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.

Susan Cain: Thank you so much, Russ. It's great to be here. I'm a huge fan.

Susan Cain: Well, I had been living this topic all my life because I am an introvert in an extroverted world, and this is something I'd been thinking about since I was four years old. I didn't have a vocabulary for talking about it or thinking about it when I was a kid, but I think that every introverted kid is hyper-aware of how their preferences of how they like to spend their time and how many people they like to spend their time with is completely different from what is mandated for them by social norms.

So, I'd been thinking about it all my life, but I think it was really when--I was a corporate lawyer for about a decade before I became a writer. And, during that time, I again started to think in a new way about how so much of the way that people showed up as lawyers was dictated by whether they're more introverted or extroverted, and yet there was no language for talking about that. We would talk about gender, we would talk about nationality, we would talk about all different things, but no one would ever talk about this most fundamental of personality types that some psychologists call the north and south of human temperament. And, in the last 10 years, it's become pretty commonplace to talk about it, but at that point, the words introvert and extrovert were almost never used.

Susan Cain: Yeah. So, this is a question that we could spend the whole hour on if we wanted to.

Susan Cain: Yeah. There's so much to say here. I'll give you first the kind of pop culture definition, which I actually like and was the definition that first spoke to me when I heard it back when I was in, I guess, my 20s. And, that is the question of: where do you get your energy from? So, do you feel more energetic when you're out and about in the world interacting with a lot of people, or do you feel more energetic when you're alone or in a quieter setting?

I often say to people with this one, imagine that you are at a party that you're truly enjoying with company who you truly love, and then think about how you feel after you've been there for about an hour and a half or two hours. So, if you're an extrovert, it's as if the internal battery that you have has been charged up by this experience, and so now you're full of energy and you're looking for more. And, if you're an introvert, no matter how socially skilled you might be, and no matter how much you love all those people at the party, your battery has been drained by this experience, and so now you're wishing that you could just press the button and be immediately whisked home.

And, that idea of the internal battery that we all have, I think is an incredibly useful metaphor, but also important to understand that it is just a metaphor for what's happening neurobiologically. And, there's a lot we can get into with that. But, just to give you one crack at it: In general, you could say that introverts have nervous systems that react more to all different kinds of stimulation.

So, we tend to think about the stimulation of that party or the stimulation of going to a big meeting at work, but there's also just the day-to-day stimulation. It could be bright lights for some people. It could be a lot of noise from a construction site. It could be anything. And, introverts have nervous systems that tend to react and respond more to that stimulation. So that, for us introverts, we're at our best, most creative, feel in our best state of equilibrium when things are a little more mellow around us. And, for extroverts who have nervous systems that react less to stimulation, the sweet spot there is when there's more happening. Because, if you find yourself in an under-stimulating environment, you start to feel listless and unhappy and checked out.

And I think it's really useful to understand these personality types through this lens, because it's just very helpful in thinking, 'Okay, what do I need, and how do I need to structure my day so that I make sure I'm in my sweet spot for as much of the time as possible?' So, what activities leave me feeling under-stimulated and I know I should call my best friend who always makes me laugh at that moment? Or, when do I feel overstimulated so I know I need to take a solo walk around the block? And, if you think about it in those terms, I think you also feel more entitled--for lack of a better word; it's not the word I want--but, better able to make the adjustments that you need so that you're showing up as your best self.

Susan Cain: Yeah. And, I don't know what it is about us humans that I think it makes it easier for us to understand our differences and be empathetic to someone who is different from us if we know why it is. Especially if we know that it's biologically rooted, there's something about that that makes it easier for us to process it. But, even just giving a name to it makes it easier. And, that is something I see with couples all the time.

And, in fact, I will say for my husband and me, because my husband's much more extroverted than I am, we had had for years, just this ongoing--I don't know if the right word is squabble. But, when we're driving in the car long distances, he would always turn the radio dial louder to make the music louder, and I would always turn it back down. And, it was years into my researching this book, and we were talking about the book all the time before we realized that we were just being classic over-stimulation/under-stimulation. And, we still squabble over the radio dial, but there's something about understanding it that makes the whole thing depersonalized. There's nothing fraught about it at that point. It's just purely: where do we compromise it out?

Susan Cain: Oh. So, are you asking about the title or the subtitle?

Susan Cain: Yeah. Okay. And, I'll tell you why I asked that question. So, the title, I thought the word 'quiet' was just right, because first of all, it expresses the poetic sense of being more introverted. The sense of quiet, the sense of still waters run deep, I felt all were captured in that word.

But, it also captures the pejorative that many introverts hear all their lives. Introverted kids from the time they are very young are told by their teachers: Sally is too quiet and must learn to speak up in class. That word 'quiet' is used in that context all the time. So, that was why I chose that title.

And, for the subtitle, which is The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, I owe the credit for that to my glorious agent, Richard Pine, who came up with it when we sent out the book proposal to prospective editors, and it stuck.

Susan Cain: Well, it's funny that you mentioned the term 'shyness,' because you may have seen me scribbling something down a minute ago; and the word I wrote was 'shyness,' because I wanted to make sure to talk about that. Because introversion and shyness are not the same thing, but they're both really important to understand.

So, introversion is about this preference for quieter, less stimulating environments and modes of interaction. Shyness is much more about the fear of social judgment. So, it happens in situations where you feel like you could be socially evaluated.

And it's different for different people. So, one person might feel shy when they have to give a speech. For someone else it might be a job interview or going on a date, or it could be some combination of all those things. Bu, in general, shy people, they're more sensitive to being socially evaluated, and they're also more likely to read in negative evaluation into a neutral facial expression because of that sensitivity.

So, first of all, in my book and in my work, I'm talking both about introverted people and shy people, although you could be introverted without being shy, and you could be shy without being introverted. The classic case is Barbra Streisand, who is a very larger-than-life extroverted personality; but she stopped performing for, I think it was decades, because of her stage fright.

So, I say the following thing as a constitutionally shy person, which is there isn't that much to recommend shyness itself. It's not a pleasant experience, pretty much ever. However, it goes along with a whole constellation of personality traits that we do value. And, I think that's important to understand.

So, shyness and conscientiousness are extremely well-linked, and the reason has to do with so much of the way human beings come to acquire a conscience in the first place. From a very young age they start to understand when they've done something right or wrong. And, shy children just feel that kind of feedback all the more intensely, and so they tend to develop a very strong conscience. Yeah--strong conscience.

Shyness is complicated, though, and it's also important to understand there's lots of situations where you could start out as shy in Situation X, but you learn over time how to handle Situation X; and the shyness mostly melts away. So, it's not as much of a fixed state, speaking situationally, but most people who, let's say were shy as children, will tell you that they still retain a kind of core of that sensation that stays with them through their lives.

Susan Cain: Well, who was it who said--was it Ernest Hemingway? I can't remember who it was who talked about the biggest problem being someone who can't be in a room by themselves. The core of a loving self--of a self that can love itself and love the people around them--is the ability to be comfortable with oneself, which generally starts in a room by yourself. Can you be comfortable with that solitude? Yeah.

And I worry a lot that, especially nowadays, kids are not trained in this core art. Which I think is part of why we've seen the explosion over the past decades of practices like yoga and meditation. I think these were a response to the lack of solitude in our lives that everybody craves. Extroverts crave it also. We all need it.

And, I think we see this also in all our religious traditions. You almost always see the moment of profound revelation for many of our religious figures, whether it's Moses, or Jesus, or Muhammad, Buddha, they go off into the wilderness, they go off into solitude, and that is the place where they have the revelation that they then bring back to the community. So, there's always a kind of dynamic between going off into solitude and then being together with whoever your community is. But, that piece [?peace?], that solitary piece, is incredibly important. And, this is partly because we're such social beings, we're constructed to be socially porous. So, when there are other people around us, we are kind of incapable of knowing what we truly think and what are the ideas that are truly original to us.

So, for example, the designer, Philippe Starck, said that during the time of his year when he would be most creative, he would go off by himself for several months. And during that time, he wouldn't even pick up a magazine, wouldn't turn on the TV, wouldn't do anything because he knew that to take in inputs from other people would be to weaken his own sense of originality. So, solitude is just an incredibly important piece of knowing ourselves and being creative.

Susan Cain: Oh, I think it's absolutely maddening. So, as you say, introverts know how ridiculous it is just by virtue of their own experience. But, then you start to look at the research literature on brainstorming, which finds in study after study that people produce more ideas and better ideas when they're on their own. Which is not to say that there isn't a role for people coming together to share those ideas. Of course there is. But we very much need a dynamic between the solitary process and the coming-together process. So, the best ideas are really where you have that kind of dynamic and people can go off by themselves before they come together to share those ideas.

One example of that, at Amazon, apparently--is it Jeff Bezos [sounds like bee-zos] or Bezos [sounds like bay-zos]? I always forget how to say his name.

Susan Cain: Okay. However we say his name. He apparently begins every meeting at Amazon by having the person who has called the meeting first write a long memo--I think like a three-page single-spaced memo--outlining that which is going to be talked about at the meeting. And then, everybody sits there in silence for the first half an hour reading this memo and thinking about it quietly before they start talking. And, the idea is that you get thoughts that are a lot less half-baked when you go through that kind of a process.

And yet, as you say, in the modern world, that's incredibly unusual. And, one of the things I was most struck by when I was researching the book, I decided that I would start visiting schools. And, this was before I had had kids myself, so I hadn't been in a school in a really long time at that point. And, I didn't even know what I was looking for. I just was popping in to just see what the experience was of introverted and extroverted kids. But, I was shocked to see how much education had changed during the years since I had been a student, which is to say I remember going to school as involving a lot of solitary effort where you would sit and think deeply and write a paper, do your math, or whatever. But, nowadays, so much of school life, it's done in groups.

Susan Cain: It's a pep rally. And, all the desks are smushed together. Even when they're doing math. It's a big group project. You're not allowed to ask the teacher a question until you've asked your peers the question. And, some of that just strikes me as kind of a waste of time.

Susan Cain: Exactly.

Susan Cain: Well, I think you just explained it beautifully. Yeah. I've had the same experience that you just recounted of somebody assuming that they're not an introvert because they actually like people. And, yeah, it has much more to do with a different form of socializing.

And, it comes back to what we were saying at the beginning about introverts preferring situations that are less overstimulating. So, therefore you would usually rather go have a glass of wine with a close friend as opposed to being in a loud party full of strangers where not only is it loud, but you're also decoding lots of social signals all at once, which is in and of itself an overstimulating thing to do.

So, that's a really important one for understanding oneself and the people around you. Especially for parents or whoever it is, you can look at a child who doesn't love to hang out with a big group of kids after school and think: 'Oh my gosh, there's something wrong with this child. They don't like the other kids in their school, or the other kids don't like them.' And, that might be a complete misreading of what's happening.

I'm actually thinking here of a friend of mine who I interviewed for the book, who, she herself is a really, really strong extrovert, hyper-extroverted person, and she had a more introverted daughter. And, her daughter had lots of friends at school, was very happy. But, after school, when the moms would come to pick up, her daughter would be off by herself shooting baskets at the basketball court while all the other girls were in a big gaggle together. And, my friend for a while was really distraught about this. She thought there was something deeply wrong. And, it was only once she understood about introversion, extroversion, and started having frank and open discussions with her daughter about what her daughter was actually feeling, that was when she realized it was okay. But, she said until then, doing pickup was incredibly painful for her. So, it was only once she understood the interior experience of what her daughter was feeling and not feeling that her mom had been misattributing to her, that she started feeling okay.

Susan Cain: You know, that's a tricky one. I don't know that that's introversion or extroversion per se. And, I'm glad you're asking the question to give me the chance to make the broader point that, while on the one hand, I do believe introversion/extroversion are the north and south of human temperament, that they're incredibly profound in terms of how they shape the we show up in the world. That's true on the one hand.

And, on the other hand, we're human beings, and we're incredibly complicated. And so, we can't reduce everything to these two albeit gigantic and profound categories.

So, having said that: Yeah, I think the way in which we seek intimacy is its own category. And, for introverts who are looking for the less-stimulating form of socializing, that is going to have a way of honing their skill at a more intimate style of socializing. So, they're probably going to get better at it over time. But, I don't know that it comes from the seeking of intimacy per se, if you see what I'm saying.

Susan Cain: Yeah. And, there's also, of course, a huge gender component. I have two boys, two teenage boys, and I always joke with them about how the way they socialize with their friends is just so completely different from the way I socialize with my friends. They and their friends, they hang out together all the time, but they know so little about details of each other's lives that to me would be, like, of course you would know that. And, my older son has a girlfriend, and I often joke with them that I have to get all the social drama from his girlfriend. She'll come over, and I'll know more about what's going on after seven minutes of sitting down and chatting with her than I had heard all year. Many different factors.

Susan Cain: Exactly.

Susan Cain: Oh yeah. Absolutely.

Susan Cain: Oh, yeah. And, I wondered about that because you said you weren't sure where you fit in. So, there's a term that psychologists have coined called 'ambivert,' which is for people who really feel they're kind of in the middle of this whole thing.

And, I don't know--I haven't seen really good data on how many people are ambiverts. Especially because the word can be so messy. So, some people feel they're almost always a mix. Some people will call themselves an ambivert because they're very introverted in situation A, but very extroverted in situation B, and I'm not sure that's actually true ambiversion, as opposed to maybe an introvert who is super-engaged when they get into situation B because it's their favorite topic or something like that. So, I don't have good data, but I will say plenty--a lot of people will raise their hands when you give them that option of being an ambivert.

Susan Cain: Well, I gave you at the beginning, the rubric of how do you feel when you're at that party with the people who you truly like? And, I think that's a good question to ask yourself.

But, another question you can ask is: if you imagine that you have a weekend or a week where you truly have no social or professional obligations of any kind, how would you choose to spend that time? How many people would be in the picture? How loud or quiet a scene would it be? That question is very helpful for people because--especially for introverts who have all their lives been training themselves to operate in a more extroverted way to the point where they sometimes lose touch with what their true preferences are. But, if you suddenly imagine total freedom, how do you fill that freedom? That can be very telling.

Susan Cain: You have to adapt this question to your own life, I would say. But, yeah, if you would choose to be mostly in the company of your wife, let's say, as opposed to, 'Hey, let's go and have all our friends over for dinner. Let's go take a big group vacation.' Those choices that you instinctively make can tell you a lot about what your preferences are.

And, I do take your point that a lot of it has to do with: well, what were you just overloaded on the week before? And, what are you just doing as a reaction to that overload? So you can extend it out. Imagine that you've got a year, imagine that you're about to retire. How do you want to fill that time for real?

Susan Cain: It's true. And, when I came across that research, to me, the most shocking part was that it had ever been different. I found that fascinating.

So, you're talking about research by a guy named Warren Susman, and he literally went--he sat and he compared the self-help books of the 19th century with those of the 20th century and counted the words and counted the attributes that they were trying to teach the reader. In the 19th century, the books were trying to teach the reader how to have integrity, how to have character, how to be resolute. And then, all of a sudden in the 20th century, it changed to: How can you be magnetic? How can you be charismatic? How can you be dominant? And, cultural historians attribute this shift--it's not just the self-help books: it's an entire culture that shifted from one, what they call the culture of character in the 19th century to the culture of personality in the 20th century.

And this happened because in the 19th century and before that, we had lived in small, more tribal communities alongside people we had known all our lives, and people would come to know who you really were, and could they rely on you? Were you a stand-up person?

But then, all of a sudden in the 20th century, people start leaving those small communities. They're moving out to the city. They now have to make their living not through agriculture, but through sales, effectively. And so, it starts becoming really important: How do you show up at a job interview? Do you seem very likable? Are you charismatic? Can you make that sale?

And then, around that same time was when we had the growth of cinema. So, at the very same time that people were showing up thinking, 'Okay, how do I do my best at a job interview?' on the weekends they're going and seeing larger than life images of movie stars who are emblems of being likable and charismatic. So everything became focused on that.

And, as you say, we are pretty much still living in that world today.

When Quiet first came out, which was 2012, I had been thinking briefly that the age of tech was giving us a bit of a reprieve from that, because it seemed as if you could go online and it was a place where you could interact with people without having to be quite so presentational. But, that was before everything became video. And, I would say now with the age of video and social media and all the rest, we're right back with the culture of personality--on steroids.

Susan Cain: Yeah. No. I think that's right. And, at the same time, one of the things that I do in the book is give examples and show all the different people who contribute so much to the culture, not despite having quiet personalities, but really because of those quiet personalities. And, I think that's really important to understand: that there is a channel for using your talents and your predilections as a quiet person and really making them sing.

I was just talking about technology. You look at the world of technology, so many of the people who have become leaders in tech are people who were just kids who love technology, gained incredible expertise at it, then build networks through shared passions with other people who had the same expertise, and they eventually grow up into leadership positions through that kind of a process. And, you see that in every field.

Susan Cain: Yeah. I mean, people have that assumption. And, in fact, as you were saying this, I was thinking of a friend of mine who is in private equity, and one of the things he has to do is go and evaluate early-stage companies. And the CEOs are making presentations. And he says he's always amazed by the extent to which his colleagues will be swayed by somebody who is a razzle dazzle presenter: They're an amazing presenter; they just assume that the company is great. And he tries to really--this is actually the same person who told me to go to Harvard Business School [HBS], which he called the spiritual capital of extroversion. And he felt that going to HBS helped him disaggregate being a great presenter from actually having the solid fundamentals. So, I do think that's an important thing.

But, I would also say that, at the same time that we absolutely have a bias that the person who is a great presenter will have an edge as a CEO, we do have many examples of CEOs, like the Tim Cook, who don't fit that model; and data showing that those CEOs will deliver results that are as good as, or better than, in some cases, those of a more extroverted CEO. So, I do want to emphasize: there is another channel there.

I do think that as human beings, again, because we're such social creatures, we are unconsciously picking up on signals--thousands of different signals from the people around us in ways that we're not even aware of. And so, we're not only picking up on the signals of charisma and presentation style, we're also picking up on signals of: Is this person trustworthy? Does this person know what they're doing? And, therefore, the leader who is trustworthy and knows what they're doing and has a more introverted style, they have a channel to walk that can be incredibly successful.

Susan Cain: Can I just add to that? Yeah. That insight that you just made is making me think of an interview I did with General Stanley McChrystal, who defines himself as an introvert. And he talks about, partly because of being an introvert, when it was time to make important decisions in the field, he said, despite there being a culture of needing to make those decisions incredibly quickly, he would always try to go off by himself to think about what he really thought was right. And, only then would he have the courage of his convictions to come back and act on that decision. And, that's a very introverted way of doing things.

Susan Cain: Oh my gosh, yeah. It's been quite the journey. There's so much to say. I guess the first thing that happened--the great irony, is--I wrote this book at the same time I gave a TED Talk [Technology, Entertainment, and Design Talk] about it that went very viral. And, as a result, I ever since have been asked to come and speak all over the world at companies and schools and organizations about how to harness the talents of the introverted half of the population.

And so, this is a huge irony, because as you alluded to, I used to be incredibly afraid of public speaking. And, when I gave that TED talk, it was by far the hardest thing I have ever done or will ever do in my life because at the time, I was still completely terrified of the stage. But, I did learn over time, and maybe we can talk separately about how to overcome any fear--because I now know, and it's really doable--so, I did overcome that. So, I have spent the last 13 years traveling the world and speaking. So, that alone has been kind of crazy. Never would I would have imagined for myself. Incredibly gratifying to see how many companies and organizations are receptive to these ideas and actually eager to implement them, because why wouldn't you be? If you have half your workforce who you're probably wasting, to some degree, their talents and energies, why wouldn't you want to try to fix that? So, that's incredibly cool.

The other thing that you also alluded to that is amazing is: I now attend a lot of conferences, as a speaker or just to see what's going on. And, especially when I attend a conference and I've given a talk at the beginning of it about introversion, the whole rest of the conference I never have to deal with small talk again, because everybody comes up to me and tells me their stories. A lot of times those stories have to do with introversion, but not always. I think there's just something about if you're out there on stage talking about any topic that has to do with psychology or about being vulnerable, other people will then feel safe to come and tell you what's going on for them. And, that's just incredibly moving and gratifying to be able to connect with people on that a level--instantly, without having to wade through any small talk first. We're just right in the deep stuff right away.

Susan Cain: Oh yeah. Well, the key--and this applies to any fear, not just the fear of public speaking--is the miracle of desensitization, which means that you can desensitize yourself to something you're afraid of by exposing yourself to it in very small, manageable doses.

So, you can't start off by giving a TED talk. You want to start off exactly the opposite. I went to a seminar for people with public speaking anxiety, and on the first day, all we had--I think I wrote about this in the book--all we had to do was stand up and say our name, and then sit back down. And we were finished and that was the victory for the day. And then, you'd come back the next week and the exercise would just be ever so slightly more challenging. Like stand up and answer some questions about where did you grow up? Where do you go to school? Really easy stuff. Sit back down. You're finished.

And, you do that little by little by little, and you're basically retraining your brain.

If you're afraid of public speaking or snakes or anything, what's happening is the amygdala in your brain is responding as if this event is just as threatening as a saber-toothed tiger. And, when you have these small, repeated experiences again and again, you are teaching your brain that it's not actually a saber-toothed tiger, and it's actually something pretty manageable. So, the butterflies don't go away a hundred percent, but they can go away up to 97, 98%, which is pretty good.

Susan Cain: It's almost miraculous.

Susan Cain: Right. And that's interesting. Does the anxiety ever outweigh the pleasure of doing it?

Susan Cain: Yeah. Or other similar things?

Susan Cain: Just the fact of being looked at.

Susan Cain: Right. No. I understand.

Susan Cain: Yeah. And, it has to be at the right levels. The level of anxiety I used to experience was not performance-enhancing. It was detracting.

And so, if you're listening to this, excuse me, you know which category you're in. So, if you're in the place where it's detracting, I would say, sign up for your local Toastmasters. Because wherever you are in the world, there is a local Toastmasters near you and they're full of people who usually start out terrified of public speaking, and that's why they're there. So, it's a place where you can practice where the stakes are really low. It doesn't matter if you screw up, and people will be supportive.

Susan Cain: No. I think that for most people, your underlying preferences and traits stay the same, more or less. But, we all have so many new experiences all the time and acquire new skills--which is what we were just talking about a minute ago. If we're talking about public speaking, that's acquiring a new skill, and that's a new skill that changes your life in profound ways. But, I don't feel that my underlying self is different or my underlying preferences. It's still the case for me that my favorite day is one where I'm hanging out with my family, maybe a close friend or two. I'm in a cafe with my laptop. I'm playing tennis. It's a pretty quiet day, and I believe that will always be my favorite day, even though I can go out and make speeches on the next Tuesday.

Susan Cain: Thank you so much for having me, Russ. Always.

Karen Elliott House: Thank you very much.

Karen Elliott House: Yes. Crown princes in Saudi Arabia typically have just been bodies waiting to ascend when the king dies, but MBS is vastly more than that. His father was Crown Prince under King Abdullah, who outlived three crown princes, and thus King Salman became king. I mean, most people never thought he would be because he was down the line, but the deaths of his brothers brought him forward. So, he became King in January of 2015 when King Abdullah died. And, MBS, who was his father's assistant at the Defense Ministry--his father was Defense Minister and Crown Prince to King Abdullah--immediately began changing things in his father's new government.

Karen Elliott House: The story--I have been going to Saudi Arabia for nearly 50 years--and the story and what was written in history, all of that time, was that the Al Sauds founded the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1744 with the help of Muhammad Abdul Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, the brand of Islam that the Saudis had largely practiced.

Under this King and this Crown Prince, they suddenly discovered that the Al Sauds founded the first Saudi state in 1727, and all by themselves. Abdul Wahhab was out there, but he had nothing to do with it. By the time they met him, they were an established state, and they helped him.

So, the co-founding went out the window--obviously, I think, because one of the first things that this King and his Crown Prince did was diminish the role of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia.

But, since that time, whether you take 1727 or 1744, Saudi Al Saud rulers have been sometimes removed violently by their brothers, their cousins, their nephews. And so, it's commonplace. They lost power in 1824 because someone killed someone, and they regained it and then lost it again in the 1880s because the Ottomans overthrew them for being too rigidly religious.

And so, it is MBS's grandfather and King Salman's father that reentered: He fled, he reentered Saudi Arabia in 1904, snuck into Riyadh, and his men killed the then-governor of the province. And they fought a 30-year civil war to reunite all of Arabia under the Al Saud, and he declared the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. So, that is the group that has ruled since then.

Karen Elliott House: And, that gentleman--I have one little--the last thing on his children: he had 44 sons by 22 wives and an endless number of kind of one-night wives and concubines. Part of his knitting the country together was to marry the people--the wives--of the tribal chiefs he killed, so that everybody, in a sense, is part of the extended Al Saud family.

Karen Elliott House: Abdulaziz, the founder of this 1932 kingdom that we're in now.

Karen Elliott House: It was never--Arabia was never colonized, like the French controlling Syria or Lebanon, or the British controlling most of the rest of the Middle East. The British provided money to King Abdulaziz when he was trying to hold on to the part of Arabia that he had gained control of; and then he had to get rid of the family of King Hussein, King Abdullah of Jordan. His ancestors were ruling Mecca at the time, and that was part of King Abdulaziz getting rid of people. The British were supporters of the Hussein family in Mecca and of Ibn Saud, and eventually Ibn Saud got--King Abdulaziz got--rid of Hussein.

I think they--it is a different country because, at some level, all Saudis, I think, do have pride in the fact that they, as Jesse Jackson used to say--the Civil Rights leader--'I am somebody.' They see themselves as somebody, even though a lot of other Arabs look down on Saudis as tribal people with little education. I mean, that's obviously changed and is continuing to change as they educate their people.

Karen Elliott House: I've seen him seven times in an interview setting and a few other times at a dinner somewhere where you can talk to him, out there. And, I'm a reporter, so I never let go of an opportunity to talk to somebody. And, lots of the interviews were two and three hours. So, I would say probably 16, 18 hours of talking to him.

Karen Elliott House: Yeah. He was not--when his father was initially--they paid their allegiance, the brothers and ancestors, due to the new King. When he was originally sworn allegiance, MBS was, as I said earlier, just his father's Defense Chief of Staff. But he immediately called together four ministers and began reorganizing his father's government. He wasn't Deputy Crown Prince, he wasn't Crown Prince; but he obviously had his father's approval, and it's part of this young man in a hurry. I mean, he said to them: I want to get rid of all of these councils they had that simply gummed up the works. They didn't actually, like a cabinet for the president here, they go through stuff and then the president is supposed to see, decide, and sign. They just spun the paper, was his view. And so, he said to these four ministers, 'I need this done.' And, they said, 'Well, this will take time.' And, he said, 'Take time, but be finished by tomorrow morning.'

So, they were. But, you know, that's the speed at which he started out. And then, fairly soon his father made him Deputy Crown Prince.

So, in 2016, when he unveiled his Vision 2030 Reform Agenda and removed the--that is an agenda to take Saudi off of dependence on oil and diversify the economy into many other things, including tourism. And, infidels visiting Saudi Arabia was something the religious did not approve of. For many reasons. He sidelined the religious police and said, 'Don't come on the street anymore. You are not allowed to arrest anyone. If somebody is truly doing something wrong, you can alert the police, who will handle it, but you can't go around as they used to do with their sticks hitting women's legs or hitting the doors of businesses, demanding that they close for prayer.'

So, that was a shock, and a very popular one to people in the community.

The next big shock was when he began calling people and saying, 'The King wants to see you,' and then putting them in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel for corruption, for money they had allegedly bilked from the government. And, I'm sure in most cases it was true, because when I did my first book, everyone said that 30% of the budget, at least, every year, simply disappeared. It didn't go into anything.

And, that became very controversial in 2009 when there was a big flood in Jeddah and lots of people died because the money that was supposed to have been spent on sewage and disposal had gone into someone's pocket.

So, he began putting not just normal people, but senior business people, senior princes into the Ritz-Carlton, and they were accused by the government corruption apparatus of X, Y, and Z.

And, that was an even bigger shock to the people of Saudi Arabia. And externally, I think, to see. And, the Saudis liked this, too, most of the ones I talked to--to see the biggest names in princely heaven and the business heaven in a certain kind of hell at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which is the fanciest, nicest hotel in Riyadh.

Over days, months, years, some of them got out. Some of them still are not out. King Abdullah, one of his sons who had been the governor of Riyadh, refused to confess that he had taken any money and is still--not in the Ritz--but in prison.

So, some people got out under house arrest. Some people paid money. But it has left a very, I would say, what's the right word? A frigid fear in people that you have to be careful. You can't participate in corruption. I am sure there is still corruption going on because they are arresting people for corruption, and you read about it; but how much of that is real corruption and how much of it is an enemies list? I don't know. It may be all corruption.

But, at any rate, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel was a far bigger shock to the Saudi people than the death of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

Karen Elliott House: Yeah, he was 29.

Karen Elliott House: The role of religion and the role of corruption, two huge things in Saudi Arabia--

Karen Elliott House: What he told me is, 'I'm trying to get the religious to have a conversation with themselves.' But, obviously that conversation was--the light of intimidation was over it, once you take the religious police and say, 'You cannot arrest people.' They did not fire them. They still are paid--because that's the Saudi way, not to upset people's finances too much.

But, the clerics, the senior clerics who actually determine what they say is the right religious conduct, as you say, were not pleased. Some of those people found themselves in prison. Some of them were quietly removed because the top senior clerics, the Council of Ulama, are appointed by the King. So, if you want to keep that appointment and you want to keep all of the goodies that have gone with it, you learn to see religion through a different light. So, some of them did not, some of them did. As I describe in the book--some of them did recant earlier things they had said and say, 'I was wrong to say that. More moderate Islam is the right way to go.' But, some found themselves in prison.

Karen Elliott House: Well, I think he did think it was good for the country, because what he wanted to do in Vision 2030 was revamp the economy. And, to do that, he wanted to allow women to drive and work. And, both of those things were forbidden by the religious authorities. A woman could teach in a girl's school, but she could not work in a government office unless it was men and women were separated, and most people were fearful of allowing their daughter to work in even the segregated environment for fear that, at some point, the men and women would have a business reason to talk to each other, and a religious policeman would walk in on it; and then your daughter would be ruined for life.

So, I think he did feel that, yes, it removed a power center. And, King Abdullah had talked about that, about allowing women to work. He tried to allow women to sell lingerie in a department store. So, to stand here and sell to you, a gentleman. And, the religious police said, 'No, no, no, no, no.' And, they shut it down. Whereas, it's apparently okay for me to stand on this side of the counter and buy intimate lingerie from a man, it is not okay for a man to buy it from a woman.

So, I think MBS, just like any of us, would say, 'That's silly.' And, if you want to unleash an economic boon into the country, women are better educated by and large than men: 58% of university graduates are women, not men.

So, he did want, I believe, for economic reasons to allow women to work in private-sector, government offices, etc. And, it's amazing to me now, if you go in a private office or a government office, you see men and women ascending in the elevator, jammed in against each other--again, which would have just been horrifying. I knew a lot of men who wouldn't get in an elevator if there was a woman in the elevator because they didn't want to risk any accusation of anything. Now they're all jammed in, headed up to their offices, and nobody seems to think anything about it.

Karen Elliott House: 47 years.

Karen Elliott House: Well, 47 years ago--1978--the country was conservative but not religiously rabid. This was under King Faisal. No, I'm sorry, King Khalid. So, I wore a knee-length skirt and a long-sleeved blouse; and I was taken when I landed in Jeddah the first time to the Oil Minister's house, Zaki Yamani, and I had asked to interview him. So, I was thinking, this is an interview. It was a big party with women and men mixing, alcohol. We watched the World Cup Soccer Final from Argentina on satellite. You know: It was a normal life. The women were wearing long dresses, and nobody said a thing about me not having an abaya or anything.

Karen Elliott House: The abaya is--it used to be only black. It's now multiple colors--but what you shroud your body in so that men don't just see a moving black mountain.

Karen Elliott House: No, that is the hijab, covers your hair. And the niqab covers your face. And people no longer have to do that. The last time I saw the Crown Prince, I was wearing my black abaya, and I walked in, my head just like this, and he said to me, 'You know you don't have to wear that.' And I said, 'Yes.' I mean, I think he would like fewer people to wear them, actually. But, I find it convenient because you attract less attention if you're wearing your black abaya. I also have a pale green one now.

Karen Elliott House: Two things happened. In 1979, the Shah fell in Iran, and the Saudi royal family did not want to go the way of the Shah. So, they began to accommodate to what the religious officials told them: get women off TV, get women's pictures out of the newspaper, cover women up. All of these things begin to rear their head.

And also, in 1979, a group of very--I don't know how religious they were, but at least they alleged to be--took over the Mecca Mosque. And, that was truly frightening for the Saudis. They tried to hide the news for--it took about two weeks to get the occupants out. And they finally had to call in the French, who used a poison gas to evict the people, because the man who was doing the prayer in the mosque was suddenly charged at with people with knives, and they put one to his throat, and it was--I mean, I don't blame the royal family for being frightened.

But, those two things--the fall of the Shah, and then this attack on the holiest place in Islam by people who alleged they were the new Mahdi, M-A-H-D-I, the new man from heaven to rule--and that obviously would have eliminated the Al Saud. So, those two things changed everything.

And then, in 1980, when I was there, I went to see Prince Turki, who was the Head of Intelligence and a son of the late King Faisal and an American ambassador to Washington--and London subsequently. But, he saw me in my normal clothes. But his aide said to me, 'I can't drive you home. I can't drive you to your hotel in the front seat of my car unless you cover up.' And he gave me, like, a--just a huge piece of black silk, and you were supposed to put it over your head and around you. And a scarf that you covered your face with. So, I was totally swathed. And since 1980, I have worn an abaya in Saudi Arabia.

Karen Elliott House: Only in the kingdom. He went to the Riyadh School, a school that his father owned, and then he went to King Saud University and to King Saud University Law School. So, that's why he knows a good bit about--beyond growing up in Saudi Arabia--he knows more about Sharia law, the Islamic law that guides life and punishment in Saudi Arabia. So he's not, because of that, I think, as intimidated by some cleric as others might be.

Karen Elliott House: 2018, the women got the freedom to drive.

Karen Elliott House: Well, Saudis are not demonstrative people. I mean, I think they are a society that is accustomed to largely accepting that the ruler is the ruler; and in Islam, you are only supposed to criticize the ruler publicly. You can try to talk to him privately, but criticize the ruler publicly if he is doing something against Islam.

So, I think people, my impression from talking to people, is that younger people, MBS's age and below--he's now 39--the below-30 people, and 60% of the population is below 30. So, they have no recollection except of this religious rigidity. And, with it, they got the Internet when they were teenagers or younger, so they began to see how the rest of the world lived, and they wanted a life more like that. I think their parents and grandparents were more shocked by all of this change, and they don't criticize it openly.

And if you know somebody well from previous times, some of them will say what they think; but now it is clearly not socially acceptable, or it's hazardous to your health, to be out criticizing.

So, I think--my impression is that the country is more conservative than what you see going on around you. I've been struck the last three or four times--the last several years of going back--that you see more women now wearing black abayas again. In the beginning, obviously, a lot of them still did, but there was more of the beige and gray and unsnapped, so you could walk around with it flowing back and show off your expensive clothes or your sports clothes, whatever you were wearing underneath. And, now I'm just struck, when you walk in public places, you see more people--some young women with their head covered very tight; some with the scarf just draped, looking quite glamorous; some with the whole thing across their face and just their eyes showing; and some with just normal clothes. You don't see people wearing short dresses much.

But, I think the society is, as this has played out, that they're getting--the natural conservatism that exists in Saudi society, I think, is becoming more visible. And, for the young, what they want out of this was more personal freedom and a good job. So, if the economy can grow and they can get good jobs, that's probably very good for the government.

The last time I was there, I heard more young Saudis in October--October 2025, when I was last there--expressing that it's difficult to get a job because the government has a conflict between two goals. One is, quote, "Saudization": increase the number of Saudis in jobs. And the other is the need for more sophisticated talents as the crown prince wants to move the economy to AI [artificial intelligence] and high-tech.

And, so more people are finding themselves with degrees in marketing, and they're kind of a glorified tour guide somewhere. So, if they can't get out of that, they're not going to rise up the income ladder over the next 20 years. I know some people who predict that there will be great unhappiness 20 years from now by the 40-year-olds because they won't have the kind of incomes they expect. And, some people who believe that when King Salman dies, the country will move back a bit: that, the Crown Prince will be under more pressure from the public to--having to lean forward like that--to just tilt it up a little.

Karen Elliott House: Yeah. They have, on the diversification front writ large, they have had some success, mostly in, I would say, tourism, because there is a--I don't know how familiar all your audience is with the Petra in Jordan, the Nabataeans ruins in Jordan, but they're spectacular. And, Saudis have a set of Nabataeans ruins called Hegra in a region called Al-'Ula, which is beautiful.

And they have tried--they have built in Riyadh, Riyadh Boulevard, Riyadh World--so, all of these theme parks that people can enjoy, that they have one outside of Riyadh, about 45 minutes, called Qiddiya, which now has the world's highest roller coaster, beating one--the largest one now is in New Jersey, not an hour from me. I haven't been on it, but I wouldn't go on the one in Saudi Arabia. But I would like to see it.

So, they have a lot of stuff that people can--Saudis can--enjoy, and they try to keep it priced so people can all go, that it's not just something for the wealthy.

But, the big projects to transform Neom is the most famous one. The Line, this city--mirrored city like this--taller than the Empire State Building and stretching the distance from 105 miles. So, basically from New York City to Philadelphia. And, that one has really been scaled back because the height of it messes up bird migration; and the length of it means, contrary to the advertising that you could get from one end to the other in 20 minutes, you can't get from one end to the other if the train stops anywhere else to let people on. And, the architects, who I quote at length in the book on, 'Yeah, this is something, and we'll have to figure this out,' haven't been able to figure it out. So, the government has scaled it back.

Karen Elliott House: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, right now for the kingdom, they need to fund all of these projects and their budget and this big building. They need $100-a-barrel oil. And oil has been going down. It's about in the $60 range. And, of course, President Trump is trying to use Venezuelan oil and get it down to $50 a barrel so that American consumers will have cheap gasoline next year during the midterm elections.

Karen Elliott House: I'm sure. But, that's one impact he would be happy to see. And, if he succeeds, that's not particularly good for Saudi Arabia.

And the other thing that I think if you were--I'm going to Saudi Arabia soon--they must be very, very nervous about Iran with all of the tension in the streets and Trump saying, 'I'm going to intervene if you kill people.' And, the Saudis have tried--or MBS has tried--everything to quiet the region down. I mean, he hasn't had help. There's Gaza, there's Iran, there's Yemen, with the UAE [United Arab Emirates] in it. So, his quiet strategy is not entirely successful.

But, if something happens, the Iranians are now saying--and this doesn't take a genius; they don't have to say it for the Saudis to know it--that if something goes wrong in Iran, the Iranians may choose to retaliate against American forces in Saudi Arabia. And, we saw it in Qatar already. And, in a way, worse yet: if Iran should turn out the way the human-rights people hope and become a democracy--I mean, a functioning democracy--other than Israel, I don't think that's at the top of the Crown Prince's wish list. I mean, stability is at the top of his wish list, in Iran, I'm sure, whoever is in charge.

Karen Elliott House: Well, their power has been reduced. So, if he could have just--

Karen Elliott House: Between Israel and the United States, and if he could have just stopped the clock back in June or not too long after, it would have been good.

Karen Elliott House: Yeah, Jamal Khashoggi, I knew from, I don't know, probably 2004 or 2005 when I was working on the first book. He was basically--I don't call him a journalist because he worked for the government. And, he was somebody that King Abdullah's people would have talked to people like me. He was a very conversational guy. He knew a lot. He ran the Arab News at one point, and he ran an Arab language newspaper, Al Watan, at another point. But just a, I would say, hale fellow, well met, with a lot of curiosity and knowledge. So, I saw him, and the last time I saw him--

Karen Elliott House: He was a Saudi.

Karen Elliott House: Yeah.

Karen Elliott House: Yeah, yeah. No, he was working for his government. And, the last time I saw him, he was not saying anything nasty about the crown prince. Indeed, he might not yet have been the crown prince in 20'--I think I saw him in 2016 or 2017.

Anyway, he was annoyed that he was not being allowed to write, and he knew that that had to come from MBS. But, he said--and he had a good sense of humor--he said, 'I prefer democracy, but at least we have KPIs.' Key Performance Indicators. Because MBS was famous for having an iPad with KPIs on it for every minister on what they were supposed to deliver. So, he was making fun of--at least this was some accountability--MBS was tracking their KPIs.

Karen Elliott House: He became Crown Prince in 2017, I believe.

Karen Elliott House: Anyway, yeah. So, then he moved to Washington, and I didn't actually--

Karen Elliott House: Mr. Khashoggi moved to Washington; and I did not see him in the United States after that. I saw him on TV some, when he was in the United States. But then suddenly he turns up murdered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The U.S.--the CIA's [Central Intelligence Agency's]--report said that the Crown Prince, the government, was responsible because nobody would do this without the permission of the government.

Karen Elliott House: 2018.

Karen Elliott House: And, it was such a--for the Crown Prince, he was here in the spring of 2018. He was in America, and he was hailed all over the country as this new, active, young--

Karen Elliott House: Crown Prince, breath of fresh air doing modern things: letting women drive and work and chaining the religious police, etc., etc.

And then in the fall, Khashoggi's murder--the contrast was huge. People in Saudi Arabia--I was there shortly after--were upset that the Americans were so hard. They said, 'The Americans are hard on the country. We didn't do this.' So, they began to sort of at least side with the Crown Prince because 'the Americans are being too nasty to us.'

Anyway, I think he was a bit shocked by it. And if you recall, when he was in the Oval Office with Trump during the Crown Prince's visit here in November, one of the reporters asked him something like, 'How do you feel now that you murdered Khashoggi?' And, Trump jumped all over her and said 'He didn't even know it,' etc. And, the Crown Prince sat there calmly. And then, he said--he rightly, I think, chose to answer for himself and not let Trump answer for him--and he said something to the effect that, 'It's a tragedy when someone dies.' And 'I have accountability.' And--

Karen Elliott House: Yeah. 'Because it's on my watch.' Right. So, he stepped up and, instead of letting Trump defend him with, 'He didn't even know it,' he didn't say whether he knew it or not. He just said, in essence: 'It's a tragedy when someone dies and I'm taking steps to make it not happen again.'

Karen Elliott House: Because I think they saw him as a threat. I cannot personally imagine why, but their view was he was in bed with Qatar, with the Muslim Brotherhood. He was taking money from Qatar. He was a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, and the Muslim Brotherhood is bad. So, I can see why they would think--they do this, as I write in the book--they picked up a prince. And, the man who was in charge of this operation against Khashoggi in the consulate, Mr. Qahtani, is the same one who was posing as a pilot when they picked up a prince and brought him home--400-pound prince--threw him down the stairs. He hasn't been seen since.

And then, Mr. Qahtani, the, quote, "pilot," shows up the next day and meets with the stewards on the plane and says, 'My name is Mohammed Qahtani.' And, he lets them go.

And he was the head of the Royal Court Press Office when I met him, and he was removed from that job after this Khashoggi incident. So, I can easily believe that they wanted to get him back to the country and put him in prison or something. I mean, the human-rights people would probably track that and protest because Khashoggi was a well-known person, but the Saudis wouldn't get, I believe, normally as much negative press if someone is just taken back to the country and they sort of disappear, and is he in prison or not? And, as when someone is murdered and his body chopped up and taken out in suitcases.

Karen Elliott House: I do not.

Karen Elliott House: I know, I know.

Karen Elliott House: Everywhere--

Karen Elliott House: Yep. I guess it's possible, but to my knowledge--I mean, I am not a sleuth reporter--I have never tried to track that.

Karen Elliott House: But, I mean, somebody might've taken money. This is why you can't take money from people.

Karen Elliott House: The Crown Prince's exact words have been 'until there is a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem.'

Karen Elliott House: My belief is he still, for reasons outlined, would like to have relations with Israel. He does not see Saudi Arabia as part of the Abraham Accords because those are small, little countries. He is the leader of the Islamic world, the big Arab country. So, he would be joining in, I think, in his mind, in a different league than the others that are in it. So, I think he still wants it because the corridor of development moving things through from India into Europe, through Israel, and not having to deal with the--

Karen Elliott House: I was going to say Panama Canal. The--

Karen Elliott House: Suez Canal, and the Iranians, yeah. But, I personally think it's quite a ways off. I know there are a lot of people that predict that, that he's dying to do it, and there's going to be some sleight of hand among he and Bibi and Trump. And, I think, obviously, Trump would like to have it as part of his legacy.

Karen Elliott House: But, whether--I think the next period, at least year, for the Crown Prince is going to be one of being more cautious than usual. Because, the King, even though he's very ill, is a respected elder. And, without him, I think the Crown Prince is somewhat more vulnerable until he can establish himself as the respected ruler. Which sounds strange because me and everyone else says he's been running the country, but there is a difference between being--what's his name at Berkshire Hathaway?

Karen Elliott House: Yeah, Warren Buffett, and some successor of his without Warren Buffett. So, I think if the Crown Prince loses his Warren Buffett, it'll still take a little time, so that he doesn't. So, that's one reason.

Another is--and it's part of the same, I guess--but young Saudis are very much against recognition of Israel, if you believe polls done by Western entities. And, I think there's no reason for him to go into the buzz saw. I'm sure that the 90% who say they're against it, if he did it tomorrow, that number would drop to 40% or lower just because of the kind of obedience syndrome.

But, you know, there comes a time--you're watching Iran; the obedience syndrome is diminishing. So, for all of those reasons--and Iran being a huge other reason: you don't need to be causing new issues when Iran is as unsettled and potentially dangerous to your short term health. And, maybe if it disintegrates, that's even worse and more preoccupying. So, I think he will be cautious for--I don't know when his father will die, obviously--but King Abdullah died at about 90-and-six-months, I think. And King Salman turned 90 on December 31st. So, that gives him by history another six months. So--I mean, obviously, I'm not God, so I don't know when he will pass on. But I think everything points to the caution.

Karen Elliott House: That is precisely what led me to write the book. Where did he get these ideas? He's not somebody that went to Oxford or Cal or MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] or Wharton. And, he said--he is, as the book says, the sixth son of the King. The first of his mother's six sons. She's wife number three. So, wife number one had five sons and a daughter, and there was a second wife who'd had a son who is the seventh son. He's after MBS. But, the older boys went to--one of them went to Oxford. And, the Energy Minister, who is his half-brother, is a very erudite Western kind of guy who loves Italy and has spent a lot of time there.

And, he didn't.

And, he said that, when I asked him about these things, he said his mother is the one that--his mother said to him as her eldest son, 'I don't want you to be an also-ran to the first wife's boys.' So, he needed to step up and learn. That she made them go to classes after school, that they had to read books and do book reports to their father. And, that he seemed to have always had this sense that he sat below the salt: that he wasn't somehow seen as as good as the older princes, not just his older--

Karen Elliott House: Ancient [inaudible 01:09:12].

Karen Elliott House: Yeah.

So, he seems to have a kind of pugnacious--he told me that--this is in the book--that he got an allowance--$500 a week--but when he was 11--I didn't get any at any age, I had to iron shirts to earn money. But, anyway, he got $500. And that he said, but his cousins, his older cousins, most of them got $20,000.

I think he's a striver, and he seems to be data-driven. He told a story about how the deputy governor of Riyadh was concerned that re-arrests were occurring, and so he hired more policemen to arrest people. And he said if he had just looked at the data, he would have realized that what you have to do is find ways to reduce recidivism. That it was different: it was the same people being arrested again and again. It wasn't a bunch of--and he's very into data. So, the KPIs, and what are we doing, and how are we doing it, and is it working?

And, I think most of the ministers--the Minister of Planning is MIT educated. Another one of the ministers is a Harvard Law grad. They're all very different from the ministers I dealt with for the previous 35 years who went to work at 11 o'clock in the morning, went home for lunch, went back from 5:00 to 7:00, and that was it. These guys are working all day long. You can see a minister now at 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning, which would never have happened. And, they all are up until midnight because that's when he tends to conduct his meetings. Most of my meetings with him have been: you get there and wait, and wait and wait, and then you're in there from midnight until 2:00 A.M. or something.

So, I think he is a really interesting man for how does his mind work.

And, the other thing that people say about him was that because he had not much to do as a kid other than school and what his mother made him do when he got home, he played video games all the time. And, that one person said he believes that anything you can do in a video game, you can do in real life. And, I think they said that seriously.

I think there is some real truth to that: that it's part of why The Line went on and on and on, was that whatever you dream, you should be able to do it. That he asked one of--'Could we build the deepest building you can build underground?' 'Maybe, but why would you want to?' I mean, he clearly has a very active imagination, and it didn't come from the Saudi religious authorities who tell you, 'Keep your mind on getting from here to eternity.' And, his mind is on--expansively on everything, it seems.

Karen Elliott House: I think he has a chance to be transformative if he listens to people around him; and how much of that, there's no way for me to know. Obviously, if I were in a meeting with him and one of his ministers, it wouldn't be the kind of meeting they'd be having alone; and I've never had a meeting with him and one of his ministers.

I think there is a chance. I think it's getting harder because the money is getting harder. They're not getting the kind of foreign direct investment they need, partly because the region didn't turn out to be peaceful and stable in Saudi and Israel, so people are more reluctant to put money in.

They have borrowing capability, but their own revenue is--they're going to be running deficits for the next, by their acknowledgement, three years, and they're trying to cut back to get closer--to cut spending--to get closer to balancing.

So, in a word--in three words--I don't know. I think there is a possibility, but it is harder than it looked five years ago. And, these next five years, I think, are going to be a very critical test for him. It's easier to announce plans and spend money than to actually execute the plans and earn money. And that's the position they're in now. The second decade has to be about executing and earning, not spending and big plans.

Karen Elliott House: Thank you, I appreciate it.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Indeed.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Thanks very much, Russ. I've been a listener for a long time, so it's a real pleasure to be here.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, so I chose that year, I suppose--that period, the early 1980s, was seen certainly within the Swiss watch industry as the pivotal moment. It's also probably the moment of the Swiss watch industry's lowest ebb. Certainly for the last 30 years prior, they essentially had a dominance over the global watch market. Watches meant Swiss. I think this was something they assumed would carry on forever. But, obviously what you then had happen was these quartz watches, this new technology.

And it's interesting, a quartz watch--we call it a watch, but ultimately it's a completely different technology. The only reason they share the same name is simply because they have, I suppose, the same function. But, this whole new technology entered the market and was really spearheaded by the Japanese. And, very, very quickly, as these things often do, the industry went from a position of global dominance to one of quite profound weakness. So, I think it's around half of Swiss watchmaking companies went bankrupt in the years prior, and also two-thirds of jobs within the industry also ceased to exist.

And so, I begin the essay in this car park in Basel with these two figures, Jacques Piguet and Jean-Claude Biver. And, these were two slight sort of renegades and mavericks who had just bought a new watch brand called Blancpain, and they were ready to lead the fight back against quartz and try and save the industry. The problem was they didn't really have any cash. So, they basically had, I think, a borrowed Volkswagen Westfalia, which is an excellent camper van by all sounds. And, they were there for the Basel Fair, which was at the time the main event of the watchmaking calendar that happened once a year in Basel. And, they were there to make their big debut and shake up the industry a little bit.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's two elements. So, firstly, I was laughing a little bit because you mentioned slide rule, because the book I've got next to me while recording this is called Slide Rule. It's a memoir of a very niche English writer called Nevil Shute and has lots of loving references to slide rules. I totally agree with that.

And I think what's also very interesting about the Swiss watch story is that the largest--the kind of incumbents, the really big players, for example, like Rolex, and I suppose Patek Philippe as well, who are dominant today--they had this sort of--I was thinking about Andy Grove's idea of the inflection point and where there is a industry disruption and you're going to get a very quick response.

What's very interesting about this story is I think Rolex and Patek had the firepower to almost stay put and wait it out a little bit. And so, the impetus for change and renewal had to come kind of elsewhere.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Mmm. Yeah. No, totally. Yes, it's an interesting one because it sort of started--I mean, the first kind of experiments happened in Bell--and it's a classic Bell Labs theory-of-everything story as well, in that you had a team in the 1920s that sort of came up with the kind of original way of doing it. And then, there was this, just, race for kind of miniaturization. And, you can see--and it's very interesting that the Japanese took it so seriously and you see it begins with--it goes then into chronometers, and then you have--I think it's the Tokyo Olympics. Then it's used as sort of timing mechanisms. And then, very quickly, then the team at Seiko come up with this quantum leap.

It's not as well as if other people aren't working on it. One thing that is very commonly told within the Swiss side of the story is that there was a--there was certainly a team there who were working on those watches--on quartz mechanisms--very early. And, there was a center, it's called CEH [Centre Electronique Horloger], and that center was experimenting and working on it, and the watchmakers were all paying in. It's just nobody took it quite as seriously as Japanese.

And also, when the article came up, again, it was that classic thing about market sizing and so on and so forth. Again, the market for a watch that's a little bit of a gimmick with the size--that costs the same as a Toyota. That's not going to be great, but it's very, very fast. The innovations come thick and fast in the 1970s, and they're very good at commercializing them as well. So, it's one of those things where I think things happen slowly, but then very quickly, and this was a good example of that in practice.

Aled Maclean-Jones: I think that's certainly--yeah, okay. I'm absolutely gutted to have found that Smith quote that I missed that, particularly The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It's an interesting quirk. I mean, when Smith is writing that, it's an interesting quote where you have--because ultimately the quest for a really accurate watch comes from essentially seafaring. Right? That's the whole value of it. Because when Smith is--in that time, Smith is writing 50 or so years before there begins to be this push towards the idea of a unified time. So, at that point where Smith--there will have been an Edinburgh time, and that would be very different to it a Glasgow time and so on and so forth.

Again, it's so fascinating reading from that period. The watch is this kind of communal coordination problem solver. That was what it was first and foremost. And, that bleeds into the--even in 19th century, the idea--the world that we have today where--so, in front of me recording this, I've got three ways of telling the time, two of them--essentially the monitor on my phone are both linked atomically. There's a much more casual approach to time, which is essentially the default for the vast majority of the last half millennia.

So, Smith is right in many ways. Even then you can see as well the kernel of the idea that watches are--and not just about telling time, they're about--there's something innate about the craft that is very, very important as well.

Aled Maclean-Jones: So, I am. So, I'm not actually a watch person. So, I basically--I had never worn a watch until writing this article. The way I came to this article was--I was interested in questions of human work in a time that we're slightly anxious about automation and so on and so forth: what was a really good example? It's a bit more sophisticated than talking about horses or typewriters or stuff. About how people actually adapted.

And so, I wasn't to start, but then it does kind of catch you a bit. You know what I mean? I was thinking about that Susan Sontag quote, like a writer is someone who is interested in everything. And, this is definitely one of the everythings that pulled me in.

So I do now wear a watch mainly--and it is a mechanical watch as well, but mainly--I thought if I write this article about the majesty of the watch industry, I'd better have some skin in the game or a watch on my hand.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. So, the other point to make there as well, is I think it's important to get into the mindset of the Swiss industry at the time. I mean, the Swiss watch industry has always been really the winner on price. It was the British and the French watchmakers who were the ones that focused on quality in the 18th and 19th century. The whole point around Switzerland and the watchmakers and the Jura is that they were able to arbitrage. They were able to provide extreme quality at a much lower price. And, that was really--the last real challenge that I would say the Swiss watchmakers had would have been in the 1870s and 1880s, which was from American manufacturers, who were able to basically do the ultimate good-enough watches, but get them down to the cost of a dollar and so on and so forth.

And so, it was interesting that as well that it undercut the idea because they were being out-competed on value.

And so, the Japanese, obviously--so you have Seiko, Casio obviously follow as well. What essentially happens in Switzerland is you have a moment of desperation. So, firstly, you end up with companies that are stuck. So, some companies will basically respond by trying to do the whole quartz thing and doing it very heavily or expanding the number of models.

So, actually Omega is the real example of this that is often given, where they expand their number of models to almost a 1,000 apparently, and they sort of have a sort of--it's a moment of a kind of spasm.

Then you have the kind of larger companies, who have the brand that is going to last. And, I think about Rolex here, which today is the dominant Swiss watch company. They sort of enter a defensive crouch, I would say, where they make one--they do some dabbling with quartz. You can still get these Rolex Oysterquartzes that are quite popular. They're quite a niche line. But that was it. They were like, 'You know what we're going to do? We're going to wait it out and see how things go.'

So, what then happens is ultimately the companies run out of money, and you get this very large consolidation play. So, you end up with--because at this point there's a very strange relationship between the fact that the--you have the movement makers. So, you have the people that make what's inside the watch. And then you have essentially the brands, and they're the ones who focus on the casings and selling the watch as well. And so, you'd have a strange situation where if, say, a movement manufacturer is going to go bust, the watch manufacturer would be, like, 'We're going to buy--we'll take you on.' And, vice versa as well.

And so, you ended up with these two very large kind of conglomerations, basically--two very large lifeboats that were reliant on loans that were backstopped by the Swiss government, I think, to basically survive. And so, that was kind of--when we entered the 1980s, that's kind of the situation. You have some manufacturing. The large players have gone into a defensive crouch. And then you have these two very large, very unwieldy lifeboats that are ones like--not orderly lifeboats: they're like the ones in the Titanic where you've got lots of people clinging onto them and everyone's pushing each other off.

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, totally. Yeah. So, they basically, at this point, they bought a slightly dormant brand and they have created a little bit of--well, I think Biver in particular has created a little bit of history around it: that lots of people on the Internet will argue about how old it is and so on and so forth, but it was very much positioned as a--and so they are working on watches together, and most importantly, I think they were positioning their watches as kind of, like, the antidote to quartz. So, this idea that these are made by human hands. That they were these makers in the mountains. And, what you are buying is not a device to tell the time, but you are solely buying a device that is a tribute to human craftsmanship.

And, they come out with lots of quite enjoyable slogans around quartz and around the company. And ultimately--of course, the problem is that early on, the don't actually have--they don't really have any product. So, it's really wonderful marketing gimmicks. Because, of course, these Watch Fairs are--these stands will have loads of watches. I mean, I've talked about Omega and they've got a thousand models or whatever at the time. But they only had two when they went in, in 1984. And so, they were, like, 'You know what we'll do? We'll create some mystique and an allure here. All the cases will be empty and you just have to come and speak to us about it.' Rather than have two--smack two watches sitting in the middle of nowhere. 'We'll do that.'

And so, yeah: There was a whole story that they were telling. And I think that was the real innovation here, was the storytelling. Less a new technology entering the market, just a new way of positioning the product.

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, totally. Yeah. There's a lot of debate online about that date in particular. But again, it just sort of, it kind of just unlocked a lot, I think.

And, I'm trying to think of a few others, but--

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, totally. Yeah. And, I think as well--it's interesting as well what the luxury watch market looked like before Blancpain. In that, you know, like, ultimately, there were still watches that had a luxury element to them, but they were normally like luxury, for example, because of the number of jewels. Right? And that thing. And also, a lot of the watches that we would now see as luxury watches--like, the Royal Oak is a good example.

Or even at the Rolex Daytona. Right? I mean, they were around before this. They just never had quite managed to land the kind of messaging and positioning because there was still always a link with utility at the heart of it. These were sort of, like--the watch I've got is a Rolex Explorer 1. I mean, that whole thing was around--the story they generated there was around the fact that it went up Everest, allegedly, and this was the--and this was the watch of mountain climbers. I think I have a bit in the article--I think it made it in--which was around James Bond's watch in the novels where he has a Rolex and uses it for many, many purposes, including a knuckle duster at one point as well. There was an element of prestige to them I think that's very important to flag. But they were not--they just hadn't quite found the marketing. It was still pegged in some way to the way they were used.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah.

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, that's totally right. And, I think the Eisenhower and the Rolex President is a really good example there, the kind of Day-Date [another Rolex watch model--Econlib Ed.] and the relationship with presidents. It's not really the craft that they're leaning on there. It's the fact that you just end up with this very prestigious set of--you're just in great company, aren't you, when you've got yourself a gold Day-Date, whether it's presidents or--now of course, Tony is probably more well-known for Tony Soprano, but at that point it was presidents throughout.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, so I think Nicolas Hayek is a wonderful figure. He was essentially a management consultant specializing in engineering works and built his own management consultant company, and was a relatively--and he got himself onto the radar of just the Swiss banks in particular for various bits of work. I can't remember exactly, but it was something to do with the Swiss military and some tanks or something. I can't remember exactly, but it was something excellent.

And, he was asked--so, I mentioned these two very large lifeboats [financial term for failing businesses that are barely being kept afloat--Econlib Ed.]. He had come in and was[?] asked, 'Would you take a look basically at what we can do with these companies? Because, we're sick of being in a situation where we are ultimately having to issue more debt and low guarantees and so on and so forth to keep them afloat.'

Aled Maclean-Jones: Exactly, right. Yes. And, one is more leaning towards the movements and the other one is slightly more brand-facing. And so, he essentially is told to go away and basically come up with a report. This is actually slightly earlier than the legendary Basel car park incident. So, I think this is 1982, off the top of my head, but he basically is--

Aled Maclean-Jones: He's asked to get this report, and I tried to get it. I tried so hard to get it, but it's very hard to get. But, anyway, the report essentially in a classic--he sort of rewrites the brief, essentially, and says basically, 'I think it's much better actually that we have one company and one company leads.'

And, they're quite reluctant to do this. So, I think he said it takes a couple of goes to get this. He proposes it, and they say, 'We're not ready for it.' And then, I think on go two or three, they say, 'Yes, okay.' And so, essentially a new large company is created, basically. And, with Hayek very much involved, his involvement increases over time. And, this is meant to be a new start for Swiss watchmaking, by which you can rationalize a lot of the things that need to be rationalized.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yes, exactly right. Yeah. I mean, so Hayek is such an interesting figure because he's sort of like--and it is interesting, the name, because he is slightly like a business philosopher. And, it's very interesting watching his interviews. He treats this whole thing very philosophically.

I mean, there's a quote I think that might still be in the article. He was obsessed with the idea of using this as a model to prove that Europe could build and Europe could compete essentially with--at this stage, his obsession with offshoring and so on and so forth. And, it's upsetting as a Brit, because he always chooses the way to do things badly is the British automotive industry, which was extraordinarily good and then tried to do manufacturing and just didn't get it right and lost the quality, lost the reputation. And so, there's that quote where, "We must build where we live. When a country loses the know-how and expertise to manufacture things, it loses its capacity to create wealth--its financial independence. When it loses its financial independence, it starts to lose political sovereignty."

And, as you say, the way he basically did that was he inverted the way things were done at this time, where you had--the brand stuff and the marketing stuff was very, very centralized within these lifeboats. And, he was very much, like, the way to solve that problem is to decentralize that and so to push it out. He has a wonderful quote that's not in the article, which is, 'Each brand is different, so each message is different. My job is to sit in a bunker with a machine gun defending the distinct messages of all my brands.' That was the first part of it.

Aled Maclean-Jones: I suppose. I think it's interesting as well, because, I mean, one way I was thinking about writing this, you could frame it as almost like you have the romantic and the rationalist. You have Biver as the romantic and Hayek as the rationalist. But I think--you know, Hayek himself, he was a huge--there was definitely a sense of a real love for the romance of it all. I think for him, he felt there was a much better way of--if you think about some of the brands that they then inherited--you think about Omega: Well, okay. We can position Omega in one way. And, you've got other luxury brands that you can position in other ways, and so on and so forth.

And, that's kind of how the modern watch market works today. Right? Aside from a few of the standalone players--you think about Rolex or Cartier--you have essentially a number of groups who will have within them--they often paint it as a triangle, where you'll have--you have the ultra premium at the top, you'll have the high premium, the middle premium, and the low premium. A lot of them will share movements, for example. A lot of them will share movements, and they'll--and again, that was the second piece of what Hayek wanted to do, was bring all of the movement-making and consolidate all of that. Which is interestingly like a play that is still developing today. Right? So, Rocca's sister company, Tudor, that's really lent into the movement side of it and is still a live debate about movements in watches--buying movements from other watches--what does that do to the quality of the watch?

But, for him, it was all about survival. There was a huge amount of automation that could be done.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. No, it totally was. Because for me, that's the real genius of Biver and Piguet and Blancpain is that they essentially kind of showed this way. And then other companies picked this up and did it in incredible ways. You think about Patek and the real winners of the luxury watch market today, they are the ones that really took the lessons and learned it so well. And so, I think about Rolex and Patek and actually kind of Cartier now are doing really well.

And, again, it's sort of taking the lessons from those two blokes in the van and applying it basically. It's always wonderful to see--watch advertising done well is a really wonderful thing. Done badly, it can be excruciating, but when they do it well and you're walking through the airport in Switzerland on the travelator and you're getting bombarded and it's the one that's really good. You're like, 'Okay, hang on. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, God. I'm a custodian. God.' It's like my [inaudible 00:38:00] and inheritance. You know what I mean? I'm not buying it for me. I'm buying it for some indistinct future me.

It's interesting, isn't it, as well? You see a lot of people now who are working technology and stuff, I think--and traditionally, it's always been about discussions of companies like big tech and Meta and Amazon and so on and so on. But, now the conversation is often about luxury companies now. One of the most enjoyable podcasts the last three years in tech was about LVMH [Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy] and the lessons from there as well. And, you will see a lot of people now really turning to luxury for the lessons on how to market.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. So I think--I totally agree with--firstly, if I was in Hayek's shoes, and I [?] the pyramid, and I was, like, 'There's this whole market here that we're not touching,' I would be, like, 'Stay away. Stay away. Stay away.'

Aled Maclean-Jones: But, I think this comes to the kind of philosopher within him. Because, he saw this as a challenge. For him, he wants to prove--and in a lot of interviews he gave, this was this thing--he wants to prove as well that the West could manufacture cheaply. I think that was one of the big things behind it. And so, he comes in and he's very keen to be, like, 'Okay, well. I want us to enter this market. I want us to create a cheap watch that can sort of out-quartz quartz. To show that we can take on Japanese manufacturers.' And, fortunately for him, there's a team within ETA [ETA SA Manufacture Horlogère Suisse, a Swiss company], I think, which is one of the main movement manufacturers, that have been working on this.

And, the story behind how they get there is very interesting. So, there's a team who are first asked by an American businessman to basically create, for distribution to the American market, the world's thinnest watch. The world's thinnest watch, called the Delirium. And, they managed to do it, and it's an incredibly thin watch. It's like a matter of millimeters. But, they kind of come up with this innovation, which is that you can incorporate a lot of the movement into the casing of the watch itself, into the case back.

And so then there's a team, and I think there's a few people in there that I mentioned--so, Elmar Mock and I think Jack Moore--I can't remember the name off the top of my head. So, they essentially are, like, 'Surely we could do that with a plastic watch; and it would reduce the number of parts. It would reduce the complexity of the movement.' Meaning, it could be a lot cheaper. And, they'd kind of been trying this a little bit off the books. There was a little bit of a wild-westiness to it, which I think indicates why they brought in Hayek and why Hayek was so keen to consolidate a lot of the manufacturing stuff if there were all these experiments happening.

But anyway, so they come to him with a bit of a ready-made proposal for a cheap watch. And so, they kind of begin with it. So, it gets the name the 'Swatch' and stuff, and they do some testing, and it doesn't really land particularly well.

So, the interesting thing about the Swatch is--so they start by testing it in--I think it started in Texas. They test it in San Antonio, I think. And, it doesn't go down that well. And, at that point as well, the Swatches, you buy it from--I think they're mainly buying it from pharmacies or something. Or no, I think it was the jewelers, I think. I can't remember. It wasn't in very exciting colors. And there's a good bit--I mean, Swiss watch-manufacturing is amazing for apocrypha. The one there is that they were very worried about whether it would succeed or not, but they had to essentially approve the manufacturing of it beforehand. So, it was in very neutral colors, almost army colors. And, the idea was that if the public didn't buy it, they could sell it to the Swiss Army. I think. Again, I'm pretty sure it's apocryphal--but I enjoyed that one a lot when I was reading it.

And so, it took a while for them to--so I think it took a few goes, a few iterations of the Swatch. But then, when it took off, and I think they figured out the bright colors, and when it took off, it really took off. And, it was a real phenomenon of the late 1980s.

Aled Maclean-Jones: I think I did when I was a kid. I think I did. Yes, I think I did. I think it might have been my first watch. There was something in there that was seeding my brain, despite my watchlessness, into returning to it.

Aled Maclean-Jones: It's true. It's true.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Then the--the other innovation that occurred with Swatch as well. So, there's an interesting life question about: What was the impact of Swatch? Because frankly, today, ultimately the way the market has settled--maybe we can talk about this in a bit--but, the way the market has settled is, it has been the luxury bit of the market that has been their most enduring. And, if you look at--

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, of the Swiss. Yeah. If you look at revenue today, it's almost exclusively luxury. And, there's always this interesting life question about: What does Swatch do? It's really important to not understate the kind of halo effect that Swatch had for the overall cause of Swiss watches, because they had this quite radical--the marketing was quite radical and it was very experiential marketing before Red Bull and so on and so forth did it. I think they arranged the world's first--I think it was the world's first break-dancing competition, I think. They did a national break-dancing competition. There was a hip hop tour, again very early.

And then, they did these stunts. The one I remember--there's a wonderful image of it--is they hung off the side of the Commerce Bank Building in Frankfurt, they hung a 13-ton watch off the side of it. They did that, but also they began as well--the enthusiast trend, the whole trend. The whole point of the Swatches was, if they're big on this, you don't buy one. You got to buy lots. Buy lots. They're all different and you can buy one depending on how you feel every single day. Again, I think that was, for me, where--the role that Swatch plays in the story is that it kind of had this halo effect that, like--teams that stay winning keep winning. And, it was just another example of Swiss watch manufacturing winning in the late 1980s, early 1990s.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. So, there was a lot of internal competition for movements. So, there was definitely some--you get this a little bit reading some of the later histories. There was a little bit of tension around competition for movements, particularly from ETA. So, you'd have brands getting allocations and so on and so forth. So, there was a little bit of internal discord.

And the other point--I think the way that Swatch was constructed is that they tried to keep spaces clear. So, you'd have a brand within the niche. For example, Omega was the only Omega brand within that section, for example. But, I think Hayek would say that a little bit of competition is worth it for the benefit that comes from decentralizing marketing, right?

Aled Maclean-Jones: So, certainly that's the way the Swatch Group, as it now today works. You still have quite centralized--it's my understanding anyway--you still have quite centralized manufacturing and decentralized marketing. The way it works today, you obviously have--you will have some of the very large companies that are their own thing. So, Rolex is a whole other strange thing. It's not even a company: it's like a foundation; and so on and so forth, and that's kind of over there basically. But then, you will then have these groups who will have consolidated manufacturing. The market manufacturing now itself is highly consolidated across the board and kind of incestuous. And, it's really the marketing that is the stuff that is really separated out.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So, I think it still exists. The thing that is interesting, of course, is you then have a second disruption. A much later disruption than in my essay, which is like--but people would say smartwatches, but I would say it's more like the ubiquity of time on devices. And so, if you think about that market, that market that we talked about--the 75% of the watch market--the reason for those cheap watches was simply because you couldn't--it was a significantly lifestyle-limiting factor to not have a watch.

So, I'm 32, but that was the thing that really hit me reading and researching this article was just, for how long--I mean, obviously, certainly in the 19th century, it was such a fundamentally important tool rather than having to hop from public clock to public clock. And, a little bit of that residual probably existed in the 1960s and 1970s. Now it obviously doesn't really matter so much because you'll always have a device, and you've got smartwatches as well, haven't you? Now it's a much smaller part of the watch ecosystem. It's still a pretty big player. It's one that people talk about. But, as I say, the most enduring part of the market today is essentially the luxury part of it.

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, totally. Yeah. And, it's interesting to see--because the thing, anecdotally, I use my watch most for is avoiding having to carry a phone around. Because ultimately, you think about an iPhone screen, that's the thing that pulls you in, isn't it? So often I find my trigger to looking at my phone is to check the time. And then, once you check the time, you've got the notifications sitting neatly beneath it, and then suddenly you're pulled in, aren't you? And so, it's interesting that time is still the largest feature on an iPhone screen.

Aled Maclean-Jones: It's the clock, isn't it? It's the clock, isn't it? Maybe that'll be the next--Biver will find it in a Volkswagen ID. Buzz, or whatever the successor is, that the idea that having a mechanical watch is kind of a way to switch off and stay device free.

Aled Maclean-Jones: I think it does. Yeah. I think it does. Yeah. I think it comes from a wonderful podcast, which is a three-hour long deep dive into Rolex by the team it acquired. Yeah: I think it covers everything, basically. It's quite difficult to break out. It's generally quite difficult to break out revenue for various reasons around watches because the two big companies are Apple and Rolex, who both don't make public their figures. Right? So, there's a whole other very funny industry, enjoyable industry, of people trying to guess at what's going on with both of those companies, basically. But, certainly the fact is, is that it's a very small number of watches sold and an extraordinary large amount of the revenue.

Aled Maclean-Jones: I think it varies. So, there's a few interesting trends with the market at the moment. So I think firstly it's--like so many things in the world--it's becoming more and more kind of an enthusiast's game. You know what I mean? Like, it's this classic trend of, like, instead of having a broad group of people who might buy one watch, there's this pool of people who are buying multiple watches, and that's where the market goes. The same as everything. It's such a large secular trend of our time.

And so, yes, it will depend, essentially. So, I think you'll have certain--so, in the United Kingdom, it's interesting because there's not really--there are not that many very large kind of watchmaking companies in the United Kingdom. So, you get these very interesting, independent watchmakers, some of whom will make their own movements. And so, in my head, certainly, like--if I think about someone like Reca[?], or--you have a guy called Roger Smith as well. You have some incredibly impressive just artisans who are doing incredible things. You'll generally get movements made there themselves, but then you'll have some other watchmakers who are independents, who will be taking movements from elsewhere.

And the differentiation comes on the--again, the dial, the craft--the aesthetics and so on and so forth.

So yeah: There's definitely a large and quite popular set of independent watchmakers, some of whom have gone completely supernova. One of the most famous ones now is a guy called F.P. Journe, whose watches are extraordinarily expensive, beloved by--go for unbelievable prices. That's probably the one big trend.

Then the other one is, of course, that you have these luxury watches that have seen a lot of growth as assets over the last five years. So, you see that particularly with kind of the most prestigious models.

It's what's interesting over the last two years, that that's cooled quite a lot.

And, how the market responds to that: This what they call the luxury recession. And, how do watchmakers survive that? And the trends that we've seen there as well has been quite interesting.

And then, the other fun one personally is that--there's been quite a big retreat away from size. So, one thing that put me off from watches when I was in my teens and 20s is they had to be very big. It had to be very big. Heavy. Now it's all very dainty and very small, and 36 millimeters is what everybody wants.

So, those are the three trends that are the most interesting to me right now.

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, totally. Yeah. I think one of the reasons I was drawn to this as someone who was not into watches beforehand was--this is, like, an optimistic story about, as you say, creative destruction and what happens when functions and products change. And I felt certainly that, there's a lot of anxieties now about human work and what happens and so on and so forth. And, it's very easy to look to negative stories. But, you know, here's a kind of positive one. It's just a little bit complex because these things are never straightforward. And, you end up with not only structural trends, but you end up with mavericks and entrepreneurs popping up. And, the sort of future isn't set and lots of things can happen. If there's enough people out there in vans in car parks in Basel, then some things might end up differently.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Thanks, Russ. Thanks so much for having me.

Andrew Fox: Thanks very much. It's great to join you.

Andrew Fox: I've had some truly terrible Israeli wine as well.

Andrew Fox: It's about a 75-25 hit rate.

Andrew Fox: But, yeah, that doesn't stop me persisting. So it's all good.

Look, the last few years have been a really interesting journey into this space. I was lecturing at Sandhurst. My academic qualifications were a Master's in Psychology, where I looked at the psychologies of leadership, and also of disinformation. And then, a war studies Masters, where I focused specifically on the Middle East.

And then, of course, a war in the Middle East began with loads of strategic questions and loads of disinformation, so I had plenty to write about. And I was head-hunted by the Henry Jackson Society to do just that. So, I kind of found myself at a new job as a Conflict Researcher.

But, it also kind of came from--I've been very vocal since the start of the war about antisemitism and the raging, kind of obvious disinformation that was coming out about the Gaza War right from the start. That got me an invitation on a trip to Israel. From there, I built up my network of contacts, and I worked quite hard to do that. I'd find people who'd talk to me and work out who was who in the academic and the military spaces: who was good to talk to, who could offer you that information that nobody else was getting. And it kind of turned into a niche for me.

So, I'm actually getting to Gaza three times during the war with the IDF. Once was with the high level military group, which is a crowd of retired very senior officers from around NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] and other European countries. And, we wrote an amicus curiae brief for the International Criminal Court off the back of that--so, to refute some of the allegations against Netanyahu and the Defense Minister Gallant.

The second trip was, again, kind of laid on for me, if I'm honest. It was--I literally asked the Spokesman's Department if I could go and visit the troops, because I've always been really interested in this from a soldiers' eye view. There are big strategic questions, there are big policy questions, there's all that stuff--which is interesting. But actually, I noticed that nobody was really talking about the troops. And, if you want to know what's really happening in a war zone, it's the soldiers who fight it that are good to speak to, rather than the generals who sit in their offices a bit further back. Not to denigrate the generals, who are doing an important role; and you can't have an army without one. But, when it comes to the tooth-and-nail fighting, it's the troops that you need to talk to. So, that was really interesting and developed my network a bit further there.

And then, my third visit was I was the first neutral international observer to go and visit and film a Gaza humanitarian foundation distribution from start to finish. Which inadvertently turned into a global exclusive; and then the footage I shot went absolutely worldwide, which was quite cool.

So, that's the access I've had.

When you go, particularly through the Spokesman Department with the IDF--they're the official party line and they're fighting their own information war. You have to--not take them with a pinch of salt, I'm not saying that at all. But you do have to divine using your experience and your knowledge what they're not telling you. I don't blame them for not telling me because they're doing a job. But it's my job to try and find the gaps and work out what the truth actually is.

And so, the paper you're talking about, I kind of slightly naughtily cut out the higher echelons of command in the IDF completely and went to my network of soldiers who would talk to me. And I cross-referenced their accounts of things with OSINT--Open Source Intelligence--and what we could glean from maps. There's some pretty impressive tracking of the war that's gone on in the open-source-intelligence-space community. So, there's some pretty good ways of checking what you're being told. And of course, you cross-reference the soldiers' accounts with each other to see where they contradict, where they complement each other, and that kind of thing.

And, only right at the end did I give the paper to the IDF's Lessons Learned Branch. Because, frankly, I didn't want to get anything--you know, if I'd made a mistake, I'd like it to be called out. Fortunately, I hadn't, actually. There were very few things they'd picked up in there. But, also, I didn't want to get anyone hurt and breach operational security or throw the IDF under a bus in any way by revealing secrets that perhaps might harm soldiers going forward. So, I made sure there was nothing in there that crossed that line. But that's really the only input the IDF had into it.

And, I don't think anyone else in the world has come up with a paper this comprehensive on how the IDF actually fought in Gaza. It's been incredibly under-reported by the world's press. A lot of sort of pro-Israel academia tends to just stick to the Spokesman's Department line without interrogating it too hard. And I've tried very hard to get past that. So, I think this paper is pretty unique, and I'm very proud of it.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. It's so tricky, because it's such a contested information space. And you know I've written a whole paper on that as well: It's called "Information Maneuver"--again, a Henry Jackson Society paper--which talks about this information war and how it's been fought. And, the "Lessons from Gaza" paper does address the journalist piece.

When it comes to my role in that information space, all I'm trying to do is be fair and write about the IDF as I would about the British Army, or the American Army, or the Dutch Army, or the Sri Lankan Army, or whoever you want to pick. Because, I think there's such a skew in the way the IDF is reported on, almost in the sense that perfection is expected and if they drop anywhere short of complete perfection then somehow that's the worst thing that ever happened. And, that's just an unrealistic way of looking at war.

We can go back to Clausewitz and he talked about the chaos and the friction, and the fact that war is deeply messy. And then, the fact that I've been to war myself three times in Afghanistan and I've seen firsthand just how brutal, and tragic, and awful war is. It's very different to, say Call of Duty--the computer game--or a Hollywood film.

So, that's the kind of perspective I take when it comes to my role in the information war, just to report fairly. And I've not shied away from criticizing the IDF where I think it's appropriate. And, actually, the IDF have encouraged that. My IDF friends appreciate that. They don't want cheerleaders with pom-poms saying that they're the best thing that ever happened. They just want to be treated fairly and normally.

When it comes specifically to the journalist issue, I kind of weathervane on this one. It depends on what time of day you catch me because I genuinely see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, we know from the 2014 war, there's very credible third-party journalist reporting talking about how they were intimidated by Hamas on the ground. There's journalists from the Netherlands and India that report on this, so it's completely divorced from Israeli press. It's third party stuff. So, that's very credible and I believe those reports.

Especially as we saw them repeated, funnily not by Hamas, but actually by Hezbollah during this war. I went to a captured tunnel up in Lebanon. It was technically a media outing, but almost nobody went. And I asked a friend of mine, who I won't name, but he's a major international journalist. I said, 'Why is nobody else here?' And, he told me outright that it's because the networks had had their correspondents in Beirut threatened if people went on this trip. So, 'If you go on this trip to the tunnel, we'll hurt your correspondent in Beirut.' So, it's a very common tactic: it's not just Hamas that do it. Hamas and Hezbollah are so close, there's no way they're not using the same tactic. But, we also know that if anything happened to a journalist on the ground, it would be pinned on the IDF no matter who was responsible.

But, on the flip side, my very first firefight in Afghanistan, I had a BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] journalist with me. I'd joined the battle group prior to a huge assault. She stayed with us in the forming-up area overnight; she went forward with us to the line of departure; and then she stayed a bound back whilst we went through the assault. There's still an article on the BBC website about that, which is kind of cool.

And perhaps more of those embeds, certainly with trusted journalists--journalists they know they can trust to be fair. I don't think they want these hagiographies: they want fair reporting. There aren't many journalists out there that have proven themselves able to do that, which is partially I think a failing of the media, which has harmed their case to get in with the IDF. But, yeah, I think a few more eyes on the ground would have definitely helped.

And then, the final thing I would say though, that is far harder to do in Gaza than it is in Afghanistan. Because in Gaza, you have that. I spoke to a Yahalom--the tunnel commander--I spoke to one of their captains the other day. He described it as a 720-degree threat in Gaza just because of the above-ground, underground, 360-degrees horizontal and vertical. So, it's a really, really challenging environment to keep people safe. And when you're fighting, the last thing you want to do is be worrying about where the journo is and are they in cover, etc., etc.

So, I do genuinely see both sides of this argument and I kind of change my mind on a daily basis about what the best thing to do would have been.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. I mean, what your students are saying tallies with everything I've ever heard from any IDF soldier. And look: you know Israelis. If that wasn't true, there's no way they'd be able to force people to repeat the party line endlessly.

Andrew Fox: I was at an academic conference with 13 Israeli academics last year, and at any one time, there were 26 opinions in the room. This is not a culture that will kind of just repeat the party line because they're told to. In my opinion, in my experience.

But, look: You look at the amount of IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices] that were in Gaza. I was trying to get a figure out of people last week when I was in [inaudible 00:16:37]--

Andrew Fox: Yeah, a booby-trap: an improvised explosive device. It's what's done the most damage to IDF soldiers in terms of casualties and deaths. It's IEDs that have really hurt them.

I was trying to get a figure. The low figure was tens of thousands: As many as 100,000 IEDs was the estimate they gave me. And if you then look at the surface area of Gaza, that equates--I did the math when I got home--that works out to an IED every half a football pitch. That's how dense this minefield was.

And of course, that's not--they weren't evenly spread across the strip. They were concentrated in the cities, in the areas where the IDF were fighting. So, actually, it's probably way more dense than an IED every 60 meters.

That gives you an answer as to why Gaza looks like it does straight off the bat. Because, the IDF is fighting or was fighting a combined arms maneuver operation. This wasn't counter-insurgency where they could go, every time they found an IED, call the disposal assets forward, wait there while they clear the bomb, and then move on. That's just not tactically viable in the slightest in Gaza. Most of these IEDs were operated by a Hamas member that was watching the tunnel mouth or wherever it was through a camera that they'd planted. Hamas were an astonishingly adaptive and well-improvised enemy when it comes to stuff like this.

So, straight away, that rules out any chance of an ammunition technical officer getting forward to do the old red-wire/blue-wire thing that you see from the films. So, the IDF had to detonate these things. And of course as soon as they go bang, that's the building destroyed. And, when you are literally advancing through a minefield detonating every mine, that's why Gaza looks like it does.

Andrew Fox: I think that rests on a false assumption that before the war, Gaza was somehow a kind of neutral population in terms of their attitudes to Israel, and only Hamas in there were the ones who really hated them. I don't think that stands up to any polling that we've seen ever in terms of Gaza and attitudes towards a two-state solution or coexistence peacefully with Israel. I don't think there was just a crowd of people who were, like, 'Oh, I'm not sure about Israel. Oh no, they've bombed me; now I hate them.' I don't think that has happened at any point during this war. This is a population who have been, in many cases, indoctrinated by the school system or by UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] to loathe, hate, and despise not only Israel, but the Jews generally.

Andrew Fox: Yeah, thank you for that. So, the U.N. Relief Works Agency. There are people in there who--very few are neutral towards Israel, even before this war. So, the idea that you've somehow now turned the population that already you against you further I think is kind of irrelevant.

It's a flaw in military thinking where you map Conflict A onto Conflict B. And you say, 'Right, because Conflict A went like this, Conflict B will go like this.' And, I think that's really the wrong way to look at lessons from one conflict to another.

And in this instance, what we're seeing is Western commentators taking our counterinsurgency doctrine from Iraq, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, and trying to apply it to a situation where it really doesn't fit. So, I kind of reject that one.

In terms of options, the idea I've had on the table. Look, I spoke to the Defense Minister about this firsthand. And, his point was, 'Look, it's the Middle East, you have to be strong. If you have a choice between being liked and being strong, you choose being strong.' It's a mentality thing. It's a psychology thing, when it's comes to the Middle East. I think a lot of Western commentators just don't understand; and that has informed--those flawed assumptions informed a lot of really sub-par, frankly, commentary on this conflict, especially when it comes to Gaza.

But, let's go back to 7th, 8th, 9th of October 2023 and just stop for a second and think about what was on the ground there. You have 1200 people lying dead. You have hundreds more where you don't know where they are. Are there bodies, are they in Gaza? You don't know. You've got rockets coming in from the north from Hezbollah. You're now worried about Judea, Samaria, and the West Bank, what's going to happen there. Syria is still a mess, so you're worried about that. You've got the Houthis down in Yemen making threats. And, you've got Iran as the spider at the center of the web. You are under siege from all sides if you're Israel. And I think the only option on the table at that point really is to punch back as hard as you can.

Now, what does that punch look like? Could they have done just targeted strikes and left it there? Potentially, but that doesn't remove the threat of future assaults from Gaza into Israel. We've seen that repeated in previous conflicts--so, Guardian of the Walls or any of the other ops that have taken place in Gaza since 2005--that's essentially what Israel did. A few air strikes, a little bit of ground maneuver, and then stop. That didn't make Israel any more safe and actually led to the 7th of October, you could make the case.

So, Israel took the opportunity--what's the word--took the decision to get in there and dismantle Hamas' terror capabilities methodologically. And, unfortunately, when those terror capabilities are embedded in every square inch of the Gaza Strip--when you have as many as 1000 miles of tunnels underneath the ground, when you have 57,000 tunnel entrances and they're digging more whilst you're fighting, when you have IEDs and arms cases[?caches?] and rat runs between houses in pretty much every house you come to--unfortunately, to destroy that, you're going to have to take Gaza to pieces. And that's what's happened.

You can make the case, I think, as a final point, that the IDF have approached this mercilessly when it comes to Hamas. I don't think they've been merciless when it comes to evacuating civilians because they have done that and probably to a greater extent than actually they needed to. Under international law, anyway. Notwithstanding that law, legal and moral, are two very different things. But, they've certainly approached Hamas and their capabilities with a merciless approach where they've just ground yard by yard, systematically dismantling everything in front of them, And so, we do see the destruction.

I think it boils down to one thing: What's the political end-state for this war? It was to remove the threat to Israel. Which they've basically done. I don't see any other tactical way of doing that.

Andrew Fox: There's a slightly binary approach to looking at war that I think is a real mistake people make, and that's looking at victory and defeat as if they're tangible things. I much prefer to frame it in a more useful way. I don't think victory and defeat are useful. I think what we're looking at is strategic goals: Have they been achieved or not? And, Israel's strategy goals were pretty clear: Secure Israel's borders, return the hostages, and destroy Hamas.

Okay, so first one is done. The strategic threat to Israel has been removed. Hamas cannot repeat 7th of October. Their rocket stocks are absolutely minimal. They may get one off, but it's not going to be anything remotely serious; and certainly Iron Dome is more than capable of dealing with it. Which leaves us to the final one, which is: Was Hamas destroyed? Well, no, they're not. But, they are heavily degraded, they can no longer strike Israel, and they are now presiding over a kingdom that is half of Gaza where everyone lives in tents and is miserable. That feels like pretty strong achievements of strategic goals right there.

Now, does that provide longterm security?

Well, the answer is we don't know. Because, actually, under the Trump ceasefire deal, that is really outsourced to the United States now. And if you go down to the Civil Military Corporation Center in Kiryat Gat--where I was last week--it's very clear who kind of runs the show down there. And it isn't Israel, it isn't the British, it isn't one of the 27 countries that have provided troops to that center. It's the Americans, quite clearly. They are liaising through Egypt directly with Hamas. Or indirectly with Hamas, I should say. They are keeping the violence to minimal levels. And they own the Board of Peace, and then what happens in Gaza going forward. So, it's kind of out of Israel's hands at this point.

So, in terms of the longterm security of Israel, I think it's safe certainly for years at least. I think Israel retains the ability to strike back in to Gaza with air strikes, should any serious capability look like are being developed by Hamas or any other militant group.

But, a lot is going to depend on, you know, who governs Gaza going forward. And there's so much down there that's not decided on, it's complete unclear as to the way forward in terms of Hamas being disarmed, etc., etc., that we can't make assessments at this point as to where it goes in the future.

Andrew Fox: Yeah, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Andrew Fox: Yeah, it's okay.

Look, I saw hungry people but not starving people--I think is my takeaway. They weren't anything like--you know, if you close your eyes and think of famine, I think most of us think of Ethiopia or Biafra, all those images that came out of the 1980s. Nothing like that at all, nowhere close. People wanted food, but they didn't look malnourished. And I've got a raft of photographs and video images to prove it. So that's just not me making it up.

Andrew Fox: Yeah, at least where I was. But, I was down in Rafah, which has some of the worst destroyed areas.

Look: There's a weird inversion during this war, and we're in danger of playing the game a little bit here. Because, the way allegations usually work is if you make an allegation, you have to give evidence. And then it's on the defending party to refute that or otherwise.

At the moment, what we've got is allegations--people making allegations--and saying, 'Right, refute that.' And you're, like, 'Well, there's nothing to refute. You've made an allegation. You've not provide any evidence. I've got nothing to refute here.' And then, by trying to refute it, you kind of play their game because you give credibility to the allegation by taking it seriously.

So, we're in a real trap here, I think. The flip side is if you don't refute the allegation, and that's the only narrative that runs.

So, it's a really clever information tactic that the anti-Israel side is using.

If you make allegations of starvation, you have to get past the fact that 3000 calories per day, per person on average went into Gaza during the war. Like, that is more than enough for every man, woman, and child in Gaza to be well-fed every single day.

And so, we can conclusively say that the issue is with distribution inside Gaza, not with the supply of food. So, the simple facts stack up that way.

Why weren't people getting fed? Well, a variety of reasons. It's a war zone. There's a lot of rubble. It's very difficult to get food to some people. And, I think if there was any hunger, that's where it was: It was in those isolated pockets where it was exceptionally difficult to get food to.

Obviously, you've also got Hamas hoarding the aid, and we've seen video after video of the baby food stockpiles that were in there. And, I spoke to someone in COGAT [Coordination of Government Activities] who couldn't understand why there was a shortage of baby food, because they knew how much powder had gone in. They just couldn't work out why A and B were not matching up.

And, since then, we've seen videos released of warehouses stacked full of baby food, because it's a high value item and Hamas can sell it for a good price if they restrict supply. It's basic economics: That's your wheelhouse. So, there's all these other factors playing into it.

Now, that doesn't mean that Israel didn't do stupid things, and the complete cessation of aid, at that point--was at last May?--it was unnecessary. It didn't work. It did so much strategic damage reputationally. It gave the enemies as much ammunition as they could have dreamed of. And, it was just a foolish thing to do. Even though we know there was enough food in there for months, that doesn't matter. We're in an environment where the slightest mistake gets seized upon. And that was just a strategic mistake. It didn't need to happen.

Andrew Fox: I think they were trying to--I can't remember off the top of my head how long it lasted for. I think it might have been a month-and-a-half, but I'd have to check. I think the reason they did it is because they knew Hamas were using the aid supplies to raise their funds, pay their fighters, keep themselves in the fight in many respects. And they thought that by cutting the supply, it would mean that the demand inside escalated, which means Hamas would have to feed people. Yeah, I just think it was fuzzy logic. And, as I said, it didn't work anyway. It just got Israel hammered on the world stage.

So, when it comes to, yeah, starvation, yeah, it doesn't stack up. And, I would recommend you read the paper by Danny Orbach and Jonathan Boxman, et al, published by the BESA--the Begin-Sadat Center. It's called "Refuting the Genocide Allegations," and it's the most extensive interrogation of this during the war.

And, when it comes to headshots and snipers, there's a really good point that they make in that paper. When we have doctors in the New York Times saying, 'We were in hospitals and all we saw was headshots to children and gunshot wounds to children,' unfortunately that's belied by Hamas' own numbers. Because, Hamas published, by hospital, the number of injuries and the kind and the mechanism of injuries they had been treating. And, whilst those doctors are in the Gaza Strip, no hospital in the Strip reported a majority of gunshot wounds, nevermind the majority of gunshot wounds to children. By far and away, the biggest mechanism of injury was air strike. So, their accounts of things is belied by Hamas' own data.

So, it's just a really good example of how you make an allegation, you don't provide any evidence other than anecdotal. Especially when you look at who they went to Gaza with, Medical Aid for Palestine, a charity that's been reported for links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the terror groups. Straightaway, there's a biased source. But they say 'Dr.,' so they get the halo effect. And then the story goes around the world, but there's actually no evidence.

Andrew Fox: I mean, respectfully, I've seen headshots in real life, and they don't look like they. I'm completely unconvinced by those X-rays.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. I've seen a headshot to a six-year-old, so I actually know what it looks like to a child. It was a ricocheted round to a child in Afghanistan. And, I can assure you it doesn't look like anything like those X-rays. So, I'm intensely skeptical of those, and I don't believe it.

Andrew Fox: So, straight off the bat, my grandfather was in the U.S. Army in World War II. I know what he was fighting against in Europe, so that's always been something I deeply admired him for. And I feel a sort of legacy to carry on in some way with this new face of antisemitism and Nazism that's reared its head.

Secondly, I had a very good Jewish friend who was killed in Afghanistan, Lieutenant Paul Mervis. Up to 7th of October, that was the only time I'd ever worn a kippah--was at his funeral. And, I'm very conscious that he gave his life for our country as a Jewish man. It morally offends me that Jews are presented as anything less than fellow British citizens. I find that deeply upsetting when I think about Paul's memory.

And then, finally, I worked very hard to get some of our former colleagues out of Afghanistan in 2021 when the Taliban took back over again. We ran a charity, a group of us, and we managed to shift about 3000 Afghans to safety, mostly women and children. And, we couldn't have done it without the Jewish community in the United Kingdom, who really helped us with fundraising and some of the legal stuff around it because, actually, it's very easy to people-traffic accidentally when you're doing this stuff. If you don't have the legal protection, you can get yourself in trouble. So, we couldn't have done any of it without them.

And then, I saw how 7th of October affected my friends. And then, I saw the storm of denial and antisemitism that came off the back of it. And, I think what got me my first invitation to Israel was primarily my support for the Jewish community in the United Kingdom. So, in terms of my attitudes to Israel, I've always been kind of a Zionist, if you will. I've always believed in the State of Israel as a thing that needs to be in existence for very important historical reasons. I've always been aware that the IDF go hard when they respond to terrorist acts. And, look: The law of armed conflict is pretty permissive, and I've got no moral qualms with going hard against terrorists. That doesn't bother me in the slightest.

And yeah, but I've always come into this, like I said, with a clear-eyed approach where I know that--look, I've studied, I have a Psychologies Masters because wars are fought by people, and if you can understand the people better, you'll understand the war better. And, the psychology when it comes to Gaza or Lebanon with Israel is no different: there's good, there's bad, and you have to take each into them as it comes and judge it on its own merits.

So, that's kind of my story and how I really got into this: but it all stems from family history, friends, and wanting to live in a world where people can get by without getting abused based on their religious or ethnic identity.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. I think if I had an answer to this, I'd be a lot wealthier than I am. I'd have a lot more impact on the world stage. This is a conundrum that has beaten every diplomat who has taken it on since 1948, and I think the reason for that is because 1948 was so messy. It wasn't a clean handover from A to B.

Certainly, there were groups like Irgun or Haganah who didn't play the cleanest slates in the run-up to Independence. And, as a Brit, there's a bit of antagonism--not from me personally because it was decades ago, but certainly people do bring it up quite regularly. There's the Declaration of Independence, there's the attack by the Arabs, there's the Israeli victory, there's what the Palestinians called the Nakba as a result. None of this is clean. None of it gives you nice lines on a map. None of it is not messy. And, it's that messiness that has caused the endless conflict ever since.

But, the article you're alluding to--I was really looking at the lens through which we try and analyze this problem. You look at the international law, the U.N., and all the arguments that are advanced forward. All the language they use is of colonialism, which was the era in which all that international law was written. That period post-Civil War when European empires were rushed--

Andrew Fox: Oh, sorry. Yeah, I misspoke. When European powers were rushing to hand their colonies back to the indigenous populations. Well, that framing just doesn't work with Israel. It's not that you'd had a bunch of Jewish colonizers from Europe who came in and kicked all the native Arabs off their land where there had never been any Jews before, and all of a sudden you've got a colony. That doesn't work.

What you effectively have is two peoples who both claim indigeneity, who both claim long historical ties to the land. And I'm not going to debate which one is right. I'm not interested in that right now. Because I think part of this is we all keep trying to rehash the battles of the past, rather than deal with what's in front of us right now.

And, what's in front of us right now is the State of Israel that isn't going anywhere. They've proven that beyond doubt in the last two years--that they will fight to the last soldier if need be. And some bases down in the south did that: They fought to the last soldier on 7th of October to defend their land. And, that's where we are, so we have to play that. But, colonialism narrative doesn't work.

And again, this debate, I think quite often pro-Israel advocates fall into the trap I articulated earlier where you play the enemy's game. When they start using the language of colonialism, many defendants like Natasha Hausdorff regularly uses uti possidetis juris as a counterargument to that. But, actually, that's a colonial framework, as well.

Andrew Fox: So, that is that when a colony was returned to the indigenous population, the borders were as they fell: 'Okay, this is the area that was colonized; these are your borders now.' And that's the argument by which the Gaza Strip, and Judea and Samaria are considered part of Israel.

But again, it's a colonial argument. And Israel is not and never has been, certainly since 1948, a colony of anyone. It's Jews returning to their indigenous homeland. Arabs maintaining that there is a waqf or Islamic right to the ground. And, they also claim a degree of indigeneity, whether that's true or not.

So, that's the situation as it is. And I think using colonial international law frameworks doesn't solve the problem.

And, I think part of the reason this is so intractable is people keep using those frameworks, and they're not fit for purpose. And perhaps we need a different way of looking at this problem to solve it rather than tie it to international law that doesn't really fit.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. So, the drones piece is interesting. It's not quite as widespread as Ukraine, and they're used in slightly different ways, so there's a really interesting in[?] comparing and contrast. And, I haven't done that work yet because that's part of my Ph.D. dissertation, so you'll have to bear with me until I grind through that one.

But, drones have been huge force multipliers. They haven't been available to every unit. There's a misconception: some of the reserve units have actually really struggled for equipment. And, one of the lessons is the challenge of mobilizing that many people in that short amount of time. 360,000 soldiers were mobilized by the IDF. They did not have stocks and supplies for 360,000 soldiers. So, that's a really good lesson about the challenges that come with mobilization.

And then, even how you train 360,000 reservists--because a lot of them hadn't worn a uniform for as much as three years, because every three years, they have to report. And yet, they only had a month-and-a-half of training before deploying to Gaza. So, there was actually quite a lot of on-the-job training done at the start of the war; they were learning in contact.

Which led to some mistakes, I would suggest. It led to things perhaps not going as well as it might have done at the start of the war because there were some soldiers lacking training. That's a really important lesson as well.

Medical is fascinating. So, it's 600 soldiers that would be dead not only if they'd been given current British standards of care, but if they had been given previous Israeli standards of care. So, if this had been the Lebanon War, 2006, those 600 would be dead. And, what's really interesting about the developments in the IDF medical space is how data-driven they are. They've really crunched the numbers on how soldiers were dying, where they were dying; and they've made some brilliant adjustments based on pure data. It's a very mathematical way of looking at it.

So, they've quite reasonably asked the question, 'How do soldiers die on the battlefield?' And the answer is blood loss. So, the very logical conclusion is, 'Well, why not have blood on the frontline?'

So, they've got refrigerated blood packs with the forward fighting units. So, when a soldier is wounded, rather than saline or some of the other intravenous stuff they give people which doesn't clot--which doesn't carry oxygen in the way that blood does--they give them blood. Incredible. No other army that I know of does this outside of the Special Forces.

They also look at where soldiers die, and actually, it's mostly the battlefield. If they make it to a hospital, they usually survive. The deaths are happening on the battlefield. And so, they've taken the doctors out of the hospitals and put them on the battlefield, because that's where they're most needed.

So, it's developments like this--data-driven, really, really intelligent, using technology--and where they're going is quite remarkable. They're going to be talking about wearable technology that updates in the app, that everyone in the medical chain can see. So when a casualty comes in, they've already got all their stats there. Then you can factor in AI [artificial intelligence] into that, which will recommend triage and treatment, and speed up that process as well, and save more lives. This is quite remarkable stuff they're doing.

They're even talking about investigating synthetic blood so you don't have to carry human blood. It can only be O-positive [Hmmm. Shouldn't be O-negative? O-negative blood is the universal donor blood type. In many cases, O-positive is fine; but O-negative is the actual universal donor blood type.--Econlib Ed.], because that's the only one that goes with everyone. It's got to be cleared of potential diseases or whatever it might be. With synthetic blood, you can just make a pure, clean blood that can go into wounded troops.

So, these are remarkable technological innovations, all data-driven. So, that was fascinating to me. And actually, the paper that I've already written, I'm just writing an annex to it now about those medical developments, because I only found those out last week.

But yeah, there's rafts of lessons here. And some of them are as old as time. Like, hygiene in the field. Gaza's sewage works were damaged: you know, the soldiers had to find somewhere to do their basic bodily functions. And then, if a bulldozer comes on and sweeps that into a sand berm, you're lying on a very contaminated pile of dirt. And people can pick up infections and all that sort of stuff.

So, even these really, really granular, gritty lessons that probably applied to the Romans just as much as they apply to the IDF in Gaza today, it's always good to have. Because, we get very excited about future technology, future developments, what's new, what's shiny. Actually, some of these classic soldiering lessons, it does no damage whatsoever to remind ourselves that they're still really important. So, I've tried to look at both new and old lessons in the paper quite deliberately.

Andrew Fox: Oh, I love that question. It's really important. It's a point to hammer home, I think--is that, it goes back to my earlier point about what you don't do: Is you don't lift Conflict A and say, 'Conflict B will be just like this.'

That the skills of the analyst--and what I've tried to do--is to say, 'Look, these lessons are not going to be the same as Gaza, but here are themes. Here are, kind of, specific data points that will lift and drop across.'

And, I've broken the lessons down into actually: You can learn from; You might want to learn from; or, You probably don't need to learn from. So I've actually broken them down.

But, it's not inconceivable that should we end up fighting in Eastern Europe--which looks increasingly likely, quite frankly--or in case we're fighting against the U.S. Army in Greenland--who knows--that there is almost certainly going to be an underground element. Look at the Battle of Stalingrad back in World War II. They were fighting in sewer systems there. This is not new; it's not unlikely.

And, what we've got from Gaza is the benchmark on how to do it against an enemy that's prepared underground; there's an obstacle every 100 meters. You're trying to maneuver simultaneously with the troops on the surface. You're trying to coordinate your fire supporters. It's all of that is happening. And it's absolutely conceivable that a NATO force could be doing that in Eastern Europe in due course. Not in the same way, but there are techniques, tactics, procedures that absolutely we can learn from.

And on top of that, what the IDF has done in Gaza is what we call a combined arms maneuver, where they use the full orchestra of war. They use air supports, artillery, mortars, guns, drones, signals intelligence, technological advances, infantry armor, tanks, you name it. It's like the whole orchestra is playing together in that urban setting. British Army hasn't done that since 2007. And even then, that was in a rural environment interspersed with buildings, rather than a pure urban environment. And, I know, because I was on that operation. I did it the last time the British did a battle group assault in that way. That is a lot of skill set[?]. That means pretty much anyone in the British Army below company commander has never touched this stuff and has loads to learn.

For example, the IDF had quite high levels of fratricide--of blue on blue at the start of the war. Because it turns out that when you operate in an urban environment, all of a sudden everything is rubble. Nothing looks like it does on your map. You lose track of where the people to the left and to the right of you are, and it's very easy to shoot your own troops by accident because of the chaos and friction of war that I mentioned earlier.

The IDF put some really good measures in on how to de-conflict your own call signs when they're moving around on the ground, so you don't actually have that. What a lesson to learn; and we can learn it from the IDF's mistakes so that we don't make those mistakes ourselves. So, it's a great opportunity, I think, for any army in the world to learn really, really important lessons in how to operate in an urban environment.

Andrew Fox: Look, the biggest difference I think is the fact it's a citizen army: It's so heavily reliant on reserves. And I have noticed differences in quality and performance between the high-end professional units and some of the reserve units. That's really interesting.

And look: it gives a lot kind of a flatter command structure in the IDF. It's very much a people's army, where our armies are very regimented and rank-orientated. My regiment is quite relaxed in that regard, and we encourage our soldiers to speak up and chip in ideas and that kind of thing. But the IDF takes that to a whole new level. And that's interesting to watch.

I don't think the IDF is quite as disciplined as Western armies tend to be. I've noticed that when I've been out with them.

But, it seems to work, and that's the important thing. It's, like: Does it work? Yes, it does. Then, great.

But it also has created some problems. If we look at how soldiers have taken their phones into Gaza when they're not supposed to: They've made stupid videos and messed around in people's houses. It comes nowhere close to the threshold of war crime, but the optics are incredibly poor.

And also, when you have a reserve army, it's very difficult to discipline them, because you can go home. They'll sack you; and they're like, 'Brilliant, I can go home now. This is great.' So, there are challenges there.

I do like how well the Israelis do what we would call mission command, what the Germans would have called Auftragstaktik[foreign language 01:03:32]. The way they empower down to the lowest level. We call it mission command. Actually, it's just command done well. And it does seem to work and have effect.

The other really good bonus from a citizen army is that you have some incredibly well-qualified, very genius soldiers. I have a friend who is a machine gunner--I won't mention his unit--but he's a machine gunner as a grunt, and the guy is just finishing off his Higher-Mathematics Master's. This is the single-brightest, most intelligent machine gunner that I've ever met in my life.

And, I can only imagine having someone like that as a battalion commander or a company commander. That would add enormous value to have someone that bright, at the lowest level you could go to, and get ideas from, and trust when you give them a mission and know how that goes.

But, the final observation is the army--the armies are made up of people. The IDF has some outstanding people, some good people, some average people, and some mediocre people, and almost certainly some bad people. Because that's just humanity. And, that actually, if you're recruiting from across your whole society, you're going to get a reflection of your whole society.

So, I find the differences interesting. I find them sometimes a little bit maddening. But, what I'm really interested in is: Does the army work or not? And it does. So, whatever they're doing culturally is obviously working for them.

Andrew Fox: Yeah. There was one thing that really jumped out. It was in Netzarim Corridor and was with 252 Division, which is a Reserve Division. And, it was classic kind of IDF disorganization, and they obviously weren't expecting us. We sort of rocked up with our escorts. It took us ages to get in. We were waiting around for hours and hours and hours. We eventually got driven in. And everyone just looked at us in a really confused way, like, 'What on Earth are you doing here?' They then had to trawl the camp to find a tiny handful of English speakers, maybe five or ten, that's all they could find. So, that's how I know this wasn't staged or laid on, which was why it sort of had meaning.

We interviewed all of them. And what really impressed me was the unity of purpose. Every single soldier understood why they were there. None of them wanted to be there. None of them, on 6th of October 2023, had any desire to go to Gaza and do anything. But they understood the importance of the mission for the defense of their country. And, they came across so compassionate when it came to talking about the civilians, actually. I was really surprised. Look, I've never bought into the genocide narrative or the systematic war crimes piece. But, the fact that unprompted, clearly un-briefed, clearly not expecting an interview with some random British guy, all of them expressed this compassion and regret for what was happening, but also understood why it was happening.

I just compare and contrast that with, firstly, my own troops who never fought in a war of that nature. And, I think back to how difficult it was as a commander to explain why we were in Afghanistan because, frankly, half the time I wasn't sure because it changed every 10 minutes. First of all: we were anti-narcotics; then we were supporting the government; then we were there to protect the people. It just changed every tour I went on.

But, the IDF didn't have that and their soldiers got that real unity.

And, it was quite humbling to see people from all walks of life just having dropped their daily life to go and defend their country. It was a really commendable thing, and I find that quite moving. I'd really hope that it's something that we could replicate in the United Kingdom should that ever come to us. But I'm actually not convinced that we could. So, that was quite sobering and certainly is an experience that stayed with me.

Andrew Fox: Thank you for having me. It was great to be here.

Daniel Coyle: I'm happy to be here with you, Russ.

Daniel Coyle: Well, I started with what flourishing is not. Right? It's not a machine, it's not a result of a machine. It's not the optimizable, maximizable process that you can predict. It's an idea from the natural world, and the natural world is really about how living systems develop. And, living systems aren't machines. We often talk about them as if they were, but actually, they're much stranger than that. Right? They're things where they find roots and they grow from the inside out, not from the outside in. They can't be planned or predicted precisely. They're not controlled from the top down; they're generated from the bottom up. So, this is how living systems develop.

And, with human beings, our substrate, if we're an ecosystem, is meaning. Is meaning. You can have all types of different kinds of living, but they all, as human beings, that is where we put our roots down. And, so, this idea is that--and joy is kind of an offshoot of it. When you visit flourishing people, they are often kind of creating the sense of surprise.

And, I guess the word 'aliveness' is one that recurred again and again in my reporting, in the science, but also in this of what flourishing is. It's from the natural world, it's not predictable. It is something that--and the fun part is when you ask people to reflect on a time where they felt it, everybody kind of gets a smile on their face, and they start telling stories that have got kind of very similar elements to them. And so, that was the fun part of the research, to take all these diverse places and say, 'Wait a minute, there's a natural process going on here that has got some basic building blocks to it.'

It's a process that we don't have good language for necessarily. Oftentimes, we use machine-like language to talk about things. We want to be planned, we want to execute, we want things to be predictable. And, I get to these places, wondering what they'd be like; and a lot of them ended up being kind of messier than I thought. And, flourishing is a messy process. If everything is totally neat, then you're probably not doing it.

Daniel Coyle: Well, all flourishing is ultimately mutual. These are independent ecosystems. These aren't little machines toiling away to get some result. All flourishing is interdependent growth. It's shared growth.

And we've gone through--I think if there's a lesson that modernity has taught us, it's kind of that these straight line solutions, these planned, executed, information-based--modernity has assumed that human beings are these computational beings, and we should decide our way forward on this straight line path. And I think the lesson the last few years has been, A), that's kind of a bummer. Self-improvement is a lonely slog. We know a lot of people that are climbing mountains of self-improvement, and they don't seem super-joyful. They seem like the goal is to automate yourself in some weird way, machine thinking again. And, the other thing is that it doesn't actually work very well.

And, there's this thing that happens--and I think a lot of the people you've had on your podcast, their lives would map onto this concept--where when you talk about a good life, or you talk about a good career, you talk about a good project, or you talk about a good conversation, they are not straight lines. Right? They are always these squiggly lines.

Now, why is that, and why are we so resistant to this squiggly path? I think it has something to do with a misunderstanding of the difference between complicated systems and complex ones. There's two kinds of systems in the world: there's complicated and there's complex. Complicated ones are ones that are put together the same every time. If I have an assembly line to build a Ferrari, and I do all the right things at the right time, and I put that on a piece of paper, that's how to build a Ferrari. You won't get a different result. Complex systems are a lot--

Daniel Coyle: It's complicated, it's extremely complicated. You need expertise. Like, you can't just do it: you need expertise. But, that expertise is about putting A to B to C to D.

Complex systems are like raising a teenager. Like, they change. What you do changes the system. And it changes you, too.

So, our misunderstanding--the reason I think this yellow door concept seems kind of strange and counterintuitive, I think, is that we have a fundamental--we're trained on this idea that the world is complicated, when in fact, what we're in is this giant complexity game, where we are trying to navigate these new possibilities. And these yellow doors--which, of course, to go back to what you were talking about--the green doors that we encounter are a clear signal to go forward, the red doors are a clear signal to stop, and the interesting stuff in life is at these curves where you actually have a choice and there's a yellow door, and you go through.

And sometimes that feels miraculous. When you look back on people's life story, they will often tell you a yellow-door story of, 'Oh, I didn't get into the school I wanted to get into, and then I was at a bar, and I met this person, and they changed my life.' Well, that's the way the world actually is. It's liberating to realize that the problem that you're facing is not one that the world has. The world is filled with yellow doors. The problem is that the model you have in your head is a straight-line model in a squiggly world.

Daniel Coyle: Well, what we're really talking about here is the way our attention systems work. And, one of the things that the book really showed me, and the research for the book taught me, was that we tend to think about attention as a single thing. And we all know we're in this attentional crisis, right? Like, we all acknowledge this: we're in an attentional crisis.

But, what we lack is a clear model of what attentional health is, what it looks like. It's like we're trying to eat well, but we don't understand the building blocks: we don't understand proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

So, the way attention actually works--and it's kind of an interesting backstory why we got off on the wrong track--attention isn't just this narrow focus thing that we usually think of. There's actually two systems in play. One of them is task attention: It's narrow, it's focused. It's built on controlling things, it's built on predicting things. It treats the world as kind of a flat puzzle piece to be manipulated.

But then, the other type of attention is relational attention--relational--and that means connecting it to your whole wide world around you, paying attention to everything. And evolutionarily, this exists for some really powerful reasons. All of our ancestors had to do two contradictory things: they had to eat--which was focus narrowly on a target, identify it, categorize it, grab it--and pay attention to this vast fabric of reality--to storms coming in, to family, to nuanced interaction, to relationships.

And, the modern world has kind of privileged this narrow task attention over--and that's where presence comes in. Presence is the activation of relational attention that creates connected[?connective?] energy. It's the stuff that relationships are made of. We don't get relationships by treating people as objects and tasks to be accomplished. We get them by stopping. And it happens in a moment of receptive stillness that occurs again and again. And, when we have those moments of receptive stillness--when we stop trying to do and we simply pay attention to what's around us--we see yellow doors. We see things, and we come into relationship with things in a different way.

And the places that I visited, from--there was a little deli in Michigan that's grown into this giant business, to a pro baseball team, to a school--they're all creating this attentional architecture that fuels and boosts relational attention to create shared presence, to create those moments of presence. And, that moment of presence is where we get meaning: it's where we get the meaning in our lives. And it treats meaning as this renewable resource where you're fueling up on meaning and then doing some tasks.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah, that's right.

Daniel Coyle: It's not. And, the thing that's the hardest about it is you have to do something that we're allergic to, which is you have to surrender. It's not enough just to say, 'Well, what's this other focus thing over here?' No, you actually have to let go. And that feels crazy vulnerable, especially when you're learning to do it.

There's a couple of things that are really helpful here. One is to actually understand what's happening in your brain. This is, as Iain says--Iain McGilchrist has, I think, in my mind, shown that our brain, the most connected entity on the planet, has this serious division, two unique centers of consciousness. You're literally turning off one and lighting up the other when you have that moment that feels wrong, like: I'm surrendering, this feels weird. But, you know what? I'm actually activating this other slower, warmer, connective attention, and it's a muscle. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. And, I would say your experience probably has been that as you've gotten better at doing this, you've found yourself, 'Oh, that's good feedback.'

And, the other thing to remember is that focus makes you blind. There's that famous experiment with the gorilla, where they have people counting basketball passes, and a gorilla walks in the middle--it's unmistakable--and pounds their chest and then walks off; and 50% of people miss the gorilla. Well, we're going through life counting passes and missing gorillas. And, when you realize, when you have that little hint to say, 'Am I really focused right now? Am I really certain right now? Do I have my armor of certainty on?' That, I think, over time, can become a tell, a little self-nudge to say, 'If I'm this certain, something's up. Maybe I should dial back, just take a step back and be curious.' And, that curiosity comes out over and over again as the most powerful immediate tool to ask, 'What's going on here that I don't understand? Am I really that certain?'

We talk about the quality of your life being the quality of your relationships. Well, the quality of your relationships is the quality of your conversations. The quality of your conversations is the quality of your questions. Period. So, those moments of curiosity, where you surrender control and step into that curiosity, step into that uncertainty, as you've said--I've had the same experience--it's really, really addictively neat.

Daniel Coyle: Uncertainty and vitality are directly related--uncertainty and vitality. The more certain you are, the less vital it seems. When you were saying that bike thing, I mean, one of the most vivid memories of my life was biking from the base of my parents' street to my house--which is, like, a half a mile--with no hands, make it all the way. I've had a lot of memories of my life; that one is top, right up there. There's something about that vitality, that aliveness, that that uncertainty gives you.

And similarly, meaning and mystery are also related. We're talking so far about these moments of surrender, which are really important. But there's a different type of presence, too, where you're leaning into something mysterious. And I'll use the word 'sacred,' but more in the sense of: sacred things are things that are endlessly a source of insight. Like, every time I go to the forest, I have an insight. Every time I have this conversation with this person, I have an insight. I think that down deep is what sacredness is. And, having these moments where you really lean into something mysterious together.

In the book, I start with the story of those Chilean miners who were down at the bottom of the mine--not a position anybody would want to be in, 2,000 feet down. It's like Lord of the Flies for the first half an hour. And then, we know what happened: They eventually came together and got a ton of camaraderie and formed a little civilization down there and survived in these unsurvivable conditions. But, what turned them around wasn't some leader saying, 'Okay, guys, I have a plan.' They weren't going certainty. What turned them around were these moments of surrender and leaning into this mystery together, like, 'Why are we here? Why are there 33 of us?' And, the leader at one point--the supervisor everybody was scared of--walked to the center of the circle, took off his white helmet, and said, 'There are no bosses and no employees.'

Now, that's a really mysterious and meaningful thing to say.

But, leaning into that mystery together, along with these momentary, organic acts of surrender, there can also be these moments of, you can call it ritual, you can call it presence, you can call it whatever you want, but you're still lighting up that relational attention, letting go of your normal to-do list and your sense of control and leaning into something that's way bigger than you. And, the world's filled with possibilities and opportunities to do that.

Daniel Coyle: And, in all the cases, the cool part is that we kind of disappear, which is kind of wild. Right? Like, in all those moments that we're talking about, there are moments where our ego shrinks and vanishes, and poof, we're gone. And that feels fabulous. It's not just that it feels fabulous: it creates that meaningful connection. And, I think too often, we understand meaning as information: like, meaning as I'm learning something or I'm seeing some literal explicit thing there. Well, really, I think what we're talking about in all these cases is this experience of connected[?connective?] energy, where there is a mystery that we're connected to, and we're trying to lean into that and have this experience of aliveness.

And going through the world like a machine--being productive, getting results--that's part of life. But, where I think it becomes powerful is when you nest one of those intelligences within the other--when you are being controlling in the service of those higher relationships. I think that's one way to think about the two attentional models and the way this works the best: it's when--I think when that narrow--because all these flourishing places are controlling a lot of things. All these places I write about--the deli and the team--they're accomplishing a lot in the world. They're not just blissing out on meaning. But, I think the way to think about them is they are using control in the service of these larger relationships.

So, to Iain McGilchrist's point, it's the master and his emissary. The master would be--the foundational piece--is relational awareness and relational attention. And the servant of that is controlling attention. Not how we often flip it around in the modern world.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. It's the story of--Ellen Langer is a professor at Harvard, and she went--as certain professors could only do--did this kind of wild experiment in the 1970s. And, she took an old monastery and retrofitted it so that everything in it was from 1959. As if--the Dean Martin records and a copy of Portnoy's Complaint and all the furnishings and the TV was swapped out for a black and white. And she invited people in their 70s to come and live there for a week. And, the people showed up, and at the time--one of them had a cane, they were shuffling in there. And they spent--and she didn't give them any constraints at all. It was just, 'Come live here and see what happens.'

And, she did another group where she asked them, 'Pretend like you're living in 1959.' That's your only instruction: pretend.

And after a week--and they measured all of the physical characteristics coming and going, their psychological characters coming and going--and what they saw as they left was this extraordinary bloom of vigor, energy, possibility, humor, comaraderie. At the very end, a couple of members of the group--

Daniel Coyle: That's right.

Daniel Coyle: Not the other group, that's right. There was a control group that lived there without instructions. But, the group that said, 'Look, pretend like you're living there,' those were the ones who had this bloom of vitality, energy, connection, humor. And there was a--one of the graduate students brought a football to throw around at the end, and a couple of the older people joined in the game. And, as Professor Langer said, nobody would mistake it for the NFL [National Football League], but at the start of the study, this would not be considered possible.

And, what that story really kind of captures is the fact that meaning and connective energy are not an increase of information, they're an experience of reception. They're an experience of stillness, where you're activating your relational attention.

And the term awakening cues is what I saw in all of the places that I visited for the book: What I saw at places where they are intentionally creating these spaces, where people can drop their armor, where they spark a question, where they spark a mystery, and where people lean into it together. Much like in that time traveler house. What are we doing here? All this stuff is here. Let's let go of our old habits. Let's try this.

And, it's a giant yellow door, you might say. And, when they step through it, it changes them.

And so, I think this concept of awakening cues, I think it speaks to attentional health, first of all: this idea that if you go through life like a machine--focus, focus, focus, produce, produce, produce--and never have these sort of cues and spaces around you, man, life goes by pretty quickly and pretty thinly. But, when you take the time to stop for a second and fire up that relational attention and really look at what's going on you and live your way into it, that's when life gets transformed.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. The way I understand it is that these things are kind of redolent with memory. Well, two things. They're out of their old, old habits. Right? They're leaving their apartment, they're leaving their house where everything's in a groove, all their behaviors in a groove. They're thrown into this new place where they need to self-organize. Where they need to figure it out. So, that's a different sort of--that's a fresh kind of autonomy. Autonomy gives energy.

But, the other thing was that these things brought them back and sort of resurrected these memories that were there ready to be encountered again. Like my memory of making that bike ride, which I hadn't thought about, and that energized me in some way.

And that idea, I think, where--she went on to study a lot of the health impacts. She really focused on the body and health and has quite a body of work on that kind of stuff. For the purposes of this connection, I think it made me see how that often meaning with relational attention--meaning is waiting for us. It's--the same way in those people's lives, those memories were there waiting to be sort of resurrected. What it took was that intentional yellow-door step to create a space where they could be awakened.

Daniel Coyle: Well, and I think it gets us into that second piece: The Group Flow. When you have to self-organize and navigate towards something, with some constraints. You unlock a lot of vitality. Which, again, sounds kind of woo-woo. It's interesting how we lack clear scientific language to talk about some of this stuff. A shot of epinephrine to the heart is what it does feel like.

But, when I do talk to people about their flourishing experiences, a lot of times, the model that comes up in their head--and it doesn't exist concretely as these things, but the underlying structure of what they describe is what you describe. Which is: I went to this place, with other people, and we kind of figured it out together. And, we didn't know what was going to happen. There was a high degree of uncertainty. There was a high degree of challenge and difficulty. But almost like--I don't know--like a flock of birds going through a forest, like, we self-organized. We figured it out. And we grew as a result of that. That's the story they tell.

And, in some ways, that story, I think, has some powerful echoes with the way our--you know--our ancestors grew up from hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years: in small groups, navigating tough stuff, growing and figuring it out together. But, in some ways, it speaks to this idea from complexity science, really. You know. We've gone through the last, I don't know, since the Enlightenment, basically, trying to imagine the world as a machine. But, this new wave of complex dynamical systems theory is showing us, I think, kind of clearly why these experiences--your experience, flourishing people's experience. And it has to do with constraints, with gradients, with all this language that's not that great.

But basically, it's making the argument--if I can sum it up really clumsily--it's life and our experiences are not machines, they're rivers. They're rivers.

And, for a river to go from being a puddle or a lake to being a river, a couple of things have to happen. You need a gradient. Like, you need to be moving towards some horizon. That's good, you need a gradient.

And now, you need river banks. Right? You need something to say, 'Go here, but not here.' Like, don't be--you can't go anywhere. This is the gradient, here's the riverbank.

And, the third thing you need is freedom. Like, the river can't be frozen. All the molecules have to be able to move around and go where they want to go.

And so, these places that I visited over and over again, we're recreating those three elements. Like, we want people to have autonomy: you choose what you want to do. When you got to Jerusalem, nobody was saying, 'This is where you do Monday, this is going to be Tuesday. Here's where your breakfast is.' You, like, being there and self-navigating with freedom is what created that vitality.

There's a constraint: you're not going to a different city every week. Like, you're staying here in this place. And there's kind of a horizon, kind of a gradient you're flowing toward.

And I see this over and over again. Like, one of the most vivid examples for me is this crazy experiment that this guy named Peter Skillman did--I don't know if somebody's talked about it on your show before, but the Spaghetti Tower experiment.

Daniel Coyle: So, Peter Skillman got groups of four--the question was, who can build the tallest tower with the following materials? Like, twenty pieces of spaghetti, a yard of scotch tape, and a single standard-sized marshmallow.

Daniel Coyle: Uncooked. Excellent question. Yeah, the cooked one never works.

Daniel Coyle: Extremely difficult, that's right. So, 20 raw [inaudible 00:34:09] spaghetti, and who can build the tallest tower? Go. Single standard sized marshmallow--has to go on the top. That's the rule. Can't go on the bottom, has to go on the top.

So, it is four-person teams of CEOs [Chief Executive Officers], of lawyers, of MBA [Masters of Business Administration] students, and of kindergartners. If you had to bet who is going to win, most of us would probably bet on one of the adult teams.

In fact, the kindergartners win, and it's not close. And, the question is why? Well, because all the adult teams do this thing where they try to organize themselves: They try to plan, and they have roles, and they talk, and they do all this stuff to foul up the flow. The kindergartners, they eat all the marshmallows, and then they save one, and then they start just jamming stuff together in a chaotic way. It looks extremely messy. But, what better way to solve?

And, it's actually a deceptively tricky problem, because, relatively, the marshmallow is really sort of heavy, and the spaghetti has no stability sideways. So it's really sort of tricky. But, what better way to solve a tricky, complex problem than to try stuff. And then it tilts this way, put something in there; tilts this way--they're arm-over-arm, they're a perfect inflow group brain, solving problems as they emerge. Like, group flow is, like, shared agency in motion; and that's what great teams do. And that's what we see in the natural world with schools of fish and flocks of birds, and that's what we feel in our own lives when we're on great teams.

It feels like pickup basketball. It feels like, 'Well, I'm not going to ask my boss if I should fix this piece of the tower. I see the problem; I'm going to fix it.' And then you fix that, and you fix that. And, who had the great idea? Well, great teams, you always get that same answer--where it's, like, you ask them where the great idea came from or where the great breakthrough; they're like, 'We don't really know. It just bubbled up from what we were doing.' That's the state that I saw over and over in these groups, whether it was scientists or business people: like, they were good at getting in the flow.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. I couldn't agree more.

And it really spotlights a bunch of things. But one of them is that I think the modern world pulls us further from those kind of moments. I think most groups of people throughout the history of the world have spent a lot of time thinking about their ancestors and thinking about having moments like that where they're routinely in there. There's a beautiful one that the Maori use where they kind of picture themselves holding hands with every ancestor--the chain of their fathers and mothers all the way back. And they're the ones who are in the sunshine right now. The others are in the shadow, but you're still holding hands. It takes five seconds to describe. Everybody gets it. It's this incredibly powerful thing.

And, we would call these things rituals, right? We would call--what you just did, we'd call what Fred did--a ritual. And, I think we sometimes have consigned ritual to the realms of superstition and the past and it's magical thinking. But, when you look at it through this lens of relational attention, when you look it through this lens of flourishing and vitality, it's the anything but. It animates us. These moments where you actually stop and you give up the usefulness. This is not a useful exercise. We get nothing measurable: no result comes from it, it's not predictable. So, you're operating in this relational space. And that's why it's effective.

And, I think even when you extend that to other cultures, like, you know, when you see these--when you go to Europe--I don't know if you're struck by this at all--but if you're in Spain during siesta or it's 5:00, all of a sudden, everybody is on the street. Everybody's got this ritual. It doesn't make sense: they've closed their shops, they could make way more money. But, they all go out and everybody does the same thing together in this common space, and it's wonderful fellowship. And, I think a lot of Americans that visit these kind of places are really struck by how vitalizing it is and how bad we are at it. It doesn't mean we have to be bad. It doesn't mean that we're locked into being this way. But, these small changes in creating these spaces, whether it's through the rituals like Fred uses or whether it's literal spaces for people to gather, has that same vitalizing effect.

Daniel Coyle: Amen. Yeah, no: incredible. I would say decency--when you were saying that, I was going to say, God, the courage it takes to be decent. I think these two qualities that he embodies was this curiosity about other people. He brought in--after Kennedy was assassinated, they talked about it on the show. He was really early on helping people work against racism. He was so curious and connective and always connecting to this fabric of people. Whenever there was a disaster, he would say, 'Look for the helpers.' Always that sense of curiosity. Combined with the courage.

And I just like that as a combination. It feels like curiosity opens up that space and lets you notice the door, but you have to be gutsy to step through it. You cannot just remain, 'Oh, I'm so appreciative and curious about other people, aren't they great?' You actually have to do the scary thing, which you did: calling your friend. You didn't just think of them, you called them. And, that is, I think, that action step that speaks to what that group flow piece feels like. It's not just that you're radiating with meaning and it feels good. In order to flourish, you actually have to step into the uncertainty, see what happens, navigate. Maybe the conversation with your friend doesn't go great at first and you've got to kind of re-figure that out, or maybe it goes great and now you've got an opportunity to explore something else. So, it's a great combo that I think he embodies that curiosity with incredible courage.

Daniel Coyle: No.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. It's in this category of how do we turn on our relational attention? How do we let go of control? And, Julia Cameron was an interesting person. She was a journalist for Rolling Stone, screenwriter, suffered from alcoholism early in her life, and kind of had the rock-and roll-lifestyle, writing Rolling Stone cover stories. Things went sideways for her. She ended up, in her early 30s, washed up in New Mexico with an infant daughter, divorced and trying to get sober. And, a friend of hers--she was trying to write, she was trying to write, trying to write, having no luck--and a friend of hers gave her some advice, which was just, 'Stop trying to be good. Stop trying to write good stuff. You should just worry about the quantity.'

And so, she put a Post-it note above her desk that said, 'Okay, God, you handle the quality; I'll handle the quantity. I'll do three pages every day.' And she did it. She didn't even think. She just walked to her [inaudible 00:49:22] and started scribbling whatever was on her mind: 'Oh, I have a headache and the cockroach is crawling across the porch,' or whatever. And, what she found was that this process--three pages a day, no matter what, whatever you express--ended up being extraordinarily vitalizing and liberating for her, both as a person and as an artist. She started to teach some classes. All of a sudden, people are passing around her handouts like they're the sacred writ. She, on a whim, publishes a book. It's now sold millions and millions and millions of copies; it's called The Artist's Way, and it's a series of exercises built on letting go of control and built on creating meaningful connection--in a creative sense.

But, it's not just artists who have benefited from this book. When you look at the people who regularly do Morning Pages, it is a dazzling variety of skilled people who make this part of their routine. Why does it work? Well, there's no task, there's no control. You're simply surrendering to whatever comes out, and it's really powerful.

Daniel Coyle: This is my problem: I struggle with--I'm used to writing with a goal, and so it's very hard for me to let go of that and stop. I catch myself, 'Oh, I'm really trying to put the spin on that phrase. That's a really nice one.' I start judging. But, when I do, it really is powerful. I do it maybe half the time. But I need to make it every day.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah, yeah. We should do something else: morning pottery or morning dance or some other form that we're not good at.

Daniel Coyle: Theirs is a good story. For many years, the relationship business--like, there have been a lot of different programs to improve relationships. Back in the 1930s, I think they had a scorecard, where you'd deduct or add points depending on how your partner behaved. And, a lot of these systems were built on this idea that a relationship is a machine that needs to be fixed, and when you fix machines, you find the broken part and you replace it. So, that's the model around which a lot of relationship therapy used to be.

And, Gottman and Schwartz were kind of a unique couple. He was a scientist. He had something called a love lab in the University of Washington where he would track in real time--with video cameras and recorders--he had couples come in and talk. And then he would see what their patterns of behavior are. And Schwartz was a top clinician. And, they came together; and their insight was, 'Well, what if relationships aren't machines? What if they're not machines? What if they're, like, these living systems, and the whole thing is to get people to pay attention to each other in a different way, to stop controlling each other, and start responding in the relationship, responding?'

And so, they developed a series of sort of moves. They're kind of like a yoga class. Like, one of them is, like, Turn Toward, which is: whenever your partner makes a bid for your attention--maybe they clear their throat, maybe they walk in the room and have a look on their face--do you turn toward them? When they share something difficult, do you turn toward them, are you neutral, or do you turn away?

And, Gottman's research will show that turning toward is an incredible indicator of a healthy relationship. Turning away or being neutral is an indicator of a bad relationship.

And so, there's a whole bunch of these different things that they talk about, figuring out the love maps of your people are--my favorite one is Scanning for Appreciation. Our task attention loves to scan for problems, like, 'Oh, there it is again, there it is again. There's that pattern.' We're really good pattern-finders, right? Pattern, pattern, pattern. And that can be death to a relationship. But, scanning for appreciation replaces that with curiosity. It clicks on your relational attention a little bit, so the lantern goes on, and all of a sudden, you're looking around and go, 'Oh, that was really nice. That was really thoughtful. Thank you.' Right?

And, so it's--all of their stuff can be viewed through the lens of these attentional systems, where instead of focusing and trying to control the other person, you're actually in kind of a dance with them, responding to what they do, and they're responding to what you do. And the track record shows that it actually works, unlike some of those other systems which are designed to fix and replace.

Daniel Coyle: Really interesting. And that rut--there's a bunch of different ways we could take this: that's the complexity dynamic system, these are how we respond to ruts. Let's put up a new riverbank, let's have a new constraint, let's have a new horizon maybe is another one.

And, from an intentional point of view, there's this other shift, I think: When we look narrowly at our partners, we do see those patterns. But when we scan for appreciation and really look at them--there was something somebody said; I'm going to butcher it because I don't know who said it. But it was something along the lines of, 'My wife now, my love for her is all about her becoming more mysterious as I get to know her.' Like, 'I'm so in love with her that I barely know her,' was the takeaway. Like, 'She's such a mystery to me. I didn't appreciate what a mystery that she really is.'

To your point earlier about how we're all the product of these millions--this ocean of little interactions and people that we've had--that's a really mysterious thing, to know a person. To really know a person is to lean into that mystery. And so, to almost flip that rut and say, 'Okay, yeah, it can feel like a rut through this lens, but when I change the lens, like, holy cow, there's so much here I don't know.' That's energizing, I think.

Daniel Coyle: All these little flips, I mean, I don't know: Is the parable of the long spoons, do people know that one?

Daniel Coyle: Is that a familiar parable to you?

Daniel Coyle: I didn't know it, so I'll share it, just because we're--a guy goes to God and says he wants to see heaven and hell. So, God, 'Okay, I'll show you hell first.' They go to open the door, and there's a pot of delicious stew and all these people starving around it because the spoons are really long and they can't reach the spoon back to their mouth. They can't: the spoon will not--so they're starving and they're miserable, and the guy says, 'All right, cool, I got it. Let's go see heaven.' Goes to see heaven, exact same situation. Long spoons, delicious stew: and people are feeding each other.

And so, it seems like we're having--in our conversation, we've hit that over and over again. It's not like some big mountain to climb or some giant new sport you have to learn. It's more like: Oh, there are these little toggles, little flips. If you flip the thing you're doing, if you flip from control to relationship, good things can happen.

Daniel Coyle: That's good.

Daniel Coyle: That's good. That's good.

Daniel Coyle: That's so good. It's true, right? I mean, those are all things where you're grounded in certainty. Like, I am certain--in each of those cases, I'm in this armor of certainty. And it is--it's great to see it. Maybe it's not--'apocalypse' might be put on a little too strong there, but it is maybe a sign of a red flag, we'll say.

Daniel Coyle: That's really good. That's really good. Oh, my God. That's going to be the gif, I don't even know how to say it--is it a gif?--of Russ getting armored up here.

Daniel Coyle: That's what it feels like, too. And, it feels good, it feels good to wear that armor. That's the thing, I love wearing that armor. Like, I really like it. So, it's very difficult--

Daniel Coyle: I'm right every time. I've never not been right.

Daniel Coyle: That's right. That's your problem. Right. Right. And the fact that getting out of it does feel like you're naked, it does feel strange, it does feel really scary. But, the more you do it and the more you realize, 'Hey, well, we just created something together. I don't have power over you. I have power with you,' that preposition changes a lot.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. The Beautiful Mess is this idea that we're kind of allergic to things being disorderly these days in the modern world. Right? Everything in our life is kind of tight and dialed down. And when we see a mess, we sometimes have the response like, 'Something's wrong. We need to fix that mess.'

In fact, that's exactly the wrong response. Natural flourishing, natural growth, cannot help but be messy. The mess is not a problem: it is the doorway. That mess is a doorway.

And, I did experience that. I've done some consulting with the Cleveland Guardians--Major League Baseball team--and started about 13 years ago. They're a very small team. They don't have the money the Yankees do; they don't have the money a lot of teams do. And, so, instead of having to buy talent, they have to develop it, they have to grow it. And, a baseball team is like a school system: You have low A, high A, double-A [AA], triple-A [AAA], majors, and there's about 180 players and all those teams, and you're trying to make them better.

So, we had all these brilliant ideas on how to make the team better. I had written a lot about talent and growth and coaching. And we showed up at spring training and shared all those great ideas with all the coaches. Right? 'You should do this.' And, strange thing happened: they didn't change. They didn't listen to our brilliance, which was strange. But, then the next year, we did the same thing. But, the third year, we were with this guy, he's out of the military, out of the Navy SEALs [SEa, Air, and Land], and he said, 'You know, instead of telling the coaches what they should do, what if we got them into groups and asked them this question, 'Tell me about the best coach you ever had,' and then see where those conversations go?'

So, we did that: small groups of coaches talking about their best coaches. Super messy. Like, it was not as neat as delivering a PowerPoint. But, out of those amazing conversations came these incredibly insightful--these coaches are really, really smart, and they dug into saying, 'Oh, this was what made this coach good at connecting. This is what gave that coach that knowledge. This is what gave the coach that trust.'

And, out of that, we were able to build a model of excellence, which then we gave back to the coaches and said, 'Hey, is this what you guys said? Is this what we believe as a group?'

So, instead of the certainty of armor delivering truth, we created this messy conversation, which then sprung off all these different experiments, where it was like, 'How do we give our players more ownership over their swings and their pitching motion? Well, let's have these camps where the player leads it.' Or, 'Let's have this other camp around doing all the little things that win games.' And, out of those conversations came all these little experiments.

So, we didn't treat the organization as this machine to fix. We treated it like this river, where we set up constraints, put a horizon of everybody learning and getting better, and over the last--I mean, baseball's a really, really, really competitive environment and the Guardians have yet to win the World Series. But, for the last, I think, 13 years, we've won as many games as the Yankees, and have spent $1.7 billion less than they have.

So, we're adding up to more, we're developing players. It's messy, it's not some clean, perfect plan, and I think that's why it works.

Daniel Coyle: Cool.

Daniel Coyle: That's right. That's right. You don't do development to people. We want them to grow. You don't do growth to them: you create the conditions where they can. So, set up the constraints, set up the horizon, allow them the autonomy and freedom to be that river that can move toward that horizon.

Daniel Coyle: I can't change, and I think we all behave that way.

Daniel Coyle: That's right. That's right. That's right. And, I think we all can empathize with that teacher a little bit, because I think we all behave that way in our own lives. I certainly do. When somebody comes in with a great new idea, instantly, my task attention can think of 150 reasons--and it's risky, why should I change? Right? I really need to be brought in.

So, that empathy, that conversation, that question, that curiosity approach isn't, like, being nice. That's the thing: we think of it like, 'What a nice person.' Yes, they are nice, but that's elemental to what they're trying to create, which is a bubbling conversation, where you are actually a part of it instead of both of you being armored up.

Daniel Coyle: Very hard, very hard. And the places that I've seen that do it really well: they spend a lot of time on the front end--a lot of time. I would call it teaming. Teaming is the process where it's, like, we're not going to just get together in a room for 10 minutes, describe a goal, and go for it. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about, 'How are we going to interact? What's this going to look like? How do you like to communicate? What have you done that's similar to this? What are you excited about here?'

And we're going to spend a lot of time describing what we're not going to do; and we're going to spend a lot of time describing the horizon, so that we understand deeply where we are trying to go and where we are not trying to go.

And, this process, which it's helpful to write it on paper, it's helpful to return to it partway through a project to have--some organizations call them flight check-ins, where it's like, 'Hey, we started to talk about this. How do you still feel about it? What's energizing you about it? Are we on track? Where do you think we're going to be? What do we not want to do now? What assumptions do we need to revisit?' Where, you're in the river, but you're continually circling up together to form kind of a group brain and really get some consensus around what's happening and where are we going?

Daniel Coyle: That's right, that's right, that's right. No, it's tough. The good leaders I know who are good at doing it, are good at taking that responsibility and understanding they're on this squiggly path. And so, you don't get to the cliff if you're constantly checking the path. There aren't any surprises, because you stay calibrated with the people who are in; and if you need to change direction, you do.

Daniel Coyle: Oh, you've got to go.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. The ironic answer that I should probably give here would be that I've completely withered: this topic has destroyed me, and now I'm just a husk of a man. That would be fun to say. No, the truth is--the secret is that all writers do books for selfish reasons. In some ways, I really needed this and wanted this. And so, now that I understand it, it has--I've gone through some yellow doors lately, and it's been really fun. There's a group of friends that I have now that I would not have had if I hadn't--a friend of mine invited me climbing one day. And, I don't like climbing, I don't like heights. I think it's fussy and stupid, indoor climbing. But, this friend was like, 'You should go.' And, I said, 'Yellow door,' I go. And then it turns out to be kind of fun, and we go every week. And then, it turns into, 'Oh, let's go on a ski trip.' And, 'Oh, do you guys play music?' 'Yeah, everybody plays guitar.' 'Let's play some music together.'

Some of our kids all live in New York. We're going to have a battle of the bands this spring, where me and my old dude friends are going to go play against my daughter and her friends.

So, yes, that's something that would not have happened. And it's, again: these pathways opening up and being alert to them--it's not, like, transformational, though. It's not, like, 'Oh, I'm a wholly new person.' I'm the same person. I'm a little more aware of possibilities, and a little more trusting that when you step into that uncertainty, that you'll be met with something good and also some good people.

Daniel Coyle: Thank you, Russ.