Interview with Peter Atwater - Nir And Far

Hello everyone. Welcome to the near and Far Podcast. This is Nir Eyal and today we have Peter Atwater. Peter Atwater is an adjunct professor of economics at William and Mary and president of Financial Insights, a consulting firm that advises institutional investors, major corporations and policymakers on how social mood affects decision making, the economy and the markets. A pioneer in securitization and a long term financial services executive, Peter's work on social mood and decision making has been featured in the Economist, Time magazine and the Financial Times. Peter, welcome to the near and Far podcast.

Thanks so much, Nir. Nice to see you.

Nice to see you as well. And most importantly, the reason for our conversation is that you have a new book coming out on August 1st called the Confidence Map. And I'm very excited to read it and I can't wait for you to tell us more about it. So, yeah, what inspired this book?

So this is a book about the impact that certainty and control have on our lives. I've been teaching a class on confidence and decision making for, oh, I guess more than a decade. And early on into it I discovered that neither my students nor I could really describe what confidence was. It was a bit of an embarrassing moment. Here I'm teaching this class and I'm supposed to know what it is. And we all sort of agreed that it was like pornography. We knew it when we saw it, but to put words around it was difficult. People would say Lebron James or Beyonce or Elon Musk, but nobody could describe what it was. So I spent a lot of time trying to refine and come up with a pretty simple definition. And I finally settled on this idea that it's all about the certainty and control that we feel in our lives. That to feel confident we need to have some sense of what's to come and to also believe that we're going to be successful in whatever it is that's ahead. So we feel prepared.

You know what I'm most interested in exploring and diving into, and I know a lot of my listeners will be as well, is how this affects our relationship with our customers. You kind of had some bold assertions here that it's the feeling of certainty and control, not price, that drives demand. Can you say more about that?

Yeah. So I'm a big believer that it's not about price, it's not about customer satisfaction, it's about customer confidence. It's about the promise that you're affording the customer. Price tends to be one of the final elements. It starts with trust. And if I don't trust You, I don't trust your brand. I don't trust what you're doing. It's going to be very difficult for me to buy at any price. And you can see this in extreme examples with companies like Boeing where if the plane's not safe, they don't have a business, no matter the price. So businesses need to think much more about how they're demonstrating a sense of predictability, particularly today, because you can see the consequences when a brand, take Bud Light, suddenly goes from being something customers are certain about to something that they're now questioning in multiple directions.

Can you break down a brand that has either succeeded or failed based on where they went wrong in terms of these two axes of control and confidence?

The ultimate brand today is a company like Apple, where the price to your point is far less of an issue than the halo effect that that brand now garners in terms of the willingness of consumers. I laughed. You know, several years ago, people were standing in line outside of Apple stores uncertain of what the new product was, but they had to have it. And so it's that sense of certainty that is extraordinary for a brand like Apple. Now we can argue whether it's gotten ahead of itself, but that's a demonstrated example of where a company has clearly satisfied the consumer's need for certainty and control and they're eager to buy. At the other hand, you could look at a company like ValuJet. One plane crash and they were out of business. And you see that particularly in industries where certainty, whether it's safety or you just the predictability of the business is imperative to their success. And once that comes under question, you don't have a business.

So I'm a sucker for two by twos. And you've got a beautiful one here in your book called the Confidence Quadrant. Can you walk us through it?

Yeah. So I took certainty and control and used those as an X and Y axis. So I use control on the Y axis, certainty on the X axis. And the result is four. Four boxes. And I think it's useful to think of these as almost different countries. They have different cultures, we talk differently, we act differently, depending on where they are. And the four boxes are pretty straightforward. Where we have certainty and control, that's our comfort zone. That's where things feel easy and we know what we're doing. Time passes quickly. We're nice people too. We're generous in that sort of a box. And that's the upper right hand corner. Lower left hand corner is the opposite environment where things feel unpredictable and we feel Powerless. You could think about how we felt right when Covid hit. That's a great example of that sense of uncertainty paired with vulnerability. And we don't think about it this way, but vulnerability is the opposite of confidence. And so when we lack confidence, it's not that we lack it, it's that we feel intensely vulnerable. All traumatic events, whether you've been mugged in a car accident, fallen down, those all happen in what I call the stress center at the lower left hand box. The other two boxes are less noticeable, but are really important. They're environments where we have either certainty or control, but not both. Easiest one to explain is what I call the passenger seat. An environment where we have certainty but no control. Again, if you've been on an airplane in the passenger seat of a cab, on a roller coaster, these are environments where we have no control whatsoever. We're either beneficiaries or victims of what others do. If I'm a service business, a restaurant, a high end restaurant, or a law firm, this is where I operate. This is what I do. The challenge with those environments is once the certainty is gone, it can begin to feel like a prison. You can feel trapped. If you think about being on an airplane when there's turbulence, suddenly you feel very aware of just how powerless you are.

So you know where you're going. High certainty, but you don't control the direction. You've hired an expert to do it, a pilot, or if you have a lawyer. You know your objective, but you're putting your entire journey in some expert's hands.

Yeah, and I think a lot of those experts don't realize that that's the environment that they operate in. And so they forget how important certainty is to somebody who doesn't have control. You know, you experience that when you hire a plumber. If the plumber doesn't get the pipe fixed, you get very impatient very quickly. So that's an environment, candidly, that we spend a whole lot more time in than we realize. We're constantly being served by others not appreciating what that dynamic is.

And then the last one, the launchpad. So high control, but low certainty.

Yeah, you could think of that as being a rock climber where you have control of the outcome, but you're not quite sure yet what that outcome's going to be. If you've pulled the arm on a slot machine, it's when you hit send with a resume, you're in control of the decision making, but you don't know what's going to happen. Interestingly, all our financial decisions are made in that box. Financial decisions are choices that we make amid uncertainty. Whether I'm lending money, borrowing money, making an investment, I don't know what's going to happen until sometime in the future in that box. It becomes all about our imagination of the future. And so we become driven by the outcomes that we imagine, which is a funny way to be making decisions, but inherently that's how we act in that box.

So would you say that some of these quadrants are better than others or is it just about a fit with knowing which box you're in and the type of business that you're, you're operating under?

Yeah, I think the self help world does us a big disservice in suggesting that, you know, you have to have confidence all the time. I don't see any of these boxes as inherently good or bad. I think that again, we're different people in them. And so if you can recognize what box you're in, then you can be more aware of the susceptibility that you have to impulsive or emotional responses in that box. So you're less prone to make the bad decisions that naturally come with that box. But they're good decisions that come with that box too.

So this is a frame for you to use as an individual or a frame for you to use as a business owner.

So what I'm finding nir is that people are using it in both dimensions. So I'll be talking to a business owner about how to apply this at work and the next thing I know, the business owner is talking about a situation with a son or daughter who's suddenly in the stress center because they got rejected from college. So it applies at both an individual level and a group level, and candidly at a societal level too.

Where are the biggest opportunities you think, either in the business world or in our personal lives where we could apply this model.

So I think particularly today is to appreciate that you're going to be in the stress center. Businesses spend a lot of time trying to prevent crises and I think they should be focused more on preparing for crises that are going to happen inevitably, that running a business, certainty and control are going to become under siege at some point. And so you better have given some thought about how do you address the vulnerability that your customers feel. What are things that you can do to begin to restore the confidence once it's broken? And I'll tell you, near that's very different from solving the crisis problem. Businesses tend to say, oh, the factory blew up, there was A fire there was the plane crashed. It's like, yeah, that's a problem. But what makes something a crisis is the feelings that go along with it. And so you have to address the feelings. You have to eliminate the vulnerability that people feel. If you're going to get the customer, the employees, the policymakers out of that stress center, can you give us some.

Actionable tips or maybe a case study for how a company got into that stress center? The situation of low control and low certainty and how they effectively got out of it, or maybe how they didn't effectively get out of it?

Yeah, I can give you a good and bad. The real classic case is Johnson and Johnson with Tylenol, where they had seven containers of Tylenol that were tainted by cyanide. And they could have said, you know what, we've identified them, we're good, we took them off the shelves, and Chicago, you're good. Instead, they took every container off the shelf everywhere. And so they completely eliminated the threat and they became heroes. If you look at the response by the FAA on 9 11, they grounded all the planes. They didn't stop to say, okay, which of the planes we should worry about. It's like, we don't have time for that. We're just going to eliminate the threat. And so threat elimination becomes a floor setting moment that you can then build from at the other end of the spectrum in terms of response, I would put Boeing with their Max series jet crashes. You know, the first one, their gut instinct was, oh, it was pilot error. And then when the second one happened, they were like, okay, we have a mechanical problem. They didn't ground the planes, they were forced to land the planes by policymakers. And that to me is a real distinction in behavior. If I'm Boeing and I'm trying to deal with vulnerability, I'm the one who needs to ground the planes. I need to be ahead of sentiment to say, you know what? Until we know what the real problem is, we're not going anywhere. And they didn't do that.

Is there a risk of ever overshooting? I mean, I'm guessing that Tylenol could take all those pill bottles off the shelves because they had some kind of insurance that let them do that and it was much cheaper than to ground all of Boeing's planes. Does that, I mean, is there a risk of, of overshooting or do you think that that just becomes a critical concern?

No, I think that the, the risk is undershooting, that the cost to undershooting is far greater than the cost of overshooting. If you look at the penalties and fines that Boeing paid, I mean, had they not had other businesses, it probably would have bankrupted the company. So you have to recognize, and this is where companies need to do some real research and understanding. Where's the client? What's the vulnerability that people are feeling? And, and are we adequately addressing it? That's what you're shooting for. So there you need to respond almost like an emergency room doctor, where you're constantly assessing and testing where, where is the patient really?

I'm curious that you contend that you can know what customers want before they do. Tell us more.

There's this three dimensional equilibrium that exists at all times between our feelings, the stories we tell and our actions. And so if I know one of them, I can pretty well deduce the other ones. And so this is where understanding the confidence of a customer quickly allows me to know what they're likely to do next. Because depending on where we are in the quadrant, we're going to think differently and more importantly, our preferences change. So if I'm in the stress center, it's all about me here now. I don't care about you, I don't care about tomorrow, I don't care about someplace in the future. I need solutions that are concrete. If I'm responding to a customer who's in the stress center, I have to be very mindful that they're in me here now mode. And so is my response immediate? Does it provide a tangible benefit now? You know, no promises, real, actionable, you know, measurable, deliverable that the customer can see at the other end of the spectrum? I can sell abstraction, I can sell potential and possibility. You mean you look at the pitch for AI today, that's a pitch to a very high confident environment where it's all about unlimited possibility in the future. And so I can offer different solutions. I need to offer different solutions depending on where the customer is.

Is the goal then in order to give confidence, realize which box you're in and make sure that you don't lose that critical factor. So if you're in the passenger seat quadrant, you have to maintain certainty because there's no control. And if you're in the launchpad quadrant, you must maintain control because there's no certainty. Am I getting it right?

Yes. You know, we talked about the service industry in the lower right hand box. You can think of the do it yourself business in the upper left box. So if I'm a Home Depot or a Lowe's or, you know, any of these do it yourself, companies. I have to make sure that my shelves are stocked with the tools and resources that people need when they come in, because that's what they're depending on. And companies get that screwed up. Companies forget sometimes what box they're in. You could see this in Covid with restaurants where they tried to pivot to takeout from dine in, and they didn't realize that what the customer wants with takeout is speed selection right now. And that's a completely different deliverable than what they were used to. And businesses in the passenger seat get themselves tied up. When they cede control to the customer. They're sort of like, oh, we can customize that for you. We'll do this for you. And they end up with a. A far less effective product. Sort of like a driver's ed car where you're sharing the steering wheel and the gas pedal and the brakes. It's like, no. If you've hired me, you've hired me. And businesses need to be real clear.

So how do you figure out which. Depending on the business you're in, how do you figure out what your customer wants, which quadrant you would put yourself into?

So I think you need to think about what's the problem you're solving? Because, remember, if I'm a business, my client isn't in the comfort zone. If they're in the comfort zone, they don't need me. I mean, short of a luxury goods manufacturer, they're not buying from me because everything is good. They're buying from me because they have a vulnerability that they want addressed. So a big part of it is to address what is the vulnerability that they're feeling. And so to understand do they want me to provide certainty or do they want me to provide control, what's their need that they're looking for me to address? And you need to recognize if I'm. If I'm a law firm, I need to have a different response. If somebody's calling me because they need to be bailed out of jail versus they're working on their estate plan. So I need to realize that if I'm in the control business, I have two environments where I may be dealing with the customer.

Interesting. Do you think the customer always wants control? Are there circumstances where the customer wants to relinquish control?

Oh, we want to relinquish control a lot. Where we don't have the skills, the tools, the education, the preparation, we're delighted to seed control. I mean, it's why we call a plumber when the pipe is burst. It's why we go out to a really nice restaurant or hop in a cab. We're very often eager to seed control. Remember, too, that following again, this process of ceding controls to others is our easiest response when we're stressed. Fight and flight require that we know what we're doing. And so I talk about this in the book, but this is why authoritarian leaders become so popular when confidence is low, is that it becomes very easy for us to just step in line behind somebody who says, I know the way ahead.

That makes sense. What surprised you most in the process of writing the book?

The hardest part of the book for me to write were the sections in the passenger seat where. So you're in the passenger seat and now you realize that you want control. And when we're in the passenger seat and we feel imprisoned, we focus an intense amount on. On who put us there, what put us there. Our focus is the blame that we can attribute to others. You know, I'm in the passenger seat because what we forget in that moment is it remains our choice to stay there. That short of imprisonment, we opt to stay there. And I'm not saying we, we choose to be victims, but we need to think about, okay, if I'm going to choose to leave now, I'm swapping an environment of certainty but no control for an environment of control but no certainty. Because I have to go to the launch pad to exit the stress center or to exit the passenger seat. Nobody's going to come rescue me, so I've got to rescue myself. And that's a very hard thing for us to do, particularly because if we've been in the passenger seat for a long time, people have convinced us that we're not going to make it on our own. We need them to succeed. And here I think we need to be thinking about how do I prepare for that moment when I jump to the launch pad? What skills do I need? What resources do I need? What coaching do I need? Would I be helped by doing it with others? You know, if I. If I look at the victims of sexual abuse, whether it's in the workplace with somebody like Harvey Weinstein or elsewhere, it often takes a group of people to act together to jump from the passenger seat to the launch pad. And so that part of it, as I was working on the book, really gave me a much greater appreciation for why it's so hard when we are in these environments of certainty but no control, why it's so hard for us to leave them.

Yeah, I think we have a Similar perspective, but maybe we use different vocabulary. So you said earlier about how important it is to figure out what your customer really wants. And it's that deeper psychological need, not just a functional need, not what they will tell you, but what actually drives their behavior. So I call those internal triggers. And they can be boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, a lack of control, all these things. And one of the questions I oftentimes get from companies is, yeah, but how do we know what internal trigger we're really building for? Like, how do I get down to that, that emotion? It's pretty tough for companies to do. Do you have any advice for that?

I tend to think about it in terms of scarcity. What's the scarcity that they have? So if somebody is bored, the scarcity is energy or attraction. There's, there's something that's missing. And so I think to get at that inner psychology, it's really important to figure out, okay, what's the scarcity? What is it that's missing? And these tend to be abstract. It could be power, could be wealth, money, identity. There are ways that we feel vulnerable. And that sense of scarcity that we have a hard time putting our fingers on, you know, safety is another one. So those are the dimensions that if I'm in a business, I want to be thinking broadly about, as opposed to your point. The specific problem that we tend to try to solve.

Yeah, I always find that opens the aperture. So you can actually figure out what the solution is, as opposed to what most companies do, they say, hey, I have the solution, what's the problem? Right. I have this whiz bang technology, and oftentimes, more often than not, that leads nowhere because they haven't really understood the problem. They only understand their specific solution. But when you back up and you open the aperture and say, no, no, what's the real problem? What's the psychological itch that my product is addressing? Then you have the highest likelihood of actually coming up something creative that actually gives the user what they're looking for.

Yeah. And to me, that so often ties to a vulnerability of scarcity, of something that matters to them.

Does your research give you any insights into kind of the way of the world where it's going? Like you mentioned geopolitics, of how we're more likely to look for authoritarian leaders who can give us the confidence we're looking when the world seems very uncertain? Does the book reflect on that at all?

Yeah. So again, this question of vulnerability or conversely, invincibility become really critical when you're talking about either policymaker decision making or group decision making. I mean, if you go back to May of 2020, policymakers should have anticipated social unrest. So when George Floyd was killed, that just became a spark that naturally led to this spontaneous social movement. You know, social movements are entirely correlated to widespread feelings of vulnerability. You're seeing that in France today. So you can begin to predict when are large groups likely to act. The Arab Spring, the vulnerability of food scarcity and inflation, again, something that matters. You can also use it to predict terrorism, because terrorism is something that only happens when people feel a sense of hopelessness. So it then too becomes a much more predictable moment than we are led to believe. You know, what we think is terrorism is random. It's like, no, terrorism tends to only happen in these sorts of moments. At the other end, you have, particularly with policymakers, feelings of invincibility. And there they're prone to either very self aggrandizing or overstepping. One of my favorite examples is always they want the Olympics to be hosted, so they overspend for something that feels very unnecessary or superfluous. But other policymakers tend to be very vindictive and revengeful when they feel invincible. So it's been interesting to watch different policymakers who seek to settle the score when they feel extremely confident.

Yeah, when I hear the word confidence and hearing your model and then we talk about people in power, I think about con men. To be conned has taken on this meaning of to be duped, to be tricked, to be. But conman stands for confidence man. Right. It's the person who sells you what you're looking for. They sell you the certainty of you will get this outcome and the control is all yours. All you have to do is believe me. And you think about con men like Bernie Madoff or Ponzi or any of these folks, that's what they're really good at. They sell people what they want. Turns out that what they want is a house of cards in actuality. So is there a dark side to this?

Yeah. So both extremes in confidence. We are highly susceptible to con men, but for different reasons. The very rich, so the Bernie Madoff clients, the more confident we are, the less we pay attention, the less we scrutinize. And so we over trust at extremes in sentiment. So we're easily victimized because we think that we have this abundance. So we're not worried about any sense of scarcity. At the other extreme, we're susceptible to con men because they provide better. You know, I always say that, you know, Stand in the cold rain long enough, you will get in the car with somebody. So we forget that con men can smell that they love nothing more than people who feel hopeless and vulnerable because they can provide all of the reassurance that these individuals lack. So whether it's corporate con men, cult leaders, authoritarian figures, sexual predators, there's a whole cadre of individuals who know that lower left hand corner of the quadrant because that's their natural feeding ground.

Yeah. It makes so much sense that what's becoming certain is the satisfaction of that discomfort. Right. Like you said, if you're in the rain long enough, you'll hop into a car with someone, it's because you don't want to feel cold and wet. Right. So it's that absolution of that feeling that's the certainty you're looking for. And the easier the control is to find that escape from that discomfort, the more likely you are to go with that solution. I guess it reminds me a little bit about the work of Rory Sutherland. I don't know if you've read the book Alchemy. It's interesting, there's some overlap here in that Rory talks about in his book Alchemy, these non economic factors, Right, that you don't have to necessarily make something cheaper or better, you know, objectively better. You can actually just shape it in a way that satisfies a psychological need and that's oftentimes good enough. Right. That you can create value, you can create alchemy simply by the positioning of the product or the user experience specifically there it seems to be, that's what you're saying as well. By giving people the psychological need, you make the product more valuable in a way.

Yeah. Address the threat, not the problem.

Very interesting. Yeah. Anything else you think is important to know that you want our listeners to take away?

No, I think that one thing near that, I think the self help industry has done a real disservice to people is this notion that you need to be confident to be successful. And the reality is success happens when we're in the comfort zone. So confidence is a consequence of success, not a precondition. And so whether I'm building a business or working in a business or remember that it's how we behave when we don't have confidence, the things that we do to get obtain it, that creates success. And so we need to focus less on being confident and more on being resilient, being very comfortable in any of the four boxes of the, of the quadrant. And to know that I will develop the Skills I will learn, I will gain the tools, I will find the people. I will ask for the help to get back to the comfort zone.

Was there a specific incident for you where you did not feel confident, and then you changed the circumstances so that you did feel confident?

Oh, in writing this book, I joked for a long time with my wife that I had this box of Christmas ornaments but no tree. And finally, she got very frustrated with me, and she said, you need a coach. And so I hired a writing coach. And it wasn't so much to write better, but to organize my thoughts and write more effectively. And we forget, particularly as adults, that asking for help isn't a sign of weakness. It's actually a step in taking control. And so we need to think about asking for help as a very actionable item in the process of gaining control of the situation.

Yeah. I remember my 9th grade health ed teacher said, when the going gets tough, the tough get help. And it always stuck with me. It's very true. There's nothing embarrassing about it. I don't know why. We have this perception that if you. If you ask for help, somehow that makes you weak or unworthy. Everybody has to ask for help. And if you're not asking for help, you're not growing fast enough. You're expecting yourself to discover everything when people have walked these paths before. So. So you worked with a writing coach. Would you put yourself in the stress center at that time before you worked with a writing coach?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And wallowing in the stress center.

Yeah, yeah. And so what did the writing coach do? How do they shape your environment in such a way that you moved over to the comfort zone?

So she really reinforced with me, what's the story you're trying to tell? What are the stories that are important to this book? And so in framing that, we got to the point where, you know, we agreed, okay, I think we have a book here. And then working together, she found my editor, Noah Schwartzberg, at portfolio. And again, if you were to look at the book today, you would say, of course, this is the book that you set out to write. But there are three, if not four, different books in terms of its organization that preceded this one. And it was only through the process of writing and getting things out on paper that we could then start to reorganize it in a way that made sense. And one of the things that was so important in this book was, so, what do we do with it? There are a lot of books that, particularly academics that are very theoretical, but what was so Important to me with this book was I want this to be useful to people. Here's the framework.

Amen.

And here's what you do with it.

Yeah, okay, so asking for help, that's one strategy. Let's get super practical here. That's one way that we can increase our control and increase our uncertainty. What else can we do to increase control? Uncertainty, practice.

I always say to my students, the difference between luck and skill is if you didn't practice, train, prepare, you were lucky. So you're skillful when you've done the work to ascend into the launch pad. And so we need to recognize that that path from the stress center back to the comfort zone through the launch pad, that's the hero's journey. You know, read mythology, and it's all on that trajectory. You know, you ascend from the stress center, and so you need to realize that it's like learning to ride a bicycle. You're going to crash, you're going to fall, you're going to get hurt, you're going to try things that don't work. But that's part of that journey. And don't look at those failures as failing, as failing, as, okay, I've learned now what not to do. The other thing I would say is don't make decisions in the launch pad based on the outcome you imagine. So we, as I said, our stories, feelings, and actions exist in equilibrium. And nothing is more revealing about how we feel than the outcomes that we imagine. The future is inherently uncertain. So anytime you think you see absolute certainty in the future, what you're revealing isn't the likelihood of that happening as much as it is how you feel about yourself, your confidence. If I think tomorrow is going to suck, that's on me, not tomorrow. And so we need to be really careful when we're listening to the stories in our head that are very negative when we're in launch pad to remember, it's like, oh, that's just me telling me I'm not ready yet. I'm not prepared. So what do I need to do to improve the odds of the outcome?

Interesting. You know that as you're, as you say this, and I'm reminded of your background in the financial services industry, investing sounds like something that sits in the stress center, right? Knowing where to put your money in the stock market for a lot of people is full of low control and low certainty. And the standard advice of, well, just put it in an index fund and sit tight doesn't seem to me to give. Give me at least a sense of control or certainty. Right. Like here, just, just put it in the stock market and wait. Feels like a situation without much confidence. Right, because we all know that the stock market crash has happened. So how, how would you advise like a financial services company to, to help its customers gain more confidence?

So I mean, passive investing puts everyone in the passenger seat. And so not surprisingly, when there's market turbulence, people still panic. So if I'm working with investors, I want to remind them that panic is a objective condition, not a subjective feeling. Or not only a subjective feeling. So when you see people panicking, when you see those market and turmoil specials, what they're telling you is the market is approaching the lower left corner of the quadrant and ironically, it's likely to get better from there rather than worse. So panic is something you should look at to say the worst is behind us, not ahead of us. And the same is true with mania, when people are stampeding into things. And so the, the best thing investors can do is to avoid making those knee jerk, impulsive emotional responses when the crowd is in a really big swirl of emotion and recognize that the best investments are those that you think you're lighting money on fire. And the worst investments are the ones that you're certain of.

So it's reshaping that emotion, it's reimagining that emotion as something different. What would typically cause you to panic, you actually see as well, if I'm panicked, everybody's panicked. And maybe that's a signal of a good time as opposed to if you're euphoric, maybe reframe that as well. If I'm feeling euphoric, probably everyone is too, and maybe that's the time to be more cautious.

Yeah, those are objective conditions, not just feelings.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Peter Atwater. This was fantastic. I really appreciate your time. And the book again is called the Confidence Map. Where else can people learn more about you?

So I'm@peteratwater.com I'm also on Twitter PeterAtWater and LinkedIn and I guess now threads with the same PeterAtWater.

Terrific. Again, the book is called the Confidence Charting a path from Chaos to Clarity. Peter Atwater, thank you so much for joining the near and Far podcast.

Thanks Nir.

Thank you.