YouSaid · the spoken record

Russ Roberts

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2022-08-05
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2022-08-05
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  1. “Often not going to work out. So it's really a fancy convolutive way of saying you should beware the law of unintended consequences. And that is one of the great virtues of studying economics or can be, is to appreciate that. And by the way, Tim, if I can go back. I never got to tell you what a Hayekan”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Especially in the last 10, 15 years, see themselves as social engineers, as if they can tweak and tinker and move people around. Adam Smith, about two hundred years before that quote, said something similar. He said the man of system, meaning a person who has a theory about how the world works, you can think about Marx or Lenin or Mao Zaitong. They move the human beings in their country around like the pieces of a chessboard, ignoring the fact that they have a motion of their own. It's just a profound metaphor for thinking about how to bring about social change. So what Hayek is saying there is that economics, the task, the curious task of economics, because kind of strange by the curious event peculiar. The curious task to be”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “That book, by the way, I think it's 108 pages, at least in some editions. I used to give it away to people's a gift, more like a punishment, it turned out. Then I want to read it. It's dense, it's very dense, but I do recommend it if you're a brave soul. You can do some waiting. It's very murky water at times. As I said, he's not the most felicitous phrase maker. But anyway, that particular sentence is pretty convoluted, right? But it is saying something profound, which is the following.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “How easy it is to be misled. So it's a profound piece, and I recommend it. You find it on the web, it's available. Easy to read for a non economist”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And economics, what people want of us is, well, tell me what's going to be like tomorrow, Professor. I need to know. And the professor should say I have no idea. But my best guess is it's going to be like yesterday. But it often isn't, and if you don't tell people that you're indulging in scientism because what you've done, in that case, for example, is you've taken the data from the past and you've extrapolated to the future and yes, sometimes the future is somewhat like the past, except for when it isn't, and then it's matching the face. So what Hayek was warning us against there, which is there's an irony is given the current moment we're in, what he's warning against there is the authority of experts using the tools of science to mislead”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “They slept well, how much they ate the night before, whether they're having a fight with their wife, how their game last week was, and the injury they sustained, and whether they're fully over it or only partially over it. Even then, I mean, there's just no way you're going to predict the outcome of the game. You might be able to get close. You might get on average right, maybe. But it's not predictable the way the location of Saturn is on July 17th, 2027. We're really good at that. You know what? We're not good at? The value of Bitcoin on July 2017, 2027, or interest rates on July 17, 2027, or whether there's going to be a crash or whether there's going to be a recession”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Kane's not the clearest writer either, but he's a much more entertaining writer. Flash forward to Hayek's Nobel Prize in the 70s. I want to say 74. And in 1974, what he does is he says, you know, I tried to build a model of the economy that would be like a big engineering machine that I could manipulate or understand which levers led to which flows of this or that. And he said, that was a fool's game. That's what he's saying in that Nobel Prize speech. He said, I can't explain that. No one can. He uses the example, the analogy of a sports event. I'll take a football game. He says, imagine that you could have all the data on everything you could possibly measure about all the players.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “We know that aren't true. The things we don't know that we wish we understood, we wish we had access to the truth. They're things we think we've discovered is true that in fact are not. And that was the focus of that piece. And in fact, that piece was, it's kind of 15 seconds of insight baseball. He was an intellectual antagonist of John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s in London, and he lost. Keynes beat them beat him. Keynes won. He won the intellectual battle. He won the battle of the marketplace of ideas. He triumphed. And Hayek tried to take him on in his own terms and Keynes beat him. Meaning tried to build a model of the economy that would be like Keynes's but better. Modeling itself is kind of really hard to understand, and anybody who's taken undergraduate macroeconomics gets a sort of bastardized version of it that.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Technical Greek letter kind of economics treatise, it's a very readable essay on, I think, a major challenge of modern life that when he wrote it and when he delivered it, it was sort of interesting. Now it's more tragic because it's become a central question to me of modern life. So we have on one side we have the so-called rationalists who believe in evidence-based data science. I love all those things. So did Hayek. They're all really good. The problem is that sometimes there's what he calls scientism, something that has to look of science, that looks scientific, and it fools people into thinking they understand something when in fact they don't. It's trivial. When I say it, it's going to be so obvious. There's two kinds of ignorance. There's the things we don't know. And then they're the things we think we know.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “It's actually one of the goals of that rap video, the first one, and then we did two. I did them with filmmaker John Popola. Part of the goal of those videos actually was to try to capture some serious economic ideas that we try to make it entertaining, obviously, which is why we put in wrap format. But part of the goal is just to let people know that this person existed because he's not well known. And one of the common comments we got on YouTube was, who is this guy? How come I ever heard of him? So you're not alone. You're a very good company. He's not part of the Payac is not part of the standard curriculum of economics departments. Forget everyday learning or reading. And he's not the greatest writer. He's not the most entertaining writer. If you're going to start with something, actually the pretense of knowledge is one of his most accessible pieces, which is, it's ironic. It was his Nobel Prize speech, but it's not a high fallutin, highbrow.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Will emerge from their experience here more complete. Now they're not fully complete. You can't really be shalem. It's an aspiration. But I think it's a great aspiration for all of us. And certainly when you embark on an educational experience, it's become very fashionable in modern times to see college as a professional career, pre-professional experience, prepare you for accounting, engineering, computer science, and so on. And that's nice. Nothing wrong with that. But Shalem, we think it's something more than that. We believe it's about the cultivation of certain habits of mind and heart that make you a full human being and not just a successful person in the marketplace. And not unrelated.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Year ago, almost to the day, I took the job as president of Shalam College, which is here in Jerusalem, which in Hebrew is Jerusalem, if you look at the Anglicization of Eushaliim, the end of Jerusalem is SLEM, which is Salem in Massachusetts, in lots of other places. Those cities are named for Jerusalem. And the name of Jerusalem has that root, that SLM, that three-letter root in Hebrew, which typically is translated as peace. Shalom is the same root But Shalom, which is slightly different, it's a reference to the fact that we're in Jerusalem, but it's also a reference to the meaning of that word, which is whole, complete, well-rounded. And so our students, we hope,”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “And we understand that about friendship. Most of our friendships take years where we experience things together, do things together, have intense conversations. And the nth one, the last one, the next one is building on all of that. And the idea that you can just say, okay, I'm here for you, which is, I think, the modern impulse. And it's good. It's not bad. It's good to be here for people. But I think the quantity time part of it helps us cultivate that quality time, get the hang of it. And it certainly, I think, I don't know, if you ever spent a long time with somebody on a lazy afternoon, it's just a different experience.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “You can comfort yourself, and I think sometimes float yourself into saying, well, you know, I don't give friend ex, family member Y, situation Z, the trip to the hospital, going to the funeral. I don't do those things because, you know, those take too much time. I have more important things to do. But when I am with them, it's quality time. I really give them myself. I think what my dad believed, and I believed or tried to believe as a parent for my four kids, is that quality time requires quantity time. You can't just turn it on. You can't just say, okay, let's have a serious conversation. Go. It doesn't work that way.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “We had our kids, and I'd say, Dad, you want to read a story? You want to read a book to one of my kids? He was so disdainful of that. The idea of reading a book that someone else had written was so cheating to him. All of his stories were made up. He told us hundreds of stories of my children, hundreds of stories, that he crafted, that he made up. And he could have been a great children's writer. He could have been maybe a minor American poet, but he spent most of his time with us, his free time”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And I can't say it. He wanted to be a poet. He wrote lots of poems, many of them pretty good. He liked a few of them. And his joke really was you read the line, but the joke was he'd like to be a minor American poet. He didn't want to be Robert Frost or a Disney Malay. He would have been happy to be a quieter person with a couple good poems. And he might have achieved that if he had devoted himself to that craft, but he instead devoted himself to us. One of my favorite things about my dad.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I went on three silent meditation retreats while he was alive. And he found that utterly bewildering. So he was not a meditator, but he understood somehow that principle about paying attention to what's important. And what was important to him was us, his children and his wife and his family. And as I said, he used to complain. He said, it's terrible. He said, God gave me such a big soul and so little talent. I have so much to say.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “And so we often don't. We miss the sunset or we see it and we just we're too busy texting or we ate the ice cream cone and we're talking while we're eating it. We're hardly noticing it's going down. It's compulsive. And I think parenting, but more than parenting, life, requires paying attention. You know, my dad, I would say my dad was one of the least meditative people who was born in 1930. There weren't that many of them, to be honest. It's a more recent phenomenon, but my dad...”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “My dad died two years ago, roughly, he was 89 years old, born in 1930. I actually would start with the point about distraction because I think it's about more than parroting. Life goes by so quickly and we let it and somebody pointed out might have been Ryan Holliday I think when you're on your deathbed what would you give for One more day with someone you love, one more ice cream cone, one more sunset. It's really trite, but it's not trite at all, actually. It's incredibly essential to a life well lived. You know, there's a beautiful song about it called May I Suggest, which I recommend profoundly as an encouragement to pay attention.”

    2022-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT