Grappling With Life's "Wild Problems"

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. As an economist, Russ Roberts has been taught to approach decision-making by conducting an analysis, weighing trade-offs, and then rationally budgeting resources to get the most bang for his buck. But as he explains in his new book, Wild Problems, a guide to the decisions that define us, he found this approach woefully inadequate for grappling with life's biggest decisions. Things like figuring out whether to get married, or how to live a meaningful life.

Today on the show, Russ and I delve into why the pros and cons approach the decision-making is deficient when facing what he calls wild problems. 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, the decisions themselves will transform us into different people, and their effects can be permanent, making such decisions akin to choosing to become a vampire. From there, we turn to strategies for dealing with the inherent uncertainty around wild problems, including looking beyond basic happiness, considering tradition, and trying things out by experience.

After the show's over, check out our show notes at awimp.is slash wild problems.

Russ Roberts, welcome back to the show. Great to be back. So we had you on several years ago to discuss your book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. 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. When economists typically think about decision-making, do they have an idea of what an optimal approach to decision-making is? Sure, because we have assumed a way of a hard part of the problem.

When economists study decision-making, they assume that we as human beings know what we want and what we like. 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. So something's really expensive. We might not want as much of it if it's less expensive. 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. So the 12th ice cream cone isn't as thrilling as the second or even the first.

And that's the economics way in general of thinking about decisions. We have a set of what are what economists call preferences. We have a certain amount of income. We can't have everything we want. And then the question is, how do we spend our scarce income and our scarce time to get the most out of life? And that sounds pretty reasonable.

Right. So it's all about trade-offs. I think we've all done that when you bought a vacuum cleaner or a car, 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, but I think in the long term, I'll enjoy that more. Or sometimes I say, well, I'm not going to get that upgrade package. I'll save some money. I can use that money somewhere else. Exactly.

Well, so this can work for a lot of decisions when you know what you want and the cost benefits of something. But you say there's a species of decisions where this typical utilitarian economic approach to decision making doesn't work and these are called wild problems. What are some examples of wild problems and why doesn't the typical economic decision making process work for them?

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? If I've eaten mint chocolate chip ice cream 50 times the 51st time, I'm pretty sure what I'm getting myself into. If I've never been married, it's a little bit hard, right? 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, we don't have an algorithm or an easy way to make the best decision. 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. How much time should I spend on friendship?

Should I be more self-centered? Should I tell my friends I'm busy tonight so I can work on that report and do better in my career? A lot of these kind of decisions are very different than the economist decision of what kind of ice cream to buy or whether to take a vacation to the mountains versus the beach. 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. These other kind of choices, these what I call wild problems, I'm not sure how I feel about them. In fact,

Once I make the choice, I might be a very different person. I just had my first grandchild. No, I didn't have my first grandchild. My first grandchild just arrived in the world. I was kind of surprised at how I felt when I helped her in my arms. I knew something about having children, but grandchildren I thought about differently and tell a head one. And then I realized it's not quite the same as I expected. That's certainly true of marriage. It's true of children. It's often true of a career choice or where you live. You think you have an idea of what's going on.

Now, you're always going to be surprised. You can't know exactly how things are going to turn out. But it's more than that, you're going to be a different person. So how you feel about the things that happen to you are also changing. So it's not just, oh, wow, I didn't expect that. It's how I feel about that. It's now different. And that, I think, is one of the challenges of making rational decisions and these basic, these kind of problems. We don't exactly know what we're getting into. And once we get into it, we're different people.

which raises the question of who we want to be. 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? Do I want to be a parent? Do I want to be a spouse? Do I want to be this kind of career and economist or lawyer? How is that going to that identity? How is that going to make me feel? And those are hard questions.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here and I hope we can hit on this. So wild problems, it sounds like wild problems are the really important decisions. Like that's the importance of who to marry, if to get married, whether to have kids, where to live. That's the, that's, it's not buying a vacuum cleaner. Yeah. And so that causes us a lot of anxiety because it's not a secret that they're important.

And one reason they're important is they have lots of ramifications for how we're going to feel and what we're going to experience. But the other reason they're important is they're hard to reverse. You don't like the vacuum thing. You can usually send it back. You can send back a romantic spouse or a partner, but it's not the same kind of experience. And so there's a lot more at stake that puts a lot more anxiety on us. And it puts a lot of pressure on us to make that decision well. And we start looking around like, how do I need more data?

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. I don't have reviews for my spouse, how 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. And not just that, most of the aspects of being a parent are not easily described in a paragraph review on, say, Amazon. So it's a very different, let's set up pressure and anxiety. And 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. It wasn't a decision to get married. Everybody got married. They could. Now it's a choice. Everybody would have kids who could. Now it's like, oh, should I bring a kid into the world? Am I going to like being a parent? So I think people today are in a very different set of experiences and choices than advanced generations. I think it's a lot harder.

So with wild problems, you can't use the typical rational utility approach to deciding. But you highlight people who've tried to do that, try to solve these wild problems using rubrics and checklists and things. And one of these guys was a famous guy, Darwin. Darwin was trying to figure out whether to get married. And the typical scientist he was, he decided to make a list. How'd that work out for Darwin? Not so well. He was 29 years old.

And he thought, well, you know, maybe it's time to settle down. He made a list of the pros and the cons of getting married. The pros, the benefits of marriage were quite few. And they weren't very exciting. At one point, he said, it's better than a dog anyway, to have a wife at home waiting for you for, for my calls female chitchat. It's not Darwin's best moment, unfortunately. So he makes this list of the positives

You know, female company, somebody to talk to. They're not very many of those. And then the cost, there's a lot of them. She might not want to live in London. I might have to move out of London. She's going to have relatives. I'm going to have to spend time with. I'm not going to be able to do my work. I'm going to have to spend time with her.

I'm gonna have kids and probably, and if we have kids, some of them could die. That's gonna be really hard on me. I know emotionally I'm gonna be a wreck all the time. So he's worried about all the negatives and he makes the list. The negatives are very numerous. And the first thing I point out about that, that's the first thing. The negatives outweigh the positive. So in theory, the rational choice is clear. Don't get married. And yet Darwin decides to marry. And so I'm interested in this question. Why did he make this leap into the dark

even though his so-called rational approach said he shouldn't. And 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. There's some ethereal, higher level aspects of purpose and meaning that he was aware of. He didn't write them down. He didn't write down anything about a shared life with another person. He didn't write anything about love.

He didn't write anything about the benefits of making a sacrifice for another person. He just looked at the sacrifice. It's all about him. And that's reasonable before you get married, because before you get married, you're the only person you think about. Once you get married, essentially you have children, all of a sudden, there's more to think about. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that. So it's not like he made an irrational choice by marrying anyway. It's that the things that naturally come to mind

when you're trying to make a rational choice in the face of these wild problems, they're not necessarily the most important things. I use the metaphor of the person looking under the lamppost for the lost keys. You know, a person can't find their keys, their car, and they're looking under this lamppost late at night. Somebody comes along to help them, they're looking too, and they can't find them. And finally, the helper says, did you lose them here? Yeah, I'm not sure, but that's where the light's the best. And I think that's a very common seduction when we make

decisions in the face of uncertainty. We look at the things that are in the light, the things that we can see. If you're not married, what do you see?

with marriage and children. Well, a lot of, I've described them as camps, thing I can't do on some area, things I can't do once I have children. The real benefits are much harder to describe, much harder to imagine before you experience them. It's a very different kind of calculus. So to think you have control of it mentally, I'll just make a pro-con list of benefit cost analysis. It's just a little bit, you're likely to mislead yourself. I'm not saying it can't be done,

It's just difficult to do. 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 benefits.

Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest insights I took from this book that 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 gonna change when you make the decision and use this analogy. Someone talks about the decision to become a vampire. 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 and maybe you like being a vampire, maybe you won't. So the only way you can find out is actually to do it.

Exactly. And that comes from a philosopher, L.A. Paul. It's her name. She wrote a book called Transformative Experiences. And it's about having children, decisions like we're talking about. And she uses a 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. And once you've made the leap, you feel very differently than you did beforehand. Although I do make the point, most of us would say, well, gee, being a vampire, this is like a very moral thing to do. 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. But the best thing to do is your happiness.

In some sense, one of the themes of this book is that happiness is overrated. We're naturally going to pursue the more obvious pleasures, and we're obviously going to try to avoid the most obvious pains. Subler 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. The people who do have access to them, people are already married, people who have children, either can't talk about it well or they don't want to talk about it. They're uncomfortable. So it's natural if you think about being a vampire to ask vampires, say, hey, what's it like? You like it? Yeah, boy, it's great. You know, I'm out at night all the time and you live forever, can't beat it. So that's one way to get information is to ask the people or to do a survey.

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. Let's say you're trying to decide where to live. It's not just, oh, I like it. It's complicated. It's nuanced. It's multifaceted. And sort of boil it down to, yeah, it's fun. I like it. Is I think missing a huge part of what makes life

We care about a lot more than just, yeah, it's pleasant. We care about meaning. We care about purpose. And these choices, these well problems have a whole overarching aspect to them that suffuses our days and doesn't just say, well, that was a good day or that was a bad day. 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. So I mean, it's irrational to be a parent.

For me, it hasn't been. I don't know if it's true. I didn't count those days every day. So I was a good one. I was a bad one and keep track. But there were a lot of tough days and there still are. Parenting is a very powerful experience. But my suggestion in the book is you don't have kids because it's fun. You don't have kids because there were good days, the bad days. You have kids because it adds meaning to life. You have kids because crucial part of being a human being, part of the human experience. You have kids to understand your parents and your own relationship

to the human enterprise. You don't have to miss fun. And you don't even just do it because it's more pleasured than pain. It's not just adding up, much more complicated than that. And I think economists and others who look at standard rational techniques are missing something when they try to apply them to these wild problems.

Okay, so instead of focusing on the standard techniques to make a decision, you say a better rubric to help you make these decisions for wild problems is figure out what it means to live a flourishing life. And this is borrowing from Aristotle and his Nick and McKeean ethics. Have you figured out any ways to hone in on what it means to live a flourishing life? Like, how do you know? Like, okay, being married is part of my flourishing life. How do you know that?

And for other people, it might not be. I give an example in the book of Kafka. Kafka, the writer, makes a pro-conless like Darwin, and he decides not to marry. And for Kafka, being a great writer was an important part of flourishing, and he was afraid, as was Darwin, that if he chose to marry, he might lose that key part of his sense of self, and what he was gonna do with his life. In Kafka's case, he decided not to marry, Darwin decided to marry, turned out okay for Darwin,

Despite the fact that he married and had a bunch of kids, he did manage to produce some of the greatest scientific works in human history. So, he could have been even better if he'd stayed single, he'd have been even more fulfilled. But I suspect not. Perhaps they're not much more pleasantly for Darwin, at least for most of his life than he expected, based on his procom list.

But it does raise this question. So if you say that meaning and purpose are crucial to a full sense of well-being and not just fleeting day-to-day pleasure and pain, how do you think about that? And so I talk about a number of ways that I think that we flourish. Obviously, these include things like using our skills to the utmost. They include knowledge of ourself. I talk about different ways and I'll spend a lot of time on this, but there are some obvious ways

you can learn about who you are and what you want to be. You can have psychotherapy, you can have meditation, you can have religion, you can read literature and philosophy. All these things are ways that human beings have tried to understand their place in the cosmos and what is meaningful to them, what gives their life their life purpose. There's no easy answer for any one person. There's no general set of

of principles that are simple, but it's an enterprise that you need to spend some time on. One of the things I suggest in the book is that tradition is a tested way that people have found to be helpful, some traditions that are not helpful. That's not simple, but you want to take all of these things seriously. A lot of what I'm talking about in the book is what Agnes Callard, the philosopher, calls aspiration. Who do I aspire to be?

That's something we're giving some bump to, right? What kind of person do I want to be? Do I want to be the kind of person who fell in the blank? Or should I just take who I am now as good enough? And I would suggest that aspiring, the act of self-improvement, the act of trying to become more than who we are today and something more tomorrow is a very powerful part of the human experience that does keep people meeting.

This sounds reminds me, it sounds like, you know, Kiergard has this idea of, you know, you kind of go through these three phases of ethical development. And the first one is the aesthetic where you just pick, oh, this is fun. I enjoy this. I'm going to wear these clothes. They're cool. I'm going to read this novel because it's fun. But he says at a certain point, you need to move on beyond the aesthetic to the ethical where you start thinking, well, what does it mean to live a good life? And I think beyond that's the religious where it's beyond the ethical.

But the way you figure out what that higher level is, like you said, I think reading philosophy, looking at religion, these are issues that humanity has been thinking about for thousands of years. They might have some insights. They might not. Things have changed, obviously, but it's a good place to start. Yeah, what works for someone else will work for Kierkegaard, might not work for you or what works for your neighbor, might not work for you. What works for you when you were younger, may not work for you when you were older. A lot of this is just being aware

that this is an aspect of life to give some time and thought to. I'm not suggesting you have to go into a Buddhist meditation retreat for, you know, for a year and think deeply about yourself and for some life. It's more as you make these decisions in life, although that's interesting, but as you make these decisions in life, you should be aware that they are

don't joy. And that's really the simplest way to think about what's at stake. You know, that the subtitle of the book is, is a guide to the decisions that define us. And these decisions define who we are, what we make of our life, who we can become. And that's really important. It's not life is not just about racking up the most, the most fun. Now, not against fun. Fun's great.

But in my experience, people who only pursue fun tend to get tired of it. They look for things that are more permanent. They want to belong. They look for causes to devote themselves to. They look for a calling. These are the things that lead to the deepest satisfactions. And I think that's the lesson to be learned from that. We're going to take a quick break for you, words, more sponsors.

and now back to the show. You make this case in the book for following traditions. Oftentimes us in the modern world think, well, traditions are funny, duddy. They hold you back. But you say traditions can actually be really useful because there's already something in place. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's worked for a long time. It possibly will work for you as well. And it's a way to help answer that vampire problem. Most of

the traditions that we have in this world suggests that being a vampire is really not the right thing to do. And so that's one way to solve the problem of, well, if I don't know, I'm going to like it or not, what should I do? Maybe I'll like it. It doesn't look good now, but all the vampires I know, once they become vampires, they seem to like it. But maybe it's just immoral and you shouldn't do it. And tradition has come to this consensus

that being a vampire is not the right thing to do. And similarly, traditions come to a consensus that having a child is a meaningful act. I mean, it'd be right for you, anyone in person, but it means take it seriously. I don't suggest following tradition blindly. I think that's a mistake. A lot of Christians can lead to the strain. They're not for you or me, they're for other people, but you should take them seriously. I talk, these examples in the book of the Chesterton fence.

Chester, you just saw a G.K. Chester then the loss for the rider. Is this a metaphor of a become-across offense in the middle of a field? It looks like it has no purpose, but it's a defense during the middle of the field. Well, I tear it down. It can't hurt anything. It doesn't have any purpose. Should start by asking instead, I don't understand why this fence is here, but rather than tear it down, I probably should look into it. I should probably find out why it's here in the first place and not just assume it's a mistake. And I think often we're

You know, it's our egos and natural tendency to see ourselves as the center of the universe as human beings. There's a lot of value to saying, I don't understand everything. I'm going to be humble and I'm going to take the received wisdom of tradition and take it seriously. I could check some of it, might accept some of it, but I should just dismiss it out of hand because I don't understand. Yeah, it's a starting point.

Yeah. A lot of our wild problems involve other people, relationships with other people, and you make this case that it might be useful to think of relationships in terms of covenants rather than contracts. And this is coming from your religious background. You are Jewish, and right now I'm reading the Old Testament again, and there's a lot of talk about covenants. Why the covenant approach to relationships? What's the benefit there?

So let's talk about the difference in a covenant contract. At least the way I'm thinking about it, obviously there's legal definitions sometimes. But a contract basically, I'll do this for you and you do that for me. You know, it's a, you know, quick pro quotes. I'll scratch her back, you scratch mine. A contract leaves out my responsibilities explicitly. It lays out your responsibilities. You're going to deliver this house. I'm going to deliver some money by a certain date in a certain condition and so on. That's a contract.

or I'm gonna work for you, I'm gonna do this task at this level of quality, using these raw materials, I'm gonna paint your house or build you a porch and in return, now you're gonna give me money. Those are contracts. Covenants are about a commitment and it's a commitment that's a little bit more open-ended than we think about a contract as a commitment also, but covenants more, this is unconditional. I'm gonna stand by your side. And we understand that not all covenants work out.

Marriage doesn't always work out. But a good marriage, you don't keep score. In a contract, you keep score. Hey, wait a minute. You said you were going to do this, this or this, and you didn't come through. Covenant is, well, I realize now that this partner of mine has certain challenges I didn't appreciate. And maybe she can't do this thing I expected or vice versa. I hope she'll appreciate that I'm an imperfect person and I'm doing the best I can. And I'm not going to keep score and say, well, wait a minute.

She took drug carpool on Tuesday. So my turn on Wednesday and then boy, she better come through on Thursday. Oh, she's not feeling well. Wait a minute. We have an agreement. We take turns in a covenant. You cut the person some slack and the commitment is much more open ended and it's much more long term. It's really powerful. Covenant is

I'm not keeping score. I'm not going to say in a cup, in a, in a contract. I might say, you know, this isn't working out for me. I'm not getting what I expected. I have to walk away. I have to break the contract. And there's usually a clause in the contract for an end. And of course, sometimes it can end to a marriage even based on a covenant can end into spoke parties can decide or one.

that it's not working out. There's too much that was not expected. It's too painful. That's totally understandable. But what really Covenant is saying is it's got to get a lot worse because I have this commitment that it might otherwise be because I have a commitment to you. I am committed to our marriage. I'm not committed to me and myself satisfaction. That's a contract. Covenant is a commitment to us. It's a very different human experience. And I think good parenting is a covenant.

And good marriage is a covenant. 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. That's a very powerful idea. 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. So I think a lot of us say, I want to be that kind of person. I want to be a person that you know you can lean on. You can trust. I'm not keeping score. And of course, at least be vulnerable. You can exploit me if you know that I'm not keeping score because, hey, I'm going to try to get more of this than I expected. It's going to be great. He's going to keep putting up with it. And that's why you want to make a covenant with a person who has a similar level of commitment as you do. So otherwise, you do leave yourself vulnerable in the covenant.

So with Aristotle's idea of flourishing is Nick and McKeean ethics, it's fluid. You're making these situational judgments, right? He's trying to figure out what the right thing to do at the right time for the right reason. And that can depend, that can vary depending on the circumstance. And I think that's useful. I think I like to take that approach to decision making.

But you make this case in the book that sometimes just having hard firm life rules can be useful in living a flourishing life. Instead of trying to figure it out at Hock, why is that? Why are hard firm life rules useful? I use the example in the book of finding a lost wallet. You find a lost wallet. Nobody sees you find it. It's laying on the street. It's actually happening once. You pick it up. It's full of cash. And nobody saw that person. I'm never 100% sure nobody stopped, but it looked to me that nobody saw it.

Put it in my pocket and kept walking. I did, once I got to a safer little more scoot of place, take it out of my pocket. So I was in it, found out some way to return it to the owner, which ended up being a great long adventure. I do not tell in the book, and it's not worth telling here, but it took a long while. But eventually I got the wallet back to the owner turned out to be a homeless person, don't get finding an address or a way to reach someone turned out to be harder than I expected. 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. I mean, if it has $20, sure, return it. What if it's $50,000 in cash in the wallet? Is it rational to return it then? And I make care of it in the book, but return it no matter what. Just have a hard rule, return it. One reason for that is that, you know, we're imperfect, and if we're not careful, we'll convince ourselves that it's okay to keep it.

And then we're not really following our principles. We're just finding an excuse for doing what we want to do anyway. 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 trade offs and saying, well, sure, it's a good idea to return the wallet. But if it's so much money that would change my life, then it's rational to keep the money.

I think that's a very dangerous thing. Start to convince yourself that when it's 20 dollars, then you're the kind of person who doesn't return wallets. The kind of person who's not trustworthy. And it will come back and bite you eventually and like, but it's the wrong thing to do. And I want to be the kind of person who does the right thing. I want to live around people who do the right thing. I want to hang around people who do the right thing. More pleasant world. And I think I have an obligation to make my contribution to making the world more pleasant. So I'm not going to be the person who exploits opportunities like that and keeps the wallet, keeps the money.

So I think, you know, what I say in there is privilege of principles, do the right thing. And no matter how much costs now, God forbid, you know, it means sacrificing a person you care about, of course, then there's two principles that conflict your honesty versus, you know, use examples, suppose that you need the money to save your child's life for medicine.

Of course, yes, that's a little more complicated. But in general, that's not what you're up against. You're up against narrow self-interest of what's in it for me. You're still doing the right thing. I suggest you do the right thing. You'll be happy with all of them.

Yeah, it makes life easier to when you just have this thing. I don't do this thing or I do this thing, you know, think about it. Yeah. So you had a surprising source of insight on how to solve wild problems. I didn't see this coming as you were talking about Aristotle and Darwin and other philosophers. You have Bill Belichick, the head coach of the Patriots. What can Bill Belichick teaches about solving some of these wild problems? So this inside of mind may not be true.

Let's start with that. I'm not an expert on Bill Belichick. I didn't interview him for the buck. I wish I could have. He's a very interesting decision maker, obviously, as the head coach of a football team. He's constantly making tradeoffs. He actually was an economics major, as an undergraduate at Wesleyan.

And at these very aware trade-offs, he's not an emotional, tries not to be an emotional decision maker. And then when he cuts a player and people say, how did you do that? Whoa, I'll say I tried to expect for the team. That's my job, period. And I wasn't saying anything else. It's a constant refrain of his. You know, he picks somebody in a draft choice, a very high draft choice being a very valuable draft choice. And it doesn't work out.

You can go off and cut. It's not working out. So to say, oh, I got to be embarrassing or I got to justify it or I got to talk myself into why he's going to turn out OK. Got some trades. But that's not the point that I focus on in the chapter. What I focus on in chapters is this is the part that's speculative on my part about his behavior. He's often will trade a draft choice for multiple draft choices in worse rounds.

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. And why does he do that? And I think the reason he does this respect a little part. 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.

So he wants to have more choices than fewer. 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. 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. And I suggest that this is sort of the

in between case where it's not as irrevocable when you make a decision, 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, should not be so afraid of it. Make more decisions, keep the good ones and cut your losses by getting rid of the bad ones, because you don't know. And what Bell check does is he uses training camp to get the information that he really needs.

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 running back, and so on. That information is not the real information he wants. 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? But they're going to be comfortable with my style of coaching. And he can't discover that ex ante before the fact.

He's got to go through some experience. You have to find out about how they're going to fit in or not fit in. And so he uses that as a way to figure out what to keep and what not to keep. And I think that's a great lesson for life. Sample lots of things. Do more of the things you love. Do fewer of the things that you don't love.

gain some experience and self knowledge about what floats your boat, what gives you deep and enduring satisfaction. Can't know that in advance. 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. I think this is really useful advice for young people who are trying to figure out their career. For example, I went to law school and I didn't know any lawyers. I was the first lawyer in my family. My only knowledge of law was watching law and order in Matlock.

And then I get to law school and I get my first internship. And I realize this is not like TV. This is not what I thought I was going to be. And I didn't enjoy it. And I decided in law is not for me. I finished law school, but I decided not to pursue a career in law. And so now when people ask me, like young people, like, should I go to law school? And I say, you should just work at a law firm for, you know, as an intern before you go to law school to figure out, do you actually like the practice of law?

And so yeah, I mean, like, test it out. There's ways you can test things out that aren't expensive. So you don't have to like take out a bunch of student loans for law school, test it out first. And you might learn you, you don't like it. And it's great advice. And of course, it's why we date. 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 on order.

is wildly misleading. You think you have valuable information about what it's like to be a lawyer, you actually know almost nothing. 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. And so it's a great example

And it gets particularly relevant for marriage and parenting. If you get your ideas of marriage from movies, you're going to be pretty disillusioned by real marriage.

So not that different than law school. Real marriage is really different than TV marriage or movie marriage, right? The falling in love, the music playing, it's lovely. Real marriage is much more complicated than that. And it's really interesting to me how little of the flavor of real marriage we share with our children. They do see us. So we watch our parents, our children see us as parents as married, perhaps, and they get some idea. But we don't talk to them much. 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. And so, literature is a good thing. It teaches a little bit more about life often than a two-hour, overly optimistic movie.

Okay, so we've covered a lot of ground here, so I think it would be useful to do a quick recap here of our conversation. So wild problems are hard because you don't know how you're going to feel about them, and you're going to be a different person once you make a decision around a wild problem. And it sounds like making the decision to do something like have a kid.

It's a wild problem. It's akin to imagining a color you've never seen before. But we've talked about some things that you can do to make these decisions. One is think about what will lead to a flourishing life and what will give you meaning. Think in terms of covenants, consider tradition, create clear rules, and then when you can test these things out through experience.

But as I was thinking, even with these strategies, you're still gonna have to deal with the uncertainty. You can't resolve all the uncertainty. 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? Well, I don't spend much time on that in the book because I don't have any magic answers. It's really tempting to say, so just don't worry about it. It's easy. Stop stressing over. It's not a good idea, better to be relaxed.

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. And you say, well, you know, I've never really missed an airplane. So I don't let this traffic bother me. It would be irrational for me to be nervous about it. And that doesn't work for me. I know maybe it works for something. So that's the right. I don't think that's helpful advice. I do think it's useful to realize that the normal approaches you take to these kind of problems don't help.

So for many of these kind of problems, the normal thing to do, as I said earlier, we're going to get more data. Where's that app? You know, I have trouble deciding what book to read next. I just got Amazon. Look at their recommendations. Usually pretty good. I need one of those for dating. Dating apps don't work very well. I need one of those for how to parent. Good luck with that. They don't work well. So I think recognizing that this is not an easy thing is a start for reducing the stress.

and anxiety, recognizing you're not alone, that almost everyone deals with this. 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. I'm not talking about even a while problems. Just day to day decision, I'm the president of a college in Jerusalem, Schlem College. I used to be a plain old researcher, economist, academic writer. The biggest decision I used to make was, should I start?

This essay on medium or sure, write it on every note or maybe pages, that's not a very well problem, not much as it's state. 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. So, you know, one piece of advice is to make more decisions. You do get better at them. You do get more comfortable with the fact that some work out and some don't.

And nobody backs a thousand. It's okay. It's totally all right. Well, Russ, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go to learn more about the book in your work? Sure. My website is Russ Roberts dot info where I keep everything I do videos, essays, books, you can follow me on Twitter, econ talker.

The book is called Wild Problems. You can find it at Amazon and elsewhere. And it's great talking to you. Thanks for us. It's been great talking to you too. My guest was Russ Roberts. He's the author of the book Wild Problems. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, RussRoberts.info. Also check out our show us at a whim.is slash Wild Problems. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

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