 Economists tend to focus on things that can be measured. Dignity is hard to measure. A sense of self is hard to measure. Belonging is hard to measure. A feeling of transcendence is hard to measure. Mattering that you are important, that people look to you. They're about the life well lived, and they're not about getting the most out of your money. They're not about what the interest rates are next week. And economists truthfully have virtually nothing to say about these things. Economist Russ Roberts is well known for his extraordinary gift at finding creative ways of communicating the power of free market capitalism to the general public. Bread eaters will rejoice when they see that every bakery is filled with so much choice. He's the host of the wildly successful podcast Econ Talk, which has been cranking out weekly episodes since 2006. I hope our listeners find it fascinating too. If you do find this interesting, please send an email to me, Russell Roberts. He's the author of two novels. The Invisible Heart, an economic romance, is one of those classic boy meets girl stories. But in this case, the boy's an economist, so it's kind of a handicap. You know, it evokes all the classic love stories of the past involving economists. I can't think of any either. And along with filmmaker John Popola, he created the blockbuster Kane's Hayek rap videos. We've been going back and forth for a century. More recently, his interest has turned to the fundamental inadequacy of his chosen discipline to comprehend what matters most to people. Roberts' new book is called Wild Problems, and it deals with the decisions that define us, whether to marry, whether to have kids, what kind of work to pursue. He says these are the sorts of central questions that can't be figured out with economic modeling and cost-benefit analyses. Reason talked with the 68-year-old Roberts about how he makes sense of a world that is richer than ever in material resources and yet suffers increasing numbers of deaths of despair. We discuss his own life from earning a PhD in economics at the University of Chicago in the 1970s to starting econ talk to becoming president of a private liberal arts college in Israel to the central role that religion plays in his life. Russ Roberts, thanks for talking to reason. Great to see you again, Nick. It's been a long time. It has been, but the new book is Wild Problems. Give me the elevator pitch. So there are elevator pitches that there are a number of aspects of our lives, big decisions we face, that we'd like to have data and evidence and make a rational logical decision about them. These are decisions like whether to have children, whether to marry, who to marry, what career to pursue. And there's not that many pieces of evidence there. And if I may, in the case of Francis Bacon, who comes up, whether to marry a child. Have I run up? Yeah, I learned a little too much about Francis Bacon in this book. This is a man who said, if you marry, you became a hostage to fortune. And by fortune, he did not mean riches. He meant the randomness of life, good luck, bad luck. So he said, once you marry, you're a hostage to fortune. He married late in life and he married a very young person. Well, he was late in life. Yeah, he was 45. She is 14 plus or minus six months, right? But he saw her, he had his eye on her when she was 11. They didn't have the best relationship. It's like the Enlightenment's version of Georgie Girl or something. It's just a very disturbing scenario. It's a British film, right? It is a British film, yeah, with Sir James Mason. Yeah. Well, Francis Bacon is also, and we're getting ahead of ourselves as always, but he's one of Hayek's enemies. He's like an epistemological enemy of Friedrich Hayek, who thought that Bacon kind of ushered in all that was wrong about Enlightenment thinking and scientism and whatnot. But to come back, while problems are problems that resist measurement, I say. And so talk about, and you do spend a lot of time early on talking about like, okay, how do you make a decision whether or not to get married? And Charles Darwin, even more than Bacon, is kind of one of the textbook cases you work through. Talk a little bit about that and how that kind of explains the larger set of issues that you're trying to get at with wild problems. So I used Darwin as an example because I think most people would agree he's perhaps the greatest scientist of all time. Okay, maybe second or third if you're a skeptic about that. But he's clearly a rational person. And I use a number of scientists and analytical thinkers and academics who struggle with these kind of decisions that we're talking about because they're used to using analytical thinking in the rest of their life, but when it comes to these kind of decisions, they're kind of unmoored at sea. And so Darwin tries to do what most economists or other people would say is rational and you'll get this advice all the time, make a pro con list, make a list of the costs of the benefits and weigh them and see what's the right choice. And he does that, he makes a list, it's embarrassing. He compares horribly embarrassing. He says coming home to a wife would be better than a dog at least. Kind of a low bar for a spouse. I just saw all the dogs must have been like, ah, God. Gosh, again? Yeah. So his list is pretty depressing. He's worried he'd have to spend time with the relatives. He doesn't have anybody in mind by the way. This is a generic wife as far as the list goes. So he's worried he might not get along with the relatives. He's worried she might want to leave London. He'd have to live in the countryside. He's worried he won't have time for his work. He's worried they'll have children. And while that might be a comfort in old age, he says they also might get sick a lot, which of course they do. They might die, which of course they do in his time quite depressingly often. And so basically if you look at his list, you'd say, well, this is no brainer. Don't get married. The pros are way inferior to the cons. I was thinking from Mrs. Darwin's perspective, look at that list and say like, don't get married. This guy, I don't know. Bad news. Yeah. You can do better. Yeah. He ends up marrying his cousin. So I guess her relatives are actually his relatives. I mean, that was part of his strategy, but. He doesn't make a rational choice. Something else is at play. And my suggestion is that these kind of decisions, marriage, whether it become a parent, what kind of career to pursue, where you live, how much time you devote to friendship. These are all quote problems, challenges we face as human beings in the modern world, where we really don't have enough information to make a rational decision. And more importantly, they don't just lead to a set of pleasant or not pleasant day-to-day experiences. They also define who we are. They are crucial to our sense of self, our identity, and these kind of factors. You can put them into the cost-benefit list, but they're essentially incommensurate with the kind of day-to-day things that Darwin's talking about. So I joke around and say, OK, let's put them in. Become the greatest scientist of all time or have someone to come home to. Wouldn't that be nice? Pleasant chat. Maybe she'll play the piano. So that's one factor, which is that the things that really count or don't necessarily come to mind. And if they do, you're not sure how to take them into account. The second part of it is that he has no idea about the cost of benefits of getting married because he's never been married. And it takes the leap of faith to become married before he'll realize that a life with another person has a different texture. It's not just, oh, it's nice to have somebody around to come home to. You see yourself as a different kind of person. It changes the way you look at the world. It changes the way you experience the world. So in the jargon of an economist, it changes your utility function. It changes your preferences. And it can be exhilarating. It can be hellish, depends on who you marry, who you are. But the point is that the idea of making a rational decision in that environment is kind of a joke. And Darwin knew it. He makes this pro con list, and then he writes this stream of consciousness paragraph about how horrible it would be to come home to a dingy apartment. And oh, OK, marry, marry, marry, he decides. And wait a minute. In the calm, sober light of day, you made a list. And it looked overwhelmingly that you should not marry. What went on there? Why did a great scientist make this crazy, quote, irrational decision? I would argue it's not irrational. He understood that there was more at stake than the day-to-day pleasures that he was, I call it, narrow utilitarianism. He knew there was more to life than that. And he made a decision accordingly. And so what the book is about is going back to the elevator pitch. And now four minutes into it, probably, because total failure, I'm sitting alone on it. You know, we're stuck. The elevator got stuck between the second and third floors. Excellent. So what the book's about is that, OK, there's no easy way to make a rational decision. So what do you do now? Go with your gut, flip a coin, ask your friends what you should do and let them decide for you. The book is about the fact, is about the reality that most important decisions are our lives. And they're only about maybe five to 10 of these in the course of our lives. Because they define us, we should treat them differently than what we're going to do Saturday night, whether we go to a movie or have go to a party or stay home and read. One thing I know I'm not doing is going over to the Darwin's because that woman won't stop with the piano. You know, I'm just going to stay home with dogs. But you write at one point that these are parts of life are outside the breach of science and the scientific method. I'm paraphrasing a little bit. First, you know, and you talk about Darwin, we mentioned Bacon, who is, I guess, less well known than he used to be. But I mean, he really is one of the super geniuses at the beginning of the Enlightenment. And these are people who put us on the path to a kind of scientific worldview or a rationalist worldview, where we're explaining why we're doing things and we're at least pretending that we're bringing the human mind to bear on these things around us, right? I mean, this is what kind of the Enlightenment is about. Is it an overstatement to say that, I mean, like in your world and you, you know, you're an economist, you know, people try to do this, but is it true that we live in a radically kind of rationalized universe where people are always making these kinds of lists? Or, you know, I mean, has that reached, you know, 100% penetration of everyday life? I mean, a lot of people will call themselves rationalists. They want to use their analytical faculties to make the best decisions they possibly can. Not a bad idea, not a bad starting place. And if I said to you, you can start with Bacon, you could go to Darwin, we could go to Einstein. And I say, you know, what I'd really like to do is I'd like to develop a device that would help me find the quickest route from A to B. And as brilliant as those people are and were, they could not imagine a smartphone that would have ways or Google Maps on it. That's an extraordinary culmination of the application of the analytical, scientific, rational way of thinking to a human problem. And it's really an extraordinary achievement that, you know, once it's in place, we'd totally take it for granted. If your smartphone dies, when you're trying to get somewhere, it's not like, oh, well, I just have to do the best I can. It's panic, right? We become extremely dependent on many aspects of that extraordinary technology. And in that sense, those kind of achievements are the pinnacle of the enlightenment way of thinking you're talking about. And I would argue that as extraordinary as the progress that has been made on that problem, which is incredibly impressive, it takes account of traffic and the other users and how many people are on the road. I mean, it's amazing. We've made no progress on whether we should go from A to B. Once we decide to go from A to B, we can find the quickest route there and we use technology and algorithms and devices. Waded spreadsheet, tall of this kind of stuff. But the crucial big parts of life, we haven't, they're not really touched by this way of thinking. And I use the phrase, you know, I talk about the person coming home from the party who can't find their keys and they're looking under the street light and a person comes along to help them and finally the person helping says, you sure you lost them here? Oh no, but the light's better here. So that's where we look. And we naturally look for those kind of things that were used to that illuminate things. But these other problems are not easily illuminated and they're certainly not easily illuminated by technology. So let me dial in a little bit on this. At one point you write the fact that choice offers potential for a better life. And, you know, we live in an age of increasing choice both banal and deep, you know. So, and for me, you know, speaking as a small L directional agitival libertarian, you know, I find this absolutely true and it's also kind of terrifying. We, more people all over the globe now have more choices which is both great and kind of terrifying. And then you also write a little bit later in the book that to flourish as a human being is to live life fully. So this is getting to that question of, we don't know, you know, we maybe know where point A is because that's where we're standing kind of, but we don't know where point B is. Can you kind of talk a little bit about, you know, why choice is important? And then also when you say to flourish as a human being is to live life fully, what are you getting at there? Well, I make the argument that through most of human history, many of these things that we struggle with today are not choices. Right. You didn't think about whether you're gonna get married. If somebody would take you, well, of course you get married. Yeah. Well, you were just told, right? Yeah, exactly. You're getting married. Yeah, and here it is. Here she is, here he is. And certainly with children, same thing. Nobody said, should I have children? What about climate change? Yeah. Most of human history, you had a lot of them. And for, and not simply because technology made that inevitable, the lack of technology, but because people wanted them, they wanted to have them for the farm, whatever, for their old age, for security. Or just because they knew, you know, half of them or a third of them probably wouldn't have. You're not gonna make it. Yeah. Yeah. So all these, what, I mean, even Adam, even Adam had multiple kids, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's like, he knew he was gonna have a couple of bad apples, or at least one. Yeah, one maybe. And your career, you did what your dad or mom did. You didn't have much of a choice. So all these things as time has passed through the millennia, the centuries, the decades, all of those choices have opened up. They're now choices rather than I say, destiny, but not destiny, they're choices. Amazing, fantastic, but really scary. And so I don't think we're well-equipped to deal with that uncertainty. We don't like it. It makes us uncomfortable. We look for ways to mitigate it. We look for help and we convince ourselves that if I get a little more data, I date this person a little more longer. I'll know for sure. And unfortunately it often doesn't help. And more importantly, it's often just an excuse to avoid making a decision. So you make a decision in fact, by default. So that's the question. And then the question about flourishing and living more fully, I think it's ironic. Freedom allows us the opportunity to flourish in ways we couldn't before. If you had to be a blacksmith, because your dad was a blacksmith and you couldn't get into another guild and you couldn't apprentice to anybody who wanted. So you're a blacksmith and you're not, turns out, you're not built like your dad. You're not a strong, you're a scrawny person. You're not gonna be a great blacksmith. You're describing yourself right now. You realize that, right? Yes, exactly. And you're stuck. Your father was a blacksmith and you ended up as an economist and a president of a university that we'll get into. But it's good you had that choice. But think about it. Yeah, I had that choice, but most of the time in the past, if flourishing required you to be an economist and you're stuck with being a blacksmith, life wasn't so thrilling or fulfilling or meaningful. And I think we have opened up this glorious opportunity to choose your path. And I think we have not gotten good yet at thinking about, how do I choose that path? If I may, you know, like to just to kind of emphasize how recent a lot of this is, my grandparents on my mother's side, they were from Italy. They were born in Italy in the 1890s, had an arranged marriage, you know, and they should, you know, that was consummated or whatever and I like around 1915 or something. And so like, essentially a hundred years ago, you know, there were people and that was not uncommon. I mean, they had moved to the U.S. But this is a- They're cultures today, that's still true. Right, but it is the rapid onset of this massive bad word choice-ification, but like, obviously a lot of people are still living in dire, almost pre-modern states, but you know, what we have seen as a mass movement towards the world you're living in and we're not good at it yet, we haven't developed. People like to make the point, oh, you know, we evolved on the savannah where a slightly sweeter peach was heaven. And so we have the sweet tooth that we're stuck with and now we have Skittles and M&Ms and Hershey's and we can't handle it because we're not evolutionary prepared for it. That's not what this is about. This is about the fact that culturally we're not prepared for it. And I think cultural norms, you know, are very much in flux in all these, most of these areas and it'll be interesting to see how they turn out, but my book's really about, given the reality that these are hard choices and they're not easily made with data or evidence, what do you do? And my suggestion is you should think about a variety of things other than what is gonna make me happiest day-to-day based on my choice. You should also think about meaning, purpose, your principles and aspiration. You should think about who you wanna be, who you wanna become, not just who you are now. In the economist world, you have what's called a utility function and set of preferences and your job is like a, is a mathematical problem. How do I get the most pleasure with my limited amount of income and time? I don't think that is the fun, that's a interesting way to describe what it's like to be in a shopping mall or in a grocery store. I don't think that's a helpful way to think about life. And part of the reason is because who you are, what you care about, what's important to you, what floats your boat, what gives you meaning and purpose, it's gonna be different in 20 years and you're gonna have to discover what that is and you need to invest in that and not merely do what's fun. And so a sub theme of the book is fun is overrated. Right and you also, you at one point talk about why you should choose principles over narrow gains or narrow utilitarianism, like what's good for you right now or seems to be. Talk about where do you generate those principles for that kind of long-term investment to guide? Okay, to be thinking about 10 years from now, 20 years from now, recognizing you're planning for a person you may not recognize. Yeah, and of course you won't to some extent if you're alive. I think there are people who don't change much over the course of their life, don't aspire, don't try to grow. What I suggest in the book is it needs to discover. And now you're talking about your other family members, right? Your siblings, you know. That uncle. I read everything as autobiography, so that's fine. That's how I get through the day. It helps me, it's very comforting, isn't it? I've totally lost my train of thought, I'm sorry, yeah, no. So, yeah, while you were saying many people don't change over the course of their life. What I suggest is that it's not a bad idea to invest in discovering and exploring what it's like to be part of something larger than yourself. That you're not just the center of the universe. I suggest there's religion, there's meditation, there's psychotherapy, there's literature, there's friendship. There are all kinds of ways that we can help get out of ourselves and to see ourselves from a different perspective rather than just me, me, me. Yeah, you say you exhort people to get over yourself and explicitly in that phrase. Kind of a Nietzschean, well, I'm not much of a Nietzschean, but I think, I don't remember if I quoted or not, but he says at some point, man is meant to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? Well, when you say live your life as an artist or as a kind of work of art, which is a very Nietzschean phrase. Oh, is it? Yeah. Yeah, and the idea there is that you craft yourself just the way an artist crafts a work of art. And we tend to think of artists as having a big plan and chiseling away at the marble until David's revealed in Michelangelo's case, when in fact, often art changes as the process of making the art is done. And I think life is a similar process. And I think it's helpful to think about it that way. How, you know, this book, I mean, a lot of your work is very Hayekian to me because it is about looking for patterns. It's about kind of setting general coordinates and then exploring rather than coming to predetermined conclusions and things like that. Part of the way, not simply because of your criticism of Francis Bacon early on in the book, but later you are kind of, at various points, you also talk about using literature and art as a way of kind of being able to inhabit past versions of things or to kind of simulate different scenarios that you would want to be. And I think it's in the counter-revolution of science that Hayek talks about how literature is the great storehouse of wisdom, literature, not history per se. Can you talk a bit about what are ways to avail ourselves? Like, it's one thing to experience something and that is the most direct way of understanding whether or not it's for you or not, but learning from other people's experiences as they recount them is really important. Can you talk a little bit about how you do that in your life? What do you read? What do you kind of wrap yourself up in that allows you to think in a different way than where you're from and what you've experienced so far? So Darwin, again, is an interesting example. I make the claim, I think it's undeniably true, that he couldn't have known much about marriage before he was married. He probably had married friends who he hung out with. He saw something of married life, but he didn't understand or appreciate the inner life of a married person, which can be glorious or hellish. Again, as I mentioned earlier, that inner life is veiled from most of us in our conversation with our friends. I suggest that married people don't like to talk about their marriage. They may feel it's inadequate or embarrassing. And even if they wanted to, they might struggle to find the words. These are somewhat ineffable things. And literature is a way where a really great writer can give you a window into marriage. A great movie can give you a window into marriage or love or friendship. And as you mentioned, it kind of simulates the imaginary inner life that you might want to experience. In my case, I've read a lot of bad fiction in my time, bad meaning lowbrow. And I've read, I don't know, a few hundred mysteries. It was just snack food. I enjoyed it, it was fun. But we think about quote, real literature. I think what makes real literature powerful is not because it's a page turner that not what we might be talking about because it forces you to confront an aspect of yourself or of others or how you interact with others or marriage or being a parent or a child that you otherwise would not focus on. I recently read a gentleman in Moscow by Amor Tolles, which I think is a masterpiece. That is the portrait of a life well lived. And you might not agree. You might think there's things that are appalling about the main character or you might just enjoy the story. It's a fantastic story. But I think if you think about it as a manual for life and how to face hardship, disappointment, constraints, the fact that the world you inherited is suddenly falling to pieces below your feet. These are all deep things. And for me it's all, I love the phrase of Faulkner's from his Nobel Prize address. He says, great art is about the human heart in conflict with itself. And what could be a better antagonist to the economist's view of rationality? In the economist's view of rationality you have a set of preferences and your job is to get the most out of them of the limited amount of money you have or the limited amount of time. And Faulkner is saying, most of life, the really hard part, it's about the fact that you're not sure what you want. And a lot of what my book's about is about, you should think about that. You should think about what you want, not just, excuse me, you should think about what you want to want. You should think about what you care about. And if you don't care about something now, you could come to care about it if you worked at it, if you wanted to. You know, let's talk less about the book right now and more about your kind of your career or your journey, because you are not just an economist, you graduated, your PhD is from the University of Chicago, which is famous for economistic thinking, right? This is, you know, this is the school of academics who reduced everything in human life to spreadsheets or to cost-benefit analyses. You worked in particular with the Nobel Prize winning, I was gonna say Academy Award winning, the Nobel Prize winning economist, Gary Becker, who one of the great insights that he did is that he applied basic economic reasoning to all aspects of life and illuminated things like the family from an economic perspective. When did you start to feel that the Chicago view was inadequate to kind of cover what it meant to live a life well lived? That's really interesting. I think there are two pieces to it. There's probably more than two, but two that stand out when I think about it. The essence of that Chicago toolkit, part of its measurement that you're talking about, the other part is assuming that two things that people pursue their self-interest rationally and that markets coordinate the different desires of people very effectively. And that first part, the rational part, and I used to, on the first day of class, I would say we're gonna assume in here that people are rational, they act in their own self-interest. It doesn't mean they don't make mistakes, but we assume they learn from their mistakes. Some people get divorced, some people buy things they don't like, of course, in the real world, but our starting point will always be that people know what they want better than anyone else from the outside and that they work systematically at fulfilling their desires given their limited income. And it's a very powerful toolkit. And I can tell you 50 things that are fantastically interesting and provocative and possibly even true when you apply that idea to the real world. And that's the gift of economics. But at some point, I realized it doesn't exactly work like that a lot of the time at the personal level and that economists fundamentally actually have come to many and come to believe that it does. So they'll say, and markets, therefore, but they forget that what is underlying the market is a bunch of decisions that individuals are making that are not quite as rational as the model. And that's okay, I would have said, yeah, fine, so what? It doesn't justify government intervention because the government doesn't understand what people want either. But the problem is that, again, I think a lot of people who are trained in economics, including myself or a bunch of my career, which is what you're alluding to, sort of took this not just as, oh, this is useful, but this is truth. And I think when I started to read Hayek and learn about emergent order, I realized my former colleague and friend, my current friend, Don Boudreau, would say that, I'm somewhere between Chicago and Vienna. I'm somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. I'm a mix of Chicago and Austrian economics. You're sinking with Atlantis, right? No, I'm walking on water, baby. No, that I'm somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean because I'm not really a Chicago economist anymore, but I still have some of that in me that tempers. And it is a massively powerful set of tools. Fantastic. And so is the Hayekian and Austrian insights about the complexity of reality and the connections between many things and so on. And I'd like both of those toolkits, they're both extremely powerful and useful and they're closely related, even though the proponents like to emphasize the differences. And even many people, I don't want to say they're left-wing, let's say centrist economists or liberal economists, people like Paul Krugman, who might criticize the Chicago School, he essentially buys into a similar model, right? He's a mainstream economist in every sense. But what happened to me, the other part that happened to me, I think has to do with the world falling apart around 2015. Around 20, it's an arbitrary date. And a lot of people say, yeah, once Trump got elected, my view is that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. The world got very different starting around 20, somewhere in the aftermath of the financial prices between 2008 and 2016, the things that economists were interested in suddenly became dramatically less interesting to the world. That forced me to think about whether I was a little too focused on them. So just to take an example of tribalism. Economists have nothing to say about tribalism. Gary Becker, were he alive today? I'm sure he could write a fabulous paper on it that would give us some insights, but most economists, nothing to say about it. In fact, it's somewhat irrational. What you're gonna prefer, your identity as a member of this tribe, whether it's the American tribe, your Catholic tribe, your economist tribe. The amazing ones are, I think about it, people who are neoconfederates or neo-Nazis, why would you affiliate with such obvious losers, but people do, right? Yeah, and they would say, you don't understand. And they might be- And I don't, I mean, a lot of, nobody understands why somebody chooses the wrong tribe, right? Correct. And of course, many of the tribes that we feel connected to, we don't choose. You're born in a certain place. And I do, I realize you're fishing for this. I do wanna bring up your love of Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots, a tribe also, you know, just, it's irrational, but. Yeah. But you're saying that, you know, economists on a certain level can't explain many human patterns or why people act the way they do, because it's not, and this isn't to say it's bad or invalid, but it is not rational in the way that they define rationality. But it's more than that, because somewhere along the line, I came to realize that economists, consciously or not, tend to focus on things that can be measured. Right. And this ties them back to the book. Dignity is hard to measure. A sense of self is hard to measure. Belonging is hard to measure. A feeling of transcendence is hard to measure. Mattering that you are important, that people look to you. These are things that I think are coming back to your question. They're about the life well lived and they're not about getting the most out of your money. They're not about what the interest rates are next week. And economists truthfully have virtually nothing to say about these things. And it came to my mind that these are not important. These are really important. And the reason it came to mind, you know, I'm toiling in the vineyard, I'm having a good time thinking about economics or the minimum wage or labor markets or social security. And it suddenly dawned on me somewhere around 2015 that nobody else cares about this except other economists, right? So the standard fiscal and monetary policy, free trade, something I cared deeply about, had cared deeply about for a long time. You know, you start to make the case for free trade if people are saying, right, but the people who are left behind, their lives aren't meaningful anymore. Oh, but the gains to this. Well, that's the way the economist deals with the fact that sometimes trade imports are hard for people. And I've had that. I mean, I've worried about that for a long time. That economist view, I think is really bad. But it suddenly dawned on me that suddenly it came to me that after a while that the economist's focus on the observable and the measurable and the tangible was missing 99% of the iceberg was below the surface. So yeah, the economist here is the drunk looking for his keys around the lampposts at night. Exactly. Can I ask if, you know, in a way, there's, you know, the 21st century has been a weird, you know, 20 years, right? And in many ways, you know, financially or materially were better off. Certainly more people on the planet are better off than ever. But there's this anxiety about is all of this gonna go away, including is the planet gonna go away, you know, because of global warming or something like that. Is it, you know, possible that the economics and the kind of economics that you were raised into and became a master of was really kind of geared around a world of scarcity that doesn't quite exist in the same way anymore. Because even if people are like, okay, it's really expensive to buy a house now or whatever. And I'm gonna pretend I don't wanna have kids because they're so expensive. In fact, we're past all of that. And people have so many choices that mere economics doesn't speak to, you know, where they are in life or where we are in society, certainly in the developed world. Well, I think that's a different way of saying what I was trying to get at before. When I used to hear people complain about economic insecurity or inequality, I would say, you know, people are worried about these things, but the data actually, and you could find evidence for those worries that make them seem reasonable, but there's evidence on the other side actually that says what you've suggested is the greatest time to be alive materially for an enormous number of people. It's unparalleled in human history. And so why are people so unhappy, stressed out? Why are suicide rising among young people? And the economist is, like I would say differently, free market economists who think things are pretty good tend to say things like, well, the media is always telling a depressing story. And of course, there's something to that, but I do think that a lot of people find the material, their material well-being unsatisfying, which is troubling to the economics world view, the economist world view. There are things that people care about besides how much, what a nice car they can have. Nothing wrong with a nice car, they're wrong with a great phone, they're wrong with a great vacation, are they wrong with a nice house, they're all lovely, but many, many people are finding themselves going, this is it, this is all there is. Something's missing. What is that? Economists don't have anything to say about it. Now, again, we can build a model of despair, a model of angst, we're really creative, but it's not the heart of the economist toolkit or enterprise. And it's- What are the social, either social sciences and maybe it's wrong because all social sciences, even if we talk as if economists and sociologists and psychologists are mortal enemies, they're all kind of working in a similar, epistemological worldview of rational analysis and incentives, behavior, all of that kind of stuff. What are the bodies of knowledge that you think speak to this sense of, you know what, like, I'm unhappy. I have a thousand thread count sheet. I cry into my pillowcase every night. What are the, are there organized schools of thought or where do we look for wisdom that might help us deal with those questions? Well, I think social science has something to say about those things. Economists, sociologists and psychologists, I'm not sure they're all working in the same vineyard. I think the psychologists and the sociologists are much more likely to invoke irrationality or mistakes or prejudices, biases. Economists have gotten into that in the last 10, 15 years, quite a bit actually, and they've tempered their certainty about rationality in creative ways. I don't know if it's helpful or not. It's interesting. But I think if we want to look to those, to understanding ourselves, we do have to go to wisdom. And there's not that much wisdom in psychology, economics and sociology. I would look to the great minds of the past that have stood the test of time. You know, I would read Tolstoy, I would read the Bible, I would read Don Quixote, and I would read Dostoevsky and Faulkner, et cetera. And great poets. All these incredibly upbeat, you know, Hollywood ending type, I mean, they invented the Hollywood ending, right, Dostoevsky? Yeah, Anna Karanina, sure, Dostoevsky, sure. No spoilers here. But it's funny because so much of our culture disdains the ancient. Our culture wants the newest, the latest, the best, the quickest, the fastest, you name it. And I think a lot of those things I just reeled off, I'll add Homer in there. They're not fashionable. Now they come and go. Occasionally, someone, you know, we still put on Shakespeare, very, very wise and insightful person, but TikTok is not the place to find wisdom. It's the place to find escape and entertainment. We live in an age of distraction rather than deep thought, deep exploration. And many of us have, I think, lost the ability to do it. I'm not sure I can do it the way I did. I certainly can't do it the way I did when I was in graduate school to immerse myself in difficult ideas and think about them for long periods of time. I'm easily distracted myself. So it's a hard thing. But I think we all understand to some extent that there are deeper things that take more time that are worth investing in. Of course, when you say that, sometimes my younger listeners on my podcast, oh, you're just old. Yeah, I was gonna, I have in my notes, your boomer, you know, question mark. I, you know, you are, according to Wikipedia, you're 67, you're about to have a birthday in September. So my math is correct, you'll be 68. And at one point you name check in the same sentence, Odysseus and Mark Knopfler, really showing your boomer roots in a way that I most, I won't even explain who Mark Knopfler is. If people don't understand, they can look it up. But is, I mean, It starts with a K just to make it easier for the boomers. Well, now, you know, now that's like 90, they're 90% of the way there. But, you know, how much of the journey that you're on is simply the journey of a person, you know, of a thoughtful, intellectually minded person getting older. And not that that isn't a meaningful journey. I'm like, you know, a couple of paces behind you up the mountain, but are you mistaking your journey for, you know, a society that needs to be redeemed according to what you're going through? I think that's a real possibility. I think about it a lot actually, although traditionally older people get cranky and self-centered and get tired of the niceties and just tell people what they want and tell them what they think of them. And maybe have to be at a certain cutoff age for that to really sit in. I don't think that's what I'm talking about. I don't think so. I get cranky though occasionally, but I do wonder how much of it's just aging. And I wonder about whether a book like this, for example, or the kind of ideas that we're talking about are things you can't enjoy until you get older. You know, I think I talk about it in the book. There's a wonderful play by Edward Albee called Three Women. I think that's what it's called. It's called Three Tall Women, Three Women. I can't remember. Three Women. And it's three characters on stage the whole time and it's actually the same person just at three different ages. It's a genius idea. I thought you were not doing spoiler alerts, but... I think you catch it on pretty quickly on that one. And if you think about it, when you think about your 20-year-old self at looking at your 67-year-old self in horror and your 67-year-old self looking back at your 20-year-old self in horror, something's going on there and it very well could be the case that until you get to be 67, the kind of things I'm suggesting are important. You have to experience them rather than note them down and live by that. You know, a lot of people say... But you can prepare for them, right? Yeah, but I don't think you can, but I'm not sure most people want to when they're 20. People, there's a common theme of what do you wish you knew when you were 20? And I can make a long list. You could too. Any older person in 20 can think back and say, oh boy, there are so many things I didn't understand. So when you take a 20-year-old and say, here, here are the things I wish I'd known when I was your age. Do you think that person goes, wow, thank you so much. Now I don't, I can get to the truth earlier. They don't, I think in general they don't. Now, some people mature quicker than others. Some people change more dramatically than others. But I think it's just a fascinating aspect of life that the things we really deeply understand aren't things we read about. They're things we learn through life. Ken, can you talk about, I mean, you are a proponent of modernity. You are not at all like, you know, you should only read Shakespeare. And you know, we should be doing things the way we did a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. So you're not at all like that, but you are deeply embedded in a religious tradition as well as an intellectual tradition. And you, I mean, to me, one of the most amazing things you've done for all of the books that you've published that I've learned a lot from, you recently, I mean, you left a comfortable gig. You know, you had a very pleasant life and you became the president of a university in Israel. What went into that? And can you talk about, you know, your Judaism and the way that that helps ground you, you know, in a certain way, it limits your choices, right, or your options. But in another way, it also helps clarify what's important or, you know, it gives you a kind of compass to kind of figure out what direction to be heading at. Yeah, it's a nice way to say it, by the way, rather than saying, as I think many people look at, at the religious life as, oh, now you don't have to worry about anything because all the decisions are made for you. That is not what the religious life is. And it's also not the case that you don't have any doubts. I think people who aren't religious, look at religious people sometimes and think, well, they're not anxious about anything because they have faith, but it's faith, it's tricky. So the question you're asking is not, answering is not easy to do. And I haven't thought a lot about how to put that into words. I'll try to say it a different way than maybe directly answering your question. If you're watching this on video, you see a window shade behind me. And outside that window, about a mile of what, mile and a half, two miles is the old city of Jerusalem. It's a walled city. The walls come from Crusader times. The most visible part of that walled city is the Dome of the Rock. A mosque that I think was built, I want to say around 600. I'm not, I apologize if I got that wrong. It's also the same spot that the Temple of Solomon was built. It's a story around 70 in the common era. So centuries before the building of the Dome of the Rock. In a way, it's the center of the spiritual universe. The poet, Yehuda Amirai, the Israeli poet said, Jerusalem is a port city on the Sea of Eternity. Now, that's line from a poem. It's a pretty good line to try to capture what it's like to look out over that tiny, tiny little, it's the old city of Jerusalem. When you're looking at it from my window, you can put your hand over it, it's gone. And yet it remains a fulcrum of many, many things today. To be connected to that is what I would struggle to put into words. You talked about being grounded in an old tradition. I am grounded in that tradition. Last month, this is crazy, but last month, the Jews observed what's called Tishababh, which is the ninth Abab, the Jewish month Abab that commemorates a tragedy of the destruction of the temple that once stood on that spot. Jews still fast on that day. 2,000 years later, we still mourn the loss of that physical structure. And of course, it's ideally, it's about more than that. It's about a connection to the divine and holiness in a physical place, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's crazy. I left my house that morning to go study, which is what people traditional Jews do on that morning. They study what happened that day and they read mournful poetry. It's a real opera. And I heard three thuds off in the distance. They were, I think, as far as I know, three scud missiles intercepting missiles coming from somewhere in the West Bank somewhere. I don't know where they came from actually, now that I think about it, I have no idea. When I got to the study session, the first announcement was if a siren goes off and you need to get to a bomb shelter, here's one over here, they told us how to get to it and there's a second one, it's a little farther, but in case it might be easier for you because the stairs are different, blah, blah, blah. Well, that's a heavy thing that makes you think that is connecting you to thousands of years of Jewish tradition at the same time you're in the middle of a bizarre conflict currently between Israel and the Palestinian people and it's intense, it's not all peaches and cream and it's deeply meaningful at many times. Some of it's a nuisance and hard to deal with and sure. And finally, I would just add that for me, I forget how you worded it, it was a nice wording, but for me, my connection to religious tradition is how I retain my sense of wonder and how I process things that I find fundamentally mysterious and I think that's an important part of being alive. I enjoyed that part a lot and religion is the way I access it, there's many other ways and so the chance to come here, the chance to come to Jerusalem and be a citizen of a state that's about to be 75 years old, which is an unimaginable turn of historic events that we can now put in perspective. The Jews are exiled in the year 70, never gave up the dream that they would return to their homeland, this weird little space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean and through a mainly horrifying set of events, but also some extraordinary sets of events, got state, not imaginable and yet was imagined for millennia by Jews who wanted to have it and they never gave up on it. So that's a certain richness to life when you're part of that. You had mentioned Faulkner earlier, one of Faulkner's best known lines that I'm going to mess it up here, but in a requiem for a non-sequel novel that he wrote, he talks about how the past isn't dead, in fact, in the South, it's not even past. How do you, because this is a question from wisdom of, how do you stay rooted in a tradition that respects the past without becoming enslaved by it or so stuck in the past? This, I think for many people on an individual level and sometimes for societies, that's the question. How do you acknowledge the past and how do you learn from the past and how do you revere the past without simply repeating it or not being able to move into a future that is going to be different? Great question. I'm reading Dara Horne's book, People Love Dead Shoes, catchy title. And she opens that book with a really, I think, deep insight about the difference between America and American culture and Jewish culture, at least historically. She says, American culture is always about looking to the future. American culture is who you can become. It's the American dream is that you're gonna either be, she doesn't say rich, but that you're gonna be able to, that it's the land of opportunity. You're gonna craft your own journey the way we were talking about earlier. And the past is, it's interesting and it's good to know about, but it's the past and no one sees the founding fathers, virtually no one. In America, very few Americans see the founding fathers as their ancestors, because they're not. They're not. And so the past in America, we debate the constitution and how much its weight should have and which amendments count and which don't and the separation of powers and the wisdom or lack of it of the founders. But it's really different for Jews because Jews, the people in the Bible in theory are our ancestors. We are a people. And that's the essence. That's an amazing thing about America is that you become an American, but they're not your people. Your people were Italian in your case or Jewish in my case or Irish. And the idea, and you're gonna forge a new thing called you and it's very individualistic. It's a beautiful thing. Judaism's really different. Judaism is you are part of a very long chain that goes back to Mount Sinai and the giving of the 10 commandments and the Exodus from Egypt. And they're not just past, as you suggest. Every spring, Jews commemorate the Exodus from Egypt and you are enjoined to feel as if you yourself went up from Egypt. What a crazy idea. And so Judaism, the past isn't like, it's hovering all the time. Now, of course, if you're not careful, you live in the past. You immerse yourself in the past. You can't look forward. You can't dream. So for Judaism, the way Judaism solved that conundrum is to say, redemption is possible. Of course, Christians have a different view of where that went, right? They believe that the Savior has been sent and he just needs to come back. Judaism doesn't believe that, but that's the way Judaism kept us, keeps Jews forward-looking. The idea of a messianic age. And in fact, John Gray, fantastic philosopher, who, although I don't agree with every aspect of it. He's taken a turn to become very, was a great explicator of Hayek and then kind of took a turn against modernity in a profound way. And in many ways, he is the antagonist, not so much of Hayek, but of, say, Stephen Pinker. So Stephen Pinker will say, the world's getting better and certainly economists say this all the time. We talked about it half an hour ago. And John Gray is saying, don't we still slaughter each other? Don't we still have a lot of anger inside us? Don't we still care more often about our tribe than what's right? And there's a lot of truth to that. I don't know why I brought up John Gray. I'm not forgotten. I don't know why I mentioned him, like, whatever. Well, in a United States context is part of the, I don't wanna say despair because I think that's overselling it, but as part of the aimlessness, perhaps, that maybe we're witnessing again. I don't know how much of this is generational. I am having a pretty successful career. You've had a fabulously successful career. We can kind of ruminate on this stuff. When you talk to younger people, they feel ripped off, they feel cheated, even though they're growing up in a world of plenty that I could not imagine much less my parents or grandparents. But is it that the sense of identity and of rootedness? I'm thinking, so my grandparents from Ireland and Italy came over in the 19 teens. My parents were very ethnic in their way. I was somewhat ethnic, but less ethnic. And then I have adult children now who are just American. I mean, they're not hyphenated. And with that comes a certain kind of universalism, but also a loss of a kind of tradition, not necessarily to continue, but to at least push back on. Are we as part of what's going on in the United States? Maybe, and maybe this is true in different ways throughout kind of the developed world, that those things which gave us meaning within the recent past have kind of dissipated. And we haven't figured out what is the next set of principles or next set of identities that we're going to use to kind of situate ourselves in time and space and start moving forward in our lives. I think it comes back to what you said earlier. Maybe I misunderstood what you said earlier, but this seems like a version of it. Greatest time to be alive, isn't it? And why are people so unhappy? And one answer is because it's the greatest time to be alive and things that used to be a struggle and a source of meaning work, for example, or just kind of for many people, not everybody, but are relatively easy. There's a feeling that, as you say, of aimlessness. Now, the easy statement to make that I think many people make this statement, even though I'd like to make it, I don't think it's necessarily true, is that religion has to a large extent died away and it is a source of meaning and has been a source of meaning for millennia. I don't think that's it. I mean, it's a piece of it, maybe, for some people, but I think I'm not sure of the cause, but I think the most compelling example of this crisis that you're referring to is how we look at masks in the aftermath of the pandemic or the middle of it. How is it that wearing a mask has become a source of identity that in certain cultural parts of America, wearing a mask is a source of pride. It's a signal of virtue. I took this seriously, I believed in the science and for other parts of America, it's a sign of stupidity and worse, it's a sign of government control or attempts to coercion. And I have my own feelings about that, which aren't important. What's important is that, could you imagine at any time in history until today that that would be an issue that people would line up behind one or the other and get occasionally violent about it? And yell at people? Yeah, I mean, I'm actually thinking of, there were hundreds of years of European history where people killed each other over whether you believed in a covenant of works or a covenant of grace. So masks, it's kind of like, all right. Step in the right direction. Yeah, at least we're just shouting mostly at each other, but I agree. Are your kids as religious as you? Somewhere along the line, I realized that I make this claim, I don't know if it's true, but I think a lot of parents want their kids to turn out like themselves more or less. Like you wouldn't like it if you're a kid and you became like an angry socialist or fell in the blank, whatever it is that's different from Nicolespi. And I think that's a natural impulse. It's probably hardwired in some sense that our children are a legacy and we expect them to be, if not literally clones of ourselves, you know, kind of cloney. And I think I'm differently now, I think of them as a portfolio. They're all parts of me. Some of them have drawn on. You had a bunch to minimize your risk to spread it around. Yeah, I have four of them. This is also Bill Belichick again, right? Exactly, yeah, exactly. But, you know, my kids are, first of all, they define religious differently than I would. They've chosen their own paths. I'm proud of all of them. I love all of them. I'm not, it's not my job to make them turn out like me. I gave them a legacy that they can choose and will choose and they'll change over time. So, you know, the question of whether they're religious or not is kind of, it's not the right question. What I really care about is they take life seriously and or at least I hope they do. And I'm not gonna judge them, but I think the issue there, I'll make a Hayekian point. I think there's, as a parent, control is really appealing. And of course, when they're young, it's a really good idea. You gotta keep safe. You gotta keep away from the street, traffic. You gotta keep away from the hot stove. There's a lot of things in life that a parent has to do that are related to control. And as your children get older, you have to recognize that they're adults like you and they need to follow their own path. And my kids are all doing that, which is glorious. You just as a kind of final conversation point, you mentioned 2015 or thereabouts as things kind of shifting in a big way. You're now living in Israel. So you may not have as much of an interest in kind of the American scene culturally and politically. But I'm curious what you think about our politics. And also I was reading an interview with you or a statement where you were quoted as saying, I'm something of a libertarian and that that term comes with some baggage and some confusion. And can you define what it means to be something of a libertarian and what is the baggage and confusion? And is it becoming more confused? Because you've been broadly in a kind of free market libertarian world for most of your career or for really all of your career. Yeah. And Econ Talk, which is one of the longest lived podcast definitely you've talked to everybody which is one of its great strengths but you're coming from a kind of identifiably libertarian or libertarianish perspective. What's your sense of where the libertarian movement or identity or set of concerns is? And is it looking at the stuff that matters? Do you think? Well, I think libertarians somewhat like economists in general are struggling to maintain relevance in the current debate. That 2015 moment, nationalism became a thing, it's not just in America, around the world. Immigration was suddenly more than just an economics issue. It was an identity issue, certainly with Brexit and other issues in America related to immigration. The baggage I was referring to is that I think a lot of people think libertarianism is about having the freedom to take drugs and to have a good time in life. And the Menkean Puritism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere is having a good time and we're on the other side. That's not exactly the right quote but that's the way I always remember it. It's close. And that's the baggage and I think that's unfortunate I think just as we are free to and should be free to party and care not at all about purpose and meaning as I was talking about earlier, we're also free to embrace it, we're free to become charitable, we're free to start voluntary organizations that make the world a better place. And I think people mistake often illegal for, excuse me, legal for desirable. I think many things should be legal that are not desirable. That seems really hard for people. And I think that's the part of libertarianism. I still embrace, I still believe that government is not our collective wisdom being expressed through the ballot box but I've lost some of my dogmatic passion for it over the last five or so years. And that's, I haven't thought extensively about it but I know it's true. I haven't dissected it or diagnosed it in my own head. You know, I'm here in Israel, we have socialized medicine and my drugs are really cheap, my prescription drugs and it's pleasant. But I do know because I'm an economist that one of the reasons they're cheap is they're subsidized ridiculously in America through the high prices that consumers pay off and out of pocket, but usually through third party insurance and Medicare that I'm a beneficiary of here now in Israel because Israel negotiates a bargain from suppliers that if everybody did it there wouldn't be some of those drugs. So I'm not a fool. And at the same time, there are things about the American healthcare system that I used to defend that I can't defend anymore or I don't aspire, I don't feel the commitment I used to have to convert the Israeli system into a free market system. In America I did because it drove me crazy when people would say, you know what proves markets don't work? The healthcare system, are you out of your mind? It's one of the most distorted government-imposed set of interactions that you could possibly imagine. It's subsidized quantities restricted of doctors, there's 10,000 interventions, it's nothing like a free market. And I think we should move in a market direction in America. In Israel, it works pretty well. Now, I haven't had anything really wrong with me but it works better than, I think it might work better than the crummy American system, which isn't as market-oriented as we like to think it is. So those kind of things are just not my passions anymore. You know, it's kind of like, I remember when I first became a libertarian or intellectually public about it, you know, I would talk about private roads say, you know, fun idea for a libertarian and my adversary would say, if we have private roads, there'd be a road leading up to everybody's house. I said, do you mean like the ones we have like now? Like, because we subsidize it and because contractors who make roads are really politically powerful and yeah, it's not the best system. But eventually, I don't know about you, but that just didn't become a crucial issue for me. I mean, people would say to me, are you in favor of private roads? Maybe intellectually, but it's not in my top 10 of things I think we ought to be struggling for. I think a lot about the one of the first articles I joined reason in the fall of 93 and one of the first articles I read about was about, you know, we need to get rid of the post office or to, you know, break its, you know, dread monopoly on first class letter delivery. And it's kind of like somewhere in the past 30 years, it's like we did that. The post office is still around and the post, you know, we're still on the hook for all the retirement and capital expenses, blah, blah, blah, but like I went to the post office for the first time in a year, like two weeks ago. And I was like, God, I, you know, and it looked like 1980 or something like that, but it's like it's not front and center because we have many workarounds. Like it's not pressing in the same way. Yeah. It's like, do you think we should privatize the national parks? Well, that might be better. That doesn't mean turn them into Disneyland. It could mean that it's held by an environmental group or other ways of running it in a more decentralized way. But I really like Yosemite. It's, you know, it could be run better, but it's okay. It's pretty good. So it's not on my top five. Do you worry about in the United States more broadly in the political scene? And I don't know how this is playing out in Israel. I mean, obviously in Europe there is something similar like you were talking about populism more broadly, nationalism and whatnot. Is it, you know, in your estimation, is it worse or is it as bad as it's been in your lifetime where, you know, there do seem to be two tribes that pull fewer and fewer people, fewer and fewer people identify as either a Republican or Democrat or conservative or liberal. The rhetoric is more heated. Violence seems to be kind of hanging out around the edges. Do you think we're at a dangerous moment or is this just a kind of momentary, you know, gas bubble that will pass? I once heard James Buchanan, the Nobel Laureate economist say that when he looks to the past, he's an optimist. When he looks to the future, he's a pessimist. So look at the future doesn't look so. And what do you mean by that? He meant, you know, if you look to the future, it's scary. If you look to the past, it's, you know, it's not that it seems like a much better time. Things are going to get, this is horrible. We're going down the tubes. He said, but if you look to the past, 1933, that looked a lot worse than right now. And it turned out, I mean, horrible things happened, but we overcame them. Nazism was defeated. The Great Depression ended. We were at, in fact, it wasn't just, and we eventually got back to the standard of living we had in 1928. No, it went way above it. So that's the sense in which he meant that. I have to say, and again, it could be just because I'm an old curmudgeon. I don't want to think of myself that way, but it does seem like things are going awry and are not going to get straightened out. And I'll tell you why, giving my argument for why. It's not because, oh, it's so much worse now. It's not. Rhetoric and I was, I was sentient in 1968. It was really bad in 1968 in terms of the left and right. There were bombings over the war in Vietnam in America. People were died for political protests and were killed for political protests at Kent State. And in a way, this is nothing. This is like the occasional streets, Kermish and Portland. I mean, come on. But the reason I'm worried is that, I say sometimes that the veneer of civilization is thin. And what I mean by that is that, we're sitting around here, we're fully dressed, where we maintain a certain civility even when we disagree and might even yell at each other, but we don't generally hurt each other. And, but deep down, we're still animals and we're prone to hurt each other and wars eventually and atrocities and horrible things happen throughout human history. And I don't think those are behind us. So in that sense, I think the veneer of civilization is thin. But I think there's another sense of that saying and that is that the norms that have governed American political life for the last 250 years are unraveling. And when people say, oh, campaigning is so dirty now. Now it was dirty in the past and you could argue it was dirtier. But what has changed is that people's respect for the institutions that sustain our civilized democracy, which is a republic, not a majority rule system, but a republic. Those norms are increasingly unraveling. And the reason they're unraveling is that each side thinks, if I act civilly, I'm gonna get taken advantage of. That's a bad spiral. And I think that's the spiral we're in. It's driven by all kinds of reasons. Social media, external events, the lack of things to, a lack of an external enemy. You can name, you know, there are a lot of theories you can give for it. And while we do, I just wanna add the actions of the people running those institutions is a major problem. Yes, and I think you've all been diagnosed very thoughtfully what is going wrong. We can debate what the causes are, but people generally are not gonna sacrifice their own well-being for the institutions they're supposed to represent. They're looking out for themselves. That is hard to sustain. I'm not optimistic about that. Are we gonna have a civil war? I don't know, but I don't think so. But I worry about it. But I worry more in America that the norms of the political system and that underpin its civility are going away. And I don't think it's gonna, that's a fixable, if you don't have that, you're in big trouble. And I think that's what I would worry the most about. All right, well, we're going to leave it there. We've been talking with Russ Roberts. The new book is Wild Problems, a guide to the decisions that define us. In reading this, you were reminding me of Neil Young or Elton John, just to go with a couple of boomer references in the 70s where these guys just went from great album to great album to great album. I mean, kept getting better. They were on a streak and like in a lot of ways. And I'm a huge fan of your work, including the novels that you wrote. This, I think, is your best book. And the last one about Adam Smith was, you know, like a phenomenal knock your socks off tour de force, but this one is better still, Wild Problems. So continued success with what you're doing, but also thank you for the provocations in this book. And, you know, I wanna just say that and say thank you. Well, thank you. That's very kind. It's great to talk to you.