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On October 15, 2026, writer Scott Douglas Jacobsen and television writer Rick Rosner traded notes on human judgment. Their conversation, centered on Charlie Munger's famous list of 25 psychological tendencies, moved from investing to religion, prayer, false hope, and why a person can be smart and still believe things that aren't true.
Munger was Warren Buffett's longtime business partner, and he died in 2023. He wasn't a psychologist, but he spent decades watching smart people make expensive mistakes. The list he compiled was never meant to be a lecture on "bad people." It was a warning about standard equipment: mental shortcuts that are built into every brain, including his own.
Rosner sent that list to Jacobsen, and the two zeroed in on the ideas that explain daily life. Take the halo effect. If someone smiles and sounds confident, you're more likely to agree with their argument. A messenger who seems trustworthy can make a shaky case feel solid. That's one of the milder traps on Munger's list. Confirmation bias, sunk cost, social proof, and dozens of others are always working in the background.
Jacobsen asked whether people are ever truly hyper-rational. Rosner's first answer was risk, but he immediately added a caveat. People can be extremely careful about one risk and completely blind to another. His mother, he said, watched too much crime TV and put extra locks on her front door. The problem: she needed a key to get out from inside. That might have made her safer against one unlikely threat while making her worse off in a much scarier one, like a fire.
Still, Rosner argued that society as a whole has become more rational about risk over time. Seatbelts are normal now. Airbags are standard in almost every new car. Commercial aviation is heavily regulated and remarkably safe. Doctors wash their hands without a second thought, even though a 19th-century doctor named Semmelweis was mocked for suggesting it. Once a risk gets recognized and baked into ordinary habits, you don't need everyone to be a genius on their own. The system does the thinking for you.
Jacobsen wasn't convinced that people deserve much credit. "People are barely rational in a few areas and broadly non-rational in most areas," he said. His hardest target was prayer. He called it "wishing it were so." Supernaturalism, in his view, is magical thinking. He didn't separate superstition from religion. Both are the same thing: an attempt to control or explain the world with invisible forces.
Rosner offered a softer view. Facing reality all day, every day is stressful. We're all going to die. We may get sick and miserable first. If religion or superstition helps someone manage that fear, Rosner said, it's not nothing. Jacobsen rebutted that false comfort is still false. People pray for a sick child or a dying parent, and when they get failure after failure, they don't always stop. They blame themselves. They go back to the same system and get hurt again. He called these cycles trauma factories.
The conversation got concrete when Rosner mentioned his mother's funeral. She and her husband had already bought burial plots, but they hadn't paid for much else. Rosner spent about $25,000 when she died. A chunk of granite with her name and dates carved into it set him back several thousand dollars. He doesn't regret honouring her, but he recognizes that grief is a terrible time to be making financial decisions. The funeral industry knows that.
Jacobsen suggested that even false hope can be a form of psychological abuse. Rosner pushed back: "In a lot of cases, false hope is better than no hope at all." Jacobsen countered that it only looks that way in the short term. Over the long run, getting disappointed over and over wears people down.
The two found an unlikely witness in Ben Franklin. Franklin, one of the most rational people America has produced, once said he wanted to be preserved in a cask of Madeira wine and brought back to life a century later. Jacobsen saw that as proof that even great minds slip into wishful thinking. Rosner read it differently. Franklin wasn't pretending death didn't happen. He was just hoping for a mechanism, the same way modern people talk about cryonics: a long shot, not a denial.
Near the end, they found common ground. People are decent at responding to immediate threats. You don't stick your hand on a hot stove. You don't play Russian roulette for entertainment. But that narrow band of rationality doesn't stretch far in time or space. People smoke, drink too much, skip seatbelts, and eat food that will quietly damage them for years. They think they're better drivers than they are. They also assume that what's comfortable is probably true.
Jacobsen, speaking from Ukraine, pointed out that he's currently living with a kind of risk most Americans get to avoid. Rosner asked: Is that rational? Jacobsen didn't give a clean yes or no. The conversation ended where it started: with the shared sense that humans are trapped between the need for certainty and the requirement to be honest with themselves.
Charlie Munger's list remains a useful map of that trap. Behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman have spent decades confirming many of Munger's intuitions with formal evidence. We all carry irrational tendencies. Some of them keep us calm. Some of them hurt us. The question isn't whether you're smart enough to escape them. It's whether you're willing to notice them before they cost you too much.
