Luke Burgis: Good to be with you. Thanks, Russ.

Luke Burgis: The One is the self--the I, the subject, you and I as we exist as individuals. And the Ninety-nine you could think of as the crowd--the many, everybody else, the group that we're a part of. So, this dichotomy between self and crowd has been something I've been thinking about for well over a decade.

The title comes most explicitly from the Parable of the Lost Sheep in the Bible, where Jesus tells a story that's familiar to many people, but he says, strangely: 'Which of you, having 100 sheep and losing one, would not go in search of the one--would not leave the ninety-nine and go in search of the one?' And, I've heard it for almost my whole life. There's always been something that has bothered me about it in some way.

From an economic standpoint, really we're going to put the 99% at risk to preserve the 1%? It doesn't make full sense.

There's also something that--I've heard very reductionistic explanations of it, and I've wondered if it doesn't have something to--even extracting from the biblical, theological meaning of it--if it doesn't just have something very basic to teach us about what it's like to exist in communities, to exist in groups and in tribes.

The sheep often gets a bad rap. He's either the sinner--he's lost, he needs to be saved. But, what happened to that sheep? Because that sheep could be all of us at some times, at some point. What happened while it was away? Was it changed? Why did it wander or leave in the first place? When it came back, was it different than it was when it left? Did it exist in the flock in a different way?

So, I wanted to get inside the head of the sheep because I've certainly felt like the sheep at many points in my life as I've moved into and out of groups and wandered from them and left them for various reasons. And the tension, I guess, between the One and the Ninety-Nine is what I was trying to examine. It seems like there's a book about tribes and how to find your tribe that's written every year--maybe every six months--in the United States. It's a really popular topic.

But, in my life, the hard part has never been finding a tribe. It's been when I find a group, a tribe, like-minded people, that's when things really get difficult, where tension starts. And, I've had to struggle to differentiate myself, understand how to exist in a healthy way within it. And, that's what I wanted to explore. So, the One and the Ninety-Nine is trying to get at the tension between the self and the crowd, the way that crowds or groups shape us, the way that we shape them, and how to exist within them in healthy ways where we don't lose ourselves.

Luke Burgis: No, and the sheep in the parable is often described as lost. In my book, I don't operate under the assumption that it's lost: that maybe it intentionally wandered. Because I'm talking about people. And we leave groups and tribes for all kinds of reasons. So, the idea is not: leave the groups that you're a part of to stake out some solitary existence as an individual--I don't think that's possible--but, what process of differentiation must a person go through so that we can exist in groups as differentiated individuals who are also in communion with other people, whether it's families, various groups that we're a part of?

So, it's really about relationships, and the thesis of the book is a relational ontology. I firmly believe we can understand very few problems by looking at individuals' behavior alone. We have to understand them in relationships with other people, whether we're talking about our family or at work. Exploring the relationship between the self and various communities that we're part of is the heart of the book, with the goal not to differentiate, but what's the process of transformation that one goes through when they experience the tension of being in community and don't run from the tension but allow it to shape who they become?

Luke Burgis: I exist in probably eight or nine or 10 groups that I would consider pretty core to my identity: my family, my church, the school that I teach at. None of them fully capture who I am. There's been a lot of great books that have written about this. Christopher Lasch refers to the minimal self. Eric Hoffer--people often join groups in unhealthy ways; he's talking about populism and mass movements, because they're fleeing an unwanted self or a flimsy self that might not have a lot of moral convictions and hasn't spent a lot of time understanding what that self is really willing to stand for.

And, I think there's something about the modern world--and it could be technology removing as much friction as possible from modern life, politics, the messages to remove the friction, join the coalition where everybody is on the same page. First of all, it's a fiction, right? If we're honest with ourselves, there's always tension even among the group that we think is the most like our tribe.

One of the points of the book is that our groups and communities will be healthier and stronger to the extent that people are exercising what I call a solid self, in the book--the kind of self that's not renegotiating itself in real time. So that the group becomes like a flock of starlings. It's just changing, and everybody changes with it, and there seems to be nobody in the group that is sort of a reference point for something that transcends the group itself. So, the inability to sit in tension is a big problem in our world. We're offered so many ways to flee it. So, the tension is a big part of it.

And, I am fascinated by stories of people that are willing to--sometimes at great risk to themselves--seem to point beyond the logic of the group itself. There's some fascinating connections. I listened to your podcast on Smith [Adam Smith--Econlib Ed.] on this with the impartial spectator. And, that is one example of having a transcendent reference point. But I think even the impartial spectator, to the extent that it is mediated and internalized only by the group, can also be a problem.

And then, what happens when the algorithm or AI [artificial intelligence] becomes the impartial spectator? It's not really one. There's all kinds of things built into it because it's a mimetic machine. How do we exist in that kind of a world?

And, I propose some ideas like value response: like, there is such a thing as responding to objective things because they are good in themselves and not because my group says that they're good, because they're not socially mediated. Very few people seem to have the ability to do that, for whatever reason. I explore, from the realms of religion to politics to education, what is missing that would allow more people to have the courage to respond to, I guess, reality or to respond to things that have truth, good, and beauty in themselves that are not 100% socially mediated to us?

Luke Burgis: Yeah. I'm the father of a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and a four-month-old daughter, and I'm thinking about this all the time. Part of my job, I feel, is to allow them to be differentiated people that have a sense of self and without being completely fused to me in the sense that they only want to make me happy, because I'm not a perfect person and I'm not a perfect role model for them. Right? I hope they don't think I'm an anti-role model. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Every child strives for communion and differentiation at the same time. As do we adults; but it starts as a child. We want to be with and we want to be known as ourselves at the same time, and it's the inability to hold these two things in tension where we often go astray.

The family is just such an incredible forge of identity, because we're just immersed in it. We're held in it--for most of us--the first 18 years of our life. That is usually where we either learn or don't learn to see where our emotions end and my parents begin. We're not just talking about ideas here: we're talking actually about emotions and the sense of self. There's literally a fusion that can happen if we don't learn differentiation.

So, an example of this would be: Mom and Dad are really upset about something. Can I be in the room with them and acknowledge that that's not upsetting to me? I don't need to be upset. Or, am I instantly subsumed into their emotions?

Let's say it's politics. I grew up with my dad watching the news and commenting on politics and sometimes getting upset, and the instinct is kind of to mirror what you're seeing, partly because you don't know enough, but this kind of transference happens subtly, usually without us knowing it.

And, one of the ways that discomfort is usually dealt with, or anxiety in a family system, is through some form of triangulation. Now, so, one of the points that I make in the book is the smallest stable unit of relationships is not an individual or a relationship between two people. The smallest stable unit is three people. It's a triad. Because if two people have a conflict, it's very volatile, but as long as there's a third person somewhere, either in the room or somebody that they can talk about or some--they have an outlet. They can offload some of the tension. This systemic dynamic within families--so, if it's a two-parent home with one child, they're the triangle. If there's two children, there's more triangles. And we sort of, like, learn to either stand as a differentiated self or move to the various positions within the family where we don't have to do that.

This is a theory from Murray Bowen, who was a Georgetown psychologist, that I thought was really, really illustrative of what I also see in society. It's, like, what he was observing in the family in terms of the way that we don't deal with problems seems to be something that we take out with us into the world if we don't learn to be a differentiated self in the family, and we just assume the role that we're expected to play within the family.

Luke Burgis: Yeah. Before, in the story, as the dad sulks away and says, 'Well, son, I'm trying to play catch with you. I thought I was doing a good thing,' and he sulks away, you know, the mom walks in the room. And she doesn't want to deal with a sulking husband all night long. So, she goes directly to her son and says, 'You really should play catch with your dad. It'll make him happy.' So, she's kind of coming in the picture telling her son to do something to just ease the anxiety and the tension in the family, because she doesn't want to deal with her husband for the rest of the night complaining about why her son didn't play catch. And then the son has a decision to make at that point.

So, there's this enormous sort of coercion, frankly. And we don't think of it--it seems like an innocent story. But the point of the story is that there is an amount of coercion--right?--to conform to the expectations or emotional needs of another person in the story.

It just happens. These innocent things just happen day after day after day. After 15, 16 years, it just shaped the way that our instinctual responses to what other people need from us.

This plays out, certainly in education, which I think has become incredibly conformist in many ways. We learn to play by the rules. We learn to make the teacher happy. We want to get along. We don't learn to tolerate dissent and anxiety very well in the classroom.

Certainly in our politics: Parties or coalitions or groups, rather than deal with the tension of somebody that's maybe they're just not quite feeling right about a certain direction, it's just much easier to tell them to get out of there; or that's very much the message, rather than sit in the tension of resolving it and recognizing that maybe we don't all feel the same way about this, that we have different convictions and we want to work through it.

So we very quickly sort of sort ourselves out into smaller and smaller units where we share, quote, "the same values."

It sounds like a wonderful thing, but the point of the story and where it trickles into the broader society is that there are often these subtle, often emotional, reasons why we do it, because we're fused in some way--we're entangled in some mimetic way--with the groups that we're a part of. And, untangling ourselves can be painful, and it can require us to have very difficult conversations, sometimes to be ostracized, to pay sacrifices. Sometimes those sacrifices are economic: sometimes they're our job.

But who is actually willing to put in that work? It seems like I'm seeing it less and less. Even movements like the network state, right? The Internet gives us the ability to just look everywhere we can possibly find it throughout the entire world to just organize ourselves into smaller and smaller units of like-minded people, and we'll write our own constitutions. Let's see how long that lasts, because in my experience, when we sort ourselves into these small tribes, that's when the hard work and the difficulty really begins.

Luke Burgis: Yes. And there are some times when you might have to leave, but what's the process that we go through to even test and discern that? How many of us even really think or bring to conscious awareness the tensions that might exist? It seems like many times we don't even want to acknowledge the tensions. But the tensions--if we're being honest, there's always some tension in any group, whether it's a family or a workplace. I think the unhealthiest workplaces that I've ever been in never acknowledge it whatsoever. Everything's always just great all of the time. To me, that's a sign of either insecurity or weakness.

The book is really a call to the individual to be the one who can, not by being grumpy all the time, not by trying to be a contrarian, but by trying to be honest and sorting out the difference between who we are, what we believe, what we're willing to stand for, and the dynamics that exist in the community. The community will be healthier to the extent that there can be differentiation while still being in good relationship with other people. And the healthiest relationships are ones where people can feel comfortable being who they are without sacrificing things that are essential.

Luke Burgis: Yeah, and there's the court jester who is the only one that can tell the truth, and it comes in the form of humor.

But yeah, it is certainly--I had the very unique experience of living in a dormitory-like environment with 250 other men after the age of 30, which is a long story about why I was doing that. I think probably it was a difficult environment because we had so much alike; and sometimes the more that you share, the more the micro-differences matter--because the stakes are so small, as we sometimes say about academia. It was certainly like that in the seminary, but it was also one of the funniest, most hilarious places I've ever been, because I think when you're in an environment like that, it just lends itself incredibly well to good jokes and humor.

Luke Burgis: I've been trying to write that screenplay to pitch to Netflix for the last 10 years.

Luke Burgis: I'm half-serious. I've actually thought about it.

Luke Burgis: No, because the education is content and knowledge transfer and not formation of the human person.

For me, education largely should be, if it's done well in education, in desire, in what we want to pursue. And, that means forming people to be hunters more than gatherers. Also, that makes education a lot more exciting, when you're a hunter and you have some agency and some responsibility to play in what you learn rather than just being fed passively.

The real message in the little passage that you just read is we--You know, Tocqueville said that the science of association is the mother science. The science of association. There's no subject in any school that I'm aware of at any level that has a class called the Science of Association or the Art of Association. I think it's just as much an art as it is a science, personally.

So we have to learn that on our own, usually, in the family, at work, in the classroom. When we associate with others, whether it's a friend group or a club or a workplace, we are formed by that association whether we like it or not. We are formed if we have the humility to understand that. And we form it, and a process begins. And, I don't think there's enough emphasis on how the decisions that we make help us enter into a process.

We do, sort of--we hook ourselves to something when we make decisions. Let's say it's the first job that we take out of college.

Now that doesn't mean that it's deterministic and that some decisions are irrevocable--some are. But it does mean that we will be shaped by that, and understanding how and the process through which that happens is a big part of what adult life is like. Right? How does my decision to marry this person help me enter on a process for the rest of my life? Is this somebody that I want to go through life with and be transformed with and suffer with and cry with and laugh with? There is a process, and understanding how things play out beyond the first step to steps two and three and four, can't predict the future entirely, but based on somebody's character, we can have a pretty good idea of what that process might look like. That seems to me to be a really important part of what education is all about.

I am a mentor to about 30 students at any given time. I'm their academic faculty adviser. Many of them are trying to choose between two or three different jobs. And one of my favorite thought experiments to do with them is to say: Look, imagine that all of these options that you're weighing right now, you do each of them for two years, and by all kind of performance metrics, they all just fail. It's the kind of thing that you might not even want to put on your resumé. You're going to just completely change paths after that. So, you can't take into account income, prestige. None of that matters. Which one of those paths will help you embark on a process that will help you become more of the person that you think you want to become?

That is an incredibly clarifying question. I had one student trying to choose between a consulting job and trying to be a standup comic for a year. Those are two incredibly different things.

Luke Burgis: Standup comedy.

Luke Burgis: I really try not to push students on either path because I don't want the responsibility, unless with some really rare cases I'll step on the scale a little bit. But I did not encourage that.

Luke Burgis: My theory on this is that we've lost rites of passage from a young age. The most important ones in life being things like a bar mitzvah or a confirmation or getting married, having children. These are big rites of passage. We're never the same after them.

If getting married is the first rite of passage--you never really had that experience before--I don't know if that's a good one to be the first one--if that makes sense. The definition of a rite of passage is it is a process of differentiation through which you are transformed in some way. The old van Gennep definition was there is separation from a group. You separate from the tribe for a period of time. You go through a liminal stage, which sometimes can be very scary where everything is in doubt, you might think you're going to die, so on and so forth; and then there is a process of reintegration either with the group that you left in a different status perhaps or with a new group. Maybe you leave and you go and you move to a different city and you join a different group. Those have been disappearing.

Marriage is a very serious rite of passage. It's a radical lifestyle change. If you've had no practice, I guess, in experiencing what it's like to embark on one of these transformative experiences, then I think it can seem incredibly daunting, and people are looking for some kind of a utilitarian proof that it's the right choice. I had a very good friend of mine who wanted me to explain in some kind of an empirical way why he would be happier if he got married. And, I couldn't give him the proof that he was looking for. And he ended up not getting married. And at some point, that was a commitment that he was going to have to make.

I think we're not looking early enough, in our society. There are all kinds of reasons. I'm not discounting the stability reasons, economic reasons. But if you don't feel like you have a solid sense of self, you don't have a certain sense of maturity, it's particularly scary. One of the ways that you acquire a solid sense of self, a differentiated personhood, is by going through various rites of passage--some of them small, some of them larger. And we just don't have it. The rites of passage that we have are online. They happen on the Internet often. And those are weak ones.

Luke Burgis: We're not only told what to pay attention to, but certain things are given to us in mass amounts and we pay attention to them because a bunch of other people are paying attention to them, and especially our social feeds if you're on social media. And it happens through this mimetic process, and untethered from reality or from what's actually important.

In this kind of new media environment that we live in, it actually seems to be getting worse. I didn't think it could get worse than it was five or six years ago, but it really seems to be worse in the sense that there are people explicitly saying what the media environment is and then doubling down on the mimetic nature of it.

So, training the senses--the sensory perception, what used to be called the sensus communis--does not mean common sense. The sensus communis is the point at which our senses--not just our five physical senses--but we have intellectual senses to perceive truth. I would say that we have spiritual senses so we can read things at different levels of meaning. There's a literal sense, there's an analogical sense, there's an allegorical sense. We have various intellectual, physical, spiritual senses. The sensus communis is when they all cohere to give us a perception of reality--right?--so we're not limiting ourselves to one sense.

And I'm a fan of Marshall McLuhan, so I fully believe when he says technology often extends one sense to the detriment of others. And that's one of the ways that it's causing us to lose the sensus communis--this cohesion of senses that allows us to see what's real and what's unreal, what matters and what doesn't.

And, education should be, in my opinion--the future of education--is a training in recovering that sensus communis, right? The sensory perception to perceive the world and to cut through the noise. If education can't do that, then it seems like it's training us to just be responsive to the mimetic environment that we already live in.

Luke Burgis: For me, education was a very passive experience, almost like something that had become gamified. Grades are like levels, and the goal of second grade is to get to third grade, and the goal of third grade is to get to fourth grade. For whatever reason, I just thought it was something to endure rather than something to make my own. I'm sure, looking back, there may have been ways for me to--I don't know, you hear stories these kids today are building computers and coding when they're in fifth grade and taking matters into their own hands. But I think that's incredibly important to feel like you're a protagonist of your own education and to be the protagonist of your own existence is incredibly important. If that drive, if that passion to do that is beaten out of you consistently for 15 years or something like that, you will have lost some life, some vitality.

And, that was me. I ended up getting into a good school, getting a job on Wall Street, starting a few companies. But because I never took my education seriously, I woke up in my late 20s realizing that I sort of lacked the foundations. I majored in finance in undergrad, which is fine. But I lacked the foundations to understand the ideas that underlay--for me, I learned far more about markets by reading René Girard than I do by reading most finance blogs. And I started to realize that there was first principles in a world of ideas--many of them classical ideas, philosophical ideas--that I had just never got. And I was mad. I was really upset that I didn't learn those ideas.

And, I was in a position in my late 20s, as you said, to step away. I took about a year off, and it happened to coincide for me with a religious experience and coming back to the religion I was raised with but had fallen away from--in my case, Catholicism--and took me on quite an odyssey where I discerned religious life for a while.

I went back to school and studied philosophy and theology, and then just did an awful lot of self-directed learning. I had the privilege to do that for about five years. I didn't get any fancy degrees to show for it, but I don't care. But it changed my life, because I felt like I now had the foundation to step back and try to look at what was really happening from a deeply kind of human, anthropological standpoint. I understood myself better. And I felt like the protagonist of my own existence at this point, which I think is what education should help people understand.

And if anything, I'm betting that AI, through some kind of a via negativa, is stripping away everything that is not human, and, if we're lucky, it will show us what is most human. And it's why I think that the humanities, probably--as maligned as they are and all of the things that went wrong in humanities' education--I think that they probably have a pretty bright future, because if you embrace them and understand them and imbibe them well, they're incredibly exciting.

Luke Burgis: Well, when I was running a company, I would go to a 24-hour Starbucks in Las Vegas almost every night and sit there until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning reading classical books and following the footnotes--

Luke Burgis: Such as The Odyssey, which came up earlier in the call, right? Homer, Plato, Dostoevsky, Adam Smith. I read the Bible front to back for the first time in my life. I went back to my bookshelf and picked up the books that I said I read in school and never did, for my Philosophy class--which did light something in me when I took it, but it took me about 10 years to go back to it. Socrates--just the very basic--the Great Books. Mostly the Great Books. I didn't have a list that I was picking from, but it was basically the Great Books.

And I followed a lot of footnotes, which is to this day is one of the most exhilarating things for me, is--I mean, I can't tell you the amount of gems that I've found in footnotes of books. And I hope that I've put some gems in this book, too, because I enjoy--I take them very, very seriously.

When I run across an idea, I know that authors don't want to get into the weeds on it and they'll just recommend another book to read. So, that led me down a wonderful path. Yes, of course, I had some mentors that came in my life; and then I joined seminary, so then I was just given a whole bunch of books to read. But, even then, I was very much reading things. I read David Foster Wallace for the first time, so kind of a mix of fiction and nonfiction.

Luke Burgis: Mimesis--mimetic desire is the key term--and it means that while thinking that our desires are fully our own--that they well up from some authentic self--that our desires are in fact borrowed or adopted from others. That desire is incredibly contagious, and mimesis is a fancy word for imitation from the Greek mimesti. So, mimetic desire is imitative desire. They're the ways in which our desires are shaped and formed through other people who model desires to us.

At the most basic level, this happens in families where there could be admired parents who are both doctors or an older sibling that has a younger brother. He goes to medical school and the younger brother follows him to medical school because he's a model of desire for him.

It also happens in a negative way where there's kind of an unhealthy form of differentiation that happens. And because differentiation is a core idea in the One and the Ninety-Nine--and I usually talk about differentiation in a positive sense. Like, it's a good thing to become a differentiated self and to know where you end and others begin or when the group begins. But there's an unhealthy form of differentiation that is related to mimesis and mimetic desire. And that's when we say, 'Well, because this person thinks or likes X,' because mimetic desire sort of naturally lends itself to rivalry--because we want to be like other people but not too much like them--so we say, 'If this person believes X, I cannot believe X,' or 'If they like X, I must like Y.'

This happens in politics all the time. Right? An idea cannot be debated on its own merits. It's: Because this party has embraced this policy, it would be mortifying for anybody in the other party to acknowledge anything good about it at all. Right? Your basis of differentiation is what another has chosen first, and colors--often through envy or insecurity or pride--colors the choice before it has actually been evaluated. And that operates at the level of ideas, and it also operates at the level of desires.

Luke Burgis: It's interesting. If you take, not just what their parents believed, but if you take 10 hot-button political issues and make a list of 10--you pick the 10. Let's say one of them is gun control. If I were just to ask a person, like, 'Tell me what you believe about the Second Amendment, about gun control,' based on their answer, there is a very high likelihood that I could predict what they would think or the position that they've arrived at on all 10, and I think I would probably be right about all 10, like, 90% of the time. Which is odd. What are the odds that they independently reasoned their way to all 10 of those positions aligning? So, this clustering of ideas and beliefs through family resemblance in a sense: 'This is what people like us believe,' right? This idea, it's deeply related to identity.

I would add, yeah, we're kind of ashamed of admitting our imitation or our mimesis as adults, which is very different than children. My daughter is very, very happy when she can imitate anything. But it's not called imitation when we're adults. It's called mimesis because it's underground, it's hidden and subconscious, and we're ashamed of it. Nobody wants to be known as an imitator.

But, it's not just the crowd that we are mimetic with or influenced by. It's more often individuals, very specific people. This is where I think Girard really hit on something. There are certain people that have an outsized influence on us that are usually far more important than the crowd as a whole, for whatever reason. We might have a particular hatred of them or we might admire them, but particular people come into our lives and shape our beliefs more than the crowd, usually.

Girard would argue this is because we have some fixation or fascination with them. We're caught up in some kind of a mimetic entanglement with them. So, while the crowd is important, it's usually important to narrow it down a bit and understand, well, who are the people that I pay the most attention to? You could start with your Twitter or X feed. Who are the people that I pay the most attention to? Because they do show up as individuals. They don't show up as the hive, and that's something that, if you can't name any, they're probably pretty powerful.

Luke Burgis: Maybe they're not so insightful after all.

Luke Burgis: Yeah, this comes near the end as I'm thinking: Okay, so existing in community is really hard. There's a lot of tensions. What are the kinds of communities that have been around for a very, very long time in a stable state? What can we look to? We need to have some model.

Monastic communities are a very obvious example in my mind. Right? Stable communities that have lived, many of them according to the same rule of life for well over a thousand years now. The Benedictine communities live by a Rule of Life written by Benedict of Nursia well over a thousand years ago, and they endure and are stable. Is there something to be learned from the Rule of Benedict? Is it the greatest organizational manual ever written, not just for monastic communities or religious communities, but is there something that we can learn from that?

So, I went back and I read the Rule of Benedict from front to back. It's not very long, sort of 73 rules of life. This is how you accept people that knock on the door of the monastery and say they want to enter, very surprisingly, says: Well, you let them stand outside for a few days. You don't just let them in right away. Then, you let them in and you let them stand in the middle part. You don't invite them to dinner, and you see if they keep wanting to come in. He's got all these--you wouldn't think that of a saint, St. Benedict. It's a very interesting rule.

I read it so you don't have to because it's not the most exciting read. But the whole Rule, I realized, is about stable community. And, there's all kinds of interesting parts to it, but it all revolves around humility. He says: 'Look, you cannot live in a community or in a monastery unless there's a degree of humility and charity, but humility is the foundation for the entire Rule because pride as[?is?] an ego is what tears communities apart.' He seemed to realize this very clearly and states explicitly that, 'None of what I'm saying here works unless we are humble.'

And then there's a ladder of humility. And he says, 'Now, humility is not one thing. There are degrees of humility.' And, I can't remember exactly where it falls on the ladder. There are 10 steps on this ladder of humility, and he says it's a ladder that you descend to deeper and deeper levels of humility, where you have a certain level of acceptance and you can exist in this community. And to have the head bowed, I think, is specific to monastic life.

These rules don't map one-to-one onto the world that most of us live in. Right? But, the way that I read that particular part of the ladder--walk with your heads bowed--is as an anti-mimetic encouragement. You know: Try not to pay too much attention to what everybody else is doing, what your brother is doing to your right and to your left. Walk with your head down, I guess in the monastery prayer and recollection. And I think it's actually an anti-mimetic exhortation that he has there. Right? The humble person can walk with their head down the hall of the monastery without looking and saying, 'No, that guy is doing that again? What a dummy,' or 'This guy has eaten that,' or whatever. Having lived in a seminary, I can tell you it's very hard not to have your head on a swivel so that you have something to complain about when you go back up to your floor and talk to your friends. So, the whole thing is built on humility, and I think there's something to learn there.

He has part of that: here's a practical way that he says it's exercised in the monastery. He says the Abbot of the monastery should always invite the youngest member--the youngest monk and novice--to a meeting where an important matter is to be decided, and he should always be consulted, because it's only in our pride that we think that because we're older and wiser that God can't speak through the youngest person.

So, it's a recognition. It plays out in these very practical ways, but it's all guided by humility. I think that if it was ever studied, there's probably some fantastic sort of business book that could be written, but I'm not going to be the one to write it; but I think we could all benefit to take Benedict's Rule of Life very seriously when we think about how to exist in a stable community, because probably it has something to teach us about marriage as well.

Luke Burgis: Institutions today seem to act more like platforms more than molds. This is Yuval Levin's idea. And communities are and institutions are meant to form us. They're meant to be a forge and not just something that we take from, not just platforms where we can take. We should contribute to them knowing that they form us.

And, I don't think that we think of them that way. We think of even going to a university--we think of it as just what can I take from it to get a job? Or do I think how is it going to form and shape me? More than just being a roll tide, this would shape me as being a fan of the football team. How is it going to actually forge me as a person?

Thinking of communities in that way is a shift. We think of them as a fountain--it just has the character of something that gives to us--and we don't think of them as something that we owe out of justice something to them, and we end up using them as platforms instead of communities that we can contribute. That to me is a key distinction. I think it's partly why institutions are decaying. People don't believe in them to the extent where they're actually willing to give themselves to them.

There are many complicated reasons for that. I think many of them justified why people wouldn't want to give more to an institution. It's a longer discussion than we can have right now. But, what is it going to take to have institutions where we really want to contribute and to sacrifice for them and to give to them, because we know that ultimately there's a symbiotic relationship there and they are a forge? What are the institutions or communities that I would like my daughters to join? I'm already having to think about that. Right now it's just soccer in the park, but it's going to get more serious really soon.

Luke Burgis: My dad developed advanced Alzheimer's and it was worse than I had realized, partly because my mom was his caregiver and she didn't want to call me complaining. So I didn't really know the full extent of it.

Luke Burgis: Yes, yes, she was. Yes, she was. She was an amazing person and just poured herself out for my dad for years and really shielded me from a lot of anxiety that it would have cost me. I was living all over the world at the time.

She passed away very unexpectedly and I became my dad's primary caregiver. And I'm an only child, so it fell on me. I was newly married. And, this was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. It shaped my sense of identity. It made me think seriously about my own memory and the role of memory in shaping our sense of self. I often think that one of the primordial sins is forgetfulness, even in my own case. And it was too late for me to do much about my dad. He was very advanced by the time that I took over his caregiving, but I at least realized that there was time. And he's still alive, and we have a wonderful, beautiful relationship, even though it often involves watching the 1999 Detroit Tigers baseball game that we've been watching together for five years.

He's seen it hundreds of times. It's just his favorite comforting thing to watch. Even when many people that lose their memory in Alzheimer's, they feel. And they remember how people and things make them feel. So, we watch this game together many times when I'm with him, and it's all new and exciting for him. I react to it as if I'm watching it for the first time. I'm doing everything that I can for my dad, and I think the beauty of it and the way that it's forced me to grow up is that he doesn't know what I'm doing for him. I get no recognition for it, even though sometimes I might like some. He lives in a home with other veterans--in a VA [Veterans' Administration] home--where he's actually had to learn to be in a community, when he's lived on his own with my mom for his entire life.

So, it's interesting that that all happened while I was writing this very book, watching my dad learn--at the end of his life--learn to exist and to coexist in the place where he lives.

And, it was rough when we started; and it's got a lot better since then. One of the things that he said to me during one of my visits is he said--and it kind of sums up everything that I've tried to say--is, 'Luke, being here is not supposed to be easy. This is going to take work.' And it was one of those things--every once in a while he says something that really surprises me and gives me the impression that he's thinking a lot about things that he can't articulate. And he has a hard time speaking, but he spoke those words incredibly clearly to me. And I thought, 'Wow, my dad is continuing to teach me really important lessons even at the end of his life.'

Luke Burgis: Thanks so much for having me, Russ. Appreciate it.

Benjamin Todd: Hi. Thanks for having me. I've listened to many of your episodes for well over 10 years, so it's an honor to be here.

Benjamin Todd: 80,000 hours is the length of a typical career. So, that's 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year for 40 years. And, the idea of the name is this is the biggest decision you'll ever make, especially from the perspective of your impact on the world.

Benjamin Todd: Well, to some degree, it's just true that many people do care. And our focus is: If you do want to make a difference, then how can you go about it more effectively? And helping people to do that.

But, if I was trying to convince someone, then I think the basic case is just it's possible to have a much bigger impact than many people realize. It's really possible to save hundreds of people's lives over your career, work on really crucial issues like what's happening now with AI [artificial intelligence], and preventing future pandemic. And, there's actually things you can do about this.

And, you can have a career that is--most--over half of students from top universities go into law, consulting, finance, and big tech. Which often end up, kind of, very--they end up working very hard and in work--it's often quite boring. And, it's possible to do something that's both better for the world and more fulfilling and interesting personally, as well.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah, exactly. And, you'd think for such an important decision that people are making over decades of their life ahead of them, this would be one of the things that society would really put the most effort into, is figuring out how to best support people in making this decision. And, a lot of the advice ends up being not much more than slogans like, 'Follow your passion,' or 'Keep your options open.' And, the advice that there is, is often--there's quite a lot of advice about, say, how to apply to a consulting job and how to do that process, but much less about how to figure out which paths are worth going down in the first place.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, that's one way the name is a little bit misleading, in that a career is not a single decision you do. It's ultimately a series of next steps, and it's very possible to build up a great career by--as long as each step you learn more, you do a bit of good, you figure out more about what fits you--it's possible to build a good career over time, even if you have no idea where it's leading. And that's a message many people find very comforting because the kind of people come in thinking that they need to find the single right career for them, and that's going to be it for the rest of their lives, but that's not the case.

But, yeah, the very broad level, one way of seeing the advice would be three key stages. So, exploring promising paths, trying out things; and then building valuable skills; and then using those skills to tackle problems that are meaningful and also get whatever you personally want out of your career.

Benjamin Todd: Well, maybe it's worth clarifying. I do think your own personal fulfillment in the career is really important, and that's what the first chapter is about, the key ingredients of a fulfilling career. And we have five I talk about there; and your positive impact is one of them. But then, yeah, when it comes to your positive impact, we argue the first key thing to think of there is which problems you're focusing on. And, in particular, we argue we're focusing on big and neglected problems.

And, I agree there is a correlation between the income of a job and its positive impact on society--though again, with a lot of caveats--though I do think if you're really thinking about which things could have the most impact, that correlation is very weak because the most-neglected issues are just things that lie totally out of the market. So, we talk about the impact of our actions today on future generations as one area, or we also talk about factory farming, and factory-farmed animals don't participate in the market. So, there's little reason to expect if I just make money that that will help the trillion or so factory-farmed animals.

Benjamin Todd: Stuff that's addictive as well--

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. It struck me during COVID [Coronavirus Disease] when everywhere was sold out of toilet paper, I was still able to get some on Amazon. And that was impressive.

So, I think obviously, there's a lot of controversy around Amazon, but just in terms of the product itself: I mean, I think Bezos is a particularly good example, but people do often not consider the counterfactuals in these cases. Because if you have a winner-takes-all market, then whoever gets there first captures the whole market, and so they will make huge profits. But, if they hadn't done that, someone else would have done it at some point afterwards.

I mean, I think it's very clear for cases like social media where there were so many different social media sites, and one eventually won--in, like, the case of Facebook. But, I mean, the scale is so large that it's still probably a significant impact, even just speeding it up a little bit.

But then, the other thought that comes to mind for me is just: he could be having far more impact on top of that by using the money really effectively that he's earned. And so, this is like the idea of earning to give that we also talk about.

Benjamin Todd: I mean, even thinking even more broadly than books in particular, I mean, I do agree making the world wealthier is better, and it's not that you only have to save lives. In general, as the world has got wealthier, that's had lots of other good consequences. So, simply contributing to that does help. Though again, I mean, I think ultimately it would come down to the scale of both things. And, for many people, I think there's much more impactful things they can do than just running a business. But I definitely don't want to say there's, like, only one way to contribute.

Benjamin Todd: Well, yeah. I mean, many people say just money doesn't matter happiness as well. And, I think that's also wrong. And, I think if we try and look at all the evidence on this, money makes you happier but only a little, is how I sum it up.

And so, I mean there were these papers that also claimed once you hit a certain level of income--like, I think it was $75,000--there's no further benefit. And, I also think that's probably wrong. It's probably a kind of logarithmic relationship for quite a long way. But that does mean that it's after around $100,000 a year in the United States, it's just not making that much difference to your life satisfaction or happiness.

So, I think around that point, it just starts to become not a very important goal compared to other things.

And, for example, I think a thing that really drives people's job satisfaction is: On a very hour to hour basis, how engaging do they find the work? And, do they get into a sense of flow?

But this tends to be pretty overlooked, I think, when people think about what makes for a good job. They tend to kind of think of, like: What would people think of me if I had this career and this more far mode type picture of things? But, your actual satisfaction is much more driven by the hour-to-hour basis.

Benjamin Todd: Well, I mean, the thing that's correct about it is that being intrinsically motivated is really good. But then, it's then interpreted as the prescription to find that is to think about what your biggest interests are, which almost all young people say is sport, art, and music. And that's in surveys, which is not surprising. And then, the key to find a fulfilling career is to find a career that matches your particular hobbies or interests. And, that's just a very limiting view. Like, a lot of people, they think, 'Well, I love literature, so I need to become a writer in order to have a fulfilling career.' And, there's actually probably many more paths that they could consider that they would find fulfilling as well.

And, by really narrowing themselves down, they've cut off a lot of options. And in fact, they probably even led themselves into the most competitive areas because most people are passionate about the same things. And, yeah, we also find only a couple of percent of jobs in the economy are in arts, sports, and music. So, you've got the majority of people trying to crowd into a small range of fields.

Benjamin Todd: There's a big problem with a lot of careers advice is it's basically just based on a bunch of stories of successful people.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. I think something I find really interesting about those ingredients is so much of them are about the context in which you're doing the work rather than the work itself or the job title. And, it's very possible you could be doing something that sounds quite boring, like financial admin. But, if it's as part of a great team and you're knocking off tasks and it's in pursuit of a meaningful goal--it's for a charity you're excited about--then that can be really engaging. While at the same time, you could love motocross racing but have a really bad boss and then be really miserable, even though you're working in the area you're passionate about.

And, this actually means people have more options than they think because if you can find those conditions for satisfaction in many other paths and fields than you might first think that you need to go down. And, another very common thing is someone's done a biology major and they think, 'Well, I need to work within biology.' But, most people don't work within the field of their major, and they actually have probably a much wider range of options than they're thinking.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, there's quite a bit of research about this. It's called job crafting. So, trying to design the role so that it is more engaging and more meaningful.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, it's alluding to the question of personal fit; and in our advice as well, we say generate a short list of things that you think would be good for the world and fulfilling, but then after that, really try to choose between that based on which one you'll be best at.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. I mean, I want to clarify, I do think compared to most jobs that people could take, it is having an important positive impact. But my claim is someone who would be capable of doing that could have quite a lot more impact again. But, yeah, some of the basic reasons, I mean the first is that healthcare hasn't actually increased our lifespans that much. Most of the increase in life expectancy is--

Benjamin Todd: Well, it has increased them by a couple of years, which is very valuable; but a lot of the increase is just from public health and sanitation and just generally being wealthier--all these other things. And then, those extra couple of years we get from healthcare, that's not just doctors: that's also spread across nurses and all the hospitals, the physical equipment that is needed as well, it's shared.

But then, yeah, maybe the most important thing is just diminishing returns. So, there's a very clear graph if you look at just the number of doctors in the population against the amount of ill health in that population. And, you very clearly see early on, each extra doctor is making a huge, huge impact. But it very quickly levels off and pretty much all rich countries are at the level where it's looking very flat.

And, some people, I mean, I think Robin Hanson has claimed that, in the United States anyway, it's actually--the curve bends down, and marginal healthcare is even slightly counterproductive because of all the side effects. So, I mean, I don't go that far in the book. I'm claiming that it's still positive, but just quite diminishing.

And then, the third effect is: if you don't go to medical school, there's a fixed number of places so someone else will take that place. And, that doesn't mean you're having no impact, because if you're the person who got the place, then presumably the medical school thinks you'll make a better doctor. So, you're increasing the supply of doctors and that should mean that the field is improved overall. But, again, it's also attenuating the impact, compared to the kind of intuitive view that it's, like, 'Well, I'm doing these heart surgeries so I'm saving these lives,' but those really crucial surgeries would have been done by someone else and the extra impact is more like whatever the extra marginal thing that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

So, I mean, this is obviously probably uncertain to within an order of magnitude, but we come down with an estimate of saving about one life every 10 years of work as a doctor in the United Kingdom. Which I think is still a meaningful impact, but I think it's a lot less than people intuitively expect.

Benjamin Todd: Well, yeah--I mean, I do think it's important to be a nice person in your day-to-day life. Though, I guess one thought that does come to mind is we are facing these civilizational challenges and there's a lot we can do about them. And, so, I think it is really important to think about that big picture as well.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. I would say that's also a theme of the book--is how it is difficult to make an impact. And, I use the example of Scared Straights, which is this huge federal program where youths who had committed misdemeanors were taken to prisons in the United States and shown around; and the hope was to scare them onto the straight and narrow. And, there were a lot of trials done on this; and they found that afterwards, the kids did actually commit less crimes. So it looked like it was working. But, when they compared it to the control group who'd never gone through, the decrease was less. So, they were actually committing more crimes compared to the counterfactual.

And, I mean, people don't know why. Maybe it was normalizing life in jail and maybe they looked up to the criminals or it wasn't as bad as they thought or something like that, but--

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, this program persisted for decades and received huge amounts of funding and the people involved all thought it was working. There was an award-winning documentary about it. And there's a lot of examples like this.

Benjamin Todd: And, Nalin also goes back to our point about doctors where my estimate was for a typical doctor, but he went to work in India. I think it was in refugee camps where a lot of people were dying from cholera and diarrhea, and tried to figure out--

Benjamin Todd: Exactly. And then, trying to figure out what could he do about this huge problem.

And, at the time, they would use intravenous drips to treat dehydration, but that's pretty difficult to do in a refugee camp because you just don't have the equipment. But, he figured out that actually if people just simply drank a solution of water and salt in the right concentration, it would be far more hydrating than just drinking normal water and would reduce mortality almost as much as the full intravenous drips with the bags of saline shipped in and all of that.

And so, by figuring out there was this much cheaper way to deliver this--I forget the exact numbers, but I mean, the number of children who die from diarrhea and the dehydration that results has reduced by millions per year from this intervention being scaled up across the world. And, again, someone would have figured this out eventually. So, it's not that Nalin is 100% of that impact.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. But, even just if we're talking about millions of lives per year, just even a small speed up of that is a huge impact.

Benjamin Todd: And in a way, we sometimes almost do the opposite, where someone like Mark Zuckerberg will spend $50 million on a house or a yacht and no one remarks on that. But, if he says he's donating loads of money to medical research, then he gets a huge amount of hate for that. And, you can have your objections to income inequality and so on, but I think we should still be encouraging people to do more good when they can.

Benjamin Todd: I think people just--they hate the idea of billionaire philanthropy and--you know, it's non-democratic--and yeah, I've seen a lot of news stories about, does he have ulterior motives? Is this just trying to make himself look good? People are very suspicious about it.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah, that was the discovery of blood groups. And so, before that, if you lost a lot of blood during an operation, they could give you blood, but sometimes that would also kill you because it would not be compatible. And then, he realized that people had fell into certain groups and if you matched the group, you could make transfusions safe. Which again, has enabled many millions of operations every year to take place that would have been too dangerous otherwise.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, just in the overall framework, we try and get people to think about which problems are biggest and most neglected. And then, the second stage in terms of your impact would be trying to find ways you can contribute to those on a bigger scale. And, the idea is to think broadly about all the different ways you can contribute. And, one of these options that is rarely--if you want to get advice on how to have a socially impactful career, then people will say charity, become a social worker, maybe a doctor. They won't say go into the corporate sector and donate the money.

But some people are a good fit for these. They want to do these careers anyway. If they can do it in a way that--I wouldn't say to do it in a harmful career, but something that's morally neutral or ideally it's a positive, it's building a useful business, then you can donate some of that to enable other people who are maybe a better fit for working directly, say, in charities, to have a big impact.

And, yeah, in the book, I use the example of Fred Mulder, who was a student in Oxford and really wanted to make an impact and was considering becoming a social worker, but he thought this would be a terrible fit for him: he wouldn't be able to hack it.

And then, instead, he was on holiday in Paris, and he uncovered this chest of Picasso prints, and he realized that these could be resold in the United Kingdom at a big markup. So, he actually put his graduate stipend into buying them and then turned them for a profit. And, this eventually turned into a career as an art dealer over many decades of career; and then he donated and he also set up an organization called the Funding Network, which is a kind of giving circle where it's encouraging other people to donate. And they've raised many millions of dollars for charity.

And, by doing that, he's enabled tens of people to take jobs in the charity sector who wouldn't have been able to get those otherwise and he thinks had a much bigger impact than he could have by doing it himself.

Benjamin Todd: Well, it's really important to think about which place is most effective to donate to. For the reasons we've been discussing, many charities probably don't have that much impact; but we think some do have a really big impact.

And the brief advice would be, again: Think about which problems are biggest and most neglected in the world, and then think about which organizations you think are doing really good work in those problems, and then try and find those that have a room for funding. So, they have lots of people who want to work for them, but they don't have the money for the salaries. And, that would be the framework for thinking about where to donate.

Yeah. I mean, in the book I use as a lower bound--I think you can do a lot more than this--but, as a lower-bound estimate on your impact, you could give to GiveDirectly, which just literally transfers the money via mobile phone to some of the world's poorest people who typically live on about $500 of income per year. And so, the average U.S. college graduate earns about $70,000 per year over their life. So, if they were donating 10% of that, that's enough to double the income of several people every year, several households among the world's poorest people.

And, because the money goes so much further, the poorer you are--the same reason that money doesn't make you happier in the United States--it means that money goes far further if you're one of the world's poorest people. And, so, just simply transferring money to them can have a big impact on their lives.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. If you are earning to give especially, then normally that would be more than 10%.

Benjamin Todd: Well, I mean, yeah--

Benjamin Todd: Hundreds of people who have read the book have taken the 10% pledge. So, maybe if you read it, there's a one in a thousand chance or something that you will, maybe one in a hundred.

I mean, I think social norms play a big role in this; and just, if we had a culture where everyone was doing this, then most people would. And, that has existed in some cultures, where most people tithe and that's the tithe and that's the norm.

One way also, that occurs to me why it's even more mysterious in a way is that people who want to do good with their career will often go into paths that involve taking more than a 50% salary cut.

If you become a teacher, you might be taking a two-thirds salary cut compared to what you could have and otherwise. And then, that's seen as completely normal.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean I think to some degree, it is virtuous. But I remember telling my mother I was going to donate 10% of my income and she was, like, 'Well, how can you afford that? That's going to be a real hardship.' But, if I'd said, 'Oh, I'm becoming a teacher,' she would have never said, 'Oh, you're giving up two-thirds of your income.' They almost see that as a lesser sacrifice than the money.

Yeah, I'm really not sure. I mean, there's even all this research that suggests that giving to charity makes people happier on net. So, it's not even obvious that you're going to be made worse off.

Benjamin Todd: But, this applies even in the United States when most people just donate a few percent and a lot of that's to local causes that they can see. And, I think, yeah, even when people have something right in front of them, they're not giving 10%.

Benjamin Todd: I mean, I do think--although, like I say, many or most charities, we don't really know if it works. As long as there's at least one that does work, then it is really true that you can actually make a difference.

But, I mean, what comes to mind for me is I think in a sense, there's this big trade off where, for exactly these reasons, if you want to have a big impact--if you want to help others--because of this neglectedness point, the things that will have the biggest impact will be the things that aren't already being handled by society. And that will tend to be these more abstract issues that don't pull people's heartstrings.

And so, in general, if you're able to work on something more abstract, that's a way to have a significantly bigger impact because it's more neglected. And so, in a way, there's this kind of--yeah, I agree--it's like a kind of internal matter of your motivation. How do you extend your kindness beyond what you can see immediately in front of you?

And, I think many people, when they reflect on it, they do realize that, yeah, just because you can't see someone doesn't mean they don't matter. But then: yeah, how to do that?

I mean, one very practical piece of advice I think in a way is a lot of people we work with, they work on these very abstract causes where they don't see the feedback of exactly what they're doing. For example, they're helping future generations, and we won't see all the benefits of that.

But you can still have a very fulfilling career by doing it with great colleagues, having engaging work. And, that's one way you can try to line up your--you can try and take a big-picture approach to your impact, but then make sure your day-to-day job is fulfilling and engaging and still then have a very satisfying life, even though you're not seeing the immediate effects of your actions in the way that would be maximally motivating.

Benjamin Todd: No, I mean, I don't think you should give it to me. You should you give it to GiveDirectly--would be much more--I mean, they'll be able to do it a lot more efficiently just for starters, much less overhead. I wouldn't[?] have to fly out anywhere, which would already use up a big--

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, I definitely don't claim to be perfect altruist. I've tried to design the book to be--for myself, I think of it in terms of I have different spheres of my life and I try to do what's best within each sphere. And, one of those is making the world better in general. But I'm definitely not saying that's the only thing people should focus on.

Benjamin Todd: A summary of all the advice?

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. I mean, we've already covered a lot of it. So, we've talked about what really makes for a dream job and why it's not as simple as following your passion, but you want to find something--well, you want to build valuable skills and apply them to something that helps others and that gets you the personal things that you want, like engaging works, good colleagues, and a sufficient salary rather than maximizing your salary.

And then, the kind of general recipe we have for doing that is--I mean, I would say start with thinking about what are some of the biggest and most neglected problems in the world and what paths could help address those. And then, consider exploring several of those, especially if you're right at the start of your career. Before you've tried any jobs, it's hard to know which things are going to be a good fit for you. So, it's important to be empirical about it.

And then, really focus on building valuable skills. You need something to offer.

And then, finally, when you have those skills, or we talk about career capital to make it--it's broader than just your skills. It's also your connections and your character and your reputation. Those are all things that help you be a more effective actor in the world. And then, the final stage is then thinking about how you can use your career capital to tackle these problems.

And, yeah: I mean we do have our own take on which problems in the world are most pressing right now, which is one of the chapters in the book. And I basically think the key thing going on right now is to do with AI and how we might have AI that can do AI R&D [Research and Development] within the next couple of years. And, this could really change society. And, that creates a whole host of problems downstream from that.

So, there's the loss of control worries that you've had covered before, but I think there's also things around concentration of power. And there's things like engineered pandemics, totally new technologies. And, these things are still really, really neglected. Like, I think there's around--it's hard to get an exact figure, but there's something like 10 million people working on in climate jobs around the world. And, ideally, it would be even more. But, these types of things I've just been listening, we're talking in the thousands. So, it's a thousand times less people working on these things, even though these are some of the biggest challenges where we could face as a civilization.

And, that means any listeners, if they switch now, they could really be among this very small group of people shaping these issues.

But yeah, we talk about other problems as well like factory farming and global health in the book, too. Yeah. And then, yeah--choosing between them based on your personal fit. And, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of other practical advice in the book. Like, if you're facing two options, how do you choose between them? And also just, like, how to do job hunting well? And, that's the final section, which is now, like: given the actual options you're facing, how do you choose between them and figure out the right plan for you? And, yeah. And, I don't know--do you feel like is there an important thing I've missed?

Benjamin Todd: Yeah.

Benjamin Todd: Exactly. And, get off the armchair. Even without trying whole career paths, people often just try to really figure it out in their head. And, often one of the most useful things is actually just to write down what could actually change my ranking here. You have your options and then what could actually be decisive between these: what things do I need to figure out? And then, just going and figuring those things out, which normally looks like talking to people in the field or even just applying to lots of jobs. These are often the fastest way to find the best path for you.

Benjamin Todd: Thanks so much.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah, thank you. Well, just very briefly, my father was a wartime refugee. He fled Germany, fled Spain when the Fascists came, and then fled France. And, so, as my father, he brought a lot of awareness of war into my world when I was young, and that clearly implanted itself in my mind.

My dad married an American woman. I grew up in Boston in a very safe, lovely, and wildly boring suburb called Belmont. And, I was a very anxious kid. And so, what I went on to do, I now realize with the benefit of hindsight and good counsel by people who loved me, I realized I was basically my whole life sort of wildly compensating for an upbringing that felt overly safe and not--I'll put it very bluntly--when I was a teenager, I wanted to become a man, and I didn't know how to do that in the environment I grew up in. And so, I wound up as a war reporter for many years and eventually stopped doing that and had a family, two young children. And, that's when I nearly lost my life--at home.

Sebastian Junger: Oh, yeah. So, my first war, self-assigned, self-funded, and really accountable to nobody, was Bosnia. It was Sarajevo, the Seige of Sarajevo in 1993, 1994. And, I came home from that and wrote my first book called The Perfect Storm. And, I literally turned the manuscript in--I was dying to go back overseas--I turned the manuscript in. I did not have high hopes for it. It felt like an odd book that people might not necessarily plug into.

And, I went overseas to Afghanistan. So, this is 1996, when the Taliban were just taking over Afghanistan. I saw them on the outskirts of Kabul. I saw them in Jalalabad, and I'd come under some suspicion from them. I left; and then I was in Kosovo in 1998 and Sierra Leone, Liberia--the Civil War in Liberia--as well. Nigeria, the Niger Delta with men--rebels--who actually took me captive for a little while. That was very, very, very unpleasant.

And then, eventually I was with American soldiers in Afghanistan. I'd been in Afghanistan many times. I was there in 2000 with Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was just fighting in the Northern Alliance. Then 2001, when Massoud's commanders took Kabul after 9/11. And then eventually with American soldiers. And, ironically, in some ways, I'm probably best known for the work I did with American soldiers, even though I'd been to Afghanistan many times and really adore that country.

And, I really hope in my lifetime, I can go back safely with my family. That would be kind of a dream for me.

Sebastian Junger: Yes, I have. Yep.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. When I was a kid and didn't know any better, I was surfing in midwinter off the coast of Massachusetts by myself. Yeah, I almost drowned. I was in very, very big seas, and I almost drowned.

And, I also was a climber for tree companies. So, I did the aerial work. I worked 60, 70, 80, 100 feet in the air, hanging on a line with a running chainsaw, taking trees down in pieces, which looks, I'm sure from the ground, it looks terrifying and dangerous and all that other stuff. And, it's definitely terrifying. But, what I realized up there in the treetops--I made good money for a young man, a young person, I made good money doing it; I loved the job--but, what I realized is that if I was going to get hurt or killed up there, it would only be because I made a mistake, because I was simply dealing with the laws of physics. And, if you top out a pine tree and you do it wrong and it comes back on you and crushes you, which can happen, it's because you did it wrong, right? You didn't make the cuts right, you didn't account for wind direction, etc., etc. So, I realized it's the laws of physics, which are knowable. And, so, if I'm just super-careful, I'm probably safer than I am driving down the road where there's a random element, other drivers that don't obey the laws of physics. They can't be predicted.

And, so, I actually came to feel quite comfortable up there, even though I was also very scared of heights and learned to do the work simply by literally not looking down. I completely compartmentalized my fear so that I could be functional. And then, there's an equivalent process in combat where you can be functional and scared by compartmentalizing what's happening.

Sebastian Junger: Oh no, you're never fighting. I mean, if you're fighting, you're not a journalist: you're a participant. So, I had a video--with American soldiers, I had a video camera. In other situations earlier in my career, I just had a notebook and pen. I was writing down what I was seeing and hearing, what people were saying, and the sense I could make of everything. With a video camera, you're recording events in the moment for later use, which is very different from distilling information into a notebook. They're both crucial to journalism.

And, so, with American soldiers, when I used a video camera most, I had it on me constantly. I mean, literally constantly. I slept with it. Just, you never knew when something was going to happen. Or, you never knew when there was a conversation between two soldiers that was just somehow evocative or interesting and that you wanted to record that. It wasn't all combat. It was everything about life at this small outpost called Restrepo. I'm shooting video, I'm taking notes, I'm imitating everyone else very, very closely. Are they taking a knee and drinking some water on a long patrol? I'm doing that. Are we behind? Are we getting behind cover? I'm doing that. Are we getting low? I'm doing that.

Everything that they did, I did because that was safer, and I lived in terror of becoming a problem, somehow causing a--even being wounded would be causing a problem, right? They're out here on a combat mission. God forbid, I make that harder or God forbid, endanger someone or get someone hurt, right? So, I never asked for anything, not even, 'Hey, could we just detour to that little hilltop so I can get a photograph?' What happens if someone gets hit on that little hilltop? How do you live with yourself, right? So, I just never asked for anything. I wouldn't even ask someone to bring me my coffee mug from across the whatever.

I just, like, God forbid, God forbid. And, I say 'God forbid': I'm an atheist, so I understand the secular context, but I think you get my meaning about--it's unthinkable. And so, I was very, very careful about what I asked for.

Sebastian Junger: Well, one was in Sierra Leone. I was coming back from a frontline fight with a couple of Sierra Leonean soldiers and a couple of journalists in the open Jeep, and the rebels that we were fighting, a group of them, stepped out from the jungle and stopped us with their guns leveled and seemed to be having a screaming argument about whether to kill us all. It was in Creole, and I couldn't follow it, but at one point, a guy racked his gun and leveled it, and another guy grabbed the barrel and jerked it upwards. It was my first experience with going kind of hollow inside, which is a fear response.

And, another time I was told by rebels in Nigeria after they detained me, they thought I was a spy. And one guy walked up to me and said--he had a machine--very muscular young man with a machine gun. He was an Ijaw warrior [River-dwelling people indigenous to the Niger Delta--Econlib Ed.], and he came up to me, he said, 'When we kill you later, I'll be the one to do it,' just sort of by way of introduction. Very, very scary moments for me.

And, with American soldiers, we were in a lot of combat. The only time that I sort of froze, which is another classic fear response, is sort of freezing for a moment, was when I had nothing to do because my video camera, the firefight started very suddenly. I almost got hit by the first round. It hit a sandbag right next to my forehead, and I couldn't get to my video camera so I didn't have a job to do. I had nothing to do. And, the only thing that insulates you from your fear is having a responsibility. Right? And I couldn't get to my camera. It was 10 feet away, and between me and the camera, the sand was moving on bullet impacts. And, because I didn't have a task, a mission, a purpose, I froze.

And then, Tim--my colleague, Tim, very brave, wonderful, beautiful Tim Hetherington--he jumped across that gap, threw me my camera, and then started throwing ammo to the soldiers who were separated from their ammo as well. He was extremely brave in that moment.

But, of course, I've also seen him in moments when he was paralyzed and I was fine. So, fear is a weird thing, right? I should just add that Tim was killed in combat in Libya in 2011. We're coming up on 15 years now.

Sebastian Junger: Sure. Yeah. So, it was June of 2020, and my wife and I have taken our little girls--who were at that point, like, three months old, six months old, and three years old--taking them out of New York City. We own a property in Massachusetts. It's deep in the woods at the end of a dead-end dirt road. There's no cell phone coverage there. When it rains, the landlines go out because they're old. It's basically paradise--right?--in its remoteness and its beauty. Which is great until you have a health crisis. I mean, I'm a lifelong athlete. I'm not a walking heart attack. I was a really good long-distance runner when I was young and carried that foundation of health my whole life.

So, it never occurred to me that I would ever go to the ER [Emergency Room] for anything except a car accident or a chainsaw accident. And, just as sort of background.

So, in mid-sentence--we had a little bit of babysitting from some teenage girls who lived up the road aways, which was rare during COVID [Coronavirus Disease]. So, the girls came over, and my wife and I went out to this cabin that I'd built even deeper in the woods, like, completely off the grid. Like, no electricity, just kerosene lamps and a wood stove. And, we went out there just to sort of relax a bit. And, in mid-sentence, while we're out there just enjoying this beautiful place of tranquility and peace and connection, in mid-sentence I felt this sort of jolt of pain in my abdomen.

And, I was, like, 'Oh, what was that?' And, I thought it was some crazy indigestion, and I sort of stood up to breathe and walk out, and I almost fell over.

What I didn't know, obviously, is that I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery. It's a very rare condition. An aneurysm is an unnatural ballooning of the artery wall. Again, this isn't heart attack territory. It's not arteries filled with cholesterol, whatever it is, whatever clogs arteries. I can't remember the word.

Sebastian Junger: Plaque, that's it. Plaque. Thank you.

It was a structural problem. And, aneurysms can grow for years, decades, undetectable, unnoticed. And then, when they rupture, you are bleeding out into your own abdomen. You are bleeding out just as much as if someone stabbed you in the abdomen and severed an artery.

Except, it's into your own artery so you don't know what's happening. There's no blood on the kitchen floor.

And, within a minute, I was too lightheaded to keep my feet. My blood pressure was plummeting. I was losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes into my own abdomen. And, there's 10 pints of blood in the human body: you can lose about half of them before you die. And, we lived an hour from the nearest hospital, which was a little regional hospital.

So, I was literally a human hourglass.

I couldn't walk. My wife literally dragged me out of the woods and put me in the passenger seat of the car in the driveway, and I was going in and out of consciousness. And, every time I lost consciousness, she thought, 'That's it. He's not coming back.' And, terrible experience for her.

I had no idea I was dying. I didn't even know I was losing consciousness. I was syncopic. and someone who is syncopic--in and out of consciousness--they don't know. It's seamless for them. They don't know they're losing consciousness, right?

And then, I knew something was really bad because the sky turned blinding white and everything turned white, and this just awful whiteness just eclipsed everything and I was blind. Another symptom of blood loss.

So, at any rate, they got me to the hospital just in time. I was in end-stage hemorrhagic shock. I'd lost half of my blood, two thirds of my blood. I was in conditions that for most people are not survivable. Particularly at my age--I was in my late 1950s. But I have an athlete's heart. My heart kept slugging away in my chest. I gave the doctor something to work with, and they brought me into the ER and started trying to save my life.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. Well, that was a little later in the evening actually. Yeah, it was at night. It was a little later in the process. When they brought me into the ER, they put me in a trauma bay. The doctors immediately knew what was going on. The medics in the ambulance didn't immediately know what was going on. They started to transfuse me with a large-gauge needle through my neck into my jugular to give me blood, right? Blood keeps you alive, the blood of other people, right? So, here's my brief pitch. Please donate blood, right? I'm alive because 10 people donated blood. You will keep alive someone's father, someone's daughter, someone's spouse. It's very important.

At any rate, they were working on me--and I was in incredible pain. And the first extraordinary thing that happened was a nurse came--they couldn't give me sedatives. My blood pressure was 60/40. I mean, I was running on fumes. I was 10 minutes from dead. Right? I was in incredible pain from all the blood in my abdomen. And, this nurse came up to me and said--held my hand--she said, 'Look at me and breathe with me. I'm here.' And, I did. And, magically, the pain went away. In my mind, I'm like, 'That's not going to work. That's some 1960s Lamaze stuff. Like, I want some drugs.' Right? It worked.

And, that human connection, literally, I believe, helped save my life. Along with incredible doctors. But it was absolutely crucial. Doctors don't have time to hold your hand. It falls on someone else, and thank God--thank God--for them.

So, they started working on my neck. And, let me just say briefly: I'm an atheist. My father was an atheist and a physicist. He's dead. He was an atheist and a physicist, which is like atheist-squared, right?

And, so, I'm lying there. I have no idea I'm dying. Absolutely none. I'm in for belly pain. I'm very confused. And under me, the universe sort of cracks open. There's this infinite darkness, and I'm getting pulled into it, and I'm terrified of this infinitely black pit, basically.

I don't know I'm dying, but I know I don't want to go in there. I'm terrified of it.

And then, suddenly, my dead father appears above me to my left on the ceiling, just above me. And, he's there in his sort of essence, this sort of energy form. It's my father. He's right there. I'm shocked. Right? And, basically he communicates to me, 'Look, you don't have to fight it. It's okay. You can come with me. I'll take care of you. You don't have to hang on. You're good. Come with me.' Right?

I was horrified. I was, like, 'Go with you? You're dead. The party's over here. Get out of here. We'll talk a lot later.' And, so, I said to the doctor, because I'm still conscious, I'm still conversant--right?--when I had this vision.

So I said to the doctor, 'You got to hurry. I'm going. I'm going away.' And, I didn't know where I was going, but I knew I wasn't coming back from there.

And then, much, much later they transfused me. They got me into the interventional radiology suite--which is basically you lie on something called a fluoroscope. It's like an x-ray machine, but it takes video so they can x-ray you in real time. They put fluorescent dye in your veins. They can see which tube is leaking inside your body. They can see where the catheter is going as they thread it through your vasculature to get the catheter to the rupture, and they embolize it, they plug it, and save your life. That's what happens there.

And, while I'm there, they work and work and work on me for hours. And they can't get the catheter to the rupture. And I'm in incredible pain, and I'm confused, and I'm having hallucinations. And I see monsters everywhere--very, very frightening monsters in the machinery. And, at one point the doctor--I watched the doctor shrug his shoulders and say, 'Oh well, we tried.' Like, 'There's nothing more we can do.' And, that was the first time--like, usually, you're sedated for moments like this, right? I couldn't be sedated, right? Very, very lightly. So, that was the moment that I realized, 'Oh my God, I might die. I might not make it home.' And, that was a moment of devastating loneliness and isolation.

And, that's again where this nurse appeared and said, 'Keep your eyes open so we know you're still here. I'm with you. We're going through this together.' Just extraordinary, extraordinary experience for me.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. So, he was a product of a mixed marriage. His mom was a Austrian Catholic, and she married a Sephardic Jew, an Ashkenazi Jew, who grew up partly in Spain, spoke fluent Spanish, and was a journalist. And, he was posted to Dresden when they met. They met at a dinner party in Salzburg. And, they fell in love with each other immediately. They were both very smart, good-looking, charming people. And, they fell in love and got married extremely quickly--as people did back in the day, in 1900.

And they moved to Dresden; and 10 years later, the Reichstag Fire, 1933; things started to get ugly.

He took the family--my father grew up speaking Spanish and German--took his family out, went to Germany, and were there until the Fascists came in 1936. They left. They went to Paris. They were there until the Fascists arrived a few years later in the form of the Nazis; and they went to Portugal, and then eventually the United States, where he met my mother and fell in love and had a family. So, as he liked to say, because of the Fascists, he got married and had a family and speaks five languages fluently, because they just kept learning everything. Every country he passed through, he learned the language.

And, he became a physicist. He was a very, very, very smart man, extraordinary mind, and extraordinarily limited in some important ways as well. I now realize he was what we would now call 'on the spectrum,'--like, very, very clearly on the spectrum [autism spectrum--Econlib Ed]. A very, very sweet man, and oblivious and hard to connect to emotionally and somewhat childlike in his emotions and his feelings, but a brilliant physicist.

And, so, we had a complicated relationship. But I loved him, and he died holding my hand, talking to his dead sister who was in the room. Right? I mean, clearly, to him, she was in the room. It was my first experience with this sort of odd phenomenon that dying people see the dead: that the dead show up to receive the dying.

And, I didn't know anything about it. I was, like, 'Wow, it's so strange.' He's quite convinced she's here. I'm a total rationalist, right? I've got no time for any of that nonsense.

Sebastian Junger: As was he, yes. No time for any of that nonsense, right?

But, we can get to this if you like, but there's quite a lot of evidence--there's quite a lot of testimony--thousands and thousands of people, and hospice nurses and doctors who the dead showing up in the rooms of the dying is a well, well-known thing, and it's been going on forever. So, make what you will of it. I try to make sense of it in my little book.

I'll end with this. Him showing up for me--as mortified as I was, right? I didn't know I was dying. I certainly didn't want to die. I wasn't going to go willingly. Right? It was in some ways the closest connection I've ever had with him. He was not an easy man to connect with emotionally. You know--intellectually, yes; not emotionally. He was there for me completely when I needed him most: just a beautiful, bighearted father who was going to take care of his son, his 58-year-old son. And, I have to say, it in some ways changed my internal relationship with him.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. So, first of all, I say in the book, the problem with being a rationalist--and rationality is an enormously powerful tool, right?

Sebastian Junger: Right? I mean, planes stay aloft because of the rational process, right? Medicine exists. Everything exists because of a rational thought process. And, so, don't dismiss it.

But, the problem with rationality, as I say in the book, is that things keep happening that don't make any sense, right? So, the sort of line between a visionary seeing the truth and a crazy person is very, very thin. It always has been. The great prophets of religion are very, very close to just being schizophrenics, right? And, maybe there's some overlap once in a while.

So, if someone came to you and said: This is the deal. The universe is 93 billion light years across. It came from nothing to everything in an amount of time that's too small to measure. And, we now live in a situation where mineral dust can organize itself in such a way that it's self-aware, can think about itself, humans and probably other beings on other planets. And, not only that, when you're smart enough, when the human race is smart enough to look at the quantum level--in other words, the subatomic level--what it finds is this weird apparent contradiction that particles at the subatomic level, if you observe them, if there's a conscious observer, they can only be in one place at one time. If you don't observe them, they are in all places at one time. The act of observation at the quantum level creates the reality that it is observing.

Now, if a person was saying all this on a street corner into a megaphone, you'd be, like, 'Well, where's social services? He's clearly insane.' That is exactly what physicists have found. And, interestingly, the physicists--supremely rational men and women--have concluded that there's many odd possibilities, one of which is that consciousness is a universal quality like the force of gravity. And, actually, it's a universal quality that is part of the physical universe and gives it form that creates the universe that we ourselves see. And, these are rational people suggesting this because they seem to be at their wits' end to explain these contradictions that we know we can prove exist.

As Sir Arthur Eddington, a great physicist of about a hundred years ago, as he said, 'Something that we don't understand is doing we know not what.' And, that was his ultimate pronouncement about the state of human knowledge.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. So, the three groups of criticisms of the book--which was really well-received--but of the sort of reader-reviewers, some people are upset that I'm still an atheist.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. And also, what I say in my quote, "defense," is: 'Look, I saw my dad. If I'd seen God, you might have an argument to make--but I saw my father, right?' And, another criticism: It's really a disappointment that I just didn't come out and say, 'Great news, everybody. There's an afterlife. I'm here to tell you, don't worry about dying because we're just going to keep on going just as we were with our loved ones.'

And, there's no responsible way scientifically or journalistically to make that assertion, right? It's just: you cannot do it. It's an act of faith, not an act of rationality.

And, I was looking for answers. And, there are two sort of main groupings in my mind of things that need to be talked about.

There are stories, and there are explanations. And the stories are crucial to our psychological survival, right? And they often involve God. And, I have children, and I now understand why people believe in heaven--because, God forbid something happens to your child, you need to feel that they're going someplace good. As a father, I get it, right? Those are stories.

Explanations explain how the world works, right? And, you can tell the difference because explanations can be tested. You don't want to test the stories because you'll embarrass them. You need them, right? The explanations have to be tested because if the explanation for why airplanes fly, if that explanation has holes in it, people are going to die. Right?

So, what I was trying to do was explain--not come up with a story about my father's appearance above me in the hospital--but explain what it was I was seeing. And, so, yes, there's near-death experiences--NDEs--are sort of a now-common term. They're very common. There's thousands of testimonies about it, all very, very similar.

And, if you look into the literature, of course, there's two camps, right? There's the believers and there's the rationalists. And, the rationalists have always been my baseball team. I like watching them defeat the other team over and over and over again, right? It's one of my most pleasurable experiences, watching that process, right?

But, here's the thing.

So, the rationalists convincingly explained to me--and I read all the papers--that a lot of the visions that people have, a lot of experiences that are hovering above the body, those can be explained through neurological processes--neurochemicals, the stress on the dying brain, etc., etc., etc. Except for one thing--and I'm continuing to be a rationalist here, because if you're a rationalist, a proper rationalist, you will apply rationality even to the rational process. I mean, you are skeptical of everything, and you even inquire into your own skepticism--skeptically, right? You really must.

So, the thing that doesn't quite work for me: Yes, if you give a roomful of people LSD [lysergic acid diethylamide], they will all hallucinate. We know how that works. When people die, they have low blood oxygen, etc., etc.: it stresses the brain. They may see things. They may have a hovering feeling about the out-of-body experience. All these things can be explained. They put pilots in the human centrifuge--fighter pilots--to see how many Gs--forces of gravity--will make them pass out. They have out of body experiences. We can reproduce all of these things. Right?

What does not make sense--what does not happen in the roomful of people who have just taken LSD--is that they all have the same vision. Not the same experience like hovering above your body. They see the dead. They don't see fire trucks and flamingos and swimming pools. They see the dead. And, sometimes there are cases--multiple cases--of dying people seeing someone show up in their room who they didn't know had died. Like, 'What's David doing here?' And, they didn't know he had died, and there he is, and no one else can see him.

So, is that probative? No. But it certainly arouses some questions in me.

So, where I came with this is that not that there's a God: you can have an afterlife and no God, or a God and no afterlife. They're not necessarily paired. They don't need each other. People just assume they go together. But it is possible--and, again, I read a lot of physics that there is a post-death continuation of individual consciousness at the quantum level that we're incapable of understanding. Our brains are for the macroscopic world. They're not designed to understand the sub-atomic world. And, at the quantum level, consciousness, which seems to affect everything in the universe, that that continues in some form; and that some of these mysteries like telepathy and the dying seeing the dead, and ghosts, and this and that--all sort of memories from former lives and all these sort of strange--and in my opinion, sort of often flaky--testimonies and experiences--it's possible that they actually are united under a very simple idea that we do not ultimately understand the true nature of reality, of time, of life, and of death. And, that might explain some of these phenomena. And I'm totally open to it.

Sebastian Junger: Oh, yes.

Sebastian Junger: Well, I'll tell you what, when I was recovering from--I had half my blood in my abdomen, and it takes a while to recover from that. Your body has to reabsorb it, and you don't feel very well until it does. So, I was spending my time with a little light reading about near-death experiences, and I eventually wound up reading about physics, right? And, I realized this is the path. Either you take the story path and go for the story of religion and God, which I wasn't going to do, or you take the explanation path, and ultimately all explanations lie in physics.

So, I'm reading these physics papers about quantum reality and all that stuff. And, I remember thinking, 'God--Dad, if only you could hover above me again and just help me here, because this isn't making any sense.'

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. So, I called up his colleague--two of his colleagues--who I knew when he was alive; he was very close to them. I invited them over for lunch. I told them--I wanted to tell them what had happened. They adored my father, right? And, I wanted to tell them what had happened and ask them, 'What do you think my father would make of this?' Right? And, so we had a great conversation, but keep in mind they're physicists. They're extremely literal, right? So, at one point I said, 'Okay, so what are the odds that my father could wind up after he died, years after he died, hovering above me in a corner of the room? What are the odds? I mean, there's odds for everything. What are the odds?' Right?

And, it was sort of a rhetorical question, right? Forgive me, I'm just human, right? But, he took it literally, and--Rudolph was his name, Rudolfo. He sort of looked up like that, and I could see him running the numbers, right? And, he said, 'I would say the odds are about 10 to the minus 63.' I was like, 'What? There's a number for this? Are you kidding?' He's, like, 'There's a number for everything.'

Sebastian Junger: A very small number, but it's not infinitely small. It's not infinity.

Sebastian Junger: It's not absolute zero.

Sebastian Junger: Right? And so, he said, 'Yeah, the molecules, the atoms that have once made up his body, they're still out there in the universe and sort of random motion would have to place them all coherently together in the corner of the room for you to see him. It's not impossible. It's just unbelievably so unlikely that it will probably never happen.' I'm, like, 'Oh my God, that's the physicist's brain.' That was the brain I was dealing with my whole childhood with my father. You ask a rhetorical question, and then he looks up at the ceiling and starts running numbers.

And, so, yeah, that physics was a serious inquiry for me and recall me to my childhood when what he did for me was sort of a kind of magic.

Sebastian Junger: She actually called an ambulance.

Sebastian Junger: She called an ambulance. Yep.

Sebastian Junger: No, I mean, I kind of knew life was finite. What I didn't realize is that you could be dead by dinner. Without being in a war zone or without driving, and being in good health. I had no idea that the world worked that way, right?

And, that's terrifying; but as I say in the book, the flip side of terror is reverence. And, if you do understand that life really is that temporary, moment by moment, it makes the moment you're in inflate--like the universe inflated in the Big Bang--it inflates in meaning to encompass everything, right?

That's all you get is this moment, and it now encompasses everything, and it's simply a matter of keeping that foremost in mind while you go through the travails and tribulations of your life--right?--which have to be dealt with.

Sebastian Junger: Piece of cake. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Sebastian Junger: Thank you.

Sebastian Junger: It's been six years. Yeah. I have easier access to reverence. I mean, you can't entirely live in that place because there are tasks that need to be done where you have to focus on a lot of mundane details. And I have young children. Like, you know, whatever. Like, ou can't stay in that place constantly, but if you can't access it, you're not living. And, if you allow yourself to be overwhelmed by frustration and anger and emotions like that, really overwhelmed by them, they are eclipsing the miracle of the fact that you're alive. Right? That you exist, that you can hold your children, that you can see a tree. It all starts to sound very trite, but it's quite true.

This makes me think of something that happened when I woke up in the ICU [Intensive Care Unit]. So, they eventually--after the doctors gave up, they tried another approach. It worked: they saved my life. And, the next thing I knew, it was morning in the ICU and I woke up to the sound of nurses talking about me, two ICU nurses. And, my eyes opened, and one of them said, 'Congratulations, Mr. Junger, you made it. We almost lost you last night. In fact, it's kind of a miracle. No one can believe you're alive.' And, indeed, I'd survived something where the odds of survival are incredibly small, right? And, I was shocked. I had no idea.

And then, immediately, I remember seeing my father, my dead father, and the black pit, right?

And then, the nurse walked away and she came back an hour later. I'm just lying there. I'm throwing up blood. I got tubes sticking out all over me. I'm in pain. I'm thinking about this terrible thing. And, she comes back and says, 'Hey, how are you doing?' And, I said, 'Well, not that great. What you told me is terrifying, and I can't stop thinking about it.' And, she said, 'Try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred.' And, she walked away. So, in my mind, as a non-religious person, as a secular person, the word 'sacred' is a beautiful word. It's a necessary word. And, I hold it to mean any process, any information, anything that protects, upholds human dignity. That's what sacred means.

So, sometimes school teachers are performing sacred work, sometimes shrinks are, sometimes doctors, sometimes ministers. We are all capable of sacred work, by my definition of the word. So, as a journalist, I've gone to frontlines over and over again and came back with information about what's happening in Afghanistan or Sierra Leone or whatever it may be, now Liberia, Gaza, etc., Iran--like, information that's sacred because it will help the world, it may help the world make wiser choices and protect human dignity. Without that--wherever you fall politically--without that information--it doesn't matter to me--wWithout that information, no good choices are possible. So, journalists on their best day are potentially doing sacred work in the sense that I mean it.

So, my question to myself was: I just went to the ultimate frontline. I almost died. I looked over the edge and was allowed to return to life. Did I come back with sacred information? In other words, with information that might help others face their own mortality with more dignity, with more love, with less fear? Did I? Yes or no? And, that was the challenge I gave myself in writing my book, which took me two years to start because I was so avoidant. I'd been so traumatized by this. I was so avoidant of the topic I just really couldn't bear for a while.

And, one of the odd things about almost dying--and it's very common, I didn't know this--is that often people who almost died, whether a medical emergency or a car accident or what have you, often they're seized with a terror that they actually did die and they just don't realize it and that they're in a kind of dying hallucination and they are the only ones who don't know.

There's an amazing movie from 30 years ago called Jacob's Ladder about a soldier in Vietnam who thinks he's returning home to his girlfriend, etc. He's actually dying in the battlefield and he doesn't know it. And, his flashbacks to the battlefield are actually what's actually happening, and everything else is the fantasy, the hallucination. Devastating idea.

So, apparently that's really common. It's an effect of trauma. And, so, I got very crazy, right? I became the most neurotic person I'd ever met. I got very depressed, very anxious. After I came home from the hospital, I couldn't be alone. I was agoraphobic. I mean, I was really a mess, way more so than combat had ever done to me. And, at one point, I went up to my wife and I said, 'Listen, can you just tell me you see me and that I'm here and that I made it? Can you just tell me?'

I mean, no one wants to hear that from their spouse, that question. A bad sign, right? And, she said, 'Yes, of course you're here. Etc., etc.' And, in my mind, I'm like, 'Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing a hallucination would say.' Right? It's actually a profound philosophical question: How do you know that you're here?

And, finally--and I'll end with this--but I think it's a good point to make along these lines. My wife said to me this amazing thing, she said, 'Sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that this happened to you? I mean, not that you survived, but that it happened at all. If you could push a button and have it not happen, would you push the button?'

Boy, I didn't know what to say, because on the one hand, I felt really like this was the most terrible thing that I'd ever experienced. On the other hand, I was privileged. I was special. I got to look over the edge and then come back, right? And, I was sort of chosen to see the truth. I phrased it even in grandiose terms to myself about what had happened to me, right? And, I didn't know what to say. I didn't have an answer.

And then, eventually I looked up the word--I thought, okay, in sort of more mythic terms, she's saying, 'Am I blessed or cursed?' Right? So, I looked up the word 'blessing,' curious what the origin was. And, it's from the Anglo-Saxon word bleczyan, which means blood. And, the idea is that there is no blessing without a wounding, right? There is no blessing without some kind of cost, some kind of consequence, without some kind of diminishment; and that they're twins and that you really can't have one without the other.

And, of course, life is both, right? Life is painful and horrible and a miracle and all at the same time: it's a blessing and a curse. And, once I saw it like that, it kind of released me from this sort of moral paralysis about who was I and what was happening to me.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. And, I am sort of conscious of having been extraordinarily lucky in the circumstances that I was born into and grew up in. Having been in many wars. The idea that I had a childhood where I didn't have any reasonable fear for my safety, for my life. No reasonable concern that there'd be food for dinner. That, I might not be able to grow up in the house we were living in, that we have to move as refugees. So, lucky that those thoughts weren't even in my mind as possibilities.

And, as I got older, I wouldn't say I felt guilty about those good circumstances, but it did make me think that something was left undeveloped in me. And something human--something essentially human--was left underdeveloped in me because I never had to worry about, like: What was going to happen to me? I mean, when--when?--have humans ever had that luxury? Right? I mean, it just started. Look, they only invented antibiotics a few decades ago, right? When my father was born, infection could have easily killed him, because they didn't have antibiotics. Now, so, even within my lifetime, there are things that protect people from, as doctors say, bad outcomes, unimaginable to even our grandparents.

And so, that precipitated in me a desire, I'm going to say test myself. It's not quite the right word--but, to not prioritize safety and convenience and comfort in the decisions that I make in my life. I wanted to prioritize experiences and challenges and human connection. I wanted to be in places where humans connect in a very immediate, visceral way, often because they're in difficult circumstances and they have to connect in order to survive. And those situations, as stressful as they can be, for me have also been the sort of food my soul has subsisted on and made up for the moral vacuum of a safe American suburb in the 1970s.

Sebastian Junger: Thank you.

Sebastian Junger: Well, it's like one's children. You sort of love them equally, but in different ways. All my books, I love equally, but in different ways. And this book was particularly meaningful because it was about me, and it was about mortality. I mean, I'd never really written about myself before. And, as a journalist, that always seemed like unseemly, right? You might see an occasional mention here and there and a few references in my book War. But, yeah, this one felt different and it felt like it easily could be the book I end my career on. Like, how do you go beyond this one? The Great Railroad Disaster of 1883?

Where do you go from here? I didn't know. And, I still don't have an answer to that question.

So, the experience of writing it--I love my words. Right? I love the process of arranging words in just the right way so that they communicate essential information, sacred information in a way that readers can't help themselves. They just want to keep reading. That's my vision, that's my goal, right? And, I love that process of doing that with words. I absolutely adore it. And, this book was that process in some ways times a thousand because it was about the most abstract ideas, the most elusive concepts, right?

And, could I keep it grounded in a reality that was compelling, even though we're talking about quantum physics? God help me, right? And, I feel like I did it. I flatter myself that I did it. Some people think it was too much science, but I think I would have lost them anyway. They said that about The Perfect Storm as well: 'What's with all the physics of wave motion?' 'Well, look, a hundred-foot wave sank the boat. You might want to know how that works, right?' So, you're not going to please everybody.

But so, I finished it, and it was an extremely emotional process and a lot of trauma comes with sorrow and trauma comes with grief and a loss of innocence and pain.

And, I'm not embarrassed to admit: I cried my way through any number of sections as I was writing it. And then it stopped; and then I was sort of okay. And, I was actually--under my wife, my poor wife--under her request, she said, 'Can you go talk to someone? You need some help.' And, so I did. I found a counselor to talk to. And, between writing the book and talking to a really good therapist, I actually got to a good place. But I got to tell you, it took a couple years. It was way worse than combat, way worse, right? Life is terrifying when you really understand what life is. It's terrifying; and in equal measure, it's magical. That's the deal. It's the only deal you're ever going to get.

Sebastian Junger: My pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Thank you, Russ. It's a real pleasure to be back.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, so I think there were two things that led into writing the essay. The first was I was thinking a lot about this kind of question of usefulness, and the fact that over the last two to three years, there's been a lot of discussion about how useful can humans be, and I think particularly humans who are doing mainly things with their minds and their brains. And so, I was quite tuned to this thing.

And then, secondly, the other thing that happened to me was I started to have kids and a family. And, it's very interesting because when you have young kids--and our eldest daughter is just very embodied: she's very, very good at picking up sports, she's very, very physical, and so on and so forth. And, as someone who is always been a professional, clever person in some kind of aspect, it was a bit like, I don't really know what to do with this.

And so, I was mulling over. I was on holiday with her and most of my family on the Isle of Wight, which is a small little island off the South Coast of Britain. And, I was mulling over this question of embodiment whilst watching her play on the beach. And then, I went to the, I think it was the only real cinema on the Isle of Wight, which is in Newport, and watched this Mission Impossible--the final film in the Mission Impossible franchise--Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. And, it all kind of came together, and then there was a frenzied evening where I began to pull it all together.

And so, that's kind of it. It was a combination of technology, my own daughter's physical attributes compared to mine when they were her age--which were dire. And then, Tom Cruise was the spark that lit everything together.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yes, I suppose--

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, no, not at all. Not at all. I remember one of the first interactions I had--so I think about that Stewart Brand, particularly the essay when he's talking about the around-the-world race and the idea of sailing in particular, and sailing is always--and it's interesting because a lot of the books I'll read in my spare time are from the 1950s. There was a very famous British author called Nevil Shute, who is kind of forgotten now. He would always write about useful people, and one of the main--he was obsessed with airplanes, and so on and so forth. I think we will circle back to this in a roundabout way--trust me, trust me, listeners, at some point, back to Shute himself, actually--because he was obsessed with aeroplanes. He was a very famous aeroplane engineer, but he always loved boats as well, and boats and messing around with boats.

And, the idea of being alone on the water and having to be self-sufficient is very attractive. I saw recently, I think it was a post that went viral on Twitter, and it was of someone who is just sailing on their own. They were talking about what they do to make sure that they avoid large ships. So, they're going to sleep and they're waking up every half an hour and checking it. And, it was interesting seeing the comments and stuff, because I think that the act of the body in action is still something that really enthralls us. It's always fascinating with the Winter Olympics have just been, and to see the figure skaters do so well and become so famous. And, in a world where so much is fake, there are these few things that you can't really fake anymore, and they still hold the ability to captivate us.

And so, just to situate the listener in terms of Cruise, what I really was talking about in this essay was this kind of, like, 10 to 15-year period, I would say, of Cruise's work that I would probably begin in the early 2010s, when he moves and situates himself to the United Kingdom and starts to work in particular with Chris McQuarrie. The first film--I think it's called Edge of Tomorrow, in which Cruise basically keeps on--so he keeps on living the same day again and again and again. And, it's really a film essentially about embodied knowledge. So, they have to figure out how to defeat these aliens, and every day he has to learn a little bit more about the world he's in and figure out how to navigate the world and be a little bit more useful in the world. Right?

He starts--he's like an Army PR [Public Relations] guy, basically. And then, so he starts and he lasts about two minutes. He just goes over the plane to the channel and then the aliens kill him. And then, over hundreds and thousands of cycles, he gets better and better and more useful in this world. And, ends up being able to basically use that knowledge that he remembers every day--that no one else knows, no one else understands, only he knows inside him--to be able to solve the problem and defeat the alien menace. And, I think that stayed with them, Cruise certainly, and McQuarrie and their collaborators. And then, that infected, I think in particular, the Mission Impossible franchise.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, that's true. That's true. I imagine if it's me and you, Russ, in this situation: there's no writing in it. You know what I mean? I would be trying to create eight memoirs and stash them in places and--

Aled Maclean-Jones: I'd write on my own body and all that sort of stuff. You know what I mean? But it's very much like, it is the ultimate example of learning by doing, you know what I mean?

And, I think that was certainly--and I think it's interesting as well because, so, he goes on from doing Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise, and you then get basically the first really embodiment inflected, I'd say, Mission Impossible film, which is Rogue Nation, which is the British one. It's like a love letter to Britain. It's a very, very funny film in lots of ways. It has a very fantastic ending at Churchill's birthplace, and there's a very English--I think Tom Hollander plays the British Prime Minister, and he has a digital red box that's going to blow up, and the password is Kipling. The password is Kipling. I remember that. The password is Kipling. But, it's very interesting to see the first scene in that and compare it to the earlier films. So, if I think about the opening of Mission Impossible 2, which is quite a famous opening where he's rock climbing up a [inaudible 00:13:26] back in Utah.

And, it just looks effortless, and he looks like the coolest guy alive, that he's just doing it. It's very, very easy.

And so, in the opening of Rogue Nation, I think, he has to get onto a Russian cargo plane, essentially. And, what I love about it is he gets on this cargo plane--it's actually filmed somewhere in Cambridgeshire or Suffolk or something, and they turn it into Belarus--I think Minsk. Not entirely convincingly, because at this point as well, I think they're beginning to understand people are starting to watch these less for the plot and more for the insane act of Tom Cruise embodiment.

But what I love about it is he gets onto the plane and then he takes off, and there's no style to it at all. It doesn't look stylized at all. His hair is flushing back, and he looks like a skeleton; and then it's coming forward, he looks like he's got a bowl cut.

And, what I always really enjoy about that film in particular, and I suppose what's really going on, is that it's the effort that is being shown. And, it's the fact that this is all happening within the body: that he is just learning how to hold onto a plane on the fly. Because he doesn't jump onto it; and he's perfect. His feet are scrabbling about for the first 10 seconds before he finds the right purchase. There's no ginning up beforehand. There's no idea that he's done this before. The idea is entirely that he's learning as he's doing, and also interestingly with the help of technology.

One thing that's very interesting, and drew me to Cruise, and sets him apart a little bit from other writers who talk about tacit knowledge, is they love a craftsman. They love getting away from the technology and retreating into electronic cottages or into the woods and learning to do things through hands. What I love about these films, and the way that Cruise approaches it in particular, is that he's like, 'Actually, technology can be pretty good. And, just because it has batteries and electric circuits, that's not necessarily a problem.'

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, totally. And, it's always going back to Merleau-Ponty and that classic quote of his, 'Our body is the general medium for having a world.'

And then, I always love the formulation. I think this is Polanyi's formulation, isn't it? He takes it a little further, and the idea that we know more than we can tell: those situations where we are behaving instinctively and applying things that we know but almost can't explain. There's a psychologist, [inaudible 00:17:55] of course, the unknown thought. The thing that we know, but we can never verbalize or never understand. And, I think about this in a few aspects of my own life, you know what I mean? Because I'm trying to be more and more useful.

The first is, I remember I had this period where I was, like, 'I'm going to stop using a satnav,' because I had this head. This is kind of a muscle, you know what I mean? And, I was, like, 'Okay, what I'll do as I--' I was doing some research at the British National Archives, which are down in Southwest London. And so, what I would try and do is, I would drive every day and learn the route. Right? So, instead of using the satnav, I would try and figure out how do I get from my place in Northwest London all the way down to Kew, basically.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. Well, yes, well, I was thinking--

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Google Maps. Google Maps.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, I'm meaning Google Maps. Yeah, because we were just following this route kind of lively. I was like, 'What if I can try and learn this thing myself? And, what happens?'

And, it's very interesting, of course, because there is a little bit of a collective actions thing here, because I always loved how--certainly, this is maybe me, I'm, like, 32. But, certainly my dad would have had very strong views. And, this happens in the United Kingdom in particular where the roads are old. And you've got bits of old Roman road; you've got bits of kind-of wind-y B roads and stuff. People would always have very, very strong views about directions. Right? 'Oh, the best way to get from where I grew up to London, 'Ohm you go this way, you go that way.' And, that's completely gone. And so, I was trying to bring it back, you know what I mean?

And it was very interesting, because you also need the world to be slightly receptive to this because it's not something that we really value. Because the thing that was very interesting was I found a video of the 1990s of someone doing a similar route. And, the signage--there's so much more signage to help you along the way. There's so many more markings.

But of course, now people don't really use the markings, so the markings kind of have eroded away. And, it's difficult because this is something that we can't really explain or we don't really value in our every day. So, when we're thinking about signage and stuff, we're not really prioritizing it. The world has to be slightly hospitable to this kind of, like, style of, 'Okay, I know this,' but I don't really know. Let me learn. The world has to be kind of able to let you learn. It has to be a bit more of a playground than perhaps it is if we're, to take a driving example, just using Google Maps and Waze.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. And, it's interesting as well how it's used as a marketing tool. That's always interesting to me, is this slight--return. You see this a lot particularly in marketing and stuff.

One bit I think I mention in the essay is, Sinners--obviously extraordinarily popular movie last year--and one of the pieces of marketing around it very early on that kind of did really well was just Ryan Coogler talking about film formats. Right?

So, instead of saying, 'Oh, here's what you're going to see in the film,' like,it was a really clever bit of marketing genius of talking about, 'Okay, here are all of the things that have gone in. I'm going to trust you that you're in a safe pair of hands when you're watching this film. And, I'm going to do that, but I want to show you how much I know about the different types of formats and how they work' and they're kind of instructive.

And it's all because obviously, it's a counter to this idea that we have now that everything's being dumbed down. And, actually if you look particularly in films, a lot of the marketing now is around the kind of mind behind--the mind behind the film. And the idea that Christopher Nolan doesn't allow phones on set, is a good example. Or I remember for the Barbie movie there was a 15-minute video of Greta Gerwig talking about the influences of Powell and Pressburger, and so on and so forth, and all of these kind of workings and stuff.

And, I think it's very interesting, with black cabs in particular, there is a bit of--you just feel like this--that's how they get their trust. That's what elevates a cabby above someone in Uber. And, they've really latched onto and led into it.

And, you see that across the board now, because ultimately these feats of embodied knowledge still wow us. I felt myself being wowed watching Ryan Coogler talk about all of these formats. You know what I mean? Because people, we like learning these things, don't we?

Aled Maclean-Jones: Totally. And, I think that's for me where the interest in the more recent Mission Impossible films came from, right? Because I quite liked them early on and I've always liked--but for me, when they decided to take this moment and they were, like--you've got the film itself you're watching and then there's this meta-film that's going on as well, which is just, 'We're just going to do spectacles of skill, and you're going to enjoy and watch these spectacles of skill.' And, you're going to be, 'Oh, it's amazing that Ethan Hunt,' this kind of character, 'is doing that.' But, ultimately when we're watching it, we're really, like, 'I can't believe--how does Tom Cruise do that?'

And obviously, in a sense, it kind of makes for worse films. The film that I focused on, which is the final film, and its predecessor, are the most spectacular films in terms of Cruise's embodiment. But, that comes at the kind of sense of the loss of a plot, I would probably say, particularly the penultimate one, which was Dead Reckoning, which is just essentially several set pieces pulled together with the loosest of threads.

And that's why the best ones are the ones before that. The best one is called Fallout, where it's Tom Cruise versus Henry Cavill. And, that I think has the best blend of an actual plot that they've actually bothered with; but then these incredible, 'Okay, we're going to fly helicopters in New Zealand,' and stuff.

But, yeah, it's very interesting. And, it's interesting with Cruise as well and his approach to stunting; and he essentially is kind of the stunt coordinator for--certainly in the later films, he is the one who is holding the pen[?] on these stunts. And also the kind of safety. He has a lovely catchphrase that he uses that wasn't in the essay, and it's like, 'Don't be safe. Be competent,' which is what he says to the team, basically, of stunt performers he has. And, I think that's a very good example of the way he's thinking about these films, but also his role within them.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, totally, totally. Yeah. And, it's interesting as well because there's the underlying story. Maybe we can talk about the last film itself in a minute. But there's an underlying story here, and you see this a lot with lots of--where he's clearly taken a step back and thought a lot about the craft of acting. It was interesting because I got a few actors literally post-DM me on Instagram after seeing the essay and asking me, was there anything about incorporating it into their own work?

And, it was very interesting because the two bits I point them to--I think Timothée Chalamet basically says what happened when he basically--I think it was after Dune, I think he got in touch with Tom Cruise, and Tom Cruise just sent him essentially his email, and was, like, 'You basically just need to learn all of these attributes if you want to be a lead, if you want to be like a star.'

So, he sent him a Rolodex of his go-to experts in every field. So, he basically said, 'In old Hollywood, you'd be getting dance training and fighting, and no one's going to hold you to that standard today. So, it's up to you.' So, he sent him a motorcycle coach, a helicopter coach. Can you be a helicopter coach? I don't know. And, all of those kind of things. And, I think one of the things that he clearly sees his role as, as the elder statesman Hollywood, is teaching all of these younger actors the importance of craft in a world where, I suppose, you are able to do all of this stuff within a hermetically-sealed studio with a very advanced green screen around you--if that makes sense.

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, totally, totally. Yeah, so maybe that's a good way. I'll talk first maybe about Top Gun: Maverick. This is obviously outside of the Mission Impossible franchise, but Cruise is, I think, probably the most embodiment-heavy, the most, like, 'We're going to blunt[?] you over a cudgel with this kind of embodiment question.' I think the motto in the film they keep saying is, 'Don't think, just do.' Often, it sounds like you're reading Polanyi off the pages.

But, the opening scene is very interesting. The opening scene is: Cruise is a test pilot. So, Maverick has 30 years and he hasn't ascended to be a senator or something, isn't it? [inaudible 00:31:07]

Aled Maclean-Jones: He's just quiet, isn't he? And so, again, a good example of how I think he's living literally in an aircraft hangar with--and it's Tom Cruise's personal, I think, P-51 Mustang there. Again, the idea that the line between Cruise the actor and Cruise the character has completely collapsed at this point. And, it even inflects film.

And then, he's sent to, I presume Groom Lake or somewhere, to test out this highly experimental plane that can go to Mach 10. And, he's set to do Mach 10, isn't he? And then, what happens is, he then goes up and he tests it before the Evil Admiral that loves drones--played by Ed Harris--can stop and gut the project. And, it's this classic thing where you've got Cruise, who is this stick jockey, who has this--there's something about they want to get rid of humans--but Cruise wants to make the argument, and that's where the film makes the argument in the first 10 minutes for humans being useful.

And, it's very interesting to think about that scene and the history of that scene, going to your point, Russ, about peril. That scene is a copy of--it's inspired by a scene in The Right Stuff, which is a film based on the Tom Wolfe book about pilots testing to be astronauts. And of course, The Right Stuff is the ultimate example of things that the we--the whole point of The Right Stuff is you can't write down but you know it, and you have to learn it. And, the way Wolfe talks about it, it's a pyramid, isn't it, for the pilots? So, that they just have to do all of these tests to be able to see whether they have the right stuff, but they can never know it or write it down because it's simply implicit knowledge.

And then, that scene is based on an earlier scene, which is a David Lean film called The Sound Barrier, which is from 1946, which is about test pilots at that point who were trying to break the sound barrier. And, the reason it's Mach 10 in the Tom Cruise film is because it's always 10, because 10 was what the gauge was when you were going supersonic.

And, that was an incredibly lethal period of history, right? So, I think it was something like 42 test pilots died trying to reach the sound barrier basically, in the period directly after World War II, because it was incredibly dangerous. They essentially were flying, in Britain anyway--I think in America they were a little bit more enlightened--but in Britain, certainly they were just taking Spitfires, World War II planes, and you would fly them very high and then dive them down. And, the idea was that you would be able to dive a certain speed, you could go supersonic.

But, of course, the plane would shake itself apart. So, the original story, the original pilot who did this and died, was very famous--was a guy called Geoffrey de Havilland Jr, who was the son of the main aerospace engineer, who is called Geoffrey de Havilland Sr. And, his son was the test pilot and his son died. Quite literally, the plane broke apart. They found his body a couple of days later in one of the estuaries. And, that was what inspired Lean to basically create these sequences in The Sound Barrier. That sequence then became the sequence where Chuck Yeager breaks the supersonic barrier in The Right Stuff. And then, that becomes a sequence in the beginning of this film. But, we've got Tom Cruise, but it's almost--and going back to your point about peril, it's like Geoffrey de Havilland Jr's death is reverberating and being relived again and again and again.

And, it's updated for every generation. The Sound Barrier, it's for the World War II generation, post-World War II generation. In The Right Stuff, it's for the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s crowd.

And now, for a whole new generation, de Havilland's death is being recreated again by Cruise in order to thrill us, because it's that sense of peril that happened to Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. when he got into his cockpit that I think Cruise is trying to recreate. And of course, at the end of that scene at the beginning of Top Gun: Maverick, the plane breaks apart, right? And we think he's going to die, but he doesn't die because he's Tom Cruise obviously, and it would kind of ruin the entire film. But, that idea, linking it to the idea of peril and how much that enthralls us, I think is definitely at the heart of these kind of films.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think that's definitely right that there are these two sides of it. There's the romanticization of it, and that can go in several directions, I think, then, that begin to cause problems. One of the reasons why I'm very attracted to the more recent Cruise films is their treatment of technology. So, one way is you see a rejection of technology entirely, and the idea that it would all be better if we were back--if the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened, that's one way that I think you see a more negative side of it. And then, this kind of lionization of essentially slightly ridiculous situations, and you can see where that leads.

I think for me, what I always find really interesting is that ultimately what's really going on, I suppose, in these films, is that they're taking embodied competence to the nth degree, aren't they? So, in the Mission Impossible film I wrote about, you essentially have, there's this evil AI called The Entity--very enjoyably named--that is taking over all of the nuclear arsenals of the world. And, Cruise and company have to kind of go offline in order to defeat the AI and its cronies, who are all completely useless, because all they basically do is they just point guns at people and tell them what to do. And then, you have this incredible fantasia of competence where they're flying--I think it's a Douglas DC-3--they're flying it, very old, the kind of plane that Indiana Jones flies. And, they are doing navigating by compass and they're using secret codes, and all of this sort of stuff.

And then, I think the most ridiculous at the beginning is, I think Ving Rhames is soldering a hard drive. There's some good soldering. Tom Cruise loves a solder. They love soldering in Mission Impossible. They're always soldering. Everyone's got a soldering iron somewhere. And, he solders a pen drive and hacks and figures out this way to defeat it himself in his own brain in an underground hospital room in London. And, I suppose the point I think is--it's all done with a bit of a wink and a nudge[?], isn't it? In a sense that it's taken to the nth degree to start to make us think a little bit more about what's the equivalent of the satnav [satellite navigation], the being-without-Waze, and so on and so forth? Because, by showing us the most embodied person of all time playing the most embodied figure as well, you begin to see some of the softer sides of what makes it good as well.

So, the ones I think about, one is--it's interesting, isn't it? Ethan Hunt, Cruise's character, is very different to action heroes, because the films always begin with something going wrong. And, he never knows--there's never any plan. So, it's not like with James Bond, where things go wrong but it's normally because people haven't listened to Bond. Bond kind of knows what's going on. He's seen the source code and knows what's going on. Hunt has got what Keats would call negative--he's got loads of negative capability. Right? He's got this feeling inside him that no matter what happens, it'll all turn out for the best.

And so, this obviously goes to a ridiculous scene where he goes to see the President of the United States. And, they're like, 'Well, we're going to basically nuke the rest of the world in order to stop the [inaudible 00:42:26] ourselves.' And, he's, like, 'Oh, well, no, or you can just hand the key that does it to me.' 'What's your plan?' 'Oh no, I don't have a plan. You can just trust me.' You know what I mean?

And, that sense of negative capability, obviously is--we can't all have that sense of negative capability. I would definitely be the first in that situation to be, like, 'Yeah, I wouldn't[?] trust me. I'd probably just nuke the rest of the world.' But, I think that that's one element of what does usefulness give you, because it's not really--and in itself, I think one thing is it does give you a sense of, 'All right.' It makes you less neurotic. 'Whatever will happen, things are kind of going to be all right.'

So, that's the one thing I think about.

The second as well is: If in our own lives we don't see many, many embodied acts of skill or feats or anything, then we in ourselves will forget them.

So, I always love J.G. Ballard, because often in his works and his short stories, you have these characters who are so at one with the machine or at one with the image or the representation, they forget they in themselves have their own bodies. And, it was interesting because when you were talking about those moments when life and death happens--like, when I think about embodiment, I actually think only about one thing really. I don't think about war or anything. I think about having children. Like, the act of childbirth. For me, that is the ultimate bodily act. And, it's interesting when you think about when there's life and death--my wife just had her third child last week. And we live our lives: so, at the moment there's a one in gazillion chance of me dying on this Zoom call. But, when you go into a labor ward, that number, those odds change and you feel it. You really feel it in the--you feel it. Okay, fine. We're to several thousand. And, you think--that's a jump that you feel.

And, the fact that we are able to see these feats of embodiment then makes you much more used to these things that are to come, because it's such a strange and alien and incredibly embodying thing to witness something like childbirth and stuff. To see that on any scale, someone doing something amazing with their body, I think makes us more used to these things. You know what I mean? [More to come, 44:51]

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, yeah, and I think that was what was so interesting to me about childbirth, is no matter how it's done, like, as a man, someone who can't do it and experience it, and in a world where, in a sense, it doesn't--if it's natural, if it's [inaudible 00:47:48], however it happens, in a sense, if it's there, however it happens, it's this incredibly bodily thing. You know what I mean? As a man, you just kind of watch it and you're just, like, 'Oh, my body can't do--.' It's something that you are confronted with the limits of your own body instantly. You know what I mean? You're, like, 'Well, there we are.' And, you can understand how it's something that's slightly beyond the rational--I find it anyway. I definitely understand how 300, 400 years ago, if you were a bloke and you were outside and whatever, and you could hear all that going on and see that, and it's beyond rational explanation.

I can't remember who it was who said it, but the idea that--I think it might be Sheila Heti or somebody--but the idea if it wasn't such a patriarchal society, the dominant philosophical question would be essentially whether or not to have a child here. That would be the dominant--rather than to be or not to be or anything like that. That was the stuff that men, that we kind of made up to make up for our inability to do this sort of stuff.

I think that goes into the broader point of this question of alienation. I think the question around screens and so on, it was generally framed in terms of attentiveness and questions and our concentration spans, and so on and so forth. And, it's always interesting to me when I'm very deeply in a scroll or something, or monitoring the situation, how quickly I forget my own body exists.

And, that, for me, is almost the thing I personally in my own life worry about, is that question of alienation: is that I'm just less and less in touch in my own body. I'm just, personally, am someone who could talk a good game on Ryle and Merleau-Ponty, and really, I could stick it to Cartesian dualism any day of the week. But the way I actually live my life--and I've lived my life majorly--is as a brain on a vat, you know what I mean? Where I'm just fueling the brain with content and writing and reading and stuff, while I'm not paying that much attention to my own body and stuff.

And so, I think that for me was that question of alienation. And, I think in a sense that also begins to move us towards a slightly more nuanced view of AI as well, because the one thing I have really enjoyed doing that has been quite embodying in my own life over the last six months, I've been doing a lot more around the house. And, that has kind of been because AI is a very good tool when it comes to helping you being a handyman and instructions. Our toilet seat broke and I was like, 'Damn it, I'm going to fix the toilet seat.' You know what I mean? And, there was just all of this trial and error, and it was a bit like Cruise getting on the Airbus A400--

Aled Maclean-Jones: I think I got through two or three toilet seats because I ordered the wrong one every time, because I was like, 'I don't want someone to come in and tell me how to do this.' So, I ordered two wrong toilet seats. The wrong screws twice as well. It turns out the people who lived in this flat before us had some very niche Italian toilet manufacturer. So, I did it myself and I wanted to do it myself, and I find AI very helpful there.

And, I think that's what's very important as well, is it's not a situation where AI instinctively means turning your brain off. It's not so much about the technology, for me anyway: it's about the way that you use it. You can use any technology to--in the same way there's a difference between going--I've got TV right here, going and watching, I don't know--yeah, a Powell and Pressburger film or something, and watching something completely mindless on YouTube. The same way with AI. If I get it to write an essay for me, then that's obviously going to be disembodying. But, if I ask it to be my handyman friend and tell me how to put this plug into the toilets, the toilet seat fix is, that's a good thing. And, beginning to think that's why I like embodiment so much, is it allows us to start to think in a more textured way about technology.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Exactly. Exactly, yeah. I'm just like, comparative, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you weren't using--exactly.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, it's interesting. It seems to me the trend is towards this almost symbolism, isn't it? You know what I mean? They become symbolic, and I suppose that's what's so interesting, isn't it?

It really goes back to your point about the linking it to peril, you know what I mean? And, that Cruise is learning to--these people will be learning to do these things with planes and so on and so forth, because it was very, very dangerous; and they were trying to push the frontiers, and so on and so on.

And now, essentially, it's symbolic. Tom Cruise is an extraordinarily accomplished pilot and stuntman, but it's to entertain. It's almost the concept of the stunt in that going from, okay, I'm in a position where I'm going to physically fight because I have to be good at physically fighting, to: I'm going to physically fight in order to entertain people.

And, I think that it's this kind of idea of stunt culture. And you can see it as well. Sports is obviously the other arena of this, isn't it, where you have these extraordinarily talented physical athletes? And, what has been going on now is that you have athletes who are doing physical acts. And, the reason they get paid so much, and so on, in sport is for entertainment.

And so, the question, I suppose is, where people can differ on it is this world of where all physical movement is almost in a sense, a stunt. Is it one where we can do without it or is it one where there is something valuable in it? Is there a value to Cruise doing these things on the screen, or Josh Allen throwing a football for 70 yards, or is it just something that we will lose and that we can just wave goodbye to? I think that there's a value to it even on the symbolic level because it shows us the virtues of it and we can apply it to our everyday lives, I suppose. But, I can see how people could argue the other way as well.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. And, I suppose as well, also it's about thinking about our definition being different about what is a spectacle of skill?

So, a good example here is Cruise. Cruise, when they were filming Top Gun: Maverick, set up kind of this school, and they were all taught how to do all of these kind of--and how useful it was that they could do all of this stuff, but they were around--not flying a fighter jet, but around being able to just behave whilst they're flying and know what they're doing, and so on and so forth.

And, one of the people, of course, in the film, is Monica Barbero, who plays one of the pilots. It's very interesting because she then went on to play--she was in the Bob Dylan film, I think. I can't remember which one it was. But, yeah, I think it is, yeah. The Bob Dylan film with Timothée Chalamet in it, essentially. And, she had never played guitar or sung in her life before. And, this might be apocryphal, but I think what happens is, of course she then gets offered the role. And I think she goes to Cruise. I think she may go to Cruise or something, and he's like, 'Well, just learn.' And then, she learns. And, watching her sing as Joan Baez in that film is absolutely incredible. It's an amazing spectacle of skill and one that you are, like, 'Oh my God, how has she done that?' You know what I mean?

And so, I think also it's about expanding our definition as to what spectacles of skill are. You know what I mean? Because obviously, the act of acting in itself is a spectacle still. When people are watching Hamnet and enjoying Hamnet so much, they're enjoying Jessie Buckley's ability just to act the thing she's asked to act. Again, it's almost like Cruise, isn't it, in a sense? In that, often when we are seeing actors do really amazing things, we are also marveling at the acting. And, I certainly felt I was doing that at some points in Hamnet, for example. I was like, 'Okay, Shakespeare or whatever, the film's gone, I'm just watching this person act on screen and being completely blown away by it.'

So, yeah, I think probably for men it's just that we have this massive neurosis about it. I do really love that Arnold Schwarzenegger book being called Be Useful, because I think he doesn't realize, but he's sort of stumbled upon the nature of the male condition rather than--it's less like a self-help guide, more just a rumination on the male condition and the desire that we all have to try and be useful as men and stuff.

But also, it doesn't have to be warfare-based, as well. My other favorite spectacle of skill last year was The Rehearsal, which was a comedy show in which Nathan Field--who is a comedian--it's about flying. It's about the act of flying and the act of flight, and so on and so forth. And then, it's all building up to the climax. Russ, have you seen it?

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, yeah, so the climax is that he basically reveals that he's been secretly learning to pilot a 747, and he can do this. And again, it's just so discombobulating, because we put people in boxes: The idea you can be a comedian and also an airline pilot, like, what is going on there? And then, he flies a packed plane of people. He takes off and he flies and goes back down. And, obviously it has the whole strange level of it. But, again, the fact is simply that you have to watch this because it's somebody doing something, this kind of spectacle of skill in a way that--and it's not really about warfare or anything like that. It's just simply active embodied knowledge, whether it's--like Alysa Liu, the figure skater who has just gone completely stratospheric because of the Winter Olympics. I think that men, I think, agonize over it, but I think a spectacle of skill is an equal game. I think both women and men can--everybody is impressive in different ways, but what has stayed the same is how attracted and allured we are to them. Even more so because they're rarer now. They're rarer now, because we don't see these incredible spectacles in our everyday life. And so, they are so enthralling, and I think they will just carry on being more and more enthralling to us.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, it's true, it's true. I think you can be completely agnostic as to whether it will or not without denigrating the value of it in its own right, I suppose. It's what drew me to watchmaking, as well.

But, it's just very interesting to see how that plays out. Because it could go in an interaction. It's very striking. My wife's family are all very clever people, big podcast listeners and stuff, professional, clever people. And, her youngest brother just became a mechanic. Never went to university and stuff. And, if you think about the anxieties that the rest of my wife's family are facing, you know what I mean, about, 'Will knowledge completely automate us away and we're going to become very useless?' I mean, I think Toby wanted to move to another garage and it took him about two days, got five job offers, off you go. You know what I mean?

And so, whether it ends up being this sting in the tail and we end up with this return to the body--which I'm not really arguing in favor of because I think it's too early to tell. But some people certainly are. But, whatever it is, I just think that there's something in each of us that's very useful. I find it anyway, from whether it's being able to thinking about driving rather than just blithely lively follow Google Maps, or fix toilets, or drill. Or again, yeah, drill my wife out of the toilet when the door bolt got seized. And, I remember, obviously this is the most pathetic male thing ever, but yeah, pulling it out and feeling so proud. And, I think I've still got the door bolt somewhere. It's actually next to the wedding ring, which makes me sound like a fictional character. So, that kind of line writes itself, basically.

But, yeah, I think where I was coming from, it was just with my own struggles and watching it done on a cosmically, comically overblown scale. And then, thinking about, 'Okay, well, I'm never going to be able to ride a motorbike. I'm never going to be able to jump out of a plane. I never want to jump out of a plane. But, how can I take some of this stuff for myself?'

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, no, totally. Totally. Yeah. No, totally. So, I think it's one of those things where I think about, there's a Norwegian writer called Karl Ove Knausgård, who just did this series of books about his own life. And, his life is completely mundane as they come. It's nappies and going to rhythm time and stuff. And, like, Jeremy Strong, the actor, is a big disciple of him. You know what I mean? I think he once did--GQ [Gentleman's Quarterly] asked him to do this thing where celebrities, they come out and they do their, 'Things I can't live without.' And, they're meant to say, 'My phone. My lip balm.' And, Jerry [Jeremy] Strong gets out this copy of Knausgård and he looks very seriously at the camera, and he says ultimately, 'What Knausgård reminds us by showing his life in so much detail, is that there are no small moments.' And, I think that's definitely true.

I think it's not what Cruise is thinking about when he's jumping out of a plane on fire or something and plummeting to earth and being beckoned by shepherds in probably one of the many religious overtones in that film. But it's something I think about anyway.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Russ, thanks so much. Absolute pleasure as always.

David Epstein: It's wonderful to be back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Epstein: That's correct, yeah.

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

David Epstein: That's right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Epstein: Of the 19th century?

David Epstein: Clausewitz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Epstein: That's right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Epstein: So, people end up eating more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Epstein: It does.

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

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

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

David Epstein: It'd have no meaning--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Epstein: The voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can I ask you a question?

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

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

Gary Belsky: Oh, yeah.

Gary Belsky: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Belsky: Four times 18. Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Belsky: Oh, wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Belsky: And, it's extraordinary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Belsky: Yeah.

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

Gary Belsky: Yeah, correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Belsky: Yeah.

Gary Belsky: Care--

Gary Belsky: They don't care.

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

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

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

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

Gary Belsky: I got it.

Gary Belsky: That's a problem. Yeah.

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

Gary Belsky: Or just disregard to a spouse.

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

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

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

Gary Belsky: Thanks for having me, Russell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Ball: That would be the idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Ball: Yes.

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

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

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

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

Dean Ball: Well--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Ball: Yes.

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

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

Dean Ball: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Ball: At this point.

Dean Ball: Sure.

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

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

Dean Ball: But, that's interesting--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Ball: Yeah--

Dean Ball: Totally--

Dean Ball: Yeah--

Dean Ball: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Ball: they'd be appalled!

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

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

Dean Ball: It's cold comfort.

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

And, once you start asking that question--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Ball: Thank you, Russ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ross Levine: It's a tough question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ross Levine: It is--

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

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

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

Ross Levine: Absolutely. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ross Levine: I don't know.

Ross Levine: How can you not love this guy?

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

Ross Levine: Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ross Levine: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Witt: Mm-hmm.

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

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

Stephen Witt: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Witt: Thank you so much, Russ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: Wow--

Stewart Brand: Wow--

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

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

Stewart Brand: Good word.

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

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

Stewart Brand: Oh, my goodness--

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: in 1968.

Stewart Brand: Oh, okay, nonetheless.

Stewart Brand: Oh, yeah--

Stewart Brand: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: Assault rifle, yeah--

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: Wow.

Stewart Brand: Is that right?

Stewart Brand: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: Right--

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: Yeah, yeah--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: Right--

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: Good--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: The Beginning of Infinity--

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

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

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

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

Stewart Brand: Oh, good. Thank you.

Stewart Brand: Delightful to spend time with you.