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We are born communicating with other people, so you think communication would be easy and
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intuitive for us, right?
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Our first cry on this earth, in fact, is a form of communication, and we go through our
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lives as social animals, learning by interacting with others, and yet, so often, whatever else
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we succeed at, we fail at communicating, and this failure harms every area of our lives,
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from our relationships to our careers to our own intellectual growth.
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I got a sense of the importance of communication in general and conversations in particular
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when I started the seen and the unseen.
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As I learned the craft, one of the rules I drew for myself was that I had to listen more
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than talk, actually pay attention to the people I was speaking with, and keep my own sense
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of ego out of the conversation.
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Good conversation isn't about showing off how much you know, how smart you are, or even
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The interesting thing is that there are so few interview shows around that actually share
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Interview shows, especially on TV, are often full of hosts interrupting their guests all
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the time, which makes for choppy, shallow conversation, and their main purpose often
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isn't to gain insight from the guest, but to catch them in a gotcha moment, so they
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can show off their own superior intellect.
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This is both rude and toxic.
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Every single person on this planet knows something that we don't.
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Every conversation gives us a chance to expand our universe.
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And that is why when we are in a conversation, our focus should not be on how we talk, but
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Welcome to the seen and the unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
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Welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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I've been thinking for months that I should ask Russ Roberts on my show, but I hesitated
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because it felt almost audacious.
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Russ is the ultimate master of what I try to do, have deep conversations with people
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that expand our brains and our sense of the world.
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His podcast, Econ Talk, began in 2006, and he has had more than 700 amazing conversations
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It's a marvelous show that's over the years not only given me great insights on economics
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and politics, but has also shown me the craft of how to have a conversation.
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Besides being the original podcaster, Russ has also been an economics educator.
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I first came across him a decade and a half ago through Cafe Hayek, the brilliant blog
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he co-wrote with Don Boudreau.
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He has written a bunch of brilliant books as well, and has been a guiding light to generations
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of people learning about economics and the world around us.
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So I finally gathered up the courage to invite him on my show and was delighted when he agreed.
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What you're about to hear now is a wide-ranging conversation across subjects.
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The art of conversation, the nature of morality, our changing political discourse, and yes,
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some economics as well.
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I've had trouble thinking of a title for this episode, in fact, because we covered so much
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So this is one of the conversations that I have most enjoyed on the seen and the unseen.
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But before we get started, let's take a quick commercial break.
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And I'm Amit Varma, here to tell you about a new weekly podcast that Vivek and I have
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launched called Econ Central.
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In Econ Central, we will help you make sense of the economic news of the last week.
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And we'll also try to explain complex subjects in a simple language.
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We will also take events outside the world of economics like from politics, sports, literature
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and explain them through the lens of economic thinking.
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Why is the stock market going up when the economy is going down?
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What's the deal with high petrol prices?
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Should we boycott Chinese goods?
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What does free speech have to do with incentives?
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Why are the roving bandits of Uttar Pradesh in competition with the biggest protection
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racket out there, the Indian state?
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All this and more in our new weekly podcast Econ Central.
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Econ Central launched a few weeks ago and is free on all podcast apps.
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You can browse our archives at EconCentral.in.
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Econ Central, you have an incentive to listen.
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Don't forget the URL EconCentral.in.
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Russ, welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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Great to be with you, Amit.
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Russ, it's a great pleasure to have you on the show, because not only are you one of
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the writers I used to read very seriously a decade and a half ago for your insights
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in economics, but you're also one of the early podcasters.
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In fact, so early that at that time, I didn't really take podcasting very seriously.
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But yours, Econ Talk was the one podcast which just captivated me for the incredible range
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of guests and conversations that you've had.
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And you've done more than 700 episodes of that, which is I've just run like this is
#
episode 182, so it sounds a bit daunting, but I want to take you a bit further back
#
and sort of ask you about your intellectual journey from the time you kind of started
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and became a student and got interested in economics, why economics and sort of who shaped
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your views of the world, who were the thinkers who influenced you and so on.
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So we could go as deep as you want.
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You'll steer me maybe and give me some suggestions on where you want to head with that.
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But the simple starting point is that I was good at economics.
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I saw it as a puzzle to be solved, the way that the theory fit together of consumers
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and producers yielding prices and quantities in the marketplace.
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I found that kind of beautiful and satisfying intellectually.
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And then I saw that it was a way to think about how to make the world better, a vision
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that I've now become much more skeptical of.
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But when I was younger, it appealed to me deeply this idea that we can help make people's
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lives better through economic policy.
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We can improve certain policies, get rid of others, add new ones, and in theory, encourage
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opportunities for people to grow financially as well as in other ways.
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I saw it as a way to think about what kind of country and where we want to live in in
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terms of structure, capitalism versus socialism, free markets versus command and control.
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So all of that was very captivating to me.
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And the intellectual influences in those early days, I was much more libertarian, I think,
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I'm still pretty libertarian, but I was more of an ideologue than I am now.
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I was very influenced by Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick.
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Those are the two, I would say, big influences of my youngest.
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Ben Ayn Rand, who I'm not as nearly as fond of now as I was when I was a teenager.
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But those are people that got me interested in this idea of liberty, of freedom, and particularly
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of economic policy that would allow that freedom.
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And that was, you know, I went off to graduate school and found a new set of mentors and
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intellectual mentors, people like Gary Becker, Deirdre McCloskey, George Stigler, Sam Pelsman.
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These are people who affected how I viewed economics, how I viewed politics.
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And then, interestingly for me, maybe of interest to you, I mean, but in 2003, I joined the
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And at that point, I had started getting very interested in the ideas of Hayek, the great
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Austrian economist, Nobel laureate.
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And I spent a lot of the next years thinking about the idea of emergent order, the idea
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of complexity, and how individual choices get magnified and aggregated into outcomes.
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And that was another big influence, you know, people like Don Boudreau there, I learned
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an immense amount from him about economics that I just hadn't thought about enough in
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And I had many, many colleagues there who influenced me.
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But the real change is that in 2006, as you pointed out, back in the Pleistocene era,
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And originally, EconTalk was me talking for an hour with an economist who either I knew
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or was I could talk into coming on the program in the early days.
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As you know, when you're getting started, it's a little challenging.
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And if you build up a guest list, it gets easier.
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But I started to talk to my, you know, former professors and other people who are doing
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And that forced an immense broadening of my horizons.
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First to be aware of the fallibility of my viewpoint, I didn't turn against my viewpoint,
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but I realized that the viewpoint that I had, I realized that a lot of the reasons that
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I thought it was the right way to think about the world weren't really the reasons that
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I adopted that viewpoint.
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I assumed, you know, I just assumed I had all the best studies, all the right studies,
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all the good facts, the other side, they were just wrong.
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And at some point, probably after interviewing Robert Frank, who looks at the world differently
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than I do and other people, I started to realize that, you know, this sounds kind of, this
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is embarrassing, it sounds kind of childish and naive.
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But I started to become aware of my own confirmation bias.
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I was reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb at the time, his book Fooled by Randomness.
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And that set me on a path of a very different intellectual arc of exploring uncertainty,
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overconfidence, humility.
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And similarly, and I'm almost done with this travelogue, and similarly, I started, I had
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a set of conversations with Dan Klein, my colleague at Church Mason, on Adam Smith,
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and his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
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And that was another complication to my worldview, because, you know, Smith is thought of as
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this free market economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations, which of course he is.
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But he also has this other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he's very interested
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in our moral sympathies, and the fact that we sometimes act altruistically, and what's
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the source of happiness.
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And I started to really open up my mind to the richness of philosophy and saw my past
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training in economics is just a little bit sterile, a little bit too narrow.
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So in a way, I haven't changed much at all.
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The things I care about, the principles I stand for, they're pretty much the same.
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I just have a different way of thinking about them, and a willingness to realize that the
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world is not as open and shut as I probably thought when I was 30 years old.
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And so that's really the, that's a quick look at what I've been, how my thinking has
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I'm increasingly interested in philosophy.
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And philosophy is about asking good questions, not about answers.
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Increasingly interested in risk and uncertainty, too.
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I'm always struck by how subtle and challenging it is to think about those topics thoughtfully.
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The people who are very confident in themselves in those areas are dangerous.
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It really is important to know what you don't know.
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So that's what I'm interested in.
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And at the same time, the country I live in has gone off the rails, become unmoored, discourse
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So I've been increasingly interested in trying to understand how that happened.
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It's not only in America, of course, you know, the rise of populism, the really rearrangement
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of what is considered left and right.
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What's considered sort of mainstream liberal conservative differences.
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I'm very interested in how that has come to pass.
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So that's another set of interviews and topics and reading I'm doing to try to, you know,
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get, wrap my head around that.
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There are, you know, a lot of threads I want to pick from, you know, what you just spoke
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about and kind of unpack them.
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But the first one I look at is, you know, I just finished rereading your book, How Adam
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Smith Can Change Your Life, which is, of course, quotes a lot from a theory of moral sentiments.
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And one of the first thing that strikes you there, of course, is that, you know, we can
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post facto we can think of Smith as an economist, but he was also a moral philosopher.
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He was also a political philosopher.
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He was also an economist, of course, I mean, the practically the founder of modern economics.
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And similarly, when I was looking at the sort of people you studied with and worked with,
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like Gary Becker, who strikes me almost as a quintessential 19th century intellectual
#
in the sense that his interests are so wide ranging.
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He has, you know, studied and written on so many different subjects, whereas if you look
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at the modern time, my impression of it is that everyone is expected to be a specialist.
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You don't have an economist talking about moral philosophy or vice versa.
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And how much do you feel that that's a trap for people who are in academics today or maybe
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over the last few decades that you tend to increasingly specialize and how important
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it is to then do that kind of wide ranging thinking and studying which in a sense, you
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know, you were forced to do by the nature of the conversations you had to have an econ
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talk because you're talking to so many disparate people.
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But how important is that and is it a rare thing?
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So that's a really interesting question.
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I've actually started thinking about aspects of that in the last year or so because I think
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a lot about what's happened to my discipline over the last 30, 40 years economics.
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When I was being trained and in the decade or so after I came out into the job market
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and became an academic, the emphasis was on very high powered mathematics, the people
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who were respected and had prestige were the people who could use the most advanced mathematics.
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Today, the people who are most respected in economics are the people who can do the most
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sophisticated statistical techniques to manipulate data and try to understand it.
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And both of those are interesting.
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But what I've come to realize and to think about your question in terms of specialization,
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there's a really funny kind of specialization that I think is the most important one.
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First, let me react to what you said about Gary Becker.
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Gary Becker, as you said, had incredibly wide ranging interests.
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He wrote on the family, he wrote on crime, wrote on discrimination.
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He was the ultimate economic imperialist on politics, of course, also.
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He was trying to use the tools of economics to understand all those things.
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So in one sense, he was incredibly diverse, in another sense, he was incredibly narrow
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because he forced every one of those areas into the economic lens.
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And let's digress for a minute and talk about what that economic lens is.
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That economic lens is the idea that rationality, the right behavior is to maximize something
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subject to the constraints of your situation.
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So the simplest way to think about this in economics is the economist's view of human
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behavior is that we try to get as most sat the maximum satisfaction out of life, given
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that we don't have an infinite amount of money.
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Now that's a really powerful tool, as it turns out, in a way, it's almost a tautology.
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It's almost not so interesting by itself.
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But economists take that tool, and Gary Becker was the master of it, and use it to see what
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insights they can get or what predictions they can get about human behavior.
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So just to take one crazy one that part of the reason Gary Becker got a Nobel Prize is
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that he said, let's treat the decision to have children the way we treat every other
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You know, we have children because we enjoy them.
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And then we invest in them.
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We give them knowledge, time, and then they go out into the world.
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They might in a primitive society be a literal investment.
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They might end up taking care of me or working on my farm or, you know, taking care of me
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In modern times, you know, the investment is more to turn them into a kind of person
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That would be one way to think about child raising.
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And what Becker talks about is the trade off between quantity and quality of children.
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Now this offends people tremendously.
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It offends me a little bit now, but I want to make clear what the nature of the offense
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What he meant by that was if you want to have children of a certain ability and have them
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have a certain set of skills to go through life with, in particular, let's say you want
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them to be college graduates, we can't have eight kids, you can't have 13 kids, they're
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So just financially and time wise, not just money, time wise also.
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So what he was trying to explain by that insight, which is trivial, but deeply true to some
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extent, not the only factor, of course, but what he's trying to explain is that why do
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wealthy people have more nights out at restaurants?
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Why do they have more cars?
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Why do they have more square footage of house?
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Why don't they have more children?
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They like kids, kids are things they like.
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They have lots of money.
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Why don't I have more of them?
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So that's interesting, which is interesting and provocative, is that, well, the more you
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have, the harder it is to have the level of investment you might want in knowledge and
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time to have them turn out a certain way.
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So that's really interesting, okay?
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That's Becker's one insight that you get from using the economic tools.
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But you really wouldn't want to, I think, I don't think you want to assume that people
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sit around and think when they're getting married, honey, let's make sure we take care
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of the quantity quality trade-off when we decide how many kids to have.
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Now Becker was a very wise man.
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He didn't think that's what people literally did, perhaps, that they were calculating machines.
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What he was trying to do is often called the as-if hypothesis, saying, well, people act
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as if they're trying to maximize how much pleasure they get from their children.
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So I think that's a very powerful tool.
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But most economists don't realize, and this is where I want to get back to your question
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as a long rambling answer, but most economists struggle to remember that their models of
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reality aren't the same as reality.
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I don't think, I'm not sure Gary Becker ever made that mistake, but most of us being human,
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more human, we make that mistake all the time.
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And you might argue, well, what's the difference?
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But the difference is, is that it starts to change how you look at human beings and how
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And the example I like to use is the dance floor.
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When you go out on a dance floor with a partner, is your goal, the economist would say, oh,
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your goal is to get as much pleasure as you can from this experience.
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You might want to show off or have people think you're a great dancer.
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And what Adam Smith would actually say is that when you're out on a dance floor, there's
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certain rules of propriety, certain rules of conduct that you should live up to, certain
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So you're not trying to maximize anything.
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What you're trying to do is live by the rules.
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You're trying to be a good person.
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Now, those two worldviews, which are get the most out of every experience versus, well,
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in some settings, you know, I just try to do the right thing.
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Obviously, there's sometimes intention.
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A lot of times doing the right thing is expensive in some fashions.
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So we don't do the right thing.
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So I don't think you want to argue that the economic way of thinking is irrelevant.
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It's just that it's not the only thing.
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And so many times economists, I think, forget that.
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So to come back to your question about specialization, you know, most economists know very little
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about other things outside of mathematical theory and statistics.
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You might think, oh, it's because they're so, they don't have time.
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And it's not the reason.
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The reason is they're not interested, not so interested in art history.
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They're not so interested in poetry.
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It's just not, that's the kind of person who's interested in math and statistics often sometimes
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isn't interested in a wider range of things.
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So I think the biggest challenge that academics face today in the world isn't just that they're
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That's one way to phrase your, the point you raise, you know, that they don't understand
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things outside their narrow silo of how they were trained.
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I think it's more, there's a meta understanding there that that's missing, which is we don't
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understand often as academics, how much our worldview is conditioned on the way we were
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Let me give you an example.
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You're raised in a household that has a respect for religion and you end up adopting, most
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people do their parents' religion if, or they leave their parents' religion, which
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else the other thing that happens.
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But let's say you keep your parents' religion.
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The idea that you spend much or any time thinking about whether it's the right religion is
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It's like, it's discomforting.
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You don't want to think about it and you're happy.
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You got a good thing going.
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You know, that's the way you were raised.
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There's deep primal things that are going on there with family and the transition from
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childhood to adulthood, the existential angst of being a human being that you don't want
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So academics have that same problem.
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They don't even realize it.
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We're trained in a certain, I can't, I don't want to repeat the actual people, but you
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know, friends of mine, colleagues of mine and fellow economists will write me and say,
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you know, or talk to me and say, you know, you sound like you're kind of skeptical about
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And I'm thinking, well, sure, aren't you?
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And they, and I realized, no, they're not.
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They haven't thought about it.
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This isn't like, oh, I'm so much better than them.
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They don't think about it.
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I'm talking about the fact that when you're a fish in water, you just don't realize you're
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I mean, that's just such an obvious challenge of being a fish.
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And if you're a fish, you don't need to think about it.
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You can't live on land.
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It's not like you're missing a big opportunity that all you're thinking about is the water.
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But if you're an academic and all you can see are the studies that confirm your way
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of looking at the world, you're in water and it's costing you because you don't realize
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that the world's more complicated.
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So even super intelligent, high IQ, prestigious, successful academics that I talk to, they
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don't spend any time questioning the tools they've been trained in.
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I mean, it's like saying, I wonder what it would be like to live in a thatched hut.
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It's like most people live in suburban America.
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Don't think about thatched huts that much as a, or I wonder if it's like to live in
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a yurt or, you know, what would it be like to live in a, to ride a bicycle to work every
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Yeah, some people do that and they realize, oh, it's kind of fun.
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But within your academic discipline to turn on it or to be, to imagine that there's a
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richer or more complicated view of the world or that you're leaving out stuff.
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And that's another way to think about it.
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One thing I've been increasingly interested in is this challenge of thinking about data
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and measurability and so much of life is not measurable.
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Just don't even think about those things that aren't measured.
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It's not like, oh, well, we can't measure that, but we'll keep it in mind.
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You know, my line is dignity is not in the data set.
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There's no variable called dignity that goes on a scale of zero to 10.
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You know, it's like if I go to a out of work coal miner in West Virginia and say, on a
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scale of zero to 10, how much self-worth are you feeling today?
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We don't ask those questions.
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If you do, that answers don't mean anything and they vary from day to day.
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It's not just how much we earn.
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It's the work we do and how satisfied we are by it and how proud we are of it.
#
And economists just ignore all this stuff because it can't be measured.
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And we say in the back of our mind, well, of course, we know about that.
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But after a while, we forget about it.
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And that leads to policy mistakes.
#
So that's a really long answer, I apologize.
#
But you know, this question of narrowness, I think is much more than just that we're
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not interdisciplinary, which most of us aren't.
#
In fact, you know, George Stigler, another one of my professors at Chicago said, there's
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only one social science and we are its practitioners, meaning economists.
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And that's the way a lot of economists feel.
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It's like our tools, that's the only way to look at the family.
#
Sociologists don't have anything.
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They just make up stuff.
#
That's sort of the just as another biographical note, Gary Becker was interested in sociology
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and he realized there's nothing here.
#
Now, there's some brilliant sociologists, but the field of sociology doesn't have an
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So I think economics was deeply appealing to him because it gave him a framework for
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organizing his thinking about the family, about what we would normally call sociology
#
And it's a powerful tool, but it's not the whole story.
#
And I think Gary knew that.
#
I think a lot of economists struggled to remember it.
#
And I'm very interested in sort of the question of how we form our belief systems.
#
Like when we are young, we're trying to make sense of the world.
#
And suddenly you come across a framework that explains everything and it feels so powerful.
#
It's almost like your eyes pop out of your head because you see everything clearly for
#
And then that's like a hammer you apply to every single nail.
#
And you've made the analogy for a bunch of people have lost a key and they're all gathered
#
around a lamp post looking for the key, even though the key is somewhere else, but they
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are where the light is.
#
So, you know, and that strikes me as being very accurate.
#
I was sort of saving my question on ideology for later about how one deals with ideologies
#
and thinks about ideologies.
#
But since you've sort of brought that subject up in your book on Adam Smith's, you quoted
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Sam Thompson as saying, quote, the universe is full of dots.
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Connect the right ones and you can draw anything.
#
The important question is not whether the dots you picked are really there, but why
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you chose to ignore all the others.
#
And you've also, you know, you've had Arnold Kling on your show and he wrote this great
#
book called The Three Languages of Politics.
#
Before I ask you to elaborate, I'll quickly sort of summarize that for my listeners, Arnold's
#
argument essentially is that if you look at the three major ideologies in America today,
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it's not a question of somebody being right or wrong.
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It's just that they are starting from different first principles.
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And from that point on, they are completely coherent.
#
Again, I'll, you know, quote from your piece in this, where you write, quote, liberals
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see the world as a battle between victims and oppressors, conservatives see the world
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as a battle between civilization and barbarism, libertarians see the world as a battle between
#
And by liberals here, of course, you mean the American-style liberals, I guess we could
#
also call them progressives, otherwise, you know, you and I would call ourselves liberals,
#
And you wrote a very interesting piece where you sort of pointed out that, well, of course,
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this is true, that we are often talking past each other and not to each other because we
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don't recognize each other's priors and try to understand where the person is coming from.
#
But you also pointed out that these three tribes, as it were, also have their own sort
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of blind spots, which stopped them from, you know, seeing the world, which I found incredibly
#
fascinating because when I read it, my first instinct was, yeah, he's right about the liberals
#
And yeah, he's right about the conservatives, well, huh, he's right about the libertarians.
#
But, you know, then one kind of reads it carefully and sees the points that you're making.
#
Can you elaborate on that a bit?
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What are these blind spots?
#
And also, you know, before you get to that, is that something that you have changed your
#
Like, were you once sort of more dogmatic than you are today?
#
Yeah, that's a good question and hard to, I'm going to get lost answering it, but maybe
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you could steer me back if I get in trouble.
#
So let's start with the three languages.
#
That comes from Arnold Kling, as you point out in his book, The Three Languages of Politics,
#
a fantastic short read that will change the way you look at politics.
#
One of the most influential books on my thinking.
#
You know, those three lenses, those three frameworks.
#
So the, I'm going to call them progressive to keep that confusion from happening.
#
So progressives say the world is full of victims and oppressors.
#
Conservatives say the world is a fight between barbarism and civilization, and libertarians
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say the world's a fight between freedom and coercion.
#
So let's take an example in the current situation in America, police brutality, the death of
#
George Floyd recently, the tragic death of George Floyd.
#
The progressives look at that and say black people are victims and the police are oppressors.
#
The conservatives look at it and say, being a policeman is a very hard job.
#
Police officer is a very hard job.
#
If we don't honor them, we're going to have a breakdown in order.
#
We're going to have looting and rioting and look, look what's happening.
#
The libertarians say the police are doing all the wrong stuff.
#
They're obsessed with the drug war, which causes them to really run amok.
#
Drugs should be a personal choice of an individual, shouldn't be the government's role.
#
Police should stay out of that and most of these problems would go away.
#
Now the irony is I think all three of those things are true.
#
I think all three of those things are true.
#
I think black people are oppressed in America.
#
I think civilization is a threat from barbarism and I think the government ought to get out
#
That's not what's interesting.
#
What's interesting is that it's very hard for each of us to see beyond our own lens.
#
And so all I can see when I put my glasses on, if I'm a conservative is, oh my gosh,
#
this looting is out of control.
#
We might, my house could get attacked.
#
The progressives look at it and saying, do you know what it's like to be black in America?
#
The libertarians look at it and saying, yeah, those police have all this military equipment.
#
So every person is seeing it through their own lens and they're not wrong.
#
What changed for me from Arnold's book and other conversations and thinking about is
#
that you got to realize the other side's got some good points.
#
They're not right, not the whole story, but they're not wrong.
#
So all three of those I think are correct.
#
And now what do you do?
#
And my point in that essay that you're referring to is that I think each of those views while
#
correct has a blind spot.
#
So the case of progressives, they think the victims have no agency.
#
They have no options, no freedom.
#
That's a ridiculous thing to believe, right?
#
So that lens of, of course, blacks are oppressed at times and have a tough time.
#
But to then go so far as to say they have no agency, there's nothing they can do about
#
It's impossible to make any progress as a black person in America.
#
That's not consistent with the data, the facts, the reality that we all understand.
#
And similarly, the conservative is right that we want to make sure that people can go safely
#
about their business and, and, and walk down the street and have good businesses.
#
But they often think that everything's the fault.
#
The police never make a mistake, but of course they do.
#
They do some terrible things.
#
And it's, they're a small portion, perhaps.
#
It should be smaller if we can do it, ideally.
#
So the conservatives, you know, I have a lot of conservative friends that I'm increasingly
#
interested in conservative ideas, you know, they'll say things like, well, there's all
#
this employment opportunity, not right now, of course, because the pandemic, but before
#
the pandemic, they'd say, why are all these people in, in inner cities in America, why
#
Why aren't they working?
#
Why aren't they getting a job?
#
Just look at all the employees.
#
If I were black, I wouldn't be like that.
#
I'm thinking, how could you say that?
#
You have no idea what it's like to be black.
#
And you really think you'd be different?
#
You wouldn't be like them if you didn't have a decent education.
#
If you grew up in a bunch of streets where everything was boarded up, you really think
#
So, so the progressives think that poor people have no agency.
#
They're just victims of rich exploiting companies and, and a racism.
#
The conservative makes the opposite mistake, oh, you can do anything you want.
#
Why aren't you making something of yourself?
#
The answer is because you've got too many handicaps, racism, bad education, a tough
#
home situation, a horrible neighborhood.
#
So the, each side has something to learn from each other.
#
But the, I think the deeper point is that our discourse, which in America and elsewhere
#
now is increasingly tribal, it's increasingly, I'm not just right and you're wrong.
#
It's I'm right and you're a threat.
#
You're a threat to civilization.
#
You're a threat to poor people, black people.
#
Each side sees the other as an existential threat.
#
And I, you know, I learned this from Sebastian Junger, he wrote a beautiful book called Tribe.
#
So, you know, if you think that the other side is, is destroying the country, which
#
is what is the case in America right now, the, the progressives think the conservatives
#
are literally destroying the country and the conservatives literally think that the progressives
#
are destroying the country.
#
You're accusing your opponents of treason.
#
And treason is usually punishable by the death penalty in human history.
#
And you start to think about what these kinds of attitudes are going to justify and we see
#
it right now, we see in America, the media is spiraling out of control, because they
#
feel that the quote other side, doesn't matter which side we're talking about, the other
#
side is an existential threat to the future of the country.
#
It's got to either get fixed or it's going to end up in violence.
#
It's a scary, scary time.
#
So to come back to your original question or observation, a quote from Sam Thompson,
#
one of my listeners or readers, I don't remember whether I got heard from him in an email,
#
that beautiful quote about cherry picking facts.
#
It's very easy to convince yourself that the facts support your view.
#
Can't tell how many people I debate with it.
#
They actually believe that a handful of facts means they've proved their case, forgetting
#
that sometimes the facts are literally not facts, that there are other facts that contradict
#
their case and they don't even imagine it.
#
I mean, it's not like, oh, I have a pretty good case and maybe I need to rethink some
#
It's like, this is open and shut.
#
And so the idea of being open to things, not being open and shut, I think is really important.
#
It's not that good for your podcast audience.
#
I think the angrier you are, and the more confident you are, you then gather around
#
you your choir of voices that will reinforce your attitudes.
#
And I just don't want to be part of that.
#
I think that's a mistake.
#
And I think that's part of the problem.
#
Everybody's in their own silo right now of, of, of reinforcing their own views.
#
And the internet's really good at that.
#
No, I'm just thinking aloud.
#
It strikes me that what we are probably seeing today is an intersection of a particular way
#
in which we are hardwired coming together with the way technology has evolved.
#
And I'm sort of going to, you know, forgive me if I ramble, but I'm going to quote from
#
Adam Smith, a theory of moral sentiments, as I try to sort of elaborate on this, where
#
Smith says, quote, the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of
#
Stop quote, which is in a sense, you know, almost banal, obviously we are all seeking
#
We are hardwired to seek validation.
#
And what's happened in modern times is that earlier, you know, the, when the theory of
#
moral sentiments was written, obviously it was written with a small group of people in
#
mind, which is your family and your friends and the people, you know, personally.
#
And we also evolved at a time where we knew very few people, we didn't have access to
#
millions and billions of people.
#
So our instincts evolve accordingly.
#
So when we seek validation from a small group, you know, there is the sort of the benefit
#
of posturing is a little less because they will be with us long enough to see through
#
And we aren't being able to posture at scale to so many people.
#
And what technology has done is that it becomes really easy to go online, to find an echo
#
chamber of people who happen to believe whatever frame you view the world through or whatever
#
And then the incentives are aligned, not towards having conversations with people who might,
#
you know, behave differently with you, but towards raising your status within this little
#
And increasingly, the way to do that is to get more and more shrill, whether you're attacking
#
the other side or whether you're signaling your own virtue or whether you're attacking
#
people on your own side for not passing, you know, a specific purity test.
#
And therefore, you know, Cass Sunstein used the phrase group polarization for what basically
#
And it's interesting that you kind of started your podcast and your great blog Cafe Hype
#
when you co-wrote that with Don Boudreau, you know, back in the day before things became
#
so bad, like I think this has really happened, maybe post Twitter really taking off post
#
2010 that things have gotten so polarized and ugly.
#
So you know, what was that journey for you like of, you know, first seeing all of this
#
evolve, making sense of it.
#
And then in a sense, you are part of the circus, right?
#
What are your thoughts on all of this?
#
Does it make you despair?
#
Yeah, I want to add one thing to your very nice summary of where we are right now.
#
I think the especially relevant comment given the title of your program, the seen and the
#
So what we see is the Twitter mob, cancel culture, the dissenting anger of people on
#
a particular individual who's violated some norm of civility or not civility, a norm of
#
the right way of thinking.
#
And that we're having a conversation about that right now in America, there was a recent
#
letter signed out of Harper's magazine about criticizing cancel culture, fascinating sociological
#
moment in America because the people who signed that letter were very diverse politically.
#
And that meant that there were some people who signed the letter who you're not supposed
#
And some people rescinded their signature because they said, oh, I didn't realize so
#
I saw that this person signed it and I think she's okay, but what I realized, oh my gosh,
#
So that's on the table right now.
#
That's what's being talked about.
#
But I think the unseen is what's more interesting right now.
#
And it's always more valuable to point out or more fun to point out what's not obvious.
#
We just had a conversation about the three languages of politics.
#
I chose to talk about police brutality as an example.
#
You can take what's amazing about Kling's insights or you can apply it to almost every
#
It breaks down that way.
#
I was a little bit uneasy mentioning George Floyd on this program.
#
It's like in the back of my mind, there's a sort of nagging fear.
#
What if I make a misstep and I say something that's politically incorrect and somebody
#
takes it out of context and puts it on Twitter and accuses me of being a racist?
#
But I think the unseen that's important in this cancel culture moment is the thoughts
#
that we have and the words that we say that we either push back down those thoughts because
#
I'm staying away from that.
#
Or quiet, better not say that because that's a minefield, better to be safe.
#
And what that does is it destroys discourse.
#
It destroys conversation.
#
Kind of like um, I would just to be, this is a crude stereotype, probably shouldn't
#
Stereotypes are trouble.
#
Like you get in trouble for stereotypes, but I'll use the difference between say a stereotypical
#
upper-class British gentleman and somebody from let's call it a Mediterranean culture.
#
It could be Israel or Greece or Italy.
#
So in the British salon, drawing room, certain things aren't talked about.
#
Certain emotions are not expressed.
#
Everything is a bit restrained, could even say it's civilized.
#
In the Mediterranean culture, everything's out on the table.
#
People are yelling at each other, calling each other names sometimes.
#
Now those are two different ways of living.
#
I think the, you know, the, uh, there's some middle path.
#
It's the right path where you have an authentic conversation, but you don't necessarily tell
#
somebody everything you're thinking, right?
#
Civilization I think does require some forms of restraint, but if you go too far in either
#
direction, you're going to destroy the opportunity to learn, you're going to destroy the opportunity
#
So I feel like we're heading, certainly in academic life in America, we're heading toward
#
a world where a bunch of things are not on the table and it can't be talked about.
#
In fact, I just saw somebody tweeted this morning that if there are any differences
#
between groups, that's racism.
#
It's all, it's all because of racism.
#
Can't be anything else.
#
If you see statistical differences by race, all of it's racism.
#
So that's a beautiful example, tragic example of what we're talking about earlier with
#
And somebody, you know, respond to that like, what?
#
I mean, there's no agency, there's no ability, nobody has any responsibility.
#
Everything is a result of other people.
#
I mean, if you think about that, ultimately that's dehumanizing the people you're supposedly
#
caring about, but that's where we're going.
#
If we're not careful, we're going to head to a world where you can't raise those other
#
And once you do that, you stop learning.
#
I like religion, by the way.
#
You probably know I'm a religious person.
#
I think religion's great.
#
I think it helps you organize your life and it's powerful and it gives meaning and I like
#
I don't think it belongs in academic life.
#
It needs to be, that needs, that's supposed to be something different.
#
But as it tends toward religion, I think we're heading toward a world where knowledge is
#
not going to be created.
#
We're just going to have priesthoods.
#
And I also do this weekly Econ podcast called Econ Central.
#
I co-hosted it with a friend and our latest episode we just dropped today, we are recording
#
this on July 16th, is called The Economics of the Chilling Effect, where we speak about
#
exactly what you just spoke about, that the incentives are now aligned for people to shut
#
There's a silent majority that disagrees with the vocal minority.
#
But oh my God, you're not going to speak out because why invite the mob upon yourself,
#
which is incredibly worrying for our discourse.
#
We'll take a quick commercial break now and I'm looking forward to continuing this conversation
#
If you enjoy listening to The Scene and the Unseen, you can play a part in keeping the
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The Scene and the Unseen has been a labor of love for me.
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I've enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe,
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Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Russ Roberts about his intellectual journey, about his podcast Econ Talk and about
#
these strange times that we find ourselves in.
#
You know, one of the themes that has sort of interested me, not just at a level of,
#
you know, what's happening to our political discourse, but also while trying to kind of
#
understand the craft of podcasting and just, you know, introspecting on the ways that it's
#
changed me, the way I sort of relate to the world.
#
And that has to do with the subject of communication, how we talk to each other.
#
Like one of my favorite novelists, George Simonon, had once said, quote, the fact that
#
we are, I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication
#
is completely impossible between two of these people is to me one of the biggest tragic
#
themes in the world, stop quote.
#
And you know, while I was going through a book about Adam Smith, I found it very interesting
#
about how you brought up the theme of communication in a context in which it's not usually brought
#
up, which is from his famous quote from the Wealth of Nations about the butcher and the
#
baker where, you know, he wrote quote, it is not from the benevolence of the butcher,
#
the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own
#
self interest, we address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self love and
#
never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages, stop quote.
#
And you know, then you go on to say as a commentary on this quote, the idea that other people
#
care about themselves is generally a good thing to remember, if you want them to do
#
something for you in return, stop quote.
#
And it's kind of interesting that, you know, when like I teach a writing class also, and
#
one of the sort of themes of communication there is that very often we communicate as
#
if are the only purpose of communication is to express ourselves and you know, to say
#
what we have to say without thinking of the other person and what value our communication
#
or our writing as it were, provides to them.
#
And obviously while doing the podcast, which is a long form interview podcast, and I've
#
only done it for three years, not 14 years like you, one of the sort of areas of communication
#
I realized was that, you know, the biggest trap that you can fall into when you're interviewing
#
someone is to make it about you.
#
Instead, you have to learn to just take a step back and listen and you've described,
#
you know, you wrote a piece where you, you know, took off from Jordan Peterson's 12 rules
#
and you wrote your own 12 rules and the first of them was about how you have to enjoy saying
#
I don't know and, you know, not listen to others merely to, you know, respond to whatever
#
they are saying with what you want to say, but actually step back and try to understand.
#
So, you know, and this is something that kind of has a dual relevance.
#
One is obviously the personal one that when you started podcasting, you know, what was
#
the sort of attention you started paying to this?
#
Do you think that you would at any level intellectually or otherwise be a different person if you've
#
never done the podcast?
#
Did having all of these conversations make a difference?
#
Well, we talked earlier about the intellectual impact on me.
#
I think there is a personal impact that I think you're getting at with this, these insights
#
about conversation and your observations caused me to think about something I don't think
#
I've ever thought about, which is, and it's also prompted by that George Seminon quote.
#
I've never thought about the fact that we don't think about how to be good at conversations.
#
I can't think of any format or any parenting idea that where we teach people or ourselves
#
or accept instruction or practice conversation in our minds, we don't need to because that's
#
what we do all day long.
#
Listening is involuntary, right, in theory, but hearing is not, or the vice versa.
#
You can hear, but you may not be listening.
#
I think it's a better way to say it.
#
So here's something that's the most essential part of being human, one of the most, not
#
the most, the ability to be one of those two, two of those people on the face of the millions
#
and billions who are trying to share ideas.
#
And it's just something that happens, we're so good at it, we don't need to practice it.
#
But what's not obvious is that maybe we could be a lot better.
#
And I think one of the things I've learned from EconTalk, and I think I still have a
#
lot to learn, even though I've done it for 14 years, is how to have a good conversation.
#
And the reason I say that is that I've had a handful of conversations in my life that
#
If we're lucky, it's a big number relatively, but we also know that there's thousands of
#
conversations that never dent our consciousness again.
#
They may be below the surface, of course, but they're literally, you couldn't bring
#
them up consciously, and they had no discernible impact on your thinking or behavior.
#
But then you have the ones that are unforgettable, the ones that are transformative.
#
And you can ask yourself, how do I have more of those?
#
And nobody talks about that.
#
Maybe we ought to write a book, I mean, on how to talk.
#
I'm sure there are such books, but it's interesting to me that they're not like bestsellers that
#
everybody knows about and says, oh, you got to read this, books like, you know, men are
#
from Mars, women are from Venus, a lot of people like to talk about the fact that men
#
and women have different conversational styles.
#
And I think men, if they're sensitive, understand that they probably should talk to women differently
#
than they talk to their male buddies.
#
And women, if they're sensitive, understand that if they want to be effective as a partner,
#
spouse, friend, that they might want to talk differently to men than they talk to their
#
women buddies, friends.
#
But this whole idea of how to talk and how to talk effectively is really does come back
#
to this Adam Smith issue, which is, you know, I think I've written about it in that book,
#
I've written about it in a few other essays.
#
A lot of times, it depends on your personality, of course, but a lot of times people just
#
And the idea that they're in, it comes back to the metaphor I used earlier of the dance.
#
I mean, a conversation is a dance.
#
So if I'm a dancer with a partner and all I'm thinking about are my moves, not much
#
So I think the opportunity to certainly be a better listener, but more than a better
#
listener to be a more engaged conversationalist is an art that we really could get a lot better
#
And I know that my favorite interviews at Econ Talk are the ones where there's magic.
#
That doesn't happen often enough, where, you know, we just had one for me just now, this
#
idea that we don't get trained in conversation.
#
That to me is the high point of this conversation, because I hadn't thought about that.
#
And the only reason I thought about it is you said something that stimulated it in me.
#
And I think when you feel that in a conversation, the novelty either of your insight you didn't
#
have before or an insight of your fellow conversationalist, that's when you really feel that delight
#
that's possible at a good conversation.
#
I think most people think of conversation as people taking turns talking.
#
That's a mediocre conversation.
#
It's better than people talking at the same time or one person doing almost all the talking.
#
And if you're the host, you're letting me do most of the talking.
#
I try to give my guests same respect and floor that you're giving me, which I appreciate.
#
But I think there are a handful of times in my life where I've been able to step back
#
and remember that it isn't all about me.
#
And the more I do that, the better conversation I have, the more alive I feel, the more I
#
So I think there's a lot to be said there, a lot to think about.
#
And I'm just thinking aloud here, but do you think it could then be said that becoming
#
better at conversation, which I think we both define as being more mindful of the other
#
person and not just being engrossed in ourselves, that becoming better at conversation would
#
make us better people and have a moral impact in the sense that I go back to Kant, another
#
philosopher you've referenced in your book on Adam Smith, where Kant's second categorical
#
imperative is all about not treating another person as a means to an end, but as an end
#
So what happens is that very often if you are in conversation, but you're obsessed
#
about what you want to say in your point of view and you're not really listening, you
#
are treating them as a means to an end, as a vessel into which you empty your thoughts
#
But if you can learn that sort of mindfulness and regard for the other person where you're
#
really listening and taking in their views and trying to open your own mind through that,
#
then possibly you're fulfilling that categorical imperative.
#
And I mean, I don't know if I'm taking this thought a bit too far.
#
Oh, no, I think it's a deep truth.
#
I think it's really incredibly important.
#
I want to raise a variation on this issue, which seems to be unrelated, but it's not,
#
You know, I talked to Ryan Holiday about Marina Abramovic, the performance artist, where she
#
did this exhibit performance where she would sit for, I think it was eight hours a day,
#
and strangers would sit three feet across from her and stare and look at her.
#
She would look back at them, no talking.
#
So for eight hours a day or so, she didn't talk at all.
#
And she engaged visually with another human being without words, which should be the most
#
boring thing in the world.
#
And you know, people lined up overnight to be one of the people to be able to, she did
#
this for months, by the way, which is also extraordinary.
#
It's an incredible performance of stamina and devotion.
#
But on the surface, it's just like, what a stupid, this is like a really just a nervous
#
What's the point of looking at somebody for 15 minutes or half an hour, you don't talking.
#
And yet, many of the people who she sat across from would just cry because they were seen,
#
It's not, so I think, you know, it's a very interesting thing in the English language.
#
We talked about hearing versus listening.
#
There's also watching and seeing, or looking and seeing.
#
So I look at you, and that makes you feel good because you're being looked at.
#
But I can look at you in a way that makes you feel seen.
#
And I can look at you in a way that doesn't convey that.
#
And there's a, I'm going to give you a bizarre digression, but it speaks to me.
#
I was watching, this is so tawdry, I mean, I was watching a clip from the Academy Awards
#
a couple years ago when Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga sang the song from A Star is Born
#
called, he's called The Shallow.
#
And in the movie, it's the best, to my mind, it's the best, I didn't like that movie at
#
I thought it was horribly flawed.
#
But the first 45 minutes is unbelievable, and it's great.
#
And the best moment in that movie for me is when Lady Gaga, who's been trying to start
#
her songwriting career, is invited to come on stage, just a little throwaway thing in
#
the middle of a concert and sing the song that I think that she's written.
#
And she's a very good actress, and she conveys unease and nervousness.
#
And over those three minutes, she becomes more confident.
#
And the most, to me, the greatest moment in that is that there's a moment where Bradley
#
Cooper looks over at her and has pure joy that the audience loves her.
#
You know, that's part of the show, part of the idea of the movie.
#
He's not saying anything.
#
He's not saying, oh, you're doing great.
#
But the way he looks at her, and he's a great actor, the way he looks at her tells her it's
#
worth a thousand words.
#
So they recreated that, not recreated, they also sang that song at the Academy Awards.
#
And the most entertaining part of that, to me, is the way they look at each other.
#
They're obviously not, it might not be a real moment of human interaction.
#
But the reason it moves us is because we recognize the emotion and importance and humanity of
#
being seen and being paid attention to.
#
And that connection is so precious.
#
So I think it's a deep part of morality.
#
And I think, you know, to tie it back to what we were talking about before, I think being
#
able to see the challenges of people in difficult situations, whether it's their safety or the
#
way they move through their neighborhoods or their economic challenges or hardship.
#
If you don't notice those things, you're not a full person.
#
It's not enough to notice them because we don't always have a solution or a way to make
#
Obviously, it's tricky.
#
But that's a starting place, right?
#
No, and I'm going to come back to morality.
#
But just to take a small digression, you know, first of all, that's a lovely song.
#
And if you go on YouTube, but you know, I haven't seen the film, but I really got into
#
that song because there are some great cover versions of it on YouTube by, you know, different
#
So it's like, yeah, so you should search for some of those as one by a bunch of school
#
kids, some school choir, which is quite terrific.
#
I'll link it from the show notes, in fact.
#
But what got me thinking was also the moment that you've pointed out that Bradley Cooper
#
looks across at her and he's happy for her success, that she's singing and the crowd
#
is into it and she's happy for her.
#
And in your book, you quoted, you know, Gour Vidal as saying that every time a friend of
#
mine has some kind of success, a part of me dies, right?
#
And it also and I was horrible, horrible, terrible thing to say.
#
You know, a couple of decades ago, a friend of mine said exactly the same thing to me.
#
And it was while reading your book that I realized that that guy was quoting Gour Vidal.
#
It wasn't his own sort of sentiment.
#
But you know, because I am perhaps, you know, using the hammer of the economic way of thinking
#
a little bit too much, the economic concept that came to mind was of, you know, zero sum
#
games that at that moment in time, when Bradley Cooper looks across at her, the world is not
#
a zero sum thing to him.
#
Her success doesn't take anything away from him.
#
You know, unlike Gour Vidal sort of zero sum view.
#
And it strikes me that, you know, we evolved, our brains evolved in prehistoric times where
#
we lived in small tribes and there was tremendous scarcity.
#
So it's possibly natural for us to view the world in a zero sum way where somebody else
#
doing well affects our own opportunity and therefore we feel kind of resentful of that.
#
But it's not, you know, in modern times is completely irrelevant because we live in a
#
world which is largely positive sum.
#
But I had a question to ask you, which I have earlier asked people and it's more a question
#
in an Indian context, but I'm still interested in seeing what you think about it, which is
#
that I think the economist Jagdish Bhagwati had once commented in 2000 or something that
#
in China, people tend to have a positive sum mindset towards interactions, where in India,
#
it's more that they have a zero sum mindset, they're out to kind of exploit the other guy.
#
And there's a quote from your book on Adam Smith, which, you know, I'll just quote, where
#
you're referring to, you know, Smith's usage of the term lovely by which you mean he means
#
somebody worthy of being loved and your quote is quote, how do you create loveliness?
#
In some cultures, it's as if a memo went out saying, quote, there's a sucker born every
#
minute all you have to do is find such people and exploit them, stop quote.
#
In other cultures, a memo seems to have gone out that says, quote, be a decent human being,
#
it's okay to make money, but keep your word and don't exploit people in distress, stop
#
And my sort of question here is that one sort of theory I have for why India is this way,
#
you know, why such a common tendency is to try and pull a scam to try and exploit somebody
#
is the institutions that we chose in our economy post independence, where we had a very statist
#
system where the state controlled everything and gave permission for everything.
#
And therefore there was this culture of rent seeking everywhere to get anything done like
#
I grew up in the eighties and the nineties and I saw the change that the eighties to
#
get anything done, you know, to getting a telephone would take seven years and you'd
#
have to, you know, bribe somebody for it.
#
And that mindset, which was in our institutional arrangements creeped into the culture and
#
it's not necessarily something inherent in the culture.
#
Now, this is just me thinking aloud, I don't have any sort of I haven't done any studies
#
or surveys on this, but what would you think of, you know, culture being shaped by institutional
#
arrangements in such a way?
#
Does that make any kind of sense to you?
#
Yeah, I think that's a fantastic insight.
#
I'm going to try to see what I can, if I can riff on a little bit, but I wanted actually,
#
I want to add one thing you said about zero sum and conversation and the success of our
#
friends because I never thought it was another nice thing.
#
I don't think I've thought it before, which is I think we think of conversation as a zero
#
sum game because if you're talking, I'm not talking.
#
It's just a fixed amount of air time, right?
#
And that ignores that our dance of back and forth creates something more than just the
#
transcript of my words and your words that just alternate.
#
And I think that's really, that whole idea that you're getting at with culture is enormously
#
In particular, I'm thinking about, you know, I just read a book called Everything Flows
#
And there's two versions of it in English, one's called Everything Flows, one's called
#
It's a terribly imperfect novel, you know, he died before he could finish it.
#
It's a sort of mishmash of beginnings of a novel mixed in with some essays on the Soviet
#
character, an essay on Lenin, an essay on Stalin.
#
But it's an incredible read, and I recommend it.
#
It's a book of despair.
#
To me, it's a must read about the modern world.
#
And one of the things that you're talking about that comes to mind is how, you know,
#
if everybody has to wait seven years for a telephone, yeah, you want yours first, I
#
I don't want to wait seven years, I got to get ahead of you.
#
And you getting ahead of me, because if I don't, by the way, you're going to get ahead,
#
somebody else is going to get ahead of me.
#
So that whole way of thinking is so destructive that that's zero-sum.
#
And the point is that in some areas of life, it is zero-sum.
#
And so that's a tragedy.
#
You think about right now, we're in the middle of this pandemic.
#
I've been appalled at how badly the American economy has performed in the following sense.
#
So be very careful what I mean by that.
#
There's still some shortages of stuff.
#
How do we understand that?
#
And this greatest economic engine, the productive capacity of the United States is enormous.
#
And yet we're struggling.
#
Now, there are no mask shortages anymore.
#
They were in the beginning, and I think most of that was due to laws against prices being
#
allowed to move freely.
#
But there's just some weird products that have some funky natures to them that everything's
#
And that's just unusual, right?
#
The idea that, oh, and in the beginning, by the way, the CDC, Center for Disease Control,
#
and the World Health Organization said, oh, masks don't help.
#
And people said, oh, yeah, well, they're just kidding.
#
They're saying that because they're afraid people are going to buy masks.
#
Well, that's horrible, because they were suggesting it is a zero-sum game.
#
If you buy a mask on the street, you person who lives in a house, a doctor who desperately
#
needs it, whether you do, won't get it.
#
And the economist answers, well, let's let the price rise and let the people willing
#
to pay the most get it.
#
And the non-economist says, well, that's horrible.
#
I mean, there aren't enough to go around.
#
And you're saying the people with the most money should get it?
#
And that's not what the economist means.
#
What the economist means is that it's not going to be a zero-sum game if you let the
#
You're going to get a lot more masks if you allow it to be profitable to make masks.
#
And I think that whole mindset of the way of thinking about the world is extremely important.
#
And it has ramifications way beyond how you treat the person, whether you bribe the person
#
who can put the telephone in quicker.
#
Because it changes this whole interpersonal interaction that we were talking about, these
#
day-to-day interactions that are really the essence of life.
#
The essence of life is small things, not big.
#
Most of the time, we're not doing big things.
#
We're talking to our wife, talking to our husband, talking to our children, talking
#
And if you have an attitude towards those interactions that's, what's in it for me?
#
That's not as good as a world, I don't think, where you're wondering how it all fits together
#
and to sometimes step back.
#
That whole idea of stepping back, come back to Bradley Cooper in that scene, he steps
#
He lets the spotlight shine on Lady Gaga, which is all things kind of funny because
#
Lady Gaga has kind of created the spotlight.
#
But she's an actress in the movie and she's not famous.
#
The fourth wall of the movie gets kind of transparent at that point.
#
You start thinking, is that Lady Gaga who's a nobody?
#
But that whole idea of stepping back, of him saying, I'm going to let her get the glory.
#
I wrote a story, an essay, I don't know if you see it, called The Story of My Life.
#
I think we see ourselves as heroes, stars of the show, the movie, the movie version
#
I'm the main character.
#
I suggest in that essay that it's really useful to think of yourself, instead of being
#
the star of the show, as more of an ensemble player, one of the cast.
#
If you can put your head in that space rather than spotlight over here, if you can put yourself
#
in that space, you're going to be a better parent, you're going to be a better friend,
#
you're going to be a better spouse, you're going to be a better conversationalist.
#
It's just interesting talking about your observation about being hardwired.
#
We are built that way, most of us.
#
Most of us aren't built to step back.
#
We're built to step forward.
#
You could argue that what civilization is about is figuring out ways to encourage people
#
to those institutions you're talking about, to encourage people to step back.
#
I'm sort of going to go back to the question of our hardwiring and how we mitigate that,
#
but before that, my listeners keep asking me about interviewing and the art of the interview
#
There's a great quote from you that there's a great passage that you've written that I
#
just want to read out for their benefit because I couldn't agree with it more.
#
I think it's profoundly insightful.
#
You write, quote, take the most basic human interaction conversation.
#
Everyone knows people who talk too much about themselves, hogging the conversation and taking
#
more than their share of the airtime.
#
It's harder to notice that sometimes you are that person.
#
We like to talk about ourselves.
#
We like to make our points.
#
We have so much to say.
#
How many times do you answer a question and conversation and wait for another instead
#
of asking the person you're talking to about herself?
#
How often do you listen for understanding rather than waiting for the other person to
#
finish so you can make another point or tell another story?
#
How would an imaginary spectator judge your conversational style?
#
Imagining an impartial spectator can help you turn your conversation into more of a
#
dance and less an exercise in taking turns, a dialogue rather than competing monologues.
#
Of course, by impartial spectator, you're invoking Smith himself who used that term.
#
I want to come back to our hardwiring because a thought that's always struck me and one
#
way in which humans are unique is that it's turned out by accident that our hardwiring
#
allows us to fight itself.
#
We are the only species which is always trying to mitigate the way we are wired in different
#
We are not wired to care about ourselves and to be tribalistic, but we learn.
#
Of course, we have competing instincts as well and we are wired in a bunch of different
#
A lot of the ways that we consider harmful, the tribalism, the selfishness, we learn to
#
mitigate that through culture.
#
We build these norms that this is what we should do.
#
If we go to a restaurant, even if you're never going there again, we will tip because there's
#
It's just a normative thing.
#
We vote in elections because it's a normative thing.
#
A lot of the growth of humanity, especially perhaps in the Enlightenment, is figuring
#
out ways in which nurture can mitigate nature.
#
Of course, it often reinforces nature as well.
#
I had, I think until a few years ago, naively assumed that this is an inevitable process
#
that we'll continue fighting this battle and winning it, that the arc of history will
#
go in a particular good direction, whether it's towards liberty or towards justice or
#
In our modern times, we discussed earlier in the show how the tribalistic discourse
#
has become, how it's so polarized.
#
No one's talking to each other anymore.
#
Everyone's talking past each other.
#
Without taking names, you look at the politics in your country or the politics in my country,
#
and suddenly you feel like the world is going backward very fast.
#
How do you look upon this?
#
I just feel profoundly disillusioned that I thought, okay, this is the defining battle
#
We'll beat our hardwiring in all these different ways, and suddenly the worst aspects of it
#
are getting reinforced.
#
I'm not sure I have anything to say about that.
#
I think a lot about my own hardwiring.
#
We're hardwired as a species, but I get a few special things in my brain, and you have
#
different special ones in yours that aren't the same as mine to overcome.
#
We all have our own... Everybody's flawed, but our flaws are all a little bit different.
#
We share some common flaws, but we get our own dose of it, our own variation, our own
#
I've been thinking lately about this.
#
I don't know if I'm going to answer your question, I mean, this might just be off the deep end,
#
but I've been thinking lately about my two selves, the self that's hardwired and the
#
To give a simple version, it's five o'clock, maybe it's 530.
#
I'm going to be eating dinner pretty soon, but I want to eat something just... I don't
#
I'm not hungry, really, but my head says, grab a handful of peanuts or eat a banana
#
or what it really wants is a bowl of ice cream, but I'm not that depraved.
#
But my mind, a set of habits that I've developed over time of snacking say, go for it.
#
It's interesting, there's one level, so we're talking about this overcoming our hardwires,
#
that's where I'm trying to get at.
#
At one level, I can say, oh, I have an urge for food that's not really hunger-based, but
#
I eat it anyway most of the time, weird.
#
I'm aware that I'm doing something I don't really want to do, but I do it anyway.
#
But being aware is a starting point, that's a good thing.
#
Sometimes I'm trying this new trick where I say, that's not me.
#
This is a very common theme in Buddhism.
#
I see it in Judaism as well, certain thematic ideas of this sort of split self.
#
It comes back to the impartial spectrum a little bit, but you can step outside yourself
#
and say, oh, I don't want to be that guy that's snacking, that's a trivial example.
#
I don't want to be that guy who gets irritated, let's say something that annoys you, not an
#
Something just annoys you, it might be traffic, habit of a friend, something that gets on
#
If you step outside yourself, you go like, well, that's stupid, that's not important,
#
why is that bothering me?
#
How hard that is to do, why is that so hard?
#
I like to say that being grown up is learning how to be aware of those things and fight
#
I think now to come back to your more serious part of your question, and to bring it back
#
to your question of a minute ago, institutions in theory can help you become more civilized
#
or they can push you the other way.
#
Right now in America, maybe in India, the institutions are pushing us away from civilization.
#
The problem with institutions is they're not designed, they emerge.
#
You can't just say, I want to fix that, I'm going to stop that institution.
#
A better way to say it is there are certain norms of behavior that have become standard
#
that those are bad norms, and then how do you reverse them?
#
A lot of people have been writing some depressing but I think thoughtful quotes, I don't remember
#
where they're from, who said them, but they're basically things like, it might take centuries
#
to build up a habit of a culture, you could destroy them in a month, and you can't build
#
them back in a month, it takes another few centuries.
#
I feel like we've torn down a lot of useful things recently, like that interactions.
#
I'm very worried about that.
#
Like you, I used to be much more optimistic about the arc of history, depending towards
#
justice or truth or civility.
#
My new quote, my depressing quote is, the veneer of civilization is thin, not that much
#
separating us from a much darker set of behaviors.
#
I think depending on what circles you travel in, there's a naivete about the security of
#
the world we live in and how persistent and reliable it is.
#
A lot of this could go south, this pandemic's exposing a lot of problems like that.
#
Certainly the response in America, these issues of race are very much in flux of where they're
#
going to go, I don't know where they're going to go, or more importantly, our national narrative.
#
What does it mean to be an American?
#
There's more than one, and when you don't share one and you don't respect the other
#
person's narrative, it's hard to have a country.
#
Those are things that bother me, but to come back to your other question, I think just
#
at the personal level, it's just really hard to overcome our hard wiring.
#
Being aware of it, as you say, is a remarkable human trait.
#
No squirrel thinks, you know, I really shouldn't be eating that bird food, that's for the birds.
#
He gets on that bird feeder with zeal, he is so excited to be on that bird feeder.
#
We don't want to be squirrels, we want to be human beings, and yet we got a squirrel
#
side that's pushing us that way all the time.
#
One could argue that another trait that we have, which other species possibly don't have
#
and you've devoted a chapter to this trait in your book on Adam Smith as well, is that
#
You know, there's a great quote by Smith from The Theory of Moral Sentiments where he says,
#
quote, the violence and injustice of our own selfish passions are sometimes sufficient
#
to induce a man within the breast to make a report very different from what the real
#
circumstances of the case are capable of authorizing, stop quote.
#
And a slightly oldish language, but you know, the broad sense is that we are constantly
#
And a tangential question, are we deluding ourselves to the extent that there is no free
#
will, but we behave as if there is?
#
Well, I can't, I don't think I have anything useful to say about that, but I, but.
#
Which side of the free will debate do you fall into?
#
I tend to be on the pro-free will side.
#
You know, what's the joke?
#
Of course I believe in free will, I don't have a choice.
#
But I think, I think that's, that's some truth in that joke, obviously.
#
We certainly feel like we have free will.
#
We know that feeling because I mentioned the snacking challenge.
#
There are times in my life when I say no to a snack.
#
So it means it's, it's possible.
#
I don't fully understand what those times are or how to get more of them.
#
And it could just be that those are just moments when there's a set of chemicals going on
#
that I don't control, but it feels like I control them for sure.
#
And I lost the track of what your first part was.
#
I kind of began to ask a question and ended in an aside, so I'll kind of finish the rest
#
of the question, which is, you know, a theory that I've had is that to be good at anything
#
is necessary to be self-delusional because otherwise we don't begin doing something because
#
And therefore we never get good at anything because we don't iterate enough to learn from
#
But my question is that, you know, through your long intellectual journey that has taken
#
all of these decades and you mentioned about how you grew intellectually through the conversations
#
you had on Econ Talk, the more than 700 episodes, looking back at yourself, do you think that
#
there are times where you were self-delusional in some way or the other and you kind of managed
#
to take a step back and now you look at things differently?
#
I'm sorry if that question sounds rude, it's not intended to be.
#
And I think the, I see my dark side on Twitter when someone says something that I think is
#
wrong and I jump to announce that it's wrong and I fail to see if it's taken out of context,
#
if it's, you know, or I retweet something and then later realize that was a terrible
#
Why would I retweet that?
#
Oh, because it confirmed my attitude toward the pandemic.
#
So I think it's, we all have this self-delusion problem, you know, I can't, I won't get the
#
quote right, but Smith says something like, bold is the surgeon whose hand does not tremble
#
when he operates upon himself.
#
That is, you know, I have it, I'll read it out.
#
Smith says, quote, he is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs
#
an operation upon his own person.
#
And he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of
#
self-delusion, which covers from his view, the deformities of his own conduct.
#
We don't like to see those deformities or we revel in those deformities and we become
#
dysfunctional because we see ourselves as failures.
#
That's a tough road to navigate.
#
We don't want to be overly confident, but we also don't want to have such low self-esteem
#
that we can't be effective.
#
You talked earlier about a minute ago about the challenge of, I will call it the challenge
#
You start off playing an instrument or learning a language or almost any skill, as you point
#
I've been playing a lot of chess online at chess.com, chess.com gives you a score for,
#
you know, it's bad enough that, you know, there's winners and losers, pretty much a
#
zero sum game in chess, but they give you a score so you can see how am I doing, which
#
seems like a good thing.
#
That's like, oh my gosh, I lost that game.
#
And I lost eight points.
#
It's like, what do you do?
#
Why are you doing that to yourself?
#
So I think it's very hard, very hard for us to, you know, to suffer through the feeling
#
of inadequacy that comes when you tackle something new.
#
And we're afraid of those things.
#
We don't want to deal with that.
#
Why would I want to feel bad about myself?
#
So we shy away, I was back to earlier conversation about inappropriate remarks and cancel culture.
#
I don't want to be seen as one of those people, I better keep quiet.
#
And similarly, I don't want to be seen as incompetent.
#
I better not try to do that because I'll just be bad at it.
#
That kills exploration.
#
That's a terrible handicap, you know, I should not fool myself and go try out for the National
#
Basketball Association, the NBA, I'm five foot six and 65 years old, don't have much
#
So that would be it's smart to not be a try to be a professional basketball player.
#
But it's fun to learn, get a little better at chess, I'm kind of enjoying it.
#
But you know, for a while, I had a really low score, my kids laughed at me.
#
So this comes back to that observation that you quoted of mine, where I said, don't be
#
afraid to say I don't know.
#
Once you are comfortable saying I don't know, it's very liberating.
#
And similarly, we're talking now about the comforters saying, yeah, I'm not that good
#
We don't like to admit that to ourselves, sometimes it's false modesty, sometimes, of
#
course, we're really good at it.
#
And we just say that to try to look modest.
#
But there are a lot of things I do badly that I still enjoy.
#
And I love the progress and the getting better part of it.
#
I think that's an important part of the human enterprise.
#
So I think that's a really interesting insight that we don't like to be reminded of our
#
own failures and incompetencies.
#
You know, one more thought, I'm sorry I'm rambling, but there's this really interesting
#
idea of the imposter syndrome, you know, this idea that people are going to figure out that
#
you don't know what you're doing, none of us know what we're doing.
#
You know, we're all imposters to some extent, we're all brave, we're all wearing this armor
#
to keep us from being revealed of our true mix of imperfection.
#
And that's a bad way to go through life, you know, I understand how hard it is to be revealed
#
that your true self, like Smith says, but most of us could use a little more of it.
#
I think it's probably a good thing.
#
Yeah, I play a lot on chess.com as well, though under the pseudonym and the girls avatar.
#
So I get hit on a lot as well by horny Indian boys.
#
And a couple of thoughts before I sort of move on to the great sociological insight though,
#
Because how else would I get that insight?
#
And one is that, you know, therefore, it kind of strikes me thinking aloud that self delusion
#
might actually in some ways be a feature, not a bug.
#
If you're not hardwired with it, how do we cope with the complexity of the world and
#
the complexity of whatever we try to do?
#
And there's also something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which, you know, works two ways.
#
One of the ways, of course, is that people who are incompetent don't know enough to know
#
how incompetent they are.
#
So they think they are better than they otherwise would be.
#
But the other side is that people who are extremely good, they imagine because it's
#
so easy for them, they imagine that it must be easy for others also.
#
And they are probably the ones more likely to suffer from the imposter effect.
#
Now, sort of what you said about Twitter kind of brings me to my next question, because
#
I sort of see the worst side of myself on Twitter as well, where somebody will say something
#
so rude or so stupid or so outrageous that I kind of, you know, these days I try to stop
#
myself from tweeting reactively and, you know, just let go.
#
And the interesting thing there is that the cost for someone entering that kind of conversation,
#
the person who's making the tweet or trolling me or calling me names or whatever, is literally
#
There is practically no cost there as well, while typically in the real world, you enter
#
a conversation, there is a cost to it.
#
And part of what enables it is technology and the access to gadgets that we have, which
#
brings me to a related question.
#
But before that, you know, another Adam Smith quote from the Theory of Moral Sentiments where
#
Smith writes, and this is 250 years ago, and he could be talking about cell phones, quote,
#
how many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility?
#
What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility as the aptness of the machines
#
which are fitted to promote it.
#
All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences, they contrive new pockets unknown
#
in the clothes of other people in order to carry a greater number, stop quote.
#
And my question here is that it strikes me that in a sense, we are shaped by our gadgets.
#
For example, you know, neuroscientists have found that every time we are in deep concentration
#
at some kind of work, and we are distracted by something, it takes, you know, more than
#
20 minutes to get back into that state of deep concentration.
#
And because we are surrounded by distractions all the time, because we are seeking out the
#
dopamine rushes of the Twitter notifications and the Facebook likes, that we are constantly
#
in a state of shallow concentration.
#
And therefore, where we could once pursue deep learning or deep conversations, we now
#
have to make do with shallow knowledge where we'll click something on social media or react
#
And you know, if you're interested in a subject, quickly scan the Wikipedia page rather than
#
And this shows through in our conversations.
#
And my question is, as an educator, which is, you know, a part of your persona, we haven't
#
really explored enough today, and maybe we'll leave it for another day.
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But as an educator, do you find that that's changed the way people learn?
#
Do you see that in your students, for example?
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Is that another competitor for, you know, their attention along with what you're teaching?
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Does it make a difference to how we accumulate knowledge and learning?
#
It's a deep question, right?
#
It's hard to know, hard to measure those things.
#
I think education is part of the issue.
#
The other part is the conversational part you're talking about, the fact that you and
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I are having this conversation.
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I think it's very high quality, by the way, I'm really enjoying it tremendously.
#
You asked me to be on your program for two to three hours, and I thought, oh, that sounds
#
Two to three hours, that's too long.
#
But I'm really enjoying it.
#
And one of the reasons I'm enjoying it is that my cell phone is on airplane mode.
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And I have not looked at it since we started talking.
#
That doesn't happen in real life anymore.
#
I don't talk to anybody for an hour without looking at a cell phone.
#
I'm looking at, well, I do on e-contact.
#
But outside of these kinds of conversations, when is the last time in my casual life that
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I go that long without looking at my phone?
#
Now, I keep the Jewish Sabbath.
#
So for 25 hours a week, from sunset on Friday to dark on Saturday, I do not look at my phone.
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So I have to add that footnote.
#
And I think that's very valuable.
#
I encourage people to keep a Sabbath of technology of some kind.
#
It's a lot easier to keep it though, if you think it's part of a servant of the divine.
#
It's just sort of a habit you've adopted, in my experience anyway.
#
But that degrades, that constant checking, I've turned off most of my notifications.
#
That's not what distracts me.
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It's just the phone's being there.
#
So we talk at different times about, oh, I should put my phone away during dinner.
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I don't consult my phone during dinner, except that's not 100% true.
#
Sometimes we'll be talking about something and some question will come up and I'll just
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Google it real quickly, or I'll check the weather because I wonder what it's going to
#
Instead of just saying, I'll check the weather later.
#
It's hard to wait, right?
#
Delayed gratification of that kind has become very difficult.
#
And then what if I forget?
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What if I don't check the weather when I'm done talking about it later?
#
Well, like, there's no consequence to that at all, really, ever.
#
I'm going to check it when I'm about to go out and I'll know whether to take the umbrella
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or the thicker coat or whatever.
#
So the whole thing is kind of silly.
#
It's a compulsive addiction.
#
So I think to come back to our earlier conversation about conversation, I think what technology
#
has done is it's made some of the conversations harder and it's made some easier.
#
We wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't for Twitter and Zoom and podcasting
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and iTunes and all the things that came before this and my headset and it's an extraordinary
#
amount of technology that's making the quality.
#
By the way, you and I are looking at each other on Zoom, muted while we're recording
#
this on ZenCaster and you think about what a gift that is that we can interact visually
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10, 12,000 miles apart.
#
So, you know, but the optimistic side of me says that norms will emerge that about how
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to use our phones and how to interact with technology that will help make it better.
#
But it's a real mixed bag, there's no doubt about it.
#
And how do you think this will impact education in the long run?
#
Like people, because of this pandemic, people are now getting so much more used to Zoom
#
And I know that just being on Zoom for a couple of hours is just more exhausting than, you
#
know, being somewhere in person.
#
I think that the real problem with Zoom right now and remote education like this is the,
#
you know, when you're in a class of 50 people, 100 people and there's, let's call it just
#
a webinar, you're at a webinar.
#
You're not in a normal Zoom call of, say, four or five people at a meeting.
#
You're listening to somebody who's teaching something.
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How many people are actually listening with anything close to 100% focus?
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Everybody's checking their email.
#
I didn't check it that much.
#
I mean, that's a big problem.
#
You know, when I give a lecture in person, I know when people are paying attention to
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I know when they're daydreaming, they're not checking their phone usually in a lecture
#
I'm given, either rude or they're actually interested, but I know when they're paying
#
attention, even if they're not using their phone, they could still be not paying attention.
#
A good speaker knows when they've captured the attention of the audience.
#
And in classes today, almost nobody's paying attention, really, full 100% full attention
#
It's really hard to do and I, you know, for us as one of many participants.
#
So I think that's got a lot of limits right now.
#
You know, when I lecture in educational programs, I ask people to turn off their phone.
#
But a lot of people say, well, I want to take notes on my laptop.
#
But that's really hard, really hard to take notes on your laptop and not go check the
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weather, your email, Twitter, Instagram, whatever.
#
I think it's a real challenge.
#
So it's interesting, again, technology has so much potential, I think, to allow large
#
groups of people to learn from great teachers.
#
And yet we've not really figured that out yet.
#
So I think mainly it's degrading education right now, not enhancing it.
#
Having said that, in the pandemic, it's been a lifesaver, a world saver to be able to continue
#
to interact with people.
#
If you think about, forget the gains of information and knowledge that people have been able to
#
use to reduce the worst effects of the pandemic, but just the ability to still stay connected
#
I mean, I don't think we can imagine what it was like to be part of the plague in medieval
#
times where you couldn't leave your house.
#
And remember, when you were stuck in your house, there wasn't any internet.
#
So you didn't know what was happening anywhere else.
#
You know, part of the thing I found so interesting about the pandemic is that we don't know when
#
So it's giving us a tiny taste of what it's like to be in war.
#
In war, you know, you can lose, but even if you win, when's it going to end?
#
When do we get normal life back?
#
When can I go out at night?
#
You know, when the bombs are falling and you know death is lurking, you want it to end.
#
And you could deal with it better if you said, okay, it's horrible right now, but in six
#
We don't know when it's over.
#
We don't know when the last day is.
#
So that's really, really hard.
#
Now put yourself in medieval times in the plague.
#
Not only do you not know when it's going to end.
#
You've got no access to information about when it's going to end.
#
You're just sitting, holed up in your house, worried about your kids dying and you have,
#
you're cut off from almost everything.
#
So that's just, I mean, that's just really, that's tough.
#
So technology has helped us get through this a little bit, but that uncertainty is very
#
hard for us, I think as human beings.
#
Now, you know, we are almost at the end of the two hours, which you promised me.
#
So I won't take much more of your time.
#
A bunch of final questions, you know, as an educator, especially teaching economics, I
#
guess, one of the challenges you must have faced, certainly a challenge when I face when
#
I write about these subjects is that so many of the ideas we talk about are so counterintuitive,
#
like the positive someness of the world, like emergent order.
#
You know, we tend to, we are again wired to think of what Adam Smith called the man of
#
system where you can plan everything from the top down.
#
And if you had to pick sort of one idea, which you can implant into everybody's brain as
#
a hardwired idea, what would that be?
#
And if you could take out a little bit of hardwiring in everyone's brain from what they
#
already have, what would that be?
#
I don't know the answer to that.
#
You know, there's some core ideas in economics, emergent order being one of them, the idea
#
that not everything that you see in the world around you is the result of somebody's scheme.
#
It's a super counterintuitive idea.
#
And once you've appreciated it, you start to see it in a lot of places that you wouldn't
#
Yeah, it's nothing trivial like the noise level in a restaurant.
#
Like, why is everyone yelling?
#
Can we all just quiet down?
#
Or traffic, you start to realize, oh, this isn't somebody's fault.
#
This is just how things are set up right now.
#
An example would be, we've spent a lot of time, you and I, in this two hours talking
#
about the state of discourse, conversation, and political discourse in particular, for
#
a good chunk of our conversation.
#
And we didn't, I don't think we talked enough much about explicitly about the media.
#
But the media is off, you know, doing all this weird stuff right now.
#
Advocacy, ideology, weird, different time.
#
I think it's very destructive.
#
Why don't they just stop doing that?
#
The answer is, well, all the incentives are lined up to make them that way.
#
So don't get mad at them.
#
See if you can think of ways to change the incentives.
#
Try not to make the incentives work on you.
#
Try to step back from them when you can.
#
And we talked about the dopamine you get from crushing someone on Twitter or whatever.
#
Recognize that that's not a great thing to be incentivized by, even though you do have
#
So in terms of economic ideas, I think that idea that there are things that emerge without
#
anyone's intention is probably the deepest insight of economics that I've tried to help
#
people understand as best I can.
#
I don't know what else I'd take away.
#
I don't have an easy quick thought on that.
#
In fact, I had an episode on the importance of emergent order in everything with Matt
#
Ridley called The Evolution of Everything, ending that from the show notes.
#
My penultimate question, I just have a couple of more questions.
#
My penultimate question, in your book, you quoted from the Talmud, where you said, quote,
#
it is not up to you to finish the work, but you are not free to desist from it.
#
And I get the sense from your work, from listening to econ talk.
#
And I know that much of econ talk, whatever the model behind it might be, much of econ
#
talk just feels so much like a labor of love that all your listeners should be truly grateful
#
It's like it's being driven by a sense of omission.
#
What drives you now and how has it changed from what used to drive you in the past?
#
What drives you to do this?
#
I mean, econ talk is a project of Liberty Fund, which is an institution, organization
#
in Indianapolis that publishes great books that are often forgotten, like David Ricardo
#
and Adam Smith and works on the American founding and law and economics.
#
So it's not like it's a charitable endeavor.
#
I don't want people to misunderstand that.
#
But it is a labor of love, like all good work can be.
#
It's a strange thing because every Monday, an hour or so of my conversation gets put
#
up on the web, a conversation with another person.
#
And a lot of people download it compared to, say, five, 10 years ago.
#
But I don't know how many listen.
#
We're going to have technology soon, I hope that'll help me figure that out.
#
But even if they listen, you don't know if they're really, as we've been talking about,
#
We don't know how many of them grasp or engage with or absorb the information.
#
And so I have this weird relationship, which you have too, with tens of thousands of human
#
beings on our planet who are used to hearing me for an hour a week, week in, week out.
#
And I've never met almost, I've met hardly any of them.
#
So they know me, they feel close to me, which is interesting, right?
#
We have no real relationship, but they feel close to me, which occasionally they send
#
me an email and I feel it, which is beautiful.
#
But most of what I'm doing with EconTalk, I can't, it's the scene, talk about the scene
#
I can't measure it, I can't grasp it.
#
I'm just, you know, it's kind of like, you know, we sent out these signals to other civilizations
#
on other stars, other planets, other, so other, you know, planetary systems, we don't know
#
if anybody's listening.
#
It could be nobody is, maybe there's nobody out there.
#
It could be there's all these people laughing at us or enjoying it, but it's too far away,
#
they don't get it until after we've died.
#
Podcasting is a little bit like that, it's a strange, strange, beautiful thing and radio
#
is the same way where, or writing a book, it's not much different, right?
#
I know thousands of people bought my book called How Adam Smith Could Change Your Life.
#
I know at least one person read it carefully, his name is Amit Varma, but that's just all
#
I get, you know, get a lot more than that.
#
You know, my dad, my dad passed away this past March and I've been thinking about him
#
a lot, of course, over the last few months.
#
He loved to write authors letters and it always amazed him that they wrote back and they would
#
It's not like he did it relentlessly, but he did it sometimes and he would write poets
#
and novelists and sometimes he would point out things that in their work that he didn't
#
agree with or he missed, he thought they were made a mistake, it was an error and he wanted
#
to let him know and then he just want to tell me that he loved their work and they would
#
often write back and I always thought, and he often thought, isn't that strange?
#
Why do they bother write back, write me back?
#
And the answer is because somebody read it, somebody read my book, oh, I got to write
#
What are you talking about?
#
Because you're otherwise, you're in the dark, you don't know.
#
And so I think that's just really interesting, you know, my dad had a letter from Robert
#
Penn Warren, one of my favorite poets, one of my favorite novelists.
#
But why would Robert Penn Warren write my dad?
#
Because it was a human interaction.
#
It was a chance to have what, talking about a conversation, not email, letter, not talk,
#
That's so insightful and even moving.
#
A final question, you know, before we end this conversation, which I've also enjoyed
#
so much is that, you know, sitting now in 2020 with vision that is anything but 2020
#
when, you know, there is so much uncertainty all around and we can see what's happening
#
to our politics, to our discourse, to our media, as you pointed out, to our education.
#
You know, if you were to look forward to the year 2030, what gives you despair and what
#
You know, I don't have as much hope as I used to have, I used to be much more optimistic.
#
Part of my optimism used to be because of the institutions we talked about that help
#
And that would be, you know, free markets.
#
All those institutions are being degraded right now in America.
#
So that's very concerning.
#
So I have a little less optimism.
#
I guess I fall back on the James Buchanan quote, the great economist who said that when
#
I look to the future, I'm pessimistic.
#
When I look to the past, I'm optimistic.
#
And what he meant by that was, like right now, like you're saying, we're in troubled
#
This seems really scary.
#
We don't know where we're headed, very unclear.
#
There have been such times in the past.
#
He would pick, when I heard him say that, I think he talked about the 1930s.
#
You had a monolithic communist state, the Soviet Union, that was wicked, that did horrible
#
things to its citizens.
#
You had a rising Nazi regime in Germany, which would lead to, both of those together would
#
lead to tens of millions of deaths.
#
There was a Great Depression, a worldwide thing that in the United States at a point
#
So one argument says things usually get better.
#
So I fall back on that.
#
I fall back on the idea also that if you live in a moderately free society, as we both do,
#
We're not in North Korea.
#
Those are tough places.
#
But you and I are talking a lot about the tragedy of the current political situation,
#
the lack of civility, the distraction of technology.
#
It still remains the case that I'm going to have in a few minutes, my wife and I are going
#
And I can smile and we can laugh and we can share each other's company.
#
And you and I are having this conversation, not quite as good as the one I'm going to
#
have with my wife and me, but it's been a special conversation.
#
Not everything takes place in the political realm.
#
Not everything takes place in Washington, DC.
#
Not everything takes place on Twitter.
#
Still plenty of places where you can let your heart sing and you can dance.
#
And you can't dance on the dance floor right now so well with the pandemic, but I can put
#
on the shallow and dance plenty in my living room, in my underwear if I want.
#
It's just plenty of good things left in life.
#
So it's easy to get depressed about the state of the world.
#
It's probably better to focus more on your own smaller corner, your own garden, keep
#
it clean, let some things grow there and not try to solve all the world's problems, even
#
though it's tempting that you and I probably think we ought to be trying.
#
But we've got plenty of problems at home to work on.
#
Raj, thank you so much for coming on the scene and the unseen has been a great honor for me.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you can follow Russ on Twitter at Econ Talker.
#
That's Econ Talker, one word.
#
I will link to his podcast, his website and his books in the show notes.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can check out the writing course that I mentioned, which I conduct online at indiancar.com
#
Registrations for the August batches will open soon.
#
You can browse the archives of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot I N. Thank
#
Did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
#
You can go over to scene unseen dot I N slash support and contribute any amount you like
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to keep this podcast alive and kicking.
