that you didn't choose. Is that just peer pressure? Is that just clear? Is that just, oh, this person who's giving me this test, I don't want to. Yeah.
Is that where it comes from? It's a really good question. In actual fact, they kind of allowed for that. So it's not kind of the white coat effect. It's not, I just don't want to offend the researcher. In fact, I think they used a pupil dilation test at the same time to check for that. Oh,
so it's honestly what your brain is telling you. Yeah, it
seemed to be, it seemed to be really rigorous research. Golly. And it happened with, with beliefs, certain beliefs as well. If I made you a statement about what do you think about, you know, Donald Trump, for example, it's probably wouldn't, that would probably be too emotive. But, you know, some kind of softer political idea, you know, I could literally swap the questionnaires around and it, and the same effect seemed to stay even when you were with a partner or you were with someone else. So even in a group, you can be just as, you know, in inverted commas, dumb.
Wow. I mean, so that, does that come back to bias as well?
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We're obviously, I mean, you know, and again, to go to this research, we can't say categorically, this is what is going on here. But I think all these little studies we looked at in the book just point to the same sort of lesson, which is you do need to be aware that your brain works in these weird ways. It can rely on judgment. It can rely on shortcuts or does rely on shortcuts and biases that your attention is very on and off and malleable and swings around, you know, all over the shop and that we have to pay attention. And we do have to be aware of these sort of factors are in play to answer your question about bias.
Yeah. I mean, we are riddled with it.
Again, you know, this is a big Daniel Kahneman thing, which is. Yeah. You know, we can't compute, think through carefully every single decision and belief. We don't have time. Our brain doesn't have the computing power. We have to make shortcuts, you know, and those result in a whole range of biases. Some of them on, you know, are helpful. They save us time. They make us allow us to make snap decisions. Other obviously are hugely damaging and involve all kinds of discrimination and bigotry. And so prejudice and so on and so forth, you know, so we have to be aware of, you know, our brains tendency to, to vulnerability to it.
Did you find after you read the, I'm sorry, after you wrote this book and did all this research, has it really helped you process the world? Has it helped you? Is it, is it, is it help guiding you through the, through this myriad of, you know, the gorilla thing that, that to me is. That would help me to reaffirm the fact that I know I can't multitask. We know we're bad at it. Everything proves we're bad at it. We can't do email and talk and run the business and we can't do this. It just doesn't work. Does it mean, you know, and obviously it feels like women are much better at it because they can, they can deal with the child and they've just got more going on. But I mean, I know that I wouldn't see the gorilla. Yeah.
I just know that about myself. I got to count those balls. I got to count those balls. Count the balls. Count the balls. Count the balls. The glue rocks right in front of me. I'm not going to see it.
I, I mean, I, I'd seen the video before a couple of years back and did the test again for the, or watched it again for the book. And I still miss the gorilla. No. Because I probably didn't count the balls, you know? Amazing. So
it hasn't
made me better. I think it's made me, it was really interesting because there were two of us. So we had two biased authors instead of one. So we were constantly going, you're so biased. You've got this. You've got overconfidence bias. You've got, and obviously when we say bias, you know, there's so many different biases. So you can look it up as like a rosette, you know, like a size of a planet with them all around there.
Yeah. They're all Venn diagramming together. Oh my God.
You've got this bias, that bias, scandalous bias in it. Um, and I, I think it just gave us a framework, um, a better framework. A framework for exploring our own minds and where our own fallibilities might be. Uh, and of course a lot of these things have a positive side. Pessimism has a positive side, you know, when it's within manageable reason. Obviously it can spiral out of control and you can just sit there, you know, unable to do anything because you feel that you're too pessimistic about everything. But you know, a degree of anxiety when you're flying fear has an adaptive side. Obviously. It keeps you alive. If you think about it, your brain isn't designed, isn't programmed, isn't hardwired to be happy and content.
It is hardwired to be alert. It is hardwired to keep you alive, to make shortcuts. So it's got enough processing power to wing it. Basically. It doesn't really care whether you're happy and content. It just wants to keep you alive. You know? So when you start looking at it like that, you go, you know, this is massive. That's helpful. Yeah. There's a massive cult out there going, Gavin, you need to be happy. You need to be optimistic. There's only one way of doing things. But you're a completely unique human being with all these various things going on your head. But certainly you haven't been hardwired to be happy and optimistic.
You've been
hardwired to be alive. And I think we can get told all the time that we're a failure because of all these things. In fact, all these things are just part of who we are.
Yeah. Right. What are some more of the 29 lists?
I'm going to play with that one for a bit. I'm just kidding.
Memory. Yeah. So memory is a big one.
A lot of us use GoPros, don't we? Yeah. We kind of, the lazy way of looking at it, the easy way of looking at it is going, my memory is like a GoPro and I can rewind a memory. And it's like a video library in my head and I can go through it. And that's frankly complete bullshit. Your memories are hugely fallible. And a fifth of people, when told by someone that something happened in their childhood, will have a false memory about it. Our memories are often... In remembering our memories, our memories actually... Disintegrate a bit or evolve or change. So our favorite memories are often the ones that have been Xeroxed so many times they're actually quite different from how they began.
We're much more likely to remember things that reinforce our identity, who we are, who we want to be.
Are our memories more positive than they were?
Yeah. Than the reality? You'll often... Not in every case. No. Not at all. But you will, depending on what you believe yourself to be, what you want to be, you'll remember things in a certain light. So it's perfectly... It's highly likely that if you make a stupid decision paragliding, you'll remember it in such a way that probably paints you in a more positive picture. Rather than just being
purely stupid.
Yeah. Exactly. So that... I think we need to remember that when we land. Did we just... To what degree can we rely on our memories for this? Have we walked it? We need to listen to other people's recollections of it as well, while also acknowledging that their memories are just as fallible. Yeah,
man. I just had this totally front and center recently. I did a podcast. I needed to put something up and I've been working on this house so hard. I haven't been recording much lately. And so I went back to... I just told a story of my sailing days in 2009, sailed from Bali up to Langkawi by myself. And it was just incredibly eventful, really, really gnarly trip and really properly life threatening in a few points. But I wrote a story about this as soon as I got there. So I was still pretty fresh. So back in 2009 when I did it, I wrote a story. And I've been up through the Java Sea and the Malacca Straits since then two more times.
And they've been very eventful as well. One was after rescuing the boat from a drunk skipper a couple of years ago and went up to Thailand, up to Phuket. And when I read the story, I mean, I basically read it for the podcast. It was rather different than how I remember it. So probably when I wrote it, it was not as it actually happened. Even though that was immediately after the trip. But certainly 12 years later, whatever it is, 11 years later, the major pieces had all happened. But for example, at one point off of Singapore, I have to rescue these two guys. And the story I had always told was their boat was on fire. And they were signaling with fire, which they were.
And I went and I just thought... And I was so scrambled and so exhausted and so tired. I went over and got up. I thought, are you kidding me? I have to rescue people in addition to what's already going on here. But when I read the story, they were just having engine trouble. But in my mind for the last 12 years, their boat was sinking and on fire. I totally made that up. That wasn't happening at all. It's amazing. I mean, that's a big difference from an engine problem. They were signaling with fire, but their boat wasn't sinking. I mean, not according to my story, but in my mind. Still, talking to you right now, their boat was sinking. I saved these people from certain death. And that's not at all what happened. They had engine trouble and they were just going, hey, can you give us some help?
That is radically different.
Radically different. That's a huge difference. It paints
them in a different light. It paints the whole situation in a different light. It makes you more of a hero. Maybe that's part of it. It's interesting that you said they were signaling with fire. Because that's probably enough of a cue. A lot of these memories are basically little networks of almost micro memories. So one bit of it will be fire. One bit of it will be ship. One bit of it at sea, me rescue. And so little bits of those may actually expand to become, well, it's not just fire. It's them on fire. That's a better story. Maybe you told it like that once in the pub and that's enough for it to evolve.
I mean, it fascinates me. We had this grizzly bear thing with my dad when I was nine years old. We were up in Glacier Bay, Alaska. We were on this boat. We go to shore. I went to shore first. And there's so many fish going up the stream you could walk across them. And I'm so excited. I went back and I got a net. I thought I could just hang the net off the front of the dinghy and just catch salmon. And that didn't work. And so we went back in with a fishing pole. And my dad literally, I mean, there wasn't any bait on it. He just threw it in the river and hooked the fish. You know, it was there. It was solid with fish. And we were so, you know, enraptured by this that we didn't see there was a grizzly bear fishing just up the stream from us. And, you know, brown bears in that part of the world are the biggest in the world because they eat so well.
And they're massive. And I'm nine years old. And I'm yanking on my dad's pants going grizzly, grizzly, grizzly, grizzly, grizzly. And he looks up and he doesn't have his glasses on. And he goes, son, that's just a log. And then the grizzly stands up. Right? So this is all I remember all this. I'm nine. And then he just hucks the pole into the river because it's got this huge fish on it. And we run down the river and get in the dinghy. And when we get to the dinghy, the tide's gone out. So there's no water. And there's lots of pushing. And there's lots of panicking. And there's lots of when the bear comes, I'll let him eat me. And you go back to the boat. You know, there's all this heroism, you know. But when he tells the story, the bear chases us. The bear didn't chase us. The bear was fishing. The bear had plenty to eat.
He didn't care that we were even there. He just looked at us. And I don't even remember him standing up. But, you know, as the years go by, he tells this story all the time. And it got more and more and more radical. And now I wonder, talking to you, does his brain really remember that the bear chased us? Or did that, you know, or he told the story once. And that's how he, does he really remember it that way? Because I remember that the bear never chased it. We never saw the bear again. And I know, I think I know that that's a fact. I don't remember ever seeing that bear again. We ran down the river and got in the boat.
Yeah, I think we have to be a bit aware that we probably go, cool bullshit. He's lying. You know, he's just telling a tall tale. But you know what? I think having done this, there's a lot of people really believing memories of things that never happened.
Yeah, like the fire guys. Honestly, that shocked me when I read the story. I went, wait, what? That doesn't sound like what happened. But obviously it is. I would have written it down that I'd save people from a burning ship if that's what had happened. You know, that sounds way better. It's
not the
way it worked,
is it? I saved someone from a burning ship, but I'm going to write it down as a kind of slightly lamer version where I'm just, yeah.
No, that's not what I would have done. No, exactly. I mean, it just blows my mind, you know? Yeah.
And then also
there was a lot of crossover. You know? I did this trip twice more in the ensuing years, and there were things from the other trips that, in my mind, had happened on the first. You know? It all got messed up. Yeah.
Pretty wild. It can be like just putting a bit of a drop of blood in a glass of water, and then it bleeds through the whole thing. Yeah. One little detail can suddenly get added to the mix. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It seems that pessimistic people are slightly less vulnerable to these false memories. Interesting. The optimistic ones, probably because they're more critical. Yeah. But also, when you're in a good mood, you're more likely to believe a false memory, it appears to me. Ah. So, yeah. So, mood
really affects them.
Mood is all part of it as well, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tom de Dorlodot, we were talking about, you know, he'd added a few bits to his pre-flight checks, and one of them was like, you really need to check in on your feelings, on your emotions before you launch, you know? It's not just helmet, harness, hang point. What's going on in your head? And what's going on in your body as well? Are you hungry? If you're hungry, you can become hangry. If you're hangry, you become angry. If you're angry, you make rash decisions. You know? Yeah. All of these things have consequences. We have to be kind of aware of them when we're flying, don't we?
Yeah, we really do. I like this idea of kind of pre-flight checks in that you have something that is a signal for, I'm not in it today. This isn't right. Yeah. A buddy of mine has a three thing. You know, if I have messed up three things, and these can be super minor, you know? Your Velcro isn't stuck on right, you know? Or you don't have your charger plugged in before you take off, whatever. Just three things. That's, boom. Okay, wait a minute. Something is wrong. Something is wrong with my head, and I'm not in the right frame of mind. And maybe it's not enough. The problem is then is, okay, is that enough to not fly? Or is that just a real check in?
I'm going to sit down for five minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, and, you know, assess. Because, you know, in the ex-Alps, something like that, there have been so many times where, you know, I feel fine. And I'm doing the air quotes for those of you listening. You can't see Matt and I right now. But, you know, and yet you're massively dehydrated, or massively tired, or massively hangry, or whatever. All these things that are compounding things that, you know, you don't really often recognize until the race is over. And you go, wow, that was a close call, that one, you know, that we had up there, the coal.
Well, it's like, it is just like slices of Swiss cheese, isn't it? With the holes in them. And if you get enough holes lining up with one another, you go through the big gap. And that's where you have the bad accident, isn't it? You know, that's the Swiss cheese model. Yeah. I think, you know, you don't want to go.
If I don't win. If I don't meet these exact conditions, I'm not going to fly, that's not really going to be viable. But I think the key thing is that you get there. And you have you give yourself the time to really think through, you know, not only that are the conditions okay, but is my head in the right space, you know, and then you make a real decision, the decision that you're aware of, rather than just a my, I think my biggest problem is, I tend to race out the car, throw my kit on the ground. Think I'm going to miss having on clamber into my harness, few cursory checks and go. I know that's that can be one of my vulnerabilities.
FOMO. Yeah, just a bit of FOMO drives me to rush things and then off I go. And then that straps around the wrong way, you know, you know, it's going to happen in advance. It's ridiculous. But you do it anyway. So you have to go when you just give yourself those 10 minutes to run through everything. You know, what's my problem? What's my head telling me as well?
How does confidence differ from optimism in your models? Is that one of the 29 things?
Well, overconfidence, there is an overconfidence bias. An overconfidence bias would mean that you are likely to blame bad things on external factors and good things and describe good things to yourself. And that can be kind of a feature of over optimism. Okay. I think we're all aware of, you know, people will, there are some people who will always go, it was always, it was the gust. It was this. It was something else's fault. Someone went here. And you need to check that, don't you? Hmm. But I think also, as you, you know, in a more colloquial sense.
In a more colloquial way, as you, as your skills develop, you before you become more confident to put yourselves in more challenging situations. But you have to make sure that those situations are all always roughly aligned with your level of confidence and ability, don't you?
Yeah. And that's the whole flow concept, isn't it? It's
really good as well, I think. I think that's really useful. Do you use that flow? Do you think about it? Yeah.
I think about it a lot. Yeah.
You know,
most of my best things have happened in a very nice flow state. Yeah. That I haven't consciously, you know, enabled. You know, it's something I've studied and I work on and we talk a lot about it on the podcast, but it's, you know, it definitely, there are, I mean, one of, one of many reasons, but I think the biggest reason the X-Alps is so addictive and, and things like that are so addictive is just the, the amount of flow. You get, which of course has all the other side benefits, the endorphins and the dopamine and all the things, because you're, you're basically in that state, even when it's bad for an extended period of time, it could be, you know, just 12 days of being a lot, you know, having a lot of flow.
And one of the things that maybe your book even talks about, but it's, you know, the, something I've brought up a lot on the show is coming down from that is for me has been brutal. I'm just awful, you know, and I have been fortunate. I don't suffer from any kind of clinical depression or at least that I know of that kind of thing, but boy, it's close. I mean, you know, the, the days after the race, you know, there's the high of the achievement and the whole thing, but you know, there, there was not much harder in my life than getting to Monaco in 2015 and the next day, you know, well now what do I do? This sucks. It's hot, it's concrete and it's over. And my whole, everything. The team breaks up and everybody goes home. And now what?
I mean, it's just, and you know, and you can see even Chrigel who's talked about it as well in the same thing, you know, what most of these guys are doing to cover and girls to cover for that. It's just the next race. Yeah. They're not really dealing with it. They're just getting back into training and going to the next one, you know, the next distraction.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, you know, what would put. You in a flow state would basically scare the complete shit out of me. So we're obviously very different flying standards, you know? And so for everyone, someone might go into flow, I guess, you know, if they're a beginner doing a top to bottom, you know, everyone will find that, you know, perfect line between, you know, skills and the level of a task at a different rate. But I totally, I'm really familiar with what you're talking about there. They come down afterwards, you know? Yeah. I
mean, it's, you know, I, I've never been an abuser either, but it's gotta be very similar to coming off, you know, a really good drug. Um, and, and the down is, is it, it's a very, it's very intense.
Yeah. Just, um, even just an hour up at cloud base or something and all your memory, all your, all your worries just seem to evaporate when you're in that kind of state then. And then when you land, there's a little bit of, you get some euphoria and then. Yeah. You can feel the real world to the rushing in to fill the void again. Very
quickly. Yes. Very quickly. It all comes rushing back. I mean, I asked you about confidence too, because it's, it's an interesting one. Um, and that we really rely on it. You don't, you wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to go flying on a day where I wasn't feeling pretty confident. Um, you know, that would be a red flag. And I guess one of the other reasons these hike and fly things are so addictive. And I'm sure comps are the same, uh, for a lot of people is that the, you know, you get in a level of confidence in the X-Alps that is completely insane. I mean, I can handle anything and I'm not bragging. Everybody's like that in that race. You get to this point where it doesn't matter what the weather throws at you.
You got it. And you just, you do the craziest shit over and over and over and over again, where, you know, in the nine months of hard training. I would never do fly in those conditions. And that's why we go so good. Cause he does. I mean, he trains in that stuff, but I don't have that move. You know, I don't have that confidence level when I'm just training. I can't get there. You know, when it, if it's just nasty and awful and over the back and cross and overdeveloping, I'm not going to go fly. That's just, that's taking your life into your hand. You're going to possibly die. Well, what's the difference? Weird. But then you'll do it in the race over and over and over and over again.
Yeah. So when you do that in the race, so you actually making, do you think you're actually making decisions or are you just competing? And that's it. You just go in.
Really good question. Yeah. Really good. I mean, there have definitely been, you know, times where, okay, this is, I'm scared, you know, but, uh, but boy, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a head space that is really outrageous and, and, and I'm sure very addictive and, and very. Powerful. Um, is it, you just get in this mode where, you know, when Paul Guescher Bauer landed in the river, I was right behind him and chatted with him. It just didn't throw him off a bit, you know, you, you, you know, his, his eyes, you know, it was in him, it was in his face, it was in his thing, but just no big deal. But when, but at any other time, I think it would have been a pretty big Denali think it would have gotten the car and gone home and sat down with his wife and gone.
Hmm.
Yeah. Oh,
well too much, you know?
Yeah. No, that's, that's really interesting. Isn't it? Um, yeah. Whether in the race, you just competitiveness.
Yeah. Is that the thing? That's a good question. We did do a chapter on kind of keeping up with the Joneses, you know, this whole idea that, you know, that you will, you compete with those around you and the people around you really, you know, really important. They really. Yeah. More than anything else. They influence who you are and how you think, you know, your friends, family, your peers. And it's quite difficult to break out from that, you know, that other group. Hmm. It's quite hard to make a stand to say, I don't want to do what everyone else is doing. Yeah. I think that's relevant for paragliding as well, isn't it? Cause you know, you're saying in the race, you start behaving in a completely different way.
You do stuff. You wouldn't dream of doing if you were just at home. Similarly on launch, you might stand there and going, well, I don't like the look of that. It looks really gnarly, but everyone else is flying. Or you may be on launch going, looks totally fine to me. Um, I have flown this site before and it's looked like that. I do have the skills. I have looked at the weather and everyone else just seems to be doing that kind of car park talk, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The whole, you know, crown, crown suck game. Yeah. And I mean, and that's, and that's where the confidence comes into play that, you know, in a, on the good side, you know, you don't want to be overconfident, but it's also, you know, when you show up and it's really cross quite nasty and, and it's, uh, you know, but when you, and you can show up and go, yeah, I've trained for that. I know I'm going to pull, I'm not going to get plucked and I know I'm going to nail this. And I'm gonna take a little bit more time with my gear and make sure I don't have anything screwed up. But you know what? What, where, where you can just, I got it, you know, and you look like Chrigel launching and, uh, and you know, you've done it a million times and that's the confidence you want versus I'm not sure if I got that move. Yeah. That's a, that's a really scary place to be.
Yeah. I guess this comes back to the kind of the, you know, that having, being a little bit pessimistic, running through the potential problems, like getting plucked, like if I launch an across, am I going to end up in the tree? Or, you know, dragged or just looking like an idiot. I've done that loads of times. Uh, and then going, well, what am I going to do about it? You know, and going, I guess this is Chrigel again as well, isn't it? I'm just going to fly, try and find that little hole in the lee side rotor that I can fly through behind the spike back. And I will keep doing it until I can do it. And the more you practice, you know, if you come up with a plan and go, let's be a bit pessimistic. Where are my weak points? Well, it's launching cross.
It's landing in small spaces. And then you go, okay, well now being honest about that, I can start training for though to make those things better and relieve some anxiety and risk in the process. Because we tend to be most afraid of the things we don't understand. Sure. You know?
Yeah. So memory, so memories are really foul. Overconfidence can play a bad role. Yeah.
We don't know what we're doing, you know, or how we're making decisions. Intuition.
Intuition. Yeah.
Changing your mind, you know, vulnerable to confirmation bias. You know, we look at, we prioritize information that reinforces our preexisting beliefs. Okay. So be aware of that one. Yeah. You know, if everyone tells you that, no, you know, if you believe that, or you really want to fly the east face of a certain mountain and someone tells you that it's okay, then you're probably more likely to, you'll give their advice more weight than maybe two people telling you that you shouldn't.
Because you really want to do it. Yeah. You know?
You believe
it's okay. You did it before. One guy said it's okay. Two said, hmm, but you know, I'm more likely to go with the one that reinforces my preexisting belief. So. That,
that one, that one got me in a heap of trouble. My first big offshore passage, this was 1999. I was up in Vancouver getting the boat ready. And there was a guy on the docks that had done a whole bunch of offshore racing. Kit, I still remember his name. And he had done, he had helped us with wind generators and some solar panels and stuff.
And everyone, I mean, everybody there, a lot of really seasoned sailors said, there's one way to go down the west coast of North America at this time of year, because it was October. It was getting into the storm season and then, you know, storms come across pretty regularly from Japan that time of year. And they said, you go, you hug the coast and you go into port, you know, every, you know, between the storms. And, you know, there's, there's all, all the ports along the Oregon and in Washington and Northern California are all really bad sandbars, you know, so the, if the waves are big, they can get pretty hairy and, and the charts are pretty unreliable because the, the, the, the, there's so much swell and so much activity, they're moving the sandbars all over the place. So you can't really rely on them.
It's a really easy place to get hung up. And, but you call the coast guard if it's big and, and they come out and they guide you in. You know? They're not really getting their help. They're not towing you in or something, but they, that's what they're there for. And, and especially at that time of year, everybody said that, I mean, dozens of people, because we, this was our first big blue water passage. I was asking everybody, I didn't know what the, I didn't know what we were doing. And this one guy, Kit said, now clear the straight to one, if you could go 200 miles off shore and just deal with whatever comes and just battle it out, you know, and, and, and that's what we did because that sounded so cool. Yeah. You know? And before, you know, when you go to sea for a long time, you get more and more and more humble all the time. You get more and more and more scared because the ocean is big and there's nothing you can do against it.
But back then I just like, ah, I'm going to have a battle and that'll be great. And we got our asses kicked and it was just, we had all the information we needed, you know, all we needed to do was do what everybody said. But this one guy said, and that just sounded more sexy to me and I've paid the price for that one. A bunch of stuff. I wanted to hear that. No, let's battle it out. You know, deal with whatever comes.
I know, you know, we exactly, we do that. I think we're probably aware we do that with our politics or whatever. You know, I read the paper most naturally, most enthusiastically that reflects my political views. You know? Sure. Of course I do. Um, and you know, I now make deliberate attempt to read the other side as well as much as possible. But, you know, we're saying it is paragliding. There it is. Isn't it? Or sailing. It's just one guy said it's fine. And I definitely wanted to throw myself off that mountain or, you know, make that crossing. So I'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. Why? What was that about?
Yeah. Interesting. We have, uh,
brain's a weird thing, isn't it?
Yeah. I
think we probably just, you know, we kind of, we've kind of, we've kind of, we've kind of, you know, we fetishize intelligence. We fetishize the rational mind, you know, but actually there's a lot of other things at play and, um, intelligence doesn't always lead you to make the right decisions. Rational doesn't always, we constantly go into, you know, intuitions. You know, it's not, it's not wrong. It's not right. We just should be aware of it.
Does IQ
have anything to do with it? Um, it comes in, it comes into play. obviously iq intelligence um it helps us to make it can help us to make good decisions but you know it's not everything um and i think you know sometimes we can give it a bit too there are plenty for example there are plenty you can imagine there'd be plenty of people with a really high iq who'd make absolutely blundering decisions paragliding or doing anything else in life sure guarantee you it doesn't it doesn't guarantee that you make good decisions by any any stretch did you
guys did you guys approach this at all in a sense so i've been thrown around this kind of wonky unscientific life you know when i when i talk to people but it seems to me you know and i've been on the planet now 50 years it seems to me that leading a pretty good life if you have all kinds of kinds of luck massive amount of luck where you're born who you're born to and there's all these things that have nothing to do with our character or who we are or how good we are at navigating you know this thing we're trying to do called life but it does seem like making good decisions i would put up there in the really high priority part of it because you know when you look at folks who are really struggling you can often trace that back to a bad decision not always we you know there's there's all kinds of suffering that has nothing to do with with decision making but um it does seem like who you partner with
having children where you live there's a lot of things where you work there's a lot of things that decisions are a big part of coming back to happiness joyfulness however we want to define it um you know and there seem to be people who just constantly make bad decisions yeah uh versus more good than bad i'm wondering if if the approach at the book would you know did did it help you understand that would do do you even agree with that or is it way just i
would i'd probably just i i'm slightly less of a believer in the kind of good versus bad decision thing um because what is a good decision for me might be a bad decision for someone else you know each to their own but i think the important thing is is that you actively make decisions good or bad make them yeah you actually make them you sit there and you decide i'm going to make a decision and i'm going to own it it might be a bad one but if you keep making decisions and you you know you'll think you're going to make a decision and you're going to own it and you're going to own it actively thinking about those decisions then that that for me is a positive thing um rather than just sort of blundering through without considering it at all i
like that you said that there i maybe just timing wise but i'm listening to this this whole thing on time management that sam harris had on his on his waking up app and uh the the guy i can't remember his name now but he is a wonderful series and the the that was his thing he said he said you know make the decision that's one way to get a whole much time back is just to not stew on stuff because we're we're given so many different there's 30 kinds of mustard in the store these days you know if you if you worry about the mustards you're never going to make that and you're going to be disappointed with the decision you make so grab one yeah do it make a
decision if it's big stuff like um you know your partner do you move to the states rather than stay in the uk whatever it is do i do the x-ops again um yeah i think you just need to don't get don't get into a situation where you're kind of flushed down that metaphorical hanging valley and your only option is to end up in the tree you know but before you get to that point in life go i am actively going to make a decision i'm going to listen to my intuitions my gut feelings on it but i'm also going to engage my rational mind a bit on this big decision because it's a biggie yeah and once you own the decision it's kind of like well it could go bad or it could go good but at least it's my decision you know i'm just going to ask how how does i'm not a leaf just you know getting flown in the wind yeah exactly so
given that we're so fallible and we make such bad decisions all the time um how about getting help from other people who have all the same biases and all these other people who have the same biases you know is should you or is that just confusing no
i think uh the the more you you need to be aware of the yeah i guess put simply um and they're like christmas cracker size you know solution here i suppose the big one is be a pay attention to what you're thinking you know be aware that your mind is fallible in all these extraordinary ways and listen and engage with other people who are different to you who have different perspectives um who exist outside your immediate bubble you know and and i don't mean your family bubble i mean that you know that echo chamber that we can all fall into is like listen to other people think broadly um engage challenge yourself even if that's i'm going to read a thriller when i normally only read you know a history book it can be that simple you know question your routines and habits you know we we
have we fall into routines because again we can't make decisions constantly all day you know do we really need by falling into a routine like i eat usually for breakfast every morning i don't i often don't have anything because i'm too lazy even to make it you you know people eat musely every day why because they don't want to think about what to have for breakfast every morning because they want to think about something else you know these are sort of routines making sense but when you fall into bad habits whether that you know it's that paragliding or the rest of life you need to be aware that you're in a bad habit and similarly that you can create good habits as
well by giving yourself little cues and rewards for the type of behavior that you want to see in yourself you know it's often about a reward um
yeah let me ask a tough one here i think maybe um i think a lot of people fly for the escape right we kind of touched on this earlier a little bit that it's it's one of the few things i've done in my adventure sports activity that you can't really do anything else you know i mean when you're when you're flying you're flying you're engaged um even if you're just ridge soaring you know it's pretty hard to think about other stuff um how does that tie into what you're talking about right now it's just kind of to me it's being mindful and being conscious of you know the the holes in our thinking and what we're trying to accomplish and you know just making decisions um i don't know if that those tie together very well and on the one hand you know you're trying to be unmindful because you're just jesus i gotta get away from this whatever the stress at work you know and and i'm reading from you that that could be quite dangerous you know you're you're you're you're you're you're escaping by doing something that is pretty risky yeah
are you saying that are you asking whether if you go are you just lazily running away from life's problems by going yes yes i think we all deserve a holiday when we're in a privileged enough situation to have one aren't we you know sometimes we just need that break whatever it is with some people it'll be it certainly wouldn't be flying it would be picking up a book or going fly fishing or um whatever it is they can do um but for us yeah i think it's okay that we take a break from our problems and go in and hell ourselves you know mindfully off the mountain um but i think all of these lessons as well can be applied to our life and to flying you know and so beforehand whether it's what are my bad habits when i fly how sharp i am when i fly i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know for my intuitions when i fly and how much should i listen to them um when i look back over my flights did i just make up the reasoning for the decisions i made can i trust my memory of them afterwards did i just do it because i feel i wanted to keep up with the joneses or because i'm too optimistic if i was more pessimistic would i think more about risk and how to mitigate it you know so you can kind of apply these things to your flying and probably be a bit safer and better at it while you do it and it can still it's obviously still fun
i hope yeah
yeah and then that's a that's a pretty good reason to just do it right there yeah just for the fun so matt yeah fascinating uh the the book you all is is are you thinking clearly 29 reasons you aren't and what to do about it by miriam frankel and our guest matt warren check it out it's out in hardcover and it's uh this is fascinating buddy i really appreciate your time and i know we've just touched the bare surfaces of this stuff so looking forward to reading your book i wasn't able to do it before we did this podcast but can't wait to read it and uh can't wait to explore more of this stuff with you in the future but thanks very much i appreciate your time
always a pleasure gavin lovely to see you and speak with you no one else can see you congratulations
on the book as you know i just went through that with team and it's a big that's a it's a big chore yeah
i mean it gets into it writing a book definitely gets in the way of flying
yes absolutely yeah anyone
anyone who wants to do more flying should do less writing of a book that's the ultimate lesson before
we sign off here is there anything you want to say about where to get it where to find out more that kind of thing you you sent me a website but it looks like it's on amazon it looks like it's on yeah it's in
uh it's uh it's about probably if you're wherever you are in the world um search it up on your own channels the uk is the easiest place to buy it at the moment and now it's spreading its way around the world but amazon us has it in kindle form uh audio book and you can get it wherever you are
from booksellers as well matt
thank you very much appreciate it man and it's good to see you yeah
good to see you too take care if
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