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PARAMATIC THINKING AND LEARNING (Unplugged)

A conversation between Andy Hunt & Moe Abdou
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Pragmatic Thinking and Learning (Unplugged) Andy Hunt with Moe Abdou !

About Andy Hunt & Moe Abdou

Andy Hunt

Andy Hunt has been on a quest to discover ways to make software

development easier. What he uncovered was an entirely different way to
learn. Andy is a programmer turned consultant, author and publisher. He
has authored award-winning and best-selling books, including The
Pragmatic Programmer and six others, including the his latest, the
popular Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.

Moe Abdou

Moe Abdou is the creator of 33voices — a global conversation about things

that matter in business and in life. moe@33voices.com

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Andy, as I mentioned to you, I’m eternally grateful for the work that
you’ve been doing for me personally. At the same time, the more that I see
the evolution of the models that you’re creating, the more excited that I
get about learning models that I think could be accessible to entrepreneurs
and business creators all over the world.

I’d like to get your thinking initially on — when I look at our society, I
really get the sense that we’re becoming more of a regressive as opposed
to a progressive learning society. I’m curious what you think about our
collective learning evolution.

First of all, thanks for the glowing words, that’s always a great way to start.
I’m glad to know that I’ve been at least somewhat helpful with the writings and
stuff I have produced.

I’m sure your question about where society is headed — it’s a really interesting
look because on the one hand, you know there is that wonderful quote by a
science fiction author William Gibson who said, The future is already here, it’s
just not very evenly distributed. I think that’s very much the case here. There
are some great bright spots.

We’ve got children in school. They’re school age, to see what they are learning
with math and science in particular they are learning much more advanced
stuff, at much younger ages than we were exposed to when we were growing
up. They are being asked to be much more creative and inventive and a lot less
leaning towards that sort of just parrot the facts back which was very popular
for a very long time. It’s just, memorize all these dates, spit it back at us and
that counts as a education. Of course it doesn’t. Creativity and invention are
critical to learning and critical to education.

There are certainly some spots where we’re seeing more of that in the
educational system and even with adult education and that’s very encouraging.
I like to see that. There are dangers as well. There is a dangerous political
environment of a kind of aggressive anti-intellectualism that seems to be taking
hold.

That’s very frightening because in a lot of subcultures in areas in the country,

it’s not cool for kids to be smart. Your peers will ostracize you if you try to be
smart or try to be smarter than them and then you see some political figures
who are kind of taking this tact too that smart isn’t great. That’s a real danger
because that’s the kind of thing that takes you back to the Dark Ages if you let
that take hold. So that’s kind of the frightening side.

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If you look overall, you know, there are bright spots in education but for the
most part, we still don’t really do it as well as we could. There is a lot of
research from neuroscience and brain physiology and what not that we know
we’re aware of, you know, it’s 10-year-old, 20-year-old research but we don’t
take advantage of it.

Some very simple things like they have done studies about teenagers and how
the hormones affect their sleep cycles. So the sort of stereotype of teenagers
wanting to sleep in late and stay up all night is not just some kind of
preference or some kind of thing they’re going through, it’s actually got
chemical basis. It’s what their hormones are doing to them.

Teenagers would learn and be much more effective in school if school started
later; if it started at 9 or 10 instead of starting at 7 or 8 and went later into the
evening. That would match their physical reality much better. But we don’t do
that because it’s not convenient.

That’s the kind of stuff that’s really fascinating to me. The more that I see
the work that people like you are doing and the more that I embrace
myself just in these studies, it seems like they’re very relevant studies to
try to improve our education system as a whole yet it seems like we’re
going backwards.

I know it’s been a few years now since pragmatic thinking came out. What
are some of the biggest insights that you have gained personally from
people who you’re exposed to, who have read the book?

The thing that really strikes me — I’ve had more people email me with their
comments and their experiences and their thoughts. I’ve had more people
email me about this book than any other book that I’ve written. I have a
written a total of I think 7 or 8 books now. This by far, got the most reaction,
at least a more personal reaction from readers.

For the most part, the thing that really impacted them, the thing that really
struck them was that it was eye opener. That they haven’t ever thought about
these sorts of issues. They hadn’t thought about their own learning or their
own thinking.

In a way, thinking is sort of like breathing. You take it for granted. You just
sort of do it. You don’t actually think about it as itself. Ironically, our natural
tendency is to do both badly. Westerners in particular don’t breathe as
effectively as you should which affects cognition because you’re not getting as

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much oxygen as you should when you should. We don’t think about thinking as
much.

Most people would right in, they’re like, this is incredible because I would
never even considered this realm of study that these ideas, you know, the fact
that you can do stuff to make it better, to make it more effective. There are
things you can do to sabotage your thinking and your learning that we do by
default and didn’t even know about.

So just opening up the awareness to this whole field, I think has been the
biggest impact that this book has had on readers that they have shared with me.

What do you know today that you didn’t five years ago about how the
brain works? I know this entire field of neuroscience is probably advancing
more than a whole lot of other scientific fields nowadays.

It’s interesting because I mean, sure there is a lot of new little discoveries
being made constantly. Every time you pick up something like Scientific
America or anyone of the online sites that supplies these sorts of things. There
are all kinds of neat new little discoveries that they’re making.

The funny thing is the tremendous ones don’t usually arrive with much fanfare
because you know, what’s that great line…it’s like great discoveries are never
heralded with eureka. It’s always, “Oh, that’s peculiar.” You find that people
say, “I wonder what that means.” There will be stuff 5-10 years from now,
we’ll look back and say, “Wow, that was the discovery that opened up this
whole thing and now it’s just like, “Huh, that’s kind of strange.”

There are certainly growing interest and appreciation for neuroplasticity for
the idea that the brain is constantly rewiring and reconfiguring itself. For many,
many years, it was thought that you had a fixed number of neurons in the brain
that you couldn’t grow new neural tissue and that was, you know, you had
what you had and that was the end of it. It turns out that’s not true.

You can grow new neurons all the time if there is a reason for it. If you’re in a
sensory rich environment and you’re doing something that needs it, your brain
will rewire itself. If you’re in a drab grey cubicle without much stimulation
then you won’t grow new gray matter because you don’t need it.

There has been growing interest in just how flexible the brain is in rewiring
itself and that’s been really fascinating. They have done things where they
have taken a video camera and wired it to the back of some guy’s tongue who
was blind. Wire the camera to his tongue and his brain rewired itself to pass

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that information up as imaging information so he could see well enough to

drive a car through cones in a parking lot.

Amazing.

Stuff like that is just it’s absolutely incredible. So it turns out not only can you
rewire your brain to suit the task at hand, but that actually happens fairly
constantly.

If you’re a musician for instance, and you play scales as a warm up, as
something to do, you’ll have areas of your brain so devoted to playing scales
the non-musician won’t have. It just wires itself because that’s what you’re
doing. Whichever you’re doing the most of, it will wire it to support that.

They have done studies to show that just thinking about it mental practice is
just as good as physical practice. They did a study with piano players, Olympic
athletes use this, and mentally will sort of figure, you know, pretend they’re
going down there ski, run or their luge run or whatever their sport is.

They have done functional MRIs to show that you get the same changes in the
brain whether you physically go through the practice regimen or you simply
imagine you’re going through the practice regimen which is absolutely
incredible to me because that leads you to the point where what you think and
how you think it causes physical and chemical changes in the brain.

You can actually rewire your brain just by thinking about it effectively, which is
just stunning when you realize the implications of that. This comes out at all
kinds of interesting places. Yes they do studies about this and they have shown
this under laboratory conditions but then weird things kind of pop out of the
sides.

For instance, there is a problem in the pharmaceutical industry where typically

part of the scientific process when you try out a new drug, you’ll have a
control group where you give them a placebo, an inert pretend medicine so
that the subject doesn’t know if they are getting the real drug that you’re
testing or not. You can use that as a control group.

The problem is they found in a lot of cases the patients who were given the
placebo got well too. And in many cases, actually showed greater improvement
at whatever condition they were trying to treat than the new experimental
drugs that they were testing. Again, this is one of those, “That’s peculiar. How
can that be?”

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It turns out it’s the same sort of thing, your brain thinks that the placebo is
going to help rid you of disease and these are physical diseases. These aren’t
just mental issues. These are cancers. These are ulcers. These are actual
physical things.

But if your brain is convinced that this will help, it will rewire itself, send out
the right hormones, play with the T cells, do whatever — I don’t know what’s
involved but whatever it does, the brain can heal the body based basically just
on a suggestion.

That’s amazing to me. I know that, as an avid sports fan, we hear a lot
about it, we see it all the time in athletes as you mentioned this whole
visualization game and the ability to rewire their thinking. The thing
that’s most surprising to me, if that truly is an option for all of us and we
have the ability as you have mentioned, that our thinking ultimately
becomes thoughts.

It’s just surprising to me why more of society doesn’t understand that and
doesn’t take advantage of creating more optimistic lives for themselves
and becoming more smarter as individuals and doing just those tiny things
that you have mentioned that could have a dramatic impact on their life.

It is absolutely amazing. The problem is the flipside, the converse, is true as

well. If you dwell on negativity, and negative thoughts, and negative
projections, and negative fantasies or what might happen, that has an impact
too, a very detrimental impact. The knife cuts both ways.

It sounds a little Peter Pan-nish, you know, you think happy thoughts you can
fly and if you think really bad thoughts, you can literally give yourself ulcers,
and cancers and whatever else. That seems to be a good bit of how it works.

Andy, is there any studies that you have been privy to that maybe leads us
to think that as human beings, we’re wired more to think negatively and
cautiously as we are more optimistically and boldly.

I can certainly see there being a bit of an evolutionary advantage there. If you
go back to a more primal state where you’re running around in the jungles,
there is a real possibility of a tiger or something jumping out at you. That’s a
very different context, a very different environment than sitting in an office.
You see this a lot when they talk about studies with stress and fighting stress
and these sorts of things. We are really wired for action.

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When you get, an upsetting email comes in. You’ve got a mad customer or the
IRS has discovered some discrepancy or whatever else. You get some email
that’s panicking you, putting you into a panic. The way your brain responds is
to shutdown unnecessary features like higher order thinking.

It’s going from the basis, okay, you’re scared that the adrenaline is running
while you must be in the jungle and there is something ready to pounce on you.
So divert all the blood flow to your legs, shut off the stomach, shut off the
higher thinking and book it so you don’t get eaten. Okay, fine. That’s a great
response if you’re in that context of jungle life or death situation. You’re
sitting working in an office in a cubicle at your desk with your email, shutting
off the thinking is a very bad physical response.

They have actually done some really interesting studies on the pressure from
deadlines. You don’t need to have a tiger jump out at you to shutdown your
thinking. The pressure of a deadline with serious consequences will do the
same thing. So if it’s the night before a deadline and you’re rushing frantically
to get it finished, if you’re panicked about it, you know, the stakes are high
and you have concerns over this, your brain will actively shut off the higher
order thinking.

You will be dumber the night before a deadline than you were the week before
or the week after or whatever. It’s the worst time to try to think and be
creative and inventive because your mind is working against you.

That’s fascinating. It really is fascinating. It really does validate a lot of

the thinking of trying to calm your mind on a regular basis so when
situations like that occur, the surprise doesn’t lead you to those types of
methods.

Exactly. It’s interesting to me to see things like training in yoga and meditation
techniques and these sorts of things. There was an article several years ago
now where one of the Fortune 500 companies started paying for in-house yoga
sessions for their employees because they had read a study that said that
would help lower healthcare costs. Of course, anyone will do anything to lower
healthcare costs so they’re like, yeah, bring it on. Apparently, that went very
well for them.

People, we have this industrialized mindset that — well that can’t possibly help.
It’s not a machine, it’s not a drug. It’s something kind of soft and easy that
couldn’t possibly be as good as something more serious, something more
industrialized. It’s an unfortunate bias that creeps into a lot of this stuff where
many times, you have to let go of a problem to solve it. You have to do

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something easier to solve a more complex problem. It’s not intuitive and we
don’t go for it that way but often that’s the right answer.

It’s interesting because you talk about even just like problem solving, right.
Suppose you got some very complex problems and you’re trying to simplify
them and solve them. The mathematician — I always get his name wrong
because he’s French — Henri Poincare had this technique where he would take
some complex proof he was trying to solve. He would break it down in parts
and get to a part where he was stuck and he had no answer for it.

As he described it, he would hold that bit of the problem in his mind but let go
of it. Don’t think so hard. Don’t over think it. Don’t struggle to, in an industrial
sense, bang out a solution but just hold the idea lightly in his head and then go
for a walk. He would go out for a walk and halfway through, it would pop into
his mind and say, “Oh, that’s what the answer is.” He would run back to his
office jot down a nice a little bit and then move on to the next one and do the
same thing.

As it turns out, a lot of really good problem solving ability lies in our kind of
preconscious mechanisms in the brain. You have to give them sort of enough
airspace for them to work. I ask programmers this all the time. I say, if you’re
stuck on a hard problem you’re trying to debug or a hard architectural issue
and you’re sitting there banging at the computer and you’re stuck, what
happens? You give up, you go to lunch, you leave for the day, you’re halfway
down the hall and what happens? Bang! The answer pops into your head. It’s
because you are away from the computer, you’re walking, you’re strengthening
different sensory input. You’re not just sitting there at the computer.

There is a bit of a problem when you’re sitting at the computer and you are
faced with the keyboard and you’re typing letters and reading letters. You’re
locking your mental processes into a particular mode that blocks creative
thinking.

So when you’re stuck on a problem, the worst place you can be is in front of
the computer. At least, in what we have seen as a traditional computer up to
now with keyboards and symbolic representation back and forth that locks your
brain in this particular mode.

You get up, you go for a walk, you go running, you go to the gym, you go whip
up an omelet, whatever one does for relaxation and then suddenly the answer
pops into your head because you have given room for those preconscious
processes to work on the problem and toss it up to you.

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I would say this kind of stuff has got to keep you everyday pretty engaged
because it’s not only very, very interesting work but it’s almost to the
point where it’s essential work. Do think strategically, we can rewire our
brains to get smarter?

Absolutely. Folks who are very smart, or recognized internationally as experts

in their field have done exactly that. It takes time and it takes deliberate
practice. That’s kind of a loaded phrase. We have always had the joke that a
lot programmers, say they have 10 years experience and it was really one year
of experience repeated nine times which doesn’t count.

You have to very deliberately with whatever your skill is, whatever you’re
doing, whatever you’re learning, whatever your profession is, you do something
that you know works, you take note of that, it fails, you figure out why. You
correct your performance and you do it again.

This constant cycling of deliberately practicing, failing, fixing, and doing it

again, you do that for enough hours and you are grooving the brain, you’re
setting up your mental processes, you’re getting to the point where you will be
an absolute expert in it.

If you look back at folks who do think came out of nowhere, that didn’t go
through this process, you look at Mozart or The Beatles or anyone like this.
They didn’t pop on the scene overnight. If you look back at Mozart, there was a
good 10-year period from when he sort of started before he actually had it
together. You look at his very earliest things that he composed from his,
what…4, 5, 6, something like that. Yeah, he did it but they weren’t great. It
was 10 years before he hit the greatness.

You look at The Beatles. You think, they burst on the scene at the time sort of
revolutionary sound in music but they have been playing in night clubs for 10
years before that, honing it, practicing it, changing it, fixing it, doing what you
need to do.

There is a realm of study that suggests you need the sort of equivalent of 10
years of deliberate practice to go from novice to expert in a given field. But it
has to be that very deliberate practice because what you’re doing is you are
actively rewiring the brain. You have built a mental model.

You’re trying something out and it doesn’t work then you fix it. You try it again.
You adjust the model in your head. You’re physically adjusting the connections
and the topology of your brain as you’re doing this - you are wiring yourself for
success. It takes awhile to get to a world class level it takes 10 years maybe

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but it absolutely can be done. There might be ways we can speed that up with
more research that gets done.

You’re a programmer. You’re a writer. You’re a dad. You’re a musician. It

seems like you know a heck of a lot about a lot. Talk to me a little bit
about the role of context in your life.

Context — to me that’s one of those really big words. It encompasses literally

everything. This is one of our kinds of problems we get to in the way we
typically think about things. We like to take things out of context very often to
study them. It’s a classic scientific bit. That you take something out of, you
know, its environment or out of the piece of the machine that’s in and study in
isolation to understand it and then you go on to understand the big thing. The
problem is that usually doesn’t work or many times, that doesn’t work.

Back before when I said, that for many years, they thought that you didn’t
grow new neurons in the brain ever. You reach some maximum number at
adulthood and that’s all you ever had because in the lab, they tried this on
primates and observed them and saw that they didn’t grow new neurons.

The problem was they were observing the primates out of context. They were
observing primates in sterile lab conditions in a cage. So what they were really
observing, was if you put a primate in a sterile lab cage they don’t grow new
neurons. Because ignoring the context extrapolated to — you don’t grow new
neurons period, which is not the case.

You put that same animal in its natural habitat, in its proper context, with a
sensory rich environment and they are growing new neurons all the time. You
have to be careful about taking things out of context to try to study them.

If you look at the discipline assistance thinking which I think is absolutely

critical for entrepreneurs, for anyone trying to get anywhere, you really need
to understand how systems thinking works. I think the best quote, I think it was
Peter Senge who said, everywhere we look we see straight lines but the world
is really made out of circles. Things affect each other and they come back and
affect what you were looking at initially. You got the reinforcing moves and
vicious cycles and all these sorts of things that we tend to kind of ignore.

The reason for that is kind of interesting too. We build new mental models
fairly easily. We see something and we build a mental model about how it
works but the side effect is that we’re really resistant to scrap existing mental
models.

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If you have an idea of how the world works whether it’s technical or political,
you know, whatever sphere it’s in, but if you got it hardwired, a model in your
brain that conservatives are right or liberals are right or whatever it might be,
all the facts in the world make it very hard for you to change that model who
are very resistant to throwing out existing mental models.

That’s one of the things that you need to be better at is a willingness to scrap
existing mental models of something that you’re learning or something that you
think and build in new ones. That’s really hard to do because we’re really not
wired to do it that way. We’re loathe to scrap any existing models that we’ve
got built.

Does the ability to be able to scrap some of these mental models and the
ability to do that kind of stuff, doesn’t it — the more we learn about
different things, I would think that would help us become a little bit more
smarter.

It absolutely does. The irony is this is something they refer to in martial arts
and those sorts of areas as keeping the beginner’s mind. It’s a real irony that
one of the key things that keeps an expert going is to keep a beginner’s mind,
to be open to possibilities, to be open to reconstructing your mental models to
be agile and flexible with change.

One of the worst things that can happen to an expert over time is that they
stop considering new things. They have seen this a hundred times before, it
always works like this and they get very fixed and very rigid in their thinking.
Time goes by, technology changes, society changes and they are still fixed in
sort of the old ways of doing things.

This is where you get that, I forget who said it but that wonderful saying about
scientific advancement that new ideas don’t ever really take hold until the
prior generation dies off. We’re not there to support it anymore and then the
new ideas have a chance to actually bloom and flourish. Like most picky things
there is a lot of truth behind that because it’s very easy to get stuck in a rut
and not have the beginner’s mind that’s open to possibilities.

There are two things that are key. You have to have the beginner’s mind where
you say, okay that’s great, you know, why? How does that work? Be open to the
possibility and avoid the issues with second order incompetence, which is a
lovely phrase. That’s the thing where you don’t know what you don’t know.
That’s a huge danger.

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I could point to some great public figures here who go out and blabber on, on
the TV. It’s quite clear that they are so ignorant that they don’t even know the
things that they are ignoring about.

That’s a whole other conversion we could have for hours.

It’s a whole another conversation. It’s really important to keep in mind that —
it has to be okay to say I don’t know. In fact, you want to do that. You want to
be comfortable with uncertainty. That’s one of the big things I think that helps
successful entrepreneurs get ahead is you can’t know everything, at least not
in this day and age. In older ages, it probably was possible to sort of know
everything maybe in the early 1800s but certainly not these days. You can’t
keep on top of everything even in a particularly narrow field.

In computing, 20-30 years ago, you probably could keep ahead of most
advances, most research and have at least a good general idea of “everything
that was going on.” There is no chance of that now. That’s blown. That’s just
not going to happen.

You have to be okay with the idea that there is a lot that you don’t know. That
most things you don’t know, and you’ll be uncertain about and you have to be
okay with that. Where it’s important you dig down and you try and figure it out.

How has your research impacted the way you work and the way you think?

I think for the most part, it has made me aware of the dangers of sort of
running on autopilot, not being deliberate and just kind of setting yourself on
auto and just letting it run.

One of my favorite quotes was decrying the fact that people go through their
lives kind of like robots a lot of the times without really seeing what’s
happening. The average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing,
moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odor or
fragrance and talks without thinking. You know who said that? Leonardo da
Vinci.

Certainly, I love that.

Da Vinci said that. Five hundred years ago, he complained that people talk
without thinking and that was long before Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, whatever.
It’s not a new problem. I think it’s exacerbated these days and especially —
this is another whole hour-long topic at least — we haven’t talked about the
gorilla in the room being the internet.

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There is some rather I think rather disturbing research on how the use of the
internet and how we interact with it is also physically changing our brains
because it would have to just like anything else. This is something that you’re
doing a lot of if you’re online, six hours, eight hours, 12, 14 hours a day that is
going to impact your brain and how it works and how it processes information.
Some of that could be positive change, some of it’s a negative change.

In particular, the ability to sort of deep read to take a longer work of an actual
book and sit and read it for some several hours, you know, most of us don’t
have the time to do that anymore. We’re used to this very type of information
gathering where it’s very shallow. We’re skimming across a bunch of websites,
we’re reading a paragraph here, a paragraph or two and we’re building a
mental model from this widely fragmented information.

There are some advantages to doing that and there are some big disadvantages
in losing the ability to deep read. How do we reconcile that? How does that
work out? I’m not sure but it’s a big thing. It may end up being the biggest
thing and we’re only dimly aware of it even now.

I’d like to close with, Andy — I’d like to stick on that topic just for a second.
I’d like to get your perspective. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who are
going to be listening to this, a lot of very successful, smart people. For
those who have an ambition this year to read lots of books, what advice do
you have for them that would enable them to retain more of what they
read actually apply it?

It’s funny, one of the things — this is pretty old school — the whole deal with
being able to remember stuff and be able to apply it and be able to work with
it is all about strengthening neural connections.

There are a couple of things that are well known to strengthen neural
connections. Strong emotion is one of them. This is why you will remember for
years possibly that bully in elementary school or that time you almost fell off
the cliff. Something that’s got a strong emotional connotation gets seared into
your memory. It has very strong connections to it.

If you’re reading about a subject that you’re passionate about that you really
care about, that’s make or break you’ll remember it much better. If you’re
reading some dry economics text that you could care less about, it ain’t going
to stick. It’s going to go in one ear and out the other. So strong emotions will
make you learn more effectively about what you’re reading for it to stick.

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Greater sensory involvement with the topic helps. So if you are reading
something, be doodling at the same time, draw little pictures not schematic
sorts of diagrams but just little pictures of what you’re reading to help put
your thoughts in perspective.

Writing and taking notes in general. This is a fascinating thing. It seems that
the act of writing notes is the important part whether or not you ever go back
and read them again, is less important. But the act of writing them, you are
again, strengthening connections.

If you put this together one of the most effective things I think if you’re
studying some new topic, you’re exploring something is to use a mind map as
you go along. This is one of those things in European countries, everyone knows
about mind maps. This is something they are thought in elementary and
primary school and they were comfortable with it. It’s a lot less visible here in
the U.S. for whatever reasons.

If you look up, you know, the classic book on it is Tony Buzan’s book on mind
mapping that there is plenty of stuff online, you can see how to do it. You
basically want to draw. You want to activate those portions of the brain
involved in drawing and note taking and put big arrows and circles and link
things together and do little doodles and pictures and what not and make it
very loose and very organic. Don’t try to make it look like a PowerPoint. Try to
make it look like something that’s very messy and organic because that’s what
it is.

If you do that, keep that mind map out. Say you read this book on some subject.
You’ve taken notes on it as a mind map form, leave it out on your desk. You’re
walking by it, you’ll ask - I wonder if these two things are related. You go to
the mind map, you can draw a line between them with a question mark and
then you go look it up and you find it and you put more notes and you draw
more stuff, you add color to it, you embellish it.

As you go through these exercises, it sounds kind of silly, it’s like, I have taken
notes and now this guy is telling me to go add color to my diagram. What good
is that? What you’re doing is you’re asking your brain to say, I want to work
with this material and classify it. I want to come up with relationships between
things.

So you’re actually mining the information, saying, okay, if I were to add color
to this drawing, what would it represent? What good would it do? Now you’re
actively looking for relationships in the information and you start to get insights.
Like, okay, I’ll color all these stuff red and this stuff green. Now you’re sitting

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Pragmatic Thinking and Learning (Unplugged) Andy Hunt with Moe Abdou !

here with a bunch of Crayolas on a piece of paper but you’re asking your brain
to do this very sophisticated in-depth analysis of the material that you’re
working on.

Andy, brilliant — absolutely brilliant. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for
your insights and I know that this field for you personally probably is just
evolving. If people just start to engage your thinking alone, I’m sure many,
many books would be forthcoming if that’s something you’re interested in.
I totally am grateful for your time.

Thank you so much for having me.

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