Addiction, Faith, and the Limits of Willpower (with Meghan O'Gieblyn)

Why do we keep doing things we know we shouldn't? And is that really a failure of will? Author Meghan O'Gieblyn spent years trying to answer that question, first in response to her struggle with alcoholism and her loss of faith, and then by means of Simone Weil, William James, and Iris Murdoch, who argue that the will is powerless over the things we want to change most. Listen as she speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about her new memoir, Will and Attention, which explores why paying attention does what effort alone can't, why we can reason ourselves into doing destructive things, and why the choices that most shape our lives are the "choices in between the choices," or the ones we barely notice making at all.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is September 14, 2026, and my guest is author Meghan O'Gieblyn. Her latest book,

• 0:42Speaker 00

  the subject of today's conversation, is Will and Attention: A Memoir. Megan, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Now, this isn't an easy book to summarize. It is a memoir, but its themes go deep into questions of addiction, rationality, religion, what it means to lead a good life. And just to set the stage, tell us a little bit about your personal story, which is the memoir part, which is the thread that runs through the book. You've had some interesting experiences.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was, I guess the first thing to say is I grew up in a very religious home. My parents were evangelical fundamentalists. And so that was a big part of my early childhood. I went to Moody Bible Institute to study theology when I was in college. Moody is one of the oldest and most conservative evangelical colleges in the country. And ended up, you know, I had a lot of good experiences there, but I also ended up having a faith crisis largely around the problem of evil. And I left the school after two years. I ended up leaving the Christian faith altogether and had this period of sort of being in

• 2:00Speaker 01

  the wilderness, so to speak, where I was, you know, fell into, I was drinking a lot. I was working at bars. I fell into an addiction, was not really connected to anybody from my former life. And I ended up getting sober when I was 28 years old and really found my way back into a sense of community and just a much more stable, healthy life, largely through my participation in 12-step programs. And yeah, and you know, the, that whole experience gave me my life back, or maybe gave me my life for the first time. I was sober for

• 2:41Speaker 01

  11 years. I got married. I started writing during that time. And then, you know, around the late 2010s, so I don't know, 2018, 2019, I became really attracted to Catholicism for reasons that were unclear to me at the time. I had, you know, not identified as a Christian for over a decade. I was not, you know, I called myself an atheist, but I found myself drawn back to attending Mass every day. I started talking with a priest and became, came very close to converting. In the end, I didn't. And then shortly after

• 3:22Speaker 01

  that, I, you know, for reasons that were totally baffling, returned to drinking. And I drank for about a year in secret, without telling anybody. And this was, you know, after I had spent years, you know, working with other alcoholics, you know, telling my story from the podium of church basements, talking about how much better my life was. So it was this completely irrational in both cases, this, this return to Christianity, which had not worked the first time and didn't work the second time, and then also this return to drinking. And so that's, the book begins as I was sort of coming out of those experiences and trying to make sense of them and figuring out this problem of like, why do we keep doing these things that we know we shouldn't do? Is it a problem of

• 4:07Speaker 01

  willpower? And yeah, that was really the starting place for the book.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  I want to start with a quote, and we're going to talk somewhat about a thinker that I always thought was pronounced Simone Weil, W-E-I-L, but sophisticated people say Simone Vey. So if you hear "Vey," we're talking about a woman who was born Jewish, who becomes deeply attracted to Catholicism, does not convert, though, finds it, as is in your story, a bridge too far for a variety of reasons. And maybe we'll get to those, maybe we won't. But you start early in the book with a really amazing quote from her. "We

• 4:55Speaker 00

  have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will." And that's the quote. It's a seemingly simple sentence. A chunk of the book is trying to untangle what that actually means. So take, take a crack at that.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  In some way, the whole book was, grew out of my desire to understand that one quote, which I was totally, you know, the first time I read it, I was on one hand attracted to it. I knew that willpower didn't work. So that part of it, I really recognized. I knew that it had not worked in my own life, that if anything, it led to more problems. You know, and I guess I'll just say in context, like, it didn't work with addiction. I couldn't, you know, cure myself of alcoholism by gritting my teeth and trying harder. And it didn't work with spiritual belief either. You can't will yourself to believe in God, right? And the part that mystified me was attention, because I had never seen those two words

• 5:56Speaker 01

  talked about together or set in opposition to one another, that attention could, could help cure faults that could not be cured through will. And I was really fascinated by what Vey meant by attention. And the more of her work that I read, the more elusive it became in some ways. She writes about, I mean, I guess just for context to her spiritual writing that we have today was not published during her life. It was composed mostly in private notebooks that she wrote during the last years of her life, so the early 1940s,

• 6:34Speaker 01

  late 1930s. And it was compiled after her death by a friend of hers. And one of her most famous books is Gravity and Grace. And what that was, is basically her, her friend, who's a French Catholic farmer, Gustave Thibault, he basically went through her notebooks and took all of these isolated quotes, some of them, she, she wrote in a way that was very aphoristic. So, you know, she has these, like, like the quote about attention and will, that sounds really gripping, but there's no context around there in her, in her journals, which is, which is really maddening. Yeah. But, you know, in Gravity and Grace, there's

• 7:16Speaker 01

  basically, Thibault took these isolated aphorisms and organized them by theme. So there's a piece in Gravity and Grace called Attention and Will. And, you know, it has all of these, these phrases that she jotted in her notebook about the relationship between these two ideas. But it sounds like you're, you're talking, you're listening to someone who's like talking almost in a way of like negative theology, like, like, almost like she's trying to understand these concepts herself. But I gathered through, through, you know, reading actually her journals themselves and reading a bunch of essays and books that she wrote during her life, that attention was not at all the way that we think about it today.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  You know, I think most people, when we talk about, you know, waning attention spans, there's a sense that attention is this hyper-focus, almost like a really rigid kind of tunnel vision, like you're, you got to look at the screen and focus on this one thing and ignore everything else. And for her, attention was almost the opposite of that. It was a kind of directed receptivity. It was a willingness to look and not grasp. So she talks about attention in the concept, in, in the context of art, you know, when you're looking at a painting and trying to understand it. She says, sometimes you move from one end of the room to the other, look at it from different angles. Sometimes you have to repeatedly come back to the same thing day after day until the light dawns, and that that process

• 8:43Speaker 01

  is largely mysterious. It's something that you can't force. And she talks about it, too, in the context of, you know, paying attention to people who are suffering, and that that requires to actually, actually listen and to give someone your full attention, requires a kind of self-emptying, that you can't, you know, be trying to, I don't know, you can't be thinking about yourself. You can't be thinking about you, what you want and be paying attention at the same time. So in that way, you know, will is really the, the enemy of attention. And so I started, yeah, just reading a lot of her writing and thinking about that, how that applied to addiction, for one thing, where it does feel

• 9:24Speaker 01

  like you can get in your own way when you try to, I mean, one of the, I think the delusions of addiction is that you can somehow figure it out, you know, like, oh, if I just, you know, try harder to control my drinking, or if I just drink the right thing at the right time, then I'll be able to master this. And the truth is, what works for a lot of people is you have to give up that delusion and just, you know, basically stop fighting, surrender. And for me, it came through, you know, showing up into this community and listening to other people's stories. And I think that's the type of attention.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  So I'm going to read a quote. You say, "The most important things in life completely elude the will. Cheerfulness can be summoned through sheer effort, but not happiness; piety, but not faith; seduction, but not love; productivity, but not genius. I know from experience that it's impossible to will oneself out of an addiction. And I know that you cannot force yourself into faith, no matter how hard you pray, or starve, or grit your teeth. I very much want to live a good and virtuous life without alcohol and drugs, which is, which have made my life miserable. And I still long to believe in God despite the resounding silence that suggests he does not exist, or is not interested

• 10:41Speaker 00

  in us, or in me specifically. But my acts, my actions suggest that part of me does not actually want these things, or that I want them only provisionally, or part of the time. My will is scattered, directed toward many contradictory things, and easily distracted." And I, I just wanted you to expand on this idea a little bit, because I think in... I would call it Western civilization. I don't have a better phrase for it. There's a deep, deep belief that our choices are ours and we bear responsibility for them. So when we make a bad choice, whether it's addiction or something cruel, something evil,

• 11:24Speaker 00

  it's our fault because we should have willed otherwise. And you're suggesting it's not 100% or maybe at all in our control?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm very interested in the question of free will as a philosophical problem. And I do touch on it a little bit in the book. I think I was more interested in the practical first-person experience of trying to will, yeah, trying to will something and just having it completely resist any kind of effort. And I mean, the other place where I've experienced this is in creative work or intellectual work, right? There's, I think, everyone recognizes this point where you're just banging your head against the wall. You've hit an obstacle and you can't figure it out. And, you know, what doesn't work in those cases is to just grit your teeth and try harder.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Usually what works is to get up, go for a walk, take a shower, you know? And the answer arises almost just from outside of yourself. Somehow, yeah. Physicists have this phrase that they use to describe the places that are most likely to give way to a breakthrough, the three Bs, the bed, the bath, and the bust. And, I mean, I think everybody can recognize that, right? That it's almost when you're relaxed and not trying that the answer comes. And so I was really interested to, I mean, Ve writes a lot about, you know, this idea that, you know, when you try to force those things that can't be forced, like spirituality,

• 12:55Speaker 01

  virtue, creativity, love, you end up with what she would call idols or sort of false versions of what you're trying to achieve. And I think that's especially true in any type of moral or spiritual life where, you know, if you try to, you know, act more virtuous than you are, you end up with a sort of false piety that isn't really rooted in a true spirituality. And, you know, that was something I recognized in my experience in 12-step programs, you know, where I think for a lot of my time there, I was sort of walking the walk and talking the talk, but didn't really have that deeper belief or had some really deep

• 13:39Speaker 01

  unresolved problems with the idea of a higher power and the whole spiritual aspect of that ideology. And so, yeah, I think the thing I was interested in is how can attention to those things that we're trying, like, instead of trying to will something, paying attention to what it is that you're not being honest with yourself about or what you're not looking at, how can that sort of offer a way through?

• 14:04Speaker 00

  So I often say on the program, when these kind of issues come up, the part of growing up is becoming self-aware and realizing you're not the center of the universe, which is the way human beings start. You are the center of the universe. You're an infant. You're a child. And you get a lot of attention because otherwise you're not going to survive. And it's hard to do anything else except put yourself in the first. So I say there are four ways to grow up and become self-aware. Religion, meditation, literature, therapy. You've done all four.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  You write all four in the book in some detail. And I would say in some sense, your book is about, ask the question, is this possible even? Is there any sense in which we control our own destiny, that we can forge ourselves, that we can become better? I'm Jewish. We're in the time of the Jewish calendar between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which were the 10 days of return. They're called the 10 days. Sometimes it's translated as repentance. I think that's a mistranslation, but the idea is this is a time of self-reflection and you should improve yourself.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Now, it's really hard to do and we all understand that. But in Judaism, it is a core belief that it's possible. That belief might be wrong, but I'm curious, what's your take on that? Is it possible to make yourself a better person? Is it possible to, through attention, say, maybe not through will, but through attention and various techniques, religion, meditation, reading, great books, the Herbie, to become a better person, become a different person, just even start with that?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like your four things. I would agree with all of those. I would add maybe a fifth, suffering.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  I think is how you.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Good.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. Well, and I mean, it's been true for me too, that I oftentimes, you know, I know something intellectually, but it doesn't really sink in until I've suffered the consequences of not doing it. And this is a thing that's really maddening me because I'm a slow learner and have to learn things firsthand, that you really don't transform that, at least for me, you don't transform that intellectual knowledge into actionable wisdom until you've had some sort of experience with it in life. But yeah, I mean, I think the ideal of any kind of religious pursuit or moral pursuit is to try to change and improve without having to constantly suffer consequences before you do. And, yeah, I mean, I fiercely believe in change.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  It does feel like it's a slightly unfashionable idea. I think a lot of people today are skeptical that people can change, but I've seen it happen in my life multiple times. I've seen it happen in the lives of other people, specifically through, you know, recovery from addiction. But it's hard because, I mean, it's an incredibly slow process and it's not direct. I think that's the thing that is sometimes frustrating about it, is that most things in life, you know, if you want something in the material world, like success, or, you know, I don't know, if you want to change your life through wellness or fitness or

• 17:49Speaker 01

  something like that, there's very sort of clear steps to doing so. Not always easy, but there's sort of a path. And for me, the idea of inner transformation is largely circular in some ways. It's about sort of having to come back either through ritual or through these successive acts of attention to the same thing and constantly sort of reminding yourself of these truths until they sink in. And, yeah, I do think, you know, it's oftentimes the case where the change happens once you've given up changing in some way, where you've sort of just committed to doing these things for their own sake.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  And then suddenly you realize a problem that you've been struggling with is gone or that the wall that you've been sort of pushing against, it suddenly falls over where before it wasn't.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Well, I thought one of the themes, which of course is a fascinating question in human behavior for economists, economists tend to ignore it, but economists assume that you look at your situation, you decide what's best for you, and that's what you do.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Well, that's like classical economics, right?

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's some modern variance on it, but not so much. It's hard to get very far if you don't assume rationality. So then you need a model of irrationality. There isn't a good one usually. But what I like is various points in your book. You concede that as human beings, we often tell stories to ourselves to explain what we did that aren't the real reasons, and we may not even have access to those reasons. And I thought, it's a beautiful quote I'd never heard that you use from William James. You say, "It's impossible to know how or when it will bear fruit," some technique. And you quote William James saying that he believed that the crisis of religious conversion

• 19:52Speaker 00

  was the last stage of a long incubation that had taken place in the unconscious. James writes, quote, "When the fruit is ripe, a touch will make it fall." And I love that because it's, it looks like something was decisive, the touch, but there's decades sometimes, or years, or months that set the stage for that change. And I think- People want to have a lightning bolt, or a crisis, or not just, I'm just talking about religion, but any transformation where people decide, say, to be, to lose weight,

• 20:33Speaker 00

  or to stop drinking, or to start drinking. You know, any kind of transformation, good or bad, it's usually, we attribute it to a dramatic moment. And James is saying, actually, it's, that's really not the right way to think about it. And I think a lot of your book has that theme underlying it.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was so fascinated by James's work, which I'd read the varieties of religious experience before, but I went back and read it again. It'd been several years when I was writing this book. And I mean, he's talking about the very problem that I'm wrestling with in the book, which is this, this problem of being at war with oneself. And he talks about these people who have divided wills. You know, they have some sort of higher aspiration, but then they keep running into problems. And sometimes it's spiritual doubt, sometimes it's temptation, sometimes it's excessive self-criticism. And that there's often this moment that comes, which he calls the crisis of self-surrender,

• 21:32Speaker 01

  where the person kind of just stops the war, says, I'm going to hand over my, my problem to some sort of higher power, or I'm going to simply admit defeat. And then the solution becomes possible. And yeah, he did believe that that, that moment of self-surrender was not the lightning bolt, that there was all this work that had been happening, maybe even throughout the struggle, that this work had been happening unconsciously. And, you know, James, I don't think he ever uses the word unconscious in that book. He talks about the powers outside of the conscious mind. He talks about, he has this great phrase

• 22:12Speaker 01

  too, which relates to the, the idea of rationality. I think he said that the change happens below the locustious level of rationality, which I love. It's, it's almost this idea that we're like constantly, right, telling ourselves these stories, right? And if you, sometimes you just need to like shut up and listen. And, and yeah, I think that so much of, you know, modern psychology, and even this idea of like cognitive biases, you know, rely on this idea that we are fundamentally rational creatures with, you know, maybe some glitches here and there in our thinking. And I mean, the thing, the thing that I really

• 22:53Speaker 01

  love about psychoanalysis, or even the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, is that there, there seems to be this, this notion that the human mind and the human heart has vast depths that are not accessible to the person, the individual themselves. And, you know, I really became interested in that larger sense of the unconscious and its role in change. And I don't necessarily mean like Freudian unconscious, I just mean everything that we're not paying attention to, right? Everything that we're not focused on. And with this idea that maybe the solution lay outside of that narrow focus.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm reminded of the line from Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, writing about, he talks about writing about the, the human heart in conflict with itself. And this is, you know, I think it's related to other work you've done, which I'm not very familiar with. But I think there's this temptation to see the brain as a machine. Now we see it as a, an LLM, which is a neural network, which of course it has neurons, there is a network, it has electricity. But it's, it's a rather meager view of the complexity of the human experience. But ultimately, it's like, oh yeah, it's got this, there's

• 24:11Speaker 00

  this bug called cognitive bias. Well, just correct that. Let me explain it to you, by the way. Let me tell you what, this bias you have. And once I tell you, you'll be protected, you'll be inoculated. It doesn't work that way. Right? And, and it's, it's a, it's an endlessly fascinating challenge, the, our war with, with our own self. And it's

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  part of, again, what I mean by growing up, or living.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, yes, old, maybe one of the oldest problems. I mean, this is what the Greek philosophers called a chrasia, this idea of weakness of will, right? You know something's good intellectually, you know what you should be doing. And yet, you don't do it. You did the opposite. And I was really fascinated by these quotes that you find, both in Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. You know, I was exposed to it through, first, I think that my first awareness of this was through the Apostle Paul, who says in his letter to the Romans, you know, I don't know what I, why I do what I do. The thing I want to do, I don't do. And what I hate, I do. And yeah, I think that really

• 25:25Speaker 01

  just sums up the, the heart of the problem. And, you know, I think through, you know, the Christian interpretation of that problem is, yes, your will is weak, you need to rely on, on God, and not trust in your own hubris, or your, you know, your own ability to change. You need grace. And today, you know, I think, I don't know, obviously, you know, Christianity still has a long legacy in our culture. But I am really interested in these, these more contemporary metaphors about the mind being a machine, and how that changes our view of our own minds, and our view of what can be changed and what can't. And, you know,

• 26:10Speaker 01

  I think that the, the thing that is most pernicious about that metaphor of the brain as a computer is this idea that like, well, you know, there's, there's really no point, everything is sort of an automatic process. There's no point in actually pay,

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's all built in.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Right. There's no point in actually paying attention, right, to what your mind is doing. And this is so much of what Vae writes about, and Iris Murdoch writes about, this idea of, like, you really need to pay close attention to your thoughts and to the stories that you're telling yourself, because your actions are a result of those thoughts. That, you know, your, your, your will is not this sort of isolated power, that, you know, and where you're, you're facing a choice, and you, you have total freedom to choose one thing or the other. It's really the outcome of what you've been thinking, how you've trained your attention, how you've changed your mind, and those habits over a much, much long period of time.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  I want to read another quote, which I found fascinating, from referencing G.K. Chesterton, and who's, who is famous on a kind of talk for his fence, Chesterton's fence, gets talked about a lot here, the idea that you see something that doesn't make sense, so you should just, of course, tear it down rationally. Why would you leave something that doesn't make sense?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  And then you, because you don't really appreciate the complexity of the world, you don't realize why the fence was put there in the first place, that the problem that it solved is still there, and so on, and so on. But here's another insight of Chesterton that is really kind of cool. And it relates a little bit to what you were just saying, so I want you to talk about it. You say, quote, "I'd read an essay that summer by G.K. Chesterton, and had underlined a passage about the importance of taboo." Now I'm going to step out of my quote for a second. A taboo is completely out in our modern culture. Taboos are irrational, they're silly. There shouldn't have any taboos. Almost by definition, a taboo is something that you believe in, that's obviously, or afraid of, or you stay

• 28:10Speaker 00

  away from, but there's no reason for it. I mean, it's just a weird cultural bias. Anyway, back to the quote. "All myths and fairy tales," he pointed out, Chesterton, "rest on a completely senseless taboo. Cinderella has to make it back from the ball before midnight. The milliner's son cannot stand on his head in the fairy place. Adam and Eve cannot eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Why? The stories never answer this. They simply insist that all the magic and wonders of paradise depend on respecting this one senseless rule. These stories," Chesterton argues, "preserve a very old and very deep

• 28:50Speaker 00

  human truth." Quote, "that happiness depended on not doing something that you could at any moment do, and which very often, it was not obvious why you should not do it." Close double quote. Say anything about that you like. It's just a really interesting idea.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  I was fascinated by this idea too. And I had, not until you mentioned it, connected it to that other writing of his about the fence, which is, it's almost exactly the same thing. Although I think here he's talking about almost this sort of mystical plane.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And yeah, I agree. I think like, the idea of a taboo is so, especially like a senseless taboo, right? It's just so antithetical to, to any type of, you know, rational contemporary thinking about,

• 29:37Speaker 00

  Modernity.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, maternity. And I was fascinated by this quote, particularly when it came to thinking about addiction. Because, you know, I think like, yeah, the one thing that you can't do as an alcoholic is drink. And so long as you don't drink, your life can be great. And the thing that's gotten me in trouble, and a lot of other addicts I know in trouble, is starting to be like, well, you know, let, maybe the taboo can be negotiated. Maybe I was just really young when I was drinking, maybe it'll be different now. You know, maybe I didn't try hard enough. And, you know, once your mind goes down that path and tries to start thinking rationally about that taboo, you, you can talk yourself back

• 30:20Speaker 01

  into something that's completely irrational. And, you know, I think this is something that I was really interested in the book, is that even reason can be used to, to arrive at completely irrational destructive conclusions. And that you need to be skeptical of your reason, and sometimes trust, you know, the idea that these taboos exist for a reason, particularly when they're embedded in a community. You know, like, you know, I've, I've heard, you know, countless people in recovery communities talk about, you know, why this one rule is the center of their lives. And that sometimes we just need to respect that there's a hard limit to something, and something that we can't understand. You know, I'm never going

• 31:02Speaker 01

  to figure out why I'm an alcoholic. But, you know, I know for a fact that my life is better when I, I heed that, that one rule.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've talked on the program before about the challenge of

• 31:20Speaker 00

  A modest violation versus a cold turkey rule. So it is remarkably easier to eat no potato chips at a party than one. And when you say to yourself, but one potato chip is not harmful, and it isn't. It's, that's a truth, that's true. So you take the one, and of course, 30 seconds pass, and it's still the case that one is okay. And after a while, you've had 40, and that's just not good. And so it's better to have a rule, I don't eat potato chips. And I'd like to keep, I'd like to have that rule, Meghan. I sometimes have it.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  And, and part of what your book talks about is that there are times when you seem to have control of your will, and times when, when you don't. Do you think it is a personality, it's a terrible way to describe it, but, uh, that some people have an addictive personality versus others, you know, for them, alcohol's not an issue. It's just, it's never an issue. And you can't, in your case, you can't have one. You can't have the potato chip. And so is it a, is it a part of our nature for some of us that we struggle with certain things like that? Or is it everyone who has that for different things?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's something I think about a lot. I certainly think that there, I mean, that is idiosyncratic, right? That it's, it's different for everybody. And, you know, I am somebody who, yeah, I absolutely cannot have one drink of alcohol without it becoming totally destructive. I can have an occasional cigarette and I'm fine, whereas I have friends who can't. And I don't know what that has to do with, you know, brain wiring, or experience, or what, but I think, you know, and that's, this is also, I think, one of the things that's so baffling about willpower when it comes to those addictions and compulsions and things that we can't control is like, you know, when I was drinking, I, I had an incredible

• 33:24Speaker 01

  will in a lot of other areas of life. I was able to show up and, you know, to work for, for a time. I was able to do anything else, you know, moderate my eating, exercise, all that stuff. You know, I had a very healthy will, but it went, came to this one thing, I just could not, the willpower was completely useless. And I think that thing is different for everybody. But yeah, what you're saying about the potato chips too. I mean, the great thing about having a taboo is that you don't spend, waste all of this mental energy constantly negotiating, like, okay, when is, when is one chip turned into two chips? And when do I need to stop? Can I do another one? And you're completely distracted and outside of yourself. Whereas if you just have a hard rule, you can stop thinking about it, and it frees up an enormous amount of space in the mind.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I had a friend too, who would tell me that there should be no overweight Orthodox Jews, because Orthodox Jews are really good at self-control. They don't eat pork, they only, because certain types of food even that are non-pork, that are certified as kosher, they don't use their phone on, on the Shabbat on Saturday, so they have this incredible will. So how could they be overweight? And welcome to the real world. My theory, which is not a theory, but an amusing to me thought, is that, you know, you have a, you have a certain amount, and you use it up on some things, it, it spills over elsewhere to, to not be available in those other things.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  So you have, you just have to have some things you struggle with. I don't know. It's a mystery.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  It is a mystery, yeah. And there's been a lot of, I mean, the, what you're talking about, about the will being sort of finite, I think there was a really popular framework called the ego depletion theory. That was, yeah, throughout the late 90s, early 2000s, maybe, that was sort of the dominant paradigm for, for self-control research. And this idea that like, yeah, the, the will was a muscle that could be overextended, and that it sort of declined the more you used it. Or maybe that you could also strengthen the muscle.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  Get better, yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, right? And I don't know, that's, I think there's some truth there, but like a lot of theories, it feels incomplete too, because there's, you know, I don't know, it's, it's a mystery. There, it's, I think the problem of will for me is that it also extends backward and ad infinitum. Like, where do you, you know, you, you can maybe talk about, okay, I have a desire, I can, when I really want something, I can do it, and I can achieve it. But where did the desire come from? You know? Like, I think everyone's had this moment where it's like, oh, I wanted so badly to get fit or skinny, that I finally was able to stick to a diet. But why did it happen at that moment that you were so motivated?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  And Schopenhauer talks about this, where there's a famous, I think it's actually a paraphrase of, of what he wrote, but he said, "A man can will what he will, but not will itself." Basically, you can, you can do what you desire, but desire itself is dependent on some previous experience or conditioning that we're not in control of. So it's, it's really this really deep problem of, you know, freedom and determinism that goes back to the person's birth, essentially.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. My dad smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for a good chunk of his life, and we, his children, when we were younger, would beg him to stop. And I would talk to, I would be maybe, I don't know, 13, 14 years old, I'd talk to his mother, my grandmother, and say, "Can you get Dad to stop smoking?" And she would look at me with total sincerity, and she'd say, "He would do anything I told him." I said, "Could you tell him to stop smoking?" And she would never do it. Now, I don't know if she'd have wanted to challenge her view of her relationship with

• 37:24Speaker 00

  her son, or whether she knew that in this one case, that wasn't realistic. But that's a complicated example of what, you know, what you're talking about. Ultimately, by the way, my dad stopped smoking somewhere, I think it is, he smoked probably from 20 to 60, or 20 to 50 something, he had to have a surgery, and he had to stop smoking. For the surgery, which he managed to do, because he could.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Wow, yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  And then he didn't start again. He went cold turkey. He didn't say, "Well, I'll go down to two packs or one pack." And I think, yeah, just, I, I'm a deep believer in zero being the right, the only really effective, unfortunately, it doesn't work with food. It's, it's hard to have zero food if you want to lose weight.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  So, let's turn to an issue which is on my mind these days, and it's, it's really about religion at large, more than, than your personal or my personal story. One of my favorite quotes, and I, I quote it often, is David Foster Wallace, in his famous commencement address, that's been called This is Water. He says, "Everybody worships." And in that passage, after he says that, he says, you know, "Some people worship.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  If they don't worship God, they worship money, fame, beauty, youth." And he says, "Those are all false gods." And he then recommends that you pick one of the older religions that have stood the test of time. And I've always found that interesting. And it turns out, Simone Vey says the same thing. You're right. "Vey believed that many of the totalitarian movements of the 20th century were forms of idolatry, and expressed a desire that was essentially spiritual, the longing to surrender one's will to some higher authority. If people don't have some spiritual absolute to abandon themselves to," she argues, "they

• 39:33Speaker 00

  will be vulnerable to the seductions of authoritarianism, ideology, and institutional religion, which similarly demand a swooning submission." And I want to say two things about that, and then I'll let you react. I've always thought about the Foster Wal, David Foster Wallace quote about adoration. Everybody worships. Everybody finds something that they adore. But it's also, I started to realize recently, it's also about something to submit to, something to be commanded by, the way religion does. Religion has all kinds of demands, either on your beliefs, or your actions, or your practices, or your rituals, restrictions on your freedom.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  And I start to worry that as religion retreats in the West, which it is doing now, it could change, but I'm not optimistic, that it will be replaced, not by Hegelian and Kantian wisdom, or Voltaire, but rather by people submitting to different religions that have other negative consequences. I think we're

• 40:48Speaker 00

  We're at risk of that in our time, very much so. And, you know, the rise of populism, the strong leader. And, you know, human beings like to be free, but they also like to be commanded. And, you know, as a child, we have both of those urges. We want to be, to do what we want. We don't like to be told what to do, but we also like limits. And we don't find our limits in religion. I worry we're going to find them elsewhere and it will be a dark, dark time. What do you think?

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I could not agree more with that. I think a lot of my writing, even from the very beginning, has been about how essentially religious or spiritual impulses find their way into weird corners of secular culture. My last book was about how that happened with technology, you know, this idea that...

• 41:43Speaker 00

  It's another god, yeah.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that all these, you know, spiritual metaphors that come up in conversations about AI or how this, this sort of techno-optimist view of the future has a lot of similarities with Christian eschatology, right? And, yeah, you see it, and I think about it a lot with politics too, and the idea that, you know, we like to say that we want freedom and endless choice. And the truth is that that is an enormous burden. And I think that people are looking for any way out of that. And I think that that can be a healthy thing when it's channeled towards something, right, a religious community that has sort of ethics built into it. And it is also about something, this is, you know, going back to Vae, she talked about

• 42:28Speaker 01

  why religion was, was the right thing, or like a spirituality, she would say, is sort of the better thing to submit to as opposed to an authoritarian leader or this sort of fascist politics. Were, was that, you know, you're, you're looking at something transcendent in a spiritual tradition. She talked about how God was the void in this idea of surrendering to mystery, to, you know, something that we fundamentally can't understand. Because, you know, if you're submitting to anything in the human world that's promising to give you answers or control, you know, that's going to come back to bite you and you're in the same place that you started out in. And, yeah, I mean, I think a lot, especially, you know, in the US, I think the extent to

• 43:13Speaker 01

  which, you know, Christianity itself has become wed and bound up with an authoritarian strain of politics is, has been really confusing to me. And it seems like a lot of, I mean, it's not confusing in a way. I mean, there's a way in which these things could be opposed to one another or different alternatives, right? You know, submit to God or submit to this other ideology.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Caesar.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Caesar, yes, thank you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that, you know, the Christian nationalism just confuses that in such a strange way. And a lot of evangelicals, I think, here, you know, tend to almost put politics over their belief system or see the belief as, as sort of subservient to this larger political ideology. And, you know, so I think, you know, that there is also this countervailing trend, I think, in the US and Europe of young people who are trying to, you know, go back to traditional religion and returning to, you know, especially, I mean, most of the press has been about Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, about an enormous amount of young people that are

• 44:22Speaker 01

  returning to those traditions and who are, you know, in some cases, doing so as a retreat from, from politics, which I think has become kind of a religion at this point of time.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  And you reference, you know, the Brothers Karamazov, which has an extraordinary immortal scene of the dilemma or distinction between organized religion and true faith, right? And it's always an issue. It's an issue in every religion. It's an issue in Judaism. It's an issue in Christianity. It was, is this version that we are practicing now, a, is it apostasy? Is it heresy? Or is it the true, it's capturing what, the essence of what we think are purposes? And I think we're gonna, we're in a very, there's a lot of ferment, I think, in, to

• 45:18Speaker 00

  the extent that religion is still a viable outlet for these urges in 2026. I think it's going to get complicated. I think it's going to get more diverse. I think, as you say, I think there's going to be all kinds, there's going to be a lot of innovations, the way I would say it. I can't help but notice, I was in Italy, which is a very unreligious country. It is the, it is the home place of, right? It's the, the Vatican is in Italy. And yet Italians are, I think, very unconnected to the church. And I suspect, as an economist, I like to believe that the government's control of

• 45:59Speaker 00

  religion in many countries has limited the innovation that would have allowed it to evolve into more healthy or more attractive, at least competitive ways. We'll see.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, I, I, I'm similar kind of bewildered by what's happening with religion these days. It feels like there's so many different facets of it and different, different directions in which it's going. But I do think there's this, this sort of, this, I don't want to say trend, but this, this sort of pattern in the history of Christianity where, you know, you have Christianity become, you know, bound up with power, institutionalized in some way. And then you have this movement to, let's go to the wilderness, to the desert, you know? Or, you know, the Protestant Revolution, there's this idea that we need to get back to the true faith, back to the first century church.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  And I think there's a way in which the, the faith has constantly renewed itself through those movements. But it does feel like it's sort of this eternal cycle that the faith is going through.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  Let's talk about Iris Murdoch for a minute. I never read anything by her until very, very recently. And she's a fascinating thinker and intellect because she's a very serious philosopher. And she's a very serious novelist. And I hope to read more of her novels. I may read some of her philosophy, but you have a really interesting variation on some of the practices we've been talking about from Murdoch. I'm going to read this, this is Murdoch. It goes to the question of what is attention and, and this difference between focus and other things.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Murdoch writes, "If we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice, most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not, but it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small and piecemeal business, which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about, unimpeded and important moments. The moral life on this view is something that goes on continually, not something that

• 48:31Speaker 00

  is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial." Close quote. And that's a really interesting commentary at all the things we were talking about earlier. So add your thoughts on that.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  I love that passage so much. And it was really not until I read Murdoch, because in, throughout that, that book that you quoted, the quote comes from her book, The Sovereignty of Good, which is just a long essay that she wrote in the late 60s. And she was basically trying to interpret and build upon Vae's ideas of attention and will. And I think she does so in a way, she, she, she's famous for having taken Vae's ideas and secularized them, like instead of God, she talks about the good, which she saw in this very platonic sense. But I think that she makes the Vae's ideas about attention and will so much more clear

• 49:33Speaker 01

  and practical. And the idea, as I understand it, is that, you know, we all think that we're free at any moment to take any choice, right? And when you are faced with a temptation or in the crucible of some sort of moral dilemma, you've basically already become the person who's going to make one choice, right? It's, it's not like you are totally free in that moment. You're actually, you know, been conditioned by everything that you've done, especially in the, the weeks and months and years leading up to that, where you've paid, what you've turned your attention to, how you've tried or not tried to, you know...

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Condition your mind through paying attention to your thoughts. That that's actually what counts and not these big moments of choice. That the choice comes down to those much simpler acts of attention that we perform every day. And she gives an example that I've found really useful, especially when it comes to paying attention to one's thoughts and self interrogation. Where she says, you know, imagine that there's this woman, a mother-in-law, who finds her daughter-in-law to be uncouth and vulgar. And, you know, she's very self-controlled. It doesn't affect her behavior in every way. She still treats her graciously, but she has this prejudice in her mind. And then one day she decides, you know what, maybe I'm being unfair.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Maybe she's not simple and vulgar. Maybe she's actually spontaneous and youthful. And Murdoch's point is that that that action happens completely in the woman's mind. There's there's no action attached to it. And yet she says, we have to be able to talk about that as a moral act. And, you know, Murdoch was writing in the sort of shadow of behaviorist and existentialist theories of of of human nature and in philosophy, where there was this idea that the will was radically free and that action is what counted. And she's saying like, no, everything that happens in your mind and how you have controlled your mind or not is what what counts.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  And, yeah, I just found that to be utterly like, it felt like one of those moments where you read something that has distilled the truth that you've you've known for a long time, but haven't been able to put into words. And I think that that that idea was maybe one of the most transformative transformative things that I encountered in my my work on this book.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  I think it's incredibly profound, especially if it's true. I like to think it's true.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  This idea that we form ourselves day by day, rather than through some great rational study of morality or religion or whatever, we actually, we're making choices constantly, most of them quite small.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  And we think, well, it's small, so I don't have to really pay attention to it. And what Murdoch is arguing, which again, if true, is profound, is that it's the small decisions that add up to form you and allow you to become the person that makes the right choice when it's a big decision. And I think so often, we fool ourselves into thinking that this thing we're doing that's actually quite self-interested is probably okay, because it's just a small thing, you know. It's not stealing. It's a corporation or it's not, you know, whatever is my rationalization.

• 53:14Speaker 00

  Adam Smith actually writes about this very profoundly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the the sort of slippery slope of small indiscretions and inappropriate things. And, you know, we I recently, we interviewed, I interviewed Adam Astrione on this idea of incentives that economists like that to explain behavior. So if you have the incentive to do something slightly dishonest or slightly unattractive, I'll pick a tiny one. I wish I'd talked about it when we when I interviewed him. I'm leaving my office at the end of the day. Should I turn the lights off? I mean, it's a very, the cost is tiny. But I could say to myself, it would be, I think, the wrong thing to say, but I could

• 53:58Speaker 00

  say to myself, well, you know, we, the college that I'm the president of, we rent the building and the electricity is included, so we're not billed for it. So I don't have any incentive to turn the lights off, so I should just leave them on. And when I come back, they'll be on already. That's a horrible attitude. First of all, it's wrong, because when we renegotiate our lease, they'll notice we used a lot of electricity because we didn't turn our lights off at night, and they'll probably pick a higher number. So it's an illusion that it's not, we're not paying for. We are paying for it. It's embedded in the in the price of the rent. But the more important point is that every time I make a decision like that and say, oh, well, it's a small thing, and I'm going to get a little bit of benefit, and I won't

• 54:39Speaker 00

  pay a cost, regardless of whether it's the right or wrong thing to do, is you're degrading, you're eroding your moral sense.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  And every time you do the right thing, I think you're strengthening that muscle. That's my view, so I like Murdoch.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, and I think that those types of moral dilemmas, even though it almost seems too small to call them moral dilemmas, about whether to turn on the light or not, or turn off the light or not, or whether to recycle, or, you know, just all these other small choices that we have in these enormous, you know, economies of scale that we're immersed in. It feels almost like you're completely powerless to do anything. You know, what does it matter if I call my congressperson as opposed to, you know? But, yeah, I agree that it's like, there, there is something to the idea of doing something just for the sake that it's right and doing it because it's a principle that you've chosen

• 55:34Speaker 01

  to live your life by, that, you know, not only, I think, strengthens your own moral sense of yourself, but also just makes life so much easier, because you're not constantly thinking about, right, those questions of like, what does this count? Will this matter? All those things that have to do with outcomes. And I think, yeah, probably Murdoch would say like, that's that the outcome is not even the point. It's about what's happening inside of you. And, you know, she, she has an interesting point that she makes, too, and it's really difficult, one at first, or it was difficult for me to wrap my head around, where she says, the ultimate goal of a moral life is not to expand your your freedom, but to actually restrict it.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  And she says, like, the person who is, you know, who has really trained their moral sense through these small acts and through attention, when they, when they arrive at a moral dilemma, they don't have to deliberate, because they automatically know what's good, right? That you sort of, you, you act according to your principles or toward your higher aspirations, so long as you've done the work leading them to that point. And I struggle with that idea a little bit, because it almost seems like she's encouraging thoughtlessness or something like, like, she, there's, there's actually a line in Vay where she says the same thing, where she says, basically, we should become automatons

• 57:03Speaker 01

  of the good, right? Almost like we should, doing good should not require any kind of struggle, because you, you have trained yourself to desire the good to such a point where it doesn't feel like a struggle. And I think there's some truth to that. But, yeah, then it does raise this question of like, well, are you, you know, what about like, the thing about moral dilemmas is that they're incredibly difficult and nuanced, and you can't, you can't really apply some rule that fits every situation. You really have to to think about the context and all of these other things. And, yeah, so that was one thing I struggled with. I do think that there's truth to this idea that like, it's, it's not, I don't think Vay or Murdoch are encouraging thoughtlessness by any means.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  I think they're encouraging the kind of deep self-reflective introspection in, again, this sort of longer piecemeal period leading up to a choice, so that the choice becomes more obvious when, when you are, you know, in the trenches of a temptation or a moral dilemma of some kind.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  No, I would think of it, and again, I don't know if they'd agree, or you just tell me if you agree, but I think of it as, it's not so much a muscle that you're strengthening. It's, well, that's half of it. The other half is you're developing a moral intuition. Because if you continually are thinking about, what's the right thing to do here? And you systematically urge yourself to do these small, relatively low-cost, selfless things, then when the more complicated ones come around, you'll know, you're not going to have to study it for so long. And that's been my experience. And especially, I think, as you get older and you go through the experiences that you

• 58:43Speaker 00

  referred to earlier, which I do think are really the, very much maybe the only way that you learn. As Adam Estrone in a different episode talked about, the brain's not connected to the ears. The things that you're told don't really go in. You have to suffer or experience them or learn from them. And intuition, which has, I think, a very bad name in some circles, because it's, quote, your gut, and it's not rational, it's not, you know, the, you haven't done a careful analysis. I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how thinking and reason should work and can work. So I think to give Vay and Murdoch their due about the thoughtless part, it's that

• 59:27Speaker 00

  it's thoughtless because you just, you feel it. You don't have to study it and pretend that you're, you've done a careful analysis.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think what you're describing, I totally agree that, and I like the idea of thinking about it as a moral intuition. And I think this is what, what basically we mean by wisdom, right? Is the ability to, you know, because you've experienced so much, you have these internalized rules that you maybe don't have conscious access to, the way that you do with, you know, and I think once you get to a point of mastery with anything, with art, writing, or music, or something, you sort of just know what to do in a certain situation. And it is a type of knowledge. It's, it's, it's something that is often difficult to articulate according to rules or maxims, but, but it is maybe the most valuable kind of knowledge that there is.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Beethoven knew what note to put next. He couldn't explain it, but he's really good at it.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  Let's close with a personal reflection. This is a brutally honest book. There's some very hard things in it to read, and I assume that they weren't easy to write. Why did you do that?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Why did I choose?

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Why did you choose yourself? Why did you expose yourself the way you do in this book?

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  Your challenges with addiction, if I were a really bad psychologist, I would say you put them down on the page so that you would be able to be held responsible for them. I don't think that's what you did, but maybe that was part of it. Can you talk about that? And if you don't want to, you don't have to.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm interested in this question. I mean, because to some extent, it's a mystery to me, too. Like, why am I led to write anything? It felt, I mean, I think with anything that I write, I wrote it because it felt like it was the only thing that I could write. I mean, that I felt was urgent to write. And I guess with this particular book, I did not plan on it being so personal when I first started off. I really conceived of it as more of a biblical memoir. I thought I would be talking about Vae's ideas and maybe have an anecdote here and there from my life. And as I was writing more and trying to understand, you know, this one passage about will and attention, I realized that these ideas are

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  so elusive and abstract that they really didn't make any sense unless I put them in conversation with my own life. And the thing that I was thinking about during this period was obviously addiction and religion and these things that I've just struggled with throughout my life. And, you know, it is always a danger to put yourself into such a center point of a narrative, because once you start telling your story, people want to know more. And so the personal stuff became bigger and bigger. But I also think, I mean, if I could speculate now after the fact about why I felt compelled to write about this, is that writing is really the only way I know how to pay attention. And this

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  book, which took about two and a half years to write, was just a way to lock me in to looking at these problems, looking at these thinkers, and then looking at my own life to see how those ideas were playing out and how my misconceptions about will and attention had led me astray. And, you know, I think anytime you start writing a book, you think you're going to get the answer at the end of it. You almost need that delusion to think, I'm going to solve this. And of course, you never solve it. If anything, I think the best thing you can do is just articulate the problem to the best of your ability and to maybe create something beautiful out of that struggle that puts the questions to rest or transcends them.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Actually, I want to ask you one other thing. I'm sorry. I thought that was going to be the last question. You mentioned in passing a few times the problem of theodicy, which is why there's suffering in the world, why good people suffer in particular. And you have a beautiful, we haven't devoted enough time to your lyricism as a writer, so I'll just encourage listeners to go read the book, because there's some really beautiful writing in here. And there's a long passage where you talk about going swimming with your husband, and you're watching these young men, and they're mostly men, but they're

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  all young, jumping off of a ridiculously steep cliff down toward rocks below and just sometimes barely avoiding them. And that during this time, no one was hurt. And you write, "It was at this point that I realized the problem was not about cliff diving, but about gravity itself. Why didn't each of those divers fall immediately to their death? Which is to say, why were all of us fragile, earthbound creatures not always constantly falling to our deaths? Why, in this universe ruled by force and blind chance, was everything not crashing relentlessly into everything else? How is it possible that healthy babies

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  were ever born? That car trips were completed without accidents? That flights departed and landed every day without a crash? It was as though the theodices that had preoccupied me for years suddenly inverted themselves. The riddle was not the problem of evil, it was the problem of good." Close quote. And I think for those of us who choose some kind of religious path, we have to deal with this, especially in the modern world. We think about it a lot. I think any thoughtful person who chooses a religious path has to think about evil. And I always find comfort in the idea that there's also good, an immense amount of good. There's an immense amount of evil is the problem. But there's also an immense amount of good. And Brian Doyle, who you mentioned, I think, once, writes

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  about this very beautifully. He's a person of faith who has great suffering and challenges at various times in life, as all human beings do. So I thought that was a really interesting and nice thought. Can I say something about it?

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think the moment that I'm describing, too, is sort of an example of what we were talking about earlier, where it's like, you know, you're struggling with some problem for a really, really long time, can't solve it. And then you sort of are one day just sitting and looking, and this insight comes. And, you know, I'm trying to articulate in a sort of logical, rational manner, what the thought that took hold of me, which was really just a deep, you know, feeling or intuition, or maybe a sense of wonder at, yeah, why is, I mean, it goes back to this really fundamental question of like, why is there anything instead of nothing? And why is there beauty? Why is there order?

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Why, if the universe is just sort of blind chance and, you know, a cosmic accident, why do we have all of this? And I've just never been able to fully buy into atheism because of that question, I guess, even though I know sort of the logical response to it. But, yeah, and the thing about that moment is that it's stuck with me since then. Like, I don't really think about the problem of evil anymore. I mean, it is something that I think that we all wrestle with and that is unavoidable in any kind of spiritual pursuit, but it hasn't become an obstacle to faith in the way that it once was for me. And, you know, I think a lot of this, too, was the outcome of the reading that I'd been doing,

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  you know, leading up to that moment. And Simone Vae talks a lot about gravity and grace being these two fundamental laws of the universe. And gravity is just sort of the blind, you know, laws of nature, that, you know, the world is sort of run by these laws. And, you know, there's a lot of chance and accident and sort of, she talks about it as a sense of fate, almost. But then there's also grace, these things, these moments of beauty, wonder, human goodness, the idea that people can, you know, attain these sort of moments of heroic virtue, that just doesn't seem like it applies to those same laws of cause and

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  effect that run the rest of the world. And so, I don't know, I think any spirituality kind of has to hold those things in tension, the gravity, you know, that keeps us sort of, you know, maybe returning to old habits, you know, keeping us in sort of a fallen state. And then these moments of self-transcendence that are really rare and that you can't will, but nevertheless happen.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Megan O'Gieblyn. Megan, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.