The dealership got me last spring. I'd read Kahneman. I'd read Munger. I'd been reading Farnam Street long enough to recognize Anchoring the way you recognize an old neighbor's car. The salesperson opened with a number I knew was theatre — a sticker price calibrated to make the next number sound like a kindness — and I still drove off having paid more than I'd planned. Two miles down the road I caught myself replaying the conversation, building a defense for a decision I'd already made. The vocabulary was there. The reflex wasn't.
This kept happening. Sunk-cost moments at 2am. Confident takes on subjects I'd read one article about. Memories I could swear to in court that turned out to be slightly, embarrassingly wrong. I'd been treating cognitive bias the way some people treat French — I could read it, but I couldn't speak it under pressure. The books had given me the magazine. What I was missing was the gym.
So I started keeping a list. The glitches I caught in myself, then the ones I caught in people I love, then the ones running at industrial scale — whole sectors quietly tuned to exploit Loss Aversion and Authority and Default Bias. The list grew past anything I could find anywhere else. 231 entries, every one named, illustrated, sourced. Most days I work on this from a tiny desk in Pennsylvania, fueled by too much coffee and a real suspicion that the people quietest about their blind spots are the ones bleeding the most money to them.
The deck is the gym I wanted. Fifty cards stay free so anyone searching for a specific bias lands somewhere useful. The rest — plus the eight training surfaces and the printable PDFs — unlock with the full membership. That's where reference turns into reflex. It's the only thing reading didn't give me.
— Alexander
