#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

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 | Brought to you by Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and Pique https://www.piquetea.com/pages/tim?rfsn=4667015.e001c3&utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=podcast_campaign&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_content=timferriss premium pu’er tea crystals. More on all three below. Russ Roberts (@EconTalker https://twitter.com/EconTalker) is the President of Shalem College in Jerusalem and the John and Jean De Nault 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 EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious https://russroberts.info/econtalk/—with more than 800 episodes available in the archives. Past guests include Christopher Hitchens, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Lewis, Angela Duckworth, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His two rap videos https://russroberts.info/videos/#rap on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek have more than thirteen million views on YouTube. His latest book, Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Problems-Guide-Decisions-Define/dp/0593418255/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, explores the challenges of using rationality when facing big life decisions. He is also the author of Gambling With Other People’s Money https://www.amazon.com/Gambling-Other-Peoples-Money-Incentives-ebook/dp/B07NQNWHN3/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20,How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life https://www.amazon.com/Adam-Smith-Change-Your-Life/dp/1591847958/, The Price of Everything https://www.amazon.com/Price-Everything-Parable-Possibility-Prosperity/dp/0691143358/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, The Invisible Heart https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Heart-Economic-Romance/dp/0262681358?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and The Choice https://www.amazon.com/Choice-Fable-Free-Trade-Protection/dp/0131433547/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. And now, my dear listeners—that’s you—can get $250 off the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim. Simply go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim or use code TIM at checkout. * This episode is also brought to you by Pique https://www.piquetea.com/pages/tim?rfsn=4667015.e001c3&utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=podcast_campaign&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_content=timferriss! I first learned about Pique through my friends Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose, and now Pique https://www.piquetea.com/pages/tim?rfsn=4667015.e001c3&utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=podcast_campaign&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_content=timferriss’s fermented pu’er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. I often kickstart my mornings with their Pu’er Green Tea and Pu’er Black Tea, and I alternate between the two. This rare type of naturally fermented tea is more concentrated in polyphenol antioxidants than any other tea—it supports focus and mental clarity, healthy digestion, metabolism, and a healthy immune system. Their crystals are cold extracted, using only wild-harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. Plus, they triple toxin screen for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold—contaminants commonly found in tea. I also use the crystals for iced tea, which saves a ton of time and hassle. Pique https://www.piquetea.com/pages/tim?rfsn=4667015.e001c3&utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=podcast_campaign&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_content=timferriss is offering up to 20% off of their pu’er teas https://www.piquetea.com/pages/tim?rfsn=4667015.e001c3&utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=podcast_campaign&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_content=timferriss, exclusively to my listeners. To sweeten the deal even more, you'll get a free sampler pack with 6 of their best-selling teas. Simply visit PiqueLife.com/Tim https://www.piquetea.com/pages/tim?rfsn=4667015.e001c3&utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=podcast_campaign&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_content=timferriss, and the discount will be automatically applied. They also offer a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so your purchase is completely risk-free. Just go to PiqueLife.com/Tim https://www.piquetea.com/pages/tim?rfsn=4667015.e001c3&utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=podcast_campaign&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_content=timferriss to learn more. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * [06:36] How Russ’ father chose to cultivate fatherhood. [10:45] Does quality time demand quantity time? [12:31] What does Shalem mean? [14:10] What’s wrong with scientism? [20:56] The curious task of economics, according to F. A. Hayek. [23:18] What is a Hayekian? [25:09] What prompted Russ to write Wild Problems? [29:05] How Russ’ ideas about data have changed over the years. [33:04] Making decisions: Charles Darwin vs. Homer vs. Russ. [43:30] What makes people ideal life partners? [52:19] Marriage as a form of growing up. [56:53] Life lessons from Bill Belichick. [1:02:04] Why Russ and his wife decided to move to Israel. [1:07:45] Impressions of Jerusalem since making the move. [1:13:34] The role of religion in Russ’ life. [1:22:00] Life lessons from Nassim Nicholas Taleb. [1:29:16] Thoughts on The Talmud, reading, and spending time in a finite life. [1:35:14] You don’t have to be religious to have transcendent experiences. [1:41:31] Tips for staying humble. [1:48:48] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peak. That's P-I-Q-U-E. I have had so much tea in my life. I've been to China. I've lived in China and Japan. I've done tea tours. I drink a lot of tea. And 10 years plus of physical experimentation and tracking has shown me many things. Chief among them, that gut health is critical to just about everything. And you'll see where tea is going to tie into this. It affects immune function, weight management, mental performance, emotional health, you name it. I've been drinking fermented Pu'er tea specifically, pretty much every day for years now. Pu'er tea delivers more polyphenols and probiotics than you can shake a stick at. It's like providing the optimal fertilizer to your microbiome. The problem with good Pu'er is that it's hard to source.

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  It's hard to find real Pu'er that hasn't been exposed to pesticides and other nasties, which is super common. That's why Peak's fermented Pu'er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. It's so simple. They have so many benefits that I'm going to get into. And I first learned about them through my friends, Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose. Peak Crystals are cold extracted using only wild harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. I often kickstart my mornings with their Pu'er green tea, their Pu'er black tea, and I alternate between the two. The rich, earthy flavor of the black specifically is amazing. It's very, very, it's like a delicious barnyard. Very peaty, if you like whiskey and stuff like that.

• 1:25Tim Ferriss?

  They triple toxin screen all of their products for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold, contaminants commonly found in tea. There's also zero prep or brewing required, as the crystals dissolve in seconds. So you can just drop it into your hot tea, or I also make iced tea, and that saves a ton of time and hassle. Their fermented teas have never been discounted, but for you, my dear listeners, only for you, and for a limited time, Peak is offering up to 20% off, plus a free sampler pack with six of their bestselling teas when you order their Pu'er teas. This all comes with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so it's risk-free. Check it out. Go to peaklife.com/tim. That's P-I-Q-U-E-L-I-F-E.com/ T-I-M.

• 2:08Tim Ferriss?

  Peaklife.com/tim. And the discount is automatically applied at checkout. Enjoy.

• 2:18Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My god, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle asleep 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, throwing blankets off, putting them back on and repeating ad nauseam, but now I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user-friendly solution on the market.

• 3:02Tim Ferriss?

  I polled all of you guys on social media about the best tools for sleep, enhancing sleep, and Eight Sleep was by far and away the crowd favorite. I mean, people were just raving fans of this. So, I used it and here we are. Add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling, she loves the heat and we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing. Now, for me, and for many people, the result, Eight Sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster,

• 3:46Tim Ferriss?

  reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40% and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery, so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And good news, Eight Sleep has launched the next generation of the Pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with twice the number of sensors. It's just a smoother, better experience that delivers you the best sleep on earth. At least, that has been true for me. Simply add this to your existing mattress and you're all set. It is not magic, but sometimes it does feel like it. It just works. So, go to eightsleep.com/tim and save $250 on the Pod Cover.

• 4:29Tim Ferriss?

  That's eightsleep.com/tim, all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T, eightsleep.com/tim. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. You can also find the link in this episode's description.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:10Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss 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 Denault 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 Pleiadian era, one of the pioneers. Past guests include Christopher Hitchens, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Lewis, Angela Duckworth, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

• 5:54Tim Ferriss?

  among many others. His two rap videos, believe it or not, on the ideas of John Mater 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 RussRoberts.info. And on Twitter, you can find him at @EconTalker. Russ, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Tim.

• 6:39Tim Ferriss?

  I thought we would begin with perhaps 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 going to 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 going to come back to. "All of us who survived 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.

• 7:24Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  My dad died two years ago, roughly. He was 89 years old, born in 1930. I actually would start with the point about distraction, because I think it's about more than parenting. Life goes by so quickly, and we let it. And somebody pointed out, it might have been Ryan Holiday, I think, when you're on your deathbed, 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 beautiful song about it called "May I Suggest?", which I recommend

• 8:36Speaker 03

  profoundly as an encouragement to pay attention. And so, we often don't, you know? We miss the sunset, or we see it and 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 1930. There weren't that many of them, to be honest. It's a, it's a more recent phenomenon, but my dad, I went on three silent meditation retreats while he was alive, and he found that utterly bewildering.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  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 as I said, he used to complain, he said, 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. He didn't want to be Robert Frost or a Desmond's Malley. He would have been happy to be a quieter person with a couple of good poems.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  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'd say, Dad, you want to read a story? You want to read a book to, you know, one of my kids? 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 that 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, his free time.

• 10:45Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 10:55Speaker 03

  I think for those of us who are ambitious, who have big egos, which is sometimes me, maybe you.

• 11:02Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'm sure it's, I'm sure it's also me.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Right? You can comfort yourself and I think sometimes fool yourself into saying, well, you know, I don't give friend X, family member Y.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Situation Z, the trip to the hospital, going to the funeral. I don't do those things because, 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,

• 11:55Speaker 03

  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. And which is, I think, the, the modern impulse. And it's good. It's not bad. It's good to be here for 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, I don't know, if you ever spent a long time with somebody on a lazy afternoon, it's just a different experience.

• 12:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Thank you for providing that context. And we're going to bounce around, 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?

• 12:40Speaker 03

  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 Eru Shalayim. And Jerusalem, if you look at the Anglicization of Eru Shalayim, the head of Jerusalem is S A L E M, which is Salem in Massachusetts and lots of other places. Those cities are named 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 root. But Shalem, which is slightly different, it's a reference to the fact that we're in Jerusalem, but it's

• 13:22Speaker 03

  also a reference to the meaning of that word, which is whole, complete, well-rounded. And so our students, we hope, Will emerge from their experience here more complete. Now, they're not fully complete. 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 colleges 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 shalem, we think it's something more than that. We believe it's about the cultivation of certain habits of mind and heart

• 14:05Speaker 03

  that make you a full human being and not just a successful person in the marketplace and not unrelated.

• 14:10Tim Ferriss?

  I think we're going to certainly, in some ways, circle back to that with, I think, the meat and potatoes of this conversation, which is going to focus on a lot of topics in the new book. But I want to 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 Cowen, 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.

• 14:54Tim Ferriss?

  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 F.A. Hayek was prior to your rap videos. I suppose that hopefully counts as a huge success in terms of rap videos reaching people who 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, this speech, and why you like it.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  What, do we have two, three hours?

• 15:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we have two or three hours, exactly.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  It's actually one of the goals of that rap video, the first one and then the second. We did two. I did them with filmmaker John Popola. Part of the goal of those videos actually was to try to capture some serious economic ideas. We tried to make it entertaining, obviously, which is why we put it in rap format. But part of the goal was just to 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 a very good company. He's not part of the... Pyeonghak is not part of the standard curriculum of economics departments. Forget everyday learning or reading. And he's not the greatest writer. He's not the most entertaining writer.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  If you were going to start with something... Actually, The Pretensidology is one of his most accessible 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.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  I love all those things. So did Pyeonghak. 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, all right? When I say it, it's going to be so obvious. There's two kinds of ignorance. There's the things we don't know, and then there's 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 15 seconds of inside baseball.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  He was an intellectual antagonist of John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s in London, and he lost.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Keynes beat them. Keynes won. He won the intellectual battle. He won the battle of the marketplace of ideas. He triumphed. And Hayek tried to take him on in his own terms, and Keynes beat him. Meaning, tried to build a model of the economy that would be like Keynes' but better. Keynes' model itself is kind of really hard to understand, and anybody who's taken undergraduate macroeconomics gets a sort of bastardized version of it, that, whatever. Keynes is not the clearest writer either, but he's a much more entertaining writer. Flash forward to Hayek's Nobel Prize in the 70s, I want to say 74. And in 1974,

• 18:39Speaker 03

  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 in that Nobel Prize speech. He's saying, "I can't explain that. No one can." He uses the example, the analogy of a sports event. Let's take a football game. He says, "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 they're having a fight with their wife, how their game last week was, and the

• 19:23Speaker 03

  injury they sustained, and whether they're fully over it or only partially over it." Even then, I mean, there's just no way you're going to predict the outcome of the game. You might be able to get close. You might get, on average, right, maybe. But it's not predictable the way the location of Saturn is on July 17, 2027. We're really good at that. You know what we're not good at? The value of Bitcoin on July 17, 2027, or interest rates on July 17, 2027, or whether there's going to be a crash, or whether there's going to be a recession. And economics, what people want of us is, "Well, tell me what's going

• 20:03Speaker 03

  to be like tomorrow, professor. I need to know." And the professor should say, "I have no idea. But my best guess is it's going to 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, is 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, and then it smacks you in the face. So what Hayek was warning us against there, which is, there's an irony, 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,

• 20:48Speaker 03

  and how easy it is to be misled. So it's a profound piece, and I recommend it. You can find it on the web, it's available. Easy to read for a non-economist.

• 20:56Tim Ferriss?

  We'll include that in the show notes for everybody to peruse. I wanted to ask you another question about Mr. Friedrich A. Hayek, and that is, actually, the explanation of a quote. This quote I saw pop up numerous places when I was doing some reading on Mr. Hayek, and it's from The Fatal Concede. And the quote is as follows, speaking as someone who really wouldn't claim to understand even the fundamentals of economics, which I'm 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?

• 21:39Speaker 03

  That book, by the way, I think it's 108 pages, at least in some editions. I used to give it away to people as a gift. 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 can do some reading. It's very murky water at times. 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 10, 15 years, see themselves as social engineers, as if they can tweak and tinker and move people around.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Adam Smith, about 200 years before that quote, said something similar. He said, "The man of system," meaning a person who has a theory about how the world works. You can think about Marx or Lenin or Mao Zedong. "They move the human beings in their country around like the pieces of a chessboard, 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 of economics, because kind of strange by the curious he meant peculiar, the curious task of economics is to tell people that what they think they can design is often not going to work out.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  So it's really a fancy, convoluted 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, if I can go back?

• 23:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  I never got to tell you what a Hayekian is.

• 23:23Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yes.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  We talked about the pretense of knowledge, but 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. A 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, "Why is it so loud in here? Well, let's just turn down the volume. 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 ratcheting it up. And similarly with traffic.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Like, who sent out the memo that says between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. 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 you think, "Okay, I gotta blame someone. Who is it?" Who did this? And the answer is we did sometimes. And that's a deep insight of Hayek also.

• 24:34Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. 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 Keynes, which I thought of prompted by these two rap videos, which I should say you have some incredible actors slash performers for. And 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

• 25:19Tim Ferriss?

  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 want to say also very playful with the, he wasn't a felicitous phrase maker. Very much like that. Why write Wild Problems?

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Well, I start the book off with a story of a friend of mine who's trying to decide whether to have, he and his wife are trying to decide whether to have a kid. And he tells me about it. He says, Well, we made a list of the costs and benefits, and we still couldn't make a decision. And I thought, Well, that's interesting. Through most of human history, people didn't make a list of cost benefits to decide whether to have children. They just had them, either because they couldn't stop them, 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 my life with kids, and which is going to be better? And I put better in quotes. And what the real

• 26:26Speaker 03

  question is, what does that mean? And one way to think about it, which is very reasonable, is more fun. Right? Having kids, we all know what the costs are. You know, there's diapers to be changed, and there's errands to take them on, and school to drive them to, and Little League games to watch, or whatever it is, music lessons. They're pretty helpless early on, only for the first 18 years or so. So there are a lot of responsibility. And I think if you're looking from the outside at having children, it looks like not the best deal. I joke in the book, hey, get to get a minivan. Now, that's exciting. So why do people do it?

• 27:06Speaker 03

  And if you look at it narrowly as a cross 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. So why do people have kids? Is it irrational? And I think most of us understand that, at least somewhere in the back of our 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 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.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  It's tie yourself to a spouse, right? It'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, they don't look that happy. But it's not like it's necessarily the obvious outcome. And so what I suggested to my friend, and 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.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Those decisions are not amenable to data. So this brings us back to Hyatt. In my view, they're not amenable 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.

• 29:05Tim Ferriss?

  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 15, 20 years? Or do you think he would have also agreed with that?

• 29:19Speaker 03

  You're really kind, Tim. We're gonna have to dial it back about 40 years. I joke in the book that when I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago, there was 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 the way I was raised intellectually, 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 theory was right or not.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  And I was very convinced when I was younger that those models of economic behavior and non-economic behavior, but using the tools of economics, were 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 20 years of the internet and smartphone is that the answers are 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 would I like if I liked this book? That's a fantastic improvement in the quality of life, right?

• 30:43Speaker 03

  In the old days, you'd go to the little bookstore, they have 17 books. This old crotchety guy behind the counter would say, "Hey, 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 is better.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  It was a lot 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? There isn't one, actually. Well, that's no 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 those choices in life of where to go, how to spend your days, whether you should marry, whether you should have kids and so on.

• 31:44Tim Ferriss?

  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, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi mineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula, digestive enzymes and adaptogens. You get the idea. Right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all in one formula,

• 32:28Tim Ferriss?

  which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/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/tim.

• 33:05Tim Ferriss?

  Let's rewind and look at some historical examples, if you're open to it, because I have, of course, notes in front of me, copious notes, we won't get through all of them. But I'll just use a cue and we can hop from there. Charles Darwin. Would you like to tell us any stories about Charles Darwin?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  So he's 29 years old. He's like, you know, maybe I should get married. He's been out on the beagle. You know, he's really on a great career trajectory and he's on the 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

• 33:54Tim Ferriss?

  So you can find this? I imagine you can find it online.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, you can find it. It is handwriting. We have his actual journal entry in England. You 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 noticed this great moment of scientific inquiry in the part of Darwin. Is it a good idea to get married? So he makes this list. And what I noticed, which 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, which he doesn't have enough 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.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  He has no access to the inner life of marriage or the inner life of a parent, which he's also worried about, whether he's going to 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 because she won't like London. He talks about how his kids might get sick and then 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.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  My favorite being female chitchat and then better than a dog anyway. Which is really not, not the greatest endorsement of married life or the opposite sex. Or kind of awkward. So Darwin, Darwin makes this list. And if you write it down, as I do, I organize it a little bit differently than he wrote it down. And you look at the pluses of getting married and the negatives of getting married. The negatives are bigger, more numerous. So what does he do? Gets married. He says, it's a journal entry. He comes back to it and he writes, he has this incredible stream of consciousness paragraph where he says, oh, my gosh, maybe all by myself, I'm gonna become this weird guy in a dingy apartment. And ah, marry, marry, marry.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Q E D, he says. Q E D, meaning what was to be proven has been proven, demonstrated. Quodis demonstratum. And this is bizarre. First of all, it's bizarre. That's a little scientism, right? Because it's not anything close to it.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  Q E D.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Q E D. Q E D is what you put at the end of a mathematical proof, right? This is not a mathematical proof. This is the most un-mathematical attempt at making a decision. And of course, I show he's not the only one. Many great rational, scientific, analytical people, even specialists in decision making, have trouble making decisions because these kind of decisions at least are not easily done with a rational framework. And so I think that's liberating. It tells you, for those of you listening who are going through these life decisions. And I'll tell you, Tim, book comes out on August 9. 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.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  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. I could 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.

• 37:29Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 38:05Speaker 03

  So in the, in the book, I talk about that choice and I kind of tongue in cheek talk about Penelope from the Odyssey, Ulysses wife, who's waiting for his return from the Trojan War. I mean, it's such a great moment in literature. She's got 108 suitors living large in her house, waiting, trying to wear her down and get her to pick one of them because 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. 108 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, there's a mathematical formula you could use, a famous mathematical problem.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  It's really beautiful, elegant thing of how she could maximize the odds of finding the best partner.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  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 them. 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. And of course, we kind of all did this, right? We got with a bunch of people and then you look back on the ones that you think, well, whoever I do marry has got to be better than the ones that I turned down. And so what she should do if she wants the best one is that after that thirty seventh,

• 39:41Speaker 03

  she should pick the first one she finds who's better than the best of the first thirty seven. You think, well, that's kind of cool. And in fact, the odds that she finds the best one is actually about thirty seven percent. It 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 got to 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 a hundred and eight? Should I, two hundred and eight, I could do even better. Two thousand and eight.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  Twenty thousand and eight. Of course, many people date lots of different people and never settle down. And that's okay. Maybe they choose to, but some of them are just saying, I haven't found the right one yet. And so what I argue in there is that Alain de Batton has a wonderful YouTube video I recommend on, I think the title is, "You're going to marry the wrong person." Fantastic short video. Don't show it to my wife because she thinks she married the right person. I don't want her to see it. It's a depressor. 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, the red or blue pill. What I mean is that

• 41:04Speaker 03

  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 are a certain level of attractiveness, there are a certain level of kindness, there are a certain level of intelligence, there are a certain level, many, many, many attributes. And then there's chemistry and sexual attraction. You've got all those things working. And 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.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  And it's not just because you can't find the best one. It's not even well-defined. And I think that's helpful. Again, doesn't make it easy to self-pick the one you're gonna marry, but you know, I give a short list of, like, pick somebody you respect, who would 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 them. Ask them. They probably won't marry you, but at least ask them.

• 42:20Tim Ferriss?

  What would you say is, is there an associated feeling for you, and this may be getting 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 in one person and being with that person? Because you've been married now for 30-plus years? Am I getting that right?

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Thirty-three.

• 42:49Tim Ferriss?

  Thirty-three years. So you have, so you have some-

• 42:52Speaker 03

  I know so carefully I said that. You're right. Thirty-three.

• 42:57Tim Ferriss?

  Is there a feeling that you can identify, a 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?

• 43:14Speaker 03

  That's a very deep question. We do call it love.

• 43:19Tim Ferriss?

  I've heard of this thing. I've heard of this.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've heard of it too, but it's actually a very misleading word in the following sense.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  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 that she, or in case the other side, he, they fill my soul and date a 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 an overarching sense of identity of who I, they're part of who I am. By the way, Darwin didn't think about that, because he'd never experienced it. Not just he hadn't been in love, he'd

• 44:13Speaker 03

  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 ketchup. 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, many negatives about a life partner. There are many positives about a life partner. It's complicated. I would ask you a question this way. What suffuses you? What are you overwhelmed

• 44:52Speaker 03

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

• 45:38Speaker 03

  And when it's in the air, you'll know what you're rooting for. You're rooting for heads or tails. That's what you really want.

• 45:44Tim Ferriss?

  That's clever.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  And that whole idea of what you really want is such a strange idea. Because what could you really want that goes above and beyond the pluses and minuses? I mean, that's just irrational. And a lot of smart people have said, not exactly. And by the way, it doesn't mean, oh, therefore you should follow your gut. Follow your intuition. That's, that can be very dangerous also. Costs you a lot of money, leads you to marry the wrong person. You have to be thoughtful about this. It isn't simple. 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 kinds of decisions.

• 46:23Tim Ferriss?

  So it's both and not either or.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:27Tim Ferriss?

  It sounds like.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Yes, for sure.

• 46:29Tim Ferriss?

  So I have a line in front of me that I love, which is from you. So I'm not certainly not going to take credit for it. And this may wind into what we end up discussing. I am going to 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, 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, at the historical record,

• 47:11Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 47:35Tim Ferriss?

  That there's some degree of, to what extent are we making ourselves miserable by expecting to find happiness in 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.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  That's a deep question, kind of a hard one. I think it's a great insight that a lot of marriages in the past were either arranged, right, by the parents, or had ulterior motives. 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 slop 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 Western literature, you understand there's a little both, right? You read Shakespeare,

• 48:44Speaker 03

  you read Jane Austen. Jane Austen's characters usually are striving to make an advantageous match, not a love match. But they also fall in love. So that's probably the reasons I think her books are so compelling. They don't just want to be pragmatic. But it's a very deep question of whether, of 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 that capture love. There are movies that capture romantic attraction, sexual attraction. I'll give you an exception, My Fair Lady. Not a very PC or politically

• 49:25Speaker 03

  correct movie 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 sees his bachelorhood life as an ideal, kind of like Darwin, actually. And yet, he finds himself falling in love. And, you know, it's one of the most beautiful love songs ever written. When you think, how do you capture that feeling of...

• 49:52Speaker 03

  Real love, not just attraction. He says, "I've grown accustomed to her face." 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." Like, that's an incredible portrait of domestic life, right?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  And so, my point being that art actually pays 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 the economies of scale at Costco. But I think, to come back to the nub. So what should you look for? What should you expect? And is it worth it? Is it worth something? Is it something you should strive for? I'll just say, you know, we can talk about this for the five hours, but the one thing I would add, I don't like it when people say, you know, "You have to work at your marriage.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  You have to work at it." That's not the way I think of my marriage. I work at crossword puzzles. I work at ditch digging. I work at, you know, writing up my notes for my next podcast. But what you do have to do is you have to treat your partner as a partner, as opposed to somebody who, you know, lives with you, who's supposed to have his roommate. They're two different things. And I think in modern life, we've taken away, for a 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 scientific for a minute.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  People are marrying later, or not at all. And... It's changed. And 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 seem to be. It's not fashionable to say that, but I think they are. But men, it's hard. Men struggle to stay in a long-term relationship. Not as appealing to either side. It's pretty obvious in the data. So what do you do? Well, tricky.

• 52:19Tim Ferriss?

  Could you say more about the diminishing of the responsibilities of marriage and what you mean by that?

• 52:27Speaker 03

  The part I like about you have to work at your marriage is that it is hard. There are parts about marriage that are hard. There's parts about having a good marriage that are difficult, that are challenging. There's a great line from Annie Lamott, "Her name for God, not me."

• 52:46Speaker 03

  And most of us naturally see ourselves as God, center of the universe, most important thing, easy. And I think one of the great advantages of marriage is to remind you that 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, 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 talk about in the book, it's more of a covenant and less of a contract, is really a powerful way to

• 53:28Speaker 03

  be alive. This is to enhance what I said earlier about what a real marriage is about. It's not about working at it. Well, let's have a session where we talk about our issues. It's about remembering, comes back to what we said at the very beginning of 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...

• 53:54Speaker 03

  That's hard because you have yours. And you know what? I like getting what 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. And not just what we're doing on Sunday night because 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 of human history, it wasn't a choice. It was a destiny. It wasn't a decision. You got married. You

• 54:39Speaker 03

  had to. You felt that way anyway. It doesn't feel that way anymore. Whole new world.

• 54:44Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So I have a number of follow up questions and I'm not going to spend the next hour 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 egocentric 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?

• 55:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:15Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it. Exactly.

• 55:18Tim Ferriss?

  All right. All right. Check.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  Let me say it in a slightly different way. I've come to believe as I've gotten older that a huge part of quote, growing up, you know, we like to joke, hey, Tim, what are you going to do when you grow up? You know, like, like you still have room to grow. Well, I hope you do. Right? You're not all grown up. It's like, 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 and you think, when I'm their age, I'll feel the way they do. And you get to that age and you don't. Right? You look at this, you look at the seniors in high school, right? When you're in 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

• 56:05Speaker 03

  all faking it. Every one of them.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  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 mature. 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. You know, 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 a part of a much bigger picture than you feel like most of the time. And I think that's really helpful and incredibly satisfying when you sense it. It's great.

• 56:52Tim Ferriss?

  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 opposite.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's definitely never been asked. It's never been asked. It's fantastic. So, I just think a little bit weird in the book, 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, as an undergraduate at Wesleyan. And one of the things you learn from economics is trade-offs. And trade-offs

• 57:52Speaker 03

  are really obvious, when you think about them. 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 as we go through our lives. And what I argue Bill Belichick understands is that he's not that good at drafting.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Future NFL successful players. By the way, Bill Belichick is the coach of the New England Patriots, a football team in the National Football League, which we should have mentioned. So Belichick each year gets to draft pick from the crop of college players, a certain set of players. And I argue in the book, and this is the 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 kind of fun, but I think it's a good lesson for life, is that he wants to increase the denominator.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  When he's thinking 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 going to get a few good players out of the whole thing. He 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.

• 59:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  Instead of picking winners, they pick an index fund. They take all the stocks because 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 you're going to succeed. You can think about this in venture capital. You know, of every 10 investments, one unicorn is extraordinary. Most of the investments are going to go broke, they're not going to make it, literally, they're going to, not going to cover their costs ever. And a few of them will be somewhat successful, and if you're lucky, you get a couple of home runs, a unicorn, company worth a billion dollars. That'd be amazing, right? One out of 10. The crazy thing is, you don't know the which one, it's a one out of 10. So that's bizarre. So I think life is something like that.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  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 going to be like, and that's why, one of the reasons that cost benefit analysis is not that helpful in trying to figure out what to do in these kinds of situations, try lots of stuff. And if you're lucky, some of those things, there'll be things you can change. You can, so Belichick, if he doesn't, the player doesn't work out, he cuts them. He doesn't sign them. And I think every year for the last, I don't know, 17, 19, 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 have a feeling it's a little bit of a seductive thing for him, but he almost always finds

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

  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 going to like that, not like it? We try to imagine reasonably what it's going to be like, but really can't know what it's going to be like until we're in it. And so you want to be in a lot of things, as long as they're not too high costs to get out of. Because if they're high costs, then there's, the trade-offs are more serious.

• 1:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  So from Bill Belichick, I recommend everybody do a deep dive on Bill Belichick.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Interesting, man.

• 1:01:19Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  Yes. When you get him on your podcast?

• 1:01:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  Would you encourage him to come on mine? He's going to come on yours before mine, but I really want to talk to him.

• 1:01:48Tim Ferriss?

  I will, I will absolutely, yes. If I manage this, 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 go on to your show.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:02:01Tim Ferriss?

  You're welcome. So let's go to Israel, and I'm going to attempt to tie a few things together, once we get into the midst of you exploring this or explaining this. But why move to Israel?

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  So I got offered this job to be president of this college. I'm Jewish. I've always liked Israel. I've been here a dozen times before. Actually, I 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. So 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 a state.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Full stop. 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 in 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, now three. But the philosophy and Jewish thought, or Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and learn Arabic. That's the whole place. And I thought, that's nice. I'm glad Israel has a college like that. It's a good thing. But I'm not interested in working for them, of course. That'd be a crazy idea. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if you listen to Econ Talk, you find out that I'm increasingly interested in questions of what is the life well-lived?

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  And we've been having that conversation for 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 an impact on the country, which I like and think that's a good thing. And I care a lot about education. And the model of education we represent here is small seminars of people exploring great texts together respectfully in open inquiry. So like, how could I say no? And the only answer really was, if my wife didn't want to come, we wouldn't come, coming back to earlier conversation.

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  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 we moved to Israel. And it's... It's drinking from fire hose. 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 than 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.

• 1:04:50Tim Ferriss?

  That is a big move. Seems like a big decision. And I would love to know if you are open to just sharing the story of how you pitched that to your wife. What did that conversation look like?

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  I can tell you a little bit about it. It was actually, it was funny. It's in the middle of COVID. It's very vivid to me because it was the middle of COVID. And most Sundays during COVID, we spent walking along the Potomac River. We had to be outside. Often it was miserably hot, as it is outside the Potomac River on, in July and August and June even, and September and, you know, it's warm in DC area. But I vivid memories us walking along and talking about whether we, we did something similar to what Darwin, obviously, I don't mean to make too much fun of cost benefit. Obviously we spent some time thinking about, is this going to be fun? You know, are we going to like it? But that wasn't the only thing in the calculus.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  You know, we have friends here, but we have friends where we've been living for 18 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 them, but so is wherever we live. So it's okay. We spent a pretty serious amount of time talking about. The purpose of this job. You know, my wife was a, in America was a high school math teacher, fabulous math teacher, but she was thinking about doing something different. So for her, this was going to be a transition time anyway.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  So we focused on whether we would like this job. And by we, it 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 as administrator, I'm challenged by as administrator too. People are kind of similar. You know, 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 my 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.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  But really, it was, is this what we're meant to do? You know, you can put a divine twist on that, but it doesn't, I think a lot of nonreligious 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 is part of why we were here, is to take this opportunity if we could do it well, if we could be successful at it. And so that verdict isn't in yet, but it's been an amazing first year.

• 1:07:45Tim Ferriss?

  So I know 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?

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  It 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 Bosnia wouldn't appeal to me. I mean, it'd be kind of 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, is a chance to contribute, a chance to, Jews have been talking about coming back to Jerusalem for 2,000 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 hard to explain what it's

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  like to live here in the following sense. If you open up an Israeli newspaper on any day, there's almost the same headlines, there's almost the same headlines every day. Terrorist attacks thwarted in such and such place. Iran heats up. New government coming, elections next month. And then my favorite, 14-year-old girl finds Roman coin in Kasaria that shows existence of so-and-so's Herod's rule at whatever time. So, everything here matters. It's so consequential 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, and it's gotten much more interesting as a place to live

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  in the last 20 years. So, it's very nice.

• 1:09:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I've not spent much time-

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  Have you been here, Tim?

• 1:09:44Tim Ferriss?

  I have.

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  Have you been here?

• 1:09:45Tim Ferriss?

  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-

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  That's what it's called, yeah.

• 1:10:07Tim Ferriss?

  ...in terms of government funding.

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  It's not a brilliant-

• 1:10:09Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. I was, that was coming next.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  It's on the tip of your tongue.

• 1:10:13Tim Ferriss?

  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 a number of places in the Middle East that almost everything is or seems consequential. Makes me think, I'm not going to get the attribution right. I think it was, I think it was Joseph Cannibal, but it may have been Viktor Frankl who said, "What we're seeking is not the meaning of life, but a feeling of being alive." And I think you get that.

• 1:10:56Tim Ferriss?

  It's hard to escape that when you're in a place like Israel, it seems.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  So behind me, which if you're 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 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 Kotel is, it's called in Hebrew. And sometimes I look down on that, I can see it from my office, sometimes I look down on that and I am moved because 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 overdramatized here. You say, "Everything matters."

• 1:11:43Speaker 03

  Everything seems consequential. Yehuda Amichai, 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 political tensions that rivet the world. And you also have modern life and great food and music. And 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. It's a little bit weird, believe it or not.

• 1:12:28Tim Ferriss?

  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 guess I'll keep it, keep it simple, but 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 kinesthetic. It is very perceptible. I'll, I'll put it at that.

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  It's a weird physical setting. It's almost all paved. It's this weird cobblestone, ancient stone. There's stones over here in the old city that are, that were carved out 2,000 years ago to build things and they're still there. And there's walls from 600 years ago from crusader times and it's, you know, you go to England, it's old. England makes the United States look brand new. You know, we have history of the United States, 1776. You go to England, it's like, we have no history. Go to, come to Israel, it's like, England has no history.

• 1:13:34Tim Ferriss?

  So I wanted to, maybe awkwardly, you can tell me, after I asked the question, bring back what was once destinies now a decision. And 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 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

• 1:14:18Tim Ferriss?

  to all of that is, To what extent, this is going to 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.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  Can we talk about the first part first?

• 1:14:53Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  About the decision issue fatigue? And so I've been very lucky. I got COVID about a month ago for the first time. It was really unpleasant. I was in bed for three days. I didn't have any energy and I was tired for another 10 days, beat, just beat. But I had it lucky. I didn't end up on a ventilator. I didn't die. It's like it was a bad flu in the Omicron phase here. But for two years, especially when I was in the United States before I came here, I had a, I think for most of us, it was a very unusual life experience. It was a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit like war.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  So war, we think back, say at the, say the bombing of London. And you think about it, every night sirens go off, you go down to the basement, you go down, not the basement, you go down to the metro, the underground, excuse me, 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 who you cared about. And can you imagine that night after night after night? And after a while, you'd say, you know, it's really hard, but the hardest part of it is, I don't know when it's going to end. If you just tell me when it's going to end, I can handle it. Just give me the arrival date. What's the ETA of peace?

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  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, month. Most wars drag on. As hard as COVID was, and again, it's embarrassing to compare it to war. Can you imagine what it was like to be in London or Berlin or Japan?

• 1:16:37Speaker 03

  Not in the United States, because the 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 going to end. And you, more than anything else, you just want, what do you want? Just give me a normal day, where I don't have to be afraid, don't have to hear worried that someone's going to die. So COVID gave us a tiny, thank God relatively much smaller, taste of that. And for most people, I thought, for me, it was incredibly hard. It was like, when am I going to be able to, fill in the blank? When am I going to have a, I just want a norm, I want to 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? Or go, even go to a funeral? Right?

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  There are people who miss funerals, who miss weddings, who miss wonderful life events, and couldn't participate. And so, I think that really wore us down, wore a lot of us down. Right? It's very, very demoralizing. There's some wonderful things about it. You face your mortality. Most of us, I think, had to reckon with the fact, you know, when I got my vaccine finally, it's like, oh, I felt like Superman. Oh, I forgot, I'm still going to die. That stinks, doesn't it? But it forced you to remember that, that you're going to die. You might die soon from COVID, in a hospital on a ventilator, horrible way to go. And if you're lucky, you don't get it, but you're still going to die.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  And I think for a lot of, those two things, when's it going to end? And I am mortal. And I, most of us, again, coming back to our theme of things you don't want to think about, or easy not to think about, the fact that we're going to die is not pleasant. Most of us 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. Ah, things are taken care of. And there is a piece of that, by the way.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  I keep the Jewish Sabbath. So if you say to me, I've got tickets to see Paul McCartney, who I don't particularly like, but I'd like to go see him, not my favorite musician. But he's at the Meadowlands with, Ed Bruce Springsteen's gonna show up, which happened recently. I don't know if it was a Friday night or not, but if you said, "You wanna go?" I'd say, "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 would otherwise you'd have to weigh. 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 a bunch of angels sitting around singing, strumming guitars, you know, a bunch of good Martin guitars, singing some kumbaya song. It's

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  really not the main thing about religion that's attractive to me, and maybe to other people. Because I have plenty of doubts, by the way, and I think most religious people in the modern era struggle with faith. I think it's a, I don't 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

• 1:20:15Speaker 03

  certain career, maybe in a profession that makes you feel full and yourself. And that texture is, to me, a lot of what a religious life is about. It's the, again, not that different from many of the things we've been talking about. There are Friday nights where I wish 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.

• 1:20:55Speaker 03

  Some people are tone deaf and they cannot enjoy music the way a great musician can, or even a mediocre musician. And other people have a great ear and all that music makes their hearts 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/spiritual practice that we inhabit that is personal, that is person-specific. It's like, I'll give you my favorite novel. You're gonna love this. And 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

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  certain people, because they're just not hardwareed that way, I think. I don't know.

• 1:21:41Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, if I may, we'll segue to a rather motley assortment of questions that may not have any thematic through line whatsoever, if that's okay with you.

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  Great.

• 1:21:53Tim Ferriss?

  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 trying to craft novel segues here. So we're gonna go from Nassim Taleb to the Talmud.

• 1:22:09Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:22:10Tim Ferriss?

  Not, not related.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:22:13Tim Ferriss?

  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, bit meaning portion of a transcript from your conversation with Tyler Cowen. And I'm just gonna read this line here. "I get a lot of flack for interviewing Nassim Taleb 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.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  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 him on your show? It's, it's against your philosophy of..." And I try to have civil conversations with people I disagree with. And I have very simple conversations with Nassim, by the way, but... He wrote a book, his first book was called Fooled by Randomness.

• 1:23:21Tim Ferriss?

  Great book.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  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, you know, as a PhD in economics, I had to take a bunch of statistics, what's called econometrics, the application of statistics to economic problems. You could argue I knew everything in there, but I didn't know it in my bones. And 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 one

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  of the finest nature experiences you can have, very, very close to a large metropolitan area, just outside Washington DC, there's a side in Virginia and a side in Maryland. Both sides are interesting, with great hikes along the Potomac River there, there's incredible waterfalls and turbulent waters, very, very beautiful place. There's a great sign, fantastic sign, not really a sign, it's a stick, on the Virginia side. You have to look up, and you look up and it says, this is the high watermark of the Potomac River. So you're, I don't know, 150 feet above the Potomac River already, and then there's this post in the ground that goes up another 12 and a half, whatever it is, 15 feet, and that's the high watermark of the Potomac River.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  And it's hard to imagine that it could flood to that level, but evidently it has, let's take that as a fact. So if you're building a house in Virginia, near the Potomac River, how high should you build it? 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 S and P 500, there's never been a 10-year period with a negative return. I don't even remember now, whatever it is.

• 1:25:34Speaker 03

  Take all the different decades, and I don't mean 1920 to 1930, 1930 to 1940. I mean, 21 to 31, 22 to 32, 1923 to 1933. And you could look at all of those, and you could take the worst 10-year period. And you'd say, okay, so I'm like, right now, I'm 67. In 10 years, I'll be 77. So if I invest all my money in the S and P 500, and don't touch it for a decade, what's the worst thing that could happen? Well, the answer is, something worse than has happened before, possibly. And that that is a possibility is so hard to remember for most people.

• 1:26:18Speaker 03

  Because really, really smart people make that mistake all the time. So 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 Skin 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 Skin in the Game, right? That's great. And fancy name for economists when they talk about this is incentives are aligned. But it means, got skin in the game. And you know, Milton Friedman liked to say that capitalism is a profit and loss system.

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  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 get it. But Taleb taught me something I hadn't understood or appreciated about Skin in 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.

• 1:27:44Speaker 03

  But what Taleb points out is that if you're really bad at something, and you ignore...

• 1:27:51Speaker 03

  The risks, you get taken 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. If 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, and every economist would tell you this, but he may be appreciative 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.

• 1:28:26Tim Ferriss?

  I've enjoyed his writing. I first read, actually, The Black Swan and then went back to Fooled by Randomists. Also read Anti-Fragile, very popular among some former, well, at the time, current military intelligence guys.

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:28:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I was introduced, actually, to his work first by 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.

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  No relation.

• 1:29:04Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  Exactly correctly.

• 1:29:22Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  Well, okay. Sorry, if you're an American, you're saying it correctly. And Israeli would say Talmud, Talmud.

• 1:29:29Tim Ferriss?

  Talmud, Talmud. So I have a quote here that I'll put into context. So this is on a site called Priceconomics. 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 Sisyphean 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 what 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."

• 1:30:09Tim Ferriss?

  So that last line is what I would love to hear more about.

• 1:30:15Speaker 03

  It's kind of embarrassing to talk about it, actually. No one's ever asked me to expound on that. It 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 we're 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 nonreligious people who have that same feeling.

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  Now, sometimes they're called type A, I should be careful. Type A people who need to do stuff is not quite the same, not quite the same. But, but the idea that you're supposed to do something of consequence, that you're not just here to enjoy yourself, is a burden or a blessing I've always somewhat felt. I don't want to be arrogant about it. I think you can easily take it as pretentious. It's interesting. You know, I had a conversation with, mentioned Tyler Cowen earlier. We did this episode on how we read, our reading habits. And it was really fun to talk to Tyler, who reads an unimaginable amount.

• 1:31:36Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it really is unimaginable.

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  He actually, I think, understands some of it, which is even, and remembers some of it, which is even better. But, seriously, I have a lot of respect for Tyler. He's a, he's a great, great thinker and polymath. And somebody wrote me a fascinating email. They said, you know, I read what you wrote about reading, and one of the things I like to say is that, you know, if you read a book a week, which is a lot, you're gonna read about 50 books a year, and if you're, you're around for about 50 years of reading, maybe a little more, but it's 2,500 books. That's it. That's it. There's a hundred thousand books, I think maybe more, I don't even remember how many books are published a year. Maybe it's a million, it's a big number.

• 1:32:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, at least a hundred thousand.

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  And I get to read 2,500 a year, I mean, in a lifetime. So, you know, I always say, pick them carefully. Which I don't always live by, I read a lot of books that are either not always so interesting and 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, thank, thank goodness. But you have a limited number of books to read. And this listener said to me, how do you justify watching a baseball game? You know, and you could argue the same thing when you think about the Talmud. 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 desist from it. So if you think of your life as having purpose and you're supposed to do stuff and accomplish, right?

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  Which I, again, I think I was both hardwired and culturally pushed to do by my, by my parents. And I single out my dad because 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, 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, fooling around, you know, doing nothing? Playing your 40th game of chess in a row that you, because you can't sleep and you're compulsively watching your score on chess.com dwindle steadily through the night. I have a smart son that says, you know, when you lose two in a row, maybe stop playing.

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  He thinks that 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 in Judaism, and I assume other religions, not to waste time. It's a precious thing and you should be studying, learning, growing, contributing, doing good deeds. And yet, watching a baseball game, how do you justify it? So, you know, I wrote him back and said, part of the reason I enjoy the occasional baseball game, which I don't watch much of from Israel because the time sign 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.

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  And to watch them emerge successfully or to be, to fail is, is, is like watching a great drama. That's one argument. The second is that you see it needs some downtime. It's okay.

• 1:34:41Speaker 03

  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 it's sometimes, by the way, it's not all, I have to build a house for homeless first. 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's not totally unrelated, which is, don't just stagnate, which is a weird attitude in a finite life.

• 1:35:14Tim Ferriss?

  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 I'm reading a quote, I think it's a quote, 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 a version of prayer would be made available through such writing to people who do not consider themselves religious.

• 1:35:59Speaker 03

  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 gonna try, now I'm teasing, of course. Let me try to answer that. 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. But I think it comes back to the, for people who weren't religious, and I'm, by the way, I was not religious my whole life. So I had a part of my life where I was not praying regularly, and where I was not keeping the Jewish Sabbath, and where I was eating lobster and 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

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  deaf, but most people, I think,

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  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. Imminent. I M M A N E N T. And in the book that I'm working on someday, maybe, I talk about the handful of times when I've come into contact with that. And I'm sure you have too. Example I use is, I'm in California, taking the family, my wife and I, I'm taking the kids to see a Shakespeare production outside in Santa Cruz, which is just really fun. You're in these redwoods and it's lovely. And it's been a long day.

• 1:37:31Speaker 03

  We've had a good time as a family and we're driving back and I think everybody's asleep in 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. 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. Right? I'm on the coast, so I'm coming up, I'm driving north on the coast and I can see

• 1:38:15Speaker 03

  constellations and stars out the horizon. I mean, it gives me goosebumps to think about it, to talk about it. It was, um, yeah, I don't remember if I woke everybody up or if we even stopped the car. I just, it was a little bit dangerous. 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 animal self, but there might not be. But I do feel it sometimes and I think most of us have moments like that. Alan Lightman, the physicist, has a wonderful book on this.

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  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 too, 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

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  this, do you?" And 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 ... Part of me wanted to run away because it was so painful. It was such a heartache that this person was sharing, somebody I didn't know very well. And those moments, those handful of times 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, you know, the birth of my children shared, where I was in, you know, privileged to be in the in the room with my wife when we, when she, I was gonna say, when we gave birth, she did most of the work, I'm pretty sure, when she gave birth. Those moments are not just like, "Oh, that was really fun."

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  I'll pick 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 herself in front of 2,000 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 feel like she's giving you access to something that's in you too. Those moments, they're transcendent. They're part of something bigger than ourselves. So that's what I think of with prayer. I think of prayer as accessing those or trying to access those more frequently. And for me, it's tied in with a belief in God or a

• 1:41:09Speaker 03

  hope of God's being there and listening. But I think for nonreligious people, there's something there even when it's not religious. It's spiritual, whatever you want to call it.

• 1:41:19Tim Ferriss?

  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 also just being cognizant of time and all other things. Is there anything else that you would like to add? Any stories, like tell, any requests of the audience, anything before we wrap up?

• 1:41:51Speaker 03

  I want to ask you a question.

• 1:41:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please.

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  And it's your show, so you can edit it out if you want, but you don't have to answer.

• 1:41:58Tim Ferriss?

  Fire away.

• 1:41:59Speaker 03

  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 multiple dimensions. You have an impact on the world through research you've been funding. I know about that because 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? We've been talking about this, right? You should be full of yourself. It would be totally normal for you to be completely

• 1:42:40Speaker 03

  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. I wish my podcast audience were bigger. I wish it was more like Tim Ferriss's. I wish my books sold more like Tim Ferriss's. You're who we want to be. And yet, you know what it's like. It's not that easy. It's not. And after a while, some of the thrill gets a little old. How do you say, uh, grown up?

• 1:43:10Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 1:43:31Tim Ferriss?

  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 attributed to someone else originally, but a older friend of mine said, a 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.

• 1:44:12Tim Ferriss?

  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 in quite some time, I would say 10 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,

• 1:44:52Tim Ferriss?

  when what gets broadcast, and you know this too, is a relatively 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 shared, or it gets edited so tremendously that it's sort of frank and spliced into something that sounds a lot better than what happened in reality. And I also have a very lucky, and this is certainly by luck and...

• 1:45:25Tim Ferriss?

  Somewhat by design on top of that, I have great friends who will call me on my bullshit and will certainly stress test any position that I hold really strongly. And I'm very fortunate. You know, I mentioned one person, Matt Mullenweg. 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 I might be ignoring,

• 1:46:07Tim Ferriss?

  alternative explanations I might be conveniently dismissing. And 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 have been doing this so much longer than I have and have been an inspiration to me in 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

• 1:46:48Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:47:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  Putz, to use a Yiddish term. But, and you might be, Tim, I don't know you well, but, but I do, speaking only for myself.

• 1:47:27Tim Ferriss?

  I try, I try not to be.

• 1:47:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely, good goal. And 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 we'd make a better show. And 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 him dumb

• 1:48:13Speaker 03

  questions. 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've talked earlier about Nassim Khomeini, and one of my favorite quotes from him is that, he cites it as 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, there's a long way to go, long way to go.

• 1:48:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there really is so, so far to go. And I want to mention, just for people who may not identify as religious in any way, you mentioned the, and am I getting this right, the Negev desert?

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:58Tim Ferriss?

  If you have not had a transcendent experience, and I'll put aside defining that term for now, but if you are curious about the types of experiences that, Russ, you were describing, if you go To the neg of 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,

• 1:49:39Tim Ferriss?

  and nor do I really want to inflict the violence of language on the feeling. But I will just say, there's a lot out there for people to explore. So I encourage them to explore. And Russ, you know, I've tracked your work for, for quite a long time. I have 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.

• 1:50:22Tim Ferriss?

  I think you offer a 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. Certainly would recommend people take a look. And that is a long way of saying, thank you. Thank you for doing what you do.

• 1:50:44Speaker 03

  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 Shalem College. You need to work on your Hebrew. Our classes are taught in Hebrew. So something to look forward to.

• 1:51:01Tim Ferriss?

  So what is, what is see you later?

• 1:51:04Speaker 03

  Lehitroot.

• 1:51:05Tim Ferriss?

  Something like that.

• 1:51:06Speaker 03

  Well done.

• 1:51:07Tim Ferriss?

  There we go. 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, A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. You can find all things Russ Roberts at RussRoberts.info, on Twitter at EconTalker. 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

• 1:51:48Tim Ferriss?

  Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 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 kinda 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

• 1:52:29Tim Ferriss?

  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/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My god, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with 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,

• 1:53:12Tim Ferriss?

  throwing blankets off, putting them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user-friendly solution on the market. I polled all of you guys on social media about the best tools for sleep, enhancing sleep, and Eight Sleep was by far and away the crowd favorite. I mean, people were just raving fans of this. So, I used it, and here we are. Add the Pod Pro

• 1:53:54Tim Ferriss?

  Recover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the heat and we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing. Now, for me, and for many people, the result, Eight Sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster, reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery, so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And good news, Eight Sleep has launched the next generation of the Pod.

• 1:54:38Tim Ferriss?

  The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with twice the number of sensors. It's just a smoother, better experience that delivers you the best sleep on earth. At least, that has been true for me. Simply add this to your existing mattress and you're all set. It is not magic, but sometimes it does feel like it. It just works. So, go to eightsleep.com/tim and save $250 on the Pod cover. That's eightsleep.com/tim, all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T, eightsleep.com/tim. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. You can also find the link in this episode's description.

• 1:55:22Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peak, that's P-I-Q-U-E. I have had so much tea in my life. I've been to China, I've lived in China, in Japan, I've done tea tours, I drink a lot of tea. And 10 years plus of physical experimentation and tracking has shown me many things. Chief among them, that gut health is critical to just about everything, and you'll see where tea is going to tie into this. It affects immune function, weight management, mental performance, emotional health, you name it. I've been drinking fermented Pu'er tea specifically, pretty much every day for years now. Pu'er tea delivers more polyphenols and probiotics than you can shake a stick at. It's like providing the optimal fertilizer to your microbiome. The problem with Good Pu'er is that it's hard to source.

• 1:56:05Tim Ferriss?

  It's hard to find real Pu'er that hasn't been exposed to pesticides and other nasties, which is super common. That's why Peak's fermented Pu'er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. It's so simple. They have so many benefits that I'm going to get into. And I first learned about them through my friends Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose. Peak Crystals are cold extracted using only wild harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. I often kick-start my mornings with their Pu'er green tea, their Pu'er black tea, and I alternate between the two. The rich, earthy flavor of the black specifically is amazing. It's very, very... It's like a delicious barnyard. Very peaty, if you like whiskey and stuff like that.

• 1:56:47Tim Ferriss?

  They triple-toxin screen all of their products for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold, contaminants commonly found in tea. There's also zero prep or brewing required, as the crystals dissolve in seconds. So you can just drop it into your hot tea, or I also make iced tea, and that saves a ton of time and hassle. Their fermented teas have never been discounted, but for you, my dear listeners, only for you, and for a limited time, Peak is offering up to 20% off, plus a free sampler pack with six of their bestselling teas when you order their Pu'er teas. This all comes with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so it's risk-free. Check it out. Go to peaklife.com/tim. That's P-I-Q-U-E-L-I-F-E dot com forward slash T-I-M. Peaklife.com/tim.

• 1:57:32Tim Ferriss?

  And the discount is automatically applied at checkout. Enjoy.