#613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence

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cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and doscelling. No Hello, boys and girls, ladies and gents, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. My guest today is Russ Roberts. I've wanted to have Russ on the show for a very long time indeed. Russ Roberts is the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and the John and Jean Denalt Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Roberts is interested in making complicated ideas understandable. He founded and hosts the award winning weekly podcast Econ Talk, one of my favorites, Conversations for the Curious, with more than 800 episodes available in the archives, which I believe began in 2006.

Back in the Pliocene era, one of the pioneers. Past guests include Christopher Hitchens, Martha Nisbaum, Michael Lewis, Angela Duckworth, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, among many others. His two rap videos, believe it or not, On the ideas of John Maider Keynes and F. A. Hayek have more than 13 million views on YouTube. I highly recommend both. I just watched them again. I would say an hour ago, just prior to Getting warmed up for this conversation. His latest book, Wild Problems, A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, explores the challenges of using rationality when facing big life decisions. He's also the author of Gambling with Other People's Money, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, The Price of Everything. The Invisible Heart and The Choice. You can find all things Russ Roberts at Russ Roberts.info, and on Twitter you can find him at Econ Talker. Russ.

Welcome to the show. Great to be here, too. I thought we would begin With perhaps an an oblique entry point. And that is a post you wrote.

Which was a eulogy for your father. And I'd like to read just a bit of it, if I could do that, and it's not gonna take terribly long, but here goes. I sometimes think that my dad really could have been a minor American poet or a more renowned story writer if he'd spent less time with his children and grandchildren. The trade off was easy for him. He chose us. He had many talents. Being a father was the talent he chose to cultivate. That's one of the lines I'm gonna come back to. All of us who survive him, his good wife, his children, and his grandchildren are so lucky that we had him for so long. So if you want to honor my father's memory, spend more time with your children. or your parents or those you love. For dad, quality time demanded quantity time. That's the second line I'll come back to. It's harder than it seems. So many things more tangible, more alluring, and with more immediate returns call for our attention and distract us. I was hoping you could just expand a bit on what it looked like.

What it meant for your father to choose Being a father as the talent. he wanted to cultivate and then the quality time demanded quantity time. As I think about kids, I don't have any yet. This is of interest to me.

And my dad died two years ago. Roughly he was eighty nine years old. Or in nineteen thirty. Actually would start with the Point about distraction.

About More than Paradine? Life goes Buy so quickly. And we let it.

And Somebody pointed out. Might have been Ryan Holiday, I think. You're on your death's bed. What would you give for One more day.

With someone you love. One more Ice cream cone, one more sunset. It's really trite, but it's not trite at all, actually. It's incredibly essential. To a life well lived. You know, there's a beauti about it called May I Suggest, which I recommend

Profoundly is uh Encouragement to pay attention. And so we We often don't. Yeah.

We missed the sunset or we see it and we just we're too busy texting, or we eat the ice cream cone and we're talking while we're eating it. We're hardly noticing it's going down. It's Compulsive. And I think Parenting? But more than parenting life.

Requires Paying attention. You know, my dad I would say my dad was one of the least meditative people Who was born in nineteen thirty. There weren't that many of them, to be honest. recent phenomenon, but my dad

I went on three silent meditation retreats while he was alive. And he found that utterly bewildering. So he was not a meditator. But He understood somehow that Principle about

Paying attention to what's important. And what was important to him was us. His children and his wife and his family And

It's terrible. He said, God gave me such a big soul. And so little talent. I have so much to say. And I can't say it. He wanted to be a poet. He wrote

Lots of poems. Many of them. Pretty good. He liked a few of them. And his joke really was you read the line, but the joke was He'd like to be a minor American poet. Didn't want to be Robert Frost or a De Saint Vince Malay Malay.

He would been happy to be a a quieter Person with a couple of good poems. And he might have achieved that if he had devoted himself to that craft, but He instead devoted himself to us. One of my favorite things about my dad.

When we had our kids and I say Dad, you want to read a story? You want to read a book to you know one of my Cats? He was so disdainful of that. The idea of reading a book. That someone else had written

Was so Cheating to him. All of his stories were made up. He told us Hundreds of stories my children hundreds of stories.

Did he Crafted. That he made up. And he could have been You know, a great children's writer, he could have been Maybe a minor American poet, but he spent most of his time with us.

It's free time. Does the quality time demanded quantity time just Is that akin to to come up with a few good ideas? You have to come up with a lot of bad ideas. You just have to throw a lot against the wall. What does that mean? I think for those of us who are ambitious, who have big egos. But

Yeah. Sometimes me. Maybe you. Oh I'm sure it's I'm sure it's also me. Right. You can

comfort yourself and I think sometimes fool yourself into saying Well, you know, I don't give Friend. Ex Family member why.

situation Z The trip to the hospital going to the funeral. I don't do those things'cause that you know, those take too much time. I got I have more important things to do. But when I am with them It's quality time, I really give them myself.

And what I think what my dad believed and I I believed or tried to believe as a parent For my four kids is that Quality time. requires quantity time. You can't just turn it on. You can't just say, Okay, let's have a serious conversation. Go.

It doesn't work that way. And We understand that about friendship. Most of our friendships Take years. Where we

Experience things together. Do things together, have intense conversations. And the nth one, the last one, the next one. is building on all of that and the idea that you can just say, Okay, I'm here for you. Which is I think the the modern impulse and it's good.

It's not bad. It's good to be here from people. But I think The quantity time part of it helps us cultivate that quality time, get the hang of it. And it's certainly I think Oh no.

If you ever spend a long time with somebody on a lazy afternoon, it's just a different experience. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. For providing

That context and we're gonna bounce round, as is my want. So I thought we would flash forward now to the other. side of the bookshelf to the bookend that is present day. What does Shalem Mean. If anything.

A year ago, almost to the day I took the job as president of Shalem College. Which is here in Jerusalem. Which in Hebrew is It was Shalem. And

Jerusalem. If you look at the Anglicization of Erushelayam. The head of Jerusalem is S A L E M. Which is

Seven. And Massachusetts and lots of other places. Name for Jerusalem. And

The name of Jerusalem has that root that S L M, that three letter root in Hebrew Which typically is translated as peace. Shalom is the same route. Yeah.

But Shalem, which is slightly different. It's a reference to the fact that we're in Jerusalem. But it's also a reference to the meaning of that word. Which is hold. Complete.

Well rounded. And so our students, we hope Well emerge from their experience here More complete. Now they're not fully. You can't really be Shalem. It's an aspiration.

But I think it's a great aspiration for all of us and certainly When you embark on an educational experience You know, it's become very fashionable. in modern times to see college as a professional career. pre professional experience, prepare you for accounting, engineering, computer science and so on. And that's nice.

Nothing wrong with that. But Shlem uh Chalem we think It's something more than that. We believe it's about the cultivation of certain habits of mind and heart. They make you a full human being and not just a successful

Person in the marketplace. And not unrelated. I think we're going to certainly in some ways circle back to that with I think the the meat and potatoes of this conversation, which is gonna focus on a lot of topics in the new book. But I wanna provide a little more connective tissue for folks who may not be familiar With you.

So I'd like to Take a second to quote from an interview you did with Tyler Cowan, who is another one of my favorite interviewers, along with yourself. So it's quite the dynamic duo to have you both in one place. And from the transcript, so this is from Tyler.

As a Hayekian, how can we do science better? And then your response is I think that's a trick question. Hayek, of course, was concerned with scientism, the illusion that what we're doing was scientific. I'm a big fan of the pretense of knowledge, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. So I want to pause here for a second because I'm going to admit something very embarrassing, which is I had no idea who FA Hayek was prior to your rap videos. I suppose that hopefully counts as a huge success in terms of the rap videos reaching people who uh maybe can't find their ass with both hands when it comes to economics and economic theory, but Could you please just give people A brief description of what it means to be a Hayekian. You can do this however it makes sense. And then also

Perhaps unpack a bit. The pretense of knowledge. The speech and why You like it. What do we have two, three hours?

Yeah, we have two or three hours exactly. It's actually one of the The goals of that. Rap video, the first one, and then the second we did two. I did them with uh filmmaker.

John Papolo. Part of the goal of those videos Actually was to try to capture some serious economic ideas that we try to make it entertaining, obviously, which is why we put it in wrap format. But part of the goal is just to r let people know

That this Person existed. Because he's not well known. And one of the common comments we got on YouTube was, Who is this guy? How come I never heard of him? So you're not alone, you're in very good company.

He's not part of the Pyak is not part of the standard curriculum of Economics departments. Forget every day. Learning or reading. He's not the greatest writer. He's not the most entertaining writer. If you were gonna start with something

Actually the pretensed knowledge is one of his most successful Pieces which is It's ironic, it was his Nobel Prize speech. But it's not a highfalutin, highbrow, technical Greek letter. kind of economics treatise. It's a very readable essay on

I think a major challenge of modern life that When he wrote it. And when he delivered it, it was sort of interesting. Now it's more Tragic.

Because It's become a central question. to me of modern life so we have On one side we have the so called rationalists. Who believe in

Evidence based data. Science. I love all those things. So did Hayek. They're all really good. The problem is is that sometimes there's what he called scientism.

Something that has the look of science that looks scientific. And it fools people into thinking They understand something when in fact they don't. Now that It's trivial.

Right, when I say it, it's gonna be so obvious. There's two kinds of ignorance. There's the things we don't know. And then they're the things we think we know that aren't true. The things we don't know that we wish we understood, we wish we had access to the truth.

There are things we think we've discovered as true that in fact are not. And That was the focus of that piece, and in fact That piece was

It's kind of Fifteen seconds of inside baseball. He was an intellectual antagonist of John Maynard Kane's. In the nineteen thirties in London. And he lost.

Can't speak the Kans won. He won the intellectual battles he won the battle of the marketplace of ideas, he triumphed.

And Pack tried to take him on in his own terms. And can't speed him. Meaning Try to build a model.

Of the economy that would be like Keynes' but better. Kansas modeling. Itself is kind of Really hard to understand and Anybody's taken undergraduate macroeconomics gets a

Show them. Bastardized version of it. Whatever. Cain's not the clearest writer either, but he's a much more entertaining writer. Flash forward to

Hay Nobel Prize. In the seventies. I wanna say seventy four. And in nineteen seventy four what he does is he says You know, I tried to build a model of the economy.

That would be like a big engineering Machine that I could manipulate or understand which levers led to which Flows of this or that. And he said

That was a fool's game. That's what he's saying when in that Nobel Prize speech. He's saying I can't explain that. No one can. It uses the example, the analogy of a a sports event.

Like a football game. Just imagine that you could have All the data. On everything you could possibly measure. About all the players.

Whether they slept well. How much they ate the night before, whether having a fight with their wife. how their game last week was and the injury they sustained and whether they're fully over it or only partially over it. Is it even then. I mean there's just no way you're gonna predict

The outcome of the game. Close. You might get on average, right? Maybe. But it's not predictable the way the location of Saturn is on july seventeenth, twenty twenty seven.

They're really g we're really good at that. You know what we're not good at? The value of Bitcoin on July twenty th seventeenth, twenty twenty seven, or interest rates on july seventeenth, twenty twenty seven, or whether it's gonna be a crash, or whether there's gonna be a recession. And Economics. What people want of us.

Is Tell me what's gonna be like tomorrow, professor. I need to know. And the professor should say I have no idea.

But my best guess Is it's gonna be like yesterday? But it often isn't. And if you don't tell people that, you're indulging in scientism because what you've done In that case, for example. You've taken the data from the past.

And you've extrapolated to the future and Yes. Sometimes the future is somewhat like the past. Except for when it isn't. Then it smacked you in the face. So what Hayek was warning us against there, which is

There's an iron is Given the current moment we're in. What he's warning against there is the Authority of experts using the tools of science. To mislead.

And how easy it is to be misled. So it's a profound piece and I recommend it if you find it on the web, it's available. Easy to read for a non economist. We'll include that in the show notes for everybody to Peruse. I wanted to ask you another question about

Mr uh Friedrich A Hayek. And that is actually the explanation of a quote. So this quote I saw pop up numerous places when I was doing some reading. on Mr. Hayek. And it's from the fatal Conceed. And the quote is as follows Speaking as someone who really wouldn't claim to understand even the fundamentals of economics, which I'm again embarrassed to say. But the quote is, you probably can see this coming.

Quote The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. Could you explain what he means by that? That book, by the way. I think it's a hundred and eight pages, at least in some editions. I used to give it away.

More like a punishment, it turned out. They don't want to read it. It's dense. It's very dense. But I do recommend it. If you're a brave soul, you you can do some waiting. Very murky water at times. Uh as I said, he's not the most felicitous phrase maker. But anyway, that particular sentence is pretty convoluted, right? But it is saying something profound.

Which is the following. economists especially In the last ten, fifteen years. See themselves as uh social engineers. As if they can

Tweak and tinker and and Move people around. Adam Smith About two hundred years before that quote. said something similar. He said he said the man of system.

meaning a person who has uh uh a theory about how the world works. You can think about Marx or Lenin or Mao Saitong. They move the human beings in their country around

Like the pieces of a chess board. Ignoring the fact that they have a motion of their own. It's just a profound metaphor for thinking about How to bring about social change. So what Hayek is saying there is that economics the task the curious task.

Because Kind of a strange by the curious he meant peculiar. The curious has to be economics. is to tell people that what they think they can design is often not gonna work out. So it's really a fancy

Convolute a way of saying. you should beware the law of unintended consequences. And that is one of the great virtues of studying economics or can be. Is to appreciate that. And by the way, Tim, I gotta if I go back.

Yes, but I never got to tell you what a Hayekian is. Oh yes. We talked about the pretense of knowledge. The other key part of it. is understanding that The world often emerges from the bottom up. And not just from the top down. And that many things

That are orderly that we see around us. are not designed by anyone, but rather emerge from the individual choices We make. Simple example would be we go to a restaurant. And it's really noisy and I can't hear you, you're sitting next to me.

And I'm thinking like why is it so loud in here? Well let's just turn down the vi where's that switch? Oh there no, there is no switch. If somebody stands up. Hey everybody, it's too loud in here. Let's all talk quietly and we'll be fine. But what happens is we all kind of

Start rationing it up. And similarly with Traffic. Like who sent out the memo that says between five AM and seven AM in the morning go really slow? That's not my intention. Not your intention next to me in the car.

One lane over and yet here we are, as if we've been commanded from the top down. So if you were We all understand that traffic doesn't work that way. It's not Designed by anyone. But there are many things in life where we think Okay, I gotta blame someone.

Who is it? Look at this. And the answer is we did sometimes. And that's a deep inside of hire also. Mm.

So I think maybe for another conversation or if we have time at the end of this one, I would love to ask you again as a complete Neophyte. How Hayek. would think of setting initial conditions.

If he would think of that. at all say contrasted with Kane's, which I thought of prompted by these two rap videos, which I should say you ca you have Some incredible. actors slash performers for. And uh I really do recommend people check them out and I will link to them in the show notes. So maybe we'll come back to that. But let's hop

directly into Wild problems. A guide to the decisions that define us. And the easiest place to start is with the question of why? Why write this book? We all have finite time.

And you could spend your time in any number of ways, new rap videos, poetry, you're very cross disciplinary. I wanna say also very playful with the he wasn't a felicitous phrase maker. Very much like that. Why write wild problems? Well I start the book off with a story of a friend of mine who's trying to sign whether to have he and his wife are trying to sign whether to have a kid. And he tells me.

About he says, Well, we made a list of the costs and benefits and We still could make a decision. And I thought Well, that's interesting. Through most of human history.

People to make a list of cost benefits to decide. Well that have children, they just had'em. Either'cause they couldn't stop'em or they thought it was a good idea. And they didn't spend a lot of time thinking about whether it was a good idea or not. And the implication of a cost benefit analysis is that

I look at my life now without kids and I look at In my life with kids and we're just gonna be Better. And I put better in quotes. And what the real question is, what does that mean?

And one way to think about it, which is very reasonable, is More fun. Right? We all know what the costs are. Yeah, there's diapers to be changed and there's

parents to take'em on and school to drive'em to and Little league games to watch, whatever it is. Music lessons. Pretty helpless. Early on.

For um only for the first eighteen years or so. So it there are a lot of responsibility and I think if you're looking from the outside at having children, it looks like a Not the best deal. I joke at the book. Oh oh hey, get to get a minivan. Oh that's exciting. So

Why do people do it and If you look at it Narrowly. As a cost benefit decision, meaning more fun. Most people would say it's not more fun. In fact I think most parents would say it's not necessarily more fun. It wouldn't

It's not like Every day. With kids is a day at the beach. And even the days at the beach. Often they're cranky and crying and they need something and

So why do people have kids? Is it irrational? And I think most of us understand that At least somewhere in the back of her mind that We have children not because it's more fun, or not because The average day with children will be better than the average day without. Or that there'll be more b good days than bad days.

And I would add this is true of marriage. Even. It's not just having a child. Parenting a child. It's Tie yourself to a spouse.

Right? That's a tough question. Most people If you look at it from the outside You know, I don't know about you, but I look at other married couples. I don't look that happy.

So but they don't it's not like the it's not like it's necessarily the obvious outcome. And so What I suggested to my friend, and what the reason I wrote the book is that I think there's more to life than fun, obviously, and The sources that

Make our life deeply meaningful and purposeful. Are not just the day to day things, there are overarching senses of who we are. And how we see ourselves. And The meaning and purpose we have in life.

That are Ultimately more important in these kinds of decisions. And these kinds of decisions which are Whether to get married, whether to have kids, how many kids to have. Whether to move to Israel, whether to take a new job, whether to study

Something crazy at college. Those decisions are not amenable to data. So this brings us back to high in my view. They're not amountable to data. So the standard algorithms and evidence that we use to

Be quote rational. are not so helpful in this framework. And so I thought I wrote the book to help people think about how to think about that. Mm. Do you think your younger self would have agreed that those things are not amenable to data. Let's just if we dial back

The chronology. fifteen, twenty years? Or do you think he would have Also agreed with that. You're really kind, Tim. We're gonna have to dial it back about forty years.

I joke in the book that when I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago There's a Literally carved in stone, a corrupted quote. More or less.

Right. From Lord Kelvin that says, If it cannot be measured, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory. That's Way I was raised intellectually in graduate school. We went out and did empirical work.

Meaning we looked at the world We had a theory, we tested it. We tested it with data with real world evidence. And then we decided whether the server was right or not. And I was very convinced when I was younger that those

models of of economic behavior. And non economic behavior, but using the tools of economics. We're very Powerful. I still think economics is pretty powerful, but I don't think I ever thought that necessarily

Those kind of models were good for making personal decisions. I think what's been fascinating about the last twenty years of the internet. And smartphone is that The answer's always here, right? Whether it's Somebody's batting average or the capital of an obscure country

Or something much more interesting. Like Where should I have dinner tonight? Or What movie am I gonna like? Or what book? What I like if I like this book. That's a fantastic improvement in the quality of life.

Right? In the old days, you go into the little bookstore they have seventeen books, this old crotchety guy behind the counter would say Yeah, you like Hemingway? Oh, you might like Fitzgerald! And That was nice.

And those people were often fabulous repositories of wisdom and suggestions. But Amazon's better. And

The temptation is to take That improvement of day to day life into the rest of our life. And I think most of us realize you can. But it's really an unpleasant discovery.

Because if I can use ways To get from A to B? Where's the app that tells me whether I should go to B in the first place? No, there isn't one, actually. Well that's not fun.

What I tried to do in the book is to remind you that you can't Use an app for that. There isn't one. And how to think about it. Those choices in life.

Whether you should marry, whether you should have kids, and so on. I Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling, If you're just busy.

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and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash. Tim. Okay. Let's rewind and look at some

historical examples if you're open to it. Because I have What's Notes in front of me, copious notes, we won't get through all of them. But I'll just use a Q. And we can hop from there. Charles Darwin.

Would you like to tell us? Any stories about Charles Darwin? He's twenty nine years old. It's like, you know, maybe I should get married. Spent out on the Beagle.

Yeah, I see. Really on a great career trajectory. And His song

A path to be Arguably If not the greatest, maybe one of the two or three greatest scientists of all time. And he thinks, you know, maybe I'm missing something. So he makes a pro con plus minus cost benefit list of marriage.

It's a really embarrassing list. It's so Bad. It's So you can find this? I imagine you can find it online. Oh yeah, you can find it is handwriting. We have his his actual Journal entry. In England, you can go to London and I don't know if you can see it or not, but it's Reproduced online all over the place. Many people have have noticed this great moment of

Scientific inquiry on the part of Darwin, is it a good idea to get married? So he makes this list. And what I noticed, which I I'd seen the list a number of times when I was In the past. But what I noticed for the first time when I was writing this book is that

He has no idea. What marriage is like. Did I never have data? Which is reasonable when you think about it because He's never been married.

He has some married friends, presumably, he watches them. After dinner talking. Or before dinner or during dinner? But that's it. He has no access. to the inner life of marriage or the inner life.

Of a parent, which is also worried about. but there's gonna have kids. And if you look at his list It's overwhelmingly that marriage and children are a horrible idea. He talks about how He's gonna

Have to maybe leave London'cause she won't like London. He talks about how his kids might get sick. And then he it would bother him and depress him. He talks about how expensive they might be. He talks about having to visit her relatives. And of course in the back of his mind, reasonably. Is that he is gonna be

One of the greatest scientists of all time, and That's a lot to give up for What he actually calls the benefits of My favorite being Female Chit Chat.

And then better than a dog anyway. Which is really not not the greatest endorsement of married life, or the opposite sex, or kinda awkward. So Darwin Dara makes us less. And if you write it down. As I do. I organise

And you look at The pluses are getting married and the negatives getting the negatives are bigger, more numerous So what does he do? Gets married.

It's a journal entry, he he comes back to it. And he writes He has this incredible stream of consciousness paragraph where he says Oh my gosh, I'm gonna be all by myself, I'm gonna become this weird guy in a dinghy apartment and ah Mary Mary Mary Q E D he says

QE D meaning what was to be proven has been proven. Demonstrated. Quotus demonstratum. Yeah. This is bizarre. First of all, it's bizarre, that's a little scientism, right? 'Cause it's not anything close to it.

Yeah, QE D. QED is what you put at the end of a mathematical proof, right? This was not a mathematical proof. This is the most unmathematical Attempt at making a decision. And of course a show. He's not the only one. Many great rational, scientific, analytical, and

People even especially decision making. Have trouble making decisions. Because These kind of decisions at least Or not easily

Done. With a rational framework. And so I think that's Liberating. It tells you

Those of you listening who are going through these life decisions, and I'll tell you, Tim Book comes out on August ninth. And I've already had people write me and say Can you get me a copy now? I'll pay for it. Because I have a decision to make. I have a decision to make and I'm really anxious about it.

And I tell them two things, when I say Well it's not that kind of book. Exactly. It's not gonna It's not an algorithm. Not gonna tell you how to make the decision exactly. It's really gonna help you think about how to make a decision, not what the right decision is. Two different things.

It's gonna help you organize your thinking about it and realize that Your normal thinking, which is this cost benefit plus minus thing. Might lead you astray. I would love to double click on That description.

To maybe Examine the Choice of spouse. Situation. that many people will find themselves in. Let's presuppose that they want a life partner.

To build a family with in some capacity. That's been decided. But then there's the question of Who? And I would love to know what advice you might give someone who is trying to sort through that. Or how they might think about it.

how they might structure their thinking. What advice would you Potentially give to such a person. So it's uh In the book. Talk about that choice and I

Kind of tongue in cheek, talk about Penelope. From the RC. Ulysses wife. Who's waiting for his return from the Trojan War. Yeah, it's such a great

Moment in literature. She's got a hundred and eight suitors. Live enlarge in her House. Waiting, trying to wear her down and get her to pick one of'em.

'Cause they don't think he's coming back. And either she's hoping he will or Doesn't really want to remarry, but it's awkward. Hundred eight guys in your house. Our son's there. Not the best situation. He's you know feeling a little bit inadequate, I suspect. Telemachus.

And I show that there's actually kind of That's a mathematical formula you could use, a famous mathematical problem. It's really beautiful. Elegant thing. Of how she could maximize the odds of finding the best Part.

And It's great. You go out with a few of them. And The presumption of the problem is that you can't Once you've said no to someone, you can't get it back.

Just a little bit like life. There's some exceptions to that, but in general, once it doesn't work out. They move on, you move on. So You go out with the first Turns out about thirty seven of'em.

Mathematically. Thirty seven. And You rank them. And you take the best one of the first thirty seven. And you use them as a benchmark.

Of course we kinda all did this, right? We got with a bunch of people and then You look back on the ones and you think, Well, whoever I do marry's gotta be better than the Once it's that I turn down. And so

But she should do if she wants the best one. Is that After that thirty seventh She should pick the first one she finds is better than the best of the first. thirty seven.

You think well that's kinda cool. In fact The odds that she uh finds the best one. is actually about thirty seven percent. Turns out not to be a coincidence. Put that to the side. Not so interesting.

But that's pretty amazing. If I said to you you've gotta Find the best person in this group of a hundred and eight people, what's the best strategy That's the best strategy. But of course

When you start to think about it. It's not a good strategy. to try to find the best person. Because For a lot of reasons, one of which is How do I stop at one hundred and eight? Should I

Two hundred eight, I could do even better. Two thousand and eight. Twenty thousand and eight, of course. Many people. Date.

Lots of different people and never settle down. That's okay, maybe they choose to, but some of them are are just saying I haven't found the the right one yet. So what I argue in there is that Alan de Baton has a wonderful YouTube video I recommend on I think the title is You're Gonna Marry the Wrong Person. Fantastic short video.

Yeah. Don't show it to my wife because she thinks she married the right person. I don't want her to see it. But seriously. There's no best. And part of the theme of my book is that most of life is a matrix. By that I don't mean like The movie.

It's a What I mean is that It's a set of Complicated. Attributes

That are pluses and minuses. For all kinds of things. So The person you're with. That you're seeing now, whoever's listening out there. You know, there's certain level of attractiveness, there's certain level of kindness, there's a certain level of intelligence, or a certain level many, many, many attributes.

And then there's chemistry and Sexual attraction. Got all those things working. So which is the best one? Oh well I need a formula to. add up all those measurements so I can get

A single number And then I'll just pick the one that gets the best score. And I'd argue that's the wrong way to think about life. It's the wrong way to think about how to pick your friends, it's the wrong way to think about how to find the best job. It's the wrong way to think about most things. And it's not just because you can't find the best one, it's it's not even well defined.

And I think that's Council. Again. Does make it easy to st still pick the one you're gonna marry, but Yeah, I s I give a short list of

But Pick somebody you respect. Who would ju company a joy, you can talk to forever, can share your secrets with. You have some Chemistry.

That's great. That's so hard to find. Marry'em. Ask'em. They probably won't marry you. But at least ask him. What would you say is is there an associated feeling for you? And this may be getting uh too far from the kind of shut up and compute rational physicalist side of things into woo woo territory, but is there a particular feeling that you associate with checking those Boxes having those things and one person and being with that person. Because you've been

Married now for thirty plus years, am I getting that right? Thirty three. Thirty three years. So you have Just how carefully I said that. Yeah, you're right. Thirty-three.

Is there a feeling that you can identify or dominant feeling? or a general sense of being that you associate with checking those boxes. I guess I'm just wondering if there's some sort of holistic feedback that you get kinesthetically or emotionally or otherwise. Yeah, that's a very deep question. We do call it.

Love. I've heard of this thing. I've heard of this. Yeah, I've heard of it too, but it's actually a very misleading word in the following sense. I think people who stay married for a long time have a wide array of emotional landscapes they live in. I think some of them

See their partners as their Soulmates. Through most of their day even. Right. It's not just, Oh, you know, I think of my wife when I go home and I see her and I'm glad to see her.

It's the She or in the case the other side They fill my soul in day to day life. It gets back to what I was talking about earlier. It's not just Oh, they're fun to be with. It's that they create it.

overarching sense of identity of who I they're part of who I am. By the way, Darwin didn't think about that'cause he had never experienced it. Not just that he hadn't been in love. He never crafted a life with another person. That's what a real marriage is, by the way. It's not just that

It's convenient. That there's economies of scale. You can go to Costco more often, if you have kids and a wife. So you can get a lower unit price on the catch up. That's not what it's about. What it's about is a journey.

It's a journey that two people share, and you said looking for a life partner. It's not so fashionable, right? Most people aren't necessarily looking for a life partner. I'm not By the way. More negatives. About a life partner. There are many positives about a life partner. It's complicated.

I would ask your question this way. What suffuses you? What are you overwhelmed by? When you're with that person For decades. And it's not every day, and it's not every night, and it's not every vacation.

Right. But the ideal Is that Much of the time You're filled with something. The word would be love. You call it love, affection, whatever.

But the reason I like your question is that Part of my book is asked this looks at these decision makers where they say things like Well, I made the list Of pluses and minuses and it came out wrong. So I added some

Plus. Or the poem I I mentioned by Piet Hein, who was a scientist and a mathematician. He says, You know, when you When you can't make a decision, flip a coin.

And When it's in the air, you'll know what your Rooting for That's what you really want. That's clever. And that whole idea But what you really want is such a strange idea.

Because what could you really want? There goes. Above and beyond the Pluses and minuses. I mean that's just irrational.

And A lot of smart people have said n not exactly and it by the way it doesn't mean Oh, therefore you should follow your gut. Follow your intuition. That's c that can be very dangerous also, costs you a lot of money. Leg you to marry the wrong person.

You have to be thoughtful about this. It isn't s the alternative The alternatives aren't Use science or just follow your gut. I don't think Either one is the right way to think about these kind of decisions.

So it's both and not Either or it sounds like I have a line in front of me that I that I love, which is from you, so I'm not certainly gonna not gonna take credit for it. And this may wind into what we end up discussing. I am gonna come back to the Costco example that you gave in the economies of scale. But What was once destiny is now a decision. It's uh I would love for for us to unpack this, but I would like to

come back to the point I just raised first. Which you said very jokingly, of course, because it'd be kind of ludicrous to marry someone just to get a discount on your equivalent of prime membership at Costco so you can buy, you know, two gallons of ketchup for the price of one gallon of ketchup. But if we look back in the That the historical record, it wasn't so long ago.

That I would imagine most marriages were marriages that did lend themselves maybe more easily to pro and con lists, right? They were political alliances, they were business agreements, they were family alliances and sharing of resources, things like that. And I'm wondering if

You think That There's some degree Uh To what extent are we making ourselves miserable by expecting to find happiness?

Yeah, one person or one person to check all of these Boxes including romantic notions that seem to have largely started in the Western world with the Troubadours and so on. I don't know if that's a coherent question, but since you have more experience with these things than I do, I'd love to Hear you speak to that in any way whatsoever. That's a deep

question, kind of a hard one. I I think it's a great insight. That A lot of marriages in the past were either arranged Right. By the parents. Yeah.

Had Ulterior motives. Mm-hmm. Even if it was just to get the crops in. We're joking about economies of scale, but economies of scale were not unimportant in most of human history. You had kids partly to help you

Slap the hogs. I mean and milk the cows. Right? And to take care of you when you got old. These were very pragmatic, unromantic. Ideas. Having said that Any

Trip through uh Western literature. You understand there's a little both, right? You read Shakespeare, you read Jane Austen. Jane Austen's characters usually are striving to make a advantageous match Not a love match.

But they also fall in love. So that's one of the reasons I think her books Or so uh compelling. They don't just want to be Pragmatic. But it's a very deep question of whether

What you should look for, what you should expect of marriage. And I think Hollywood misleads us a little bit. The look across the room and I've argued there are very few movies. They capture love.

There are movies that capture romantic attraction, sexual attraction. I'll give you an exception. My fair lady. Yeah. Not a very

P C your Pleasantly correct. movie in in modern times. But it's a fascinating portrait of how Henry Higgins falls in love with Eliza Doolittle.

Despite himself, right. Doesn't want to fall in love. He ha he sees his Bachelorhood life as a Is an ideal. Kinda like Darwin actually.

And yet He finds himself falling in love and Yeah, it's one of the most beautiful love songs ever written. When you think How do you capture that feeling of Real love, not just

Attraction. He says I've grown accustomed to her face. Mm-hmm. What a magnificent Magnificent line, right?

Her smiles, her frowns, her ups, her downs. They're second nature to me now. Like breathing out and breathing in. That's an incredible portrait of domestic life, right? Yeah.

And so My point being that Art. Actually pay some attention to this thing that evidently has been around for a long time. It's not just about sexual attraction, it's about love and romantic attraction, or whatever you want to call that.

Partnership. Symbiosis to make it really as unromantic as possible. Maybe even less romantic than uh Economies to scale at Costco. But I think

The nubs. So what should you look for? What should you expect? And is it worth it? Is it worth some is it something you should strive for?

I'll just say one you know, we can talk about this for the five hours, but I the the one thing I would add I don't like it when people say You know, you have to work at your marriage. You have to work at it. That's not the way I think of my marriage.

I work at crossroad puzzles. I work at at ditch digging. I work at Yeah. Brighten up my notes for my next podcast. But what you do have to do.

Is you have to treat Your partner's partner. As opposed to somebody who You know, lives with you who's pleasant to have his roommate. They're two different things, and I think

In modern life, we've taken away for thousand reasons. the responsibilities of marriage. And I think that's come at a cost, right? And It's made it harder for people to get married. If you look at the data, it's pretty obvious. Let's be uh scientific for a minute.

People are marrying later. Or not at all. Yeah. It's changed. And does the appeal

This comes back to the Darwin point. The appeal of a long term commitment From the outside is mostly negative. For most people. I think certainly for most men. I don't know if women are different, but they uh seem to be.

It's not fashionable to say that, but I think they are. But men. It's hard. Yeah, struggled to stay in a long term relationship. Not as as appealing to either side. It's pretty obvious.

In the date. So What do you do? Well. Tricky.

Could you say more about the diminishing of the responsibilities of marriage. And what you mean by that? The part I like about you have to work at your marriage is it it is hard. There are parts about marriage that are hard. There's parts about having a good marriage. That are difficult.

They're challenging. There's a great line from Annie Lamont. Her name for God. Not me.

Most of us Naturally. See ourselves as God.

Send with the universe, most important thing. Easy. And I think One of the great advantages of marriage. Is to remind you

The it's not all about you. And You know, some people find that appealing and some people don't. I think I took this line out of the book, but I have a friend who said, uh until you get married his father told him this until you get married, you're an idiot. I feel that sometimes. I think there's a lot of truth to that.

And Living with another person. As a commitment. Not as a contract. Very important difference, I'll talk about in the book.

It's more of a covenant and less of a contract. is really a powerful way to be alive. This is to enhance what I said earlier about What a real marriage is about. It's not about working at it. Oh, let's have a session where we

Talk about our issues. It's about remembering'cause back to what we said at the very beginning this conversation, remembering things. That are very hard to remember. That you're in this together. This other person has a soul.

A desire A flavor, a preference. And That's hard. 'Cause you have yours. And you know what? I like it one I want, don't you?

Yeah. We do, most of us most of the time. And to to figure out how to Mesh Your plans. With your partner's plans.

Not just what we're doing on Sunday night,'cause we can take turns and we'll do Italian tonight, and next week we'll do Chinese. But How to make a life together is really hard. And beautiful. And deeply rewarding.

If it goes well. And when it doesn't go well, it's horrible, by the way. Don't want to romanticize it at all, right? It's horrible. Awful, stultifying Degrading. It's bad.

So it's a high risk game. And to come back to your earlier question. For most human history, it wasn't a choice, it was a destiny. It wasn't a decision. You got married. You had to.

It felt that way anyway. It doesn't feel that way anymore. Whole new world. All right. So I have a number of follow up questions and I'm not gonna spend the next hour on on marriage, so don't worry, but I do have one clarifying question, which is until you're married, you're an idiot. Does that refer to being an idiot in the sense of being

So ego centric and self referential that you just don't have the sort of lens. or experience of the world that is as broad and more complete as someone who has decided to partner with someone else? Yeah.

Okay. Got it. Yeah. That's it exactly. All right. Check. Let me say it in slightly different way. I've come to believe as I've gotten older

Yeah. A huge part of quote growing up. You know, we like to joke. Hey Tim, what are you gonna do when you grow up? You know, like like you still have room to grow. Well, I hope you do. Right.

Yeah. It's like Shalem. Right, you're not whole. You're not grown up. One of the funniest things in life is you look at the people older than you

Anything. When I'm their age, I'll feel the way they do, and you get to that age and you don't. Yeah. Right. You look at seniors in high school, right?

When you're a software. Wow, they're so confident and they seem so at ease. I can't wait till I'm a senior. Then you're a senior it's like They were all faking it. Every one of them. Right. And

It's a great thing, I think, to admit that I'm not grown up. I haven't figured it all out. Not mature. Fully. More mature maybe than I was before. But I'm not sure.

It's hard. So A lot of what To me. Of a life well lived is about growing up.

And marriage is one way to grow up. Not the only way, there are other ways to grow up. Yeah. Religion. Meditation, psychotherapy. Marriage.

They're all about self awareness. They're all if they're done well. They're all about recognizing That you're part of a much bigger picture than you feel like most of the time.

And I think that's Really helpful. And S incredibly satisfying. When you said it. Great.

So I'd like to ask a question that I don't think has ever been asked before in the history of podcasting, which is I would love for you to tell me more about Life lessons from Bill Belichick. And also why you moved to Israel. And it doesn't have to be in that order.

Could be in the I think. So I did something a little bit weird in the book. Uh you know, I don't know if it's I literally don't know if it's true. I think I admit it that I don't know if it's true. And it's not surprising that we don't know if it's true because Bill Belichick Doesn't like to tell secrets. He keeps them to himself. I guess nobody tells secrets because if they did, they wouldn't be secrets anymore. But Bill Belichick has a lot of things that he keeps to himself.

And maybe someday he'll write a book about What he understands about football. Should be interesting. But I think he understands something about life, whether it's Intentional or not.

He, by the way, was an economics major. Uh as an undergraduate. And one of the things you learn from economics is trade offs. And trade offs are really obvious when you think about'em, but like many things we're talking about in this conversation. They're hard to remember to think about. So a lot of times we kind of ignore trade offs so we go through our lives. And what I argue Bel Belichick understands.

Is that He's not that good. at drafting Future NFL.

Successful players. By the way, Bill Balcheck's the coach of the New England Patriots, a football team in the National Football League. Which we should have mentioned. So Bel check. Each year.

Get a draft pick. From the crop of college players. A certain Set of players. And I argue in the book, and this is part I'm not sure it's true, but I think it's true. A lot of times he will

Trade away a draft choice. To have more draft choices lower down. Later in the draft. And the reason I argue he does that, so this is all speculative, it's just kind of fun, but I think it's a good lesson for life, is that he wants to increase the denominator. When you think about the ratio of successful

Picks. To total picks. He knows that it's not a big number. So the bigger he makes the denominator He's gonna get a few good players out of the whole thing. It can't

Predict in advance. who they necessarily are going to be. This by the way is very similar to the way Some people invest. Yeah. Instead of picking winners.

They pick an index fund. They take all the stocks'cause they say I can't It's crazy. It's hard to believe, but I think it's mostly true. You can't On average you could do pretty well, but you can't necessarily pick out

In advance. Which are gonna succeed. You can think about this in venture capital. You know, Of every ten investments. One unicorn is extraordinary.

Mostotok Investments are gonna go broke. They're not gonna make it. Literally they're gonna Not gonna cover their costs ever. And a few other movies some was successful, if you're lucky you get a couple home runs.

A unicorn. Company worth a billion dollars. That'd be amazing, right? One out of ten. The crazy thing is You don't know who the witch one it's a one out of ten. So that's bizarre.

So I think life is something like that. And so what I argue in the book And then we'll get to why I moved to Israel, but what I argue in the book is that Even though you can't always anticipate what experiences are gonna be like, and that's why One of the reasons that cost benefit analysis is not that helpful.

Yeah. Trying to figure out what to do in these kind of situations. Try lots of stuff. And if you're lucky Some of those things will be things you can

Change. You can So Bell check if he doesn't the player doesn't work out. He cuts them, he doesn't sign them. I think every year for the last I don't know, seventeen, nineteen, I don't know how many years it is. He has signed

A player who was not drafted. And I think he loves it. I've a feeling it's a little bit of a Seductive thing for him. But he almost always finds A player who no one else wanted, no one thought was worth picking. And finds out that they can contribute.

And he finds that out, this is the punchline, through the experience of working with them. And that's life. Life a lot of the things that we try to figure out, am I gonna like that, not like it? We try to imagine reasonably What it's gonna be like, really can't

No what it's gonna be like until we're in. And so you wanna be in a lot of things, as long as they're not too high cost. To get out of. 'Cause if they're high cost, then there's the trade offs are more serious. So from Bill Belichick, I recommend everybody do a deep dive on Bill Belichick.

And interesting man. Fascinating. And I do not follow football, to be clear. So for me to say that takes something. Absolutely fascinating. Bill also has done quite a bit of reading on stoic philosophy and the stoics it's just all around. A very, very, very interesting guy. So bookmark that for other people. Yes. When you get him on your podcast. Yes.

Would you recomm encourage him to come on mine? He's gonna come on yours before mine, but I really want to talk to him. I will. I will absolutely yes. If if I'm if I manage the so Bill can be the white whale for both of us, if I get him first, then I will I will certainly recommend that he he go on to your show. And You're welcome. So let's go to Israel and I'm gonna attempt to tie a few things together once we get into the midst of of you.

exploring this or explaining this, but why move to Israel? So I got offered this job to be president of college. Uh I'm Jewish. I've always liked Israel. I've been here a dozen times horror. Actually lived here as a teenager when my dad's company sent him here to look at an Israeli company as a possible partner merger.

Or acquisition. I like Israel. It's nice. Great place to visit. I've always enjoyed it. I care about it. I think it's important. I think it's great that the Jewish people have state.

F But I had no interest in moving here. That's a crazy idea. But I got offered this job and the job is leading this college that has a core curriculum and Greek philosophy, Jewish thought, the Quran.

The New Testament, Shakespeare. Western history And then you could either major in two things when I got here or now three, but the philosophy and Jew thought are Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and learn Arabic. That's the whole place. And I thought That's nice. I'm glad it still has a college like that. It's a good thing.

But I'm not interested in working for'em, of course. That'd be a crazy idea. But The more I thought about it, the more I realized it. If you listen to Econ Talk, you find out that I'm increasingly interested in questions of what is the life well lived and

We've been having that Conversation from the last Hour and a bit, actually. Not explicitly, but that's Really. What we're talking about. What is the life well lived.

How do we flourish as human beings? So that's at the center. Of the intellectual mission of this college. And also to turn out leaders who will go on to have uh impact on the country, which I like and think that's a good thing. And uh I care a lot about education. Um

The model of education we represent here is small seminars of people exploring Great text together. Respectfully in open inquiry. So like how can I say no? And the only answer really was if my wife didn't want to come, I wouldn't we wouldn't come, coming back to earlier conversation. But she thought it would

Be a great adventure, and so we jumped. We sold our house. We put our stuff in storage to be shipped here when we found a place. To live and uh we move to Ezra. And it's

It's stricken from firehooks. It's uh You know, people say to me, So how's it going? You settling in? No, we're not settling in. We are foreigners, we're immigrants. And we're living in the Middle East where we've never lived before.

It's a Jewish state, but it's in the Middle East. It's culturally different. Then many places where lots of Jews live. So it's fascinating. It's an incredible life experience. And the work part is amazing. And it's

You know, an adventure. Incredible adventure. That is big move. Seems like a big decision. And

I would love to know if you are open to sh just sharing the story of how you Pitch that. To your wife, what did that conversation look like? I can tell you a little bit about it. It was actually it was funny. It's in the middle of co it's very vivid to me because it was the middle of Covid. And most Sundays during Covid we spent uh walking along the Potomac River.

We had to be outside. Often it was miserably hot. Yes, it is outside the Potomac River on in July and and August. And June even. And sometimes September and you know, no, it's warm in D C area. But

I have vivid memory of us walking along. And talking about whether we we did something similar to what Darwin. Obviously. Bay. too much fun and cost benefit. Obviously we spent some time thinking about is this gonna be

Fun. Are we gonna like it? But that wasn't the only thing in the calculus. Yeah, we have friends here. But we have friends where we've been living for eighteen years and we miss them.

Our children are spread out all over the world. I have a daughter in London, a son in California, a son in Maryland, we have a son in and we have a son in Australia. I said I I hate that. We have children in all those places. So one argument was, Well, Israel's far from all of them, but so's wherever we live, so it's okay. We spent it.

Pretty serious amount of time talking about The purpose. Of This job. You know, my wife was uh

І Америка у за хайско. math teacher, fabulous math teacher, but she was thinking about doing something different. So for her, this was gonna be a transition time. Anyway, so we focused on whether We would like this job and by we was Literally we in the sense that

My wife had been an administrator as well and As it turns out Most of the things that She was challenged by his administrator, I'm challenged by his administrator too. People are kinda similar. Yeah.

There's issues of management and getting along with other folks and Ego and normal human interaction. So She's an incredible advisor for me on this in this job. She's Might.

Right hand person, obviously. And She cares about this mission. If she didn't, I don't think we would have done it. If she didn't care about education and this kind of

Purpose. I think she thought it would be good for me. I think she saw that. She thought it was a chance for her to explore a bunch of new things. But really it was

Is this what we're meant to do? Yeah, you can put a divine twist on that. But it doesn't I think a lot of non religious people have a similar feeling about their life. Is this what I'm called to.

Is this what Why I'm here. And we both felt that this was part of why we were here is to If we could do it well.

If we could be successful at it. And so That verdict isn't in yet, but it's it's been an amazing first year. So I know uh quite a few Jewish friends, some of which have ended up moving to Israel or figuring out ways from the US or within Israel to contribute to Israel. How much of it was a

contribution to Israel and its people. versus the particulars of this college its curriculum its approach to education was definitely both. If this had been in say Bosnia, I don't think I'd have done it.

the chance to lead a small liberal arts college in uh Bosnia wouldn't appeal to me. I mean it'd be kinda interesting, but the downside would have been significantly It would be large enough that I would have said no to it. So a lot of it was the former's a chance to contribute, a chance to

Jews have been talking about coming back to Jerusalem for two thousand years. Since the second temple was destroyed. And the fact that in my lifetime We have a Jewish state. Is Amazing. And I am very proud and

It's exhilarating to me to be part of it. There's so many Day to day moments here. It's it's hard to explain. What it's like to live here in the following sense.

You open up the an Israeli newspaper on any any day. There's almost the same headlines. This almost the same headlines every day. Terrorist attacks worded in such and such place.

Iran heats up. New government coming, elections next month. And then my favorite Fourteen year old girl finds Roman coin in Cassaria that shows uh existence of So and so.

Harris rule at in at whatever time. So Everything here matters. It's so consequential to to be here. As part of the Jewish experience. So that's a lot of it for me. It's pretty fun too, by the way. I don't mean to downgrade the fun part. Jerusalem's an amazing city. It's gotten much more interesting as a place to live in the last twenty years.

So it's very nice. Yeah, I've I've not spent much time. Have you been here, Tim? I have. Have you been here? Yeah, I actually I actually went to Israel For the first and only time. to Join

A training. I was auditing. But in this case it was a training for MDMA assisted psychotherapy. Which was funded in part by the equivalent of the Ministry of Health. Maybe it's called the Ministry of Health in Israel, which was the first in terms of government funding. Exactly.

I was that was coming next. It's on the tip of your tongue. Right. It was just it was just there. And we engaged in the training on I don't think it would be called a kibbutz, but it was a communal living environment which was half Jewish and half Muslim. And that certainly made it very, very, very Interesting. And the feeling certainly is in Israel

And I suppose in in a number of places in the Middle East that Almost everything is or seems consequential. Makes me think I'm not gonna get the attribution right. I think it was I think it was Joseph Cannibal, but it may have been Victor Frankel who said what we're seeking is not the meaning of life, but a feeling of being alive, and I think you get that. It's hard to escape that when you are in a place like Israel.

It seems. So behind me Which if you're s watching this on YouTube you can see is a Shade. If we raise that shade and you stood at that window.

You are about two miles from uh the old city of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, where you can see the dome of the rock. A great Muslim shrine and The Temple Mount is a great Jewish shrine where the Western Wall is the Cotels, it's called in Hebrew.

And sometimes I look down on that from my I can say from my office, sometimes I look down on that and I am moved because it's It's bizarre. It's so small. It is so small and it feels like it's the center of the universe sometimes. Meaning everything is over dramatized here. You say everything matters. Everything seems consequential.

Who to I'm if I The poet said that Jerusalem is a Port City on the Sea of Eternity. So you have this Credible spiritual

center here for the three great Abrahamic religions. You have the політика. That rivet the world. And we also have modern life and

Great food. Yeah. Yes, I can. It's really small. Not just the old city. I mean the old city is tiny. Israel is really small. If you look at Israel on a map.

You can barely pick it out most of the time. And it gets so much attention. More. Leave it at that.

Walking through the old city is one of the most intense I've done it twice. One of the more intense experiences I've ever had in my life. It's the Again I'll I guess I'll keep it. Keep it simple, but the the sort of tension and attention in the air is so palpable. I don't want to get too mystical, but it could just be kinda aesthetic. It is

Very perceptible. I'll th I'll put it to that. It's a weird physical setting. It's almost all paved. It's this weird Cobblestone, ancient stone. They're stone.

Over here in the old city that are That were carved out. Two thousand years ago to build Things and they're still there. And

There's walls from six hundred years ago, from crusader times and It's Yeah, you go to England, it's old. England makes the United States look brand new. Yeah, we have history of the United States cut. Seventeen seventy six.

Go to England's like We have no history. Go to come to Israel it's like England has no history. So I wanted to Maybe awkwardly, you can tell me. After I asked the question.

Bring back. What was once destiny is now a decision and I I may be putting this in the wrong context, but one thing that I feel I've observed with my audience over the last say year or two in particular Is a certain degree of growing apathy

But I I think the apathy Is derived from many different factors, one of which is just decision fatigue and overwhelm.

Which is where I do think numeracy and other basic capabilities come in very, very handy so that you're not just lost in the rapids of noise. But my question related to all of that is To what extent this is gonna be strange wording, so it's deliberate, but it might seem odd. To what extent has

Religion been an advantage for you. In the sense. That it provides rules.

And maybe some automaticity to certain aspects. of life. I'm not religious, but there are definitely times when I envy those who are. And I would just Be curious to hear. Any and all thoughts.

on that. Can we talk about the first part first? Absolutely. About the decision issue fatigue and I've been very lucky. I I got covered about a month ago. For the first time.

It was really unpleasant. I was in bed for three days. Damn it energy. And I was Ten days.

B. Just B. But I had a lucky, I didn't end up on a ventilator, I didn't die. It's like it was a bad flu. Yeah, the Omicron.

Phase here. But for two years, especially the night when I was in the United States before I came here I had a I think for most of us it was a ver a very unusual life experience. It was a little bit not a lot, but a little bit like war.

So war We think back, say at the Say the bombing of of London. Yeah, you think about it, every night Sirens go off, you go down to the basement.

You go down not the basement, you're going on to the metro, the underground, excuse me, in in London. Or you go to some place of shelter. And you come back out. If you're lucky, your house is still there. And if you're not lucky, it's your house is gone and maybe somebody died. Oh you

Sure about. Yeah. Can you imagine that night after night after night, and after a while you say You know, it's really hard. But the hardest part of it is I don't know when it's gonna end.

If you just tell me when it's gonna end. I can handle it. Just give me the Arrival date. What's the ETA? Of peace.

And of course. Most wars They think oh it'll be over in a week. Civil War. It'll be over in a week. Two weeks. Months. Most corners

Drag on. As hard as Cove it was and it Again, it's embarrassing to compare to or Can you imagine what it was like to be in London or Berlin?

Yeah. Japan? Not in the United States, because United States was Pretty protected. But in these countries where Day in, day out.

Your loved ones were dying. And you don't know when it's gonna end. And you more than anything else, you just want What do you want? Just give me a normal day.

Or don't have to be afraid. Don't have to hear worried that someone's gonna die. So Covid gave us a tiny Thank God relatively s much smaller taste of that. And for most people I thought for me it was incredibly hard. It was like

When am I gonna be able to fill in the blank? When am I gonna have a nor I just want a norm I wanna go out to a bar? And see some friends and have a drink. Or go to a party? Or Better yet, go to a wedding?

Go even go to a funeral. Right. People who miss funerals, who miss weddings, who miss Wonderful. Life events and and couldn't participate.

And so I think That really wore us down. Or a lot of us down, right? Very, very demoralizing.

There's some wonderful things about it. You faced your mortality. Most of us, I think. Yeah. Recommend the fact.

When I got my vaccine finally, it's like oh I felt like Superman. Oh, I forgot I'm still gonna die. It stinks, doesn't it? But

It force you to remember that, that you're gonna die. You might die soon from covet and a Hospital on a ventilator or Horrible way to go. And if you're lucky you don't get it, but you're still gonna die. And I think for a lot those two things

When's it gonna end and I am mortal. And I Again, coming back to our theme of of things you don't want to think about or easy not to think about. The fact that we're gonna die is

Not pleasant, monstrous. Push that one off. Those two things really wore us down. So What does that have to do with religion?

I think Religion's really interesting. Obviously it's a fascinating part of of human experience. Both glorious and inglorious. I think people who aren't religious

think it makes life easy in the way that you suggested the automaticity. Uh, things are taken care of. And and there is a piece of that, by the way. I keep the Jewish Sabbath. So if you say to me I've got tickets to see Paul McCartney, who I jump. Particularly like, but he's I'd like to go see him.

That might Favorite musician. But he's at the Meadowlands with Edward Springsteen's gonna show up, which happened recently. I don't I don't know if it was a Briday night or not, but if you said You wanna go? I think Oh yeah, I wanna go Oh it's Friday night. Oh I can't go. So

For me. It does rule out Certain decisions that What otherwise you'd have to wag. Th there's no doubt about that. But I think a lot of people think that a religious life is one that's free of doubt.

And is is a bunch of angels sitting around singing, strumming guitars, you know. Bunch of good Martin guitars singing some. Come by our song. It's really not the main thing about religion that's attractive to me, and maybe to other people. 'Cause I have plenty of doubts, by the way, and I think most most religious people in the modern era

struggle with faith. I think it's a I know I shouldn't say most. Many do. For me it comes back to what we talked about earlier. I didn't write about this in the book, but It gives life a certain texture. And

Part of what I'm trying to say in that book in Wild Problems Is that there's more to life than The emotional ups and downs, and what we call fun or happiness. And there's a certain texture to life that comes, say, from being married. Or being a parent.

Or moving to Israel. Or having a certain career. Maybe in a a profession that that makes you feel F And yourself.

And that texture. is to me a lot of what uh religious life is about. It's the Okay. Not that different from many of the things we've been talking about.

There are Friday nights where I wished I could do something I choose not to do. More globally. But the overall impact As a Effect on how I see myself.

And how I go through the world. That I find Meaningful. I don't think it's accessible to everyone. It's for me, in my experience a little bit like music.

Some people are tone deaf. And they cannot Enjoy music the way. A great musician can, or even a mediocre

And other people have a great ear. And All that music makes their heart sing all the time. And they live in a different world than the rest of us. And I think there's a whole continuum of music and religious

slash spiritual Practice. That we inhabit That is personal. That is person specific.

It's like I give you my favorite novel. You're gonna love this. It didn't speak to me. That's what happens. And there's certain religious experiences

Or spiritual experiences, spiritual practices. That don't speak to certain people because they're just not Hardware that way, I think. I don't know. Let's uh

If I may segue to A rather motley assortment of questions that may not have any thematic through line whatsoever. That's okay with you. But they're actually they do have they do have a through line, which is my personal curiosity. So the first And again I'm I'm I'm trying to Craft novel.

Segue here. So we're gonna go from Nasim Talib to The Talmud. Okay. Not not related. So the first is related to Nassim, so I have not had any contact with him in many years, but we had two meals long, long, long, long, long time ago. He goes on very few podcasts.

He's been on yours several times. And I'm looking at another bit from

Cowan. And I'm just gonna read this. line here. I get a lot of flack for interviewing Nasim Tab because his online persona seems to be different from mine. I'll say it judiciously. I've learned an immense amount from him. I would just love to hear You speak more to what you have learned from him or his writing or gleaned from him or his writing. I've been meaning to write an essay on this for a while because

I've never systematically thought about it. Occasionally, you know, someone will say, Oh, he's so he's so annoying or I don't like him or And why do you have'em on your show? It's it's against your Philosophy of I try to have civil conversations with people I disagree with. And I have very civil conversations with Nassim, by the way, but He wrote a book. His first book was called Fooled by Randomness.

Great book. It's a fabulous book. A lot of people's reaction to that book was Oh, there's nothing new in there. And

I could argue I guess I've you know as a PhD in economics I take a bunch of statistics, what's called econometrics. The application of statistics to economic problems. You could argue I do everything in there, but I didn't know it in my bones, and th that's

A lot of what we're talking about today, which is How do you pay attention? And he taught me how to pay attention to some things out in the real world. That I was totally Unaware of in the moment.

If you said to me later. Did you realize I'll take one here's an easy one. If you go to Great Falls. National Park, which is a fantastic. Park very maybe the one of the finest

nature experiences you can have very, very close to a large metropolitan area just outside Washington D C. There's a side in Virginia and a side of Maryland. Both sides are interesting and great. Pikes along the Potomac River there. There's incredible waterfalls and and Turbulent waters.

Very, very beautiful place. There's a great sign. Fantastic sign. It's not really a science stick. on the Virginia side.

You have to look up. And you look up and it says this is the high water mark of the Potomac River. So you're I don't know. Hundred and fifty feet above the Potomac River already? And then there's this post in the ground that goes up another twelve and a half, whatever it is, fifteen feet. And that's the high water mark of the Potomac River.

It's Hard to imagine it could flood to that level. But evidently it has. is a fact. So if you're building a house

In Virginia. Dear the Potomac River. How high should you build? And the answer some people would actually argue is that if you build it higher than that Sign.

You're safe. And you'd be wrong. Because the past is not necessarily A good predictor. Of the future.

And we all know that. That's the most trivial Obvious thing and yet To take another a financial example. Oh well

The SP five hundred. There's never been a ten year period with a negative return. I don't even remember now. Whatever it is. Take all the different decades. And I don't mean nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty, nineteen thirty to nineteen forty. I mean Twenty one to thirty one, twenty two to thirty two, nineteen twenty three to nineteen thirty three.

And you could look at all of those, and you could take the worst. Ten year period. And you'd say, Okay. So I'm Like I'm right now I'm sixty seven.

In ten years I'll be seventy seven. So if I invest all my money in the SP five hundred and don't touch it for a decade What's the worst thing that could happen? Well The answer is

Something worse than this happened before. Possibly. And th that that is a possibility is so hard to remember for most people. 'Cause really, really smart people make that mistake all the time. That's a simple thing.

That I've learned from him. That's not that's not like Dramatic. I'll give you one more. One of my favorites as an economist. So he has a book called Skid in the Game.

Skin in the game is like the bread and butter of economics. So skin in the game means if I bear The costs of mistakes. And I enjoy the fruits of my good decisions. That's getting the game, right?

That's great. Yeah. Fancy name. For economists. When they talk about this is incentives are aligned.

But it means get skin on again. And Yeah, Milton Friedman like to say that capitalism is a profit and loss system. The profit encourages risk taking. The loss encourages prudence.

So profit and loss encourage prudent risk taking, not reckless risk taking. If you bail out. Losers. You have taken away the loss and you get imprudent. Risk taking. It's a bad idea.

So economists understand this. We we get it. But Talad taught me something I hadn't understood or appreciated about skin on the game. Which is fascinating. Which is that Let's say you don't pay attention.

To the fact that you've got skin in the game. You're oblivious. Economists like to argue people are rational. They take account of their gains, they take account of their losses, that's why they're prudent risk takers if there's profit and loss. But what Talet points out is that

If you're really bad at something And you ignore The risks? You can take it out of the game. You're not in the pool anymore.

And so even if you're not paying attention skin in the game makes a difference because it weeds out Say Gamblers who are Imprudent risk takers, unless you bail them out.

You take out the skin in the game. But I've always as an economist thought, Oh yeah, you look at it You take into account the effect of every economist would tell you this. But he made me appreciate that even if you're not paying attention As long as you don't bail out losers.

They'll be weeded out of the process. Nice point. Cool. I've enjoyed his writing. I first read actually the the Black Swan. And then

Went back to Fooled by Ranamis, also read Anti Fragile, very popular among Some uh former well, at the time current military intelligence guys. Interesting. And I was introduced. Actually to his work. First by a a friend of mine, an incredible Tech innovator named Matt Mullenweg and then

Later. had anti fragile recommended to me by military folks. Just as a side note. I was introduced to him by the late Seth Roberts. I don't know if you ever knew Seth Roberts.

Uh in no relation, but the first time I ever met Nassim in person, I think it was the day after Lehman had collapsed. It was quite a time to have a conversation. So let's go from Lehman Brothers to the Talmud. Am I saying that word remotely correctly? Exactly correctly. All right. Well sorry, if you're an American you're saying it correctly.

In Israel you would say Talmud. Talmud. Half mood. So I have

A quote here that I'll put into context. So this is on a site called Pricenomics. And here it goes. So some of his commentary and then we have a quote that I would love for you to expand on. Explaining complex economic ideas can be a sissy and task, a fact that Roberts acknowledges, quote, of course it's frustrating and sometimes it's very depressing, end quote, he says, but he is philosophical about one person can do.

And here we go. I follow what the Talmud says about this. It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. So that lasts Line. Is

What I would love to hear more about. It's kind of embarrassing to talk about it actually. No one's ever asked me to expound on that. Yeah. Yeah. forces me to think about coming full circle to our earlier

First thing we talked about, which was my dad. And I think Many of us. Are raised to think that we have obligations. We have things we're supposed to do.

Things were supposed to pick up. Tasks. And I've always felt that to some extent. I don't know How much of it's genetic, how much of it's cultural, the way I was raised. So that idea that you're not free to desist from it?

You can think of it as a religious statement but I don't think it's most people there are plenty of non religious people Who have that same feeling. Yeah, sometimes they're called type A. I should be careful.

Type A people who need to do stuff. It's not quite the same. Not quite the same. But But the idea that you're supposed to do something of consequence the That you're not just here to enjoy yourself. Is a burden.

Or blessing I've always somewhat felt. I don't want to be I think it's a little bit more. You can easily take it as pretentious. It's interesting. Yeah, I had a conversation with mentioned Tyler Coward earlier. We did this episode on

How we read. Our reading habits. And it was really fun to talk to Tyler's Please. An unimaginable amount. It's it's it really is unimaginable. He actually I think understands some of it, which is even b and remembers some of it, which is even better. Uh but

Sayers I have a lot of respect for Tyler. He's a he's a great, great Thicker and Polymath. And somebody wrote me an a a fascinating email. They said You know, I read what you wrote about reading and one of the things I s I like to say is that

And if you read a book a week. Which is a lot. You can read about fifty books a year and if you're You're around for about fifty years of reading. Maybe a little more, but

It's twenty five hundred bucks. That's it. That's it. Yeah, there there's a hundred thousand books. I think maybe more. I don't even remember now how many books are published a year. Maybe it's a million. It's a big number. Oh yeah. Yeah, at least a hundred thousand. And I get to read twenty five hundred a year. I mean in a lifetime. So you know

I would say pick'em carefully. Which I don't always live by. I read a lot of books that are either Not always so interesting, and I I've gotten better at stopping. When I was younger, I couldn't put down a book without finishing. It was a moral imperative terrible habit. I got over that thing. Thank goodness. But You have a limited number of books to read and and this listener said to me, W how do you justify watching a baseball game?

You know? And you could argue the same thing when you think about the top. It's not up to you to finish the work, but it's you're not free to desist from it and while you're watching baseball, you're Kind of assisting from it.

So if you think of your life as having purpose and you're supposed to do stuff and accomplish, right, which I again I think I was both hardwired and and culturally pushed to do by my By my parents. And I single that my damn'cause He's the one who drove home for me, much more than my mom.

Who gave me other things, but Not this. Or curse me. Again, it's is it a blessing or a burden, I don't know.

I like to think of it as a blessing. But how do you justify like full it around? You know, doing nothing. Plan your Fourtieth game of chess in a row that you'cause you can't sleep and you're compulsively

Why should your score on chess dot com dwindle? Steadily through the night. I have a smart son who says, You know, when you lose two in a row Maybe stop playing.

He thinks it the goal is to win. The goal's not to win, the goal's to distract yourself. It's terrible. I play too much chess. I think I do, but frivolous things. And certainly there is, by the way, a strong Impulse and Judaism.

And I assume other religions. Not to waste time. It's a precious thing. You should be Study, learning, growing, contributing. Doing good deeds.

And yet. Watching a baseball game, how do you justify it? So Yeah, I wrote it back and said Part of the reason I I enjoy the occasional baseball game, which I don't watch much of from Israel'cause the time zone doesn't Work so well.

Part of the reason I like watching sports is that There's drama. It's about a human being. And a set of human beings put in a cauldron of expectations and pressure. And to watch them emerge successfully.

Or to be. To fail is is is like watching a great drama. That's one argument. Second is that See, it needs some downtime. It's okay. Your head's gonna explode otherwise. But I do think For myself, whether it's

For whatever reason, and I think for many people. We feel we have to We have to. We can't desist from it. We have a job to do. And some of it's by the way, it's not all I'm I have to build a

A house for homeless person, sometimes it's just I have to grow. I'd say that's even more of a It's not the Talmud quote, but it's a different impulse that that's not totally unrelated, which is

Don't just stagnate. Which is a weird attitude in a finite life. I want to just ask a handful of Last questions and the next one is related to prayer. And this may be Dated. I don't think it's too dated, but uh I'm reading a quote.

Mm. from you, which is I'm trying to write a book on prayer for people who struggle with prayer. And I think most people do, at least the ones I know. And then it goes on to talk about other potential books on forgiveness and so on. I would Love to know what

Prayer means to you. And if such a book would be for religious people or if Yeah. version of prayer would be made available through such writing to people who do not consider themselves religious.

Definitely the most personal question anyone's ever asked me. Tim, but since we've been talking now for almost two hours, I feel like we're very close. So I'm I'm gonna try it. No, I'm tasing, of course. Let me try to answer that. I I am trying to write a book on prayer and since I became president of Shalem College, I was lucky to finish Wild Problems. I haven't made any progress on that prayer book since I got to Israel.

It's kind of ironic. The holy land. Ha. But I think It comes back to the For people who aren't religious, and I by the way, I was not religious my whole life, so I had a a part of my life where

Was not praying regularly and where I was not keeping the Jewish Sabbath as it were, I was eating lobster pork and enjoying it immensely. And I think Every not everyone. It comes back a little bit to the comment I made earlier about being tone deaf, but most people I think

Can experience the transcendent. Or the A word that I find very difficult to think about, but I love the word. It's imminent. Not Meaning soon, but

Sort of embodied in you. Eminent I M M. A N E N T. And In the book. that that I'm working on someday.

Maybe. I talk about the handful of times when I've come into contact with that. Yeah. I'm sure you have too. Example I use is

I'm in California. Taking the family My wife and I have taken the kids to see it. The Shakespeare production outside in Santa Cruz, which is just really fun. You're in these red woods and it just it's lovely. It's been a long day. We've had a good time as a family and

We're driving back and I think everybody's asleep with the car except me. We're driving back to Palo Alto and I realize that To my left. It is such a dark night for some reason and there's so little Light pollution.

That the stars are as vivid as they are, say, in Yosemite or The Negev, the desert here in Israel, the only these are the two places I've seen the best stars of my life. And They're luminous. They're not just like White dots. They're luminous.

And you can see them all the way down to the ocean. But I'm on the coast, so I'm coming up I'm driving north on the coast. And I can see Constellations and stars.

At the horizon. I mean it gives me goosebumps to think about it. To talk about it. It it was um Yeah, I don't remember if I woke everybody up or if we even stopped the car. Uh I just It was a little bit dangerous. I'm dr you know, I rolled down the window to get better sight and I remember just I kept turning my head.

I felt connected to something. Now was I really connected to something? Am I imagining it? I don't really care, actually. I hope it's true that there's something Greater than just Nature and the material and

My um Animal self. But there might not be, but I do feel it. Sometimes. And I think most of us have moments like that. Alan Leitman, the physicist.

has a wonderful book on this. He he's an atheist. But he talks about Lying in a boat, looking up at the stars and how You feel something and it bothers him as a physicist. And he writes about this discomfort that He feels he's

Something transcendent there, something bigger than himself. So you can feel it out in nature. I have felt it many times. Not enough, but many times in Random encounters with human beings under duress.

I'm sure you have to where you You meet someone who's having a Very bad time. And you interact with them in a Way that

is not normal. You don't usually have people sharing incredibly personal things, but they do. They need to share it. And they pour out their heart to you and you're there for them. And one of these moments for me is this person said, You don't want to hear this, do you? I said, No, I do.

I do. And the truth is I didn't want to hear it. But I did. I was compelled. literally compelled. I wasn't gonna go anywhere. I wasn't gonna but part of me was wanted to run away because it was so painful. It was such a a heartache this person was sharing.

Somebody I didn't know very well. And those moments, those handful of times in in my life as a human being. Where I've encountered another human being either under duress or in joy. It's also in joy. No, the birth of my children share it w where I was in you know, privileged to be in the

in the room with my wife when we when she gave as we gave birth she did most of the work, pretty sure when when she gave birth Those moments are not just like oh that was really fun. I'll pick an even more trivial ones, you know. Great musical performances. I've written about this.

You know, watching next to normal, and I think her name is Rachel Bay Jones. Pour out her self. In front of a Two thousand strangers. And expose herself emotionally.

as the character in that play and do it in a way that isn't just like I'm act you don't feel like she's acting at all. You felt like she's Giving you access to something. That's in you too. Those moments they're they're

They're transcendent. Th they're part of something Bigger than ourselves. So that that's what I think of. With prayer, I think a prayer is accessing those. Or trying to access us more frequently. And for me it's tied in with a belief in God or a hope of God's

Being there and listening. But I think for non religious people there there's something there even when it's not Religious. It's spiritual, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah, thank you for that explanation and those examples. I agree with you on the Access. to such things even if you do not identify as a theist in any way. I certainly would agree with that. Russ, I appreciate you as a thinker. I appreciate you as a teacher. I've enjoyed this conversation. I'm not in a rush to close it. But

Cognizant of time and all other things. Is there anything else that you would like to add? Any stories like to tell, any requests of the audience anything before we wrap up? I wanna ask you a question.

Yes, please. And uh It's your show, so you can edit it out if you want, but you don't have to answer it. Fire away. You know, we've been talking about Stepping outside yourself.

It's been a sort of sub theme of this conversation. As an example of the life well lived. And You are a very successful person. In s multiple dimensions.

You have an impact on the world. through the research you've been funding, I know about that'cause I keep an eye on you. Your podcast is phenomenally successful, your books are phenomenally successful. You're charismatic, you're charming. How to keep your head screwed on straight.

Is it a challenge? Yeah, we've been talking about this, right? You should be full of yourself. It would be totally normal. For you to be completely full of yourself.

Do you have anything you do? To try to keep your feet on the ground. And to stay sane. I don't think it's so healthy, by the way. Most of us aspire. Yeah, I wish my podcast audience were bigger.

I wish it was more like Tim Ferris's. Work like Tim Ferris's. You're who we wanna be and yet You know what it's like. It's not that easy. It's not And after a while some of the bro get

Gets a lulled. How do you say uh Grown up. Thank you for Saying all that and for the question.

I'll mention a few things. The first is that and I'm not proud of this, but I am my own Best critic or worst enemy depending on The day depending on the impact that it has on me, this being my Inner voices.

on my psychology and emotional state and so on. But I do think that as a perfectionist Most of what I do Is never. Up to my standards. Whatever.

those imaginary standards might be. Or as unreachable as they might be. So I think that's One. I've certainly been told and I'm sure this is

tributed someone else originally, but a older friend of mine said long time ago, he said, You're never as good as they say you are and you're never as bad as they say you are. And I've Often Reminded myself.

Of that, I think that I also At least through the podcast and sometimes through the books, even though I haven't written a What I would consider a proper book and Quite some time, I would say. Ten years actually.

I try to broadcast the mistakes and the failures. I try to Serve up. equal portions of success stories and also Misguided.

side alleys that end in disaster so that I'm not creating a highlight reel for people. It's very difficult not to do that, especially I think in some cases in the podcast. When What gets broadcast, and you know this too, is is a relatively s small piece or can be a relatively small piece of the entire operation and what goes into it and the survivorship bias. I mean, if you really have a terrible interview, it doesn't get shar. Or it gets edited so tremendously that it's sort of s frank and spliced into something that sounds a lot better than what happened in reality.

And I also have a very lucky uh and this is by certainly by luck and uh Somewhat by design on top of that. I have great friends who Well call me on my bullshit.

And Well certainly stress test any position that I hold really strongly. And I'm very fortunate. You know, I mentioned one person, Matt Mullenwig. He's certainly one of those people. He's excellent at seeing things from different perspectives. And he will even as devil's advocate, even if he doesn't have a dog in the fight with a particular position, he will Force me.

Through ruthless cross examination to look very closely at perspectives that might be ignoring. alternative explanations I might be conveniently dismissing. And uh

Those are the first handful of things that come to mind for me. I would also say That just by virtue of the And certainly you you have been doing this so much longer than I have and have been an inspiration to me and this podcast in so many ways. When you interview people who are exceptional at what they do all the time, it highlights how much I'll speak for myself. I personally do not know and how many capacities I either will never have or have not developed.

That The older I get, the more I realize how incredibly little. We understand to any extent. It's actually very exciting to me. So those are those are a few things that come to mind.

For me. I like that observation about Humility. Because I feel being a podcast host has made me more humble.

And I've had some success. Not as Like yours, right, but I'm doing okay. You're doing You're doing okay.

And in theory you should just be an arrogant Put to use a gettersterm. And you might be, Tim, I don't know you will, but but I do my speaking only for myself. I d I try. I try not to be. Definitely. Good goal. Yeah for me It's not just

I decided a long time ago That I wanted to be empathetic. To my guests. That I would make a better show. It's the right thing to do.

And I thought it would make a better show. That was a very costly decision. Because it forced me to reevaluate a lot of things that I had believed or held as

Dogma. And I haven't changed so much, but I have changed some. And One of the things that changes is that as you say You're forced to recognize

Your own limitations. I like to joke. That each week I get to interview a person smarter than I am and ask'em dumb questions. Yeah. But it's really the truth, and it has made me much smarter. As well as reminding me how little I know.

And since we talked earlier about Nasa Dek was Talib One of my favorite Quotes from him is the He cites it as a A Venetian proverb.

The farther from shore The deeper the ocean. And The more you learn, the more you realize How deep the water is. She there's a long way to go.

Long way to go. Yeah. It really is, so So far to go and I wanna mention

just for people who may not identify as religious in any way. You mentioned the and am I getting this right, the negative? That's it. Yeah. If you have not had a transcendent Experience.

And I'll put aside defining that term for now, but if you are Russ, you were describing if you go To the negative.

Do it with a tour. It is a desert after all. Or have a tour guide at least. And sit there quietly, which I did. with my girlfriend for about an hour. There is something

Very I mean the word that comes to mind is bizarre, but there is a feeling there. That I have not experienced. anywhere else and I can't put it into words and nor do I really want to inflict the violence of language on the Feeling?

But I I will just say there's a lot out there for people to explore. So I I encourage them to explore. Russ, you'd I've tracked your work for For quite a long time.

I've enjoyed a lot of your writing, including how Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. You have a very wide spectrum of subject matter. That you explore. Wild problems a guide to the decisions that define us. Is the latest and newest, which I'm very excited about.

And I said it before, I'll say it again. I really appreciate you and value you as a thinker and as a teacher. I think you offer tremendous service to people with econ talk. For those who have not heard Econ Talk, go check it out. There are so many fantastically Nuanced.

And rich conversations. to choose from. I certainly would recommend people take a look. And that is a long way of saying. Thank you. Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you, Tim.

It's a treat to talk to you. Look forward to doing it in person sometime. As a person who aspires to perfection, you would be a great student at Shalom College. Need to work on your Hebrew.

Our classes are taught in neighbor, so um something uh to look forward to. So what is what is see you later? Late hot. Well done.

I've got a few I've got a few words here and there. So I'll work on my Hebrew, always open to learning new languages and to everybody listening. Certainly check out Wild Problems, the guide to the decisions that define us. You can find all things Russ Roberts at Russ Roberts.info on Twitter at econ. Talker. And until next time, please be a little Kinder than you think is necessary. Look outside yourself.

If you really want to solve some of the problems that you can't solve. focusing within yourself. And thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Aidsleep. My god am I in love with Aidsleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle sleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades, tossing and turning.

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