The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


Grappling With Life's ＂Wild Problems＂


Episode Stats

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

6


Summary

In his new book, "Wild Problems," economist Russ Roberts explains why the typical, pros and cons approach to decision-making is woefully inadequate for grappling with life's biggest decisions, like figuring out whether to get married or how to live a meaningful life.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:11.060 As an economist, Russ Roberts has been taught to approach decision-making by conducting an analysis,
00:00:15.840 weighing trade-offs, and then rationally budgeting resources to get the most bang for his buck.
00:00:19.980 But as he explains in his new book, Wild Problems, a guide to the decisions that define us,
00:00:24.760 he found this approach woefully inadequate for grappling with life's biggest decisions.
00:00:28.940 Things like figuring out whether to get married or how to live a meaningful life.
00:00:32.640 Today on the show, Russ and I delve into why the pros and cons approach to decision-making is deficient when facing what he calls wild problems.
00:00:39.120 Russ explains that what makes life's big decisions so difficult to deal with is the fact that we don't know what they'll be like before we make them.
00:00:44.840 The decisions themselves will transform us into different people, and their effects can be permanent.
00:00:49.580 Making such decisions akin to choosing to become a vampire.
00:00:52.880 From there, we turn to strategies for dealing with the inherent uncertainty around wild problems,
00:00:56.380 including looking beyond basic happiness, considering tradition, and trying things out by experience.
00:01:01.920 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash wildproblems.
00:01:17.960 Russ Roberts, welcome back to the show.
00:01:20.000 Great to be back.
00:01:20.820 So we had you on several years ago to discuss your book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life.
00:01:26.440 You are an economist, so you spend a lot of your time thinking about how people make decisions and how to make the best decisions.
00:01:34.760 When economists typically think about decision-making, do they have an idea of what an optimal approach to decision-making is?
00:01:41.320 Sure, because we have assumed away all the hard parts of the problem.
00:01:46.960 When economists study decision-making, they assume that we as human beings know what we want and what we like.
00:01:54.160 And then it's just a question of making sure that we pick the things that we like the most, given how much they cost.
00:01:59.200 So if something's really expensive, we might not want as much of it if it's less expensive.
00:02:05.560 If we already have a bunch of it, we might not want more of it as much as if we started with very little of it.
00:02:10.680 So the 12th ice cream cone isn't as thrilling as the second or even the first.
00:02:16.180 And that's the economics way in general of thinking about decisions.
00:02:21.700 We have a set of what economists call preferences.
00:02:25.120 We care about – we have a certain amount of income.
00:02:27.040 We can't have everything we want.
00:02:28.300 And then the question is, how do we spend our scarce income and our scarce time to get the most out of life?
00:02:34.620 And that sounds pretty reasonable.
00:02:36.520 Right.
00:02:36.700 So it's all about tradeoffs.
00:02:37.860 I think we've all done that when you bought a vacuum cleaner or a car.
00:02:41.300 Or I think, well, you know, if I get the upgraded package on this car, well, it's going to cost me a little bit more money.
00:02:47.440 But I think in the long term, I'll enjoy that more.
00:02:49.840 Or sometimes I say, well, I'm not going to get that upgraded package.
00:02:52.220 I'll save some money.
00:02:53.000 I can use that money somewhere else.
00:02:55.040 Exactly.
00:02:56.000 Well, so this can work for a lot of decisions when you know what you want and the cost benefits of something.
00:03:02.480 But you say there's a species of decisions where this typical utilitarian economic approach to decision-making doesn't work.
00:03:10.340 And these are called wild problems.
00:03:12.680 What are some examples of wild problems?
00:03:14.540 And why doesn't the typical economic decision-making process work for them?
00:03:20.440 Well, in life, we're constantly making decisions where we're not really 100% sure how much we're going to like the choice we make, right?
00:03:27.280 If I've eaten mint chocolate chip ice cream 50 times, the 51st time, I'm pretty sure what I'm getting myself into.
00:03:34.540 If I've never been married, it's a little bit hard, right?
00:03:38.280 And so I call wild problems problems where analytical methods and rationality the way we usually define it don't help so much, where there's very little data.
00:03:49.520 We don't have an algorithm or an easy way to make the best decision.
00:03:52.960 And these are problems like whether to get married, who to marry, whether to have children, how many children to have, what kind of career you should choose, where you should live, and even questions that are a little more vague.
00:04:07.500 How much time should I spend on friendship?
00:04:09.840 Should I be more self-centered?
00:04:11.540 Should I tell my friends I'm busy tonight so I can work on that report and do better in my career?
00:04:15.940 A lot of these kind of decisions are very different than the economist's decision of, you know, what kind of ice cream to buy or whether to take a vacation to the mountains versus the beach.
00:04:25.420 We have a lot of information about both myself and the choice I'm going to make and how it's going to make me feel when I'm done.
00:04:31.940 These other kind of choices, these what I call wild problems, I'm not sure how I feel about them.
00:04:37.220 In fact, once I make the choice, I might be a very different person.
00:04:41.560 I just had my first grandchild.
00:04:43.920 I didn't have my first grandchild.
00:04:45.320 My first grandchild just arrived in the world.
00:04:47.460 I was kind of surprised at how I felt when I held her in my arms.
00:04:51.880 I knew something about having children, but grandchildren I thought about differently until I had one, and then I realized it's not quite the same as I expected.
00:05:00.440 That's certainly true of marriage.
00:05:01.800 It's true of children.
00:05:02.880 It's often true of a career choice or where you live.
00:05:05.420 You think you have an idea of what's going on.
00:05:08.360 Now, you're always going to be surprised.
00:05:10.100 You can't know exactly how things are going to turn out, but it's more than that.
00:05:14.140 You're going to be a different person.
00:05:16.220 So how you feel about the things that happen to you are also changing.
00:05:20.880 So it's not just, oh, wow, I didn't expect that.
00:05:23.720 It's how I feel about that is now different.
00:05:26.620 And that, I think, is one of the challenges of making rational decisions and facing these kind of problems.
00:05:32.100 We don't exactly know what we're getting into.
00:05:34.420 And once we get into it, we're different people, which raises the question of who we want to be.
00:05:40.560 So I argue that the right way to think about these problems, a big part of it is once you realize you're going to be different, you now start thinking about what kind of person do I want to be?
00:05:50.160 Do I want to be a parent?
00:05:51.380 Do I want to be a spouse?
00:05:52.980 Do I want to be this kind of career, an economist or a lawyer?
00:05:55.940 How is that going to, that identity, how is that going to make me feel?
00:06:01.360 And those are hard questions.
00:06:03.500 Okay, there's a lot to unpack here, and I hope we can hit on this.
00:06:05.840 So wild problems, it sounds like wild problems are the really important decisions.
00:06:10.800 Like that's the importance of who to marry, if to get married, whether to have kids, where to live.
00:06:15.800 It's not buying a vacuum cleaner.
00:06:17.980 Yeah.
00:06:18.820 And so that causes us a lot of anxiety because it's not a secret that they're important.
00:06:23.280 And one reason they're important is they have lots of ramifications for how we're going to feel and live and what we're going to experience.
00:06:30.040 Of course, the other reason they're important is they're hard to reverse.
00:06:33.040 You don't like the vacuum cleaner, you can usually send it back.
00:06:35.680 You can send back a romantic spouse or a partner, but it's not as the same kind of experience.
00:06:41.840 And so there's a lot more at stake, and that puts a lot more anxiety on us, and it puts a lot of pressure on us to make that decision well.
00:06:50.180 And we start looking around, like, how do I, oh, I need more data.
00:06:54.540 That's a great thing to do when I'm trying to buy a product and I say, I need to look at some reviews.
00:07:00.380 I don't look at reviews for my spouse.
00:07:03.520 I have to look at reviews for what it's like to have a kid, given that I'm going to feel differently once I have a kid.
00:07:09.640 And not just that, most of the aspects of being a parent are not easily described in a paragraph review on, say, Amazon.
00:07:18.040 So it's a very different set of pressure and anxiety.
00:07:22.760 I think it's particularly problematic in the modern era where a lot of the decisions that people make, they didn't used to be decisions.
00:07:30.000 It wasn't a decision to get married.
00:07:31.080 Everybody got married if they could.
00:07:32.960 Now it's a choice, having a kid.
00:07:35.260 Everybody would have kids who could.
00:07:36.660 But now it's like, oh, should I bring a kid into the world?
00:07:39.620 Am I going to like being a parent?
00:07:41.580 So I think people today are in a very different set of experiences and choices than in past generations.
00:07:49.100 I think it's a lot harder.
00:07:50.860 So with wild problems, you can't use the typical rational utility approach to deciding.
00:07:55.040 But you highlight people who have tried to do that, tried to solve these wild problems using rubrics and checklists and things.
00:08:03.940 And one of these guys was a famous guy, Darwin.
00:08:07.560 Darwin was trying to figure out whether to get married.
00:08:10.060 And the typical scientist he was, he decided to make a list.
00:08:13.640 How'd that work out for Darwin?
00:08:15.700 Not so well.
00:08:16.900 He was 29 years old.
00:08:18.940 And he thought, well, you know, maybe it's time to settle down.
00:08:21.160 He made a list of the pros and the cons of getting married.
00:08:24.520 The pros, the benefits of marriage were quite few.
00:08:28.880 And they weren't very exciting.
00:08:31.580 At one point, he said, it's better than a dog, anyway, to have a wife at home waiting for you for what he calls female chit-chat.
00:08:40.160 It's not Darwin's best moment, unfortunately.
00:08:44.220 So he makes this list.
00:08:45.920 The positives, you know, female company, somebody to talk to, they're not very many of those.
00:08:53.200 And then the costs, there's a lot of them.
00:08:55.660 She might not want to live in London.
00:08:57.080 I might have to move out of London.
00:08:59.060 She's going to have relatives I'm going to have to spend time with.
00:09:01.480 I'm not going to be able to do my work.
00:09:03.180 I'm going to have to spend time with her.
00:09:05.260 I'm going to have kids, probably.
00:09:07.460 And if we have kids, some of them could die.
00:09:09.760 That's going to be really hard on me.
00:09:11.160 I know emotionally I'm going to be a wreck all the time.
00:09:13.700 So he's worried about all the negatives.
00:09:15.340 And he makes the list.
00:09:16.720 The negatives are very numerous.
00:09:18.440 And the first thing I point out about that, that's the first thing.
00:09:20.500 The negatives outweigh the positives.
00:09:21.900 So in theory, the rational choice is clear.
00:09:24.820 Don't get married.
00:09:25.460 And yet Darwin decides to marry.
00:09:28.420 And so I'm interested in this question.
00:09:30.880 Why did he make this leap into the dark, even though his so-called rational approach said he shouldn't?
00:09:37.920 And, you know, I suggest that there are more things in life than the day-to-day pluses and minuses that he was able to imagine in advance before he married.
00:09:49.280 There's some ethereal, higher-level aspects of purpose and meaning that he was aware of.
00:09:55.260 He didn't write them down.
00:09:56.880 He didn't write down anything about a shared life with another person.
00:10:00.580 He didn't write anything about love.
00:10:02.140 He didn't write anything about the benefits of making a sacrifice for another person.
00:10:07.300 He just looked at the sacrifice.
00:10:09.000 It's all about him.
00:10:10.280 And that's reasonable before you get married, because before you get married, you're the only person you think about.
00:10:14.480 Once you get married, especially if you have children, all of a sudden, there's more to think about.
00:10:18.560 Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that.
00:10:20.440 So it's not like he made an irrational choice by marrying anyway.
00:10:26.120 It's that the things that naturally come to mind when you're trying to make a rational choice in the face of these well problems, they're not necessarily the most important things.
00:10:36.040 I use the metaphor of the person looking under the lamppost for the lost keys.
00:10:40.160 You know, a person can't find their keys in their car, and they're looking under this lamppost late at night.
00:10:45.120 Somebody comes along to help them, and they're looking too, and they can't find them.
00:10:49.040 And finally, the helper says, did you lose him here?
00:10:51.700 Yeah, I'm not sure, but this is where the light's the best.
00:10:54.240 And I think that's a very common seduction when we make decisions in the face of uncertainty.
00:11:02.140 We look at the things that are in the light, the things that we can see.
00:11:05.260 If you're not married, what do you see with marriage and children?
00:11:08.620 Well, a lot of, I've described them as can'ts, things I can't do once I'm married, things I can't do once I have children.
00:11:16.400 The real benefits are much harder to describe, much harder to imagine before you experience them.
00:11:22.440 It's a very different kind of calculus.
00:11:25.900 So to think you have control of it mentally, I'll just make a pro-con list, a benefit-cost analysis.
00:11:32.220 It's just a little bit, you're likely to mislead yourself.
00:11:35.080 I'm not saying it can't be done.
00:11:36.400 But it's just difficult to do.
00:11:39.380 And so what I'm trying to do in this book is remind people what else is at stake besides the obvious day-to-day costs of our decisions and the day-to-day benefit.
00:11:47.800 Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest insights I took from this book that I really, I've been thinking a lot about, is when you have these wild problems, it's hard to make the decision because you don't realize how you're going to change when you make the decision.
00:11:59.620 And use this analogy, someone talks about the decision to become a vampire.
00:12:03.720 Well, you can't make that decision because you've never been a vampire, so you don't know what it's like to be a vampire.
00:12:09.800 And maybe you like, will like being a vampire, or maybe you won't.
00:12:12.720 So the only way you can find that is actually to do it.
00:12:16.620 Exactly. And that comes from a philosopher, L.A. Hall is her name.
00:12:21.420 She wrote a book called Transformative Experiences, and it's about having children, decisions like we're talking about.
00:12:27.520 And she uses this metaphor of a vampire, and it's kind of silly, but it's actually not that different in that you don't know what it's going to be like.
00:12:36.740 And once you've made the leap, you feel very differently than you did beforehand.
00:12:40.820 Although I do make the point, most of us would say, well, being a vampire doesn't sound like a very moral thing to do.
00:12:47.260 And using your ethics or principles or morality is another way you can make some of these decisions in life when it's not clear what the best thing to do is for your happiness.
00:12:56.860 You know, in some sense, one of the themes of this book is that happiness is overrated, and we naturally are going to pursue the more obvious pleasures, and we're obviously going to try to avoid the most obvious pains.
00:13:11.260 Subtler things, say, what it's like to live a life as a parent or what it's like to live a life as a husband or wife, those are things you don't have much access to.
00:13:22.340 The people who do have access to them, the people who are already married, the people who have children, either can't talk about it well or they don't want to talk about it.
00:13:29.860 They're uncomfortable.
00:13:31.360 So it's natural, if you're thinking about being a vampire, to ask vampires, say, hey, what's it like?
00:13:36.100 You like it?
00:13:36.980 Yeah, boy, it's great.
00:13:38.360 You know, I'm out at night all the time, and you live forever.
00:13:40.920 Can't beat it.
00:13:42.040 So that's one way to get information, is to ask the people or to do a survey.
00:13:46.020 But part of the problem with that is that it's a very rich set of experiences that follow once you marry or have children or choose a particular career or live in an unusual or interesting place.
00:14:00.320 Let's say you're trying to decide where to live.
00:14:02.500 Oh, it's not just, oh, I like it.
00:14:04.860 It's complicated.
00:14:05.940 It's nuanced.
00:14:07.100 It's multifaceted.
00:14:08.860 And so to boil it down to, yeah, it's fun.
00:14:10.620 I like it, is, I think, missing a huge part of what makes life worth living.
00:14:14.520 We care about a lot more than just, yeah, it's pleasant.
00:14:17.660 We care about meaning.
00:14:19.020 We care about purpose.
00:14:20.480 And these choices, these wild problems, have a whole overarching aspect to them that suffuses our days and doesn't just say, oh, that was a good day or that was a bad day.
00:14:32.080 You know, I make the point in the book that it very well could be the case that as a parent, there are more bad days than good days.
00:14:38.700 Does that mean it's irrational to be a parent?
00:14:41.100 For me, it hasn't been.
00:14:42.420 I don't know if it's true.
00:14:43.420 I didn't count those days every day.
00:14:45.120 I said, oh, that was a good one.
00:14:45.820 That was a bad one.
00:14:46.620 I didn't keep track.
00:14:47.920 But there were a lot of tough days, and there still are.
00:14:50.120 Parenting is a very powerful experience.
00:14:53.540 But my suggestion in the book is you don't have kids because it's fun.
00:14:56.660 You don't have kids because there are more good days than bad days.
00:14:59.980 You have kids because it adds meaning to your life.
00:15:02.420 You have kids because it's a crucial part of being a human being.
00:15:06.200 It's part of the human experience.
00:15:07.440 You have kids to understand your parents and your own relationship to the human enterprise.
00:15:13.780 You don't have to do this as fun.
00:15:15.080 And you don't even just do it because it's more pleasure than pain.
00:15:17.460 It's not just adding up.
00:15:19.140 Much more complicated than that.
00:15:20.500 And I think economists and others who look at standard rational techniques are missing
00:15:25.720 something when they try to apply them to these wild problems.
00:15:29.060 Okay.
00:15:29.240 So instead of focusing on the standard techniques to make a decision, you say a better rubric
00:15:33.440 to help you make these decisions for wild problems is figure out what it means to live
00:15:38.400 a flourishing life.
00:15:39.560 And this is borrowing from Aristotle and his Nicomachean Ethics.
00:15:43.200 Have you figured out any ways to hone in on what it means to live a flourishing life?
00:15:49.740 Like, how do you know if like, okay, being married is part of my flourishing life.
00:15:53.080 How do you know that?
00:15:54.860 Yeah.
00:15:55.040 For other people, it might not be.
00:15:56.460 I give the example in the book of Kafka.
00:15:59.580 Kafka, the writer, makes a pro-con list like Darwin, and he decides not to marry.
00:16:04.560 And for Kafka, being a great writer was an important part of flourishing.
00:16:08.620 And he was afraid, as was Darwin, that if he chose to marry, he might lose that key part
00:16:15.180 of his sense of self and what he was going to do with his life.
00:16:18.760 In Kafka's case, he decided not to marry.
00:16:20.820 Darwin decided to marry.
00:16:22.360 Turned out okay for Darwin.
00:16:24.360 Despite the fact that he married and had a bunch of kids, he did manage to produce some
00:16:28.000 of the greatest scientific works in human history.
00:16:30.580 So you could argue it could have been even better if he'd stayed single.
00:16:33.960 It had been even more fulfilled.
00:16:35.660 But I suspect not.
00:16:37.420 But marriage turned out much more pleasantly for Darwin, at least for most of his life,
00:16:40.760 than he expected, based on his pro-con list.
00:16:44.380 But it does raise this question.
00:16:46.560 So if you say that meaning and purpose are crucial to a full sense of well-being and not
00:16:53.220 just fleeting day-to-day pleasure and pain, how do you think about that?
00:16:58.720 And so I talk about a number of ways that I think that we flourish.
00:17:02.600 Obviously, these include things like using our skills to the utmost.
00:17:06.960 They include knowledge of ourself.
00:17:10.060 I talk about different ways.
00:17:11.620 I don't spend a lot of time on this, but there are some obvious ways you can learn about who
00:17:16.080 you are and what you want to be.
00:17:17.760 You can go and have psychotherapy.
00:17:20.940 You can have meditation.
00:17:22.580 You can have religion.
00:17:23.680 You can read literature and philosophy.
00:17:25.540 All these things are ways that human beings have tried to understand their place in the cosmos
00:17:30.960 and what is meaningful to them, what gives their life purpose.
00:17:36.460 There's no easy answer for any one person.
00:17:39.640 There's no general set of principles that are simple, but it's an enterprise that you need to
00:17:46.060 spend some time on.
00:17:48.240 One of the things I suggest in the book is that tradition is a tested way that people have found
00:17:54.800 to be helpful.
00:17:55.660 Some traditions are not helpful.
00:17:56.880 It's not simple, but you want to take all of these things seriously.
00:18:02.120 A lot of what I'm talking about in the book is what Agnes Callard, the philosopher, calls
00:18:06.940 aspiration.
00:18:08.440 Who do I aspire to be?
00:18:10.240 That's something worth giving some fuck to, right?
00:18:12.620 What kind of person do I want to be?
00:18:14.020 Do I want to be the kind of person who fell in the blank?
00:18:17.080 Or should I just take who I am now as good enough?
00:18:20.200 And I would suggest that aspiring, the act of self-improvement, the act of trying to become
00:18:25.660 more than who we are today and something more tomorrow is a very powerful part of the human
00:18:31.820 experience that does keep people meaning.
00:18:34.540 This reminds me, it sounds like, you know, Kierkegaard has this idea of, you know, you
00:18:38.500 kind of go through these three phases of ethical development.
00:18:40.940 And the first one is the aesthetic where you just pick, oh, this is fun.
00:18:44.420 I enjoy this.
00:18:45.840 I'm going to wear these cloaks.
00:18:46.900 They're cool.
00:18:47.560 I'm going to read this novel because it's fun.
00:18:50.180 But he says at a certain point, you need to move on beyond the aesthetic to the ethical
00:18:53.600 where you start thinking, well, what does it mean to live a good life?
00:18:56.100 And I think beyond that's the religious where it's beyond the ethical.
00:18:59.760 But the way you figure out what that higher level is, like you said, I think reading philosophy,
00:19:04.840 looking at religion, like these are issues that humanity has been thinking about for
00:19:10.160 thousands of years.
00:19:11.540 They might have some insights.
00:19:12.820 They might not.
00:19:13.800 Things have changed, obviously.
00:19:15.580 But it's a good place to start.
00:19:17.640 Yeah.
00:19:17.760 What worked for someone else, what worked for Kierkegaard, might not work for you, or
00:19:22.120 what works for your neighbor might not work for you.
00:19:24.200 What worked for you when you were younger may not work for you when you were older.
00:19:27.620 A lot of this is just being aware that this is an aspect of life to give some time and
00:19:33.580 thought to.
00:19:34.420 I'm not suggesting you have to go into a Buddhist meditation retreat for a year and think deeply
00:19:41.800 about yourself and purpose in life.
00:19:44.020 It's more, as you make these decisions in life, although that's interesting, but as
00:19:48.920 you make these decisions in life, you should be aware that they are determining who you
00:19:54.480 are, not just what you enjoy or don't enjoy.
00:19:57.760 That's really the simplest way to think about what's at stake.
00:20:03.220 You know, the subtitle of the book is, is a guide to the decisions that define us.
00:20:08.580 But these decisions define who we are, what we make of our life, who we can become.
00:20:15.020 And that's really important.
00:20:17.880 It's not, life is not just about racking up the most, the most fun.
00:20:21.640 Now, I'm not against fun.
00:20:23.260 Fun's great.
00:20:24.580 But in my experience, people who only pursue fun tend to get tired of it.
00:20:29.600 They look for things that are more permanent.
00:20:32.200 They want to belong.
00:20:33.360 They look for causes to devote themselves to.
00:20:35.980 They look for a calling.
00:20:37.300 And these are the things that, that lead to the deepest satisfactions.
00:20:41.980 And I think that's the lesson to be learned from, from that.
00:20:45.540 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:20:49.600 And now back to the show.
00:20:51.420 You make this case in the book for following traditions.
00:20:54.580 Oftentimes us in the modern world think, well, traditions are fuddy-duddy.
00:20:57.760 They hold you back.
00:20:58.600 They're because, but you say traditions can actually be really useful because there's already
00:21:02.120 something in place.
00:21:03.000 You don't have to reinvent the wheel.
00:21:04.380 It's worked for a long time.
00:21:06.800 It possibly will work for you as well.
00:21:09.500 And it's a way to help answer that vampire problem.
00:21:15.160 Most of the traditions that we have in this world suggest that being a vampire is really
00:21:21.840 not the right thing to do.
00:21:24.240 And so that's one way to solve the problem of, well, if I don't know if I'm going to like
00:21:31.260 it or not, what should I do?
00:21:32.380 Maybe I'll like it.
00:21:33.640 It doesn't look good now.
00:21:34.920 But all the vampires I know, once they become vampires, they seem to like it.
00:21:39.600 But maybe it's just immoral and you shouldn't do it.
00:21:42.420 And tradition has come to this consensus that being a vampire is not the right thing to do.
00:21:49.040 And similarly, tradition has come to a consensus that having a child is a meaningful act.
00:21:55.000 I mean, it'd be right for you, any one person, but it means take it seriously.
00:21:59.400 I don't suggest following tradition blindly.
00:22:01.500 I think that's a mistake.
00:22:02.520 A lot of traditions can lead us astray.
00:22:04.980 They're not for you or me.
00:22:06.900 They're for other people.
00:22:08.300 But you should take them seriously.
00:22:10.160 I use the example in the book of the Chesterton fence.
00:22:14.260 Chesterton uses G.K.
00:22:16.340 Chesterton, the philosopher and writer, uses this metaphor of you come across a fence in
00:22:21.300 the middle of a field.
00:22:21.940 It looks like it has no purpose.
00:22:22.960 What's this fence doing in the middle of the field?
00:22:24.240 Well, I tear it down.
00:22:26.360 You can't hurt anything.
00:22:27.040 It doesn't have any purpose.
00:22:27.780 You should start by asking instead, I don't understand why this fence is here, but rather
00:22:34.200 than tear it down, I probably should look into it.
00:22:36.380 I should probably find out why it's here in the first place and not just assume it's a
00:22:40.740 mistake.
00:22:41.880 And I think often we're, you know, it's our egos and natural tendency to see ourselves
00:22:47.740 as the center of the universe as human beings.
00:22:50.760 There's a lot of value to saying, I don't understand everything.
00:22:53.340 I'm going to be humble and I'm going to take the received wisdom of tradition and take
00:22:58.120 it seriously.
00:22:59.320 I might reject some of it, I might accept some of it, but I shouldn't just dismiss it out
00:23:03.880 of hand because I don't understand.
00:23:05.980 Yeah, it's a starting point.
00:23:07.380 Yeah.
00:23:07.800 A lot of our wild problems involve other people, relationships with other people.
00:23:12.680 And you make this case that it might be useful to think of relationships in terms of covenants
00:23:19.660 rather than contracts.
00:23:21.380 And this is coming from your religious background.
00:23:23.380 You are Jewish.
00:23:24.720 And right now I'm reading the Old Testament again.
00:23:26.600 There's a lot of talk about covenants.
00:23:28.620 Why the covenant approach to relationships?
00:23:30.700 What's the benefit there?
00:23:32.380 So let's talk about the difference between a covenant and a contract, at least the way
00:23:35.000 I'm thinking about it.
00:23:35.740 Obviously, there's legal definitions sometimes, but a contract's basically, I'll do this for
00:23:41.440 you and you do that for me.
00:23:43.300 You know, it's a quick pro quotes.
00:23:46.020 I'll scratch her back, you scratch mine.
00:23:48.800 A contract lays out my responsibilities.
00:23:51.380 Explicitly, it lays out your responsibilities.
00:23:54.520 You're going to deliver this house.
00:23:55.660 I'm going to deliver some money by a certain date, in a certain condition, and so on.
00:23:59.680 That's a contract.
00:24:00.700 Or I'm going to work for you.
00:24:01.920 I'm going to do this task at this level of quality using these raw materials.
00:24:06.140 I'm going to paint your house or build you a porch.
00:24:09.380 And in return, no, you're going to give me money.
00:24:11.600 Those are contracts.
00:24:13.280 Covenants are about a commitment.
00:24:15.200 And it's a commitment that's a little bit more open-ended than we think about.
00:24:19.120 A contract has a commitment also.
00:24:20.460 But a covenant's more, this is unconditional.
00:24:24.000 I'm going to stand by your side.
00:24:26.200 Now, I understand that not all covenants work out.
00:24:28.680 Marriage doesn't always work out.
00:24:30.700 But a good marriage, you don't keep score.
00:24:34.080 In a contract, you keep score.
00:24:35.760 Hey, wait a minute.
00:24:36.820 You said you were going to do this, this, and this, and you didn't come through.
00:24:39.200 So covenant is, well, I realize now that this partner of mine has certain challenges I didn't
00:24:45.820 appreciate, and maybe she can't do this thing I expected, or vice versa.
00:24:51.080 I hope she'll appreciate that I'm an imperfect person, and I'm doing the best I can.
00:24:56.540 And I'm not going to keep score and say, well, wait a minute.
00:24:58.900 She drove carpool on Tuesday, so my turn on Wednesday, and then, boy, she better come through
00:25:04.600 on Thursday or she's not feeling well.
00:25:06.680 Wait a minute.
00:25:07.120 We have an agreement.
00:25:07.900 We take turns.
00:25:09.200 In a covenant, you cut the person some slack.
00:25:12.780 And the commitment is much more open-ended, and it's much more long-term.
00:25:17.240 It's really powerful.
00:25:18.840 Covenant is, I'm not keeping score.
00:25:21.860 I'm not going to say, in a contract, I might say, you know, this isn't working out for me.
00:25:27.240 I'm not getting what I expected.
00:25:28.980 I have to walk away.
00:25:30.400 I have to break the contract.
00:25:32.020 And there's usually a clause in the contract for an end.
00:25:35.340 And of course, sometimes it can end, too.
00:25:36.700 A marriage, even based on a covenant, can end.
00:25:39.200 And both parties can decide, or one, that it's not working out.
00:25:43.000 There's too much that was not expected.
00:25:45.260 It's too painful.
00:25:46.480 That's totally understandable.
00:25:48.020 But what really covenant is saying is it's got to get a lot worse than it might otherwise be, because I have a commitment to you.
00:25:56.380 I am committed to our marriage.
00:25:58.760 I'm not committed to me and my self-satisfaction.
00:26:02.240 That's a contract.
00:26:03.180 A covenant is a commitment to us.
00:26:05.140 It's a very different human experience.
00:26:07.340 And I think good parenting is a covenant.
00:26:10.160 And good marriage is a covenant.
00:26:11.720 And, of course, sometimes a work partnership can be more of a covenant than a contract, even though there might be a contractual basis for it.
00:26:18.360 That's a very powerful idea.
00:26:20.120 Certainly, I want to be around people who are committed to me and not just in it for what, you know, as long as it's positive versus negative.
00:26:27.700 So I think a lot of us say, I want to be that kind of person.
00:26:31.040 I want to be a person that you know you can lean on, you can trust, and I'm not keeping score.
00:26:36.480 That, of course, leaves me vulnerable.
00:26:37.940 You can exploit me if you know that I'm not keeping score.
00:26:40.540 You can say, hey, I'm going to try to get more of this than I expected.
00:26:43.480 It's going to be great.
00:26:44.720 He's going to keep putting up with it.
00:26:46.200 And that's why you want to make a covenant with a person who has a similar level of commitment as you do.
00:26:52.140 So otherwise, you do leave yourself vulnerable in the covenant.
00:26:54.580 So with Aristotle's idea of flourishing and his Nicomachean ethics, it's fluid.
00:27:00.620 You're making these situational judgments, right?
00:27:02.640 He's trying to figure out what the right thing to do at the right time for the right reason.
00:27:06.900 And that can depend, that can vary depending on the circumstance.
00:27:10.700 And I think that's useful.
00:27:11.620 I think I like to take that approach to decision making.
00:27:15.280 But you make this case in the book that sometimes just having hard, firm life rules can be useful in living a flourishing life.
00:27:23.400 Instead of trying to figure it out ad hoc, why is that?
00:27:26.500 Why are hard, firm life rules useful?
00:27:29.120 I use the example in the book of finding a lost wallet.
00:27:32.120 You find a lost wallet.
00:27:33.260 Nobody sees you find it.
00:27:34.900 It's laying on the street.
00:27:36.140 This actually happened to me once.
00:27:37.380 You pick it up.
00:27:37.820 I picked it up.
00:27:38.400 It's full of cash.
00:27:40.080 And nobody saw it.
00:27:41.620 Now, of course, I'm never 100% sure nobody saw it.
00:27:43.740 But it looked to me that nobody saw it.
00:27:45.520 Put it in my pocket and kept walking.
00:27:47.940 I did, once I got to a safer, a little more secure place, take it out of my pocket, saw it was in it, found some way to return it to the owner, which ended up being a great long adventure.
00:27:57.180 I do not tell in the book.
00:27:58.720 It's not worth telling here.
00:27:59.780 But it took a long while.
00:28:00.840 But eventually, I got the wallet back to the owner.
00:28:03.200 It turned out to be a homeless person.
00:28:05.020 So finding an address or a way to reach someone turned out to be harder than I expected.
00:28:09.200 But, you know, economists, if they're not careful, say, well, whether you return it or not depends on how much money is in it.
00:28:17.840 I mean, if it has $20, sure, return it.
00:28:20.480 What if it's $50,000 in cash in the wallet?
00:28:24.040 Is it rational to return it then?
00:28:26.360 And I make the argument in the book that return it no matter what.
00:28:29.360 Just have a hard rule.
00:28:30.900 Return it.
00:28:31.380 One reason for that is that, you know, we're imperfect.
00:28:36.300 And if we're not careful, we'll convince ourselves that it's okay to keep it.
00:28:39.820 And then we're not really following our principles.
00:28:42.860 We're just finding an excuse for doing what we want to do anyway.
00:28:46.420 So in the case of principles like honesty, trust, things like that, what I'm suggesting there is that you don't want to use the economic, normal way of tradeoffs and say, well, sure, it's a good idea to return the wallet.
00:29:00.740 But if it's so much money that would change my life, then it's rational to keep the money.
00:29:06.260 I think that's a very dangerous thing.
00:29:07.700 Start to convince yourself of that when it's $20.
00:29:09.620 And then you're the kind of person who doesn't return wallets, the kind of person who's not trustworthy.
00:29:14.180 And it will come back and bite you eventually in life.
00:29:16.320 But it's more than that.
00:29:16.940 It's just the wrong thing to do.
00:29:18.400 But I want to be the kind of person who does the right thing.
00:29:20.580 I want to live around people who do the right thing.
00:29:22.040 I want to hang around people who do the right thing.
00:29:23.720 It's a more pleasant world.
00:29:25.240 I think I have an obligation to make my contribution to making the world more pleasant.
00:29:29.460 So I'm not going to be the person who exploits opportunities like that and keeps the wallet, keeps the money.
00:29:35.300 So I think what I say in there is privilege your principles.
00:29:38.440 Do the right thing.
00:29:39.680 And no matter how much it costs.
00:29:41.360 Now, God forbid, it means sacrificing a person that you care about.
00:29:47.120 Of course, then there's two principles that conflict.
00:29:50.280 Your honesty versus, I'll use the example.
00:29:52.780 Supposedly, you need the money to save your child's life for medicine.
00:29:55.440 Of course, yes, that's a little more complicated.
00:29:57.840 But in general, that's not what you're up against.
00:29:59.560 You're up against your narrow self-interest of what's in it for me versus doing the right thing.
00:30:04.860 I suggest do the right thing.
00:30:05.940 You'll be happier in the long run.
00:30:07.480 Yeah, and it makes life easier, too, when you just have this thing, I don't do this thing, or I do this thing.
00:30:11.620 You don't have to think about it.
00:30:12.980 Yeah.
00:30:13.140 So you had a surprising source of insight on how to solve wild problems.
00:30:19.540 I didn't see this coming because you were talking about Aristotle and Darwin and other philosophers.
00:30:25.220 You got Bill Belichick, the head coach of the Patriots.
00:30:28.980 What can Bill Belichick teach us about solving some of these wild problems?
00:30:33.360 So this insight of mine may not be true.
00:30:36.780 Let's start with that.
00:30:38.120 I'm not an expert on Bill Belichick.
00:30:40.160 I didn't interview him for the book.
00:30:41.240 I wish I could have.
00:30:41.880 He's a very interesting decision-maker.
00:30:44.540 Obviously, as the head coach of a football team, he's constantly making trade-offs.
00:30:50.620 He actually was an economics major as an undergraduate at Wesleyan, and I think he's very aware of trade-offs.
00:30:57.760 He's not an emotional – tries not to be an emotional decision-maker.
00:31:01.800 And when he cuts a player and people say, how could you do – whoa, they'll say, I tried to do what's best for the team.
00:31:07.840 That's my job, period.
00:31:08.940 He doesn't say anything else.
00:31:10.500 It's a constant refrain of his.
00:31:13.100 You know, you pick somebody in a draft choice, a very high draft choice, meaning a very valuable draft choice, and it doesn't work out.
00:31:20.840 He can go off and cut them.
00:31:22.400 It's not working out.
00:31:23.300 Instead of saying, oh, I've got to – that'll be embarrassing, or I've got to justify it, or I've got to talk myself into why he's going to turn out okay.
00:31:30.240 Cuts him, trades him.
00:31:31.300 But that's not the point that I focus on in the chapter.
00:31:33.960 What I focus on in the chapter is the part that's speculative on my part about his behavior.
00:31:39.100 He often will trade a draft choice for multiple draft choices in worse rounds.
00:31:46.200 So he'll have a first or second round choice, and he'll trade that choice for two picks in the fourth or fifth round, say.
00:31:54.900 And why does he do that?
00:31:57.380 And I think the reason he does – this is the speculative part.
00:31:59.520 I think the reason he does it is that he recognizes that the NFL draft, the choice of college players who you have pretty good information about but not perfect information, is a bit of a crapshoot, meaning it's really hard to know how it's going to turn out.
00:32:14.120 So he wants to have more choices than fewer.
00:32:17.560 He wants to have lots of draft picks, even though some of them on paper are not as good as the fewer that he could have had if he had not made the trades.
00:32:26.660 But he recognizes his own ignorance, and he tries to increase the size of the denominator, the number of options he has, knowing that if they don't turn out well, he doesn't have to keep them on the team.
00:32:40.340 And I suggest that this is sort of the in-between case where it's not as irrevocable when you make a decision.
00:32:47.320 You should be – it's okay to jump and make decisions where it's not so expensive to change your mind when you discover more about the choice.
00:32:57.160 You should not be so afraid of it.
00:32:58.480 Make more decisions.
00:32:59.760 Keep the good ones and cut your losses by getting rid of the bad ones because you don't know.
00:33:05.100 And what Belichick does is he uses training camp to get the information that he really needs.
00:33:10.600 The information he has is how fast the person runs a 40-yard dash, how many yards per carry they gained in their particular college career, say, if they're a running back, and so on.
00:33:22.120 That information is not the real information he wants.
00:33:24.700 The real information he wants is how is this person going to fit in with my players that I have right now on my team, and how is this person going to fit in with me?
00:33:33.820 Are they going to be comfortable with my style of coaching?
00:33:36.500 And he can't discover that ex-ante before the fact.
00:33:40.280 He's got to go through some experience.
00:33:42.480 You have to find out about how they're going to fit in or not fit in.
00:33:46.400 And so he uses that as a way to figure out what to keep and what not to keep.
00:33:50.680 And I think that's a great lesson for life.
00:33:53.460 Sample lots of things.
00:33:55.180 Do more of the things you love.
00:33:56.500 Do fewer of the things that you don't love.
00:33:59.300 But gain some experience and self-knowledge about what floats your boat, what gives you deep and enduring satisfaction.
00:34:07.480 Can't know that in advance.
00:34:08.860 And so the bell check lesson is try to find out about yourself and about how you feel about things if you can do it in a way that isn't too expensive.
00:34:16.700 I think this is really useful advice for young people who are trying to figure out their career.
00:34:20.920 So, for example, I went to law school and I didn't know any lawyers.
00:34:28.420 I was the first lawyer in my family.
00:34:30.260 My only knowledge of law was watching Law and Order and Matlock.
00:34:35.100 And then I get to law school and I get my first internship and I realize this is not like TV.
00:34:41.420 This is not what I thought it was going to be.
00:34:43.440 And I didn't enjoy it.
00:34:45.080 And I decided law is not for me.
00:34:47.160 I finished law school, but I decided not to pursue a career in law.
00:34:49.460 And so now when people ask me, young people, should I go to law school?
00:34:53.680 And I say, you should just work at a law firm as an intern before you go to law school to figure out, do you actually like the practice of law?
00:35:03.200 And so, yeah, I mean, test it out.
00:35:04.660 There's ways you can test things out that aren't expensive so you don't have to take out a bunch of student loans for law school.
00:35:11.200 Test it out first and you might learn you don't like it.
00:35:14.260 Yeah, it's great advice.
00:35:15.140 And of course, that's why we date when we're trying to decide who to marry.
00:35:20.780 But I think there's a much deeper point here that you're making, which I love, which is the information you do have, Matlock, Law and Order, is wildly misleading.
00:35:33.360 You think you have valuable information about what it's like to be a lawyer.
00:35:36.720 You actually know almost nothing.
00:35:40.480 Worse than that, the part that you do know from those shows romanticizes and exaggerates the positives and shows you almost nothing of the day-to-day unpleasant, boring part, or worse, ethically challenging part of being a lawyer that you find you don't like at all.
00:35:56.300 And so it's a great example, and I think it's particularly relevant for marriage and parenting.
00:36:02.840 If you get your ideas of marriage from movies, you're going to be pretty disillusioned by real marriage.
00:36:09.120 It's not that different than law school.
00:36:11.220 Real marriage is really different than TV marriage or movie marriage.
00:36:16.200 Right?
00:36:16.380 The falling in love, the music playing, it's lovely.
00:36:20.060 Real marriage is much more complicated than that.
00:36:22.200 And it's really interesting to me how little of the flavor of real marriage we share with our children.
00:36:28.460 They do see us.
00:36:30.000 So we watch our parents.
00:36:31.800 Our children see us as parents, as married, perhaps, and they get some idea.
00:36:37.180 But we don't talk to them much.
00:36:38.540 In fact, literature, the reading of great novels, is a much better way to understand marriage when you're reading a great writer than, say, a two-hour movie.
00:36:49.020 And so literature is a good thing.
00:36:51.260 It teaches a little bit more about life often than a two-hour overly optimistic movie.
00:36:58.680 Okay.
00:36:59.160 So we've covered a lot of ground here.
00:37:00.740 So I think it would be useful to do a quick recap here of our conversation.
00:37:05.560 So wild problems are hard because you don't know how you're going to feel about them.
00:37:09.940 And you're going to be a different person once you make a decision around a wild problem.
00:37:15.160 And it sounds like making the decision to do something like have a kid.
00:37:18.900 You know, it's a wild problem.
00:37:20.020 It's akin to imagining a color you've never seen before.
00:37:24.400 But we've talked about some things that you can do to make these decisions.
00:37:28.100 One is think about what will lead to a flourishing life and what will give you meaning.
00:37:33.180 Think in terms of covenants.
00:37:35.540 Consider tradition.
00:37:37.160 Create clear rules.
00:37:38.200 And then when you can, you know, test these things out through experience.
00:37:43.440 But, you know, as I was thinking, like, even with these strategies, you're still going to have to deal with the uncertainty.
00:37:49.160 You can't resolve all the uncertainty.
00:37:51.080 So do you have any insight into how to learn just to be okay with the uncertainty when you're trying to figure out these wild problems?
00:37:57.760 Well, I don't spend much time on the book because I don't have any magic answers.
00:38:01.980 You know, it's really tempting to say, so just don't worry about it.
00:38:05.040 You know, it's easy.
00:38:06.300 Stop stressing over it.
00:38:08.260 It's not a good idea.
00:38:09.520 Better to be relaxed.
00:38:11.640 You know, it's like when you're late to the airport and you've never missed a plane and the traffic's picking up.
00:38:16.740 And you say, well, you know, I've never really missed an airplane, so I won't let this traffic bother me.
00:38:22.680 It would be irrational for me to be nervous about it.
00:38:25.800 And that doesn't work for me.
00:38:27.860 I don't know.
00:38:28.220 Maybe it works for somebody.
00:38:29.380 So I don't think that's the right, I don't think that's helpful advice.
00:38:33.600 I do think it's useful to realize that the normal approaches you take to these kind of problems don't help.
00:38:40.900 So for many of these kind of problems, the normal thing to do, as I said earlier, was to get more data.
00:38:45.660 Where's that app?
00:38:47.560 You know, I have trouble deciding what book to read next.
00:38:49.560 I just go to Amazon and look at their recommendations.
00:38:51.260 Usually pretty good.
00:38:52.600 I need one of those for dating.
00:38:55.640 Dating apps don't work very well.
00:38:57.140 I need one of those for how to parent.
00:38:59.200 Good luck with that.
00:39:00.240 They don't work well.
00:39:01.760 So I think recognizing that this is not an easy thing is a start toward reducing the stress and anxiety.
00:39:10.980 They recognize that you're not alone, that almost everyone deals with this.
00:39:16.520 But it's taken me, I'm 67 years old, it's taken me a long time to get better, not good, but better at making decisions.
00:39:25.260 I'm not talking about even wild problems, just day-to-day decisions.
00:39:28.960 I'm the president of a college in Jerusalem, Sholem College.
00:39:32.620 I used to be a plain old researcher, economist, academic writer.
00:39:37.240 The biggest decision I used to make was, should I start this essay on Medium or should I write it on Evernote or maybe Pages?
00:39:45.260 That's not a very wild problem.
00:39:47.500 Not much is at stake.
00:39:48.720 When you start making bigger decisions, you start to realize that it's not that hard, not that bad, that the worst thing that can happen is as bad as you think.
00:39:58.900 So, you know, one piece of advice is to make more decisions.
00:40:01.880 You do get better at them.
00:40:03.480 You do get more comfortable with the fact that some work out and some don't, and nobody bats a thousand.
00:40:09.300 It's okay.
00:40:10.120 It's totally all right.
00:40:11.620 Well, Russ, this has been a great conversation.
00:40:13.320 Is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:40:15.920 Sure.
00:40:16.280 My website is russroberts.info, where I keep everything I do, videos, essays, books.
00:40:22.960 You can follow me on Twitter at EconTalker.
00:40:25.800 The book is called Wild Problems.
00:40:27.060 You can find it at Amazon and elsewhere, and it's great talking to you.
00:40:30.980 Thanks, Russ.
00:40:31.420 It's been great talking to you, too.
00:40:33.080 My guest today was Russ Roberts.
00:40:34.340 He's the author of the book Wild Problems.
00:40:36.120 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:40:38.340 You can find more information about his work at his website, russroberts.info.
00:40:41.720 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash wildproblems, where you can find links to resources.
00:40:46.000 We delve deeper into this topic.
00:40:54.560 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
00:40:57.380 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives,
00:41:00.960 as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you'd
00:41:03.760 think of.
00:41:04.320 And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher
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00:41:07.820 Head over to stitcherpremium.com.
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00:41:09.540 Use code MANLESS at checkout for a free month trial.
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00:41:16.780 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review
00:41:19.360 on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
00:41:20.800 It helps out a lot.
00:41:21.540 If you've done that already, thank you.
00:41:23.000 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think can get something
00:41:26.000 out of it.
00:41:26.700 As always, thank you for the continued support.
00:41:28.320 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.
00:41:29.600 Remind you on the list of the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.
00:41:33.120 We'll see you next time.