Everyone Says…

About twenty years ago, I was sitting with Aki Chen at Dan Ryan’s Chicago Grill in Hong Kong. A flag from the University of Chicago hung on the wall above us and provided a natural spot to discuss her MBA there. She extolled the virtues of her alma mater, The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (now the Booth School of Business). She talked about its commitment to quantitative rigor, intellectual honesty, and open inquiry with an enthusiasm that was infectious. Ten years later, I followed her path to the same school. What stayed with me from that education was not just the mathematical methods, but the deeply ingrained habit of questioning assumptions that sound obvious. It should come as no surprise, then, that she would eventually coauthor a book about exactly that.

In Everyone Says, Aki Chen and statistician Jeffrey R. Wilson focus on the banal phrases used every day, such as “everyone knows,” “you can’t go wrong,” and “everyone feels this way.” These phrases may seem comforting at first glance because they imply that uncertainty has been resolved. But as Chen and Wilson show, through examples spanning professional and personal life, this reassurance is illusory. These phrases are conversation closers, stifling debate and leading to worse decision making.

Consistently making better decisions is at the core of my professional life managing derivatives traders and building automated trading systems. In trading, success depends in large part on maintaining the discipline to revisit assumptions when new evidence emerges. The most effective traders are often not those with the strongest opinions, but those willing to pause, ask better questions, and examine whether confidence is supported by data.

Everyone Says offers a blueprint of circuit breakers that reorient conversations without creating conflict. The goal is to keep conversations and thinking going long enough for real inquiry to happen. Whether you are in the boardroom, a trading floor, or the family dinner table, the ability to pause when language feels finished is one of the most underrated tools in decision making. This book is a smart, approachable guide for developing that skill.

We were incredibly tempted to open this piece by writing, “We have all been held hostage by a lazy sentence.”

But if we did, the authors of this book would immediately catch us. They would gently pause the room, look at us, and ask: “Who exactly is ‘all’?” They would want to know if we had actually bothered to count the hostages. That is the hilarious danger of reading Everyone Says—it completely ruins your ability to speak carelessly. You cannot even write an introductory sentence without instantly catching yourself in a linguistic lie.

We drop these blanket, sweeping statements in a myriad of contexts. It happens mid-meeting, around family dinners, or during critical decisions. Someone leans back with supreme confidence and detonates a conversational nuclear bomb: “Well, everyone knows that…” or “Most people think…”. It sounds so smooth and reassuring. How can you possibly disagree? There is just one tiny problem: usually, nobody has done the math. Now instead of cowering in silence you can enable conversations forward with the strategies presented in this book.

In Everyone Says, Chiu-I Chen and Jeffrey R. Wilson pull back the curtain on how the magic of someone’s raw confidence can mesmerise and overthrow us into thinking the statement means consensus. They are the perfect duo to stage this intervention. Jeffrey spent a career navigating high-stakes court cases as an expert witness, watching lawyers subtly twist “all” into a mere fifty-one percent. Aki has spent decades managing complex, cross-cultural teams across Asia and the West, observing how the exact same linguistic illusions pop up in completely different languages. Together, they bring sharp analytical eyes and deep human empathy to our everyday chatter.

Through their combined experiences, they expose the hilarious reality of human communication. They show that “everyone” is frequently just two enthusiastic siblings at a kitchen table. “Most people” is usually shorthand for “the three people who spoke loudest in the Zoom chat”. And “we’re all tired of talking about this” almost always translates to “I am tired of this, so please stop asking questions.”

But don’t worry: despite the statistical and academic backgrounds of the authors, you will not find terrifying algebraic proofs or calculus homework in these pages. Instead, the authors use a statistical mindset to offer a masterclass in ordinary observation. Refreshingly, you will catch yourself turning the pages for the next nugget of untruth to demystify. The authors teach us a vital, quiet discipline: the art of slowing down the room. They show us how to gently probe a massive claim using simple, elegant questions: Compared to what? Out of how many? Has anyone actually counted?

Armed with these simple questions, they show us how to disarm the conversational bomb that was just dropped. You will have fewer deserted conversations and awkward silences. Instead, watch the dinner table or the office meeting become lively with chatter and debate because you’ve bothered to challenge and awaken.

Leave this book right on your coffee table. Let it sit there as a beautiful, daily reminder to level up your communication. Use it as a tactical tickler to rescue your next dinner conversation from the trap of unquestioned certainties. Real consensus isn't manufactured by a confident tone—it is found when we have the patience to stop generalizing, look closer, and actually count.