An Economist’s Guide To Big Decisions - Russ Roberts

Russell Roberts is an economist, a research fellow at Stanford University, President designate of Shalem College in Jerusalem, an author and a podcaster. Economics promised us a model which works for all of life's decisions. From what to buy for lunch to investing in a company. But when you're faced with decisions like where to live, how many children to have, whether to get married or what sort of person you want to be, it falls short. Thankfully Russ has a new toolkit. Expect to learn why Charles Darwin made a checklist before marriage which said his wife was slightly better than a dog, why the decision about whether to have children is so difficult to predict, whether rationality is totally incompatible with the decisions that define us, why happiness is overrated as an optimising function, whether tradition is any use and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on all VERSO’s products at https://ver.so/modernwisdom (use code: MW15) Extra Stuff: Buy Wild Problems - https://amzn.to/3qWTzRa Follow Russ on Twitter - https://twitter.com/EconTalker Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #lifeadvice #mindset #rationality - 00:00 Intro 00:29 How Economists Make Decisions 05:35 Learning Happiness 17:45 The Story of Darwin’s Marriage 25:56 Anxiety Cost of ‘What Ifs’ 33:55 How to Have a Life Well Lived 48:26 Principles for Big Decisions 59:54 Where to Find Russ - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  These decisions about whether to marry, who to marry, whether to have children, where to live, career, what kind of a friend to be, these are decisions that capture who we are. They're much more than just the sum of everyday pleasure and pain that I accumulate through the course of living. And if I only take that perspective, I'm going to miss out on the overarching things that I think matter: dignity, self-respect, living the way one should live, aspiring, becoming the person you want to become. I think if you only focus on the narrow pleasures and pains, you will miss out on some of these bigger things.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  As an economist, how do they typically assess decision-making in humans? What's the framework that an economist looks at decisions through?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  The framework is one that I've often advocated for in my youth, when I was less wise, I suppose. But it's a pretty standard framework, and it makes a lot of sense. It's that you have a finite amount of money, you have a finite amount of time, and you have infinite wants. You have all the stuff that you enjoy, and you'd like more of everything, but you can't have all you want, can't always get what you want. And that's because you don't have an infinite amount of money. So the goal of life is to get the most out of it. And the way we do that is we balance off the pleasure we get from this good versus the pleasure we get from that good, and we pick how much we want to consume of these goods and services based on our limited resources. And it's a formal maximization problem.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  It's a calculus problem. The goal is to accumulate as much pleasure as possible. And pleasure doesn't just mean days at the beach and gluttonous meals. It includes subtle satisfactions as well in the hands of a skilled economist. But the goal in life is to be happy, where happiness can have some real texture to it if we're thoughtful about it.

• 1:46Chris Williamson?

  You said that that was something you used when you were younger. Why has that framework been eroded over time?

• 1:53Speaker 00

  It has trouble dealing with some of the things that I've come to think are quite important. It struggles, and I should add as a footnote before I start, that there are probably a handful of economists who wouldn't struggle to include these things. I'm talking about the average economist and the average person who's drunk the economist's Kool-Aid and has used these techniques for their own lives. Let's talk about what's missing from that. One of the things that's missing is other people. Now, in my earlier work as a scholarly academic, I tried to build models of charity. And obviously, there are parts of charitable giving where you get pleasure from it, and that

• 2:33Speaker 00

  fits very nicely into the economist's toolkit. It implies things like if you make charity tax deductible, and it wasn't before, people give more because you've lowered the price of giving money to someone else. It's a bit sterile, right? It's a bit sterile, but it can be fitted to the framework. What about my wife? How should I think about my wife's happiness? Is my wife's happiness something that makes me happy if I am kind to her? Is that... do I do that because I enjoy being nice to her, because then she'll be nice to me? Is it all about keeping score, which is sort of the economist's framework? And I'd suggest it's not. A life well-lived,

• 3:16Speaker 00

  a marriage well-executed and lived is not about keeping score. I shouldn't be thinking about what's in it for me all the time. The economist model is what's in it for me? And you can broaden it to say, well, one of the things that's in it for me is what's in it for you makes me happy? But again, I think that's kind of a little bit sterile. It doesn't really capture the full way we think about. Most of us think about being nice to other people. And how about decisions that my wife and I make together? How do I think about my happiness, her happiness, the morality of it? Do we take turns?

• 3:49Speaker 00

  That's not the right way most people live. And most importantly, most of the things that really bring deep and abiding satisfaction as opposed to momentary pleasure. Most of the things that bring us deep and abiding satisfaction don't fit so well into the model. Dignity, sense of self, autonomy, mattering, that people think and respect you. These are things that you can cram them into the economist's toolkit, but not very easily. And one of the reasons is that they overlay the entire experience of life, I argue in my book. They give texture to everyday life. And it's very different from the texture of, well, that was a good ice cream cone. Should I have a second one?

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Well, they're $5.85 apiece. No, I won't. Well, that's a rational economics decision, but the deeper questions of, you know, moral dilemmas, what should I do with my life? Should I get married? Should I have children? These don't fit into the economist's toolkit. It's not all about cost-benefit analysis on a day-to-day basis. And so that's where I've kind of parted company in some sense. I think most economists would recognize, although I don't want to be a creative straw person, that, you know, economists would say, there are some, but economists would say, you should maximize your satisfaction from your marriage, and that means if you can get away without taking out the garbage or doing the dishes, or you can watch the movie you want and for a surgery. There are economists who do that.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Most economists know that economics has some limitations in what it applies to. And so then the question is, what's left? What do we do for rational decisions in these tough areas? So that's kind of the starting point for my book.

• 5:34Chris Williamson?

  Evolutionary psychology would say the reason that you want to be selfless to other people is for ultimately selfish ends. Reciprocal altruism, you would be pushing your own genetic fitness, they will owe you. I learned this amazing insight, which you may be familiar with or may not, about why we feel sympathy for people. So sympathy is investment advice. The reason being that someone that is unbelievably down on their luck will be disprop Portionately appreciative of even the smallest amount of investment that you give to them. The reason why your heartstrings are pulled when you see a homeless guy in the street who has no shoes and two pence to his name. Because you know that two pence to him would be so much, whereas two pence to the millionaire down the road would not. And it is one of the tensions that I think we'll probably talk about is this difference between

• 6:20Chris Williamson?

  knowing yourself, knowing the world, understanding the principles that things are based upon, and then transcending them, like realizing that the principles and the artistry of life kind of have to flow together in a way where if you look at them through too much of a utilitarian rationalistic perspective where you've got an expected value outcome proposition on the other side of it. You end up removing the joy of the decision itself. Because I think integrity and a sense of faith in your own character comes about from making decisions beyond simply a rational framework that you go through.

• 7:00Chris Williamson?

  It's something that's emergent. It applies, it comes out of you because you wanted to do it, because you have imbibed the right principles that turn you into the sort of person you want to be. As opposed to your desires clashing up against some external framework that you always needs to be funneled down.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  I would say a little differently. I would say that happiness is one of those things that's best pursued in a roundabout way. If you're gonna have a vacation and you say, well, I gotta get the most out of my vacation. Or um

• 7:37Speaker 00

  what am I gonna do not to make myself really happy? And of course, some of those things you have to discover and they're not things you're gonna plan. That's the part that you're saying that I agree with very much, this city of emergence. It's it's the irony that some goals are best achieved by not thinking about the goals. And the the other part, though, is that economists, because of their they're not careful because of their their commitment to the model. Model is only an idea for trying to understand the complexity of human life. But if you take it a little too seriously, you can put yourself in the following situation. It's an example. It's not in the book. I think it illustrates it nicely.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  So you invite me over for dinner and I think, you know, that was really nice of Chris to have us. We should we should bring something. Now, you might ask the question of why we would even think of doing that, right? You're having a server dinner. Why would I think of bringing something? I mean, you're giving me a gift. In a way, it negates the gift. But it's just cultural norm. Okay. So, my wife says, "I'll just bring him a bottle of wine." And I think, you know, I think we're having, it's dinner. It'll probably be, red wine will probably be appropriate. So, she suggests a bottle of red wine. And I, being the foolish economist, say, "You know, he might not like wine as much as we do." And instead of bringing him the bottle of wine, I think, I'm sure he's got wine prepared for the dinner.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  He's not counting on us. Let's just bring him a $20 bill. So, that way, he can get the most out of it. Because the $20 bill can buy the $20, let's say it's a $20 bottle of wine. He can buy a $20 bottle of wine if he wants. But if he likes something more than the $20 bill, than the wine, excuse me. If he likes something more than the wine, he could buy that instead. So, to give him the wine is inefficient. We could produce more happiness for the world by giving him the $20 bill. And most wives, unless they've been married to economists for a long time, go, "What the heck are you talking about? Aren't you a human being? There's a norm that you don't bring money to somebody's house." And I'll say, as the stupid economist, "Yeah, but the wine is like money.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Even if I do bring the wine, I'm still paying him back something. So, at least, let's pay him back with something he can, it'll get the most out of." But most people go like, "Well, that's stupid. Why would you do that? It's not gracious." So, you might ask a deeper question. Why isn't it gracious? What's the economist missing there? And one, we could talk about that for the whole rest of the time. But one of the things economists are missing is that there are certain expectations that have been set up for a social experience. You know, it'd be like me saying, "Well, you know, in my experience at dinner parties, they work best when people take turns talking. And nobody really talks more than, say, 53% of the time. So, I'm just gonna let you know that while you're talking at dinner, I'll be keeping a stopwatch to make sure that you don't take more than your fair share.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  And because I'm a good person, I'll be doing that for myself as well." These are bad ideas, but they're the reductio ad absurdum of where you end up if you take too seriously this notion of getting the most out of every opportunity. And the Economist's toolkit is quite useful in many settings. I think if the kind of settings we're talking about, it leads to social faux pas.

• 11:00Chris Williamson?

  And then scaling these problems up to the bigger ones about where to live, about whether or not to marry, how many children to have, how self-centered to be, these are what you've termed as wild problems, which have bigger externalities and last for longer and are more serious, but they kind of run along similar lines that trying to do the expected value calculator for them is going to end up in a challenging place.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  I give a lot of examples of why that's the case, you know. But to take your first point, the subtitle of the book is A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. These decisions about whether to marry, who to marry, whether there are children, where to live, career, what kind of a friend to be, these are decisions that capture who we are. They're much more than just the sum of everyday pleasure and pain that I accumulate through the course of living. And if I only take that perspective, I'm going to miss out on the overarching things I mentioned earlier that I think matter, dignity, self-respect, a feeling of being, living the way one should live, aspiring, becoming the person you want to become. I think if you only focus on the narrow pleasures and pains, the way the Economist's

• 12:10Speaker 00

  toolkit really pushes you, you will miss out on some of these bigger things. But of course, the other point is, is that you can't really do a rational calculation on becoming a parent when you realize that becoming a parent changes what you care about. So who should you take into account, the you before you have kids or the you after you have kids? And so that's, that's another piece of it.

• 12:31Chris Williamson?

  What should people rely on if they're not using more data in that case? What, what else is there?

• 12:40Speaker 00

  You know, the narrow definition I go with these wild problems. So these are problems where it's not just you can't do a cost benefit analysis. You don't have the kind of information you need to make a rational decision. You can't really imagine remotely what it's like to be a parent or a spouse. A little bit with a spouse, but a parent you really can't. What it's like to live in a foreign country. What it's like to live an ethical life. These are things that you learn about as you experience them. You make sacrifices, for example, of day to day pleasure and get something else. So now what? You know, that's, that's great. Okay, so you've ruined my day. You know, I can't make a rational decision. I don't, I can't use an algorithm. I don't have an app on my phone. What do I do?

• 13:25Speaker 00

  And the, you know, I suggest that since these are the decisions that define us, you might want to think about who you want to be. You know, if they define who you are. To answer that question, you have to think about who you want to be. To figure out who you want to be, you have to get some thought to what you care about and what you might care about if you were different. What you might care about if you grew. What you might care about if you reach beyond who you are now to be something maybe better, greater. Could be more ambitious, but it could be more ethical. It could be more meaningful, more purposeful. It could be you accomplish something you would otherwise neglect or miss if you focused on it only on the day to day. And in the book, I, I spent, I think, a whole paragraph,

• 14:08Speaker 00

  only a paragraph, on the different ways that you might explore those questions. Obviously, many, many books of many, many volumes have been written on who you might want to become. The standard routes for getting there, the paragraph version is, well, you could go into therapy because you have trouble actually seeing who you are. You could try religion, which forces you to transcend yourself. You could meditate, which although it seems self-centered, I think often leads us to be able to stand outside ourselves and observe what.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Triggers us, pushes us. And you can read great literature, which I think helps us understand the human heart. So those are the routes to go. But my book's not about that. The question then is, okay, so I have to give some thought to where I want to go. But how do I cope with the fact that I can't use my tools? I can't use my cross benefit analysis. I can't make my pro con list. And so most, the second half of the book is trying to give people various ideas for how to frame these decisions, you know, to recognize that there's no right decision. Many people find that comforting. We're so obsessed, I gotta find not just the right decision, the best decision. I gotta find the best outcome. Gotta maximize, optimize. Where are the life hacks? Give me, give me the 10 best ways to find a spouse, the 10 best ways to decide whether to have a child.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  And they aren't there. So you have to think about what it'd be like to live in a world where you're unmoored from the techniques and tools that you've become accustomed to using. And so some of the book is trying to give you ease and solace over what I think is a reality, that you will make many what are, will be called mistakes if you're not careful, but are actually just part of the natural process of living because you can't see the future. So why would you feel guilty that you couldn't make the best decision when you didn't have any data? I mean, that's not a mistake. That's life.

• 16:02Chris Williamson?

  I fell in love with a concept called Release the Tiller, which is from Jed McCann. And the tiller is the thing that's attached to the rudder on the back of a boat. And his argument is that a lot of the time, while people try to control their life, they grip the tiller harder and harder. Yeah, they grip it with fury. And he says that one of the best ways is to just release the tiller, to just allow yourself to have ease. And I ended up realizing a bunch of situations that people get themselves into, myself first and foremost, one of them being that the more that I try and apply cognitive horsepower to the decisions that I need to make. A lot of the time, the less effective the decisions are, the more painful they are to go through because I put all of the onus somewhere.

• 16:47Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of like the paradox of choice. If only, if only, if only I'd had a better model, more, more time, more whatever to do the thing. As opposed to realising that every single person that's listening to this podcast right now, no matter what the challenges are that they came up against, the neuroses, the overthinking, the complete, the sleepless nights of not being able to believe that they could get through this thing. If they're listening to this podcast right now, by that fact, it means that they've got through whatever the challenges are. You have however many years or decades that you've been alive of proof that every single challenge that you thought would destroy you or take you to the edge of destruction and despair has not managed to do it. Right? You have, you are the survival of all of those challenges.

• 17:32Chris Williamson?

  And yet, because of negativity bias and loss aversion and all of that sort of stuff, we look to the future still with this same degree of fragility. And I think that, I think that the fact that we've got through all of that is super important. You used as an illustrative example, one of my favourite stories from history, which is Darwin's marriage and how he, how he went through that. And I've got a little description that I took out of the first book I ever learned about it in, which was The Moral Animal by Robert Wright from 1993. So in the decade of Darwin's marriage, the 1830s, the number of British couples filing for divorce averaged four per year.

• 18:17Chris Williamson?

  So Darwin-

• 18:19Speaker 00

  That's not in thousands, that's just four.

• 18:21Chris Williamson?

  Four. Four. I mean, the population will be a bit lower, but it's not, it's, the marriage is significantly lower than the population is. So Darwin, the ever the rationalist and the self-assessor, he was a man that seemed to be quite troubled with his own motivations. I think his degree of analysis and attention and assessment of other creatures also got turned inward on himself too. And he journaled, he journaled very frequently. So it meant that he has this journal, which we now have access to. And he is trying to make this decision about whether to marry or not. The document has two columns, one labelled marry, one labelled not marry. And above them circled are the words, this is the question. On the pro-marriage side of the equation were children, if it please God,

• 19:03Chris Williamson?

  constant companion and friend in old age, who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved and played with. After reflection of an unknown length, he modified the foregoing sentence with, better than a dog anyhow. He continued, home and someone to take care of the house, charms of music and female chit-chat. These things, good for one's health, but terrible loss of time. Without warning, Darwin had, from the pro-marriage column, swerved uncontrollably into major anti-marriage factors, so major that he underlined it. This issue, the infringement of marriage on his time, especially his work time, was addressed at greater length in the appropriate not-marry column. Not marrying, he wrote, would preserve freedom to go where one likes,

• 19:47Chris Williamson?

  choice of society and little of it, conversation of clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives and to bent in every trifle, to have the expense and anxiety of children, perhaps quarrelling, loss of time, cannot read in the evening, fatness and idleness, anxiety and responsibility, less money for books and, if many children, forced to gain one's bread. What an unbelievable example of somebody trying to use those frameworks in order to come up with a big life decision.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, what I suggest. First point, of course, as I argue, is that if you look at those two columns, it's pretty clear what the right choice is. Not enough time to read, do your work, and missing the clever conversation in clubs with men. And what do you get in return? Female chit-chat and something that's better than a dog anyhow. It's thin soup. It's pretty clear that the right choice for Darwin is not to marry. And underlying, of course, all that loss of time, I think, is his worry that he will not achieve his scientific legacy. Kafka, by the way, as I recount in the book, makes a similar list, and he decides not to marry, which is pretty rational based on his list.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  But Darwin, despite his list, marries. And at the end of having made those two columns, he then writes this stream of consciousness paragraph, which is basically, "Oh, my God, I'll be alone in my old age, coming back to a digi apartment. Marry, marry, marry." And he marries. And he marries, I think about six months later, marries his cousin. And he, I don't think she was planned as the person in the back of his mind. I think he just went out and found her. Footnote, fascinating. She would read to him every night, and he actually liked it. So even though he wasn't doing his own reading at night, he did get, he did come to like the alternative that he was able to have through marriage. But the question is, what was he thinking there?

• 21:49Speaker 00

  I mean, in the calm, sober light of day, he totes up the costs and the benefits, and it's pretty clear, marriage is a loser. But he marries anyway. And I think, you know, there's a lot of things you could say about that decision. You know, you could argue social norms kind of pushed him in that direction, I'm sure they did. But I like to think, and it's what I expanded on the book, I like to think that he understood there was more at stake than the day-to-day pleasures and pains of married life. There was meaning, and there was satisfactions he could only imagine, and he really couldn't imagine because he had no access to them. He surely knew no one articulate about marriage who could explain it to him. He might have read a great novel, he could have read Jane Austen, and maybe if he did,

• 22:34Speaker 00

  I don't know if he read Austen, but I think she'd already written Sensibility, say, or other books by that time. But he didn't really have, who's going to explain it? And think about, for those who are out there who are married, how do you explain to someone what's good and bad about marriage? The bad's pretty clear. Most people, I think, could list what's bad about marriage, like Darwin was worried about the downside. He had really no access to the upside. The same would be to a children. From the outside, children looks like a pretty...

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Bad decision. I mean, really? All the expense and the time and the nuisance and they get sick and they're worried about this, they would die and they did. It's hard. And yet, most people have children. Is that irrational? Or is there something else going on there? And I think the, certainly the, until you've had children, your access to the inner life of parenthood is limited. It's not for everybody. It's not like it's a day at the park. It's not. But it adds a texture to your life that is unattainable and other, very difficult to attain, I'd say in other ways. It adds a meaningfulness and a purpose of this to life. And I think Darwin probably understood that somewhere, but they didn't write it down. Maybe not. I don't know.

• 23:48Chris Williamson?

  How is that similar to the choice about whether or not to become a vampire?

• 23:52Speaker 00

  So, the vampire idea comes from the philosopher L.A. Paul of Yale University in her book Transformative Experiences that I riff on in my book. You know, a vampire, if you talk to vampires, they're really happy. They like flitting about at night and drinking blood and sleeping in a coffin. And us mere mortals, we look at that and go like, that sounds kind of creepy. I don't think I'd like that. And yet, everyone, almost everyone, maybe, maybe all of them, think it's a great way to live and they look back on their feeble and thin lives as humans with disgust and disdain. So now, what do you do? You take the leap? If you do, there's no going back, right? And some decisions in life are literally like that. There's no going back.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  It's very hard to go back from being a parent. It's very hard to, it's costly to go back from being married. But you can go back. You can get divorced. If you move to a place you turn out you don't like, you can go back. But Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again. He was, I think, on to something, right? It's easy to say you can go back, but it's actually quite emotionally complicated. Many decisions in life, and we're talking about A handful of decisions, marriage, children, career, what kind of friend to be is a little bit different, but many of these decisions, they have a irreversibility about them. They're a bit of a one-way leap. It's harder to leap back. You can sometimes, and you can do it sometimes at a cost. And I argue later that if the cost is relatively small, you should

• 25:19Speaker 00

  do more leaping. You can go back. It's okay. Nothing to be ashamed of. I think a lot of times there's a more, this worry that, oh, I look foolish. I had to change my mind. Why is that? Is that embarrassing? It's not. It's okay. It's like saying, I bought a bad, I bought the wrong stereo in the old days. I bought a bad car, or I picked a bad college, or whatever it is. And it's okay to transfer. It's okay. Right? Nothing shameful there. But a lot of times I think we're emotionally very, it's very awkward because you don't want to reveal to other people that quote, we made a mistake. And, you know, I suggest in the book, it's okay. It's not a mistake, really.

• 25:56Chris Williamson?

  There's a topic that I have fallen in love with called anxiety cost. So you'll be familiar with opportunity cost, right? Which is by doing a thing, you can't do another thing. Anxiety cost is the mental effort that is taken up considering the thing that you are yet to do, which could have been gotten rid of by simply doing the thing. So every morning when you wake up, your daily routine starts and you have to meditate and walk the dog and do whatever else it is that you do. And the longer that you wait during the day to do that, the more time you spend thinking about having to do it, whereas had you have done it earlier, you reduce what I've termed anxiety cost.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 26:29Chris Williamson?

  Bro-science economist over here.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  I love that.

• 26:32Chris Williamson?

  What I realized with regards to the anxiety cost is that closing the loop, right? Getting rid of that Zeigarnik effect wherever you can is a good opportunity. On average, it seems like people that make decisions end up being happier. People enjoy just making decisions and having change. So if you are faced with two relatively similar options, especially one which is reversible and moving, this is one that I've been playing with for a long time because I recently moved to America and I got this visa and it was a big thing. And I'm in a country on my own doing this podcast thing and God knows how that's going to go. And yet, I ended up going and doing it, and I adored it. I adored the decision. I absolutely loved it. I know that you recently made the jump to go to Israel, I think.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 27:18Chris Williamson?

  And everything is, everything's exciting and new. And if I want to move back, and even if I messed up, even if I messed up and I came back with egg on my face, I genuinely think, getting back into The Economist's thought process, that the discomfort of having to admit publicly that I made a go of this and it didn't work out, would be less painful than living with the anxiety cost of the what if, had I not done it.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Well, I don't totally agree with that. I like the anxiety cost idea. I think I would have been totally happy if I'd not moved to Israel, doing whatever, what I was doing before, which was very pleasant. It's true, I would have had that what if, but I would have forgotten about it. I would have pushed it down and tried not to dwell on it, because it's, it's in the past. You also move to a country where they speak more or less the same language. Israel's a lot harder. They speak Hebrew here. There are a number of people who speak English, but cultural transition, I think, between the United States and Israel, and England and the United States is, is trickier. I took what you were saying differently,

• 28:27Speaker 00

  and tell me if I got this wrong. I like this anxiety cost idea because it says, you need surgery, and you can have it now, or you can have it in six weeks. What do you want? A lot of people would say, I don't want it now. I'll do it in six weeks. And then you have six weeks of torment. Pull the Band-Aid off. Do it now. Get it done. Now, it's true, you could die. That'd be a negative. And then you could have had the six weeks of life in between before the surgery. So that it's a little bit more complicated. But the idea that procrastination is a, a malaise, a, an unhealthy thing, and we justify it

• 29:11Speaker 00

  by saying, I'll just get more information, or maybe I'll recover before the surgery. I won't need it at all. Right? We have all these stories we might tell ourselves to avoid short-term pain. I have a different trick. See what you think of this one. I believe, armchair psychologist, that...

• 29:33Speaker 00

  Pleasure remains much longer in our memories than pain. So if you go on a great vacation, you're going to savor it. And you'll be able to enjoy it for years because you'll be able to look back on it and say, remember that? That was so much fun and we did this and you have the photographs. Whereas the root canal, it's over. I don't think about it. You say, how bad was that root canal? Oh, my gosh, it was horrible. I had a bad one. I've had good ones since, by the way, which I dreaded, but they turned out to be fine. I was wrong to dread them, but I shouldn't have dreaded them for the reason I'm saying now, which is like, really, do you look back on it and say, oh, it was horrible? No, you don't. You didn't even think about it. And so, get through it. Do it now.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Do the painful thing now and enjoy more the pleasurable thing. Because the algorithm, you know, I'll get more information about whether I really need the operation. That's a bad trick. That's a, that's a false trick. It's not good for you. It's your brain playing a bad, a bad life hack.

• 30:31Chris Williamson?

  The opposite of the anxiety cost, which you can leverage to have more enjoyment in life is the anticipation effect. So you, Tim Ferriss does this, and I love doing this as well. Have holidays booked two years, three years in advance, right? Because a big chunk of the enjoyment of the holiday before you get the sand between your toes and you got the cocktail that was blended, not, not on the rocks and it's a bit hotter than you expected, is the anticipation of it. So you can reverse the anxiety cost with the anticipation effect. And what you just said there, I think, is an example of fading affect bias. The goodness and badness of memories fade over time, but the badness fades faster. Some bad memories even become good memories while good memories rarely become bad ones. It makes sense that both joy and pain fade with time.

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  Stuff just feels less intense when it's farther away. But why does pain fade faster? It's because when bad stuff happens to us, our psychological immune systems turn on. We start to rationalize. Why would I want to be with someone who doesn't want to be with me? We downplay. Breakups happen all the time in high school. It's no big deal. We distance. I never liked her that much anyway. And we distract. I'm going to go and play video games. These mental processes function like emotional antibodies, taking the sting out of bad memories. We don't use them on good memories. So good memories keep their luster longer. Everything is temporary, bad stuff especially. Tragedy plus time equals comedy is the closest thing psychology has to a chemical equation.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Who wrote that?

• 31:56Chris Williamson?

  Adam Mastriani.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  In?

• 31:59Chris Williamson?

  Substack.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  It's very nice.

• 32:01Chris Williamson?

  I'll send you the article.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  It's very nice. And it's consistent with what Adam Smith says in his theory of moral sentiments. He says, when you have a really horrible trip, and think about a horrible trip, you know, for us, a horrible trip is the plane sat on the tarmac for four hours. They didn't let us get off and then we didn't end up taking on. We had to come back. They lost our bags, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 32:22Chris Williamson?

  Adam Smith got dysentery.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know what he got. Or his horse, the horse, you know, stepped on his foot. I don't know what it was, 1759. But, and dysentery is, that's bad. But Smith says, when you have a bad trip, when people are bad to you and things go wrong and are unexpected, he said, there's a certain type of person who just, who comes and whines about it. They come to other friends, oh, this was so horrible. You can't believe what happened to me. It was so unfair. Why me? You know, the plane was et cetera, et cetera. And what Smith says is, no one sympathizes with you, actually. One reason being, of course, is because it's a first world problem. Really, nothing horrible happens to you in that's in those stories. It's just your expectations get frustrated.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  And what Smith says, which is very consistent with Adam Astriani, Smith says, you're better off making a joke out of it. And, you know, some of my brother's best comedy routines, he has many, but some of the best ones are about the trips that go wrong. And it's great advice, you know? I got bit by a cat about a week and a half ago, a street cat here in Jerusalem.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a pretty good stand up routine. At the time, didn't feel like one. You know, I'm watching blood run down my hand. I'm worried about rabies. I'm thinking I'm going to die. By the way, I think I'm outside the window. I think I'm good. I'm going to be okay. But for a bit there, I was kind of anxious, but I didn't tell people about it. You can't believe what happened to me. I can't believe there are all these street cats here. Instead, I tried to make it humorous. And I think that's great advice for life.

• 33:55Chris Williamson?

  What about John Stuart Mill? What did you learn about a life well lived from him?

• 34:00Speaker 00

  So, um, this comes from Dan Gilbert, the great Harvard psychologist. He and I don't agree about this, but I love the examples I use in the book. So Mill said, it's better to be a philosopher unsatisfied than a pig satisfied.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  And that's a deep question. Is that true? Is that true statement?

• 34:24Chris Williamson?

  Is ignorance bliss?

• 34:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Is the unexamined life really not worth living? As a colleague of mine here at Shalem said once to me, I don't know. I've known a lot of people with an unexamined life. They seem pretty happy.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  I could argue the opposite, you know? Philosophers are kind of morbid and depressed and so on. And Dan Gilbert's insight, which I don't agree with, but it's an interesting claim, is that Mill was wrong, he says. The only thing that matters is how much pleasure you have in life. And if you swim in a pool of placid water for 23 hours a day, and for one hour a day, you step out of the pool and go like, that's my whole life. All I'm doing is swimming. I should be ashamed of myself. It's okay. For an hour, you're unhappy, but for 23 hours, you're happy. And the 23 hours that you're happy, you're not thinking about the philosopher saying, that's it. That's all there is to life. And for the one hour you're the philosopher, you're neglecting the pleasure you get from swimming.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  So all you've got is how many hours there are. And if there's more hours of swimming than guilt, swim. I think that's wrong. I don't agree. I think when you're in the pool, after a while, some of the thrill is gone because you think, this is my whole life is swimming, is just enjoying myself merely. And so I think there's a lot more to say about it, say in the book. But it's a very interesting way to think about framing, how we think about where we want ourselves to be. Just want to have fun. Can't really say anything wrong with that.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  You know, is it really true that a more meaningful life is a better life? I don't know.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  People seem to think so. A lot of smart people seem to argue so.

• 36:01Chris Williamson?

  A lot of signaling going on there.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it could be. Yeah, it's true. Hard to know, but it's worth thinking about.

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  I first heard this as positive as a

• 36:13Chris Williamson?

  Debate between the two great Dan's of psychology, Kahneman and Gilbert, because they stand on opposite sides of the fence with regards to this. I've come to believe that this is temperament dependent. I have some friends who live in the now, who are much more hedonic than I am, who are much less introspective. They ruminate less and they would be, I don't know whether they would be completely, but they would be more likely to be the person that's happy having the cocktail on the Lilo in the pool. Right. For me, because of the amount of time that I tend to spend reflecting, introspecting, ruminating, I know that to me, a life well-lived is one which in retrospect, I'm glad that I lived. I very much am assessing, reassessing the things that I did.

• 36:56Chris Williamson?

  And then my current degree of self-worth is based off the back of that reflection. Whereas somebody else very much may be able to, and this is the question, right? Is ignorance bliss? Now, you also get into something similar. I'm very interested, I'm going to see Jordan Peterson tonight in Manchester. He's a good friend. The first time I ever saw him was five years ago in Manchester at the same venue. And someone asked him a question that he used to take questions from Twitter. He does a Q and A at the end, he still may do. And someone asked him basically, the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is ignorance bliss? I wish that I could regress back from this. And Jordan's answer basically was, once you have opened that box, once you have seen what is inside, you've peered into the red pill, you've begun to examine the life.

• 37:41Chris Williamson?

  There is no going back. And his argument was that the only way out is through. He used this analogy of taking more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that allows you to girdle the world around you. I mean, it's in typically apocalyptic, Jordan Peterson patriarchal finger wagging tone. But I read, and I've kept that with you, that's a five-year-old, two-minute monologue that I've kept with me because it's a question I ask myself a lot about, you know, this sort of bloody hell, would life not be simpler if it was just simpler? And then on the reverse of that, you think, well, if you can learn to love the process of analysis, there is such deep pleasure that can be got from working out how things link together and knowing that there is a bit of a heavy weight.

• 38:25Chris Williamson?

  To bear here, like I had to do a good bit of a lift to get myself around my own encumbered nature. And yet, on the other side of it, it's so it's really, really satisfying. And I thought that that linked in a little bit with Adam Adam Smith's example.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Well, when you're talking about your friends who are a little more hedonistic than you are, I was thinking, oh, yeah, they're each one of them is as happy as a clam, an expression that we use. It's a very strange expression when you think about it. Can't imagine a clam is that happy. But I think what it means is, it's easy to please a clam, just pleasant in water, you're good. And I don't know whether it's because I'm a religious person, or my cultural upbringing, but I kind of aspire to more than a clam. I think many do. Nothing wrong with, you know, not not judging. Yeah, clam life is great for clams. And as you say,

• 39:23Speaker 00

  I think it is a temperament, it's partly a temperament issue. Your example of doing the hard work, I think, I think most people who do hard work and find a reward at the end, find that meaningful. I think it depends what the reward is. Sometimes it's self actualization. Sometimes it's the sense of command. Sometimes it's helping others by something you've created with a group of people through a set of sacrifices and hard work. But, you know, when I list the things that are deeply meaningful to me, most of them aren't the clam area. You know,

• 40:04Speaker 00

  I've had a lot of fun in my life. I don't look, I'm not a, you know, H. L. Mencken's not an exact quote, but the gist of it is Mencken said that, you know, puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere is having a good time. I love a good time. All kinds of good times. There's many different ones, some with a group of people, some with a close friend, some with your family. They're all good. They're great. They're part of the important texture of day to day life, and they're not to be looked down on or sneered at. And many of them are transcendent through the sublimity of them. But at the same time, there are many other things that are part of life that that extend past just the moment.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  You alluded to them earlier a minute ago. And, you know, as I write in the book that

• 40:55Speaker 00

  As you get older, bittersweet chocolate is better than sweet chocolate. You know, when you're a child, sweet is all you want. And when you're an adult, things that are bittersweet, that are a little more painful, that come with sacrifice, they're the things that I think we value most deeply often.

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  There's a very interesting point to be raised here around age, I think, and wisdom. And there is an element of this that Confucius talks about. So he says, "In the early stages of training, an aspiring Confucian gentleman needs to memorize entire shelves of archaic texts, learn the precise angle at which to bow, and learn the lengths of the steps with which he is to enter a room. His sitting mat must always be perfectly straight. All of this rigor and restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated, but nonetheless genuine form of spontaneity. Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort."

• 41:52Chris Williamson?

  One of the problems that we encounter is that when most people begin any sort of pursuit that are reflective, and probably the sort of people that are listening to this podcast, they will rely on cognitive horsepower to get them through these challenges. They will have frameworks, they will have principles, and so on and so forth, that they apply to these situations. Now, over time, what you realize is that your subconscious embodied experience, whatever it is that you want to call it, is able to aggregate all of your experiences in a much more effective way than rationally trying to go. So what got you here won't get you there. But because we use memetic evolution to work out, well, this in the past worked, therefore I should continue to do it, it's very difficult to let go of that.

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  And the ruling that I'm thinking about here is that when you are younger, relying on frameworks seems like a smarter idea because you don't have as much experience, right? What are you drawing on? And also, another element to consider here is, I always thought, when I was younger, and I still do now, my ability to do sort of hyperbolic discounting, or to basically just have such a small sphere of understanding around, the tactics I'm using now are going to be the ones that I'll use forever. They're not. You periodize your life. You go through a period. Everyone that I know went through a period of being obsessed about productivity and, and having the note-taking external brain app and they were pomodoroing 25 minutes on and five minutes off.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Getting things done.

• 43:16Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah, they were David Allen-ing their way through the world and then they transcend that after a while. But I remember when I was doing that, that this is going to be my pursuit for the rest of time. I'm going to be completely just dedicated to productivity. And then now I just have like a minimum viable system. I'm like, look, could it be better? Yeah. But is it enough? Yeah. And now I move on to the next thing and you aggregate through all of these different bits. My point being, in the beginning, relying on principles, you know, the stuff that you guys talk about on your show and learning the more rational utilitarian foundations. This is how things get underpinned. And then allowing yourself to ameliorate that. How does it just get mixed in with the soup of everything else that I

• 43:58Chris Williamson?

  do? And the good shit sticks. The stuff that I like will stick about and the stuff that I don't use will just fade away. And that's fine. And I think it also gets on to what you said earlier on about relieving some of the pressure. It's like, look, you're going to let some stuff go. Maybe you're not going to be able to recall all of the different elements of David Allen's GTD method as effectively as you could 20 years ago. But it doesn't matter because you are now on to bigger and better things. And I think that that balance between young, procedural, old, spontaneous, wisdom, embodied, whatever you want to call it. I think that that's a dynamic that increasingly I think people should be aware of.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  It's a great insight. I think when I, when I say to people, don't use cost benefit analysis, or at least be aware of its shortcomings, which I talk about at length, people then say, well, what's the alternative? Going with your gut? And I wouldn't suggest going with your gut generally in most situations, although I give some examples in the book of where seemingly rational people looks like they went with their gut. But I suggest they had other things going on there. But I do think when you talk to very successful people, particularly in the financial and business world, you ask them how they make decisions, they will often say, at least I've heard it many, many times, I just use my intuition. It's a form of going with your gut. It's like, you know,

• 45:18Speaker 00

  like, think about it and I see the path. And on the surface, that sounds like just going with your gut. It's just a wild guess. I try something. I just see what's, what I feel like. But it's really more than, it's a lot more than that. It's what you were talking about. You said it very well, that as you get older, you accumulate evidence that your self processes in ways you don't see rationally. And you gotta trust some of that. It's not your gut. It's the accumulated experience of, of living. And, you know, I always wonder, you know, these lists of what I want my 20 year, what would I want my 20 year old self to know? And I'm not sure my 20 year old self was,

• 46:00Speaker 00

  well, I know my 20 year old self was not a good listener. So I don't think my 20 year old self would have heard that advice much. And I don't know if young people in general can hear wisdom from older people, like you just passed on. Some can. It's a temperament issue. I think people bury in how their ability to, to absorb lessons. But what you're really saying is that when you're younger, you're going to need to realize you're going to make decisions differently when you get older. And there's nothing wrong with that because you'll have different powers. It's pretty cool.

• 46:34Chris Williamson?

  It's a very big problem that we have, that a lot of the people who, especially now in the world of podcasting and YouTube, the people that have a lot of status and or reach online are people who have been through a lot of situations that young people haven't. And young people are trying to model young behavior on old people's advice.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 46:54Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't work. Doesn't work. You can take a photo of the top of the mountain and say to people, look, here's what it looks like at the top. By the way, there's this hole on the right hand side. You need to avoid that. And the ladder's a little bit rickety. So the fourth rung up, you should avoid that one. And da, da, da, da, da. And people go, yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds great. And yet

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Taking notes the whole while.

• 47:13Chris Williamson?

  They still decide to have to go up the mountain themselves in order to be able to see what's at the top of it. And this is Part of, I have an insight, maybe that a good amount, an embarrassingly large amount of the wisdom that we think is self-generated through our introspection and our self-work comes along for the ride as a by-product of just getting older. And that's, as someone that loves an agentic, like sovereign experience, terrifies me. Because I think, oh God, how much of the time that I'm spending. Now, that being said, I take pleasure from the introspection and the work in any case. So it's kind of a moot point, but I think-

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Some of it's a narrative fallacy, right? You're just convincing yourself of something that just looks, it's on the surface. It's, uh, it's like the, uh, you know, my favorite example is the guy playing the video game. And he hasn't put any money in it yet, doesn't realize that it's got an automatic version before you put the money in that you're doing. And in the case of, uh, you know, you're pushing the buttons for Space Invaders, for those old enough to remember what it was. And you think, you see things fire in and you think ships, rocket ships of the enemy going down, you think, I'm doing great, but you haven't even put the money in. It's, it's just an illusion. So some of that going on.

• 48:26Chris Williamson?

  What about having, well, I have to presume that having robust principles and hard rules that scale across multiple situations must be one of the solutions that people can have here, not having to approach each individual challenge with the expected value calculator of this one. Something, a firmer place for people to stand must be a good way to expedite this.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, I have some of those in the book. And there's some nice, there's some thoughtful people on Twitter and in wisdom literature and elsewhere who have some of these rules. You know, one, the one I focus on in a chapter is called Privilege or Principles, that a lot of times, keeping your principles, keeping your values, living by them is going to be costly. And you're not going to get much pleasure from the idea that you stuck to your principles. You're just going to miss out on something you thought you could have done if you were a little less honest. And I use the example of returning a wallet where no one sees you finding it on the street. You find a wallet in the street. But it'd be great if you could keep it and not feel guilty, but you know, I suggest to it might be a good thing to aspire to be a person who would feel guilty if you don't feel guilty now. And these kind of ideas of, you know, ethical

• 49:34Speaker 00

  principles, mostly, I think they come up a lot at work and in situations where, you know, there's always a financial temptation to do certain things that are, you know, in your heart are wrong. Don't compromise. You know, economics suggests, oh, the bigger the gain, the more likely you are to sell out your principles. And I suggest don't just never sell them. Much better rule. Have a rule. Don't go, well, in this case, it's probably worth it. Now, if your kid's life's at stake, steal the bread. Yes. That's a different kind of principle than besides honesty is to keep your children alive. But in general, those conflicts don't happen. It's usually about your pleasure versus doing the right thing. You should do the right thing. You'll be, you'll lead a better life, but not a better life. You're a fuller human being. But you will have some pain. So might not be the right thing.

• 50:20Chris Williamson?

  You see this online a lot in the online content creation world that there are people who will succumb to audience capture one piece of content at a time.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:31Chris Williamson?

  And the problem is when you sell your integrity, you can't buy it back. It is a one way street.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Good line. Yeah.

• 50:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  So true.

• 50:39Chris Williamson?

  It only goes in one direction. And although you don't have the external accountability of the audience fact checking you about whether you did give that wallet back or not, there is something, you know, whether it's the Damon, whether it's the subconscious, whether it's the whatever, right? There's something that's keeping track. And I remember, so I was a club promoter for a long time. I ran nightclubs in the UK. And I wasn't the most honest person. I wasn't stealing money. I wasn't doing anything like that. But I'd just compromise my own opinion to try and please other people. I wanted to be liked. So I would tell them what I thought they wanted to hear.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  And there was this, there was this ambient sort of trepidation around what, how I would feel. And I think it's because I was always fearful that I would be found out for not being the person that I said I was. So there was ambient anxiety the whole time, just, you know, infusing whatever I did. Yeah. And On the other side of that now, you know, maybe not being the same party guy or whatever that I was that wouldn't appease people in that same sort of way. First off, I found that authenticity is much more seductive and attractive to people than whatever version of persona you think that they want to see, because they can see through it. And secondly, your degree of self-love, self-respect, whatever you want to refer to it as, really should be prioritized above most other things.

• 51:58Chris Williamson?

  There are few things that I think should go above. You said, you know, steal the bread if your child's hungry and dying. Yep, cool. There's not many, not many situations that I think that should go above that.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree with that. I do, I wanted to say, I think redemption is possible. It's hard to get your integrity back, but it is possible. And I do think that a lot of people who are good at deceiving others or have to deal with that temptation of they can be inauthentic and get away with it, which seems like a blessing, but it's probably a curse.

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  It's an extra degree of difficulty on their life. Yeah. And what about, so obviously, one of the issues that we have here is that there are, these large decisions have an anxiety of uncertainty around them. How should people avoid being crushed under the pressure of these big decisions that they need to make?

• 52:51Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's helpful to start off by recognizing that as a human being, you have a strong desire for certainty, that the uncertainty and the anxiety it produces is very normal. And to be able to be aware of that as opposed to just being anxious is a huge step forward. I try to relieve some of the uncertainty by pointing out that it's inevitable. We talked about this earlier. You're making a leap into the dark. The fact that you don't know where you're going to land is nothing to be embarrassed about or ashamed of or, and should think of it as a mistake. I also talk about the virtues of settling, the pressure we put on ourselves to buy the best.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Wicking underwear are the best, fill in the blank, using, oh, they're great. These wire cutter recommendations with my Amazon thing, and I've got this other site that checks on whether Amazon recommendation, you know, the stars are real or whether they're done by a bot or the, you know, um. It's okay. So you don't have to have the best one. It's not, usually isn't the best one. There's a best one for you. That might be a best one for the average person. You're not the average person. Some, it fascinates me that, that we are anxious about those things. And I do think that some self-awareness about that is, goes partway toward reducing the, um, the pain of it.

• 54:12Chris Williamson?

  What did you learn from Bill Belichick? I know that you looked at him.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Bill Belichick's an interesting example. He's widely regarded as one of the greatest football coaches of all time. Uh, what I suggest is he's very aware of his own limitations. Uh, most important thing, one of the most important things, not the, but one of the most important things a coach or general manager does in football is pick players for, from college who are going to play for your team. Uh, Bill has been around for a long time. He's learned that that's really hard to do well. And it's interesting why it's hard to do well. There is hard data on every player. They know how fast they run, how much weight they can lift, um, how many yards they ran for, what competition, the level of competition they played against. They have an immense amount of statistic, statistical information about these players and it's not vaguely enough.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  And one of the reasons it's not enough is that each player then comes into a specific situation and Belichick has, puts a lot of pressure on his players to adapt to his system and to communicate with each other and therefore the, he can't really know how good that person's going to be until they're in the actual crucible

• 55:18Chris Williamson?

  Vampire problem again.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  And exactly. And so he's realized that.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  His success ratio is small, so his best bet is just to have a large denominator. Pick a lot of players and some of them he will discover through the process of testing them in preseason whether they're going to be good players or not. Problem is you only get one player per round, so how can you get more picks? And the answer is, well, you can trade the higher rated picks, the second, first or third round picks for multiple picks in the choices in the sixth and seventh and fourth rounds, and he does that quite often. And I don't know if this is true, by the way. I presume he does it more often than others, and I presume he doesn't. You know, it's just, it's my impression as a very casual fan of the Patriots, his team, that he's often doing that.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  And what he is famous for, though, is finding really good players from later rounds, Tom Brady being the most famous example, and often players that weren't drafted. He has chosen a player who was not drafted, meaning he signed them after the draft was over, the selection process, and they've made the team. He's also famous for cutting people that he thought were really good that weren't. He doesn't go, oh, I'm going to look stupid. I wasted this high ranked pick. He goes, they're not a good player. So he's a fascinating example. By the way, he was major in economics at Wesleyan, and I think he understands trade-offs really, really well, which is one of the things you learn as an economist. And if you're a successful football coach, I think you understand them also.

• 56:52Chris Williamson?

  There's a guy called Eddie Jones. He is England rugby's head coach, and it is the World Cup for rugby 2023 coming up, so there is a good amount of pressure on him. He has coached Australia, Japan, and England, and in between that, he went and he was a PE teacher of 13, 14, 15-year-old boys. So he has literally been from the lowest of the low to the elite in terms of rugby. And I had him on the show and got to have a breakfast with him while he was in Newcastle, which is where I am now. I got a breakfast with him about a year ago. And first off, I noticed that he paid a lot of attention, a bunch of other things. He asked me a ton of questions, and then I wanted to ask him about what was the selection criteria for his players?

• 57:33Chris Williamson?

  Because he travels around the country watching club games, Premier League club games of rugby, and he's maybe got three or four players on the pitch who he's assessing, are these guys going to be right? And I was like, so what are you looking for? And

• 57:48Chris Williamson?

  The answer that he gave was just nothing that I thought. So he said he arrives before, well before the game starts and what he's looking for has almost nothing to do with the ball handling skills, their speed, their strength, their power, any of that. What he looks at is what's their relationship like with the ground staff when they walk out onto the pitch? What's their relationship like with the other players when they're determining what drills to run before the game begins? Once the game begins, if they're winning, how does their body language change? If they're losing, how does their body language change? One of the key things that he looked at was how often are they looking to the coaches for what to do next and how often they're deciding themselves? Said that when he went to Japan, he spoke to the only successful Japanese team, which was the female volleyball

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  team. Japan wasn't having a good period with regards to the Olympics and he went and spoke to the coach who'd been relatively new and he said, what did you do? Some successful criteria here. In volleyball, I didn't know this, in volleyball, the coach is very close to the edge of the court and that means that the players can interact with the coach pretty quickly. I guess similar to football, except for the fact that the pitch is, you know, one tenth of the size or one fiftieth of the size. So he's able to speak to them and the coach immediately cut any player that asked him for advice. Now that seems like a perhaps a bit more of a brutal, hard and fast rule. Yes, but the principle I think came through that Eddie says that the absolute elite of sport, you want players that are self-sufficient, you want players who are not going to have their internal state too

• 59:13Chris Williamson?

  affected by the current position of the game because that means they're going to be down when you're down and up when you're up and there's this flip-flopping around. And he wanted to see how they interacted with the training staff, with the ground staff, with the coaches, with the physios, with the other players. I just thought that that was, again, again, similar to Bill, you know, he's, he's looking for the intangibles because, yeah, what, is there a term for this vampire problem, the unknown unknowns and how you need to Bayesianly update and you can't predict that updating? Is there, is there a term for that?

• 59:43Speaker 00

  I think it's the term is the unknown unknowns and the Bayesian, no, I don't think there's a term.

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you know what I mean? There should be one. The vampire, we can refer to it as the vampire problem for now. But look, Russ Roberts, ladies and gentlemen, Russ, this has been great. I really, really appreciate, I appreciate your artful form of looking at economics through the transcended sage that you've obviously now managed to, to, to get yourself close to. If people want to check out the stuff that you do online, where should they go?

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  I'm on Twitter as @econtalker.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  They can go to econ talk.org to see if I my podcast or any place where podcasts are found and I archive all my work at Russ Roberts dot info.

• 1:00:23Chris Williamson?

  Amazing, Russ, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  A lot of fun, Chris. Talk to you soon. Mr. President, my company for me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 and middle without parent.