David Epstein: It's wonderful to be back.

David Epstein: I think the main idea is that it's never been easier to do too much in our work lives, in our personal lives, and that we often overvalue complete freedom--a problem that is a newer problem in human history--and undervalue the ability of smart boundaries to make us more creative, to make us more productive, and to make us more satisfied in our lives, more meaningful.

David Epstein: Yeah, Mendeleev. So, Siberian genius--it's a tough one. In the winter of 1869, supposedly he has this feeling that there's an order to the elements, to all of the chemical building blocks of the universe. But he can't find it. And he stays up for three days, where he doesn't sleep. And finally, he can't stay awake any longer, and he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And, he dreams of the elements swirling around until they snap into columns. And then the columns snap into place next to one another. And, he realizes that as you move along those columns, the chemical and physical properties of elements recur, periodically--which is why it's called the Periodic Table.

And, he wakes up; he supposedly wakes up and writes it down exactly as he saw it, fully formed. And, so, it's the perfect kind of eureka moment; and it's been celebrated by scientific societies. Matthew Walker in his blockbuster, Why We Sleep, held it up as the ultimate proof that our dreaming brains, loosed from the bounds of reality, can accomplish what our waking brains can't. The mattress company, Casper, used it in their marketing. I learned about it in college chemistry, so that's how I was attuned to it.

David Epstein: That's right. And, I should say, by the way, just so people know: If you think of the Periodic Table as something that just hangs in high school classrooms, it actually was incredibly important at the time, because it not only pointed the way to where new elements should be--because we only had discovered about half of the ones that we've discovered now at the time--but it also motivated the search for the underlying reason for this order, which was atoms. And so, it motivated the search for atoms.

So, the real story: can I share with you the real story?

David Epstein: And, I don't think it'll spoil it too much anyway. But--

David Epstein: So, the real story is, Mendeleev had a book contract to write a two-volume intro-to-chemistry textbook, and he had only gotten eight of the then 63-known elements into Volume One. So, he had to get the other 55 into Volume Two. And he had a customer problem, which was: it had to make sense for intro students.

So, it was in thinking about how could he save space and organize things in a logical way for introductory students that he started experimenting with groups, so he didn't have to explain one element at a time but could kind of pick an element that represented a full family. And in doing that, that's where he started thinking of elements in terms of families, and essentially stumbled onto the periodic pattern.

I mean, he eventually realized that he had found this underlying law of nature, and in fact said, 'Oh, there are gaps in my table here, which means this is where we should look for new materials.' So, it led him to make these very bold predictions that were so accurate that when--he called the gaps--so he labeled these gaps, like, eka aluminum and eka silicon. Eka is the Sanskrit word for one, meaning one spot away from this other element. And, when other chemists would find some element and report that they found some element and it would be similar to what he predicted but not the same, he would write them and say, 'Check your calculations again.' And, they would, and he would be right.

So, it was a pretty amazing story. But I think the gap between the myth and the reality is symbolic of something important, which is that we overvalue this complete freedom and undervalue the power of constraints to make us, to launch us into productive exploration.

David Epstein: That's correct, yeah.

David Epstein: You know, Russ, speaking of dreams though, I realized as I was doing this reporting, there's a whole lineage of people in chemistry, at least, supposedly discovering stuff in dreams. And, it's usually they're doing that because they're in a priority dispute and they want to claim, 'I could not have possibly seen this other person's work.' It's, like, 'It came to me in a dream.' And so there's this whole long lineage in chemistry of discoveries that were supposedly made in dreams. Very dubious, almost all of them.

David Epstein: That's right.

David Epstein: No, I mean, absolutely. And, this is in this chapter where I'm writing about what's called multiple discovery, which is basically the idea--the kind of pioneering sociologist of science, Robert Merton [Robert K. Merton--Econlib Ed.], first started to attune people to the fact that even though one person was typically or one team was typically credited with world-changing scientific breakthroughs, that if you actually dug into it, there were often multiple people or multiple teams basically arriving at the answer the same day. It's not always as dramatic as Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filing their patent on the same day--probably there were like a half dozen other people that were there about the same time--but it's usually quite close.

And so, when you mentioned Darwin, I think one of the important things is--you know, a discovery like that, or maybe that one in particular, is you did such a break from everything that came before that it's just a complete paradigm shift. This person was just thinking, as I would say, outside the box of their whole time, and obviously it was an incredible breakthrough. But Darwin was so grounded in the thinking of his day. I mean, there were people, he had about 240 penpals that he would pepper with all sorts of questions, and they helped him set up these kind of pretty well-known mysteries of the day, like: Why are we finding marine fossils on mountains? And, why are we finding fossils of species that we don't see around us? Why do the bones in a wing of a bat, and the flipper of a whale, and the arm of a human have so much in common? So, he was really collecting--even, he would write to breeders, and they would tell him, 'We know that there are inherited variations when we're breeding.' They called them 'sports,' actually.

So, all of these ideas were percolating. And then he would read other thinking of the day. So, you'd appreciate this one, he was reading Adam Smith, which attuned him to the idea of competitive pressures and how does organization occur naturally out of competitive pressures? And, it was really synthesizing all those things into a coherent view that gave him this frame to think through.

And, of course, he wasn't the only one. You mentioned Malthus, where he was reading the Reverend Malthus on population, and Malthus's argument was that--and this had a lot to do with the British Poor Laws of the day. Malthus was arguing that if we basically do a lot of charity, essentially, that there will just always be more mouths to feed because population will grow geometrically and the food supply will not. And--

David Epstein: He absolutely did. He missed some things that were coming. But that's one of the points I try to make in the chapter, is that these people who set up really interesting questions don't necessarily have to be right, because they frame a question for someone else--for a lot of other people--that leads them to think differently.

So, it was both Wallace and Darwin read Malthus--the same essay--and it crystallized something for them, where they then essentially came up with the exact same theory.

So, I think one of the points I was trying to make was that these lightning strikes of inspiration are not what they seem. They're actually really people who are tuned into the thinking of the day, paying attention to these well-defined questions. And, that's why even the most world-changing breakthroughs are arrived at by multiple people at the same time, almost always.

David Epstein: That's not what you do in your leisure time, reading Malthus?

David Epstein: Of the 19th century?

David Epstein: Clausewitz.

David Epstein: Wait, wait, would you have really?

David Epstein: Yeah, I was going to say, he's a good writer--

David Epstein: Absolutely. And, it's really tuning into--I think tuning into the thinking of the day and looking for really well-defined questions. And, I should say, to your point also, I think it's just easier to tell a story with one person, right? In many cases in these priority disputes, somebody fought much harder to become the person in history books.

David Epstein: Right. Not to do a huge spoiler in the book, but you mentioned the Periodic Table story comes back: it recurs throughout the book. And, Mendeleev--eh, whatever, it's not a spoiler, it's still interesting--Mendeleev is the person credited in the history books, and there's some reasons; but again, he made these bold predictions that others didn't make, and his system was very complete.

But, so, there were no Periodic Tables before 1860, and there were six in the 1860s, all of which, again, Mendeleev's I say had some advantages, but all of them got the main idea. And, some of them were forgotten because the diagram was horrific. And, one of them, the diagram was what the creator called a 'telluric screw.' It was basically like a barber pole with the elements winding around it, and if you looked at it straight down, you would see the periodic pattern. And so, the publisher was, like, 'What is this?' and just left it out, so it didn't get published, so that got no notice. But, it was really these other things that were setting up the context.

Not that Mendeleev and these other people--actually most of them were not chemists, were not geniuses. They were, but there were these other forces of the time, including very importantly, an Italian guy who said, 'You're all measuring the weights of elements differently. Here's how we're going to do it from now on,' and handed out a pamphlet, which allowed work to communicate across space, because people could reference one another's work. That really set people up and defined the problem for them.

And, one of the examples I love from that chapter involved a mathematician, David Hilbert, arguably the most influential of the 20th century. And, one of the things he's most remembered for--genius, luminary genius--but that he decided to go survey the math landscape and collect two dozen problems that he thought were important and define them really specifically and then hand those out to his colleagues. And, it set an agenda for math in the 20th century, and many of them got solved, because he looked around at what was going on in really well-defined problems. And that made a whole bunch of other people look like geniuses because it focused their energies.

David Epstein: Yeah, yeah. In the paper--in his famous relativity paper--he has a footnote in the second paragraph where he's noting, 'By the way, I hadn't read this paper'--I think by Lorentz--and he's basically saying--was it Lorentz that it was--

David Epstein: And, he's basically saying, 'Yes, I realize this guy came up with some of the same things, but just so you know, I hadn't read that yet,' basically.

David Epstein: Yeah. So, I will say Einstein, I think, did have some unique, what seemed to me at least, fully unique physical interpretations of some of the discoveries, but was not the only one alighting on these equations at the same time.

David Epstein: Yeah. I appreciate you asking about that. Nobody's asked me about that, as yet. So, this particular injury, the specifics was an uncommon phenomenon where in eighth grade, I was a very good athlete, and so I was playing quarterback in some gym class--touch football--in middle school. And, instead of kicking off, you would just have someone throw as hard as they could to the other side. And, in doing this, I reared back and threw as hard as I could, and my arm snapped on the follow through of the throw--my upper arm bone, the humerus--in a spiral. And, it was such a bizarre injury, nobody would believe that my arm was broken. I think I kind of went unconscious for a second; it shocked my system.

And, by the time someone took me to the hospital, I remember them laying me on a table, basically taking an x-ray, and I'm laying on my back, and they told me to put my hand up perpendicular, as if I were shaking hands. And, I had my eyes closed because I was nauseous, and I did it, and they said, 'Put your hand up.' And, I thought I was doing it. And, it turned out that the bone was totally separated from the shoulder, so I was turning my shoulder and feeling a phantom hand out in front of me.

We'll never know what happened. The doctor said that if there hadn't been witnesses, they would have thought one of my parents had twisted my arm until it broke. But, he said maybe there was a bone weakness or an air pocket or something like that, but we'll never know because once it broke, the evidence is gone.

And, I've only seen this happen one other time, and it was a major league pitcher, and he had to have his arm amputated. So, that ruined my life at the time because I had to have my arms strapped to my torso. So, a cast running all the way up to my shoulder and arms strapped to my torso.

And so, I couldn't play sports anymore. And my life revolved around sports. That was the only thing I was interested in.

But, it led to some changes. Like, in school at the time, I was taking French class, and we had these tests where you had to listen to a recording of a French person speaking and then you follow along on a worksheet and there are blanks, and you have to follow well enough to fill in the blanks with the word that they said. And, I was okay at this, but with the broken arm, I couldn't write fast enough--because it was my writing hand--to keep up. And so, I started realizing I'd have to try to memorize the words as I went through and then go back and write them down with my left hand. And, I started using sports-related mnemonics, like, attaching the words as I heard them to some sports image. And, I started knocking these tests out of the park, doing better than I'd ever done before. And, I started using mnemonics for everything in school.

Decades later, I would read one of the most famous memory studies ever done that involved a Carnegie Mellon undergrad. And, in this research, they took him from being able to memorize only seven digits to 80 digits using sports-related mnemonics. And, he was also an athlete. And so, this--

David Epstein: That's right.

But, it turns out, people have known this for a long time; a lot of people do memory palace and things like that. And, I use that to this day: If I memorize an hour long keynote talk, I'm using mnemonic. And, people will ask me if I have a photographic memory when I'm done with a talk sometimes, and--because I talk into slides, so it's clear that I've memorized everything. If I put my keys down and spin in a circle, I lose them. I do not have a photographic memory. It's that I learned to use these mnemonics, and I was forced to do that because my typical tactic was taken away.

It's called a preclude constraint, where when the typical tactic is blocked, you start looking for something different, and oftentimes, it's better. It also led to me taking up running because I was barred from contact sports for a year, and I ended up becoming something I never would have thought of--I ended up becoming a college runner and a university record holder, and all these things.

And so, it was just interesting in retrospect that this thing that blocked my normal modes of being led me to explore learning strategies and athletic activities that I just never would have explored in the past.

And, I think that's kind of a theme. In some ways, I hope this book is maybe an emotional reframe for people asked to do more with less, but also part of that reframe is to look at limits as opportunities to clarify your priorities and launch productive exploration. And, that's what happened in my personal life.

David Epstein: Yeah. It really reminds me of--maybe you know this study--the famous London Underground study where there was a strike and certain lines were down for a few days, and so commuters had to find new ways to work. And, these are people who are doing this every day; you would assume they would have optimized the path. And yet a significant portion of commuters found a different path and stuck with it. It saved, like, 1,500 commuting hours per day, just a two or three day strike that led people to experiment with different paths.

So, I think arguably we don't experiment enough, and we tend to follow what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance, where we do the convenient thing or the thing we've always done. Because, as the cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham, says, 'You may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made to prevent you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly.' And so, unless the thing you're used to is blocked, you're probably not going to explore as much as you should.

David Epstein: You're also making me think about--because I should say that many parts of the book are about self-imposed constraints that can prevent a team from drowning in possibilities and things like that, or make people more creative--but you are making me think about how often in my own life something like an injury has led to something useful. Where, I had--a few years ago--I had to get a few stitches in my head, and I was told to try to keep my blood pressure down for at least a few days, if not a week or two, and not to turn my head independently of my shoulders, if I could help it. And, it was painful; it was annoying; I had to sleep sitting up. And, a few days in, I found I was so happy that I was wondering what was going on, even though I was in a little bit of pain and sleeping was annoying.

And so, I started journaling about my days, and the thing that jumped out at me was that I had to do one thing at a time. I physically could not multitask. I couldn't turn my head quickly. And, I would actually feel if I started trying to toggle between things, my blood pressure rising, and I'd feel a little tingling on the scar. So, it was almost I had this built-in biofeedback if I tried to multitask.

And, I ended up writing that into one of the chapters about attention and focus, because it was so transformative for me in realizing how stressful multitasking was, and I hadn't even really been thinking about it. Not that I would wish stitches in the head on anyone; but again, it was kind of revelatory for me in forcing me to do one thing at a time and realizing how great that was, both my productivity, but also just my sense of wellbeing at the end of the day.

David Epstein: Yeah. I think there were kind of two buckets for this. One, how my workday works, and one, the book in specific. Are you thinking about either one of those specifically?

David Epstein: Okay. Okay, both. So, let me talk about the book specifically. One of the reasons I took on this topic--I guess the older I get, the more I realize or the more honest I am about maybe how much me-search is in my projects. And, it's pretty clear in this one, because I have been terrible at drawing boundaries around things--around my workday, around my work projects.

So, for my first two books, I wrote about 150% the length of a book and then had to cut back to get a book. For my first book, I took a trip to Arctic Sweden that I had to cut. Once I became a parent, you don't want to be taking trips. It was an interesting trip; but you don't want to be taking trips to Arctic Sweden that aren't going in the book. And, that was very much because I didn't do a good job of defining my project ahead of time.

So, this time around, once I did my reporting--because basically for the first year of the project, I don't write. I'm just reading papers, interviewing, mapping the landscape. And, after that, I sat down and forced myself to make a one page outline. One page only. This kind of came at the suggestion of one of the people I interviewed in the book who was the lead designer of the iPod, where he tells people to write the press release before they start the project so you have this kind of bounding box for it. And actually this is--I have it right behind me--this is for anyone who is--here you go, Russ--this is the one page outline.

David Epstein: You can see I tried to defeat my own system by writing as small as possible.

David Epstein: It's a big mess. But, it's one page. And if it's not on that page, it's not in the book. And, this forced me--it was painful--but it forced me to clarify my priorities for what was in the book, because in the past I had this, what designers call 'feature-itis.' Anything I thought was interesting, I'm trying to shoehorn it in there.

David Epstein: And, that doesn't necessarily serve the reader. You want to prioritize, as the writer. It also led me to--very much in the vein of Mendeleev--with that small space, it led me to come up with this structure I've never used before, where I tell different slices of the Periodic Table story throughout the book, each time with a new layer that then introduces a series of linked chapters. And, it was trying to put the book in this small space that forced me to think about ways to arrange like topics. Whereas in the past, I was more just one chapter at a time. And so, I think a weakness of mine might have been coherence in my previous books.

So, it also made me much more efficient because--so I was slower to start writing this time around. It took me longer to get to the phase where I started writing. But once I started writing, I executed really quickly because I understood the playing field.

So this is what, in the book, the Danish researcher, Bent Flyvbjerg, who studies projects, would call the good sequence for a project--for projects that are usually, in his case, that come in on time and on budget and deliver what they promised--is: 'Think slow, act fast.' Meaning, you have this small early stage where you're defining the problem, you're setting the boundaries, what are you doing? And then, when you move into execution, you can do it more quickly.

The opposite is think fast, act slow, where you have a big idea, you rush into execution, and then the lessons are going to be much more painfully acquired because you have momentum and all these things.

And so, I actually, in my first two books--well, the first one I needed an extension actually, so I didn't even make it by the deadline. The second one I turned in on 5:00 PM on the day of the contract. So, I assumed that's what I was going to do again. And I finished--I had it a month early, and I just sat for two weeks because I didn't know what to do.

David Epstein: Like, does anybody turn in books early?

David Epstein: So, I would never not do it this way again if I--well, for the third time I'm saying 'never again.' I always say that after writing books, and I believe it, but then there's a period of recovery. But, if I did it again, I would always do it this way. It was so helpful.

David Epstein: Yeah. So, and some of these won't make sense for everybody or a lot of people, but I think there's something that people can pull from them. Where, when I was reporting the chapter about attention and focus, I found it a little bit scary, where a lot of it was based on the work of this psychologist named Gloria Mark, who for about 25 years was shadowing people at work. First sitting behind them with a stopwatch, and then later it became logging their computer activity and heart rate monitors, and all these kinds of things.

And, what she found when she started monitoring people about 25 years ago, people switched tasks about every three minutes. And then, by 2012, it was more like a minute and a half. And, by 2022, it was 45 seconds, where it seems to have flattened out at 45 seconds at least for the last few years.

And, not only do the number of switches predict people's end of day productivity in a bad way, they also predict their stress as measured by heart rate variability.

And, but the scariest part of this research, I think, was what she showed about self-interruptions, where, if you're interrupted by notifications and email and all these things all day, or other people, and you say, 'Well, today I'm going to focus,' and you turn the notifications off, you will just self-interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rhythm to which you've become accustomed, as if you have an internal distraction barometer that wants to keep a certain rhythm. And so, if you want to be able to reclaim your focus, basically, you have to train yourself. And it doesn't take long; but you have to start working in some blocks where you're not toggling.

So, for me, because being a writer I had a lot of ability to do this, when I was in my deep focus part of the work where I was really writing, I wouldn't turn my phone on until late in the day, and I definitely wouldn't check email. I wouldn't check email really until my work for the day was done.

So, again, it doesn't make sense for everybody. But, the email, your inbox is--there's something called the Zeigarnik effect, which is this idea that an open task takes up a little brain space. And, my email inbox is always that, right? There's a million things I can never respond to, and so it takes up brain space. So, I stopped opening it during the day. But I think a more sensible thing for most people is to try to do some batching.

So, Mark found that people in offices check email on average 77 times a day, and different times. So, maybe you need to answer all that email, but can you do it in one block where you're just doing email, or two blocks, or three blocks? And then, do your other work in blocks so that you're mono-tasking for the thing you're doing within a half hour or within an hour, and not toggling all day long because that feels efficient, but it actually isn't, and it's really stress inducing. So, if you can block some of your work and start not in your inbox, that's probably helpful. So, I think--again, not that everyone can do it to the extent that I did, but probably everyone can do a little better than they are.

David Epstein: Yeah. And, by the way, I think there's some research that shows that it might interfere with your satiety signals if you're not paying attention while you're eating, too.

David Epstein: So, people end up eating more.

I think there are a few reasons. I think one is, again, as Daniel Willingham said: Our brains are meant to prevent us from thinking when possible. So, we do the convenient thing. And a lot of that is passive, right? We're scrolling or whatever it is. Whereas what you're talking about, being mindful, I mean, that takes some work. It feels like you're not doing certain things, but it actually takes--anyone who has tried to meditate in the early going realizes that it's hard. It takes work. It's uncomfortable. That's why it takes a lot of practice to do it well.

But another side I think is that--and again, as Gloria Mark's research shows--we've been trained now way more for the distraction, always doing something side. So, you go to a retreat and you practice in a different way for, I don't know, days, a week, two weeks, whatever it is. The whole rest of your life probably has been training you for this other mode of being. And, of course, there's, like, an army of psychologists behind all of these apps that are trying to engineer your attention also. So, I think it becomes so easy unless you're forcibly putting boundaries in place. If you're not engineering your attention these days, it will be engineered for you by very smart people who have a lot at stake. And so, I think, again, we're following the path of least resistance, where you're falling into attention traps that have been engineered to make you behave in a certain way.

David Epstein: Yeah. So, she's one of the great living writers, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and a recipient, winner. It's kind of weird to call it Presidential Medal of Freedom like as if it's the Olympics. And, she started writing in midlife, just before she turned 40 when--so, her father's cousin was Salvador Allende, who I think was the only democratically elected socialist head of state in the world, the only one that I can think of, anyway--and was overthrown in a coup. And that led Isabel to end up having to flee Chile.

And so, she was in exile when she learned that her grandfather was dying. And so, she started writing him a letter on January 8th. And, she was basically just writing him a letter to say, 'All the stories that you told me, they're not going to die with you.' So, this would have been, by the way, January 8th, I think it was 1981, that: 'I'm going to preserve them.'

And as she's writing this letter, a lot of them are about the sort of fantastical, magical stories that her family has told. Some of them--yeah--that she had a relative who could move a sugar bowl with her mind, these interesting stories. And it starts morphing into a novel, and she realizes that's happening. And so, she keeps writing, keeps writing, and it becomes this book called The House of the Spirits, which becomes this international blockbuster. Now it's a movie with Antonio Banderas in it and all these sorts of things. But it starts this ritual for her.

So, the book comes out when she's about 40, where every January 8th from then on, if she has finished the previous book, she starts a new book every January 8th. And she has all these rituals where she needs structure and silence. And, before she was this huge international celebrity, sometimes this was in a clothing closet where she would set up a typewriter because she needed silence.

And, she starts cleansing to get ready for this January 8th ritual, throwing out things from the previous project, cleansing her office. She puts a Pablo Neruda book under her computer, or typewriter, then computer, just in case creativity by osmosis is a thing.

And, this ritual always brings her back. Even if she doesn't really have an idea yet, the ritual sort of forces her to do it again. And, since then--so in the last 45 years, she only had one publishing break. So, this ritual has led to about a bestseller about every 18 months for the last 40 years. So she's sold 80 million books. And by the way, she's plowed a ton of that money into a foundation. She's given away an enormous amount of money.

And, the one time she had a break was when her daughter, Paula, who was in her 20s, died of a rare disease, and--that they didn't know she had until she fell into a coma. And, she writes this searing memoir, Paula, about it, that's just incredible to read. And, in the book she's saying, 'I think I'm done writing. This is it. I just don't have it anymore. This has sapped me.' And, she skips one January 8th for the first time ever and said, 'I'm done. No more writing.' But then, the next January 8th is coming around and she says, 'Maybe I'll just sit down and see.' So, she goes through a ritual again, and it pulls her back, and of course she writes another book and starts the ritual again, and it reinvigorates her career.

And, she's so driven by ritual and by--she needs structure and silence, as she said, lots of silence. And, for the first few weeks--and it also adds a seasonality to her life, where everyone knows if they need something from her, better have gotten it by January 7th because then she's away doing her thing. And, she'll turn down, by the way, $150-grand to give a talk once she goes into that phase, because it's so sacred to her.

And, I think it's particularly interesting, because if you read profiles of her, because there's magical realism in some of her books--many of them do not have but some of them do--profiles of her will make it sound like she's a mystical medium. She just sits back and characters speak through her. But, in fact, the story of her creation is one of incredible boundaries and discipline that she put in place.

So, it was amazing to see, as a writer. Even down to her workday. She lights a candle to start the day and blows it out to finish the day because she has a very defined period of work and then period of recovery. So, I adopted that also, by the way. I use electric candles because too much paper or maybe I'm not as brave as her or something like that. But, I just thought it was so interesting to see someone whose public legend is, again, of this creative lightning strikes, but really, it's driven by this incredible discipline and structure and ritual that she's set up for herself.

David Epstein: It does.

David Epstein: Yeah. No, I love that, because like you said, it does seem silly.

David Epstein: That's why it's important. I mean, when I think back to when I was a competitive runner, I was running the 800 meters. There's a lot of days you don't feel like doing the training that you have to do for that event: it's not pleasant. People end up in that event because they wanted to be a 400-meter runner, and they weren't cutting it, and this is a way to survive. So, but there's so many days where the habit, the ritual, sometimes the other people also pushing you on, bring you back because there are a lot of days you don't want to do it. That's why it's important to have. On the days where you feel like it, and you're great, and you're jazzed up, then I think all the discipline and the structure is less important. It's all those other days that you also need.

And, I think this is why, if you've ever read the novelist Haruki Murakami, another international phenomenon, talking about--he starts doing endurance training to get ready to write a book because it's also an act of endurance where, an act of endurance and ritual. And, it's like Rick Rubin, the music producer, he wrote about in his book about creativity that it's really this kind of--that a lot of their creatives have this very, not boring, but rigid day where it's very structured because that's actually what liberates them to do their thing, when they're not having to make a million other decisions and they know this is where they're going to be and it's going to bring them back. So, I think that discipline and structure actually, almost that boring repetitiveness allows you to flourish and expand your thinking within that.

David Epstein: It'd have no meaning--

David Epstein: I will, but I want to say two things to your comment first, one of which is that that "Rules of the Game" chapter, influenced by you. Some of the things that I've heard on EconTalk [inaudible 00:54:10].

David Epstein: So, I just wanted to thank you for that.

David Epstein: And, I appreciate your compliment about not doing bullet points at the end of chapters. Because, I think of--I strongly identify as a craftsman for writing who is always trying to improve, and so I'm trying to make a Swiss watch of a book. And, so, I don't want those kinds of breaks. I want my narrative to be narrative.

But, Suits--so as you mentioned in Wittgenstein, one of the things Wittgenstein famously said was, 'Language is fuzzy.' And, one of his famous--maybe his most famous--example was that there's no core essence of what we call a game. So, some have strict rules, some don't; some you play alone, some you play with a team; some are just for fun, some are competition; etc., etc. Some are make believe. And, Suits said, 'No, I think that's wrong. I think there is a core quality of all games, and it's an attitude.' And, he called it the 'lusery attitude'--the attitude that you have to take on in order to participate in the game. And, he described it as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Which I love. And, it is that voluntary acceptance of these obstacles that are totally unnecessary, right? You could get from point A to point B in a race much more efficiently, or get down a football field, things like that, much more efficiently.

David Epstein: [inaudible 00:55:43].

David Epstein: Or you could let people just run down the court without dribbling the ball--which seems like it's happening sometimes now anyway.

But, his point was that--so, he wrote it in this brilliant book called The Grasshopper, which is a parable where he takes Aesop's grasshopper, who plays all summer long. And so, unlike the ants who are hoarding food, he's going to die during the winter because he's been playing instead of hoarding food. But, in this case, in Suits's case, the grasshopper defends his choice and said, 'I was doing something that made my life meaningful by pushing against these obstacles.'

And so, I think it's an analogy for life. Take field, add lines, and suddenly you have collective meaning where you can engage in something with other people, and it allows the attempt to achieve things.

And so, I viewed that as almost like a nugget that encapsulates a huge part of the book. That, this voluntary acceptance of obstacles, you do it because it can take you places that you never could have otherwise envisioned.

David Epstein: The voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

David Epstein: So, this company, General Magic, really starting in the late 1980s, but in the early 1990s, they saw the future of the communications technology. So, they were essentially trying to build the iPhone starting in 1990, essentially, when only 15% of American households even had computers. And, they had so much talent. They were founded by three former Apple employees, two of whom helped design the original Mac. The third, his job was looking for the future of technology. And, he was, this guy named Marc Porat, absolute visionary. I read his Ph.D. dissertation for Stanford in 1976 in which he coins the term, 'Information economy,' and it is eerie to read. I mean, he saw what was coming. So, they found this company, it spun out of Apple, to make the new personal communicator.

And, the idea is so intoxicating and visionary, and the talent is so incredible, that Goldman Sachs takes them public in the first so-called concept IPO [Initial Public Offering], where they go public just with an idea, not with a product.

And, fast-forward, it becomes a disaster. After six months' of the product debuting--which is again a personal communicator--they've sold 3,000 units mostly to people they know, and it just becomes this epic disaster.

And, there's this question of how could this have failed? Porat later said that he raised so much money so quickly, they had this 17-partner alliance. Their alliance--these people they were working with, these other companies--they covered so much of the communications technology world that they had to start their meetings with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they weren't allowed to discuss. But, that also made it incredibly hard to make decisions, because there were so many people involved. And, Porat said he raised all this money from them and other people because he wanted to create heaven for engineers where the engineers were free to play and create and limited only by their imaginations. And he said, 'What more could anyone want?'

And, I think the answer was less freedom. Because I interviewed dozens of former employees from General Magic, and a refrain was, 'We could not figure out what not to do.' They didn't have a clear customer. They called their customer Joe Sixpack. After a few years' of missed deadlines, they realized nobody knew who that guy was or what he wanted. And so, they ended up just building for each other. They had so much talent, so many resources, they could do anything, so they often did.

There was actually one, if I can share this, one interview I think was kind of emblematic of the problem there with this engineer named Steve Perlman, who was charged with creating a calendar function for the device.

David Epstein: And, he writes the calendar function to go from 1904 to 2096, and checks it in and thinks he's done. And then, another one of the leaders comes to him and says, 'Steve, somebody might write apps'--because they already were building an app store back in 1990--'Somebody might write apps that does historical things or goes way into the future. You have to expand this calendar app.' So, he brings away: he goes back to Year One instead. Fine, checks it in, done.

Then its other team comes to him and says, 'Steve, why are you tying this into some arbitrary religious context? Take it back to the beginning of astronomical time.' So, he checks it out again and starts the calendar function to go from the Big Bang, way into the future. And, as he said, if he'd left it at 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code, and instead it dragged on for months. Which was a huge waste of time. And, that was how things at General Magic happened. Because they had not drawn good boundaries, and because they did have so many resources and so much talent that they couldn't figure out what not to do. And so, it became a disaster.

As the venture capitalist, Bill Gurley, when I was interviewing him said, 'We have a saying in venture, more startups die of indigestion than starvation. Too much, not too little.'

The good thing about General Magic, though, I'd say, is it was almost a trauma for some of the people that were working there. And, they came out of it having learned these incredible lessons about the importance of putting constraints in place, and went on to co-found or create Android, iPod, iPhone, Nest, to lead things like Google Maps, Safari, all these other things, LinkedIn, eBay. E-Bay was actually incubated by a low level service engineer at General Magic who offered it to General Magic; he was actually obligated to offer his IP [?Intellectual Protocol?]. And, they were like, 'No, no. We got a much bigger thing going on.' It was called AuctionWeb at the time, so he took it out on his own and turned it into eBay.

They basically had the PalmPilot internally, too. The guy that was making PalmPilot started as a third party app for General Magic called Graffiti, where strokes with a stylus could be turned into writing. And, that guy said--when it was clear General Magic was going to fail--he said, he identified a clear customer problem, busy professionals wanted to sync their contacts and calendar and take it on the go. So, I'm going to do just contacts, calendar, and memo pad, period. And, General Magic, like, laughed at him and said, 'You can't compete with us.' Because that was three of the bajillion things they were doing, and PalmPilot became a hit. So, when General Magic's device appeared, it had tons of features, but user experience was choppy because it had so much--battery life was bad--and it was confusing. It shipped with a 200 page manual. Can you imagine getting--right? There were eight pages just on the battery.

But, again, it did produce these incredible people, like Tony Fadell, who is an important character in the book who is known as the pod father because he led the design of the iPod. When he co-founded Nest, a smart thermostat company, after that, he forced the team to work inside a literal box. He's like a zealot for constraints. The first time I called him, he's going, 'If you don't have constraints, make up constraints.' He's a very enthusiastic guy. And, he made them prototype the packaging at Nest before they had the product because he said, 'This will show us what our priorities are, if it goes on here, and this is what we want to communicate to the end customer. And, if it's not on here, then we can put it in a holding pattern because it's not important enough.' As he said, with these ultra constraint-based things, they slow you down, but they make you think really hard. And, that's exactly what happened to me in doing this one page outline, so--

David Epstein: Yeah. That story comes back toward the end of the book, and it's become an important story in the book.

David Epstein: First, I think it's clear that constraints can be bad. Right? It's almost synonymous with something that is frustrating.

But, I think you're right, and you said it really eloquently. And, I guess maybe--so I don't know that I have that much to add to that, so let me bring in something that I think is interesting and related, which is--because the most important thinker in the book we haven't mentioned. And to me, Herbert Simon. Was trained as a political scientist, won the Turing Award in computer science because he co-did the first AI [artificial intelligence] demonstration. Won the highest award you can win in psychology, and then won the Nobel Prize in economics also for bounded rationality, basically, in some of his other work.

And, one of the important--his life's work was really motivated by the noticing that people didn't really adhere to some of the decision-making behavior that classical economics suggested they would. And, one of his important findings--he turned into this word that he coined 'satisficing,' which is a combination of satisfy and suffice. And, what he found was that because we have finite brains and finite capacity to evaluate options, we can't actually make optimal decisions. We use shortcuts and heuristics to make our decisions.

And, what Simon suggested was that we actually should proactively do that and set good-enough rules for ourselves.

So, he proactively satisfies. He said, 'You only need three pairs of clothes. One on your back, one in the wash, and one in the closet.' He had the same breakfast every day. He had one beret that he always wore, etc., because he famously wrote, 'The best is the enemy of the good,' where he argued that by looking through--we have this idea if we have more, and more, and more, that we can optimize our solutions--or maximize, in the language of the people in his field. What he said is not only can you not, but in fact, if you counted the cost in time and money and energy of attempting to maximize, you'd realize that satisficing is the maximizing strategy, basically.

David Epstein: Right. And so, I think it's important, always, instead of always pining for more--even though more has led to shared prosperity in ways that are very, very important--setting good-enough decision rules. We're not built to have access to everything everywhere, all of the time. And, so I think recognizing that constraints can be good and saying when you're going into decisions, 'What are the three things I want this decision to accomplish, or this purchase to accomplish, or whatever?' And, when you get that, make the decision and move on, instead of wondering if there's always more and better out there. Otherwise, you fall prey to something called Fredkin's paradox, which is we spend the most time on the least important decisions because we're having trouble telling the options apart, which is why you agonize over it. But, it also means either that there's not much difference, or you can't figure out much more difference, or maybe it doesn't matter.

So, I've become a proactive satisficer. It almost sounds--you'd almost accuse Herbert Simon of having low ambition if he hadn't won the highest award in several different disciplines.

David Epstein: It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure and honor to be here. And, like I said, you're an influence in this book, Russ, so I really appreciate you and your thinking.

Gary Belsky: Oh my God. Very glad to be here.

Can I ask you a question?

Gary Belsky: Do you have a thing like Saturday Night Live has, where if a host has hosted five times, they get a jacket? I know that there have been people who have been on many more times than me, but is there a threshold in which we become part of a club?--

Gary Belsky: An EconTalk Club? Can we make it three?

Gary Belsky: Oh, yeah.

Gary Belsky: Yes.

Gary Belsky: Solo golf is what I call a--it's not a foursome, a threesome, or a twosome. It's a lonesome. I don't mean playing as a single, which is a thing in golf. I'm a highly social person. I make this point at the beginning of the book: that I love playing golf because I love playing with friends, present company included, and nephews as well. But, solo golf is the act of playing golf by yourself on a course, or at least on a hole, without anyone there.

And, it can be a transformative experience, because the golf industrial complex, by definition, wants you to go out with other people. They want--almost every golf club or golf course in the world wants four golfers to go out every eight to 12 minutes, as many days of the year as they possibly can.

Even private courses, where if you belong to a private club--especially if they're at certain times of the year--you can--it's a little bit easier to go out on your own: they still generally discourage it because courses are meant to be shared, I think.

But courses, in some ways, are best enjoyed when you are playing it by yourself. I have a line in the book: 'In some ways, there's no lonelier place in the world, or emptier place in the world, than a golf course with nobody on it. And, the second loneliest place in the world is a golf course with one person on it.' That's what solo golf is. Playing by yourself, playing alone.

Gary Belsky: I don't know if I could count it, but dozens.

Gary Belsky: Four times 18. Right.

Gary Belsky: Well, before I answer that, I want to note something, and I want to note that I once worked for a very long time with a guy named Brendan O'Connor, who was our golf editor at ESPN [Entertainment and Sports Programming Network] when I was at the Worldwide Leader in Sports. And, Brendan would always correct me because, like you, I use the term golfing as a gerund, I guess. Is that what it would be?

Gary Belsky: And, he would say, 'Play golf.' That, real golfers don't say 'golfing.' They say 'play golf.' But, I also say golfing.

The reason to play by yourself--I mean, there could be many reasons to play by yourself. You could be traveling, as I often am, and all of a sudden realize: Oh wait, the weather outside is kind of crappy, and I can probably find a really not well-attended course in this area--meaning kind of a bad course. And, if I call them up, they will probably rent me clubs, and I can go play at least a few holes. And, there's just something about that that, first of all, is a little bit fun, a little bit serendipitous, a little bit adventurous.

But, the reason to play by yourself is because it's an entirely different experience than playing with other people in almost every way possible.

We divide the book--the book is divided into three different parts. The largest part is me explaining why it's so different. But essentially, it's a meditative, introspective, contemplative experience that's unlike almost anything you generally encounter when you're playing golf with other people. And really unlike almost any other sports activity, except I guess maybe like shooting hoops outside by yourself on a spring or summer or fall night, something like that. But, it feeds the soul in a way that a round of golf with other people doesn't. It doesn't mean that a round of golf with other people doesn't feed your soul. The sociability of a round of golf, even with strangers, is something and can be itself a really meaningful experience. But, when you're playing by yourself, it's the closest thing to, like, a yoga practice for me. It's just a beautiful, quiet, thoughtful experience. And, those are not words I would generally attach to the sport of golf.

Gary Belsky: No, no, no. I get--it's a great question.

First of all, yes, we did cover golf. I'll tell you the two most memorable golf stories we ever did were actually participatory stories, which I'll tell you about in a second. But, generally at ESPN--and this is really true even in the ESPN.com and on TV as well--like, you're going to spend most of your time and most of your resources covering the most obvious sports, right? Football, baseball, basketball, hockey.

ESPN, obviously, to some extent, some of the coverage was dictated by who the television network had contracts with. Not in a bad way, but if we were broadcasting hockey, then we would probably do a little bit more hockey in the Magazine or on Insider, which we also ran--you know, the premium website for ESPN. X Games, action sports was something that we also did coverage of, partially because ESPN invented action sports, right?

But, our rule generally was that as long as we thought 10% of our audience would find the story compelling, that was reason enough to do it, as long as we also covered the major sports. And, we had this sense that turned out to be true, that proved out in readership surveys and focus groups, that with sports like golf or wrestling or--and I mean both kinds of wrestling, actually, we covered both the entertainment kind and the hardcore sports kind--with those kinds of, quote-unquote, "minor sports," readers who didn't care about it would forgive you because they just assumed that somebody else liked it. And, as long as you were giving them their quotient of football, baseball, basketball, hockey, motor sports, they were, like, 'Okay, I guess somebody must want to read about snowboarders.' So, that was how we thought about it.

Gary Belsky: So, my two favorite stories that we did was we had an editor, a young editor at the time, who had played collegiate golf. She's now at 60 Minutes, actually, as a producer at 60 Minutes, but she was a collegiate golfer. And so, she entered a tournament, an LPGA [Ladies Professional Golf Association] tournament. And, by the way, that golf editor that I mentioned to you, Brendan O'Connor, he was her caddy. But, the story was really about what it was like to compete as a former athlete in an LPGA tournament. She didn't make the cut. Her name is Sarah Turcotte. She was an excellent editor and a phenomenal golfer. She didn't make the cut, but the story was fantastic. So, I remember that story a lot. We went down there to watch her play, actually. That was just cool to be rooting for someone in a gallery, rooting for them because you knew them.

And the other story we did was, there's a legendary ESPN writer named Tim Keown. He's still there. He's just phenomenal. He can write about any sport. He really gets you inside an athlete's mind and inside a team. But, we had Timmy, who hates to be called Timmy, but let me call him Timmy. We had Timmy once caddy in a professional golf tournament. That shows you the trust that we built up with athletes because we had to convince a professional golfer to let us replace his caddy with Tim, who went to some version of caddy school to do it. And, it's a phenomenal story, if you want to read it, mostly because of how difficult it is to caddy--

Gary Belsky: in a professional golf tournament. The pressure on you; the things you have to do. We all have these experiences of playing with a friend who is a real stickler for etiquette and rules. 'You can't walk in that line.' Or just there's always that golfer. I'm not that golfer, as you would guess, who is a stickler for etiquette. But, if you're a caddy, you really have to know not just the rules, and not just the course, and not just the green. You have to understand the unwritten rules of golf, too, because you cannot be pissing your golfer's partner off in the middle of a round because you did something wrong.

So, both those stories, to me, were fascinating.

You know, we--I would say 10 times a year--we profile, we did previews of the majors, we profiled a really hot golfer. I was amazed. I don't think she gets nearly as much attention as she should. Not Annika Sörenstam, who is arguably the greatest female golfer ever and who did get a lot of attention. But, there was a golfer named Lorena Ochoa, who was from Mexico, I believe, and she was just phenomenal. And, Lindsay Berra, Yogi Berra's granddaughter who wrote for us, did a profile of her. And, she basically was at the top of her game, arguably one of the best golfers, male or female, in the world. And, she got married and wanted to start having kids. And, she just quit because she had done what she wanted to do and had no problems walking away. And, the story--we did a story about her when she was still playing--but I just remember admiring the way she approached the game, and then admiring the way she walked away from the game. Anyway, so yeah, we covered golf. Long answer.

Gary Belsky: Yeah. I think it was The Michelob Light Open, by the way. I think literally, I think that's what it was.

Gary Belsky: Yes. There was a senior tournament in St. Louis that I watched a little bit of it, but not as much as I should have.

You know, when I was at ESPN, both when I was rising up the ranks and then became editor, I generally wanted to be the kind of boss who--you get credentials at ESPN. You can't just go because you work at ESPN; you get credentials. And, I was generally--and all of leadership at the Magazine was--the kind of leadership that--we wanted to let our editors and writers get the credentials.

Gary Belsky: And so, I should have gone to Augusta. I wanted our golf people to go to Augusta. So, I didn't go to nearly as many events as I could have where credentials were tight.

Gary Belsky: Yeah. Well, there's different experiences even when you watch it live, even if you're camping out at holes. Oftentimes, what people will do is they'll camp out for a certain period of time at a certain hole, and then later on, they'll try to get somewhere else. But, even what does it mean to camp out? Because you could be camping out where somebody's teeing off.

Gary Belsky: Or you can be camping out at the greens, right?

Gary Belsky: So, we wrote about this back in the day at ESPN. We gave advice, because there's different schools of thought. Some people say it's just a better experience if you follow a group. And remember, usually you're following a group. You're not following one person, you're following at least two. Sometimes, depending on the tournament, you could be following three people. And then, you at least get a little bit of variation, but also you're getting to see all the holes, and you're getting to see all of the shots, albeit from two or three golfers. But, it's just a different philosophy.

But, you're right, it's--in some ways, the difference between watching it on TV and the difference between watching it in person is as stark or as wide as for any sport. Because, sure, people always ask me, 'What's your favorite sport?' And I always say, 'To play or to watch?' And then, if they say, 'To watch,' I say, 'In person or on TV?' Because there are differences. I love hockey, love it on TV. In person, it's the most exciting sport to be in a good seat in an arena; but it's still, they feel like the same game you're watching, whether or not you're watching it on TV, or whether or not you're watching it live. Golf, it's--like you said--it's very, very different.

And ultimately, I think I would encourage somebody to do both, right? To do a tournament where they follow a twosome or one golfer, and then also to try to do a tournament or split the tournament up. Or remember, you can do it on--there's four days usually to do it, where you are just sitting at a particular hole and seeing how different people play it. That's the excitement. And, of course, nobody's ever going to regret being on the green at a Major, the 18th green, to see the end of the tournament.

So, it's personal preference, but they are very different experiences.

Gary Belsky: And also, by the way--yes. And also, by the way, the assistance of, if you and I keep our head down, that often means we don't know where the heck the ball went. And so, it's helpful to have somebody else. My friend David Khan just has--he's my age, but somehow he has the--and I have 20/25 vision, and I don't think he does; but man, this guy can spot a ball no matter where it goes in a way that I could have binoculars and be watching it like an eagle and not be able to find a ball. He's phenomenal, and that's a big advantage.

But, I tell a story about--I think I make it third person, but it's about me--that speaks to the issue of what you're talking about, the self-consciousness, and why it's so stressful.

Which is that: I was playing with a guy who was a very good minor league professional golfer. That is to say, I knew him through a friend, and he played--I played with him somewhat regularly in the 1990s, and he played on the mini tours, a couple of--so, he made a little bit of money playing golf. He never really made it to the show; but he was a very, very good golfer, just a different golfer than I was. It was an entirely different--he plays a game with which I'm not familiar, right? That line.

But, one time I said to him--and he understood immediately what I meant--I was, like, 'What's the one difference,' I said, 'between you and me?' And, what I meant when I asked him that was, what's the one difference between golfers like me and hackers, amateurs, enthusiasts, and a golfer like you--a professional? He was a guy who could go to any course and potentially shoot par, or even below par.

And, he knew exactly what I meant, and he said, 'Oh, that's easy.' And I said, 'What?' He goes, 'When I'm over a shot, all I am thinking about is that shot. Period.' He goes, 'When you're over the ball, all you are thinking about is every shot you took before in this game, and in this round, and maybe all the other rounds. And, you're also thinking about me, and you're thinking about other people watching in the other holes.'

And, I would argue that the stress you and I feel--the anxiety--is what you're trying to lose when they talk about focus. It's not just focusing on the shot and the many, many things you have to think about in golf that are--I listed them in the book at one point--just, all the things about setup, and waggle, and hand position, and hip turn, and shoulder. Just when you go through it, it's astounding. Follow through and--

But, not just thinking about that, but we're also just thinking about: Who is watching, and what are they going to think, and what did they think? And, 'Oh my God, what's the matter with me?' and, 'Am I ever going to learn?' and, 'Why do I play this game?'

So, I think that's a big--and in solo golf, I lose almost all of that. It's one of the reasons why it's--first of all, on the mechanics of the game, it's just a calmer experience because it doesn't count. And, literally, I have a sidebar in the book that I should point out here that one of the issues with solo golf is it does not count for your handicap because you need witnesses for your handicap. But also, the stress that you talk about is gone.

Now I want you to imagine, you and I have had some fun times playing golf, and I don't think we stress too much about each other--

Gary Belsky: But, any of the stress that you have on a golf course that's sort of normal for golfers like us, it's gone because you're just by yourself and nobody is watching--because nobody is watching.

Gary Belsky: Oh, wow.

Gary Belsky: Yeah. And, I would also say that much more of that is in our control--and I'm putting you and me in the same camp--much more of that is in our control, in the amateur golfer, in the hacker's control than they realize, right? I'm quite good now at playing with very good players, partially because I understand when to pick up the ball. By the way, not to be needy, not to have them have to validate you, right? To just go about your business.

Gary Belsky: Right. To go about your business, and if those golfers, the really good golfers, see--even if they don't know you, if they're strangers--if they see that you understand how to play with them, then it becomes fine, right? And, you notice sometimes when you're playing with golfers who are not very good and who don't understand what to do when they're playing with golfers of just orders of magnitude different levels of skill, then you realize that's the--the issue is not their play, it's their not-understanding of how to play with others when others are considerably better.

Life is about getting comfortable with that in everything so that hopefully, by the time you die, you're like, 'I'm pretty okay with anybody watching me do anything--with a couple of things excepted--because I feel like I either do it well or I'm okay with not doing it well because I understand who I am and how I got there.' And, in a funny way, the solo golf experience is kind of part of that journey, I think.

Gary Belsky: And, golf, you can practice a lot and not improve in a certain way because if you're not getting the mechanics right for you, it just doesn't click. And, the margins of error in golf are so different than they are in most other sports.

I haven't really gotten to answer your question yet, but there's a story I tell in the book that, like you, I think sometimes I write books because I want to get some of the stories I've been telling all the time onto a page. And, the story I tell in golf that's both a fair story and not a fair story is a story that was told to me at the peak of Tiger Woods' greatness. And, somebody was trying to explain to me--some professional was trying to explain to me--just like the margin of error factor in golf. And, this person said, 'If you shoot a 70, if you average 73 in golf,' which is basically a little bit over par, which is phenomenal, but they said, 'If you average 73 in golf, you'll be the most popular player in your local course or your country club.' And, they said, 'If you average one stroke better, 72, you can go to college for free. And, if you average one stroke better than that, 71, you can probably make a living playing golf. And, if you average one stroke better than that, 70, you can be a millionaire. One stroke better than that, 69--remember, we're only four strokes away from where we started--you can be a multimillionaire, and if you average 68, you'll be the most famous person in the world.' Which is what Tiger Woods was averaging in 2002 for a season. And, he was arguably the most famous person in the world.

And, you're thinking, like, that doesn't seem like a very big difference between a guy at a club and the most famous person in the world. But, of course, it is, but it speaks to--the funny thing about golf is that you can hit a ball, and if you mis-hit it on your clubface by a centimeter, two centimeters, the outcome could be 70 or 80 yards wide of where you were aiming. Forget about the distance part. And, that's just an extraordinary--nobody misses a basketball shot by 40 feet. They might throw an air ball, but it doesn't look like they were aiming for the exit of the stadium. Do you know what I mean?

Gary Belsky: And, it's extraordinary.

But, I think you're right. We've talked about this, I think, before, you and I, just in private conversations. I think recent years have seen an explosions in the sales of pocket watches and fountain pens.

Gary Belsky: And, I believe, and I think people who know better than me believe that it has to do with analog versus digital, right? That people are looking for analog experiences. So, if I were the grand poobahs of the golf industry, I would understand and embrace the digital simulation of golf and then somehow also frame my game as: that stuff is fun. It's also fun to write with a fountain pen. It's also fun to use a pocket watch sometimes, to pull that out of your pocket, have the business of flipping the lid. And, there's a golf equivalent of that.

Like, I think you're right. I think golf has an opportunity--especially, by the way, if there's more options to do physical golf that don't require you to spend five or six or seven hours of your day. I'm still amazed that people don't lean in more into the executive golf course--you know, those nine holes. I think if somebody could come up with a golf experience that was not Topgolf, which is great, but which is just basically it's a version of a driving range where you're aiming at targets. But, if somebody could come up with a six-hole golf experience, they might get some attention. That could be a business, because part of the problem with golf is people don't have six hours to spend or five hours to spend.

And, there's a way in which I think people could--I make the point that one of the--when you asked me how many rounds of solo golf I played in my life and I said, 'Dozens,' some of those rounds were six holes. Because, a good part of the book is explaining to people how to play solo golf, because it's difficult to do. But, one of the ways to do it is to go late in a round and to say to the starter, 'Hey, I just want to play. Can I start it at one?' Where they're not starting people anymore because it's getting late in the day. 'I just want to play five holes.' And, sometimes you might have to pay for it. Sometimes you can just slip the starter a few bucks; and you can just play five holes, and who cares? It doesn't count for your handicap. You're not trying to tell somebody what you shot in your solo golf round because anyway, what does that even mean? And, sometimes it's just really a good experience to go out there and just knock off six holes by yourself.

And, so, in general, I think as people are thinking about playing golf for real or playing golf in a simulation, there's ways to think about it as you can get that physical experience over the course of an hour and a half, and it can really complement your digital golf experience. But, it's funny that I think you're right that they're different, and it could be an opportunity because the physical game is so much different than the simulation game, even if the swing motion is the same in theory.

Gary Belsky: Well, by the way, that's a really astute point, especially since--so golf sort of takes a lot of pride in this sticking to tradition. When, of course, if you took a shepherd from Scotland or China or Holland, all of whom, roughly contemporaneously, were inventing the game of golf with shepherds' crooks and sheep dung and random holes in the ground that they were taking aim at, if you brought them to Baltusrol or Augusta and said, 'This is the sport you invented,' they'd be, like, 'What?' They look at these pristine courses, and they might understand that it's the same game--I think they would--but they would also be like, 'This is not the game I'm playing at, mate.'

And, it's funny because, again, one of the secrets to playing solo golf is to actually seek out bad courses, courses that aren't well-tended, public courses that don't have a lot of money because there's just not as many crowds there and there's not as many golfers there. The crowds aren't as big. And so, you can maybe get a solo round in. But, those courses are harder. And, I have turned that into a really fun imagination game in which I'm playing golf a little bit closer to the way that it used to be played, right? When you're in a fairway and you land in a rough patch or in a hard pan in the middle of the fairway or just a mud hole, you're thinking, like: Yeah, I could be bummed about this, or I could think like I'm in Scotland and it's 1575.

Gary Belsky: And, I'm ignoring the King's order not to play golf, which, at one point the King of England had to make that a law because they wanted people to be practicing archery, not golf. And, I'm playing golf like it was meant to be played. So, it's funny that golf hews[? inaudible 00:34:24] to tradition because the game we play now is, in some ways, very far from the game they played when the sport was invented.

Gary Belsky: Yeah.

Gary Belsky: Not probably. And if you do touch it, Russell, it will hurt. I'm quite serious.

Gary Belsky: Yeah, correct.

Gary Belsky: There are moments where, when you are--it's funny, I don't ever think of it off the tee on a par three. I think of it more where every once in a while, I will have an approach shot with a wedge, and I'll keep my head down, my mechanics will be great. I do the swing I'm supposed to. And, when I hit it, I know that I've hit it well and that it comes down in the exact right arc on the green. And, I'm like, 'Oh, that's how you're actually supposed to do it.' And, I'm not sure anybody, any other golfer, like you said, would take it and would want to exchange their shot for that in that moment.

I would argue that golf has a phrase that doesn't exist in any other participatory sport, which is, 'golf shot,' right? When somebody hits an amazing shot--you can even say it about yourself--but somebody else will say, 'That's a golf shot.'

Gary Belsky: And, nobody ever--you can have nothing but net in basketball. There's lots of things, but there's no phrase in any other sport that basically means: that's exactly how it's supposed to be done at the professional level.

Gary Belsky: Sometimes they call those 'be-back shots,' right? 'I'll be back,' because I've made that. Often it happens on the 18th hole, where you just hit this one shot and you're like, 'Oh my God, I think I've figured it out.' But, 'golf shot' speaks to exactly what you're talking about, I think, which is this weird opportunity to go, 'Oh, that must be what it feels like to do this at the highest level.'

So, I think you're right. It's an unusual sport. I often find--it's also just a sport where--the great thing about sports, in general, is that the maintenance guy and the CEO [Chief Executive Officer] can have a conversation in the bathroom about the Cardinals game. I guess you could say the Red Sox game, but I don't know why anybody would talk about American baseball. But you can have a conversation about that Knicks-Pacers game with anybody. And, by the way, the CEO, if the maintenance guy is talking smart, will listen.

Gary Belsky: Right? And, participatory sports, there's not that many opportunities for people to sort of play socially with people in a kind of bringing-people-together way. But golf does offer that, right? You can be out on a golf course, and at some point you're playing with strangers sometimes, and you don't know who is who. And, if somebody is playing well, they're just like, 'Mad props, sir, for playing as well as you play.' That might be a CEO and that might not be. But, there's not many sports where you can do that--sort of play with strangers. You could, in theory, do it in bowling, but nobody does that. And, we rarely have corporate bowling outings even, too. Nobody does a bowling match for a sales call, right?

Gary Belsky: But, golf serves a lot of purposes culturally in a way that people, I don't think, who don't participate in it quite understand.

Gary Belsky: I disagree. I think he would. I think he would because I think the conversation would be interesting.

Gary Belsky: I think because, you'd be a welcome recipient of his advice and wouldn't be giving him any. And, as long as you--and then two things. One, a), as long as you understood how to keep the pace appropriate--

Gary Belsky: whatever that meant. Sometimes it meant like a drive into the woods, and you'd be like, 'You know what? I'm just going to walk this round and watch you.'

Gary Belsky: And, the other thing that I think speaks to what you're talking about is: if you understand how to be a human being, an adult human being, on the course while you're doing it, right? If it's just clear that you are--everybody talks about you play golf with somebody, you understand how they are in life, it's kind of true. To some extent, it's true in any sport. Somebody who is--

Gary Belsky: Right. You get a bit of a sense. But, with golf, you walk with somebody, and you see how they handle mistakes, how they handle defeat, how they handle somebody else doing better than them, their graciousness, their respect for the game, their respect for golfers that come after them in terms of how they--there's a lot of nuance in the game that tells you something about the person you're playing with that makes you go, 'I like this person,' or 'I don't like this person,' or 'I respect this person.' Right? So, I actually think Michael Jordan would have a good time playing with you for all of those reasons because I think you--I've played with you. I think you meet all those criteria.

Gary Belsky: I think it would be the latter. I often keep score while I'm playing solo golf. When I don't--

Gary Belsky: I do. Because, you know, the cool thing about golf is it's like this--every hole is a test. They think a good golfer can do this in five strokes. Let's see about me.

But sometimes I don't: and it's more enjoyable. Because I'm not--in the beginning, I'm vaguely aware of how I've been scoring, but then if I do some other things that I recommend, sometimes if it's the right situation--by the way, sometimes you can be playing solo golf and other people are not. So, you have to think about what you're doing relative to other people. You're going to either butt up against somebody or usually you have to worry about the people behind you, but when I'm playing solo golf and there's nobody around, like, sometimes I'll just be, like: I'm going to hit three balls from this lie or from right here. I just want to see what happens if I do a crosshanded? what happens if I do--if I'm thinking more about turning my--whatever the case may be.

But, in general, when I'm not keeping score, what I remember is, 'Oh yeah, I did that sand trap on seven really well. Oh, I really liked how I was putting when I putted three times. I don't mean a three putt, but I putted three times from a particular position on 13 because I wanted to see what happened if I worked on pace and went right at the hole, or if I worked on the line a little bit more and went to where the curvature of the green would do me. Like--you'd like it. It's different. I don't do it every time, but it's freeing in a different kind of way.

I mean, that's what's funny about these kinds of exercises, in general, which is you just don't realize how--you know, we're so socialized as human beings. Babies do what--as you know, I like to spend a lot of time around babies like my nephews' and nieces' kids or my friend's kids, and they're just amazing, mostly because they are not self-conscious. Newborns, up to a certain age, they really are not self-conscious.

And it's just so funny, you realize, especially when you're playing solo golf, how much what you do is based on how you're socialized: the expectations, the rules. And, there are ways in which where you're just playing for yourself. And you're not being selfish: you're not ruining a green. I don't mean anything like that. But you're just doing the thing for the thing itself.

Gary Belsky: And, it's extraordinary when it--sometimes you get into these flow zones that are just incredible. I think I finished the book off talking about my greatest score ever, which is 10 shots better than my second-greatest score; and I've never even approached it. And, I was having such an experience. It was a solo golf round, is the point. I was playing with rented clubs in one of the hardest courses I ever played--the University of New Mexico Championship Course. I was reporting a story for Money Magazine when I was there. And, I remember when I got to the turn, I was scoring on every hole--

Gary Belsky: But, I didn't add up my score, because I was, like, I am in such a flow state I do not want to know. I had a sense. I knew this was the best nine holes that I'd ever strung together; and graded on a curve, I was Arnold Palmer. But I'm old enough where Tiger Woods wasn't even a thing you would say back then, right?

But, I was in such a flow state because of the solo golf experience and because of the absence of constraints or self-consciousness that I didn't even want to count my score at the turn because I didn't want to disrupt it. And, those are the moments where the whole thing is really worth it. And, sometimes you can get it--I've just been stressed, and I'm, like, 'I need a round by myself.' And, the round is only five holes in Omaha when I'm reporting a story about Warren Buffet and not having much success getting to him at the time and just found a course in Omaha that had room, let's just say.

And, it was just: My blood pressure just lowered by 10 points because by the end of that hour and a half--I didn't play a full round--I was just, like, 'Oh yeah, I know what it's like to stay within myself, to think clearly, to take things as they come.' And, I was able to apply that to a frustrating professional experience where I was just uptight because they had sent me out there for a thing. And I ended up producing and reporting and solving one of the best stories of my career, one of the stories that sort of made my career. And, would I have solved it anyway? Maybe. I don't know. But, I like the fact that this sort of weird meditative practice contributed to it.

Gary Belsky: Yeah. It's a really good question. There's a couple of answers to it. One is, I've been a yogi, practicing yoga--I'm not a yogi, but I've been practicing yoga for 22 years, 21 years. And, what's incredible about yoga is that--and everybody has this experience, no matter who they are--is that some weeks you're--some practices you are just more limber, you're able to do more things, and some you're not. But, sometimes you just get in--it's a very physical activity. You are sweating, it's hard, but you just get into a flow, a rhythm because the teacher has called a particularly good sequence of poses, or it's working for you, or whatever the case; and you just realize, like, you are flowing. I do vinyasa yoga, which is a very hard, physical, flow kind of yoga. As opposed to holding the poses for long periods of time, you're flowing from pose to pose. There's different ways to approach yoga.

And so, it can be that way with golf. You are just flowing--like, you're swinging well. It feels very--you're aware of your physicality, but you're also not kind of completely conscious of it, if that makes sense.

So, I never have that, to be honest with you, when I'm playing with people, because you have to do other things when you're playing with people. You have to talk to them. You have to look for their ball. You have to adjudicate disputes, whatever the case may be.

But the other way is--you know, I have a term I use. I've never heard anybody else use it, except if they've heard it from me. I can't believe I invented it because if I did, I should write a book about this or something. But, I call it 'yoga off the mat.' There are things you learn in yoga, which is basically like some days, those days where you don't have the flow, it's the opposite. You're thinking, like, 'Oh, my knee is just not going to do this,' or, 'It hurts.' And, yoga, by the way, the practice of yoga, which is much--20% of yoga is about the physical practice that, in America, we think is what yoga is. The rest of it is spiritual and mental. But, one of the things you learn, if you're doing yoga a long time, is, like, those days when your knee is hurting, the appropriate yoga response is to not try to force your knee, or even be bummed. It's just to sort of go, like, 'Oh, my knee is not working this much these days.'

And, that also happens when I'm playing by myself. It's yoga off the mat, but not exactly in the way that I mean it. Because I say yoga off the mat sometimes--you know, you 'breathe into the pose' is a phrase in yoga. Like, when it's not working, the first thing you try before you say, 'It just may not be my day to do that pose,' is you just alter your breath. Right?

And so sometimes at work, something's happening: a client can call, and I can get anxious about it. I will just try to take some deep breaths, and it's incredible how that can help. But, in golf, what you find sometimes is like it's not working. And, what you do is: you're able to sort of go, like, 'It's just not working. That was just a really bad shot.' Or you were just not--for some reason you are consistently skulling the ball. Whatever the case may be. And, rather than getting mad at yourself, you're just observing it.

And, you might, as you walk to the next shot, be thinking, like, 'I wonder what was going on there.' And, it's hard to explain, but in that way, this kind of yoga-off-the-mat way, it feels very yogic because you're not criticizing yourself. Which, as you know, how often can you do that when you're playing yoga [?golf? --Econlib Ed.] You hit the perfect tee shot, and then you go to the second shot and you hit a shot that's not the perfect approach shot, and you get mad at yourself. Where, if solo golf works well, you rarely get mad at yourself, because even when you're working on a good hole or a good round, you're just, like, 'Oh, that was interesting. I got ahead of myself.' Or, 'I was so cocky that I didn't focus as much as I had been.' That's what I mean. And, I think it feels very much like yoga to me.

Gary Belsky: Yoga, I know from. So, I'm not speaking out of my pocket.

Gary Belsky: Yeah.

Gary Belsky: Care--

Gary Belsky: They don't care.

Gary Belsky: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I will say, because to the question you talked about before, it's a principle of yoga as well.

Right? I think the reason I made that analogy from solo golf to yoga is because it's a principle of yoga as well. It's one of the reasons I think why people--some people like yoga because of what it does: it keeps you limber. But some people like it because it trains your mind towards acceptance--but not in the touchy-feely way--in a way that actually is realistic and practical in how one should go through life. And, by the way, once you go through life, that helps you be ambitious. That helps you do all sorts of things that are not woo-woo, because the more you can accept who you are, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, the more likely you are to allocate your resources better.

By the way, Russell, before we go, I feel like we're obligated--I think each of us should tell our favorite--I mean, it's your podcast, but I think each of us should tell our favorite golf joke. Do you have a favorite golf joke? I give mine in my--

Gary Belsky: in the book, but I want to know what yours is.

Gary Belsky: I got it.

Gary Belsky: That's a problem. Yeah.

Gary Belsky: Oh yeah, that's not--that's right.

Gary Belsky: Or just disregard to a spouse.

Gary Belsky: I think that--by the way, there is a joke that involves religion that actually I think is both G-rated and not insulting, which I can get to. But I'll tell you my G-rated joke, and you can think, if you want, and you can think about yours, and then we can--

Gary Belsky: So, Bill is golfing at a club, and he's got a caddy, and Bill is not a very good golfer. And, it's about--he's at the 17, and he's in a bunker, and he's at the 17, and he's 14 over par. He's not doing very well. He's 24 over par. And, at some point, he asks his caddy what he thinks he should do or how he should approach the shot. And, the caddy gives him advice, and Bill listens and swings, and the ball just hits the lip of the bunker and rolls back down to his feet. And, he looks at the caddy, and he says, 'You must be the worst caddy in the world.' And, the caddy says, 'I don't think so. That would be too much of a coincidence.'

Gary Belsky: Okay. It's G-rated, and it doesn't insult anybody but the golfer.

Gary Belsky: Thanks for having me, Russell.

Dean Ball: Thank you so much for having me, Russ.

Dean Ball: So, I think to understand this conflict in full, you need to go back about 18 months to the tail end of the Biden Administration. In the summer of 2024, the Department of Defense [DOD]--now Department of War [DOW]--approaches Anthropic, and they agree to a contract for the use of the large language model Claude in classified contexts. That's distinct from the unclassified uses. Right? So, the Department of Defense and many other government agencies have access to LLMs for all kinds of mundane uses: contract review and procurement, navigating HR [human resource] rules; and government has lots and lots of complex internal rules that just affect the agency, and so you need an LLM to navigate that, things like that.

This is different. This is, like, intelligence analysis, potentially targeting in active combat zones, selecting or at least recommending targets for human reviewers, things of that sort.

So, that starts in the summer of 2024, and in that contract, the Biden Administration agreed to usage restrictions. A wide variety of usage restrictions, as I understand it, but two in particular were on domestic mass surveillance and the use of AI in autonomous lethal weapons. Autonomous lethal weapons being defined as weapons that can autonomously basically identify a target, track it, and kill it with no human intervention. So, this would be machines killing humans on human instructions, but without human oversight.

So, those two things were disallowed in this contract. The Department of Defense agreed to that.

In the summer of 2025--this is during the Trump Administration--the Department of Defense still--it was not yet called the Department of War at that time--the Trump Department of Defense expanded this contract by a significant amount. This was publicly announced. And, when they did that--it was up to a $200 million contract with Anthropic--and, when they did that, they renewed the contract with the same, very similar contract, and it did have the same usage restrictions on domestic mass surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons.

Then we get into the fall of 2025, and as I understand it, a Department of War, now, official named Emil Michael is confirmed by the Senate. He had not been confirmed when this contract was renewed in 2025, or in the summer of 2025. He's confirmed in the fall. He comes in, he reviews the contract, he sees these usage restrictions, and makes the decision to--he decides that the Department of War cannot live with these restrictions and says, 'We have to have all lawful use only.' So, he approaches Anthropic--and it's worth noting Anthropic is the only LLM that is available to be used on classified systems. He approaches Anthropic, says, 'We need to renegotiate for all lawful use.' Anthropic agrees to drop many of their usage restrictions, but not those two. That ends up being a red line for Anthropic. Department of War then says, 'If you don't--.'

This goes on for months, and eventually this escalates to the point--I think there's probably a lot of personal conflict and a lot of back-and-forth drama here that's mostly private. But, we eventually get to the point where the Department of War says, 'If you don't agree to drop this red lines and allow us to use AI for all lawful uses, then we will designate your company Anthropic a supply chain risk.' Which will mean that, a). All of your Department of War contracts are canceled; but more importantly so are all of your contracts with any Department of War contractors. So, for example, Microsoft is a Department of War contractor, and they wouldn't be able to use Anthropic AI services in their fulfillment of contracts that they do for the Department of War.

And, that gets announced--at this point about two weeks ago is when that initially gets threatened; and then the actual designation came down something like a week ago, something like that. The timeline is now fuzzy for me because it's been a very busy couple weeks. And, now we're essentially in court. Anthropic has sued the government in the Ninth District of California. Or the Northern District of California, my apologies. And, that's kind of where we are.

Dean Ball: That is correct, yes. And so, I think specifically when it comes to domestic mass surveillance, I think that's the complex sticking point here.

So, just as an example, there are a very large number of commercially available data sets that would include information on Americans that could be private or sensitive, but that are commercially available. So, things like smartphone location data. For example, many people--you might download a third-party weather app to your phone. A lot of times, the weather app needs to know the location all the time to give you the weather in wherever you happen to be physically in the world. So, a lot of the ways these weather apps make money is the users turn on location, and then they have a location tracker, and they sell the location data. This is very common. And so, there's tons of things like that.

There is obviously also commercial satellite data that you can buy. There's web usage data, just a very--not only can you buy these individual data sets, but you can combine them in all sorts of ways to generate quite rich insights on individual people.

This has been true for a long time. This is the era of web-scale data.

The binding constraint, though, on the use of this data is simply that it's time-intensive to actually analyze for any individual person. So, you have to do this for high-value targets. It's not illegal. In many domains of national security law, what I have just described is not illegal to do. It's not considered surveillance. If it's commercially-available data, it's not considered surveillance.

So, once you have advanced AI systems which can scale human expert-like attention infinitely, essentially, it is all of a sudden as though the intelligence community has, instead of thousands of analysts, millions and tens of millions of analysts. And so, you have a workforce of analysts larger than the government itself. Larger than the human workforce of the government itself, I should say.

And, Anthropic's position is essentially that--and I agree with them here--that the law is not sufficient. The law has not been updated for this reality because this is the reality only of the last few years, and the law is not updated for it. And so, yes, that basically domestic mass surveillance as a legal term, as a legal term of art, does not correspond with what you and I might think of as the vernacular definition of the term domestic mass surveillance.

Dean Ball: Yeah. At least there's an agreement in principle, it seems, for OpenAI models to be used in classified settings that I would say don't contain the same red-line protections that Anthropic sought from the government, but do contain--OpenAI is essentially hanging its hat on the notion of technical safeguards. So, instead of putting these safeguards into the contract, their view is: 'We can train a model and build a system, and if we control the deployment of the system to the Department of War, then that system could, for example, reason in real-time about whether or not what it's being asked to do is domestic mass surveillance and say no to the government.'

Dean Ball: That would be the idea.

Dean Ball: Well, a number of reasons. I think the first is the nature of the punishment. One thing I think that's worth being clear about is there's this whole notion of 'all lawful use.' I've talked to defense procurement and procurement law experts: This is an abnormal notion in contracting. It's sort of question-begging, in maybe the vernacular as opposed to the literal sense of that term. But, it's like: 'Well, what is lawful? What does lawful mean? Who decides?' And, in this case it's, 'Well,' the Trump Administration saying, 'We decide what lawful is, and we'll do it until courts stop us.' Or someone stops us.

And so, it's a somewhat strange term of art.

I get the principle. The principle sounds very intuitive. And, I'm actually just willing to concede for the purposes at least of this debate that it's perfectly reasonable to say, 'We want all lawful use.' I actually think it's kind of complicated and strange to say that, but there's, like, reasons that most--like, a contract for a missile does not say, 'You can use the missile for all lawful use.' That's not what it says. The Department of War's position here is they're pretending like that is what the contracts are like. But it's really not.

But setting that aside, the bigger issue here for me is the nature of the both threatened and realized punishments that have been doled out on Anthropic.

So, first of all, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth threatened to issue regulations that would make it such that no DOD contractor--or Department of War--contractor could do any business with Anthropic. Which is very different from saying, 'No Department of War contractor can use Anthropic in the fulfillment of DOW contracts.' Right? Two very different things. One is profoundly broader than the other.

So, he threatened any commercial relations. And what they actually followed through with in terms of the regulation that's been issued so far, is, it's just barring Department of War contractors from using Claude in their fulfillment of Department of War contracts. So you can still use Claude for other things.

Dean Ball: Yes, this is the supply chain risk designation.

Dean Ball: Yes.

Dean Ball: Yes. It is a little bit complicated because the Department of War does--one thing that's subject to a Department of War contract would be Microsoft Windows.

Dean Ball: They buy lots of computers that run Windows. They buy lots of computers that run Microsoft Word.

Dean Ball: Yeah. And, I mean, one way to think about this, too, though, like, even if it is the more narrow definition. Actually, Microsoft is a good example. Let's say in the 1990s, in the early 1990s, that the Department of Defense had issued a supply-chain risk designation against Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and said, 'We won't use it and none of our contractors can use it in their fulfillment of Department of Defense contracts.' One wonders, would Microsoft be the sort of world-bestriding company that it is today? I don't know.

So, we are talking about something--even in this narrower usage of the regulatory authority--we're talking about a government intervention in a critical emerging technology that has the potential to really radically reshape the trajectory of this industry, and one company within it.

Dean Ball: Well--

Dean Ball: Well, yeah. No, I think that is worth mentioning. I'll just say, stepping back a little, this supply-chain-risk designation is only used--typically is only used--against companies from foreign adversaries. This is about adversary manipulation of American military systems.

Dean Ball: So, it's really treating Anthropic like enemies of the state, essentially.

Dean Ball: It would have been the equivalent of sanctions. And, one other thing that I think is worth noting here is that this is clearly Act I, Scene I.

Dean Ball: If the Administration decides that they want to bring the entire federal regulatory apparatus to bear against Anthropic, I imagine they will.

And, I also think, by the way, this doesn't have to be restricted to formal, legible regulatory action. This can be jawboning. In fact, Anthropic has alleged in their complaint against the government, they have alleged already that the government is calling Anthropic customers--government officials are calling Anthropic customers--and encouraging them to cease doing business with Anthropic. So, it's jawboning--that is, soft--and it's very hard to sue about.

So, all this is essentially--like, if I were to summarize it in just a sentence, I would say the government is saying here that if you don't do business on the terms we unilaterally set, we'll set out to destroy your company. Which is a kind of usurpation of private property.

And even more, to your point, Russ, about some of the political---basically, every time senior Trump Administration officials have invoked Anthropic and talked about the supply-chain-risk designation, they have inevitably mentioned that Anthropic is liberal. That they're supposedly woke. I think that's not exactly true, actually. But, that they're supposedly woke and they don't share Trump Administration political values, that part certainly is true. Anthropic is run by people who donate to Democrats. A lot of AI companies are, it's worth noting.

And if that's the case, if that really does--then this is also a form of political interference, which would be in addition to private property usurpation, would also be a pretty serious abridgment of First Amendment rights.

Dean Ball: Yes. And, one thing that I think should be really clearly said here is that: one of the reasons that it's very hard--and this is not just true of American, it's true internationally--it's very hard to do business with the Chinese--with large Chinese tech companies--because it's sort of known that in particular things like information technologies, there's a reason that Chinese companies don't make the operating systems that define computers all over the world. And, it's because one of the reasons is that--it's a lot of reasons--but one of them is that everyone knows that Chinese technology companies are assets of the military and are viewed that way by the government. And, that's not the case in the United States. And, that has aided American companies in doing business abroad because there is a trust.

One of the things I actually used to always say when I was in government to foreign governments, who, maybe they would have some concerns about doing business with America: 'Oh, you're an unreliable business partner.' And, I'd say, 'Look, yeah, I can't deny it to you that the government changes every four years here in America and there are these wild swings in different directions, and I can't deny that to you. But the thing is, is that don't think of yourself as doing business with the U.S. government. Think of yourself as doing business with Microsoft.' Which is, like, way more stable and has totally legible incentives.

The problem is that when you do things like this, you are eroding that distinction between public and private, which gives people faith in Microsoft. Microsoft has a higher credit rating than the U.S. government. It gives people faith in the institution of Microsoft that is separate and apart from faith in the institutions of the federal government. And, you erode that and all of a sudden, everything becomes political, and that's a subsuming mentality that I think is quite toxic.

Dean Ball: Well, first of all, I think it's worth noting, yes, there's a picking of winners and losers here; and it is explicitly not merit-based because Secretary Hegseth has said that: 'The reason we use Claude'--I'm paraphrasing him here, but--'it's because it's the best.' And, 'the reason that this is so important to us'--the reason that this fight is so important to them--he said, 'is because it's the best.' And yet at the same time, his regulatory actions are trying to drive the company--at least hurt them, if not drive them out of business.

And yeah: it's also worth observing here that this is an incredibly capital-intensive industry, and all of this regulatory risk is making it much harder for Anthropic in particular, and probably the industry in general, to raise the capital that they need. And so, yeah, you are diminishing America's ability to maintain its lead in this technology right at a critical time.

And, not to mention the fact that, by all accounts, Claude is exceptionally useful already in its still relatively nascent forms. It's already exceptionally useful for certain kinds of military operations. So, I think it's unambiguous to say that if Claude disappeared from military systems tomorrow, it would be a--American national security would be weaker.

Dean Ball: Yes.

Dean Ball: I think the argument is that, yeah, that, like, this--Anthropic is essentially using its private power to set what amounts to public policy unilaterally. And, there is some truth to that--

Dean Ball: I think. I don't think that's crazy. And, my own view is that: Look, on one level, we look at this now and it feels really restrictive. At the same time, the government purchases software, including software that's used in really important critical applications, purchases software on commercial terms all the time. And, commercial terms of service are, like, the same ones that you purchase it under--right?--basically. And so, commercial terms of service often have usage restrictions. Government software contracts have all kinds of usage restrictions.

Dean Ball: Yes.

Dean Ball: Yes. Yeah. Right. And, AI is in fact a competitive market. It's true that Anthropic is the only model on classified systems right now, but that's not a fact of physics. Right? That can change.

And so--but--I think, to make their argument for them, I think it would be: No, it doesn't matter about competition. A private party can't do public policy through contracting.

Dean Ball: And, it's just that simple. And also, there are some allegations that the government has made that Anthropic has done things, like threaten to remove Claude. Like, basically, to pull Claude's services during active military operations if Anthropic doesn't like what the government is doing.

I must be honest with you that I have some real questions about the veracity of those claims, but at the end of the day--because I will say, it doesn't sound like a thing that you would say to the government. It doesn't sound true. But, it's what the government claims. I'll be interested to see if they claim these things under oath.

Dean Ball: That's the ultimate thing: Do the DOJ [Department of Justice] lawyers claim it under oath?

Dean Ball: Well, I think the contractual analogy actually is fair. And, in fact, you can imagine even a version of--you could imagine Anthropic having a contractual term that says, 'We are only comfortable with our models being used in wars declared by Congress,' or something.

Dean Ball: And, of course, there's a long history of America engaging in basically wars that aren't technically wars.

So, I think the nuclear-weapons-to-AI analogy is actually quite poor for reasons that I would be happy to explain, but that's not actually your point here. Your point is more about this contractual term. And, I think the government has a very fair point here.

My observation is twofold. You can make that point without trying to destroy Anthropic's business, Number One.

Number Two, but I think on the Anthropic side of things, you shouldn't try--if these protections matter so much to the leadership of Anthropic, if they matter so much that they're willing to call these red lines against a government that is threatening to basically destroy their business, I think if they're that important, then you should have just said, 'We're not selling you anything until there's a law.' And, they should have said that in 2024. In fact, if they were in such cahoots with the Biden Administration and the Democrats, they should have said it in the summer of 2024. They should have said, 'No, we're not going to do this until Congress passes a law about domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons; and we want those protections written in statute.'

Dean Ball: So, your question gets, I think, to one of the most interesting dynamics that we're going to face in the next decade, two decades, maybe more. Which is: What is the relationship between this thing we know today of as the frontier lab--which is the AI companies--and the U.S. government--and the federal government?

And, it's an incredibly complicated question because, Number One, there are national security implications, right? These technologies can be used for object-level dangerous things, right? They can be used to engage in autonomous cyber attacks. So, in other words, I don't need to have a military arsenal to make use of these models, or an intelligence-gathering apparatus. Anyone can launch a cyber attack. So, there are these things.

There are people who talk about things like bioweapons and whatnot. There's all sorts of catastrophic potential dangerous misuses, malicious uses of the technology. Obviously, there is a government role in the sort of mitigation of those things. Well, maybe not obviously, but I think that there's some government role in the mitigation of those things.

But, it's also an incredibly useful technology for national security, like, for government, for militaries specifically and uniquely.

And then, it's also a technology that I think will be a profound part of how all of us exercise our individual liberty and express ourselves in the future. And even today. It will be hugely important, a sort of foundational tool in the acquisition of knowledge, which is a First Amendment right in and of itself. But also, the self-expression for many people, I think.

And then, on top of all that, I think that we're dealing with a technology that, like the printing press, may well be so foundational to the capability of organizations and institutions that it actually changes sort of the institutional complex that defines the technocratic nation state. Such that what we currently think of as the government will actually change in important ways. And so, in that sense, you might think that the technology the frontier labs are developing is in some ways a challenge to the institutional status quo in which technocratic regulators are in charge of large swaths of the economy, basically. That that in and of itself might be challenged in various ways.

And so, it's all of these things all at the same time. So, I can't say that I know exactly what the answers are going to be here because indeed, I approach these issues with a classical liberal frame. But, I am also aware that the very notion of classical liberalism--some people would argue it's already anachronistic; and certainly you could say that if you think about the future, that maybe all of our political concepts--all of our political theoretic concepts--are going to be somewhat outdated. Because something new: there's some new type of institutional complex beyond the technocratic nation state is going to emerge. And so, new sorts of political relationships will undergird that.

And so, I think classical liberalism is a good starting point and all I can say is I changed my career from what I was doing before to be writing about this, because basically, this question in particular is one that I find infinitely fascinating and extremely important. And, I don't have all the answers. I don't have anything like all the answers. But I do think that this is going to keep coming back to us I think many times.

Dean Ball: Yes. I think that's right. And, the thing here that's hard for , I think, is--you know, there's this notion of aligned super-intelligence. That we're going to make something that is smarter--vastly smarter--than the best human experts at everything--right?--and at every cognitive task. And, I don't know if that's actually what we're going to build exactly; I don't know if that's quite the right way of thinking about it. Yeah.

But, grant for a moment that, like, it will be of foundational importance to everything that an organization like the Department of War does, or a very large number of the activities that they engage in. And also, that it may be capable--in fact, definitionally, in order to be what it is described as or what the companies are trying to build, it will have to be able to act in the world as its own. It's not a pure legal agent that does whatever you say. It will have to be able to make decisions. Again, anthropomorphizing language is complicated here, but we're taking our hands off the wheel to a certain extent.

And so, I guess what I would say is imagine a world in which we build something that is smarter than all the employees of the Department of War; and when we ask, 'What is domestic mass surveillance? What will it do and what will it not do?' And, the answer is, 'Well, the machine will decide.' That's obviously a caricatured world. I don't think it will be that simple. But, probably that element of the machine deciding--truly deciding something--that's probably something that a lot of people have not emotionally and intellectually factored in to their models of the future that you probably ought to.

Dean Ball: At this point.

Dean Ball: Sure.

Dean Ball: I agree with you in part and disagree in other areas. So, I think, like--like, the other day, actually I was using GPT [ChatGPT, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer] 5.4, the newest model from OpenAI, and I was asking it about a very complex, a private issue, but related to some of the things we're talking about in some ways--a very complex interpersonal and professional thing I'm dealing with. I was, 'Okay, here's what I'm thinking about saying in this situation. What do you think?' And, it responded to me and it actually said what I should have said. It was, like, 'No, you shouldn't say that, you should say this.' And, I was, like, 'Wow, that's really,'--like, because it knows enough about me to know what I want to sound like.

Dean Ball: It knows what I sound like at my best, in some sense. And so, what I do think though, what I think is--so I'm not sure that I agree with you that it won't be able to reason about trade-offs and moral and ethical things. In fact, I think Claude is a better--I'd be willing to bet you, if I had a moral and ethical question for Secretary Hegseth versus Claude Opus 4.6, I bet you nine times out of ten, I would prefer Claude's answer, to maybe more.

Dean Ball: But, that's interesting--

Dean Ball: Right, right, right. Well, that's interesting because that's not true of you, Russ.

Dean Ball: I don't think so, I don't think so. I bet you sometimes I like Claude more than what you would say, but I bet you not every time.

Dean Ball: And so, what I do think is that, a). I agree with you that there's a risk to just assuming the AI is right about everything because it's actually not, especially in things like this.

But also, where I think the value of--where I think the human touch is going is really going to be on these things that are definitionally based on relationships. Based on things like trust, and integrity, and charisma, and persuasion; and politics to some extent. It's like the notion of automating politics doesn't really make sense to me.

Dean Ball: That seems like a category error. And, the reason for that is not that AI can't do a better speech, that it can't perform the--I think AI can probably perform many of the speech acts of politics better than the best. And, I'm willing to submit, one day, the best--it'll be better than those things in even strategy and stuff. Better at strategy than Otto von Bismarck. Better at rhetoric than Abraham Lincoln. Better at writing rhetoric at least than Abraham Lincoln. But, there's this issue of, like, politics is an inherently relational act. And, that seems much harder to automate. And so that's my guess as to where we're going. That's where I think the human touch is going to be. That's a super-different world than the one we currently live in and I don't think our education is prepared--maybe yours, but not the U.S. education system--is preparing students to live in that world. That's a very different world than the one we're used to.

Dean Ball: So, I have come to a quite biological conception of institutions. I think institutions are made up of human beings and I think that nature is filled with fractals. And so, I think that while institutions aren't exactly like human beings, there are ways of observing and thinking about living things that can also be usefully and productively applied to institutions, both as an analytic matter and for purposes of the poetry of it all. I don't think there's that much of a distinction between those two things, actually.

So, I open up the piece basically describing the experience of sitting at my father's deathbed about 11 years ago. I was 22 years old. I had just started my career. And it was no secret. We were in hospice--it was me, and my mother and a few other family members--and we knew that we were watching my father die. And, I remember reflecting at the time--and I've reflected, of course, on that experience many times since--that death is this process, and that in some ways, my father had become sick. He had gotten heart surgery that went wrong six months prior to the date that he died, roughly. It was immediately after that six months, he was a changed man entirely. The life had been sucked out of him. And then, it was just this gradual process of just him becoming less and less there, in fits and starts, not even necessarily, but he would occasionally come back and have some life in him.

And then, the actual process of just watching him die, I realized that I don't know: he seemed dead to me well before the machine declared him dead. And so, the machine making this declaration that his heart had stopped, or the faint signal that it was getting from the heart had crossed a point of faintness that the machine made some arbitrary decision, basically, that he had officially passed over. That is just, I think, one way of looking at where he was in the process of death.

And so, I was reflecting on that and reflecting on why is this experience of writing about Anthropic, Department of War--why is it so emotional for me? Why is it so frustrating? Why do I feel such a deep melancholy about it? And, what I realized is that it is because I just feel as though I've watched--throughout my lifetime, for 20 years--I've watched a lot of these bedrock principles of our Republic get eroded in thing after thing. It's been the same sort of corrosiveness, but worse sequentially every year, it feels like. And, I suddenly realized--it clicked for me--that that process feels very much like death. It felt very much like the experience--I don't know what death feels like, but it felt very much like the experience of watching my father die.

And also, the fact that, like, I think about this a lot privately, but I don't talk about it that much. And the reason I don't talk about it is that it feels quite painful to talk about. When my father was going through his six months of dying, we talked about his health a lot. But we didn't talk about, sort of, the certainty of his death that much, and where he was in the process, and all these kinds of things. Because it was too painful and we knew the answer. The answer, we all knew.

And so, yeah, that's why I started. I will say I wrote that piece in about two hours, so it just kind of came out of me.

Dean Ball: Yeah--

Dean Ball: Totally--

Dean Ball: Yeah--

Dean Ball: Yeah.

Dean Ball: Yeah. No, I think it's very well put. In some ways, more precisely than I communicated it. And, I think the way I think about this is you are definitely right that this is about change and not death; because, I also talk about the birth of my son briefly in that piece and how it is similar. And how my experience thus far, quite brief still--it's only several months of being a father--is that I sort of just am watching my son progressively awaken. He just becomes more and more aware of the world. And, nature is like this. Nature is filled with phase transitions.

There's a great graphic I saw on social media, on Twitter, the other day of a heart beginning to beat and what that looks like. And, it's all these cells, these decentralized cells that begin to activate; and then enough of them activate, and all of a sudden you have a heart beating. But, it's not like there's ever one moment where it is--and by the way, I think that change from AI will be like this, too. There will be phase transitions. There already have been phase transitions in the progression of AI, and there will be in the adoption as well.

So, very much, yes. And, part of the point I'm making is--like, yeah, I'm not trying to make a point about fascism. I think probably a lot of people on the Left read my piece; and I took pains to say that this wasn't just about Trump. But I'm sure a lot of people--and I knew this would happen--a lot of people on the Left I think read my piece and in self-satisfied fashion said, 'Ah, yes, but everything will be solved when we get Gavin Newsom in,' or whoever--

Dean Ball: in a few years. And, that's very much not my view. My view is, like, the most charitable thing I could say about the Left would be that they would likelier do all the same stuff in a somewhat more gentlemanly technocratic fashion than the Trump Administration, which has a tendency to be really explicit and stumble into things like this. But, in some sense, I actually applaud the Trump Administration for that because at least it's out in the open--

Dean Ball: At least we can talk about it with the Trump Administration.

And, the one other point I would make is, you know, I spent more time debating whether or not I should publish this piece in the form that I published it than I did writing it. Because there's a certain aspect of, like, there's run-on-the-bank dynamics that you don't want to contribute to with things like this. The reason that republics work is that we all believe in the common fiction of the Republic. And that's always been true--

Dean Ball: That's always been true. And, I certainly did get pushback from some people, including people that you and I both respect about that, about the decision to publish it. And, one of the things that I heard is, like, 'Well, you know, democratic--like, elections are still functioning. Right? Like, we still have elections and the results of them are observed.' My view on that is that that's a goalpost moving in my view--

Dean Ball: Yeah. It's really easy--

Dean Ball: It's better than nothing and the thing is, it's really easy to observe--

Dean Ball: It's really easy to observe. Did I go to my polling place and vote, and did the person who won get into power? And so, it's very, very hard to erode that particular thing.

And, it's interesting to me that even the Left has chosen to focus so much on this issue of, like, the erosion of democracy per se. Because that has always seemed to me that the thing that the Trump Administration or anyone else is least likely to mess with. Because it's so verifiable. And instead, like, indeed, the Founding Fathers, if you told them that the one thing that persisted was the ability of the masses to vote--

Dean Ball: they'd be appalled!

Dean Ball: They'd be, like, 'That is the worst part of the whole system.'

Dean Ball: Yeah. Because yeah, it's tyranny of the masses. Democracy is just the tyranny--the idea that there's an omni-powerful, an omnipotent executive who--we shift wildly between two different omnipotent executives based on a democratic vote--that's not at all what a republic is. So, the fact that elections are being observed, it doesn't feel--it's cold comfort.

Dean Ball: It's cold comfort.

Dean Ball: Yes. I think the one functioning branch remains the Courts and so they are this one lasting check on the unfettered power of the Executive. And, that exists in a real tension because the Courts can only do so much. At the end of the day, who enforces the Courts' decisions? It's the Executive.

And, once you start asking that question--

Dean Ball: that's sort of my point--once you start asking that question, you're in the law of the jungle at that point.

Dean Ball: And so, I'm hopeful. Part of the reason that I'm a very close observer of the Courts on a wide variety of different issues, far beyond just AI and tech-related issues, is because I like to observe this chess match in detail.

One thing that maybe is a note of optimism that I can give is that if you think about the Courts as the last umpire enforcing the rules of game as written down--the laws that are written down--well, then if you are a smart long-range actor who wants to win in court, it's incentive-compatible for you to pretend like those rules of the game actually do govern your actions. Because then when you go to court, you will have a better case to be made.

I'm a big fan of a book called Homo Ludens: Man at Play by a guy named Johan Huizinga. It's an old book, but it's a great book. And, it would make this point that you should model the institutions of classical liberalism as this kind of grand game. As long as there's one institution that enforces the rules of the game, then maybe it's incentive-compatible for the actors to remain. But, the problem is, like, the court authority gets eroded and it's not always clear--even today, it's not always clear--that court rulings get observed. Biden had this problem, too. Biden ignored aspects of court rulings and so does Trump. And so, even that is starting to break down a little bit, and we could get into court packing. There's all kind of things.

Dean Ball: Yeah. So, I'm very grateful that the Courts exist, but in the end--and this gets into this locus of control thing to bring us back to the middle of the conversation about where is the proper locus of control and how should we be thinking of AI as this kind of new institutional technology. Well, one of the problems I have is that I'm trying to analyze this and think about the appropriate locus of control in a moment when I'm also just candidly acknowledging that our republic is in not very good health. And so, there's a certain extent to which I have trouble trusting the unfettered executive to be the governing institution over AI. I have a lot of trouble with that in a way that maybe I wouldn't have if this were 1923--

Dean Ball: Or if Calvin Coolidge were President or something: maybe we would be in a very different world.

But, we're in the world that we're in. So, I think that that should affect your--well, I don't want to be--it affects my view of the accumulation of private power versus the accumulation of public power because the thing about private corporations is they don't have the monopoly on legitimate violence.

And so, maybe we build new checks and balances in this way somehow. But, I think whatever we're doing, I suspect that we are in a new Founding moment--which is not novel for this country, but certainly we're in uncharted territory.

Dean Ball: Thank you, Russ.

Ross Levine: Oh, it's great to be here, Russ.

Ross Levine: So, I decided that it was the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and more importantly for an economist, the publication of The Wealth of Nations. And so, I was asked to write something about the U.S. independence, and I proposed that I write a monthly letter from Adam Smith to America in 2026.

And so, the purpose of the letters is to be very true to Smith, but written in a way that is easy for somebody to read when they're waiting on line. And, as you know very well from your own writings, Smith is oftentimes invoked and simplified and caricatured, but he's such a complex, insightful scholar, psychologist, and political scientist that I thought he would have a lot to offer to many of us today.

Ross Levine: So, the way I understood it and understand it is, he's asking, 'What are you doing? What motivates you? Why do you work so hard?' And, he comes back to a theme that, oftentimes we work hard in order to be admired, in order to be held in esteem, in order to receive praise. And, he understands that this is a motivation that has existed over time and across civilizations; but he's concerned about that as a motivation because he ultimately views it as leading to an emptiness and a dissatisfaction. And I thought that for today, and certainly in the United States, that people work extraordinarily hard, and starting out to be true to Smith and asking the question, 'Why do you do that?'

So, it was one of the ways in which Smith opens up The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his first book, and it seemed the right way to engage readers from a--a very broad array of readers.

Ross Levine: So, I live in Silicon Valley. So, what you describe as people have sleeping devices and people wear all sorts of complicated watches, and everything is to maximize their productivity, and people are very much in a rush to get where they're going. And so, you look around and you ask, 'Why?' And then, you look around, and housing prices here are truly astronomical. And, there are other really great places in the United States one can live with just much more reasonable housing prices in a style of life. So, there's a question of why we're doing this.

I think, less on the optimization front, there was a personal aspect of this as well. I am reaching an age where I don't really have to work for money. And so, there's a question of, 'Okay. I'm working very hard. Why am I doing that? Is this the best way for me to spend my time?' So, there was both a personal aspect and an aspect of looking at my surroundings.

Ross Levine: So, Smith--an, it's a very interesting contrast with the way most economists approach it--but Smith argues that the key reason, the key motivation is that we work to be seen, we work to be admired, we work to be praised, we work to be held in esteem. So, a lot of our motivation is to get this approval from others.

And, the reason why it's in contrast with much of economics is that one of the main ways that economists model human behavior motivation is that my happiness or utility is based on what I consume, independent of what goes on around me. And, I think anybody who has kids and anybody who engages with the world quickly realizes that that's not the case: that we are very much social animals. And, from the beginning, this is what Smith argues, that even our sense of right and wrong--our moral sentiments--is very much shaped by social interactions with our parents and our community more generally.

So, that was at the essence of Smith, is that a big motivation is seeking this esteem and approval of others.

And then, he says: Look, this won't bring you happiness. This won't bring you tranquility. That, you have to look inside to this impartial spectator and look to be admirable, not admired by others, and to be lovely, not necessarily seeking love and approval of others. And, it's a deep insight into what motivates us and a deep insight into what can make us truly happy in the long run. It's quite remarkable that somebody who is only known for a narrow perspective of what the invisible hand means is writing--as you explain extremely well in your book--essentially a self-help book on how to live a good life.

Ross Levine: It's a tough question.

Ross Levine: No. It's a very good question, but at least for me, I think I have an answer. So, in terms of having the love and approval of people who are closest to me, I am just extraordinarily fortunate. The issue for me was of one of work, and I think there was a driving force for much of my life to be held in esteem, to be approved of, to acquire a certain rank. And, there's no question that this was a driving force.

And, I think over the last five to 10 years, there's been a reflection of: Okay, now what do I want to do? And, I think what motivates me now--I don't think I work that much less. But, what motivates me now is to explore something different.

For example, much of my life has been mainstream economic analysis, methodology, identification, my work on finance. And, I think now it's: I want to explore something broader and write for a broader audience. And, I may fail, but it's something that gives me a lot of joy.

This reading about Smith has just been thrilling, and I'm writing a book that is more geared toward a broader audience and doesn't have empirical work or any regressions in it. And so, that has been very satisfying for me. And, I think reading Smith gave me a little bit of extra insight and permission to do these other things.

Ross Levine: I just want to interject one thing: that I may be one of your only guests who knows who George Allen is.

Ross Levine: So, it's Smith's story, but it's a story that has been told again and again in many different forms. So, I think for listeners, it will be very familiar. But, it's a story about a young man who is poor, who sort of sees what the rich has, and looks at all the glitter and looks at the esteem with which the rich are held, and says, 'If I can be rich, if I can acquire that wealth, I will have that esteem and approval, and that will make me happy.' And, the word Smith uses is 'tranquil.'

And so, it's about this person who works his life and neglects his family and neglects caring for himself in many ways. And then, as old age hits, he realizes how much he has missed, how empty his life is, and that even though he is rich, all of this outside external esteem doesn't leave him tranquil because of the choices that he made throughout his life.

And so, it's a story about ultimately feeling regret and about not making the types of choices that would have led to a happier, more tranquil life for him. And, it was about seeking the approval of others in a particular realm--becoming rich--rather than seeking internal approval and being what Smith would say, a virtuous person and a good person. Some of the things that you talked about: being benevolent and good to other people, treating people well, and that he neglected those essentials.

How about yourself? How do you read it? You are very much an expert on Smith, and I'm curious: Do you have the same perspective on the story?

Ross Levine: Well, my understanding was that the perspective on this is that it's okay to want to be held in esteem, to be approved of, but that you develop an impartial spectator--a conscious, we may call it today--a sense of right and wrong that's developed from really the moment you're born and you start to interact with your parents. Do you get a smile? Do you get a hug? Do you get approval? He, again, very contrary to some of the philosophers at that time and contrary to some economists, your sense of right and wrong is based on your social interactions. It doesn't just emerge. And that, when there's a consistency between being this good, virtuous person, this person that your conscious approves of, and being in a society that also finds those things admirable, then I read Smith as saying this is when you have a very good life.

But like you say--and you get to this more when he moves to the social interactions between an individual's choice in society--is, there's very much this notion that if you're admired for the right things or kind of virtue, then you will pursue all sorts of activities that seek to gain that approval that are consistent with yourself that will be socially beneficial. If in contrast, society admires only wealth, regardless of how it's achieved--for example, through fraud, or through coercion, or through other types of force--then this is going to encourage those types of actions on the part of individuals, which will cause this distinction between gaining the approval from outside and having the internal approval of your own actions. That was my reading of it.

Ross Levine: Even in your quotation, when you said that you're not an expert on Smith: you just play one on TV. It's a good joke, but there's an element of the imposter element there.

Ross Levine: You wrote a book: You really are an expert on Smith.

Ross Levine: Yes. No, it's a very good point. And so, now we can devolve into psychotherapy a little bit here.

Ross Levine: Yes. We all feel this sense of--maybe not all of us, but I do. Many people do have the imposter syndrome. And, I think, at least for myself, part of what has happened over time is to just not engage with this thought of: Am I really what people think I am? And, simply to say, I am what I am. People will make their own assessments, and I am just going to try to be professional, to do my best, and to be as comfortable as I can with trying to be a good person and a good economist.

And, again, I view that as very consistent with Smith and why reading him--really starting to read him 10 years ago or so--had a very positive effect on my own approach to life more generally. And, that's why I thought your book, and I think that people reading Smith can be a useful way to lead a happier life.

And be a good--yeah, so I--and, I think that you brought up a point earlier, that Smith did not view one's happiness simply as what they consume. That this notion of virtue, of being praiseworthy, was how one dealt with society as a whole. This did not mean forgoing self-interest, but it did mean not being greedy. For someone who lived very much alone as a scholar, he had a very intricate view of how people engage with society more broadly and how important that was for their own sense of contentment.

Ross Levine: I wish I was insightful enough to say it, but I'm just trying to say what Smith said in Substack language, so it's easy to digest. So, yeah. [More to come, 29:19]

Ross Levine: Yeah. And, by the way, I have lots of letters to go, but I kind of wrote the first four. When I'm writing those, just apropos of this, I would wake up in the morning, it would be dark outside, and I'm like, 'Man, I really hope it's past five because then I can get up and kind of keep working on those, on the letters.' And so, that's, I think, very consistent with Smith's view that: are you engaged in something that you think is worthwhile internally and maybe will--'Hey, it's just wonderful to be on the show with you.' He's not against working hard. He's against: Are you working hard in a way that is really going to give you an inner peace, where inner peace and contentment also involves serving a social role?

Ross Levine: It is--

Ross Levine: That's a very good question. So, first of all, I do recognize that I am in such a--I don't want to use the word 'privilege' because it's overused. But, I am in a unique, unique position. And, many people must do a lot of work on things that are not intrinsically satisfying, but that provide the means to support their families. That has to be recognized.

The point is that within the context of the control that somebody has, and if they're fortunate enough to have really what they need to survive, to ask themselves what they are doing and why they are doing it: have some introspection, and to think about the degree to which they're working to try to gain approval from others. Because those others, their opinions can change day to day, week to week, and you may devote your life, and they may approve of it now and disapprove of it later. And, they may be on to the next shiny thing that they're going to admire. So, there's a sense of trying to learn about yourself and figure out is this something that you, we, me as an individual, want to pursue, view as worthwhile. It can be a false and constantly moving target if one is seeking the approval of, quote, "the others."

I think that's how I would frame it, say, for my kids who were trying to make their way in their world and turning toward their late 60s with the comforts to be able to just pursue their intellectual curiosities.

Ross Levine: Absolutely. Yes.

Ross Levine: I think I decided to focus on it for two reasons. One is that I really saw it as essential to portraying Smith, that this is something that he viewed as very important--we can talk about this as we go--that links up to what he viewed as essential for prosperity, broadly defined: and that is justice.

And, the other reason was that I wanted to talk to people today, especially given the media and the political environment, that when we admire people, part of that is wanting to become like them, and part of that is cutting them some slack on whatever they've done to get there. And, part of that is giving them--whatever they say--more credit than maybe it deserves. And, it poses, again, the question that goes back to--the way I'll put it, the way you put it--like, who do we want to become? Are these people virtuous? Are they good? Are they benevolent, or are they just rich? Have they become powerful through good means? And so, is that what we want to reward in society via our admiration?

And again, it comes back to what you were saying. It's like, who do we want to be? And, part of who we want to be is what do we value? So, I very much liked the way you posed it. I think that's wonderful.

It was those two reasons. It's really very true to Smith. It's not looking for something on the side where I wanted to say something and I looked to Smith. This is front and center.

Ross Levine: So, I would point out just as a quotation, which I think I'll get right, but when I say Smith really emphasized this, he calls this admiration of the rich and the powerful 'the major threat,'--the major source of the corruption of our moral sentiment. So, the major way in which our sense of right and wrong is corrupted. And so, he very genuinely thought that this was an enormous deal.

So, let's see if I can get all four off the top of my head. So, I think one is very much as an economist, and it goes back to the first thing we talked about, in that: if society, if we admire the wrong types of activities and people want to be admired, then they are going to engage in the wrong types of activities. And so, this is really essential, and it feeds into his understanding of the motivation of human beings.

So, that's One. And so, he's not saying that the rich and the power are, because they are rich and powerful, unvirtuous. But, he's saying that they're not necessarily virtuous because they're rich and they're powerful. And, if we admire the one thing--the rich and the power as opposed to the virtuousness--then that is what's going to lead to potentially fraud and coercion, and really the disintegration of a free society.

That comes to the next point, which is both about a free society and a peaceful society, and also later what leads to his notion of how the market is going to work to foster prosperity, and that is how much he stressed justice. So, a sense of rules and a judicial system that focus normal self-interest in ways that are socially benevolent.

And so, the issue here is that if what we do is we admire the wrong people or we admire the wrong activities--simply if we just admire wealth--then this can give rise to fraud and the seeking of various types of monopoly privileges and the undermining of the judicial system; and people have less faith in the entire social apparatus. You can have a breakdown of freedom--because for Smith, freedom and the market ultimately are founded on a judicial system and a sense that the judicial system is reasonably fair. And so, that's why this admiring the wrong people is fundamental to Smith.

The other two are interrelated with these, and that is, is that if we admire--it's like the way you told the story about the kings. We want the rich and the powerful--we admire them; we want them to do well. Part of that could also mean that we cut them some slack when they do wrong. And, that again means that the judicial system fails to provide justice. And, again, people can lose faith if it's not a reasonably equitable administration of justice across people.

Ross Levine: Yeah, there's one more. I'm slipping my mind right now.

Ross Levine: Yes. I would guess that in many of the places where people work, that people can become extraordinarily deferential to those in positions of power across a number of dimensions. And therefore, rather than calling out or speaking up when they view things as wrong, they will defer. And, that's part of this admiration of the rich and the powerful. And again, it's not the rich and the powerful just because they're rich and powerful. It's admiring them for reasons other than their virtue and their honesty and the degree to which they live a life of integrity. And, if that's the case, then we're going to defer to leaders who don't exhibit those types of virtuous traits. We're simply going to defer to people who have achieved power and wealth, regardless of how they've gone about it.

Ross Levine: Yeah. No--I think what I'm not sure of, what I'm not sure of in the United States is there's an admiration for what glitters, as you point out. I would say that there's an admiration for certain political leaders that to me doesn't seem to be based on virtue or what Smith would admire. But, at very local levels, those types of traits, I think are still very much valued.

I'll just give a small example. My parents had a small house in Maine, and the neighbors couldn't have been more different, politically. And, it was simply not possible to discuss national politics with them. But, in terms of: if I needed anything, and if they needed anything, we would be there for each other. And, at a local level, dealing with how to raise money to address this problem or that problem, there was much a very much shared sense. And, in terms of the story you gave about the friends going for death--I mean, trusting with money, resources, houses, anything.

So this--there's sort of in me a hope that some of those traits that we see in each other at these smaller levels, can, with some work, replace what's going on at a bigger level. There's a hope in me that some of the anger--some of the constant desire to be angered by what's going on at the national and international level, where we tap into that all of the time and the media feeds it to us all of the time--that we'll become tired of it. And, maybe my optimism is irrational, but seeing it at a small level, I'm hoping we can reclaim it at a bigger level.

Ross Levine: I don't know.

Ross Levine: How can you not love this guy?

Ross Levine: When you read that, it's so beautiful. I kind of then question, so why do I have to rewrite it in a way for Substack? Just read the guy. That's why it can be annoying when Smith gets caricatured--like in the movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas: greed is good. And it's, like, that guy is not saying greed is good.

Ross Levine: Correct.

Ross Levine: Oh yeah. I think so, too.

I think the other thing, by the way, in the quotation, just building on what you were saying, is that he also--this goes back to the beginning part of our conversation--is that he sort of says, 'Look, it's quite natural for us to seek this admiration of others. That's part of the reason we work hard.' And he sort of is telling you where this conflict comes from: because we seek that, and yet we're socialized. We have this internal impartial spectator, this conscious, and there can be a conflict. And that he wants us to reflect and find that path that is consistent with our internal morality or internal sense of right or wrong.

And so, it's very nuanced. It's not like all wealth and power are bad. And so, it's a very, very sophisticated perspective on human nature. And that's why I appreciate him so much.

Ross Levine: UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles].

Ross Levine: No, I didn't read Smith in graduate school. There may have been small, small segments of The Wealth of Nations.

So, actually, the reading of The Theory of Moral Sentiments--I'll tell you a little story about that. So, my father, who is a professor of history and a Marxist and writes a lot of books on Marx, felt that Marx did not understand Adam Smith. And so he--this is during COVID [Coronavirus Disease]--and he wanted to read Smith with me. So, he decided to start with The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which I, like I had mentioned, had not read.

So, we were going to read this chapter by chapter, section by section, and then chat. So, we each read, and then we got together; and I was very annoyed with my father because I felt that he had read Smith simply trying to find in Smith what he wanted to read.

And then I realized that I had read Smith simply wanting to find in Smith what I wanted to read.

And so, I went back and I read the sections again; and at first I had highlighted, then I highlighted more. And then, I realized, 'Man, I can't caricature this guy into what I want him to be, given as a modern trained economist.' And, it was just taking a deep breath and reading and appreciating him, and then talking to my father about it.

And, as I mentioned to you outside is that by the time I got done reading Smith, the entire book was essentially highlighted, and I had to buy another copy so I could read it. And so, that's how--so no, not graduate school. Way after graduate school.

Ross Levine: Absolutely.

Ross Levine: I couldn't agree more. Adam--I just could not agree more.

It's funny--like, if you go to economics before the movement in Behavioral Economics, I mean, Smith would have looked at the profession like, 'What are you guys doing?' Have any of you sort of engaged with the world before?

So, I think that, yes. And, like you say, I'm sure there've been immense advances in psychology. But Smith is, I think, writing a century or more before psychology even becomes its own discipline.

So, I think the passage you read earlier, there are a lot of insights, and I certainly not only have learned a lot, but it's given me great joy learning from Smith. It's been a real pleasure.

Ross Levine: Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Stephen Witt: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Stephen Witt: Yup. Jensen was born in Taiwan in 1963. He moved to Thailand when he was about five years old. His father was an engineer who worked at a petroleum company. And then he came to the United States when he was about 10. In 1973, there was a coup d'état in Thailand, and it was violent: there were tanks in the street. And, his parents said, 'Let's get the kids out of here.' So, he sent Jensen and his older brother ahead to the United States. They were planning to move to the United States, but Jensen showed up alone to live with his uncle.

His uncle didn't know what to do with these kids. And so, he looked for a boarding school that would take him. And, he found the Oneida Baptist Institute in rural Kentucky in the United States, which I think he may have thought was a prestigious preparatory academy. But the boys show up there, sight unseen--two foreigners, barely speaking English--and they realize they've arrived at a reform school for juvenile delinquents. The grounds are littered with cigarette butts, and all the kids--they're basically criminals. And, Jensen's first night there, he's put with a 17-year-old roommate who has recently been stabbed in a knife fight.

So, the kids are carrying switchblades; they're pretty poor backgrounds for the most part, mostly the children of tobacco farmers or coal miners, almost exclusively white. And, at this time, actually, the Vietnam War is still going on, so a lot of racism against Asians. Jensen is called all sorts of racial slurs. It's a very difficult environment.

But, amazingly, Jensen thrives here. He does well. He's a good student; he's always been a good student. But he actually becomes one of the most popular students in the school and even a leader.

And then, when his parents return a couple years later and he moves back to Portland, he's had this kind of unusual experience of being cast into basically a knife fight and surviving. Right? And, this kind of sticks with him: He would later say this is one of the most important things that ever happens to him.

But, still, I mean, despite surviving this kind of juvenile delinquent academy, he's still a nerd. He's still front-of-the-class, top grades, top test scores. Ends up majoring in electrical engineering and gets a job in 1983 in Silicon Valley on the silicon side, designing microchips--not software, but electrical engineering. And so, really he starts building computers from the transistor up--from the circuit board up--and has done so continuously ever since, ultimately revolutionizing what the computer can be.

Stephen Witt: Mm-hmm.

Stephen Witt: 1993, the booth at Denny's Diner. If you're not familiar with the United States, Denny's is--it's known more for the adequacy of its food than its--

Stephen Witt: quality. It's open all the time; it's open 24 hours.

Stephen Witt: Yeah.

Stephen Witt: Jensen's co-founders, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, had been at Sun Microsystems, and Jensen had been at LSI Logic [Large-Scale Integration Logic], and they knew each other, actually, because Sun was LSI's customer. So, Jensen was essentially a sales guy, and Chris and Curtis were buying stuff. Now, that's a little demeaning to Jensen; yet, technically, he worked in sales, but he still had this Master's in Electrical Engineering; and, in fact, Curtis and Chris were his most sophisticated and technically demanding customers.

What they wanted to do was design a microchip that could work as a three-dimensional graphics controller for video games. Readers of a particular age will remember the Nintendo 64, which came out around this time, and moved us from side scrolling video games--where we moved across a static map--to ones that were rendered in three dimensions, with almost like a camera in real time; and we could move our point of view around to see what was going on.

That was a radical upgrade. Basically, what we're doing is we're drawing points in space and then painting in the textures in them to make these kind of blocky, polygonal figures and have them move around. So, it's really actually a pretty tough math and physics problem. You wouldn't necessarily know that from what the game designers used to build with it, which is mostly gunfights, and car chases, and gore, and zombies.

But, they roll out this 3D [3-dimensional] graphics chip. Initially, it's a flop. They almost go out of business, actually, the three of them. NVIDIA almost went out of business twice in their early days. But they managed to stabilize and find a niche market for this 3D graphics controller, especially for the video game Quake, which was a big hit in 1996 or 1997, kind of the first three-dimensional shooting game.

Stephen Witt: You have to be a little careful with Jensen, who has a tendency to retcon the past to fit the story that he wants to tell.

Stephen Witt: It was much larger than zero. There were 30 or 40 companies attempting to do exactly this thing. The market--they will tell you, Jensen will tell you, 'Oh, there's no market.' That was not true. It was obvious post-Doom, post-Mist, that the PC [personal computer] gaming market was going to be big money: the size of the market was going to be.

The challenge there was that everyone saw that. I think there were 40-plus companies by 1994 or 1995 trying to do the same thing. And in fact, NVIDIA was all the way at the back of the line. They were basically in last place. And, as Jensen has described it, this was actually an opportunity for him, because when you're in last place, you can do anything you want; there's no real risk to it. You're going to go out of business anyways. It's true.

So, Jensen threw this huge Hail Mary to design his chips in a new way, using a simulator rather than build a prototype. And, this allowed them to skip about six months of work and actually arrive first to the market with what was basically, even by his own admission, an inferior knockoff product. But it came out faster. And, that was enough to keep the company alive in those early days. I think the zero billion market came later. I think that Jensen did not identify that till later, but he wants a story.

Stephen Witt: [inaudible 00:10:06].

Stephen Witt: This is one thing I noticed with Jensen, interviewing him a lot. He's got great stories; he's got great anecdotes. The details of those anecdotes tend to shift around a bit over time. So, as a journalist, you have to be a little careful with him.

Stephen Witt: I'll tell you what I think the lesson of that early video game era is. The survivor--but yes, there's survivor bias--but who gets to be the survivor? Jensen and his team would go into their whiteboard in their office, and they would list out all of their competitors, and they would list out who the best engineers were, working at each of their competitors. And then they would come up with strategic plans to poach that specific best engineer and get them to come work at NVIDIA. They called it brain extraction. And, once they did--once they extracted that other company's brain--they would typically collapse very quickly because they no longer had their best person working from them.

Jensen knows how to win in a knife fight, and the other guys didn't. Jensen had that ruthless killer instinct that you sometimes need in business, and he really made that the culture of NVIDIA. And, the other guys really came from the gaming space. They were wearing flip flops to the office. You know, it was fun for them. They didn't think like killers. But Jensen thought like a killer, and of those 29, 30, 40 companies that were out there, by 2000, there was basically just one left, NVIDIA. So, he won the battle royale of the 3D graphics controller market.

If you talk to people who experienced the other side of that, they were like, 'God, he was just ruthless. I mean, he was just a shark. He destroyed our company without mercy, without pity.' And, that's not the story he's going to tell. But that's what happened.

Stephen Witt: Yeah. They wanted to make their competitors green with envy. They wanted people to envy them. And, originally, they called the company Envision, but this turned out to be the manufacturer of environmentally-friendly toilet paper. So, they went back to the drawing board. I think Chris, or Curtis, one of the co-founders, had a Latin dictionary, and invidia is the Latin word for 'envy'. And so, they called it NVIDIA. That's where it comes from. And, I would say they have done that: they have made their competitors green with envy.

Stephen Witt: Well, not just that, but in fact, they recently hit the highest single concentration of any stock in the S&P 500 since Standard and Poor's started keeping track. So, in real terms, inflation adjusted, not only the most valuable company in the world: they're, by some measures, the most valuable company in history.

Stephen Witt: Sure. We could divide the NVIDIA story into three phases. The first is--the first, I would say, eight years or so, as they go from spitballing in the diner to actually joining the S&P 500 in 2001. And, all of that is just the success and rise of their gaming product, but also the organic growth of the video game market, which was huge.

Around 2001, they had started to notice that these graphics chips didn't work like normal computer chips. They were much more what is called arithmetically dense. So, what that means, basically, it's parallel computing or accelerated computing: The microchip will pulse with each clock cycle. On a classic Intel CPU [Central Processing Unit], about 3% of the microchip lights up with each cycle. So, about 3% of the silicon is actually active with each pulse. For an NVIDIA chip, it was more like 30 or 40%. So, they were doing a much greater volume of calculations per second, per tick.

And you might say, 'Well, why don't all chips work that way?' Well, the answer is that the parallel compute approach is much harder to program. But when you do it right, it's much more dense and much faster.

And what started to happen was that scientists noticed this. Quantum physicists, people doing medical imaging, people with needs for very high and high-powered, high performance computing. And they actually started to hack the video game circuits--the video game programming--just to get to these circuits.

And Jensen saw this; and he's, like, 'Well, they shouldn't be hacking our video game stuff. I will build them a platform. I will build them software so that they can do science on these Graphics Processing Units, on these GPUs.'

And, that was a platform called CUDA [Compute Unified Device Architecture]. It was free. It wasn't open source, but it was free: it was an open platform just for downloading it, and you would do it, and then you could do science on GPUs. You could use them to do medical imaging, quantum computing, all of this stuff.

And so, Jensen started to do all this outreach to scientists during Phase Two. Now, they made a huge list of potential applications for parallel computing: weather forecasting, oil prospecting, all of these potential customers. And, way down at the bottom of the list, in this tiny little use case that they barely considered, was something called 'computer vision.'

So, by 2008 or 2009, this program is up and running. They've got a few--let's say, 100,000 downloads or so per year--but it's not really a success, and it's extremely resource intensive, and this is the zero billion dollar market. This is Jensen inventing this platform from scratch, basically, and losing money to do so.

Now you might ask, who is this for? Right? Really. Well, it's not actually for mainstream research scientists, because those guys are well-funded. Those guys can afford time on a classical supercomputer. Who needs a jury-rigged, home-brew supercomputer built out of graphics cards? Well, it's a marginalized scientist. It's a scientist without a lot of research money. It's a mad scientist, basically.

And, at the very fringes of science at this time, in the computer vision world, the very smallest, most meager customer were these guys doing this form of AI [artificial intelligence]. And it was an unpopular form of AI that did something called a 'neural net,' which simulated the firing of the neurons in the human brain. I have the 2011 Artificial Intelligence textbook by Russell and Norvig on my shelf. It's about 1100 pages long. Of those 1100 pages, about 16 total are devoted to neural nets; and that was the state of the art in 2011. This was a dead technology. Nobody believed in neural nets; and these guys were fringe mad scientists working on the absolute limits of computer science.

But Jensen had built them this tool. And around 2010, 2011, and 2012, the mad scientists get ahold of two GPUs--two NVIDIA graphics cards. Total costs about $1,000. And they use CUDA, this platform, to jerry-rig [?jerry-build? jury-rig?] a supercomputer; they start simulating the neurons of the human brain on this, like, tiny home-brew supercomputer. And, they usher in a scientific revolution, because as it turns out, the thing that the neural nets were missing was just firepower: they were just missing computing power. And, when you unite these two technologies, you have an extraordinary breakthrough that was known as AlexNet, where suddenly computers which had struggled to label images--this computer vision program--suddenly computers can see, and they can identify images correctly with an unprecedented level of accuracy, on basically the cheapest commodity--not commodity, but cheap hardware that you can just buy at Best Buy. You can have a revolution in computer science: you don't need a supercomputer. And, this inaugurates the third phase of NVIDIA, which is the AI phase.

Now, up until this time, NVIDIA had actually been struggling. If you look at the period from 2001 to, say, 2012 or 2013, NVIDIA's stock goes nowhere. And in fact, Jensen was not well-regarded. There were activist investors taking positions in NVIDIA demanding change. It had a stagnant company; they were having to reform the Board. And the reason was: this super-computing effort--this platform--Wall Street did not believe in it. It was the zero billion dollar market. Jensen was spending a billion dollars plus in research money a year to pursue what looked like these marginal weirdos, weird customers and weird ideas. Right?

I can't express to you how fringe these AI guys were. They were not popular. Even in the AI community, they weren't popular. And, AI itself was viewed as a career graveyard at that time. I mean, you went into AI because you wanted to be a research academic. You didn't start a company. The amount of total venture capital investment in 2010 into AI was closer to zero than any other meaningful number.

But, they had this breakthrough, and it started to build the modern world, inaugurating Phase Three of NVIDIA, which basically was a rocket ship to planet money. It was just a galaxy made of money, as it turns out. I guess we'll get into that.

Stephen Witt: Well, I think they built the modern world. I mostly reject the narrative that they got lucky.

I mean, yeah, they didn't identify AI as their big customers when they were building CUDA. But they were very deliberately trying to unlock new branches of science. I mean, that's why you do this, right? Maybe you can't predict in advance exactly which new branch of science that you're going to unlock, but they were certainly trying to unlock some kind of scientific revolution with the understanding that, when that happens, now you can build a whole platform around that, and you can build a whole ecosystem.

You know, it wasn't a charity. From the start, they were engineering what they called vendor lock into the parallel computing platform, into the CUDA system. Once you learned how to do science on a GPU, you were basically locked into this relatively expensive--actually quite expensive--hardware upgrade ladder, basically forever.

And, that had long been true of the gamers. NVIDIA had always been good at going into the video game companies, and even, like, having a guy kind of embedded in the video game company, helping the game developers optimize their game for NVIDIA hardware. So that, when it came out, all the gamer, they could put, run this on an NVIDIA chip, that's the best platform for this particular game, and all the gamers would go out and spend $1,000 on NVIDIA hardware.

And then, they did the same for scientists. And, as the AI kind-of revolution started, all of the science grew--the entire ecosystem grew--around this particular chip, right down to the guts of the machine.

They'd struggled a bit, actually, getting scientists to use CUDA sometimes, because they would already have their own programs. And, the scientists would be, like, 'What do you mean? I got to refactor a million lines of code to do weather forecasting on a GPU? I'm not going to do that. It's going to take forever. It's going to take years. I don't want to do that.'

But with AI, there was nothing to refactor. There was nothing to rewrite. It was being built from scratch around this platform, right? It was good, actually, that it was kind of a backwater, because that meant they could just rebuild everything and build it for the first time, that is, from scratch. And so, that turned out to be enormously profitable.

Now, along the way, two things happened that really turbocharged NVIDIA. One is--and this came as a shock to a lot of people--AI is a brute force problem. It's basically linear. The more computing power you throw at the computer, the smarter it gets. And, the demand for AI is functionally unlimited. Why would you not want something more intelligent? You're never satisfied. You always want a more intelligent system. So, the smarter the computer gets, kind of counterintuitively actually increases demand as new potential applications are unlocked.

The second thing that really helped NVIDIA was: In 2017 at Google, they introduced a new deep-learning or AI-kind-of architecture--a new blueprint for AI--called a 'transformer,' which was basically a funnel that took massive, massive amounts of data and distilled intelligence from it.

The best-known transformer model is the Generalized Pre-trained Transformer or GPT--ChatGPT, that's where that comes from.

Now, this is great for NVIDIA that this works because it really turns AI into heavy industry, basically. Giant barns called data centers, giant warehouses that have to be full of NVIDIA equipment running 24/7, around the clock, to distill intelligence, to distill insights from massive, massive, massive amounts of data. It's almost like an oil refinery or something: it's like this big heavy industry project. And, for NVIDIA, this is the best thing that can ever happen because it 100 or even 1,000xs the demand for their microchips.

And so, this is the point at which NVIDIA, which had actually been doing well already based on the computer vision results, starts to really rocket from being $5, $10 billion market capitalization to $500 billion, and then ultimately $5 trillion. Jensen calls these data centers AI factories, where data goes in and intelligence comes out.

Stephen Witt: Yep. So, why can't we just use an AMD [Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.] chip? Well, we can.

Stephen Witt: AMD is one of NVIDIA's rivals.

Stephen Witt: Why can't we just use an AMD or[?] chip? You can, but then you have to go back into the guts of your AI code and rewrite a whole bunch of code, re-factor a whole bunch of code. And, people who have worked with AMD chips just will straight up tell you they're not as good. And their software, in particular, is just not as good as NVIDIA software. It's harder to get those chips to do what you want.

Now, there is competition today. Google has something called the Tensor Processing Unit, the TPU, and a lot of AI developers are now also using that. But, at least for a long time, NVIDIA was really the only game in town. I mean, this is the genius of the zero billion dollar market. Who is going to be crazy enough to spend $10 billion--this is how much it costs, $10 billion--building a science platform that a handful of people are going to use?

I mean, early in the days of CUDA, they wanted to use it for medical tomography, which is like cancer imaging, and Jensen built this giant contraption that cost a couple million dollars, and it had two customers, total. Two doctors used it, at first. So, it doesn't seem to make sense.

But the logic is--the kind of the genius of it--is that if you can get that to work and you can unlock new uses, then when it does succeed, no one else has been crazy enough to follow you, and you're the only person around, and you're alone to enjoy the benefits.

Jensen is--he won the knife fight. He won the 30-to-40 person competition. But it scarred him, and he never wanted to do it again. And, for the rest of his career, he would always steer away from knife fights. He would always steer away from these kind of battle royale marketplaces with 30 companies in it, into weird, kind of niche applications that looked small and didn't apparently seem profitable, at least at first. But, if you had the vision to think, 'Well, what would this industry look like if I gave them a million times more computing power? How might it grow?' Then you can be alone to do it.

The profits that NVIDIA has earned--their gross margin--is so high that it's like throwing chum in the water: like, sharks come after you. It just creates a feeding frenzy. And so, today, there actually is a lot of competition. But they're five or 10 years behind. The problems they face today are the problems that NVIDIA solved five to 10 years ago.

Stephen Witt: Yeah. The motto for a long time was, 'NVIDIA is 30 days from going out of business.' In the early days, that was actually literally true a couple of times.

Stephen Witt: Okay. I'd love to hear your take on it, too, because I'm obsessed with Christensen.

So, to begin with, I think this is where we get the term 'disruption.' This is sort of--Clayton coined this term. Now, that term has grown meaningless through overuse: it's become a buzzword. But, if you read the source material, disruptive companies were not necessarily high-tech. In fact, one of the canonical examples from the book was a Honda motorcycle, a dirt bike that Honda introduced into the U.S. market in the 1960s, early 1960s. Now, this was a low-margin product for a limited number of customers. Basically, they were selling dirt bikes to off-roading enthusiasts. That's not a big market on its own. It doesn't make a lot of money. You can't sell the dirt bike for--your customers don't have that much money.

And, GM [General Motors] looked at the dirt bike market, and they were selling Cadillacs, and they said, 'Well, why would we move into a low-margin product with a limited customer base? That doesn't make any sense. We're just going to sell Cadillacs to businessmen and make 10x per unit; then we wouldn't be selling a dirt bike. If we went into this business, actually our profit margins would go down, and we would have to draw capital away from our best customers to serve our most meager customers. So, we're not going to do that.'

Well, I think you know what happened with Honda. They came to dominate the U.S. dirt bike market. They leveraged that expertise to build a compact car, and they raided the automotive industry from below. And, ultimately, they were a huge threat to GM.

And so, Christensen's conclusion from all from this--and many, many similar experiences in the corporate world--was that this was a chronic error that managers made. And, this is the secret of The Innovator's Dilemma, I would say. It's not really a manual for startups on how to succeed. It's actually a counter-insurgency manual for decision makers in established firms to avoid getting raided by these low-cost players.

And, there's a line explicitly in The Innovator's Dilemma that I highlighted because I was so shocked by it, but basically the line--I'm paraphrasing--but it's roughly: There are times when it is correct to ignore high margin opportunities and pursue low margin ones. And, there are times when it is correct to ignore large customer bases and pursue small, niche customer bases. And then, he makes the point that is especially true when the innovation seems to be not high-input or high-tech, but basically bootlegged solutions to existing problems.

All of that is the NVIDIA story. Right? All of that is the story of using video game cards, bootlegging them for a different purpose. All of that is a low margin, niche customer that NVIDIA pursued. Jensen used to assign The Innovator's Dilemma to all of his executives, and he actually hired Christensen as a consultant at some point.

Now, knowing all that, when I asked Jensen about Christensen, he was, like, 'Yeah, I mean, you have to read that book and absorb his lessons. But there's much, much more to it than that. And there's even certain ways in which Christensen was wrong.' And, when I asked him what those were, he refused to tell me that. So, he knows something we don't, and I think it shows in their market capitalization. And perhaps someday he will write his own business book--his own business philosophy. But, again, I would be a little careful about it because, as I said at the beginning, Jensen does have a tendency to retcon the past to fit his current operating philosophy.

Also, many of his advice, according to him, is kind of internally contradictory. Even, like, in the same sentence. One person compared it to, like, if he wrote a book, it would be a book of Zen koans--like these kind of frank, single-sentence statements that are profound, but take some unpacking.

I think it's often that way in business. I think it's often the case that there's kind of your lowest margin, zero billion customer can be your best customer. I mean, that would be one of Jensen's koans. How is that true? And, you have to think through it to see how it might be true.

What's your take, though? How is your take different on Christensen? I should say, I'm obsessed with Christensen.

Stephen Witt: Yeah. I mean, I think that's right.

I mean, the other thing that makes it tough is, and this is really the hard part about The Innovator's Dilemma. It's even why you can read the book, absorb its lessons, and still actually fail--

Stephen Witt: When you want to go, especially if you're a publicly traded company, into a low-margin business that is not going to promise returns anytime soon, your investors will start screaming at you. When you want to pivot, if you're selling a high margin product--

Stephen Witt: and you take the money that you earn from that and plow it into what is essentially an experimental low-margin product without a lot of customers, you will hear about it from Wall Street; and you will hear that you are an idiot.

And in fact, Wall Street did not like what NVIDIA was doing. Jensen really had to fight not just his competitors, but his own investors, and even often his own customers, to do this. Right? Because, the cashflow that's going into the scientific computing market, that's coming from the video gamers. You're having to charge the gamers more to do this science project that won't benefit them directly. So, it's hard. Your investors and customers don't like it.

And, this was, I think, Christensen's, to me, his most profound insight. That's why it's hard.

Actually, when he interviewed managers at top firms in the 1980s, he was like, 'Actually, a lot of these guys understood this already. They actually saw the problem already.' But they were bound--they couldn't convince managers and investors to go along. And this is actually what cratered Intel. If you go into Intel and talk to people, they actually, many of them, will tell you--I mean, who knows, maybe they're covering their own butts--but they will tell you they saw it coming.

And, in fact, Intel did have its own parallel computing GPU initiative in the mid-2000s, because they saw what was coming with NVIDIA. They saw the value of the platform that Jensen was building. But, Intel had huge profits and was one of the largest companies on the planet. And, to pursue this market would mean lowering Intel's profit margins, which--investors just don't like it. They just look at those numbers, and they're, like, 'I just don't like it. Sorry, your profit margins went down. I'm selling the stock.' And, you get calls about it in a conference call, and if you can't explain or articulate to a stable group of investors why you're doing this, why you're spending $10 billion dollars pursuing a market that has fewer than $1 billion dollars in revenue each year, it's very, very, very hard to do. In a sense, Jensen's success is that he was able to ignore his investors, right? It's not easy to do.

Stephen Witt: Well, two things. First, it's true that Jensen is not nearly as well known as some other Silicon Valley figures. Until you go to China; until you go to Asia. He is as popular in Asia as Steve Jobs was at the peak of Apple. He is a household name: everyone knows who he is. He's a celebrity; people follow him down the street; he needs security. His face is everywhere; he's incredibly famous in Asia. So, it depends on where you are in the world.

Having said that, what makes Jensen different? Well, first of all, no one ever--it's funny how rare people will just come out and say this, but Jensen is just smarter than almost anyone. His IQ [intelligence quotient] is through the roof. His ability to absorb, synthesize, and use new information is almost--it's uncanny how fast he can do that. When he was a kid, he started playing table tennis. He was, like, 15 years old; he had no background in the sport, and within six months, he was nationally ranked. Not a lot of people can do that. And that is true in almost any field that he enters.

If we all started, I don't know, taking trombone lessons this week--I don't play the trombone; I assume you don't either; maybe, probably not. And, we did that for six months, and we all put in the same amount of effort. By the end of those six months--well, first of all, Jensen would have practiced the trombone for 12 hours a day while we were doing eight, at best. And, he also learns faster, so by the end of those six months, Jensen would be the best trombone player among us. And, I'm not just saying that: there's multiple times in his career where basically that exact thing has happened. He's had to rapidly learn some new field, and within a few months is actually a domain expert. So, that's very hard to do.

I mean, I asked Morris Chang, the CEO of TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company], the big Taiwanese manufacturer of microchips, what made Jensen different. And, Morris Chang is 92 years old now, so he doesn't have that much time to talk about stuff. He just waved his hand at me right away; he's, like, 'He's just smarter than everyone else.' I mean, that was just his takeaway: He's just smarter than everyone else.

I think on top of that, he is very adaptable. So, he can use his intelligence to repurpose his company--and even himself--to the task at hand. He thinks like an engineer: it's all inputs and outputs.

So, I'll give you the most recent example. Everyone at Silicon Valley is trying to get Donald Trump to do what they desire, what they want. Some of them are successful; some of them are not so successful. The most successful so far has been Jensen. He has appeared in public with Trump seven times in the past year. He has gotten everything he needs from the Trump Administration. Now, Jensen is not a political creature by nature; he has not historically had any involvement with politics at all. In fact, I said that in my book, I published it; and then instantly he pivoted and proved me wrong by befriending Donald Trump.

But, what Jensen is going to do is he is going to approach Donald Trump just like he would any other problem, as an engineering problem. He's going to study the inputs and outputs of Donald Trump. He's going to say, 'When I give this input to Trump, this happens. When I give this one, this happens. When I modify my inputs just enough, I get what I want as an output from Trump, which might be him lifting sales restrictions on China, not putting tariffs on Taiwanese products, or allowing me to get a lot of H-1B visas from my workers in Silicon Valley.' All of which are sort of against what you would think Trump would want, right? Trump would seem to want to limit the sale of microchips to China, would seem to want to put tariffs on Taiwan, and would seem to want to stop visas in the United States--but Jensen gets all those three things from. And, this is not a problem that Jensen had ever faced before. He just learned how to do it faster and better than any other Silicon Valley exec. So, he has this remarkable adaptability that I think he really can change himself to the moment at hand.

I think the other thing that Jensen now has, that none of the other Silicon Valley guys have, is 30 years in the chair. He is a wizened elder of Silicon Valley. He has been in the CEO spot for 30 straight years. He is the single longest-serving CEO in the entire S&P 500 [Standard and Poor's 500] tech sector. And so, I think that means that he has seen it all, now; and he can use his accumulated intelligence, his work ethic, his adaptability, and his wisdom to succeed.

Now, as you say, he berates employees, too. That part, it's controversial. He can be a really rough leader. He screams at people. He screamed at me. His point of view is, some people are, like, well, listen, you look at a great sports coach, a great military general. They're not trying to be your best friend, and sometimes they will yell at you to get the best out of you. And so, Jensen is just doing the same thing within his company. One guy said, 'He's not the only S&P 500 CEO to scream at his employees.' Maybe that's all true. But, when I witnessed it firsthand, I must say, it did seem a little self-indulgent. I question whether this is necessarily a broadly repeatable management lesson or a quirk of Jensen's personality.

Stephen Witt: Yeah, I mean, it's a combination of religious leaders do often use this approach, especially the cult leaders, right? You both love the guy and you're afraid of him. And, what this does is it means that you're so eager to please the guy, and you're so scared of displeasing him, that you basically organize your life around the principles that he tells you of what to do. And Jensen very much has that.

I say in the book, he's like a prophet. He's like a prophet, and it's true. He makes predictions about the future. The difference is: Everything he says comes true. And, when the things that he says comes true, everyone in the room gets to add a zero to their net worth. So, you follow this prophet, you would have done well. He has led you to the promised land for real. So, I think that's part of it.

I think the other thing is: this is a demanding industry. It's a hardware industry. Things have to be on time; they have to be on deadline. You know, I have worked in a newsroom for a lot of my life. If you have a hard deadline to get something in and it looks like you're going to miss it, you are going to hear about it, vocally, from the editor. And, the editor is under tremendous pressure to get the thing out on time.

At NVIDIA, the deadlines are tight; the schedules are tight. They can't delay the product; it must come out; it must come out on time. And that can lead to screaming. You watch the basketball game, coaches screaming at the players often. In a war, the captain, the lieutenants screaming at the soldiers. It is an actually effective way to lead people. It's unpleasant. I mean, I've been screamed at for being late on a deadline. It's not a pleasant experience. And, often, it's just almost human. It's inevitable when you're under stress, under tight pressure to deliver this stuff. As NVIDIA has grown and Jensen has succeeded, I think it has gotten a little self-indulgent.

Stephen Witt: I think a Bobby Knight couldn't exist today. Gregg Popovich yells a lot. Well, J.B. Bickerstaff yells quite a lot. And this is still the case--I don't think they're choking players anymore; Bobby Knight was a little extreme. Even in his day, he was viewed as very extreme. And, it probably wouldn't be tolerated now, but it's still there, I think, for a lot of these guys.

And, especially--this is the thing about NVIDIA. It's not Google. There's not a ball pit in the office. There's not a rock climbing gym in the office--his kind of touchy, or feely, or fun, creative software stuff. That's not the vibe at NVIDIA. The vibe is: We need the microchip yesterday. It's late; it's late. We're late turning it in, and our competitors are going to catch us and destroy us if we don't produce this thing on deadline, on time to the best of our capability. There's a sense that you're just constantly, constantly falling behind. And, Jensen inculcates that desperation, that sense of fear, and that sense of almost near-panic every day.

Stephen Witt: They build all of the world's most advanced microchips in Taiwan. It is a global manufacturing choke point. When they had to shut down their facilities for a little while during COVID [Coronavirus Disease], the entire world economy ground to a halt, basically. You couldn't get a new car because the microchips that you needed for the car weren't being produced on the line in Taiwan.

So it's vitally important that this place stays open. And that's on purpose. Morris Chang built that to build what he called the Silicon Shield surrounding Taiwan, where, if China invaded, they would cause the world economy to crash because it made it more painful for China to possess Taiwan.

In terms of geographic importance, it would be similar to the Saudi oil fields. That's basically the similar contribution. You can imagine, the Saudi oil fields went offline for a few years. That's what would happen if Taiwan went offline. And, it probably would go online even if China did manage to seize Taiwan; they probably would just blow up the factory, to be honest with you. It's not clear that China would ever come into possession of this. But it would cause the world economy to crash.

You mentioned Iran, and I won't go too much into it, but I saw yesterday that for the first time since 1945, the United States had used a torpedo to sink a warship. Naval conflict, first time since 1945. Now, perhaps the United States has some kind of limited strategic or tactical goal in sinking that boat, but to me it's a signal. It's a signal to China--

Stephen Witt: We're going to sink your boats, and we can do it.

So, if China wants to invade Taiwan--you know, we talk about this a lot, but people don't discuss the details. It would be the largest amphibious invasion in human history. It would make D-Day look small. I mean, they would need four or five times the number of boats and people to get across the channel to Taiwan. And it's a longer trip, too. And patrolling that trip, in very short order, there's going to be a bunch of autonomous submarines with the capability of sinking the transport boats. So, to me, this boat-sinking, I don't think it achieves any obvious strategic or tactical goal inside of Iran right now. I think it's a signal. It's just my opinion, but as I look at this, that's what it looks like to me.

Stephen Witt: Two ways to think about this. One is the economic approach. And, if we use the classic tools of economics to analyze AI, it is fantastic. Things look great. This is another tool that humans get to use to improve global productivity, cure disease, accomplish all sorts of new things, make our lives better. Full stop, that's the end of that. It's just better.

The other way to think about it is the biological way. And what happens in biology is new systems or animals or biological entities emerge, and then they destroy everything that's there, and they rebuild the world on their own image. And that's what happened when the human brain came online. The ecosystem of our planet has been transformed. There's more animals in captivity that we use for farming on earth's surface by a factor of 100 than there are wild animals. Now: we remade the earth in our image, what we wanted it to be. Is the neural net a productive economic tool, or is it the next phase of biology? I think where you land on that question informs your sensibility about what's to come.

For Jensen and company, it may be biologically inspired. In fact, it is biomimicry--that's what it is. But, it's not, in and of itself, biology; and therefore it's an economic tool that we can use to enrich ourselves.

Some of the other pioneers I talked to see it more like a biological revolution. And, those can be very dangerous. Life on earth has undergone multiple times where new organisms emerged. There was no oxygen on earth two billion years ago. And then, algae showed up, and they oxygenated the earth. Sounds great for us, but it killed almost everything alive. When the land bridge was connected with Asia and the Bering Strait, and these big cats, these predators, came over, they killed almost everything that was existing in North America at that time. And again, when humans came, they killed multiple categories of large animals. It wiped them off the map.

A biological revolution can be dangerous if you're on the wrong side of it, and these systems are inspired by biology. Whether or not they can evolve into kind of self-perpetuating organisms with their own will and their own desire to survive, I think will determine whether or not we live in the flourishing utopian world of economics, or the more dangerous world of biology.

Stephen Witt: Thank you so much, Russ.

Stewart Brand: Well, thank you. Nice to be here.

Stewart Brand: When you get to be 87 like I am, I think you'll find that the biggest maintenance item is your health.

Stewart Brand: And, when I was a young hippie, we all lived in the moment. And it took us a while to figure out that you had to do things like change the oil even if you didn't feel like it. So, there's the discipline about maintenance, I think, that emerges. And, some people find a way to make it kind of a enjoyable ritual.

Stewart Brand: I had boats, sailboats, a lot, and motorboats. And, as has been said, messing about with boats is a pleasure in its own right. I think people who have guns enjoy cleaning it and oiling it. And people who have motorcycles--I have a friend who had a Harley Davidson when he was growing up, and every Christmas he took it all the way apart, all the way down to the last washer and screw, or bolt. And, then he put it back together again, and it was like he was putting his life together.

Stewart Brand: No, I'm a terrible maintainer. I do not maintain well. And, I think it goes along with being an optimist. And, I have this sort of probably Platoist, essential sense of things. And, in Plato's world, things never need maintenance: they're all so essency, they stand and live by themselves.

And, pessimists--well, I mean, the truth is that good maintainers are basically realists, which probably looks to other people like pessimism, because they look at their motorcycle, and they're looking for signs of oil leaks. They're wondering if they need to adjust this, that, or the other thing. Of course, but that was the old combustion engine motorcycles. The new ones that are electric have almost no moving parts, no fluids worth mentioning, and maintenance on them is almost non-existent.

Stewart Brand: Wow--

Stewart Brand: Wow--

Stewart Brand: Well, I think your computer--you probably do a certain amount of computer hygiene on there to keep things basically updated and try to get rid of things that are cluttering the world there. And so, as we move into more and more of the digital way of life, discovering other kinds of maintenance that need to happen, I think one of the potential great things that'll come from AI [artificial intelligence] being applied is--software people refer to boring maintenance, which they have to do all the time, with back-end and sometimes the front end of software. They refer to it as toil. And, they're always trying to automate basically out in front of it to see everything that's about to fail, and have the software just notice that and put in the fix.

I think that AI is going to help a lot with that, but then we'll be in this weird circumstance of: we're going to spend more and more of our life arguing with robots. These things have automatic procedures based on somebody else's idea of what will be obvious and not obvious when you're messing with it. And, you have to figure out what they thought you should behave like now to do that. And so, there's a lot of this kind of guessing into what the AI is up to, because it's not quite human. It just--it talks human, but it's not human.

Stewart Brand: Good word.

Stewart Brand: Well, the thermostat is all the way down. And, governors on steam engines, and a lot of things which take care of keeping something in proper running mode, and it's [?] to circumstances: the temperature goes down in the room, and the furnace turns on or whatever. So, we've been dealing with this kind of thing a long time. And it's just--part of being alive is being in communication with the systems we rely on. And, as time goes by and civilization gets ever more complex and rich and interesting and great, it has plenty of things to have to figure out how you deal with it.

And, this is why I think YouTube is such a breakthrough for people, that: when you're mystified by something, you put in a couple of words--the make and model of the thing, and then the way you think it's broken, and look around on YouTube. And pretty soon you find somebody who is ready to help you--show you how to actually make that fix or do that maintenance, or understand the basic functioning of how the thing that you're feeling is too mysterious to either understand or fix. You understand it, and you fix it. It's fantastic.

Stewart Brand: Oh, my goodness--

Stewart Brand: Yeah, that used to be the case. And, one of the things that was interesting about the hippie generation that I was part of, is: not only were we deciding to pay little attention--or just respectful attention--to our parents, we were doing that to experts of every kind. And even neighbors. And, this is sort of what made the Whole Earth Catalog succeed, in a way. Most of the stuff that was in the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1960s was books, how-to books. And, hippies ate that stuff up. We got the Idiot's Guide to Fixing Your Volkswagen, and went through the step-by-step process that was in there, and actually learned how to fix our Volkswagens. But, we didn't learn it from a mechanic. We learned it from a book that a mechanic wrote.

Stewart Brand: You are the true economist in this interview; I love that--

Stewart Brand: You figured out what 5,000 pounds would do--

Stewart Brand: in 1968.

Stewart Brand: Oh, okay, nonetheless.

Stewart Brand: Oh, yeah--

Stewart Brand: Yep.

Stewart Brand: Yeah. Yeah, so you had three people that had books written by them or about them: Donald Crowhurst and Bernard Moitessier, a sailor I knew a little bit when he lived on his boat in Sausalito, California. And, Robin Knox-Johnston was a young guy who was 29. He had a--

Stewart Brand: Yeah. And, he had a pretty short sailboat, 20-some feet, that--and it went slower than the other boats because of that. But, he had sailed it from India to England with friends, and he felt he knew it very well. And, he'd been trained by the Merchant Marine in doing maintenance. And so, he felt that even though it was a wooden boat and wouldn't go fast, nevertheless, it was what he had, and he would make do. And, man, as he said.

Donald Crowhurst entered the race very late and thought that he was so smart that he would use a new kind of sailboat called the Trimaran, which was a central hull with two big sides on it that reach out. And so, it doesn't tip over. Except that when it does tip over, it turns upside down, so you can't right it up. But, it's much faster because it doesn't go deep in the water; there's not a lot of friction.

And then, third, Bernard Moitessier had done actually some of the longest sailing of anyone, including in the Southern Ocean, which is violent. And so, he had a steel boat made, and it was fast, and it was solid, and it was simple.

So, Donald Crowhurst tried to take care of everything with cleverness. And, he actually hated doing maintenance. He called it sailorizing. And shirked it quite a lot. And, pretty quickly he discovered that his boat had been built so hastily that it was going to fall apart if he went into the Southern Ocean. And, nevertheless, it had a big opening in one of the pontoons. And so he started cheating by going ashore and pretending to be somebody else, and getting it fixed, and then going back out.

And, the radio at that time--these guys, in 1968, it was pretty primitive. They were basically sailing the way ancestors had for a hundred-some years at that point. Which was: you made your own weather forecast, based on what you were seeing with the clouds and the wind and the swell and that sort of thing. And, you're in the Southern Ocean, which means ferocious storms from time to time and the wind blasting from the west all the time.

So, Crowhurst loved his radios, and he figured out a way to pretend to be going around the world--the signals, basically the telegrams that he was sending back. And, meanwhile, he never left The Atlantic Ocean. By the time it was getting toward the end of the race, he realized that he wasn't going to get away with it. People were going to discover it. It would be a horrible scandal. He would have failed his family, there wouldn't be any money, there'd be lots of blame. And, he committed suicide. Went off the boat. And, there's a boat called--

Stewart Brand: Yeah, yeah. He went crazy. And for 10 days he was imagining that he could stipulate reality, and he came up with a whole theory of how Einstein and him were smart enough to be able to stipulate reality. And, that lasted just the 10 intense days, and he realized it wasn't going to work, and game over. And, as I said, he crossed his own finish line into the ocean, and he never did leave the Atlantic Ocean.

So, that was a terrible maintainer, to put it mildly.

Bernard Moitessier had done so much sailing, he was older than many of the other competitors, and he designed his boat to not need much maintenance, and to be easy to maintain.

And, for example, he had steps that went up the mast. So, if he needed to do something at the top of the mast, which you do when you're at sea for a long time under dire circumstances, he'd just go straight up. Whereas Knox-Johnston had a Bosun's Chair where he would try to haul himself up, and you could only do that in a dead calm. He tried it one time when it was violent, and he almost got killed.

So, the way things wound up is that Bernard Moitessier loved being a sea alone, sailing fast. He just loved it. And, by the time he was rounding the bottom of South America and heading back toward England, he decided not--and he was going to win, he was probably going to win both prizes.

Stewart Brand: He was going to be first and [inaudible 00:22:42].

Stewart Brand: Yep. So, that's what everybody was expecting he would do. France was going to have a fleet of naval vessels come and meet him, take him home to France. He was going to get the Legion of Honor. But, Moitessier really dreaded all of that, and he hated it. All of that fuss and stuff. He was loving what he was doing so much, that he just decided to keep going. And, he had lived in Tahiti before, so he's 'What the hell? Just keep going.' Alone, without living up on all the rules. And, he went on to Tahiti; so he sailed and he decided not to finish.

And, he wrote a beautiful book called The Long Way, that--Knox-Johnston's book was A World of My Own. The one about Robin Crowhurst was The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. And, that was where they basically examined his log books, and the sailboat was intact. So, all of the bad maintenance was clearly visible, and so on.

There are three great stories, and they come together in a way that I'm saying basically it wasn't just will. It was maintenance styles that differentiated these three.

And, Robin Knox-Johnston's was, 'Whatever comes, deal with it.' And, he was incredibly resourceful at dealing with problems. Well, Donald Crowhurst--

Stewart Brand: Yep. Yeah, he would do a thing, like, he needed to solder a joint. But he'd completely equipped the boat, but he didn't have any solder. But he had some extra bulbs that he carefully disassembled, and little tiny dots of solder were in there. And, he collected those enough and found a way to heat it and melt it and resolder that connection. And, that was classic Robin Knox-Johnston.

He was later knighted, of course, by the Queen: Sir Robin. So, his was making [inaudible 00:25:48] and whatever comes, deal with it.

The stance of the optimist--the kind of the pathological optimist of Donald Crowhurst--was 'Hope for the best.'

And, it killed him. It led to the cheat, and the cheat killed him.

Bernard Moitessier was: 'Prepare for the worst,' and in my view, it freed him. That gave him the sense that--so even in a storm, and there were plenty of them, he got knocked down, capsized several times--but he was relatively relaxed about it because even though single-handing through a storm is extremely tiring, he didn't worry about his equipment failing, because he built it very strong in the first place and then maintained it daily. What he told me when I talked to him was, I said, 'You have a nice pretty fit sailboat here,' and he said, 'The rule is: New every day.' Basically, a sailboat as if it had just been made.

So, that winds up being the beginning of the book, because it's just this nice, kind of beautifully self-packaged fable to tell. And, the point I'm making at the beginning, the first line of the text of the book, is, 'Probably a great many famous stories can be retold in terms of maintenance. Here's one.' And then, I tell the Golden Globe lobe story.

But, in a way, the whole book is revisiting various famous situations, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Egyptian invasion of the Sinai across the Suez Canal in 1973, or with Israel. In those cases, the army that was better at maintenance prevailed; and militaries are really the place to look for good theory and practice on maintenance. So, Chapter Two of the book was going to be Vehicles, but I had to call it "Vehicles"--parentheses--"(and Weapons)" because I wound up telling a lot of weapons stories.

Stewart Brand: Assault rifle, yeah--

Stewart Brand: It's an incredible example. It made all the difference. Yeah. And so, in firefights, in the Hill fights, the first really bloody combat between the VC [Viet Cong] and American troops and Marines was--I used to be in the army and then taught rifle training, among other things. The AK-47s that the Vietnamese had were incredibly reliable and incredibly easy to clean and fix. When an assault rifle jams, when it jams in the chamber, you can't get it out any other way except running basically a cleaning rod down the barrel from the front and poke it out from inside. You can't claw it out. And so, a number of American soldiers were found dead next to their disassembled M16 trying to get the bullet that had jammed out.

The AK-47 has a cleaning rod mounted right under the barrel. And so, if it jams, you just grab that, run it down--it's the length it needs reach--run it down. And you unjam the rifle and it'll carry on just fine. The American troops eventually--but not at the beginning: they didn't have cleaning rods with them in the field. Then they started to put them into the butt in a little compartment that you would have to open up, take out this folded-up rod. Imagine you're in combat: You're running or you're flat on the ground trying to do all this stuff. Unfold the thing, screw it together, and run it down the barrel.

So, the AK-47 was designed, from the start, to be incredibly reliable. It was going to be used by Russian conscripts, who, many of them couldn't read. There was not going to be much in the way of training. There was not going to be a manual. It had to be pretty obvious how it worked. And so, it was easy to field strip, easy to clean, easy to put back together. And, that was the opposite case for the M16.

Stewart Brand: Yeah. So, in Vietnam, it's a humid environment. They were rusting out pretty quickly. And, it's great out to 500 meters, but generally you can't see 500 meters because you're in jungle. And, things are all up close and personal. Some of the Marines wounded up using their [inaudible 00:33:14] rifles as clubs in hand-to-hand combat in the jungle.

But then again, in Iraq--yeah, you got 500 meters of distance sometimes to the enemy, but the sand and dust gets into everything. And, anything that you oil, the sand gets into it; and then that turns out to be something that abrades the weapon. So, you basically had to keep an M-16 surgically cleaned to really function well.

Stewart Brand: Yeah.

Stewart Brand: Well, remember the Egyptians were equipped and trained by the Russians. And, the Russian army is that equipment and troops are disposable, dispensable; and they don't try to bear down on maintenance. They're often good on maintainability. The AK-47 is a Russian weapon, and the T-55 tanks that they fielded for the Egyptians in that war were pretty solid. I think the most reliably-used tank in the history in the world.

But, you know, it was desert warfare. And it was warfare, and the weapons go down. And, like you say, there was a kind of a--a problem--I love this because one of the things about the American Army and the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Association] militaries is they all have non-commissioned officers--sergeants--that have a lot of power, a lot of respect. They're usually the most experienced person in any unit. The officers respect them, and the troops respect them, and they're the people responsible, really, for maintenance and for teaching, which in a way is how to maintain troops is made in training.

So, the--and, there's pretty good NCOs [non-commissioned officers] in the Israeli army, and they've been training them up in the Ukrainian army, because originally they had a sort of Russian system. But, as they became closer and closer with NATO, they started developing NCO schools.

The Arab armies generally in--the Egyptian ones in particular--have a kind of a caste system where officers see themselves as quite superior to the troops, and they are not hands-on in any respect. They'll proudly never touch anything. And, that's for what troops do. And, indeed, maintenance always is done by the troops.

But, if you don't have officers who connect with that and have NCOs in the middle, which mostly the Arab armies don't, then the whole thing falls apart. And, that turned out to be--in both cases, in Ukraine and in Israel--pretty much the difference between victory and defeat.

Stewart Brand: Wow.

Stewart Brand: Is that right?

Stewart Brand: Wow.

Stewart Brand: Do you have an explanation for that as an economist?

Stewart Brand: Well, I grew up in the Midwest, in Rockford, Illinois. And, serving in the military was kind of a routine thing. This was before the Vietnam War, and so places like Stanford, where I eventually went, had ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corps] programs--Reserve Officer training. And, my older sister had married a West Point officer, tillerman[?]; and my older brother, Mike, at Stanford, I guess, gone to ROTC and then went off to serve for two years active duty. And so, I liked the idea of the military. I love training--and both doing it and especially receiving it. So, I did parachute training and at least part of ranger training. Too cold in the winter: didn't make it through that.

And, being trained as an officer, you basically--it's a skill. And so, you develop a commanding voice, and you expect you to be in charge of something.

And so, when I started things like the Whole Earth Catalog, I wasn't deferential or uncertain about just taking charge and doing it, then being responsible for other people's behavior. And doing the things I've been taught to, and encourage good work and correct bad work.

So, I mean, one of the things you learn in the military is--at least the American military--is commanding people to do a thing doesn't mean it's going to happen. You have to monitor it.

Stewart Brand: And then, after any kind of action, you do an after-action review. Right after, when everybody is still sweaty and wiped out and so on, but everything is fresh in their mind. What went well, what went badly, what are the lessons here, what do we do different next time. This is how you do stuff.

So, among hippies, I and other people I knew, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters had a number of ex-military people in it. Ken Kesey's best friend, Ken Babbs, had been a helicopter pilot and officer in Vietnam. And, he was a easy commander, 'Right, right, right, let's get into this.' It's one of the things you got to learn to do and then take for granted.

Stewart Brand: Well, it was a little--I had, on LSD [Lysergic acid diethylamide] one day in San Francisco and in the spring of 1966, gone up on the roof of the apartment I had lived in North Beach, and with a kind of a low dose--a hundred micrograms--of LSD, and was just watching the afternoon happen, looking at downtown. And I persuaded myself that I could see that the buildings were on a spherical surface and that they actually fanned out a little bit. And then, I imagined myself going further and further out where I could see the curve, and then the curve that closed all the way on itself of the earth.

And, I thought, 'God, we've been in space for 10 years at this point'--which we had. Sputnik was back in 1956. 'Why haven't there been any photographs of the earth as a whole from a distance?' And, I figured, 'Okay, I'm going to make this happen. I'm going to make a button.' And, the button is going to say in mumble, mumble[inaudible 00:46:02] that I wound up with, it said, slightly paranoid question: 'Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?' And, I sent them up to the Politburo and Soviet Union. I sent them to people in American Congress and their secretaries, and I sent them to NASA.

I got to know some of the astronauts later, and I, of course, wondered if any of that had gotten to them. And, Rusty Schweickart was the one I know best, he said, 'Nah, we were surprised that when that photograph was taken--what came to be called Earthrise--that is where the earth comes around the rim of the moon.' And, that photograph of a dead planet in the foreground--the moon--and the clearly living, beautiful, jewel-like, blue-and-white earth from a distance, was just inspiring. And, at the time, environmentalists, which I was one of--I was a biologist by training and an ecologist specifically--they had been completely against the space program. But, my mother had loved it, and so I grew up loving it. And now Earth Day followed immediately after that photograph, the Earth from Space. And, basically the whole environmental movement took off with that photograph. So, the environmentalists fought the wrong thing.

Stewart Brand: Right--

Stewart Brand: Yeah, tools and skills. And, I mean, I was a kid who had grown up, thanks to my father, who was a tinkerer. He was a civil engineer out of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. He had a bench in the basement, and I had a bench in the basement, and I was building Heathkit Radios along with everybody else who wound up doing software. And, that's probably part of why I was comfortable around the beginnings of the personal computers later on.

Stewart Brand: Well, I said at the beginning of it on an opening page, and it wasn't a big issue: 'We are as gods and might as well get good at it.' And by which I meant lowercase gods--just very powerful. We have these amazing tools and capabilities, and they re what would have been seen in earlier times as god-like powers. And so: Step up to it.

Part of the hippie ethic was to back away from it and to be anti-technology. And, once you take the idea of tools seriously--which I picked up from Mr. Fuller--then better tools are of great interest. And better tools are often increasingly high tech. Like, the first calculators and then a programmable calculator, we were pushing those things in the Whole Earth Catalog.

I guess that became part of the bridge for the--part of the counterculture was New Left, which I was not. I spent some time working with them and realized it was self-canceling. So, I was more in the Ken Kesey, Merry Pranksters-version of counterculture. And, what I knew was that the people who were starting communes--and I was involved in several of them--were basically college graduates or college dropouts who had really no idea how anything worked. And so, they were imagining they were going to go back to basics and garden, but they didn't know how to garden. They didn't know how to have bees or how to have goats, or why you might want to do that; or anything. It was just earnest. And ignorant. So, a golden opportunity to come up with a place where, like YouTube now and Whole Earth Catalog then: Here's all the skills you need to do whatever you want.

Stewart Brand: Yeah, yeah--

Stewart Brand: Yep. And, the Model T was a sort of a platform. The Rolls-Royce, you would not tailor it because it was so perfectly assembled and exquisite, that doing the things that it did very well, running very powerfully, but very silently. The Silver Ghost was the name of that earliest one.

And, the Model T was noisy. And it was basically an invitation to--just to get it to function properly, you had to buy some extra things to add in there, and you had to learn how to grease it and how to get it to start. And, everybody knew how to fix--they had to know how to fix--their Model Ts. And so, it was this great common knowledge. And, even if you didn't understand what was going on with a timer or something, somebody else would. And so, everybody did it.

But then, they turned it into tractors. They turned it into boats. They turned it into airplanes.

The basic internal[?] of the Model T was simple enough and fixable enough and adjustable, so you could really adapt it any old which way. And, in a way, that then took off: that basically taught the world that you could buy something and then adjust it to your life, your ideas, your dreams. And it took off. I mean, it made Ford the richest man in the world by quite a long bit.

And, when personal computers came along later, they went through the same process: that individuals were empowered to basically start programming their machine and adjust it to do things that they wanted it to do. When I and others put together a thing called the Hackers Conference in 1984, people had--just individuals--had come up with software that was used by everybody. Because you send software from place to place. And we did.

And, you had this democratically empowering and empowered massive event where everybody had to have a Model T and they could afford it, everybody had to have a personal computer and they could afford it.

And, I dare say that AI is going to be moving in the same direction. I certainly use it for research, Jim and I, three role; and it's brilliant for me. It finds sources that I would never have found on my own. And that's what you're going to see more and more of in the forthcoming sections of Maintenance of Everything.

Stewart Brand: Right--

Stewart Brand: That's an interesting asymmetry there. You're right about that. And, I've always regretted that us hippies were kind of mean to our parents. That was just stupid. And, I can tell you that when hippies reproduced and they had children, they were shocked that their children were just loving and not nasty the way you had been. So, lots of regrets there. But, one generation makes a mistake, and the next generation knows that it was a mistake.

Stewart Brand: Oh no, I greatly agree. And, it's one of the things we do with pets: that is, take on this intimate relation, which has a whole lot to do with taking care of them, feeding them, and taking them to the vet, and so on. And they care back.

Stewart Brand: I have an economic question for you, if you don't mind.

Stewart Brand: I intend to have a lot of stuff on infrastructure in the book later on. And, one of the huge things of mega-structures--here I'm going to draw on the economist at Oxford, who did a book called How Big Things Get Done. And, I got in touch with him [Bent Flyvbjerg--Econlib Ed.] and called him and said, 'Okay, infrastructure maintenance. Tell me how to--I didn't see anything in your books about--you talk about everything is about building well or badly these various mega-structures of infrastructure. And, what about maintenance?' And, he said, 'I can't tell you anything.' And I'm, 'Okay, come on, you've looked at this stuff. You've compared them all over the world. You know all of this inside out,' and kind of angrily, he said, 'I can't tell you anything about maintenance.'

And, apparently what happens is that operations and maintenance are so blended together, definitionally and in economic reporting terms, that the expenditure of time and money and effort and resources into keeping the thing going, versus operating it to make it function for what it was built to do, is not distinguished enough for somebody like him--

Stewart Brand: to do any analysis on it. Can you explain that?

Stewart Brand: Good--

Stewart Brand: It's different than infrastructure. Manufacturing has a whole huge literature on maintenance. They love acronyms. It's all boring; I have not found a good soulful book, but there's no end of textbooks with all of these acronyms, and they always refer to the entity that they're maintaining as 'the asset.' And, they're mostly talking about the machines that they're manufacturing.

And you know, so Honda developing the lean approach to all of that is very well thought out and very influential. And, that is a well-explored and theoretically rich--not soulful yet--but nevertheless, very detailed and a lot of thought is going into it.

So, manufacturing is really aware of all of this. Aerospace is tremendously aware of maintenance, behavior, and cost.

Stewart Brand: With airplanes, obviously, because when they fall out of the sky with people on board, people are really upset and don't want that to happen ever. So, there's a lot of really, really highly disciplined study of maintenance issues in airplanes.

And then, in space, typically you've got something out in space and they've got to fix everything like Robin Knox-Johnston on a sailboat. They got to fix whatever goes wrong with whatever is on board. That's it. Once we get to Mars--and well, just the moon, but then to Mars--there's going to be serious issues like that of how do you--you don't have the tools for the job, but you've got to get this job done. How do you do that?

Likewise, software. They talk about maintenance all of the time. How do you keep the links alive, how do you manage all the dependencies that develop, how do you deal with these different layers? And, AI is getting into the thick of all of that now with coding.

And then, I want to have a chapter on Japan, because Japan is more like infrastructure in the sense that they are insanely good at maintenance. It's hard to find a roof tile in all of the Japan that is broken. The rooves are that well maintained that they're always going to look good. And, there may be something having to do with the shame culture and duty and giri[?Japanese?], and things like that, and always wanting to look good. But, there's more to it than that, and it is kind of hidden.

I could find no Japanese poetry that talks about maintenance. And, in American poetry, you've got Robert Frost, the "Mending Wall": 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' wants it down, so on. And, that winds up being about unnecessary maintenance and he wants it to stop. And, there's in Japan, the Buddhist chop[?] would carry water. But that's it.

And so, these things can be quite hidden. And, I'm pretty sure that taking the look for pattern, inspecting for how does it actually work, how does maintenance separate out from operation of infrastructure, for example. I guess there needs to be another Flyvbjerg-like person who is going to walk into that, because he said he won't: it's too hard.

Stewart Brand: Well, Rights for Repair is a thing going on in the United States and I guess in Europe, and I'm about to write about that, so I've been studying up. And, there's an online version of the book where I put it up for comment and so on, and there's a couple of sections that are not in the print book that are going to be part of Part Two.

And, one of them is the history of blacksmithing, where I wound up discovering that John Deere--the original guy behind the John Deere, company--was a blacksmith, and he invented a slightly better plow back in the days when plows were just taking off in the United States, in the Midwest. And, it turned out to be a fascinating story, and he's one of the great success stories that's seldom told of how to really build a long-lasting company that can scale. And it really scaled. It's still more than 50% of agricultural equipment in the United States and in the world, is from John Deere.

But then, the Right to Repair--so John Deere, the man, was highly dedicated to his customers, and he did everything with his customers and for his customers. And, the company became famous for that: that people would buy John Deere toys for their children because it was that level of dedication. Kind of like Harley Davidson did with motorcycle people. They're willing to tattoo it on their bodies.

But now, in the Right to Repair issue in this century, John Deere is famous and is sort of the poster boy for having your customers fight you and hate you, because the software that's involved in precision agriculture, John Deere wants to totally own in a closed garden; and you are not allowed basically to fix things on your own. You have to do it with a dealer, even though the dealer may be a hundred miles away from where you are in the plains. And, farmers have always fixed their own stuff, so they are offended at all of this.

And, by the way, if you do try to mess with your machine, they cripple it. Through the air. They will make it so that you cannot use that machine in any bigger way than to get it back to the barn. And, people really hate that.

Stewart Brand: The laws are emerging on this. And I looked into: What was the dialogue inside the company as all of this started to break loose in the 2010s and 2020s? Where there are some people saying, 'Oh, we take care of our customers. Let's figure out how to do that.' And, it turns out that nobody was doing that. There was a real argument in the company that was between hard-liners and soft-liners. Soft-liners said, 'Well, what's the minimum we can do that looks like we're okay with getting people to repair stuff, but we don't actually change things?' Or, others saying, 'No, screw them, it's our company, just buy[?] these folks. They're not going to pass laws: they're afraid to do that. We're too big to fail.' All that kind of stuff.

So, that's how something as fundamental as 'how repairable is your stuff by the user?' becomes a fundamental issue in business. And, John Deere has been around for three centuries now, and--it started in the 1800s and it prospered all through the 1900s, and is now in the 2000s--and I don't think it's going to make it through this century with that kind of attitude. What do you think?

Stewart Brand: Yeah, it's huge. It's the most profitable thing they do, is sequestered repair.

Stewart Brand: What do you think the nature of the misunderstanding is?

Stewart Brand: Well, one advantage of being in your 80s is you've seen a lot of things come and go. And, I've seen the personal computer come and not go. I've seen the Internet come and not go. And clearly AI is going to be in that lineage of something that comes and doesn't go away. It will fail in small ways, and that's how you do research. It will fail in big ways, and that's how society comes to decisions on basically how to manage it. And, it will fail in global ways in the sense that, because different parts of the world will have different relationships with their AI, and some may be more military than others, and so on. There's going to be some scary things that no doubt happen. But, that happened with gas, it happened with machine guns, it happened with various kinds of weapons over the--nuclear. And, one figures out a way. I mean, this is pure David Deutsch. Have you had him on the program?

Stewart Brand: The Beginning of Infinity--

Stewart Brand: Yeah, it's basically a cosmic level optimistic perspective that there are always problems. And then, we come up with better explanations that solve a particular problem. But that doesn't mean problems go away. You just have new problems that emerge with this new explanation, this new understanding.

And, that's the engine of progress: is finding ever better explanations for the problems that keep emerging. And, the process comes from actual experience, not imagination, in the sense that--and this is one of the things we learned about technology early on, is everything that came along, some people would say, 'Oh, we can't do that because here's how I imagine things might go wrong.' And, very creative notions sometimes; but irrelevant because that isn't what went wrong. Real stuff went wrong, and then that had to be dealt with.

So, generally the thing you do with any new technology, is embrace it and become comfortable with it, and also become uncomfortable with it, so that you adjust it to fix that aspect.

And then, when things go wrong on a bigger scale, you understand it from inside--from the actual behavior of that sort of tools in the world. And you correct a perceptible mistake, not an imaginary mistake. And, that's the kind of explanations that I think move us forward from problem to problem, from technology to technology.

Stewart Brand: Oh, good. Thank you.

Stewart Brand: Delightful to spend time with you.

Tyler Cowen: Always happy to be here, Russ.

Tyler Cowen: There will be plenty of new jobs under AI. Just look at the energy sector. To the extent AI takes off, we will need much, much more energy. Those jobs require people. It will change where jobs are and what individuals do. Or look at biomedical trials. Again, to the extent AI does well, it will produce all kinds of new and interesting ideas for drugs, medical devices. These will need to be tested. They will need to work their way through the regulatory process.

I also think, somewhat counterintuitively, AI will lead to more lawyers. I'm not sure that is a good thing, but we will need to write a lot of new laws for the AIs.

Now, a big part of me believes the AIs would write those laws better than humans could, but I do not think we will let them do it, rightly or wrongly. So, humans will use AI assistance in drafting those laws. I think lawyers who work in government will be a growth sector for the foreseeable future. So, those are just a few areas.

But as you well know, it can be very hard to predict where future jobs come. If you go back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution and you tell people all these agricultural jobs are going away, would you have two people sitting around the campfire saying, 'Oh, yes, a lot more of us will become podcasters'? Well, no, right? They would have no idea. So, we are in that same position.

I do think there will be more leisure time. And, if that is what one means by fewer work, it is mostly a good thing. It may not be a good thing for everyone, but I think that will be one effect of this. There is already more leisure time because tasks you do at work, the AI can help you with more quickly. It is just not reported to the boss that this is going on.

Tyler Cowen: Well, I would vote for Claude or GPT [Generative Pre-trained Transformer] over most of our current leaders or even people in the regulatory apparatus. But, that is not how it is going to work. It will be used as an aid. The real problem is whether humans will listen to it. I think it gives, on average, better governance answers. It is not exactly my point of view, the different leading models. But again, better than what we typically have in office.

I think in the short run, some governance will be worse. Just imagine the process for regulatory comments being overloaded by high-quality but pointless AI-generated comments. I think we are already seeing this. So, there will be a lot more spam. Any kind of open process that receives input will become overloaded, I think.

Tyler Cowen: There is a lot of different issues wrapped up into that. You said, am I pessimistic at all? The words 'at all' carry a lot of weight there. I can tell you my biggest worry, and that is: AI will change governance in ways that are hard to predict. We have worse political models than economic models in general, no matter what your point of view. And, it is possible governance becomes worse. And, if governance becomes worse, that is bad for the economy. Really, I do not rule that out at all. So, that is a significant worry.

But, in terms of normal economic mechanisms, I expect we will have more wealth. We will not have fewer jobs. Many people at the very bottom will get all kinds of services for free or near free. I do think we will have more billionaires and more mega-billionaires because you will have small numbers of people building these companies that are quite large in revenue terms. That will be easier than it is today. But, those new companies will mean new projects, and that will create many new jobs. And, I do not think we are headed for anything like mass unemployment. Absolutely not. But, that does not mean I have no worries, right? I have plenty of worries.

Tyler Cowen: It is my biggest worry, with or without AI, right? That if politics gets worse, economies become worse also. There are plenty of negative mechanisms operating today. Most of them do not have to do with AI. But, if you add AI into that mix and just see it as a big change where the people in charge may not regulate it well, may not regulate it properly, may not do whatever, it is just so many scenarios where things politically get worse.

And, again, with economics, we have models like price system, Hayek, comparative advantage, Say's Laws, often true, different ways of thinking through how things will go. Politics, I do not think we have very good models. There is median voter theorem, that is worth something, but we do not even know what the median voter wants when it comes to AI.

Tyler Cowen: If you take something like trucking, a trucking job has a lot more to it than just driving. There are all sorts of ways in which you load, unload cargo, and deal with points of contact. I think those changes will come relatively slowly.

When will Tesla be ready to displace Waymo as a truly cheaper alternative with driverless vehicles? Again, I expect that within 10 years, but I do not think it will all happen in two or three months. So, a lot of humans still will want a taxi driver. Tesla and Waymo are not free. Taxi drivers do not earn that much. It is not completely obvious to me what the equilibrium there looks like. I know there is a difference between fixed costs and marginal costs. But, a lot of systems end up having higher marginal costs than you think at first, once you make them universal, and they have to handle all possible problems. So, we will see.

But, jobs have changed over the long sweep of human history. I think they will change somewhat faster this time. I am not that worried about additional leisure time. It is bad for some people. We saw that during COVID [Coronavirus Disease]. But, if you want to work, your chance to control, manipulate, and manage projects will be far, far higher than it ever has been in the past. And, that will keep us busy, whether it is for earning monetary income or not.

Tyler Cowen: Yes. It's fun.

Tyler Cowen: Well, you are not paying the full cost of a Waymo, right?

Tyler Cowen: So, it is subsidized to you. And, people claim the Tesla network will, over time, prove better because it is accumulating data; then the marginal cost of that will be very low. But, as things change on the roads, rules change, I do not know what people expect changes. Maybe we will want people driving vehicles to be performing other services. It will be connected to package delivery. I am not sure, but we shouldn't overpredict the future. And, if that one job truly just totally does go away, I think that will be fine.

Tyler Cowen: Once there are more goods and services, which is what it means to say AI is working, it is relatively hard to get to a conclusion where most people are worse off. The goods and services are sold. If need be, their prices fall. The production, marketing, and distribution of the goods and services generates income of its own. Keynes had this one scenario in mind where you produce more, but it is all hoarded in the form of currency--the liquidity trap. That is not plausible for an AI-enriched world, where there are all these new and fascinating things people want to buy. So, some version of Say's Law is likely to hold. The production of these goods and services generates incomes and incomes for people to buy those same things. So, that is by far the most likely scenario.

Tyler Cowen: Your jobs will be less routine also, right?

Tyler Cowen: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: Many people may prefer routine jobs. That is one worry I have. Another worry I have is it is possible the people who are most displaced will be the upper, upper-middle-class white-collar workers, and they will have to move to Houston and work for energy companies. Which is not the end of the world, but politically, they will hate that. And, rather than being, say, a consulting partner for $1.4 million a year, they will be sent to Houston and they will earn $300,000 a year. And, politically, they are a very influential group. So, I do not know how we survive that, politically. What are they going to vote for? Right?

Tyler Cowen: Those individuals, you could say, in a sense, run the Democratic Party, and they are not going to be happy under a lot of scenarios. So, that gets back to my main worry being the politics.

Tyler Cowen: I agree with that, but I think they could do that with, say, a third of their current employees.

Tyler Cowen: And, I think in the short run, there will be a boom in consulting because everyone needs consultants to tell them how to integrate AI into their workflows, though the consultants themselves may not know how to do that. But, in the medium term, I do think the demand for consulting services will be down.

Tyler Cowen: Those are polite words, but yes.

Tyler Cowen: Or a third of total course-time. But, yes.

Tyler Cowen: Well, almost every job in the future will involve knowing how to use AI well. In most schools, that isn't taught at all in any formal sense. Particular professors might teach it, as indeed I do.

So, I think what we should do is devote a significant part of the curriculum to a skill everyone will need, and right now is quite scarce. And keep in mind, when you are teaching people how to use AI well, it's not at the expense of teaching them other things. So, you can teach them, 'Here is how to use AI to better read and understand Homer's Odyssey,' and you are teaching them Homer's Odyssey at the same time. But you are teaching them the combination of Homer's Odyssey and AI.

So, to take a third of curriculum time and devote it to AI, you are not pushing out other things very much. You may, in fact, be enhancing them. Everyone will be learning better.

The main problem is our own faculty do not know how to do this. And our administrators, probably even less so. So, who is going to do the teaching? The students? You could have the students maybe teach the professors because the students probably have been using it to cheat.

Tyler Cowen: It depends what the area is. Right now, you might be teaching people something like Codex--how to use AI to program better. And programming will do your tasks. But, for some of the humanities, it is just how to write a better prompt. So, if you are asking it questions about Homer's Odyssey, how do you ensure you get the best possible answers, the smartest answers? Which advanced model should you ask? Whatever it is you need to know. But over time, less and less of it will be about prompting. Good prompting will occur automatically. People will learn that pretty quickly.

Tyler Cowen: Sure. Just telling people they need to use it. But, if Biology is the class, how to integrate AI systems into a lab would be the thing to be taught. Again, I fully recognize there is no one there to teach it yet, but that is what you will need to know. So, why should not we just be teaching people what they need to know and have that as our goal?

Tyler Cowen: But there's other questions one might have about Homer's Odyssey. So, to teach people how to ask better questions is an unending task.

So, for instance, you probably know much more ancient history than what the students would, reading Homer's Odyssey. You live near the Mediterranean. But, just what are the questions about the historic era of Homer that one should ask? Was it composed orally? How was it passed down? What was the role of oxen in these economies? What did they use for money? What do we know about whether these events really happened?

Maybe it's trivial to you to know to ask those questions. You have been podcasting--how many episodes?

Tyler Cowen: A lot. But, other people need to learn how to ask questions better. That is why we are not all podcasters.

Tyler Cowen: Or if someone said--let's say it is an archeology class--not a classics or literature class--and then you want to have good questions to ask about Homer's Odyssey. I am not even sure that you and I would have the best questions.

Tyler Cowen: And we need to learn how to do that. In fact, you can learn it using the AI.

Tyler Cowen: But, you need to put more structure on it.

Tyler Cowen: Like, what are the good questions, for which purposes? How do I follow up? And so on.

Tyler Cowen: The cheating problem with AI is much overrated. We are simply unwilling to do something about it. Now, it's not that you can detect AI-style, necessarily. Maybe you can now, maybe you can't. But over time, you will not be able to.

But just take students, and for, say, 2 or 3% of their output over the course of their college career, lock them in a room and test them. And, if what they are handing in and how they do on the test diverge dramatically, just call them in for a chat. I am not saying send them to jail, but look into the matter. And, it requires a certain harshness that you are actually willing to pursue, you know, a strong differential performance. I do not think you have to kick them out, but I think as an incentive against cheating, it will work much better than anything we are doing right now.

Tyler Cowen: Exactly. It is just a sampling problem.

And, you could just make them write more of their essays locked in a room if you think something fishy is going on. You do not have to expel them. You do not have to write this up in a manner where they cannot get a job in the future--because some people just get nervous when they are locked in a room, right? Nonetheless, I think there is much more cheating today than there would be under my recommended scheme.

Tyler Cowen: Well, I think you need to split up the tasks. So, a big portion of those writing classes, you force the students to write with AI. This is what I am doing with my current History of Economic Thought class. And you just say: 'Well, the standard for a good paper is higher. Use AI. You have to use AI.' Try to teach them how to do it. And you grade the joint product.

So, you should teach them that and how to write on their own. And, you are teaching them how to write on their own mostly as a way of teaching them how to think. Most people may not need to know how to write on their own for its own sake, but they will need to know how to think. And, writing is a great path to thinking, as you and I both know.

Tyler Cowen: I cannot think in the shower. I hear these stories of people, 'The idea came to me in the shower.' Like, I'm just wet. I'm showering. That's my thing. Nothing else comes. The soap comes. So, I need to write to think, or I need to talk to people.

Tyler Cowen: Well, you and I were both fans of Adam Smith, right?

Tyler Cowen: And, we know what Adam Smith's proposal was: that different classes and different professors compete with each other. So, I gave my talk at U. Austin--which is not UT Austin [University of Texas at Austin]. It is University of Austin. It is a small school. In a semester, they told me they offer 30 classes. Thirty is not a lot. It does not cover the entire sweep of human knowledge.

I made them a simple proposal. Each year, let a student take one class with artificial intelligence. No more than one: just one, or even one every two years, or even one every four years, just once, and see what they think. If you want, you can have the students take the class in a small group. Well, you need to recruit three people to do it with you. And, you choose the topic of Tudor England, which they do not currently offer a class in. It is an important topic.

I asked the student body in my talk, 'How many of you want a class in Tudor England?' Seven or eight hands went up. So, let those people try with AI and just see what they think. See what works; let different groups of students design different kinds of AI-driven classes. If they do not like it, they will just stop doing it. This is Adam Smith's point. So, let people in your institution--and I will pose the same challenge to you--just try it once and see what they think.

Tyler Cowen: You would, at least at first, work with a coach. Let's say the class is in Tudor England. The coach does not have to be an expert in Tudor England, but they have to know something about how a class should be structured. So, you prompt the AI; it generates a reading list. You go off and you do those readings. You prompt the AI to generate quizzes. I did all this for the audience during my talk. There is a link where one can do this. The AI can grade the quizzes for you.

And again, students would decide: Should this class have a paper, only quizzes, three short papers, one long paper? But, the AI would grade the papers, the quizzes, whatever you have. And, at the end of it all, if you want, you can reintroduce a human to grade the whole thing. I do not think you need to, but I understand people will feel a lot better if we have the coach come along and just certify that somehow the AIs were not insane lunatics here. And then, you have a grade and you have a course of study. And, there you go.

Now, I have more radical ideas that I think are actually better. But, let's just start by having AI try to copy a human class. My more radical idea is you just chat with the AI for, say, three months, 15 weeks, whatever. And, at the end of it all, you have a different AI grade your chat with the first AI. Like, what did the person learn from this chat? A lot, a little? B-, A+? I think that is eventually how it will work.

But I know that is too radical. Let's start just by copying how a human would teach a class, but put in an AI instead. It has zero marginal cost to you. And again, if it is missing in human warmth, or insight, or depth, or in-person discussion, and that really matters, students won't take it. But, I think you will have a lot of students who want to learn about, say, Tudor England. And, I suspect your college also does not teach a class in Tudor England.

Tyler Cowen: And, they will do that instead for one of their classes. And then, just see over time, where are the students flocking? Do they want more AI or less? I think as Hayekians, we can say we are not sure, but let us let a kind of market discover that, as Adam Smith himself had indicated.

Tyler Cowen: But, keep in mind, my initial proposal: if the topic so requires, you can mandate groups of 2, 3, 5, 10, whatever, if that is important--and it may be for the Iliad, especially in Israel--so, that is fine. You can do that.

Tyler Cowen: The person does not have to be alone. Furthermore, we are going to see the whole 15-week thing as highly artificial, right?

Tyler Cowen: We are going to move away from that over time.

Tyler Cowen: I do.

Tyler Cowen: Imagine the class in the Iliad, and you have everyone read it in six weeks, and then they move on to another text on warfare. So, there is so much more flexibility in the AI model. But, just to pose you this as a challenge: You are a president of a college. Will you allow this experiment, that a student can take one class with AI and just see how they like it, as Adam Smith more or less recommended?

Tyler Cowen: Much cheaper. And, they won't insist on all kinds of other treatment.

Tyler Cowen: Right.

Tyler Cowen: We could help each other with our papers.

Tyler Cowen: And help directly, but help use the AI to learn about the topic your paper is on. Just discuss with each other, and you could have the AI record a group discussion and then just ask it, 'Well, what do you think?' And then, say, 'Well, people made these points. Were there any factual errors in the points people made?' Or, 'Would you add something to this?' And, it can speak out loud if you want. It could have your voice, right? We can do this.

Tyler Cowen: Everyone could take a class with the president. We could ask the AI, 'What do you think Russ Roberts would say here?' Everyone would get to have some weird version of a class with you on Homer. There is so much material from Russ Roberts. The AI is an excellent model of you. So, the possibilities are endless.

Tyler Cowen: I do. I lecture. I also--

Tyler Cowen: I think there is something about the vividness of human face-to-face communication. But, I gave them an assignment last week. I said, 'Use AI to teach yourself the Ricardian model.' And, they have all been doing this. And then, I said, 'This week,' which is later today, 'I am going to go in and I am going to teach you the Ricardian model.' And, I said, 'You do not have to report back, but I just want you to mentally compare how it did and how I did. You do not ever have to say anything.' But, that is a big part of the lesson.

Tyler Cowen: And, that is what we are doing.

Tyler Cowen: We'll see. But, clearly over time, I will lose some number of what might be my current advantages. And, if I end up doing different things than what I do now, I am fine with that. I am ready to adapt. I do much more podcasting because of competition from AI, which competes with my writing more than my podcasting. And, I do more personal appearances, which the AI can't do at all. So, I would say I have adapted at least half of my time usage already because of what you might call AI competition. So, I am very ready for this.

Tyler Cowen: Only a little. I mean, I have seen quite a few projects of people who take an AI, there is a base model, and they modify the base model so it will not tell you the answer right away, or it talks you through the steps of learning, or 30 different other things. There are a lot of EdTech startups.

My intuition is none of those--few [?a few?] of those will succeed. The people are just going to use the basic foundation model. I am not even saying that is better, but it is what they are used to. And, I do not think the bells and whistles on top will be the equilibrium. So, when I teach using AI, I just stress, not, 'Here is some company with a neat little thing that will walk you through, talk you through,' just, 'Here is the base model, here is how to use it.' That is what I think we will be doing. People want one model to work with, I think.

Tyler Cowen: Yes.

Tyler Cowen: You just test people, grade their papers. I mean, the British have a tutoring system to this day in many parts of the country.

Tyler Cowen: It works acceptably well. It could be 10 or 20 times better with AI assistance. So, we know some version of that works, right? We can just do it now much better.

Now, it may be possible to improve on it further yet. I would say, get a few years of data, feed it into the AIs that have been doing this, and ask them how to improve it. You don't really quite have that same possibility without the AIs. So, they will be figuring out what works and what does not. That is another reason to do this. You are feeding them the actual data.

Tyler Cowen: Well, does not your college do that? You know much more about that than I do. Does not University of Austin do that?

Tyler Cowen: A lot of people do that off campus, of course. That is how you and I mainly learn.

Tyler Cowen: It is called life. So, there is life, which includes the Internet and AI, right? And, we do not learn in 15-week batches, you and I. We pick up things as we wish. We learn, we stop, we go forward, we stop, we pick up another thing. So, we are the supposed experts, and that is what we are doing, and we insist that everyone else has to do it some quite different way. That, to me, is what is weird.

Tyler Cowen: The AI can outcompete us in certification, easily. We are not doing that yet, but it is the future equilibrium. Just have a person spend a day with the AI. And, in this case, you have the AI prearranged to be testing the person across a number of areas. You will get great certification: strengths, weaknesses, temperament, what they know, what they do not know. Way better than these As and Bs--or I guess at Harvard and Stanford, it is only As you get. So, again, there is only an issue of will. We can solve that problem whenever we want to. I get that we do not want to do it because we do not want to unravel the bundle. But, sooner or later, that is what will happen.

Tyler Cowen: They use AI for it.

Tyler Cowen: That makes it harder for me.

Tyler Cowen: They ask the AI, 'Well, what is Tyler going to ask me?' Right?

Tyler Cowen: So, I need new questions all the time. I think AI soon will be better than most human interviewers. It may well be already. I am not sure it will soon be better than the best human interviewers. But, again, if it beats most, we have gotten somewhere.

Tyler Cowen: Well, you can change that very easily.

Tyler Cowen: And, that is part of what we will teach people in the third of the curriculum devoted to teaching them AI: How do you get different moods from it? Right? But, it is not hard. And, eventually, there will be a greater diversity of models available. So, it will be easier yet.

Tyler Cowen: That's right. Very important.

Tyler Cowen: I do not know what the word 'confident' means here. I think people on the whole do not love change, and these are big changes. Did people love the Industrial Revolution at the time? No. Some did. Is it arguably the best thing that ever happened to humans? Basically, yes. So, I think it will be like that.

I said, once in some other interview, like, the more people are upset, the better we'll know that things are going. That was tongue in cheek. But, there is some truth to that. And, it will just change expectations about what jobs will be like or what future your kids will have in a way that the people who are clued in will find quite unsettling. I wouldn't deny that at all. It worries me. It gets back to this point: We do not know how the politics of this will evolve. Including in China. We are only talking about America, but China faces its own version of this; the EU [European Union] does; the rest of the world. We are going to have a lot of different decisions made. But, I think for the most part, it will prove too difficult or too costly to stop.

Tyler Cowen: No, I will take out the 'maybe,' but it is not just stuff. It's creativity. It's opportunity. It's liberation of women. It's human rights. It's much more than just stuff. That's part of the core message of Stubborn Attachments.

Tyler Cowen: You need resources to pay for making people's lives better in all kinds of humanitarian ways. Very poor societies typically do not have a lot of tolerance, do not grant rights to women very readily. They are worse places to live, not just because they do not have the flat-screen televisions. They are worse on human rights, and dignity, and most of the other things we care about. So, GDP [Gross Domestic Product] per capita and what you might call non-GDP gains, they seem to correlate by about 0.95, which, to me, is quite striking.

So, you want economic growth. And, for Israel in particular, there is a national security angle. If you do not have AI, I mean, you are toast. Now, if you are Brazil, you might be safe anyway. But you are not Brazil.

Tyler Cowen: Yes.

Tyler Cowen: A lot of small countries don't have that option. Most do not.

Tyler Cowen: So, geopolitics will change radically.

Tyler Cowen: Tell them to learn AI. Tell them to look for what Luis Garicano called messy jobs, in a very good online essay. He said, 'In the AI world, the premium will be on messy jobs where you do many different things that cannot be routinized or turned into formula, and that involve a lot of face-to-face contact, and solving difficult problems with and/or caused by other human beings.' So, that would be my advice. That is my advice. I get this question really, literally every day.

Tyler Cowen: Well, we are talking about advice for them, but this applies to us also. We are not done. We can reallocate our energies at any moment. If anyone has the ability to do that, it/s the two of us. So, start with yourself is another thing I say. And, I have reallocated my time and energy quite a bit. Emergent Ventures is part of that. Traveling more, doing more face-to-face presentation is part of that. Doing more meetings is part of that. So, try living your own advice, and maybe then give some more.

Tyler Cowen: Somewhat less, for this reason. Now, I have become more efficient generally. So, my writing hasn't declined as much as my other outputs have increased. But, I do write less, and it is for this reason.

And, I write for the AIs. I think, what do the AIs need to learn, and what do they need to learn about me? They are my best readers. They are very patient. They always understand the background to what I am saying. And, yeah, full steam ahead. They are reading, they are listening, right now.

Tyler Cowen: Of course. But, I also want to build a model of myself so they know what I want and how I think. I use that, and people in the future can use it also.

Tyler Cowen: No, not at all. Now, if you use Gmail, there is a complicated question, like, what is Gemini reading? What can they read? Gmail is not important for me. But, my dialogues with the AIs, they are very formal, very scientific. There is nothing embarrassing in there. I don't need to restrain myself. That is what I would want to do anyway. But, I would not put detailed information about your personal life into the AIs. Probably not.

I have a pretty high degree of trust in those systems, but I do not know. Things can change. Company goes bankrupt, company gets hacked by China, whatever. I do not know. I wouldn't do it. It is not that I am against those companies. I'm not. But, for the time being, I just wait. Same with a lot of confidential job information, national security questions. There are all these reports that the U.S. military uses it for actual planning. I don't know. Maybe it is a net expected value positive, but, like, I don't have to do things like that. I am asking it how to read Homer's Odyssey, and that's fine. If the world could see my logs, I think it would actually be very flattering for me.

Tyler Cowen: Yes. That is right.

Tyler Cowen: I send people those logs all the time, where they will ask me a question and I will say, 'No, wait, GPT has a better answer than I do,' and I send them that, but they still get to hear back from me. I hope they are not insulted, but I feel I am being suitably modest.

Tyler Cowen: An honor, as always, Russ. Take care.

Matti Friedman: Thank you so much for having me.

Matti Friedman: So, Hannah Senesh is one of four main characters in this book. And, the operation that I'm describing, which is a very strange episode in which a group of young Jews who escaped the Holocaust to British Mandate Palestine volunteered to parachute back into the Holocaust.

The group is 32 parachutists. I've chosen a core group of characters who are participants in the most dramatic part of that operation. And, of those four, the best known is Hannah.

So while some of these characters have a kibbutz named after them or a street named after them, Hannah Senesh has 32 streets named after her. She has a kibbutz named after her. She has a forest named after her. She is one of the most famous national characters in Israel. She's probably as famous as someone like Judah Maccabee, just in terms of name recognition to an Israeli.

One of my kids brought home--I mention this in the book--a couple years ago, a deck of patriotic playing cards. And, there was a set of four cards that had a kind of pantheon of the nation's greatest characters. So, one of them was Theodor Herzl, who is, of course, the founder of Modern Zionism. One of them was Golda Meir, who is the only woman to ever become Prime Minister in Israel. One was Moshe Dayan, the famous one-eyed general. And, the fourth was Hannah Senesh, who was a 23-year-old woman who had come to Israel from Hungary and was here for a few years and wrote some poems that have become among the most famous texts in Hebrew.

So, Hannah Senesh is a legend, but it's not 100% clear, or at least it wasn't to me before I wrote the book, why she was a legend. Because as you hinted in your question, she doesn't seem to have succeeded at her mission. So, that mystery is one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book. How could you become a hero if you failed?

Matti Friedman: Unfortunately, all of the characters in the story are dead. Even the ones who survived to the end of 1944. And, I had no one to interview, and I wanted to bring the story to life.

So, there were two main ways to do that. One was the incredible amount of documentation that turned out to survive from the operation. Most of it kept in Tel Aviv, in the archive of the Haganah, which is the pre-state militia. It's kind of the Jewish underground militia that becomes--it ultimately becomes the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. And, their archive is in Tel Aviv in this old mansion that used to belong to one of the militia commanders, Eliyahu Golomb. So, I spent a lot of time there going through thousands of documents that were kind of telling the story of this operation in real time. The operation stretches basically from the beginning of 1944 to the end of 1944. That's more or less the time span.

So, that's one way that I recreated the action.

But, another way to do it is to go to the places that I'm writing about and see if I can breathe the smell that these characters would have smelled and walked, to the extent that it's possible, on the streets that they walked.

So, I tried to do that by going to Rome, which is where one of the main characters is from, a character named Enzo Sereni, who was one of the commanders of the mission--very literate, a kind of aristocratic Roman Jew. And, I went to Budapest, which is where Hannah Senesh is from. I went to Dachau, as you mentioned, because one of the characters ends up there.

And, maybe the funnest thing I did was to take an incredible train journey from Rome over the Alps to Munich, and to Dachau--which must be one of the most beautiful train journeys in the world. Although I was retracing a train journey that one of my characters took in much darker circumstances. But it was certainly something that helped me recreate for myself the world that these characters inhabited, and then I hope to recreate it in an accurate fashion for the readers.

Matti Friedman: I've always had an ambivalent relationship to the Holocaust, you know, recognizing, of course, that it is one of the most important events in Jewish history and certainly one of the most important events of the 20th century. But I never wanted to let it define my own Jewish story. I don't see my own story as being one of victimhood. And, I think that in the time that we're in now, victimhood is really the currency that is exchanged in cultural discourse, and everyone wants to be a victim, and I'm not interested in that. And, I think that the Zionist movement was not interested in that.

And, that's another reason, I think, or that's one reason, that the Zionist movement always had an ambivalent relationship with the Holocaust and never quite wanted to remember it quite in the way that it happened. They wanted to remember it in a slightly different way.

Holocaust Remembrance Day here is called, officially, the Remembrance Day for Holocaust and Heroism. And, there was always an emphasis on heroic events like the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

So, the Zionist movement never accepted that Jews were victims because the whole idea of Zionism is that Jews are actors in history: that we're agents of our own fate and not victims. And, I think that that very much was my own mindset. So, I've never been drawn to visit Auschwitz or any of these places. In fact, I once went to Krakow, which is right next to Auschwitz. And, I considered going to the camp because I was already in Krakow, and there are signs up all over Krakow advertising tours to Auschwitz. And, I was really turned off by the whole thing--the idea of going to a camp that's also a tourist site.

So, I ended up just hanging out in a bookstore in Krakow. I found a book by Primo Levi and bought the book; and I sat in the bookstore cafe reading Primo Levi with a couple of Polish goths. That was my alternative to actually going to a Nazi death camp.

I've always thought that the history of those places and the history of the Holocaust is something best pondered by the societies that perpetrated it. And, I'd like to tell a different story about myself.

So, it turned out that when I went to Dachau, because I was researching the fate of one of my characters--of Enzo Sereni--and I wanted to see the camp, and I wanted to research in the archive that's at the camp. And, I went to Dachau really unprepared for it, because I was just going for technical reasons. And I was quite bowled over, as I recount in the book, just by how evil the place was.

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but it was probably the most evil place I've ever been. You could just feel it. It was in the air. It kind of seeped from the ground. And, I'm glad I had that chance, and I'm glad that I went when I did, in my mid-40s, and not as an impressionable 16- or 17-year old. Many Jewish teenagers get taken to these places, I think, at a time when they're not really capable of understanding what they are, placing it in the right location in their own story about themselves and about the Jewish people. But, it was one of the most powerful experiences that I had writing this book.

Matti Friedman: So, the way the Holocaust is seen in Israel has really changed in the past 20 or 30 years, but traditionally, Zionism was uncomfortable with it. And, they were uncomfortable with the fact--I mean, it seems ludicrous to even say this now, but this was really a prevalent way of thinking about it: In the early days of Israel, they were uncomfortable with the fact that the Jews hadn't rebelled or that the line was that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter. And, that was anathema to Zionism. I mean, Zionism was all about Jewish power and Jewish military bravery, and the Zionists were very much concerned, but even before the founding of the state, with inculcating an ethos of military prowess.

And, Zionism abandons the original Jewish heroes, who are these rabbis, and scholars, and timid intellectuals, and replaces them with military heroes--people like Bar Kokhba, who was the leader of a disastrous revolt against Rome in the second century CE [Christian Era]. And, he'd always actually been hated by the rabbis because he very unwisely rebelled against the superpower and brought an absolute disaster on the Jewish people. But, he gets reborn as an example of Jewish prowess. Or Judah Maccabee, who had been a relatively minor character who led a successful rebellion against the Seleucid Greeks a couple centuries earlier.

So, Zionism is very much interested in that kind of Jew.

And then, there's this terrible thing in Europe, which seems to be about passive Jews just getting on trains and being shipped to their deaths, and that's not true. That's not accurate representation of what happened. And, it's actually a terrible insult, I think, to the people who went through it. But, that was very much the vibe in Israel in the early years. And, eventually the Holocaust is commemorated in a very Zionist way. As I mentioned, they call the Remembrance Day for the Holocaust, Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and Heroism.

And, there was really an emphasis on people who had resisted the Nazis, and there was a lot of discomfort with those who didn't. And, many Holocaust survivors who came to Israel were misunderstood at best, sometimes treated with disrespect. There was an assumption among some people that if you survived the Holocaust, you must have done something shady. So, you must be crooked in some way, or you must have collaborated in some way, or you must have done something untoward in order to survive when so many other people were killed.

So, it takes decades for that event just to be digested by the psyche. Of course, it makes perfect sense. I mean, some things can't be understood right away. And, the Holocaust is certainly an example of something that maybe can't be understood at all, certainly not within a decade or two of it happening.

In the past 20 or 30 years, I think things have become much more sane, and Israelis have learned to think about it, think about it differently; but there's still an unwillingness to see ourselves as victims.

We've seen it over the past two years or so since October 7th, where we've had to participate in a discourse in the West where it's all about victimhood. The question is, who is the bigger victim? And, the greater your victimhood, the more cultural power you have, and increasingly political power you have.

So, everyone wants to be a victim, and we have to play that game. So, we have to play up the way we were victimized on October 7th. But, you can see that for a lot of Israelis, that doesn't come naturally because the Zionist story is not about playing up your victimization: it's about being strong. And, if you're victimized, then you go and you kick ass, you don't whine about being victimized.

So, there is a tension that exists to this day, which is still the one that the Zionist movement felt in the days of the Holocaust.

In fact, this operation--the parachutists' operation of 1944--is essentially a product of that tension. So, you have the Zionist movement in what was then British Mandate Palestine watching this catastrophe unfold in Europe. They're unable to stop it despite their ethos of heroism and prowess. The Jews don't have an army. They need to get people into Europe. The Jews don't have an Air Force. They have no way of doing anything. They're completely helpless. So, they come up with what seems like the only plan at their disposal and send these people who had escaped the Holocaust back into the Holocaust.

Matti Friedman: Well, at the time--I guess we should say for listeners who may not be familiar with the history--this country is a British Mandate territory called Palestine. The British conquered it in 1917 from the Ottoman Turks and are given the mandate by the League of Nations to create a Jewish national home. And, they've been running it essentially since the end of the First World War, and they're about to leave in 1948.

So, the whole thing lasts about 30 years, and this is the waning years of the Mandate, although that's not at all clear at the time that we're talking about. This is the middle of the Second World War. So, the Jews are trying to form a state in Palestine, but the ruling authority is British, and the Jews do not have a military or a government. They have a quasi-governing authority that they recognize called the Jewish Agency, but it's not a real government, and they don't have any military force.

And, at the beginning of the war, the Jews are begging the British to allow them to form Jewish fighting units and go to Europe to fight the Nazis. And, the Jews, of course, they have good reason to want to fight the Nazis.

However, they're also at odds with British authorities. So, the Jews also hate the British. They hate the British, but they hate them less than they hate the Germans. Why do they hate the British? Because the British, having promised to create a Jewish national home that will be a refuge for the Jewish people in the 1930s, they basically slam the door on that in order to placate Arab public opinion, which is very much opposed to Jewish immigration and opposed to the British Empire in general.

Matti Friedman: Absolutely.

Matti Friedman: Right. Exactly.

So, there are two competing national movements that are kind of alive and at odds in this place. So, the British are in a bit of a pickle. What they do is they stop Jewish immigration, with few exceptions, precisely at the time when it's a matter of life and death for millions of Jews, and people have nowhere to go, and they can't come here. So, the Jews, of course, are furious at the British about that; but they have no choice but to be on the Allied side in the war, so they're trying to get the British to allow them to form fighting battalions. And, the British won't do it because they're worried about forming military units of Jews that could, after the war, boomerang against the British. And, I think that concern was quite well-placed, and indeed would prove to be completely justified.

So, we can understand where the British are coming from, but this is intensely frustrating for the Jews. So, what remains of these grandiose plans to form--specifically a plan to drop a battalion of paratroopers, Jewish paratroopers, into Europe in order to lead a Jewish uprising? That was the original plan.

This is whittled down by British colonial officials into a plan that will see just over 30 Jewish parachutists dropped--not as a fighting unit and not together. They'll be dropped in twos and threes, and they'll be dropped mainly by an outfit called MI9 [Military Intelligence 9], which is now largely forgotten, but it's the arm of British Military Intelligence that deals with escape and evasion. So, their job is to pick up downed Allied pilots or escaped POWs [prisoners of war]--people who are behind enemy lines--and get them back to Allied lines so they can be put on new airplanes and sent back into the war.

So, that's MI9, and it's being run out of Cairo in this part of the world by an officer named Tony Simmons, who is a very pro-Zionist officer. He has been in Palestine for a while, and who the Jews trust. So, because of this relationship that Simmons has with the Zionist leadership, they create this plan to recruit newly-arrived Jews, mainly from Central Europe. People who speak the local languages, know the territory. And, these people will be recruited into the British Army. They'll be given British uniforms. They'll be given radio training and parachute training, and then they will be dropped via an Allied airbase in Italy back into Central Europe. That's what the British think they're doing. These people are meant to maintain radio contact between British military headquarters and partisan forces--resistance forces--behind enemy lines, and they're supposed to help locate and rescue Allied personnel behind enemy lines. That's the British mission.

As far as the Jewish leadership is concerned--and this is mainly a group of men who will ultimately be the creators of the Mossad--so, in my book in English, I call them the Mossad because they are actually part of a small office that is called the Mossad LeAliyah Bet, which means basically the Illegal Immigration Bureau. But it will eventually morph into what we now call the Mossad. So, I refer to the Mossad: These are intelligence men, although of course there's no state and they don't actually belong to an official intelligence service.

And they have a different plan.

And, their plan, of course, is to save Jews.

The Allied mission is secondary to them. Their idea is to get Zionist agents back into Europe to fight the Nazis and save Jews. And, eventually they also want people who will have gained enough military experience to be able to use it against the British after the war is over. So, this British operation is also an operation against the British.

So, it's a complicated affair. But there's a confluence of interests here for a while between the Zionist leadership and certain British military officers that allows this operation to take place. The Jews want to get people into Europe, but they don't have their own Air Force. The British need agents who can fit in behind enemy lines, and they have almost no one who can do it. And, they realize that the Jews in Palestine have this incredible reservoir of agents, because the place is full of people who come from what are now occupied countries in Europe. So, if you need someone who can pass in Nazi-occupied France, no problem--Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary--the Jews have whatever you need. So, those are the conditions that create this strange operation in 1944, which was at least officially a British operation run by MI9 out of Cairo.

Matti Friedman: Well, the operation is documented in a very thorough fashion. And I was surprised: When I went to the Haganah Archive in Tel Aviv to see what I could rustle up, I had no idea that there would be so much.

So, the Jewish intelligence men who leave these documents are very organized, and everything is documented, cataloged, and eventually saved in the Haganah Archive. So, there's actually a lot of material that allows us to recreate the mission--not from a distance, but from the perspective of the people who are running it in real time. So, we have letters from my characters sent to headquarters. We have radio transmissions. We have telegrams. We have personal archives of some of these people. Hannah Senesh, for example, because she became a legend afterward, her diaries and letters have been published.

Another one of my characters, Havivah Reik--who is a very interesting woman who is probably the most efficient of the parachutists, but she's not the most remembered of them--she has an archive. She left an archive of fascinating letters on her kibbutz, which is a kibbutz called Ma'anit. One of the characters who is the only one of my characters to walk out of this mission alive, he wrote a really superb memoir about it that has been forgotten and is out of print and was never translated. But, if you're looking for material, it's there. And, all I lacked was an opportunity to actually speak to the people who participated in the mission, but I had a lot of material to work with. And, that allowed me to create a story that I think, or I hope, is very rich in texture.

This is not a bird's eye view of the story. This is a very kind of high-resolution take on the mission as viewed mainly through documents telling us what this felt like, day to day. And, I try to zoom out and give us some context and try to think a bit about what all of it means. But the narrative rests on a very granular portrait of four characters who are part of this pretty small and marginal mission that somehow becomes a legend and the subject of myth to such an extent that, again, you can say Hannah Senesh to an Israeli kid and they'll know exactly who you're talking about.

Matti Friedman: I guess you'd say that Hannah Senesh was a universalist who was mugged by reality. I think at heart, that's the world that she wanted. And, she came out of this very liberal environment in Budapest: Her dad is a playwright and a novelist and a Bohemian, and she fully expects to have a liberal life as an equal citizen in a European state. And, like many Jews, she's disabused of that notion in the late 1930s, and she realized it's not going to happen. And, her solution is to become a Zionist. And, luckily for her, she gets a visa really on the eve of the war. It's the fall of 1939. She gets a very rare immigration certificate to British Palestine, and she leaves, and her mother remains behind in Budapest. And she makes it out just as the door is closing. So, her lesson from this is not a universal lesson.

I think she would like to see a kind of world where all people are siblings, but I think she's lived long enough and seen enough to know that that world does not yet exist. And if she wants to be able to exist in the world, it's going to be as a Jew, and the Jews are going to have to defend themselves because no one else is going to do it. And, she's not the only one to reach that conclusion in those years.

And, it's interesting to make a comparison between these two young women, because they literally have the same name. Anne, Hannah, it's the same name. Anne is an English translation of the Hebrew name Hannah, but even more than that, her name in Hungary was actually Anna Szenes--that's her Hungarian name. And, when she becomes a Zionist pioneer, she Hebreicizes the name and becomes Hannah.

So, she has consciously made a decision not to be Anne, but to be Hannah, who is a different person in that she's not part of a universal or European story. She is definitely a Jew, and her name is Hebrew. So, there's a story even just in the names of these two young women. Hannah Senesh is a bit older than Anne Frank. Anne Frank is a teenager. Hannah Senesh is a young woman. But they both write. I think they would recognize each other as kindred spirits in many ways. They're both very literary. They both read. I'm sure they read some of the same books, and they have the idea that they can write.

So, Anne, of course, has her famous diary, which becomes one of the best-selling books in the world after the war, and it's a best-seller in Japan. Anne Frank really becomes a global icon. Hannah Senesh writes initially in Hungarian. And then, after she moves to Israel, she begins writing in Hebrew, and she's incredibly adept at languages. And, she manages to write some really excellent poems, even though they are poems written by a young person who is not quite there yet. But, it's quite clear when you read her early writing that had she been allowed to live past age 23, she eventually would have been probably an important writer. I think that's clear. She had incredible powers of observation. She was really skillful with language. Even in a language that--Hebrew, which she only spoke for four or five years--she was already writing things of worth in that language. So, I think we could have seen some important literature come from Hannah Senesh' pen had she lived.

And, her observations about the world are cut off, of course, by her death. So, she's remembered for universalist pronouncements like her famous sentence where she says that, I'm not quoting this verbatim, but she says, 'Deep in my heart, I believe that'--no--'Deep inside, I believe that people are good at heart.' She has that famous sentence--

Matti Friedman: That's Anne Frank, right. And, that is her most famous sentence. And, as my friend and colleague, Dara Horn, pointed out in a great book called People Love Dead Jews, she pointed out that Anne wrote that, of course, before she was arrested by murderers and killed in a camp. So, had we been able to speak to her a few years after that, it's possible that her conclusions about human nature would have been different, and it's possible that her worldview would have been closer to that of Hannah Senesh. We don't know, but it's certainly true that the universal message of Anne Frank and the fact that she is a perfect victim--she's just a girl and she's murdered--that makes her a much more palatable character for people outside this story looking in. They want Anne Frank. They want someone who believes in the goodness of humanity. They want someone who doesn't really do anything threatening. Anne Frank just dies and doesn't live after the war to disturb the peace of Christians or Muslims by trying to set up a state where Jews can be at home.

So, Hannah Senesh, who is the more heroic character--it's no fault of Anne Frank's that she wasn't a hero--but Hannah Senesh lived long enough to be able to make a decision about whether or not to take action, and she decides to take action. Hannah Senesh is known and venerated mostly among Israelis and Jews who value what she did. And, outside that group, she's barely known. So, it'll be interesting to see what happens with this book once it comes out, if people can kind of maybe better understand her character if we understand what made her tick in the way that she saw the world. I'm not giving anything away to say that. I think that Hannah's analysis of the world and human nature was closer to the accurate one, unfortunately.

Matti Friedman: Right. I guess the question asked by the woman at the skating rink is essentially the question I'm asking in this book: What motivated these characters to embark on a quest that seems quite hopeless? And, the chances of success were very small, if they existed at all. Certainly the idea that they were going to go save Jews or fight the Nazis--I mean, it seems quite unrealistic. There's actually--I mention this in the book--a very funny skit, kind of funny in a painful way, done by an Israeli satire program called "The Jews Are Coming--HaYehudim Baim." It's a famous satire program here.

Matti Friedman: And, they riff on Biblical stories, and they kind of make fun of Israeli national myths. And, they have this skit where you see--it's in the 1940s, and you see this Jewish militia commander, he's a really tough guy. He's standing in front of a map of Europe with a big swastika on it. And, he's saying, 'We're going to go. We're going to fight the Nazis. We're going to kill the Germans.' And then, the camera swivels, and you see there's just one person in the room, and it's this very young woman; and it's Hannah Senesh, and she raises her hand, and she says, 'I'm sorry, who is we?' And, the commander is forced to admit that actually it's not 'we.' It's just you.

And, what was Hannah Senesh supposed to do against the Nazis? And that, I guess, was more than anything else, the mystery that led me to write the book. Because there's this incredible gap between the legend of the mission and the actual accomplishments of the mission.

And there's this gap between what they said they were going to do and what they could have reasonably expected to do. Again, this is 32 people dropped in twos and threes in about a half dozen Axis countries in the middle of the war. So, I try to unravel it in the book.

And, my conclusion is that it's related to storytelling. And, it was interesting to write a book, which is essentially about the act of storytelling. But Zionism has always been a movement based on telling a different story about ourselves. And, it's not a coincidence that the greatest minds of Zionism are often writers. Most prominently Theodor Herzl, who is a playwright and a journalist. And, he comes up with political Zionism because he understands that the story that the Jews are telling themselves in the 1890s in cosmopolitan Vienna--which is a story of increasing assimilation and liberalism and acceptance in a Christian society--he realizes that this story is not true.

And, he understands that the Jews are going to need to tell themselves a different story and mobilize themselves for a different purpose. And, his idea is that--which seems insane at the time--is that there's going to be a Jewish state and the Jews are going to emigrate from Europe and they're going to go to this state and they're going to be free people in their own land, to quote what ultimately becomes the Israeli national anthem. So, he's a writer. Jabotinsky's a writer, Begin's a journalist; and these people are writers. So, the Zionist movement is essentially a storytelling movement. And it tells people that they're not refugees, they're pioneers. Which is a very effective form of storytelling because it takes people who are victims and turns them into agents of their own fate. And, they're not running away from their home in Poland because that was never their home. They're going to their real home.

And, whether or not this is real or fake is almost beside the point. It is a great story that saves the Jews in the 20th century. So, there's a real connection between Zionism and the ability to tell a story.

And here, too, in 1944, we have an example of a mission that I think was mainly about a story. It was the Zionist movement using the story weapon. What was the idea? These people would go to Europe and they would write a different story about the Second World War. And, in this story, the Jews would not be victims. They would be heroes. And they would not be miserable people in cattle cars. They would be parachutists jumping out of airplanes into occupied countries to bravely fight the Nazis. And, this story would be so powerful that it would, of course, not change anything about the war, but it would change the way the war is remembered, and then change the actions of people after the war.

And, I think that if you understand the mission in those terms, it makes sense. And, it also then makes sense why the participants in the mission tended to be very literary people.

Hannah Senesh is a good example, but Enzo Sereni was also a writer. He wrote a history of Italian Fascism. He wrote a treatise, or he edited and wrote a treatise, on Jewish-Arab coexistence under Zionist Socialism, which is very interesting to read from 2026. But it made sense, I guess, at the time--it was written in the 1930s. So, these are people who wrote. He dreamed of writing a great novel. So, these people understood storytelling, and they understood themselves as characters in a story, and no one understood that better than Hannah Senesh, who was the daughter of a playwright and the daughter of a novelist, and a bookworm, and a theater kid.

She literally grows up in a media of theater people in Budapest. So she knows exactly what a heroic quest is. She knows what the role of the heroine is. She knows who Joan of Arc was. She knows what's expected of her. She is not remembered because she's the best commando. She's remembered because she's the best writer. And, I think that she instinctively gets this. And, when we understand that this enterprise is not a military enterprise--it is, at its root, a literary enterprise--the thing begins to make more sense.

Matti Friedman: So, the poem that I refer to as Hannah's second-most famous poem is called--in Hebrew, it's called 'Ashrei HaGafrur.' And, there's a debate about how to translate that name. Most of the translations will translate that as--most of the translations you'll see in English translate it as 'Blessed is the match.' That's the most common translation of it. Which in my opinion is a mistranslation of it. It's much closer to 'Happy is the match.' The word 'Ashrei' in Hebrew comes from the prayer book. It's from a prayer that we say multiple times a day, which is, 'Happy'--Ashrei Yoshvei Veitecha: 'Happy are those who dwell in your house.' So, Hannah is playing on the words of a prayer.

And I'll read it in Hebrew, and then I'll read my own translation into English. So, that in Hebrew, it reads like this:

אַשְׁרֵי הַגַּפְרוּר שֶׁנִּשְׂרַף וְהִצִּית לֶהָבוֹת
אַשְׁרֵי הַלְּהָבָה שֶׁבָּעֲרָה בְּסִתְרֵי לְבָבוֹת
אַשְׁרֵי הַלְבָבוֹת שֶׁיָדְעוּ לַחְדוֹל בְּכָבוֹד
אַשְׁרֵי הַגַּפְרוּר שֶׁנִּשְׂרַף וְהִצִּית לֶהָבוֹת

So, that's the poem.

In my translation, which differs a bit from the most common one in English, it means something like this:

Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames.
Happy is the flame that burns secret in the deepest hearts.
Happy is the heart that knew when in honor to stop.
Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames.

So, this is a poem that we have because of a pretty incredible series of events. Hannah is about to cross the border from Yugoslavia, where she's been with Tito's partisan army for a few months in the spring and early summer of 1944, and she's about to cross into Nazi-occupied Hungary. And, she knows that she's crossing a hostile border and that there's a very good chance she's not coming back, and her comrades are actually trying to convince her not to go. They think it's too dangerous, and she is not listening to reason, as they see it, and she's insisting on crossing the border.

She needs to get into Hungary. She needs to complete her mission. And her mother is trapped in Budapest, literally a few streets away from the villa where Adolf Eichmann is planning the liquidation of the Jews of Hungary. So, she needs to get into Hungary; and she insists on going.

And, as she parts from a comrade named Reuven Dafni--another one of the Jewish parachutists--in the forest near the border, she shakes his hand, and he feels that she's pressing something into his hand. And, she leaves, and he sees that she's left him with a folded piece of paper. And, when he unfolds the paper, he sees that she's written this poem.

So, in many ways, this poem is Hannah's last will and testament. She will write a few other documents in prison after she's captured, but this is something that she's writing with the knowledge that it might be her last communication with home.

So, Dafni says in his account of these events that he was so annoyed at this theatrical gesture that he throws the poem away. He throws it into the bushes and kind of stomps off back to the partisan camp. And then regrets it and comes back to look for the piece of paper, and he finds it in a bush and brings it back. And, it eventually travels from Yugoslavia across the Mediterranean back to British Mandate Palestine. And, I've seen it. I've seen the note. It's kept at a kibbutz in Northern Israel.

So, that's how this poem makes it home. And, it's a very famous poem at the time. It's printed almost immediately. It's put to music. It becomes kind of a staple of youth movement meetings and rallies. And, what Hannah's saying here is something that I think is very important--that the ideological style of the poem, I think, hasn't aged well.

So, we kind of have to reinhabit that world where people felt comfortable making high-minded ideological pronouncements, which is what she's doing. But, it's quite clear here, I think, what she's saying.

If you look at the common English translation of the poem, the first line reads, 'Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.' That's the way it's usually translated.

And, when I went to the Hebrew, I realized that that's a mistranslation. And in fact, that mistranslation tells us something very important about the mission, because the whole point of the first line is not that the match is consumed in kindling flame. The point is that the match lights the flame.

The match is consumed after lighting the flame. And, in fact, that word, I think, explains what Hannah thinks that she's doing. And, it kind of explains her transformation from a young woman living in Bohemian Budapest into a Zionist pioneer, because what differentiates Anna Szenes from Hannah Senesh is action.

She is a woman of action. And, she knows the match might be consumed, but first it will light the flame that consumes the match.

And, that's what this poem says.

So, the poem has kind of been forgotten. It's much less known today than Hannah's most famous poem, which we could talk about if you want, but it's still--

Matti Friedman: It's still quite a famous poem, in Hebrew. And, it kind of falls on hard times along with all of the simple-sounding ideology of early Israel. And eventually, of course, there's a discomfort with martyrdom, and there's a discomfort with this whole story and what it seems to mean.

But, if we recreate the headspace of this very young woman in the summer of 1944, I think we can understand what she's saying. She knows she's about to cross the border between life and death, and she explicitly tells us that she's happy to cross.

Matti Friedman: Hannah's most famous poem, which is probably one of the most famous Hebrew texts in our times, is a song that is now called "Eli Eli." That's the song title as it eventually becomes famous. Hannah actually gave that poem a different name. She called it 'The Walk to Caesarea,--Halikha LeKesarya'. Caesarea is a Roman ruin that was not far from the kibbutz where Hannah lived, which is called Sdot Yam.

And, it's this very short poem. It's just a few lines, and she writes it in 1942. And, there's no ideology in it. There's no pronouncements about anything. It's just a very personal moment on the beach looking at the water, seems to be during a storm. And, it's discovered along with Hannah's belongings after she vanishes in Europe. And, it's put to music immediately. It's put to music in 1945. And it's given this absolutely beautiful tune, and it's kind of a perfect marriage of a melody and words.

The composer adds a word to the text to make it match the melody. So, he repeats the first word of the poem, which is 'Eli,' which in Hebrew means 'My Lord.' So, Hannah writes that once in her poem, and he adds another one. So, it becomes "Eli, Eli" in order to make it fit the scheme of the song. And, that song becomes what Hannah Senesh is known for. And, it's been covered hundreds and hundreds of times.

As I was writing this book, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine--this was a couple of years ago--I happened upon a video on YouTube of these very burly Slavic guys in camouflage uniforms singing "Eli, Eli." And, it was a Ukrainian military choir doing a version of "Eli, Eli." So, people who may know nothing about Israel or about Hebrew literature know this song; and anyone, any of our listeners who attended Hebrew schools or Jewish summer camps or something like that probably encountered "Eli, Eli." They might not know the story behind it or the woman who wrote it, but it remains one of the most famous songs in modern Hebrew.

Matti Friedman: Absolutely. The original Hebrew song, which is slightly different in one word from the poem that Hannah wrote, goes like this:

  אֵלִי, אֵלִי

שֶׁלֹּא יִגָּמֵר לְעוֹלָם
הַחוֹל וְהַיָּם,
רִשְׁרוּשׁ שֶׁל הַמַּיִם,
בְּרַק הַשָּׁמַיִם,
תְּפִלַּת הָאָדָם

That's it. That's the whole poem. And in English, it means:

My Lord,
May these things never end.
The sand and the sea,
The murmur of water,
the lightning in the sky,
a human prayer.

That's it. It's kind of a perfect poem. And, it's written by someone who writes it in Hebrew and has been speaking Hebrew at this time for three years.

And, what a funny detail that I discovered when I was looking into this: I was looking at the original copy of the poem from Hannah's notebook where she writes this poem, and there's a spelling mistake in it. She writes the word "לְעוֹלָם" [sounds like 'le'olam'], which means in this case, 'Never'--'may these things never end.' She writes it with--she gets one of the letters wrong. Instead of the word, the letter Ayin, she writes the letter Aleph, and it's a reminder. It's kind of like finding a typo in Yeats or something, because it's such a famous poem, or finding out that Shakespeare didn't know how to spell 'fish' or something like that. She was a new immigrant to this country, and she was operating in a place that she didn't know very well and in a language that she had only recently learned.

And, that's, I think, an important insight into her character.

Afterwards, she becomes kind of a legendary Israeli pioneer hero. So, she gets turned into almost the ultimate pioneer. So, she loves menial labor, which she'd hated. And she was ready for sacrifice, which she was. And, she is, of course--she's a daughter of the nation. She's essentially Israeli, even though she never lived in a country called Israel.

And, when you read this poem, you remember that she was a very young woman who came from somewhere else. And, the character of Hannah Senesh, the pioneer, was, to a very large extent, a character that she created. And again, this is a very theatrical, literary young woman. She understood character, and she made a conscious decision to stop being the character that she had inhabited until she finished high school, which was a Hungarian bourgeois, a girl named Anna Szenes, and she becomes something else. She becomes a pioneer named Hannah Senesh. And then she becomes a heroic parachutist. And, these are all very conscious decisions. And, she documents it in these poems. She has a notebook full of poems that she doesn't tell anyone about because she's embarrassed about writing poems because she's meant to be a simple laborer and a socialist pioneer. And the sabras in those days did not respect poets.

You weren't supposed to be an intellectual. The Jews had enough intellectuals. What they needed was dairy farmers and people who were happy to, I guess, scrub the pots in the kitchen. And, she had a bit of an ambiguous relationship with her own poetry, which she hides in a suitcase. And then, this notebook is found after her death, and people realized that she'd been writing quite striking poetry.

And again, I don't want to oversell it. It's not the most amazing poetry ever written, and she was a very young person. And, what it is really, I think "Eli, Eli" is a wonderful poem, particularly when put together with the music. But, this is poetry written by a very young person who would have been great, who could have been great. So, when we read Hannah Senesh's diaries and letters and poems, and she left a lot, you see that it's potential. It's something that should have been allowed to grow into something amazing, and wasn't. And, that's part of the tragedy of this story.

Matti Friedman: Absolutely. These people are kind of fated to be remembered as cartoons. The fate of the hero is essentially to be venerated to the point where you're a two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a person, and that has definitely happened to Anne Frank. And, we can see that now as Anne Frank's memory is abused by every conceivable political movement from left to right. And she's a symbol of immigrants and progressive ideology and non-conformist sexuality. She's a symbol for Palestinians if you're on that side of things. She's a symbol of people being forced to wear masks because of COVID [Coronavirus Disease], if you remember that, that episode. So, she's a symbol of whatever you want. And it's a terrible abuse of that person. She was just a little girl who was killed because she was a Jew, and she never thought anyone would read her diary, and she never asked to be famous.

And, there's something tragic about it just as there's something tragic about Hannah, who--she's venerated. She becomes a national heroine, and she's remembered beyond anything that she could possibly have expected when she was alive. But part of that process is just this flattening of her character.

And, one of the great things for me about writing this book was discovering what an incredible character she really was.

So, I also want to end with this idea that she was kind of--you know, it's like Davy Crockett--like, how seriously are you going to take? It's like George Washington and the cherry tree. I mean, literally, these are the things that people remember about people who are fantastically complex. And, Hannah Senesh was young, so she didn't have time to be that complex, but she was an incredibly intelligent and determined woman. And, when you read her letters and her diary entries, even from a very young age, you see that this is someone with very powerful powers of observation and a very skillful way of expressing herself.

And, to turn her into the kind of Sabra poster child actually does her injustice. And, it's better than the alternative, I guess, which is forgetting her. But, one thing that I'm trying to do in this book is to rescue her and, to some extent, her comrades, not just from amnesia, but from mythology. Because when you realize that they're real people, they're much more impressive. The cardboard cutouts aren't impressive because they don't seem like human beings. When you understand that she was a human being and she did what she did, I think she's more of a heroine than I appreciated at the beginning of my work on this book.

Matti Friedman: I started writing this book in one state of mind and finished writing it in a completely different state of mind.

I started the research more than a year before October 7th. And when I did, I thought I was writing a book about a very distant historical episode. And, suddenly the times that Hannah lived in really came to life for me. And I'm not saying that this is the Holocaust and I'm not comparing the darkness of these times to the darkness of her times, but it's much easier to imagine her times now than it was when I started researching this book. And I think that when I moved here--from Toronto in my case in 1995--I really thought that I was moving from one Jewish solution to another Jewish solution. I did not feel that North American Judaism was precarious. And I thought that actually liberal Western democracy had essentially solved the problem for people who wanted to partake in it. And that Zionism had solved the Jewish problem for people who wanted to live in a Jewish state.

And this is the mid-1990s, so it's a pretty optimistic time and things seem to be going in the right direction. It's the peace process.

And I've been through a lot here, long enough to doubt my certainty that everything was going in the right direction, but certainly it all crashed down on October 7th for everyone. And I think that anyone with their eyes open in the Jewish world understands that neither of these is a solution to the Jewish problem. And in fact, that we were, to a very large extent, deluded about where things stand--in North America in one way, in Israel in a different way--but that many Jews had been pretty sanguine about our situation in the 21st century when we should not have been. And I think we're in a very different headspace right now.

And I think there's not much that's good about it. But, one thing that was good about it for me was that I think it allowed me to inhabit more effectively the world of my characters and to understand who they were and how they saw things and just to understand what it's like to live in a world with--where all the doors are slammed shut and where there is no clear way to progress. And, if we feel that way now, then I mean, Hannah and her comrades felt that a million times over. We have a state; they had nothing and there was no clear path to one. And in 1944, it was the heart of darkness. There was nothing good that we know that seems possible.

And yet they didn't live in denial. They didn't go into their bed and pull the covers over their head and they didn't run away and they didn't pretend to be something else. They got on an airplane and jumped back into the fire. And they offer us a model for how to act in a time where the options are unclear. So the Zionist path is action. And that's what Hannah is saying in that poem. The match isn't consumed in the flame: the match lights the flame. So it's all about action.

So in 1944, it seems that there's nothing you can do. Well, Ben-Gurion would say, "We need to build another farm. We need to pave another road, to build another school; we need to teach some more kids to speak Hebrew." It seems like nothing when six million people are being murdered, but eventually that nothing becomes something.

And just like this mission--which was essentially nothing in military terms--becomes something enormous that plays a part in saving the Jewish people. And that seems like a grand claim to make for a mission that clearly did not accomplish its goals, but it's the story that Zionism tells people that allows the Jews to move past the catastrophe and become actors again, and become agents of their own fate again, and not fall into the trap of victimhood--which many have, including our most proximate neighbors. The Palestinians, who have a story that is about victimhood, and that is a trap, because if you see yourself as a victim, you'll never be able to get anywhere.

So the Jews basically make up a different story where, again, they're not refugees: they're pioneers. And they're not homeless because this has always been their home. And when you run away to Israel, that's not running away. It's called Aliyah, which means ascent. So there's a different way to see your situation and stories are powerful things and no one knows that better than the Jews, of course, who survived for 2,000 years, thanks to stories. That was all they had, right? That was their only superpower. They certainly weren't known for military prowess, and they weren't known for their architecture or their art or for statecraft. What they knew how to do was tell very powerful stories that kept this thing going through the generations.

Ironically, it's a superpower that we seem to have lost to a large extent since regaining sovereignty. So it's possible that once you have the regular kind of power, you lose that old alchemy of storytelling. And what we've seen over the past few years has been an abject failure of this country to tell a story that makes sense about itself and about what it's doing. And we're dealing with the consequences of that, of course.

But all of these thoughts occurred to me thanks to--that's a weird way of putting it--but occurred to me in the context of the post-October 7 world, which I think allowed me, gave me a different window into the time that I was writing about.

Matti Friedman: It was a pleasure, as always.

Michael Munger: It is a pleasure on both counts.

Michael Munger: I'm happy to get a chance to talk about this. Basketball is very important in North Carolina. It's important in other states also--Kentucky, Indiana. So, I don't want to claim that North Carolina is best, but it is certainly up there in the importance of college basketball, as opposed to professional basketball or other professional sports.

So, I was an undergraduate at Davidson College. We always played Duke and got killed. Then I moved to University of North Carolina, where I was much more initiated into the cultic dislike of the other. So, UNC and Duke--almost everyone at UNC or Duke agrees on one thing: The UNC-versus-Duke game is the archangel Gabriel against Satan himself.

Now, they disagree about who Gabriel and Satan are, but they completely agree that this is not just a basketball game, but good versus evil. People will be depressed. They're--shots will be taken. People will have to wear clothing if they lose a bet on the outcome of this game.

So, the--ACC [Atlantic Coast Conference] basketball generally, but Duke-UNC in particular, has a sort of cultic status among those of us who are in this area. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the tickets to that game are very expensive. People want actually to participate in the experience. Now, UNC is a very large stadium, the Dean Dome. It holds 14-, 15,000 people. It has a student area of 6,000. So, it is possible to go to the UNC-Duke game, although it's pretty expensive.

But--I have a visual aid here--I went to StubHub and I'll say about it, but for those people who are watching this on YouTube, this is Cameron Indoor Stadium. It holds 9,000 people. The student section there is 1200. And, I wanted to get an idea of the shadow price of a student ticket.

And so, as you see here, up in the nosebleed seats, it's $2,200. Now that's for two tickets. So, for a college basketball game, it's $1,100 apiece. For the good seats, it's $9,000. So, those are prices that we often see actually not just asked, but accepted.

And so, the price of going to this game at Cameron Indoor Stadium, this tiny little relic of a high school gym, is something--some people have called it the greatest college basketball experience in America. I've never liked Duke, so I'm willing to concede that other people think that.

Michael Munger: It's nine miles, as the crow flies. It's about 11 miles by a road. So it's not far.

Michael Munger: You're right to correct me. When I said I went there: I moved there from the University of Texas as a faculty member. Quite so.

Michael Munger: Not only can a student not sell, they have a variety of mechanisms for ensuring that the student can't sell it. And, one of them is in order to get in, you have to have a student ID [student identification] and you have to have a wristband showing that you have registered and that you are the person you are claiming to be. So, they don't give out student tickets. So, students cannot sell their tickets.

I showed just that just as a shadow price: that's something about what the student tickets would be worth. But, in 2006, a young man named Tristan Patterson tried to sell his student ticket by giving someone--he advertised, not very clever, on Craigslist and asked $3,000 for his ticket, and said that 'You're going to have to look enough like a student. I will give you my ID. We'll go in.' He had actually waited in line and gotten the ticket. He got kicked out. And so, we wouldn't know about people who were successful. So, this is a selection. We would only know about people who failed.

It is very difficult for students to sell their tickets. However, on StubHub, it's pretty easy for the grownups to sell their tickets.

Michael Munger: The student section is Section 17, which is immediately courtside across from the two teams. So, you can see the two teams, and it's immediately a long, narrow--that's courtside. They're clearly the best seats in the house. So, the student tickets are the best seats in the house.

Michael Munger: Yes. And, those are for people who can't get in to 17. [Section] 18 is for people who--those tend to be more organized groups because they get behind the basket and try to distract the players from the other team from shooting free throws. And for the band. Section 18 is for the band. 19 is more graduate students; and those are farther away. Those are not nearly as good. So, the undergraduate student seating is section 17.

Michael Munger: No, you're right. The 1200 includes all of that student--

Michael Munger: Six thousand.

Michael Munger: There it's the nineteen-seventies--

Michael Munger: Some of you young people might--the 1970s.

Michael Munger: It would be wrong not to mention that. Yes.

Michael Munger: I'm afraid that in anticipation for doing this--because I wrote a piece for AIER [American Institute for Economic Research], which by the time this airs will have come out, and so I hope you'll put up a link to that also so people can look at it. But, the past week, I have just gone down a rabbit hole trying to figure out the details of this. So, I'm actually pretty mad at you, Russ, for agreeing to do this. You could have protected me by saying, 'No, no, that's too arcane.' So, I will try not to be too arcane in my description.

So, Adam Smith in Book One, Chapter Five of The Wealth of Nations famously said, "The real price of every thing... is the toil and trouble of acquiring it." And so, I ask my students--because I want to torment them: they would rather give definitions than think--I ask them, 'Does Starbucks have surge pricing?' And they all say, 'Well, no. Uber has surge pricing.'

Starbucks totally has surge pricing, because the length of the line is part of the cost of paying.

So, if I'm at the airport and I think I want to get some coffee, so, I walk over towards Starbucks and I see there's a 20-minute line. The cost of the $7 latte is not $7. It's $7 plus 20 minutes. And so, I would actually be willing to pay more for not having a line. And, if Starbucks were giving away lattes for free, there would be an hour wait. So, nothing is free if people want it.

So, economists have a concept called scarcity. Scarcity is the idea that more people want the thing than can get the thing at the current price. And, the question is what to do when there is scarcity. Because that means that not everyone who wants it can get it at the current price. And, there's four main things that economists have listed that we can do.

One is to raise the price.

The second is queuing, which is first-come, first-serve. That's what Starbucks uses. That certainly is, we'll see, a version of what Duke does.

The third is chance. Lottery. That, we will decide--and that seems fair in the sense that we all have an equal opportunity to get it, and just chance determines who gets it.

And then, the last is authority or discretion. So, we might decide based on who we think--we could have some sorts of characteristics. And, you've talked a number of times on this show about the dangers of discretion. Because, the minimum wage, for example, allows discretion on the part--because more people want the job than can get it at this wage. And then, they can exercise tastes that they might have for discrimination, for acting badly. And, that means that if you use authority, you are giving--probably the discretion will be misused.

All of these four things have a disadvantage.

However, price, it seems to me, and since I have tenure, I'm going to go ahead and say this. Because Duke is not the only 'elite'--I'm making air quotes for those listening--'elite' university that does this; but Duke seems to miss no opportunity to take students by the ankles and shake the change out of their pocket. On every margin. So, the costs of food, the costs of housing, fees. Lord knows: tuition--$75,000 US. Now, not everybody pays full freight, but we are trying to maximize revenue. And, in fact, there was a very great EconTalk guest, Eugene Fama, who in January of 2012 did a terrific EconTalk. And, I should point out, he then won the Nobel Prize in October of 2013. Coincidence, I think not.

Michael Munger: Well, I don't know which caused which. Maybe it was selection. Obviously you only invite people of that quality, so it may not have been causal. But, he and Michael Jensen were just en fuego [trans.: on fire] in the mid-1980s. So, 1983 and then two papers in 1985, they said, 'People don't understand nonprofits.' And, nonprofits don't mean you're not trying to get revenue. It just means that what you do with the revenue is different. There's no residual claimant. People are more willing to contribute.

And so, big universities and other big nonprofits, it's not that they're not trying to maximize revenue. They are. It's just that then there's no residual claimant. And so, people are also willing to make contributions. You can have a big endowment, and so that you probably still get mail from UNC saying, 'Will you contribute to the endowment? Boy, it would really help.'

So, there's a puzzle. Duke--well, I shouldn't say Duke. Universities--elite universities--miss no opportunity to try to maximize revenue on almost every margin. And yet, Duke does this weird thing. It may be the most sought after, most expensive athletic ticket in all of college sports, which is the Duke game against UNC in Cameron Indoor Stadium, which is a tiny little high school gym. They do not charge money for it. They give it away for free.

Now, of course, if you're going to give it away for free, that means it's going to be scarce, because, as you said, a lot more people want it. So, which of the other mechanisms do they use?

It seems as if they should--and I'm using this in an efficiency sense--they should use a lottery. The advantage of a lottery is that it's arbitrary and it has far less dead weight loss. So, dead weight loss is the name that economists give to the resources that are wasted in competing for a rent. And, this is a kind of rent-seeking. So, I want this valuable thing. It's free. What do you have to do in order to get it? Well, you have to wait in line. How long? Well, longer than the next person who wants it.

And so, there's this arms race where you have to wait longer and longer. And, it turned out that the solution at Duke was to wait--not go sit in the seat that day, not the previous night. Six weeks!

Michael Munger: But, your example raises a bunch of interesting questions coinciding with Duke actually becoming pretty good in the early 1980s. So, Duke had been up and down. It's not that Duke was no good before Coach K, and though I can pronounce Krzyzewski correctly, I'm going to say Coach K and K-Ville. I'm not going to pronounce his name again. Duke had been good on and off before the arrival of Coach K. And, on the arrival of Coach K, Duke was terrible for quite a while. It was easy to get tickets. You could show up in the middle of the game and get student seats. So, it wasn't a problem.

Then, though, Duke started to get good--they had several good years. And, in 1986, a lot of people wanted to see the Carolina game because UNC was also good. And this story now has become legend. It's actually, as you said, it's in the terrible video, but this is described as an origin story. A young woman named Kimberly Reed, who was a senior and had gone to a number of games--and some friends of hers were playing quarters. And so, one of the things that I looked up was, what is the difference between quarters and beer pong? I thought they were basically the same game. They're not.

Michael Munger: Well, see, I didn't know that. This must be a UNC thing because we at Davidson did not drink. So, that was certainly not a thing that I've ever heard of.

So, quarters, you're trying to bounce a quarter into a cup; and there's conditions. They had played quite a few rounds of this and they had said, 'We probably should go. We need to plan how we're going to get the Duke UNC tickets.' And, someone said, 'Well, why don't we just pitch a tent?' And, after a few rounds, that started to sound like a good idea.

But they were warm and inside. This is in January. And so, North Carolina is not New Hampshire, but it often gets down to 40, maybe 30. It snows, it rains. It's pretty uncomfortable. And so, they considered asking--Kimberly Reed and her friends--considered asking Dean Sue, who is still--has just retired from Duke--and she was the Dean of Students for, I think, over a century. And, they said, 'We're not going to ask. It's much easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.' So, they went to U-Haul and they rented an enormous party tent and they set it up and only the 15 people who had participated were allowed in the tent and other people saw that and said, 'Hey, that's like a comfortable lounge chair, I now realize.'

So, Duke, by allowing tents--because the question was, are we going to allow this or not? And, they said, 'Well, I guess we will, because the alternative is they will be out in the elements. It'll be much more uncomfortable.'

Once tents were allowed, it was no longer true that you would just stay overnight. They started to stay for multiple nights. And, it is a little village. It is a brigadoon. So, Brigadoon is the famous Broadway musical about a little village--I think that it only comes once every 99 or 100 years--in Scotland. And so, it appears those people are there for a night. The young gentleman goes; he dances with a young lady. The next day, the village disappears and it doesn't come back for a hundred, so you'll never see it again.

But, K-Ville is annual. This is the 60th year, 6-0, 60th year from 1986--forgive me, the 40th year, from 1986 to 2026, consecutive, that K-Ville has been done. Although in 2021, there were some conditions, but still they allowed them to do it because it was outside. They were a little worried because of COVID [Coronavirus Disease]. But, 40 straight years there has now been this ephemeral, evanescent little tent village that shows up and it exists for a little while--and it has streets, it has lights, it has customs--and then it disappears and it's gone for an entire year.

The conditions and rules that they have come up with--this is entirely student-done. All of this has been delegated to the students. It's a bit like Burning Man. So, it has a constitution, it has a set of rules, it has a police force that are perceived by people not on the police force as being fascist, and there's an appeals process. So, if you disagree with the decision of the so-called line monitors, you can file a grievance and go through the appeals process with an independent authority. So, all of this has been created by the students as a way of managing the fact that once you made it more comfortable, the line got much longer.

Michael Munger: I think we should go through that at least.

Michael Munger: I can do that in just--I've tried to get an outline where I can do that in just a couple of minutes.

Michael Munger: So, the Duke Student Government--the DSG--every November, votes on a set of rules that is the constitution for the coming year, which they then put up online. And, I sent you the 2025/2026 version, so you can put that up in the show notes. So, the deadline to switch out or into a tenting group is January 16th. If more people have registered--if more than 80 different tents have registered--that means that that is more than the limit of black tents, which is the first one. There's black, blue, and white. So, black is the first one to come online. If there's more than 80 that have registered--and the registration process is you can have up to 12 people in the tent, and then everybody has to present their ID [identification].

If there's more than 80, they have an exam. And, the exam--I have a copy of a previous one. I obviously don't have this year's. This year's will be very valuable. But, there's 52 questions--58 questions. It's 14 pages long. And all of them are extremely detailed questions about what has happened in basketball this year.

So, for example, Question 16: Who did Duke play in a secret scrimmage against before the season began? In what city did they play? What was the final score? Now, almost no one knows that this even happened. So, it's a secret scrimmage, after all. So, you have to be a fanatical Duke fan.

So, the point is, in order even to get a chance to tent, you have to pass an exam.

Michael Munger: So, let me give the dates for that. Black tenting is from January 18th to January 28th. Blue tenting is from January 28th to February 9th, and white tenting is from February 14th to 28th. And, the rules are much less strict as you go down that hierarchy. However, it's important to note, black tents convert from black to blue on the 28th. So, all of them--blue tenting is just a rule for all the tents. So, at first, the black tenting rules are for all the tents.

You can be checked at any time. If the people are not in the tent, the tent will be removed. And, that's why they call the line monitors 'fascists,' because you'll be kicked out. Blue tenting is a little bit easier. White tenting, which is from February 14th to February 28th, is much less severe. All of the tents convert to white on February 14th.

So, it's just the earliest period that is the most draconian, because those are the people who are going to get in the front row of section 17.

The question is, why do they--they give a quiz. There's 58 questions. And they have to write up a new one every year. So, let me give the description. I think this is remarkable. Again, students wrote this. So, let me give their reason. "Unlike other universities that use a random lottery or ticket sales to determine which students are admitted to a sporting event, K-Ville is proud of its first come, first served, meritocratic approach." So, that word was just added. 'Meritocratic' has never been there until this year. So, until now, it just said 'first come, first serve' approach. This year, they added 'meritocratic.'

Michael Munger: Well, there's hundreds of people, all of whom have to take it on the same day; and it's the average score of your entire tent. So, you probably want to make sure not just that you're tenting with your friends, but you may very well need to tent with other fanatics.

Now, I only read one of the questions. This is not a cerebral test. This is memorizing trivia--

Michael Munger: And so, the more trivial, the better. And so, I have suggested that an alternative is: All they need to do is have a Bunsen burner set up on a table, and I can just hold my hand in it, and whoever will hold their hand in at the longest, 'Okay, you're in. Nope, you're out.' This is: How much will I hurt myself? They study for weeks to try to memorize these trivia, so the people who know the most about something stupid. This is a loyalty filter.

Michael Munger: Sorry. Well, about something irrelevant. This is not knowledge that is especially useful except in the context of this test.

Michael Munger: So, George Akerlof had a famous series of papers about loyalty filters. And, one of the examples that is used in that literature is that when China first was trying to establish a civil service, they had a problem because if you are far--the provinces that are far away, very difficult to monitor or enforce--

Michael Munger: Yeah. From the capital. And, the mountains are high and the emperor is far.

And so, the Civil Service exam was: Could you memorize and write from memory, in beautiful calligraphy, classical Chinese poetry? Which had nothing to do with your job. But it meant that you were willing to do something. And [?]: I'm going to double down. Something stupid. This has no point except that you will do something that is orthogonal. This is not in your interest, except to do this thing that shows I have the intensity. Because everyone, if you ask them, 'Are you a fanatic?' 'Absolutely. I'm a crazy fan.'

Michael Munger: This is a Motte and Bailey thing. I am now going to retreat to my prepared line of defense. It may not be perfectly correlated, but it is more correlated than other things that are easily measured.

Michael Munger: The other things would be measured with even more--this is actually relatively cheap. So, everyone takes it at exactly the same time, so there's no way for it to leak. Although money might be a way around this. If I am one of the line monitors who has made up the exam and I have a copy and you offer me, I don't know, $10,000, I'd probably think about it. That's a lot. And, that's a sign of devotion, and I get $10,000. So, maybe it does happen. However, the position of line monitor is extremely honorable. Even though people call them fascists, they all want to be one.

Michael Munger: Oh, it is a position of honor. You can say that it's something like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence and it's not really an honor. Thinking makes it so. It is perceived as an honor. You bitter UNC fans make me sick.

Michael Munger: Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Michael Munger: They get seats though. They get seats--

Michael Munger: Russ, you're understating this. Let me say--maybe you knew this and just didn't want to mention it. There are border guards.

Michael Munger: The line monitors in the middle of the night, they go around with a fantastically loud air horn. And, three times they sound the air horn. You have five minutes to check in and a third of your tent has to check in or the tent is moved. There are border guards, which means that you have to be physically in--maybe not in your tent, but you can't be in the gym, you can't be in the bathroom, and you can't be outside of this well-defined area. There's a very specifically defined area about what constitutes K-Ville. And, before they do a check, they call all of the line monitors and they form a line along the border. If anyone tries to come in, they check your ID, and you do not count towards the tent count.

Michael Munger: And, you are the same person who registered to wait--

Michael Munger: to prevent people from selling their place in line.

Michael Munger: They really check. There's barcodes. It's very hard to do that.

Michael Munger: Several every year.

Michael Munger: Every year. And, it's not one.

Michael Munger: You have to have one third. And so, most of the time--this is the middle of the night, too--so that you can take turns. And then, the check could be during the day. And, if it is, then you have to--and that's another thing you have to do. At the beginning of the semester, you all have to compare class schedules and you can't all have a class at the same time. Many are called, few are chosen.

Michael Munger: Well, let me say what's interesting about Skarbek's example is that often the justice is enforced against a member of your own tribe. So, some member of our gang behaves badly against a member of another gang. And so, the heads of the two gangs will meet and the aggrieved one says, 'Look, we don't want a war. Nobody wants a war here. What are you going to do?' And so, the members of the gang beat the heck out of their own member in a way that--

Michael Munger: It's not in front of a camera, but it is within the sight of the other gang. And, they say, 'Okay, justice has been done. We're good. No problem.' And, that's a very strong deterrent that--I think: I'm in a gang, I'm invulnerable. No. I am going to be--the enforcers are the members of my own tribe.

That's true of Duke students. So, the enforcers here are the members of their own tribe. These are people who tented as first-years. Second-years, maybe they tried to be line monitors. By the time they're a senior, they know all the rules, they've participated in this; and, being a line monitor, they really believe fiercely in this. The definition of K-Ville is very strongly enforced. They are the law. They are delegated. The prison example is a good one. The prison guards are likely to at least implicitly accept the emergent order that is produced by these prison constitutions because they can't control these prisoners if there's a war, if there's a giant fight. And so, the fact that there's less violence: if they have this constitution, the guards will look the other way. 'Okay, that was deserved. They were punishing their own member. I didn't hear a thing.'

Here, they are--normally, people would not tolerate someone else acting like this: being officious, blowing an air horn in the middle of the night, saying, 'No: You, no soup for you. No ticket for you.' So, there are ticket-Nazis, like on Seinfeld: 'No. No ticket for you. You have to go to the back.' So, they have to re-register; and then by the time they get to the white-ticket era, that means you're probably not going to get in. So, some of those are--they're called 'flex.' The white ticket--white-tent people are depending on some of the black- and blue-tent people getting kicked out. And it happens. So, in expected value, it actually happens.

Michael Munger: It is all completely delegated to students.

Now, in equilibrium, I could imagine that if the students said, 'We're going to have public floggings,' that would be out. But the--in equilibrium, yes, it's all delegated. So, the students recognize there's some things that they can't do. They can't have beatings or struggle sessions. But, yes, this is all entirely delegated; and the practice of pestering people at night, you might be concerned that people have maybe a lower GPA [grade-point average], maybe they get sick. There's a variety of concerns. The constitution is 50 pages long.

There's a bunch of dispensations and ways where you do not have to show up. So, the main ones are if it is below 35 degrees, if there's two inches of snow on the ground, or 30 mile-an-hour winds. So, you could have 34 degrees, an inch of snow, and 20 mile-an-hour winds, and you still have to be there.

So, they're trying to make it uncomfortable in a way, because those conditions are--it's called grace. You get grace: you get to go away. You also get grace two hours before and two hours after any home basketball game, because it's assumed you'll want to go to the basketball game. And, you get grace an hour before and an hour after any away game, because it's assumed you'll want to go watch that on TV. So there's all sorts of periods in here that are built in where no one has to be in K-Ville.

Michael Munger: I'm not saying that. In equilibrium, the administration has no say in that.

Michael Munger: The administration says nothing about them.

Michael Munger: It's not that it has no say, but it says nothing. It looks at it and it says, 'All right.'

Michael Munger: Have you got a cup of haterade there, because you clearly need a little more haterade?

Michael Munger: I'm going to fuss at you about that. This is how we train fighter pilots, elite military units, and Duke basketball fans.

Michael Munger: In all three cases, it is the severity of the initiation rite that creates a sense of solidarity and belonging. The average GPA [grade point average] is higher for people who tent. They are far more likely to give money and large amounts of money for a very long time.

So, we started out with a puzzle: Why would Duke do this? They're leaving literally millions of dollars on the table. Now, maybe it's causal; maybe it's not; maybe it's selection. And, I agree it's partly selection.

I think it's partly causal. Somebody comes to Duke--my younger son, Brian, went to Duke, tented in 2011. The experience was horrible, and he still keeps in touch with the people that he tented with. It is a bonding experience. And, I'm not saying other places should necessarily emulate it, but something that emerges from the existing culture that students come to own and they come to value. And, that then is one of the connections that years later at a reunion is a way of organizing--getting more money for Duke's endowment. In the long run, it might very well even be monetarily useful. They probably don't get as much as if they were to sell it. But it would change the nature of the game.

If they auctioned off the tickets to the highest bidder, it would be much quieter. All of the grownups that now have to pay--let me say for just a second: If you want a ticket in Cameron Indoor Stadium as a grownup, you have to pay $10,000 a year for five years to the Iron Dukes to get onto a list that takes up to 20 years--and still contributing $10,000 a year--in order to get a chance to be able to buy season tickets. So, your ability to get tickets any other way are not very much. But some people who go to Duke will end up doing that if they still live in the area.

So, I think it creates the kind of fanaticism that we intentionally use for fighter pilots and elite troops.

Michael Munger: Well, but bootcamp is mandatory. All of them have to go through this. In fighter pilots and in elite military units, every day they say, 'You can quit. You're crazy. Why would you be here? Go somewhere else. Somebody else better will take your place. It's okay. You should just quit.' This is entirely voluntary. Nobody is making these kids do this.

The other thing that what you just said reminded me of--two things. One is that if Cameron Indoor or if Duke's K-Ville were to change, I think a lot of the other teams in the league and the television contract would all object behind the scenes. Because, one of the things that makes the television contract so valuable for all the other teams is there's always an opponent. And, everybody wants to watch the crazies in K-Ville play someone. Those games are really valuable for the TV contract.

Michael Munger: I forgot the other thing.

Michael Munger: They play at UNC.

Michael Munger: I want to add one thing about--since I have tried to defend Duke, let me take a little bit of that back. I am a UNC fan. It is true. And, Coach K's last two games I thought were an embarrassment to Duke because it was this sort of coordination. And, if you want to do that, that's fine. But, there was an opponent, and the opponent was UNC. So, they had all of the speeches beforehand, which UNC was required to sit there and listen to about how great Coach K was. And then, Duke got their butt kicked at home by UNC. And, afterwards-- the score was 94 to 81, which is not that close for a home game for Duke. And, well, the result was that after the game, Coach K with very tight pursed lips said, 'That's just unacceptable. That's unacceptable.' And so, I got this t-shirt made. And so, those people who are watching on YouTube can see it. Let me just read it. It says, '94-81 Acceptable.' And then, it has UNC's logo. So, I immediately bought one of these shirts. I think it is acceptable that Duke lost because I think Duke made a marketing mistake by pretending we could both have an actual game, which you might lose and pretend this is the coronation for Duke.

I remember the other thing that I wanted to say. I was interested if there was anything measurable about the difference in what we might call home court advantage. You mentioned that Duke is perceived to have a substantial home court advantage. And the students are obnoxious. The foul line is only three or four feet from the student section. They can lean far forward and you can see them out of--

Michael Munger: That would be bad if it were the--so the side lines. So, all along section 17, if they lean forward and somebody holds their legs, you can see them in your peripheral vision as you're trying to inbound. And they're screaming things. And, what are they screaming? Well, for each of the opposing players, they have investigated embarrassing things about their mom, their girlfriend; so-and-so broke up with you--horrible things. In some cases, like a death in the family. So, I hate this. I hate the fact that they do this. But, it is one of the things that they feel like they get to do that seems like it should create a home field advantage. And so, I wanted to see if your head would explode, Russ.

Studies show--so, I asked AI, 'What team in college basketball has the biggest home court advantage?' And, it immediately said, 'Duke.' And, I said, 'All right, what is the evidence for that? Is there differences in betting lines, home and away for the same opponent for Duke?' 'No, Duke is not in the top 10.' 'Are there differences in scores for how Duke does against other teams, home and away?' 'No, it's not in the top 10.' And so, then being astonished but not surprised, I asked the AI, 'What is the basis for you thinking that there's a big home court advantage? Because two of the things that are measurable, Duke's not even in the top 10.' And, it said, 'Well, everyone says that it has the biggest home court advantage.'

And, that's worth something. That's actually worth something when it comes to TV contracts. But there's no evidence of it.

Michael Munger: May I take something back? I've been pretty hard on Coach K. I think he is the best coach in the history of college sport. Not basketball: in the history of college sport. Consistent success, everybody graduated, no scandals. And, if you look at the number of his players that make it into professional ranks, it's almost unprecedented. So, I think he is the best coach in the history of college sport; and I will always dislike him.

Michael Munger: A pleasure as always, Russ.

Hanno Sauer: Thanks for the invite, Russ.

Hanno Sauer: Yeah, you're right. Adam Smith, I greatly appreciate him. Fantastic writer, philosopher. More and more, he gets, I think, also recognized as a philosopher again. And, of course, his economic contribution is, without a doubt, first-rate. So, I enjoy that comparison.

And, you're right: At the most abstract and general level, one way of putting it would be that I try to deal with a kind of reverse theodicy problem. So, when you think about it, in pre-Darwinian times, when you have a theistic framework, a theistic outlook on the world, you get a theodicy problem. You kind of need to explain how evil and suffering come into the world if you have a deity that is all-kind, and all-powerful, and knows everything. So, how do you square these three classical features of this divine entity with the fact that there are children dying early, and there are wars and genocides and torture and so on--

Hanno Sauer: That's right. Yeah.

And, now you get the opposite problem when you move to a naturalistic Darwinian framework. All of a sudden, the default assumption seems to be that it's 'nature, red in tooth and claw.' It's dog-eat-dog, it's elbows out. Everyone is selfish. Everyone is essentially sociopathic. Right?

And, now you get the problem: Okay, evidently there is friendship and heroism and love and altruism and sacrifice. But, where do those come from? It seems to not make any sense.

But people like Adam Smith noticed this tension as well, and many others did. Evidently, such things do exist. So, on the one hand, we do have selfish and antisocial and uncooperative instincts and drives and inclinations, but clearly we also have the opposite. We also have friendship and altruism and morality and nice and cooperative and generous dispositions. Where do they come from?

And I think interestingly, we haven't really figured out a good, solid, and precise answer until well into the second half of the 20th century, where people started to understand--evolutionary biologists equipped with game theory, in tandem with economists indeed; sometimes these people were one and the same--figured out where do the returns from cooperative behavior come from? And, people started talking about inclusive fitness, and we started to understand reciprocity and how cooperation can get off the ground in a Darwinian world that in principle is morally indifferent and doesn't follow any divine design or any plan.

Hanno Sauer: So, you're right. So, it's one thing to find out or to figure out why cooperation is an explanatory problem in the first place. But then, you get a whole, another set of problems that are specific to human beings, because we are indeed somewhat unusual in the animal kingdom, because we do cooperate and we thrive under conditions of cooperation. We are, in fact, especially good at cooperating, in our own way.

But, what we do is curious and unique, namely: we have managed over the past years, decades, centuries, millennia, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of years in a way--now we're talking about proto-human, pre-human beings--we have managed to scale up our cooperation in a way that other animals don't do.

So, we have chimpanzees, and they live in cooperative small groups of maybe a few dozen individuals, but they never build societies of thousands of individuals, or millions.

In fact, it would be a kind of science fiction horror story--it would be uncanny to see millions of chimpanzees cooperate, right? Because we know they don't do that.

Now, there are some animals that engage in large-scale cooperation--for instance, certain insects, termites, and so on and so on. But also, they always do just that. So, they have a specific genetic programming, and they live one way and not any other way.

But, human beings have this malleability and plasticity and capability to live in all sorts of ways. We can, and sometimes occasionally we still do even nowadays, live in very, very small hunter-gatherer groups. And also, we live in the society that you and me live in: We talk across thousands of miles with modern technology, and we use trade that spans continents, and so on and so on. So, the society that we are part of essentially has billions of members--right?--who cooperate on the basis of institutions and norms and social practice, and so on and so on. And, only we can really do that.

And so, the book that I've written is essentially a story of how we manage to expand our institutional toolkit to scale up human cooperation from very small groups to contemporary times with billions of people cooperating, sometimes inadvertently or not even knowingly, but we do in fact cooperate with people from Egypt and Taiwan.

Hanno Sauer: I mean, obviously there isn't just one, but I try to narrate this story of the various mechanisms that we use to scale up cooperation.

So, you can think of it as groups grow in size from very small, largely genetically-related people that interact face-to-face almost every day, know each other very well, and occasionally meet other groups that they are distinct from and that may be somewhat hostile, it may be unremarkable. But we're talking about small groups. But, the larger these groups become, you need to introduce new mechanisms to stabilize cooperation, which becomes increasingly fragile, the more people you have. It becomes more entropic, so to speak, when you have more members in a group.

Just think about a camping trip that you do with six people in your family and compare that to a camping trip with 60 or 600 people. You see, you need complete different solutions regarding division of labor, enforcement of norms, who gets up in the morning and when, who takes care of the kids, who is cleaning the pots, who is doing the fishing, who is building the tents, who is repairing the tools, and so on and so on. And so, you need to figure all that out.

And, after a while, maybe the people who are supposed to clean the pots and repair the tools, they say, 'I don't feel like it today.' And, cooperation tends to unravel when this happens. Right? So, you need enforcement mechanisms.

And so, I dedicate a whole chapter to this idea of enforcement, social sanctions from softer sanctions such as telling people off, gossip, all the way to capital punishment, and the way that this plays a role in the so-called self-domestication of humans.

So, we are the golden retriever in the primate kingdom. So, think about how golden retrievers relate to wolves, and that's how we relate to chimpanzees and gorillas. Very docile, kind of peaceful, at least towards the in-group. Very norm-conformist, very eager to learn, to play, relatively low aggression--at least impulsive aggression--and so on and so on. And, we have become that way.

Well, the question is, how did we become this way? And, I think the story that is best supported by the evidence and also some theoretical considerations is that we just killed the most aggressive members of our tribes and bands for hundreds of thousands of years. So, you get a kind of very, very intense selection pressure on human groups where, if you take out the 10% of the most violent people each generation, you're going to become less violent. Right? Because if you, I don't know, if you take out all the wannabe bullies and tyrants before they get to reproduce, those genes tend to disappear from the population. And that sort of happened. And, that is another mechanism: the self-domestication mechanism is another way for us to stabilize cooperation and to do the next step in scaling up our group size.

Hanno Sauer: Well, I think this also happened. We know that humans can be very violent as well. They can coordinate on violence. They can form ad hoc coalitions. They can practice violent cooperation in hunting, which is a kind of--it's very similar to ambushing and raiding a different tribe. I believe that's what primordial warfare is mostly supposed to have been, is like raids. Nightly raids. So, you don't really have: we're going to meet war-like in an open field and engage in combat like that. It was mostly, yeah, and we take what we can get, and we take as many women as we can get. And so, that has left some mark on our genetic makeup as well.

And then the question would be like, which of these processes is, maybe swamped the other? And so, either way, this self-domestication dynamic would be something that applies more to the in-group, to the group itself. And, these violent tendencies would largely remain directed at the out-group. And, that is indeed another factor in our moral psychology is that we inherited this strong us-and them cognition.

Hanno Sauer: Well, if you have an increasing need to enforce social norms--and sometimes you need violence--it just helps to install a disposition for people to enjoy violence. Right? Just like, if you want to get people to reproduce, it makes sense to have people enjoy that.

And, that is not a justification for being violent today. It's just under certain circumstances that can be an asset. And, later on, once you have solved the problem, as it were, that you were going to solve with this taste for violence, it can be that it becomes a kind of evolutionary hangover. So we still have it in our psyche, but now it's impractical, and we are too violent and too harsh and too punitive.

And I think that is what we see sometimes that in contemporary societies and in modern societies, it is sometimes possible to need very little violence to enforce cooperation for various reasons, but it's still possible for that instinct, for that atavistic instinct to flare up. And when an egregious crime happens that's very, very salient perhaps in the public, people get this taste for punitive reaction. It's understandable, but at the same time, it's useful to know where that comes from and when it may or may not be appropriate.

Hanno Sauer: That's right. That's right. I fully agree with that description. And, the reason I describe it as, well, some things can be moral improvements or moral changes that, at a certain point in time, constitute a moral improvement, even though looking at them from today's perspective we would also view them as something unpleasant and at least ambivalent. And, I think the evolution of punishment and cruelty is a little bit like that, where it was like a ladder we needed to get on the roof, and now we want to kick the ladder away. It has that kind of thing about or kind of feel about it.

The very general point is that as human groups become larger, the need for enforcement of norms increases. We know from experimental studies, economics games, public goods games, for instance, that people start with in the first couple of rounds, one or two rounds, with cooperation, and then cooperation unravels. And when you do these experiments with a punishment option, you see that cooperation can be stabilized.

Now, that's not the first-best way that we would like humans to be, but that's the way it is. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made, and social sanctions are one of the ways to straighten out the crooked timber of humanity.

And, it still works today. It makes sense to think about also, to engage in cost-benefit analysis of how punitive we need to be. And, I think we often overlook that because our psychology isn't really cost-benefit psychology, as [?] to the greater chagrin[?] of economists who keep reminding people of trade-offs and hidden costs. It's one of the big frustrations that economists have with the general public is that they only see benefits or they only see costs, and so on and so on, and they just completely omit and ignore one side of the equation.

So, we should engage in cost-benefit thinking when it comes to punishment and our punitive instincts and social sanctions. But they did play that role in the past, and they still continue to play that role today. And, I don't think we could really do without any social sanctions. We tend to need some mix of incentives and sanctions, of course; and ideally more incentives and fewer sanctions, and ideally the sanctions aren't too harsh. But in principle, well, collective action problems remain present and they always threaten to undermine social cooperation, and so you need some sort of enforcement.

Hanno Sauer: Go ahead.

Hanno Sauer: And, I think that's a nice--so I like this way of thinking. I just disagree with this specific point. But, because I think--so I may not be 100% up to date on this topic, but the last time I looked at the evidence--

Hanno Sauer: So, then I'm just leaving it to the audience to look it up.

But, my read of the evidence right now is that, in terms of making deterrence and the threat of punishment actually effective in deterring unwanted antisocial behavior, it's the opposite.

So, it seems to be motivationally the most effective when people are quite certain that they get caught, even when the punishment is not as harsh. So you can tell people--so, if you have a society where you rob someone and there is a 90% chance you're going to get flogged--right?--people find that very motivationally disincentivizing. And, if they have an extremely harsh punishment as they're going to get drawn and quartered in the town square, but it almost never happens, people think they're going to get away with it. And, apparently, well, this would make sense because, I mean, there is a kind of selection effect of people who self-select into criminal careers. They tend to not be very, very prudent. Right?

Hanno Sauer: Right. So, I suppose that you and I don't tend to contemplate the pros and cons of bank robbery very often. It's just not a thing that some--so the kind of person that contemplates seriously whether or not to rob a bank may not be the one that is most susceptible to the kind of cost-benefit analysis that Gary Becker recommended. So, it's a little bit of--it's the kind of punishment that would work among economists with an IQ [intelligence quotient] of 145, right? But not on the people that you want to deter.

But, I like that idea. I like that way you're thinking. I remember that there is an example that Gordon Tullock gives at some point where he says, 'If you want to increase road safety, don't install airbags. You should install a sharp dagger into the steering wheel.' Right? That's going to increase safety. And, it's just so counterintuitive, and as you said, is upsetting to most people to think that way. But I like that way you're thinking, if only because it's contrarian, and it cracks something open. I like that.

Hanno Sauer: Exactly, exactly.

Hanno Sauer: I mean, I think you're right that we do not just desire to be loved, but to be worthy of love--to be lovely.

Now, I think in the vast majority of cases, these things are almost identical because the best way to be loved is to be lovely. Right? So, the best way to seem good is to just be good. If you want to just aim at seeming good straight, without the detour through being good, this is a little bit like the paradox of hedonism. If you aim for fun directly, you're going to miss it. Right? Fun needs to happen--at your behavior.

So, there's a paradox of being moral, which is that if you aim at seeming moral--if you aim at seeming moral directly--there's also going to be--you're going to come off as calculative and manipulative and just keeping up appearances. And, if you just go for just authentically caring about people, you're going to seem moral, and that's going to be something that people appreciate much more.

And, I think the process of evolution is smart in that way, in that it has equipped us with these abilities to be motivated in ways that feel authentic to us--that are authentic. So, we genuinely care about friends, we genuinely care about people we love, we genuinely care about our kids, or whatever group that we identify with: the tennis club, or the nation, or the tribe, or whatever. This is not fake. But of course, underlying it, distally speaking, there is a strategic rationale that led to the evolution of these tendencies that have become authentically experienced in our minds.

So, it's sort of both: you have an underlying strategic rationale for the evolution of authentically-felt dispositions of virtue. So, it's--the great primatologist, Frans de Waal, Dutch primatologist, once said that, he's an advocate of this so called veneer theory of morality. [Editorial note: Immediately subsequent to the publication of this podcast episode, Sauer, on X, qualified that to: "In this podcast I mistakenly attribute the 'veneer theory' of morality to de Waal, but of course he just coined the term and rejects it."] He has this great line--I think it's false, but it's a great line--'Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed.' And, the idea is that altruism is skin deep. But, I don't think that's really true. I think our altruistic and cooperative dispositions, they go pretty deep. Even though it is of course correct, there is a selfish-gene kind of rationale underlying them.

Hanno Sauer: Yeah. It could also help to be a CEO that used to start at the very bottom in the company where you really know the ropes. So, if you actually used to do that 45 years ago, it's going to be much more believable. You know the culture and how people talk, you know the movements, and so on and so on. And then, that's going to be a huge plus for your credibility in the business.

I once heard a story about someone who was walking around London late at night, 11:00 or something. And, there was this famous, world-famous chef. There was many restaurants in London. And, he was getting out of a black SUV [Sport Utility Vehicle] in full kitchen garment only to walk through the back door and then greet the guests as if he had been in the kitchen. And then, he would go back into the SUV and go to the next restaurant.

And so, once you hear--that kind of story is really off-putting to people because people absolutely hate that kind of mimicry. And we are very, very sensitive towards deception and people trying to manipulate us with the signals that they send. And when they do it so strategically, people absolutely hate that.

Hanno Sauer: That's right.

Hanno Sauer: Okay. So, I'll try to give a nuanced answer to this question. I do think that religion is very important in the biological and cultural and social evolution of human society, cooperation, and morality, but I say that as an outside observer. So, I do not think that that's the case because morality gets some or all of its authority from divine command, because I do not believe there is such a thing. And, I do not think that morality can only have authority over human behavior if there were such a thing as a divine entity asking us to behave a certain way.

So, I do not think that without God, everything is allowed. I think we can ground morality in human level considerations, and we don't need transcendent justification or backing our foundations to do that. At any rate, I would always want to know why should I accept the verdict or wishes of the divine entity then, if there were one. These are the classical objections to a theistic validation of moral norms.

But, I do think that religion is very important, not just in constraining human behavior, but also it's kind of cheesecake for some of our moral instincts. So, it activates some of our moral instincts. And, religion in the most abstract level--famously there can be religions without God, without a deity like the Abramitic religions would know it. But, religion, first and foremost, sociologically speaking, I think what it does is that it practices ritual and respect for authority and the cohesion of a group.

So, when you think about, I don't know if you've been to one, but, like, a Catholic--I've been to, I guess, one or two in my life, as a witness--to a Catholic mass. It's singing, it's a ritual, it's very regimented, it's very structured. It has very, very clear symbolic affirmation of roles: Who is the boss? Who gets to call the shots, if I may say so. And, I think it practices awe, respect for higher values and authority; and it practices ritual. That's why there's a lot of singing, there's lots of--praying is a kind of 'we are in sync'-kind of activity. Right? Obviously there is--what is it called? Isolated prayer is, like, lone prayer, I suppose. But, I think first and foremost, it's a social activity that you then sometimes enact privately in your room.

So, that's the conducive way in which religion or a taste for transcendent forces such as authority and the group inculcates in us a sense that can then be harnessed for the sake of cooperation in general.

And, likewise, you have very, very interesting, very recent studies and contributions in theories of cultural evolution, which notice that you almost always see the co-evolution of early urbanization and empires together with what these people call 'Big Gods.' Right? So, in many small-scale societies, you have a bunch of gods. Even the Greeks still had a bunch of gods with, like, different roles, right? One was for war, one was for science, one was for the arts, one was the big guy.

This strikes us as a kind of infantile way of thinking. Right? At least that's how it always seemed to me. These are great stories--right?--where you have Zeus and Poseidon battling. But it's great. You don't really believe that. I don't really believe in Odin and Thor. I assume you don't either, but these are great stories, right?

And at a certain point in time, around a couple thousand years ago, in different places but largely in Mesopotamia--so, the Middle East, basically--you see these Big Gods, big moralistic gods. And they are larger than life. First of all, it tends to gravitate towards one God--right?--who does everything; and you don't have these goofy nature gods, the river god and the forest god, or whatever, but one huge God who gets--who becomes increasingly powerful, right? Until you have this idea that it's an other-worldly creature that knows everything, can do everything, and so on and so on. And, the reason is that as societies, again, scale up and become larger, you have cities that maybe have 50,000 inhabitants--right?--in Iraq or in what used to be Persia or something. You know, that kind of region.

And you can't monitor people's behavior, right? It becomes easier and easier to get away with antisocial behavior.

So then it becomes very, very useful to have a cultural invention where you tell people, 'Oh, by the way, we have bad news. You're not getting away with anything because God sees everything and God knows your thoughts and your wickedness. And, in fact, this divine entity doesn't just know everything you do, but here's another piece of bad news. Namely, you get to live after you die, and so you can be punished in whatever the construct then is--purgatory or Hell or some sort of conception of continued existence of the mind that can be subject to retaliation or punishment even after you're dead.' And that becomes a very, very powerful idea.

So, in that sense, I think religion is very important for human morality and cooperation, even though I personally say this as someone who is not a person of faith, but just looks at it from a theoretical and empirical standpoint.

Hanno Sauer: I think these are all very interesting questions, and I think I'm happy to--I'm not against any possible answer, whatever the truth is. The reason why--well, this is easy to say, like I only care about this--but the reason I'm saying this is it could turn out that having religion of some sort in a society is beneficial because the vast majority of people needs that kind of compass and orientation and value system. It doesn't bother me if this were true because, on the one hand, it wouldn't show that it's therefore true. Sometimes untrue opinions or theories can be more socially beneficial. Right? It could also be--like, we talked earlier about what kind of cost-benefit analysis would in terms of punishment or what kind of threat of deterrence would be effective for different people in society.

And, it could also be that, yeah, maybe most people in society need religion to be cooperative and cohesive and compliant, but maybe some don't.

And, thirdly, I also think that there are certain places that are quite cohesive and high trust and very low religion. So, this is cheap to bring this up--but often people talk about Scandinavia, and so on and so on, as Northern Europe.

And, I mean, just anecdotally, people around me are nice. And I don't think I've even ever met a person of faith in my life.

So, it's very rare. I mean, people baptize their children sometimes, but it's sort of like, 'Yeah,'--but no one--I've never heard anyone say, 'I believe in it,' straight up. But, everyone is perfectly well-adjusted and, you know, good person to be around.

Hanno Sauer: Exactly.

Hanno Sauer: I'm German. So, I grew up in a small town close to Frankfurt, so in the center of Germany, and my parents are from Dusseldorf where I live now. This is the Rhineland area, so very Western Germany, close to the Dutch border.

So, like Dawkins, I would refer to myself as a cultural Christian. Right? So, evidently, I grew up in a country where the culture is Christian. I celebrate Christmas, for instance, and Easter, and there are churches around and so on and so on. So, culturally, yes, but I didn't grow up as a participant.

Hanno Sauer: I don't really think so.

Hanno Sauer: Where are you from, if I may ask?

Hanno Sauer: Israel is a young and modern country. I suppose there are many people who do the rituals, I suppose, and are culturally Jewish, but maybe they don't really believe in the Old Testament. Right?

Hanno Sauer: Yeah, yeah, sure.

Hanno Sauer: Yeah. I'm not sure. I'm not sure whether I agree with it. And, I've never had a firm view on this because I'm not sure what the criteria for evaluating that would be.

And, let me explain what I mean by that. So, the phrase comes from Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond is a famous author who wrote many famous books, but Guns, Germs, and Steel made a huge impression on--it was a massive bestseller, and it's a great book. I don't know if that one still holds up in light of the evidence, but it's still recommended, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which also explains certain global inequalities in economic development or how some places got a head start. And, he coined this phrase: The worst mistake of humanity was the invention of agriculture.

Now, I think what this means--and this seems to me to be largely accepted in the people who study archaeology and the Neolithic period and the transition from essentially the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle that human beings were engaging in for the whole Pleistocene, 2 million-ish years.

And then, there was a switch--people used to think it was 10,000 years ago, maybe 11, maybe 12,000 years ago. Maybe at one point we'll realize it was 15,000 years ago. Who knows? Certain climatic upheavals probably happened that enabled new forms of living, and then human beings, who are constantly experimenting, figured it out. And, that turned out to be the successful variant: to become sedentary, to figure out seasons and planting crops and irrigation and building larger and larger buildings and living closer together, domesticating animals, and so on and so on.

Now, this turned out to be the successful model because it also amplified military capability. Right? So, all the other people who wanted to remain hunter-gatherers, they were just killed or absorbed by this new model. And, probably the populations that we know today as hunter-gatherers are not some sort of remnants of a primitive lifestyle, as some people sometimes say. They probably live in a post-apocalyptic world where a huge empire destroyed their life.

So, contemporary hunter-gatherers are the people who--the very few people who escaped this absorption by the cultural evolution of empires a couple of thousand years ago. This same dynamic happened in East Asia in various places, somewhat later, but analogous happened in middle America in populations there. And so, you keep seeing that, but to my knowledge, the earliest is in Mesopotamia.

And, why is it supposed to be the worst mistake of all time? And, I think there the argument is that it was a terrible deal for the vast majority of people. You were able to create an economic surplus via agriculture, storing calories, essentially. So, people had a higher calorie input perhaps. But it came with oppression. It came with very, very hard labor. It came with slavery. It came with huge inequality. It came with warfare and terror. It came with diseases, because for the first time people lived around animals a lot, and you get these zoonotic pandemics. And so, at the very least, it seems to have been a terrible deal for the majority of people--maybe not for everyone, but for the majority.

And, people now think that the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle had certain downsides, but overall it wasn't so bad. Human beings always had relatively high child mortality. That has to do with the big head and various other things. So, we always had that. But once people made it past four or five years old, life was apparently pretty good. Right? People--they were 60, 70 years old in many cases. There weren't many diseases. They didn't really have cancer. They didn't really have most diseases: they didn't really have the flu, perhaps even, because that is an animal virus.

And, they were telling stories. They didn't have long work days, not unusually long--at least that's what we now believe. So, compared to hunter-gatherer life, the transition to early empires was a terrible development for the vast majority of people. And, it's only somewhat recently that life became better for many people again.

Hanno Sauer: All right.

Hanno Sauer: Yeah. Yeah. So, that's right. I mean, this is an interesting question. You're right: it's empirical. I think for a long time, the view of what we would now describe as hunter-gatherer populations was a kind of like: these are savages and they are uncivilized. That was then overcome--and over-corrected in a way by people like Mead who said, 'No, this was all kumbaya.' Right?

And then, the pendulum swings back, and people say, 'Well, that seems to be a little bit like a sort of civilizational guilt and you're trying to--.' So, it wasn't all fine. It was actually hard work, and the diet was at least very unsteady. I think people still believe that. Right? So, sometimes you would have a huge kill, and then you're fine for a couple of days. But then, there are periods of scarcity, and so on and so on.

Hanno Sauer: Exactly.

Hanno Sauer: Exactly. Well, and all of that, I'm not sure about the details, but just conditionally, I would be happy to grant that. And still the transition to agriculture could have been even worse than that, right? Where you have grinding, grinding oppression and--

Hanno Sauer: Exactly. And, you just get absolutely murdered building the pyramids. That sort of stuff.

I think--well, it seems to me that at least in terms of, like I said, disease and oppression, I would be surprised if there hadn't been more of that with the emergence of civilization.

Hanno Sauer: Also, a certain type of warfare--I mean, there's always been out-group violence, and like we said, raids and people competing for resources with violence, and sometimes people just being hostile for no good reason even, other than these people look different. So, we find that--and you also have some things that--that's why it's so difficult to evaluate. So, was it, all things considered, a mistake or not? Because, you also have certain types of economic development that only become possible this way.

Hanno Sauer: You cannot have the fruits of a modern economy if you--first and foremost, you need a large number of people. There are fascinating studies about populations from Australia and New Zealand where there are no differences between them other than population size. And, in New Zealand, the populations, they couldn't sustain bows and arrows. They only had very, very primitive boats. They lost almost all their tools. Not because they were stupid; not because they were genetically inferior. They're literally identical to Australians. It's just that they got stuck on this island, and it was too few people, and you can't sustain a certain type of technology and cooperation if you have 20,000 people.

So, that's why I always find it hilarious when you have The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or these shows. And, you have evidently a society where everyone is in the army and--there's no economy. You need millions of people. And, like The Lord of the Rings, I'm not sure, but there are a hundred thousand humans or something in Middle Earth and they have essentially a medieval civilization, which is just not possible. You can't have anything. You can't have armor and huge cities and castles with 100,000 people. You have nothing. And so, of course, this is a fantasy novel, but I'm just saying that population size matters a lot. And, the emergence of civilizations and urban living indeed only made that possible. And then, it still took a couple of thousand years until the real escape from the Malthusian trap started to work out. And, that's just 300 years ago when that started. That's very recent.

Hanno Sauer: No, I'm curious to hear.

Hanno Sauer: Oh, thank you.

Hanno Sauer: Oh, yeah.

Hanno Sauer: Totally. Totally. I think about that, too. I think about that, too. And, I do agree. So, actually the English version, we were still working, copy editing that, in 2024, and we did make some changes already. So, it's very slightly, but even some examples that I gave are toned down or even less optimist. So, we already had to adjust away from that a little bit.

I did become interested in that question of progress. You're right, we forget some bad things, but we also forget--or we forget some good things, but we also forget some bad things. And, there's been this trend in thinking about the past and about society over the past 10 years or so, where people try to say, 'Really, things are better now than they seem.' This, sort of like, optimism.

So, you did have Angus Deaton, for instance, an economist who said health and wealth, they improve. You had famously Steven Pinker, social scientists such as Hans Rosling. And, I have a whole library of optimism like that. And, I think that was necessary, too, to avoid that nostalgia and doomerism about everything's always going to hell. Right? I think that is a useful corrective as well. So, I'm still temperamentally on board with trying to be optimistic.

And I think there's negativity bias in headlines. Suicide numbers only get reported when they tick up, even when they're long-term trend is--whatever, that kind of example. So, I'm still mostly on board with that. At the same time, you're right that the optimistic tone that people like Pinker had or that I have in the book a little bit is a little more awkward now.

And, I do think that essentially, well, pretty much exactly the past 10 years have brought certain changes that don't point in a direction that I think is great. I tend to think that Brexit was the first real big event that ushered in this atmosphere of returning to a ethno-nationalist thinking about politics, groups, culture, and the economy. It was always a silly idea that an isolated British economy would function better, that this is not really even a possibility, right? This has always been a cultural vibe kind of thing. You had the same thing with various right-wing neoconservative backlash kind of movements in the Netherlands, Hungary, in Germany, Austria, France, and so on and so on and so on where people also said, 'We do not like many of the things that are happening due to essentially the global integration of institutions and the economy.' This can be migration, it can be changes in the labor market and unemployment, and so on and so on.

I think part of that is understandable. It does suck when your job appears [?disappears?]. Well, it's an entirely different question whether in terms of running an economy of 50 million or 500 people, that cost doesn't have to be accepted. Well, easy for us to say perhaps, but it's a tricky question; but we have seen these movements. We have seen--the election of Donald Trump makes it about one person, but it's more and more. And, I think increasingly we see that it's also a cultural normative shift in the erosion and/or destruction of certain norms of decorum and the way people treat each other. Every couple of years, people share this video of the Presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and it's a different country.

Hanno Sauer: These guys, they spend five minutes each on stage and say, 'This guy is my best friend. I love him.' Right? And, I cannot praise the accomplishments of Mr. Obama; and they're hugging and kissing. It's amazing. It is unthinkable even a couple of years later, and certainly today. That may be gone forever. I mean, we don't know that, but that's not something that I think is likely to be good. And so, I would tone down the optimistic message a little bit.

Now, when we talk about long-term trends, you have this or that guy, you have whatever representative of this or that party, that is shortsighted or vicious or both. But, I still want to think about general trends in more optimistic terms because I do think that these trends--let's put our own country first, let's run our own economy with our own interests in mind, let's be more homogenous, and so on and so on--I don't really think they are functional in the world that we live in. I do think the trend still goes towards scaling up cooporation even more, and these I'm inclined to think are growing pains of that. I hope that these growing pains don't become so large that people tear it all down and destroy things. That is, in a way, what happened in the 1930s in Germany--right?--where things were happening and it created a moment that could be exploited by people who were, well, lucky from their point of view, so opportunistically lucky in exploiting a kind of sentiment in a noteworthy part of the population. And it allowed them to--I mean, wreak havoc doesn't even; it seems inadequate--but just catastrophic consequences for huge numbers of people. So, hopefully that's not the path that we're on, even though there's always that risk, I think, that that can happen.

So, there's no wiggishness or naivete, I hope, in the story that I'm inclined to tell. But, I think that if I had to guess, the forces are still pushing in a direction of: it doesn't really make sense to hate each other because your eyes look different or your skin is darker or lighter or whatever. And, there can be cultural diversity without antagonism, and there can be tolerance for plural ways of living, and so on and so on.

But then, again, I'm a 42-year-old man now, so maybe these are my values, and now you have a bunch of 25-year-olds who grew up on toxic internet content and they disagree. But, if you ask me, Hanno Sauer right now, this is my answer.

Hanno Sauer: Thank you so much. It was great fun.