The Knowledge Project
The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking | Peter D. Kaufman [Outliers]
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Go positive and go first and be constant in doing it.
Chapter 2: Why is multidisciplinary thinking important?
There may be no better formula for living the best life you could possibly live. That's a quote from Peter Kaufman. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parish.
This podcast is all about learning from others, mastering the best of what they've figured out so you can use their lessons in your life.
Chapter 3: How does Peter Kaufman illustrate the world's complexity?
Peter Kaufman is someone you've probably never heard of, and that's by design. He's the chairman and CEO of Glenair, an aerospace company that he's led since 1977. Over that tenure, he's compiled one of the best track records in business history. Peter's also the editor of Poor Charlie's Almanac, the definitive collection of Charlie Munger's wisdom.
He was one of Charlie's closest friends for decades. Peter is also a personal friend. I've learned more from him in the past decade than nearly anyone else in my life. Despite all of his wisdom, Peter rarely gives public talks or interviews. He prefers it that way. One of his favorite sayings is that the whale that surfaces gets harpooned. In 2018, he made an exception.
Chapter 4: What are the biggest blind spots in business?
He gave a speech that was never supposed to be recorded. But Peter believed the message was too important to keep private. As he put it, it was critical for anyone interested in living a full, meaningful life with minimal regret. So he allowed that talk to be transcribed.
And I'm so glad he did, because what he shared that day might be one of the most valuable frameworks for living I've ever encountered. We're going to talk about some of the lessons from that talk today using a lot of Peter's ideas and thinking.
Chapter 5: How can we learn from diverse disciplines?
The complete transcript and audio are reproduced at fs.blog with the written permission of Peter. So you can find a link in the description for this episode or just Google the multidisciplinary approach to thinking. Let's dive in. Peter opens his talk by asking why multidisciplinary thinking is important.
The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, to understand is to know what to do. What a great way of putting it. When you truly understand something, you don't make mistakes. Think about it this way. Mistakes come from blind spots. They come from a lack of understanding. So the more we understand, the fewer mistakes we will make.
This is why Peter believes multidisciplinary thinking is critical because we understand more. The world doesn't organize itself into neat academic departments. Problems don't come with labels like economics or psychology or biology. They come unlabeled and interconnected. They're usually super messy. The financial crisis of 2008, for example, wasn't really a financial problem.
It was a psychology problem, an incentives problem wrapped in a complexity problem. The range of specialists couldn't see it because they could only see the world through one lens. Peter illustrates the danger of such specialization with a Japanese proverb, the frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean. We see this constantly in our world today.
A brilliant engineer builds a complex product nobody wants because they don't understand human behavior. A talented marketer destroys a brand because she doesn't understand its history or its relationship with customers. A skilled investor blows up because he understands spreadsheets but not his own cognitive biases. Each one is a master in one area but struggles in the complex systems of life.
They know the well, not the ocean. So Peter advocates for learning the big ideas from all the different disciplines. The person who understands the big ideas is more likely to see the connections that the specialists miss. They spot risks that don't show up in any single department's models. They notice when something that works is theory is about to fail in practice.
But Peter admits the problem is practical. There's just too many fields. The books are too numerous and too thick, and you don't have time to master everything the way Charlie Munger did in his 99 years. So Peter found a shortcut. Picture a middle-aged man walking into a coffee shop in Southern California. It's early, before the morning rush.
He's carrying a binder full of papers, several hundred pages. He orders his usual, finds his seat by the window, and opens the binder and begins to read. And he does this every morning for six months. Peter had discovered that Discover magazine had 12 years of archives posted online.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of going first in social interactions?
And every single month they interviewed an expert from some domain of science and published a six or seven page article for a general audience. These weren't dumbed down summaries. They were the experts of their field, the cream of the crop, bringing their A game, using their best stories and their clearest language to communicate the most important ideas in their work.
So Peter printed all of them. Then he read them in what he calls index fund style, which means he read them all. He didn't pick and choose, just one after another, every single day for six straight months. This is the universe, he said, and I'm going to own the whole universe.
and if he had been left to his own preferences he admits he probably only would have read a few of them a few would have piqued his interest he never would have voluntarily read six pages on nanoparticles but after he had completed his reading that's exactly where he found some of his best ideas
Over those six months reading across unfamiliar domains, Peter started to recognize something in each seemingly unrelated article. That's exactly how it works over here in biology. That's exactly how this works over here in human nature. Thank you. Reading broadly showed him the biggest ideas were hiding in arcane places nobody else was looking.
It's why index fund reading beats selective reading because it allows you to capture the information that most people miss. But being multidisciplinary created a new problem. How do you know which ideas are actually true? And Peter came up with a clever solution to this problem that drew on statistics. As he put it, a statistician's best friend is a large, relevant sample size. And why?
Because a principle derived from a large, relevant sample size can't be wrong. The only way it could be wrong is if the sample size is too small or the sample itself is not relevant. So Peter tested every important idea against what he calls his three buckets, the three largest relevant sample sizes he could think of. Bucket number one was 13.7 billion years of the inorganic universe.
This is physics, geology, chemistry, everything that isn't alive. And this was the largest sample size in existence. And bucket number two is 3.5 billion years of biology on Earth. As a biological creature, this is directly relevant to us. And bucket number three is sort of the 20,000 years or so of recorded human history. This is the most relevant of all.
It's our stories, our species, our nature. When a principle shows up consistently across all three buckets, when it's true in physics and true in biology and true throughout human history, you can trust it completely. As Peter says, you see these things lined up like three bars on a slot machine, and boy, do you hit the jackpot. Peter tested his new framework with an ambitious question.
Is there a simple two-word description that accurately describes how everything in the world works? And Peter says yes. And he proves it by checking it across all three of his buckets. So let's start with physics. Newton's third law states that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. If you push down on a table, the table pushes back with equal force.
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Chapter 7: How do we ensure we are not blinded by our own perspectives?
And Peter references Mark Twain's observation that a man who picks up a cat by its tail will learn a lesson that he can learn in no other way. And I don't recommend doing this. Please just imagine it in your head. But if you pick up a cat by its tail, it will undeniably scratch you. If you treat the cat disagreeably, you get disagreeable back.
But if you were to gently pick up that same cat, stroke it, pet it, it will start licking your hand soon after. Agreeable in is agreeable out. So what is this? This is mirrored reciprocation in action. And next we can turn to the third bucket. And Peter observes that your entire life, every interaction you've ever had with another being is merely mirrored reciprocation.
And I know you're probably thinking, it can't be this simple. And Peter sort of anticipates this objection. So he tells the audience, it is this simple. It doesn't mean it's not sophisticated. This is a very sophisticated model we just derived, isn't it? We looked into the three largest sample sizes that exist, the three most relevant, and they all said exactly the same thing.
Do you think we can bank on that? Well, 100% we can bank on that. Simple does not mean simplistic. A principle verified across 13.7 billion years of evidence is as solid as knowledge as we can get. And Peter uses what he calls the elevator example to illustrate mirrored reciprocation. So you're standing in the front of an elevator, the door opens and inside walks a stranger you've never met.
So you step in. You have three choices in that moment. Choice number one is you can smile and say good morning. Peter claims that in California, 98% of the time a stranger will smile and say good morning right back. Choice number two is you can scowl and hiss at the stranger for no reason. And 98% of the time, the stranger will scowl and hiss back at you. And choice three is you do nothing.
And this is the choice that most people make. And you almost always get nothing back. Whatever you put out, you get back. But, and this is the crucial insight, you have to go first. Peter connects this to a pattern he sees everywhere. This is why these bars are full of people at 2 a.m. drowning their sorrows. They're knocking down these drinks. When's the world going to give me something, man?
When am I going to get mine? Well, what did you ever do? Did you get up in the morning and smile at the world? No. You either did nothing or you scowled and hissed at the world and you're getting back exactly what you would expect to get back if you understood how the world really works. So why don't more people go positive first?
Daniel Kahneman himself answered this, and it's what won him the Nobel Prize. The human brain weighs potential losses far more heavily than they do equivalent gains. We'll sacrifice 98% upside to avoid a 2% chance of rejection or embarrassment. Peter also quotes baseball legend Lou Brock, show me a man who's afraid of appearing foolish and I'll show you a man who can be beat every time.
Or you can think about this the same way that I do. So much advantage in life comes from being willing to look like an idiot in the short term, willing to be uncomfortable. My friend Harley Finkelstein has a great way of framing this too. He calls it cringe tolerance. And it's something most people can't get over.
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