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Brain Primer is about the patterns behind human decisions: why bubbles inflate, why scams work, why big companies collapse, and why smart people make the same mistakes again and again.
Six topics
Everything here sits in one of six topics. Pick the one that pulls at you:
- Money & Markets: Why prices, bubbles and your own money decisions behave the way they do.
- Business Collapses: How giant companies fail, and the warning signs nobody wanted to see.
- Scams & Frauds: How the cleverest cons work, and why smart people fall for them.
- Mind Traps: The mental shortcuts and biases that quietly steer your decisions.
- Incentives & Game Theory: Why people do what they are rewarded for, and how rules backfire.
- Mental Models: Simple thinking tools that help you see problems more clearly.
What you will find out
- Why can a reward make the very problem it pays for worse?
- Why is being clever no protection against a good con?
- How can a company watch its own end coming for years, and still walk into it?
- Why does it feel safer to be wrong with the crowd than right on your own?
- Why does the first number you hear quietly bend every estimate you make after it?
- What one question would have stopped most failed plans before they started?
The answers are stories. On our YouTube channel you watch them unfold, from the first sensible decision to the moment everything turned. The articles here go further than a film has time for: more cases of the same pattern, why it fools smart people, and the question that stops it. And the letter helps you catch each pattern in your own life.
If you only have ten minutes
Start with Mind Traps. The biases there turn up in every other topic, from the way markets overreact to the way scams find their victims.
Stay in touch
Subscribe on YouTube so the next story finds you, or join the letter to catch each pattern before it costs you.