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Also: how does age affect happiness?

*      *      *

Relevant References & Research

Question 1: Are you a hard worker?

• Angela says that asking people if they work hard is helpful for measuring grit. If you want to learn more about her research on grit, Angela’s book is Grit: The Power of Passion and Perservance. You can also find more about her and her work at the Character Lab website.
• Angela breaks down an international study about conscientiousness which demonstrates the consequences of reference bias. The study is The Geographic Distribution of Big Five Personality Traits: Patterns and Profiles of Human Self-Description Across 56 Nations.
• Stephen references “the Lake Wobegon effect.” This form of optimism bias is the human tendency to overestimate oneself, named for the fictional town in A Prairie Home Companion where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
• The book that Stephen mentioned about Jewish history is Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947 by Norman Lebrecht.

*      *      *

Question 2: Why does happiness start dropping at age 16, and not rise again until our late 40s?

• Angela and Stephen discuss Dartmouth economist David Blanchflower’s most recent paper on the happiness curve. The paper is Is Happiness U-shaped Everywhere? Age and Subjective Well-being in 132 Countries.
• Angela mentions that she received her PhD from the Positive Psychology Center at The University of Pennsylvania. The mission of the center is to “to promote research, training, education, and the dissemination of Positive Psychology.” Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive.
• Angela references the work of psychologist Don Moore who studies confidence, judgement and decision making. You can find more about Moore’s research on his personal website.
• Angela says that the “Three Blessings” exercise is a reliable way to increase happiness. The intervention was developed by Martin Selegman, under whom Angela studied during her PhD.

If you enjoyed this conversation, you might want to check out the recent Freakonomics Radio episode Reasons to Be Cheerful.

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You can't be completely recession-proof, but by adopting the following steps, your business can be more resilient to the shock of an economic downturn.

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In the U.S. alone, we hold 55 million meetings a day. Most of them are woefully unproductive, and tyrannize our offices. The revolution begins now — with better agendas, smaller invite lists, and an embrace of healthy conflict.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. I recently launched a spinoff podcast with my behavioral-psychologist friend Angela Duckworth. It’s called No Stupid Questions. 

Angela DUCKWORTH: How satisfied are you with your life?

Stephen DUBNER: How do you hack the happiness curve? 

DUCKWORTH: How do we explain increasing rates of depression?

DUBNER: Are you suggesting that young people are unrealistically optimistic? 

DUCKWORTH: Are you a hard worker?

DUBNER: Marx said money is everything. Freud said sex is everything. And Einstein said everything is relative. 

And I say: you should subscribe to No Stupid Questions, right now, wherever you get your podcasts. As for Freakonomics Radio, here’s a question for you: has sheltering in place protected you from meetings? No, me neither. And virtual meetings can be even worse than the regular ones. So we thought it was time to dig into our archive to play you an important episode we put out last year. It’s called “How to Make Meetings Less Terrible.” Most of the rules still apply — maybe more so — in a socially-distanced world. Hope you enjoy.

*      *      *

I’d like you to be particularly open-minded today. I’d like you to entertain the possibility that two absurdly disconnected stories may in fact have a deep connection — and that if you’re willing to see it through, this connection may yield insights that substantially improve your life. Or not. But let’s try. The first story is set in the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

Hallie WALKER: The Okavango is absolutely beautiful. It’s the world’s largest inland delta. So it’s surrounded by desert, and it’s this kind of emerald jewel in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa.

Hallie Walker is a Ph.D. student.

WALKER: I study behavioral ecology at the University of Idaho.

When we spoke, she was in Mozambique.

WALKER: Yeah, right now I’m studying three species of spiral horned antelopes.

In the Okavango, Walker was studying a species known as the African wild dog.

WALKER: So what’s amazing about this study site is these dogs have been followed for 25 years. So they are raised with vehicles right there. And they’re so habituated that they really don’t recognize the vehicle.

This allows the researchers to get close enough to record really good video.

WALKER: So the recordings are pretty intimate.

In the videos the dogs lie around, keeping cool in the shade. Sometimes they pile on each other and play. And sometimes the dogs make these strange sounds.

WALKER: It’s really odd. The sounds they make are unvoiced, kind of like sneezes.

Here’s what it sounds like.

WALKER: So sneezes really only happened in those rally events that I was observing.

And what is a “rally event”?

WALKER: Yeah, a rally is— African wild dogs are incredibly social animals. So they spend their whole lives in packs.

In each pack, there are dominant dogs and less-dominant dogs. Let’s say the pack has just been lying around, and the dominant dog gets up.

WALKER: And he greets other dogs. Just like your dog greets you when you get home from work. They try to recruit other pack members to stop resting and sleeping in the shade, to go hunt. And that either ends in a successful rally, where the whole pack leaves the resting site and goes to hunt, or an unsuccessful rally, where they lie back down.

And the sneezes, remember:

WALKER: Sneezes really only happened in those rally events. The only other sneezes that we observed, it was 15 percent of them, looked like they were just sneezing because they got dust in their nose.

So what did the sneezing have to do with the rally events? Were they some kind of communication? Well, consider our second story. It’s about this person:

Priya PARKER: Priya Parker. And I’m a group-conflict-resolution facilitator.

How does one become a group-conflict-resolution facilitator?

PARKER: One grows up in complicated family.

Specifically:

PARKER: Well, I’m biracial. I’m half-Indian, half-white American. And when I was nine, my parents divorced and they both remarried other people, who were radically different from their original marriage. And they had joint custody. So every two weeks I would go back and forth between these two households. And my mother’s household was Indian and British, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, liberal, democratic, vegetarian household. And my dad and stepmother are white American, evangelical Christian, conservative Republican, twice-a-week churchgoing, family. And I was part of both families.

So: plenty of opportunity for conflict resolution in a family setting. Parker went on to formally study conflict resolution and she ultimately resolved actual conflicts, or at least tried to, in Africa, India, the Middle East. These days, she’s hired primarily by companies in conflict. Companies, it turns out, often try to resolve their conflicts by holding meetings. And a lot of these meetings are unsuccessful. Why?

PARKER: There is a belief, sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken, that all meetings should be de-risked. Yes there is an opportunity to kind of be embarrassed or to lose face. But we have so over-indexed on not wanting that to happen that we’ve drained the meaning and the relevance out of so many of our meetings.

Have you ever been to a meeting where no one says what they really think? Of course you have.

PARKER: But unhealthy peace can be as threatening to human connection as unhealthy conflict. And in my experience, because of the norms of our culture, and particularly in the U.S., most of our gatherings suffer from unhealthy peace, not unhealthy conflict.

So Priya Parker likes to introduce healthy conflict into meetings. To turn the meeting from a time-wasting orgy of passive-aggression into a well-oiled decision-making machine. If you were looking for a model to do the same, you could do worse than copying our friends, the African wild dogs. Remember, the sneezes happen when one of the dogs rallies the pack to go hunting. Hallie Walker was trying to discern the difference between a successful rally and an unsuccessful one. It turned out the sneezes were a strong indicator.

WALKER: In successful rallies, there about seven times more sneezes than in unsuccessful rallies.

Could it be that the sneezes are how the dog pack votes on whether to go hunting? That a sneeze means “Sure, let’s go hunting now!” And no sneeze means, “Nah, let’s lie in the dirt for a while.”

WALKER: So our research actually didn’t establish any direct causality. That’s the kind of subtlety I definitely want to get across. So we have a very strong correlation between the number of sneezes, so it could be that they’ve already decided and they’re clearing their nasal passages to leave. It is a cue. We know for sure that it’s a cue. But we don’t know for sure that it’s a signal. If that makes sense.

But Walker did find a relationship between the number of sneezes and the status of the dog that attempted the rally.

WALKER: When a dominant individual was the one that got up and started the motion—

Dominant as in, the boss. Picture a meeting at your company. It’s being led by the global sales manager.

WALKER: When a dominant individual started the motion, then it only required three sneezes to guarantee success for them to leave the area. And if it was a sub-dominant individual—

Now picture: same meeting, but instead of being led by the global sales manager, it’s the assistant to the regional manager.

WALKER: If it was a sub-dominant individual, it required more than 10 sneezes for them to leave. So we drew from that shifting quorum threshold that your vote matters, but some votes just matter more. So if the dominant dog wants to leave, it takes fewer individuals to add support to the motion to leave. But it takes a lot more momentum to convince the dominant individual to leave their resting site.

Have you ever been in that meeting? Yes; yes, you have. You have been in every kind of terrible meeting there is. How do we know? Because we asked Freakonomics Radio listeners for their meeting stories, and here’s what you told us:

Hagai SCHACHOR: I have no idea what I’m doing there because it’s not relevant to my work at all.

Gina LIM: Most of us ended up working late because we had to be in the meeting most of the day.

SCHACHOR: And to add to that, the guy who invited all of us said, “I’ve got to run, enjoy the meeting,” and he just, poof, left.

JOHNSON: Until they were literally climbing up on the table and each had a knee on the table, shaking fists and screaming at each other.

LIM: My boss berated me in front of everybody for being disrespectful.

JOHNSON: And I didn’t really understand, thinking, “This is what I’ve got myself involved in, in meetings like this?”

*      *      *

There are, of course, many kinds of meetings, with different rules and customs and outcomes depending on where they’re held and with whom. You’ve got community-board meetings and family meetings and the weekly floor meeting in a college dorm. You may belong to a knitting club or a rugby team or a religious group that meets regularly. With such variety, there’s no way this episode can be remotely encyclopedic. So we will focus on the most standardized meetings: the ones held by professionals in offices, whether it’s a construction company or a tech or healthcare firm; whether it’s a non-profit or an academic or government department. Because all those places have a lot of meetings.

Steven ROGELBERG: The best estimates suggest that there are around 55 million meetings a day in the U.S. alone.

That’s Steven Rogelberg.

ROGELBERG: Most professionals attend approximately 15 meetings a week.

He’s an organizational psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

ROGELBERG: And as you move up the organizational hierarchy, individuals spend more and more time in meetings.

He’s written a book called The Surprising Science of Meetings.

ROGELBERG: Basically, it’s the examination of meetings as a workplace phenomenon — trying to understand why they go bad, trying to understand the dynamics that emerge in meetings, and trying to figure out how to make them better.

Which is important because — again, 55 million meetings a day.

ROGELBERG: And it’s not a surprise to find executives spending anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of their time in meetings.

DUBNER: So does that fact mean that the people who end up running companies or institutions are basically the people who are good at meetings?

ROGELBERG: Oh, I wish that was the case. But, no, that does not appear to be the case. Some of the research I do looks at satisfaction with a meeting. And if you survey people immediately after a meeting, one person is invariably more positive than everyone else. And this one person is the meeting leader. The person who’s leading the meeting says, “Hey, this is really good.” And why wouldn’t they feel that? They’re controlling the whole experience. They’re talking the most. They’re like, “Hey this is nirvana.” But everyone else is reporting much more negative experiences.

DUBNER: So, in other words, you don’t have to be very good to be considered even, let’s say, top quintile.

ROGELBERG: That appears to be the case. So when you consider the fact that “too many meetings” has been identified consistently as the number-one source of frustration at work, the number-one time-waster at work — you know, research has shown that around 70, 71 percent of senior managers view meetings as unproductive. Now this is jarring, because senior managers are the ones calling the most meetings. So if senior managers are calling them unproductive, we know we have a problem.

Bad meetings have just been accepted as a cost of doing business. I give these speeches to senior H.R. leaders and talent leaders across the Fortune 100 companies, and I ask them, “How many of you have any content on your employee-engagement surveys that covers the topic of meetings?” Do you want to guess how many people raise their hands?

DUBNER: Two percent.

ROGELBERG: Hey, that’s a really good guess. Yes — that’s right. There is no organizational intentionality around this. And with no organizational accountability, leaders are just part of this system, where bad meetings are just the cost of doing business. Like the rain is in London. So I study meetings because I dislike them tremendously. I study them because I know it is a source of frustration for so many people.

Okay, so: we hold a lot of meetings even though most people don’t like meetings and consider them unproductive. But there’s a wrinkle:

ROGELBERG: Well, we know from the research that people actually want to have some level of meeting activity per day. And if you ask people to design their perfect day, it’s very rare that they say zero meetings. And this shouldn’t be a big surprise. We know from social-psychological research that humans are inherently social creatures. There’s value of interaction and engagement with others.

So maybe we pretend to dislike meetings even more than we actually dislike them. In any case: just about everyone agrees that meetings could use some improvement. So let’s start by taking a step back and asking: what is a meeting, exactly?

Helen SCHWARTZMAN: A meeting is a gathering, let’s say, two or more people, who assemble for a purpose that’s ostensibly related to the functioning of an organization or a group.

Alright, that sounds pretty sensible.

SCHWARTZMAN: Meetings seem to be a communication event that is basically neutral.

That’s Helen Schwartzman, an anthropologist at Northwestern University.

SCHWARTZMAN: It’s just a place where you come together. You have a problem, you solve it. You have a decision to make, you make the decision, you whatever. And when you actually study organizations, you find that’s not really the way that it works.

In 1989, Schwartzman published a book called The Meeting: Gatherings in Organizations and Communities.

SCHWARTZMAN: I would say that meetings are the organization. Which is to say that instead of having the meeting as a place to solve problems, we need to have problems and crises and decisions to produce meetings.

Jen SANDLER: We actually have vastly superior technologies to do exactly the things that people say go on in meetings.

That is Jen Sandler, another anthropologist who studies meetings. She’s at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

SANDLER: So the question of why we continue to meet becomes really important. So one answer to that is that we don’t need to. And the other answer is that’s not what meetings are for. That might be what we tell ourselves that they are for. And most of us have this experience too, where we go into a meeting that is ostensibly to make a decision, but it’s clear that decision has been made prior to the meeting. And then we might ask as participants in that meeting, why are we even meeting then? We’re meeting maybe to legitimize that decision or for somebody to say that was a collective decision even though it wasn’t.

Okay, it may not come as a shock to you that meetings do not always serve their advertised purpose. Or that there was barely a purpose at all. We heard this sentiment from several listeners — including, here, Michael Conklin, who used to work in the oil-and-gas industry:

Michael CONKLIN: After coming back from a short vacation, my boss came into my office frantically and said, “You just missed three meetings in the last two days.” And I said, “Oh my gosh, I must have missed so much. Tell me all these things that have changed.” And the boss froze and said, “Well, nothing really changed. Just keep up the good work.” I figured that was a pretty good indication those meetings did not need to take place.

So let’s hear what the experts say about meeting basics: establishing a goal; setting an agenda; deciding whom to invite; even determining the length. What would you guess is the average length of a meeting?

ROGELBERG: Magically, the average length across the world is one hour. And there’s just no reason for that. This is a modern phenomenon that has emerged due to calendaring programs like Outlook and Google Calendar.

DUBNER: So if you could invade everybody’s calendar on earth and have a new preset that was not 60 minutes, what would it be?

ROGELBERG: I just want the leader to think about how long the meeting should be. So give it a set of goals. Make a decision. This is particularly important given something called Parkinson’s Law. And Parkinson’s Law is this idea that work expands to whatever time is allotted to it. So if you schedule an hour, it’s going to take an hour. But if you schedule 48 minutes, it’s gonna take 48 minutes.

If you doubt the legitimacy of Parkinson’s Law, consider this story from a listener named Chad Wiebe. He’s a financial planner in Canada.

Chad WIEBE: So my boss at the time said, “Let’s have a four-hour long meeting,” which is excruciating. So at the end of this planning meeting we had half an hour still to fill. I put my hand up and I said, “You know what, I think it would be really appreciated if we just cut everybody loose a half hour early, let everyone get back to the office a little bit earlier.” And I was met with silence for about 10, 15 seconds before one of my other middle managers piped up and said, “You know what? I just brought in a client who’s a magician.” And so, we hired a magician. For half an hour. It was unbelievable.

Here’s Steven Rogelberg’s advice: rather than hiring magicians to fill out your scheduled meeting time, set a tight time frame and use that tightness to your advantage.

ROGELBERG: Psychological research shows that when you add a little bit of pressure, it creates more focus on optimal performance. So if this results in you starting your meeting at 1:12 p.m. and ending at 1:50, so be it. You are in control. Make choices.

PARKER: We go into autopilot and we follow specific scripts and we don’t actually think about asking the first question of all meetings, which is, “What is the purpose of this meeting?”

Priya Parker again. Her book is called The Art of Gathering.

PARKER: So it’s our Monday morning staff meeting, it’s our Wednesday afternoon sales meeting — that is not a purpose, that is a category. So what is the primary purpose? What is your desired outcome of the staff meeting? If you are having this on a Monday morning, what do you want to be different for this week? If we weren’t to have this Monday morning meeting, would anything be different? And if nothing would be different, scrap the meeting.

ROGELBERG: If a leader truly recognizes that they are inherently a steward of others’ time, they do meetings differently. They think carefully about what the meetings should cover. They think carefully about how that meeting should be facilitated. And we do this all the time when it comes to meetings we have with customers. When we meet with a customer, we think about that in advance. But when it comes to employee meetings, we just dial it in. We rely on habits. And a great example is the research shows that 50 percent of agendas are recycled. We would never do that with customers.

PARKER: My biggest piece of advice is, if you’re going to get people together in person, when time is limited and resources are limited, gather around the things that you can’t figure out over email.

ROGELBERG: So when you are thinking about your agenda, consider framing it not as topics to be discussed, but consider framing it as questions to be answered. By framing it as questions to be answered it’s easier to determine who needs to be there because they’re relevant to the questions.

DUBNER: I feel like every time you call a meeting that involves a lot of people from different arenas, you are inevitably asking each of them to waste a lot of time.

ROGELBERG: Meetings are getting larger and larger and larger. And this phenomenon is not happening out of bad intentions. Typically, we just don’t want to exclude anyone. And at the same time, technology makes it so easy for us to just hijack someone’s calendar. And the research shows that larger meetings are just filled with additional dysfunction. While people generally complain about having a meeting, they complain just as much if they are not invited to a meeting. Given this reality, there’s a couple of things that we can do. So first of all, we can actually design the agenda such that part of the agenda is relevant to a large group of individuals, and then part of it is relevant to a smaller section of that. So a big group attends for part of the meeting and then people leave. And then it’s a smaller group that has additional discussion. And what a leader can do is once they start thinking about meeting attendees as being core vs. secondary, that can be a very useful distinction.

PARKER: Most of us have been raised with the age-old adage “the more, the merrier.” And for most gatherings, unless it’s literally a rave, a soccer match, or a concert, the more is the hairier or the scarier.

ROGELBERG: If you go to those secondary individuals and you tell them, “Hey, I’m having a meeting. Here are the topics we’re going to talk about. If you have any input on these topics, please feel free to email me. I will also show you the minutes of the meeting. And at any point down the road you want to go to future meetings you’re more than welcome.” And people really appreciate being given, arguably, the best gift in the world right now. Which is time.

PARKER: The more specific your purpose is, the more people can actually see themselves and say, “What I do is not actually relevant to that.” So don’t make exclusion personal. Make it purposeful.

DUBNER: Okay, I need some personal advice, because I try to avoid meetings as much as possible, so I’m showing my bias. I don’t typically enjoy meetings. But also because of what I do for a living, I just want my days unencumbered. I want my days for reading, writing, thinking, and interviewing people, and I don’t want meetings. So, sometimes they’re unavoidable, and sometimes they’re great and useful. I don’t mean to rain on them. But one thing I don’t like is when you arrange a meeting with someone, it’s usually via email, and then they send me a calendar invite. But I don’t want somebody else’s software living on my computer. And then every time there’s an update to it, I get another alert. I don’t want the distraction. I took the time to plan the meeting. I know how to plan a meeting. I put it in my calendar. I’ll be there. You’re not — you don’t feel my pain. That’s okay. We can move on.

PARKER: I actually think it’s actually very deep. So we live in an age where— you’re talking about software, but basically we live in a multicultural, diverse, “everybody is kind of their own island but also all sorts of other things” world. And we’re all gathering all of the time. And gathering at some level is a form of imposition.

DUBNER: At some level? At every — no, sorry, yes, yes, sorry, no, no, no.

PARKER: Well, actually what I love about how you’re talking about it is, it should be thought of as a form of imposition. And you only take the meetings or the gatherings where you think that you are willing to tolerate that imposition. And what you’re talking about is— I actually think your instinct to say, “I want to have my days free, I want to think, I want to write, I want to interview,” is a much healthier instinct, because you’re raising the bar for anything to get through to you. For many of the companies and organizations I work with, I don’t say gather more, I say gather better. In many cases that means gather less.

*      *      *

Steven Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist, and Priya Parker, a group-conflict-resolution facilitator, are trying to make your meetings less terrible. Okay. So how should you start a meeting? First example: how not to start.

ROGELBERG: So, it starts late. A person arrives 10 minutes late, and then the leader says, “Okay, we can start now.” Or worse yet it’s the leader herself or himself that shows up late. And then they start the meeting with a whole bunch of news and announcements. Things that clearly could have been communicated in other mechanisms. Then the leader says, “I have a really important issue to talk about.” And they start talking about that issue, and they dominate the discussion. And then another person in the meeting starts to dominate the discussion. And, next thing you know, the leader looks at her or his watch and says, “Oh gosh, we’re out of time. But you know what? Let’s run 10 minutes after the meeting time, just to see if we can close the loop.” And says, “Okay. Look, I’ve heard from you all.” But in effect, they’ve only heard from one or two people. And the other people either didn’t have a chance to speak or were completely irrelevant to the discussion.

So the meeting ends 10 minutes later than it should. The leader thinks that there was a good decision made, but no one else feels that way. And they go back to work and they go, “Oy vey. What just happened?” It’s called Meeting Recovery Syndrome. What we find is that when people have bad meetings, they don’t necessarily just leave it at the door. It sticks with them. They ruminate, they co-ruminate, and they even report it negatively affecting their productivity after the meeting.

Or you could start your meeting like this.

PARKER: Don’t open it with logistics, open it— spend the first 5 or 10 minutes connecting people in a specific way.

Here’s an idea Parker got from someone who ran a weekly staff meeting.

PARKER: She started her meetings by saying, “Let’s everybody do a rose and a thorn,” which is sort of this old exercise of like, what’s the best part of your week, what’s the worst part of your week. And that’s just the first 10 minutes, the rest of the 50 minutes was used for “business.” And she called me up and she said, my meetings have transformed. And I said, why? And she said, “Well first, our team has changed over time because the risks people take vary week to week. Some people share silly stuff. Some people share deep stuff. Some people share stuff from work, some people share stuff from over the weekend. It’s actually changed what’s allowable in the conversation.”

She’s like, “But the second thing that has been most interesting is — I didn’t realize this — but people have started to say more real stuff in the context of work, because by starting the meeting with including a thorn as the base default, I didn’t realize I was playing a role as cheerleader, and they didn’t think that I could handle, or wanted, to have 50-50 thorns. It’s changed the norms of what’s acceptable and what we talk about for the rest of the meeting.”

DUBNER: So Priya, you write that businesses tend to “run on a cult of positivity.” What do you mean by that, and how do you counter it?

PARKER: Whether it is panels that are asking guests to talk about all of their successes or launch a product, or whether it is a meeting in which you’re talking about how wonderful or how great things are. And so part of the unwinding of the cult of positivity is to go back and ask, what is the purpose of this gathering? And often, positivity prevents progress.

DUBNER: Talk about the difference between generous authority and ungenerous, or as you term it, imperious authority.

PARKER: Part of the role of a host is to practice generous authority. And I define generous authority to do three things with your guest. First is to connect them to each other and to the purpose. To protect them from each other. And to temporarily equalize them. Because in any type of group people will fall into the default patterns that they always fall into. Whether they know people or not. And your role as a host is to temporarily allow them to behave in a way that helps you collectively go to that purpose.

ROGELBERG: So if I’m a meeting leader, I can do different things. Instead of asking people to prepare in advance, you allocate the very first part of the meeting to reading the preparatory materials because at that point at least you know everyone has done it. And then there’s other unconventional tools. Even if I have a large group of folks, and I want them to engage strongly on a topic, if I have people pair up and work in dyads, even just for a few minutes, and then come back together as a group, me having folks work in dyad changes the whole dynamic of the large group discussion. The level of communication and passion will be much higher. But what we know from the research is that left to just the standard protocols of people talking, that a decision better than what would have just been produced by the best individual in the room only occurs 20 percent of the time. So, most typically, meeting performance is just not optimal.

The problem with meetings is that the proportion of good use of time and bad use of time is out of whack. I think that’s the critical issue. It’s just figuring out how can we increase the proportion of good time over bad time. Good time is when the attendees of the meeting are interacting in a genuine way such that the decisions and solutions being generated might surpass what any one individual could have done by themselves. And that time is not necessarily free of conflict. In fact, we want conflict in meetings. What we don’t want is personal conflict, but we want conflict around ideas. So if you have a group going to battle with incredible passion around ideas — that is a fantastic meeting. Especially if it’s a safe environment and people go, “Wow, that was amazing that we could have this level of disagreement. But in a way that does not castrate everyone in the room.”

Or, as Priya Parker put it earlier:

PARKER: Unhealthy peace can be as threatening to human connection as unhealthy conflict. And most of our gatherings suffer from unhealthy peace, not unhealthy conflict.

So sometimes, Parker has to invent some healthy conflict.

PARKER: I was brought into an architecture firm — a 70-years-old architecture firm — to figure out their vision for the future. And they were debating whether to maintain being an architecture firm — which meant, in their case, whether to continue to be bricks and mortar, building buildings — or whether to pivot and become a design firm. And there was real disagreement in the firm. But you wouldn’t know it by being in the room. And any time someone would say something even related to one of the possible visions, everyone else would shrink back. They weren’t willing to go there. And it was very polite.

So during the coffee break, my client said to me — he literally whispered to me, “Priya, we need more heat.” And so we paused and thought, okay, basically the norm of politeness in this context is too strong for good controversy to happen through the way they normally meet. We quickly, in Photoshop, took two of the photos of the architects’ heads and slapped them on wrestlers’ bodies. We printed them out and put them on two walls — one side was the head, meaning design, and the other was the body, meaning the future would be architecture, bricks and mortar. And the architects came back. And we basically said, “Welcome back to the cage match. In one corner” — I was the emcee, I was like — “In one corner you have the body, and the other you have the head.” And fortunately for us, the two architects were game. And so they started jeering and raising their hands over their shoulders. We assigned coaches to each of the sides, they threw white towels around their neck, we played the Rocky music, right? We interrupted the script. And I said each side has two minutes to say the strongest possible argument for the future of the vision of the firm, whether it’s architecture or design. And then they get two minutes for rebuttal. And everybody else — this was the key insight — everybody else has to physically choose a side. No neutrality and no wallflowers. And what that did was, it broke the norm of implicit consensus, which there wasn’t.

DUBNER: And what was the outcome of this architect cage match?

PARKER: So at the end, the group voted, and the best argument was the body.

DUBNER: And was that choice considered binding?

PARKER: That choice was considered recommendational. But people knew that ahead of time. The deeper outcome of that meeting is that they have a shared memory that they are capable of this, they are capable of speaking in this way. In any room, there’s troublemakers and smoother-overs.

DUBNER: And the troublemaker plainly says, what I learned today is that we have too many meetings. That’s the nature of the troublemaker?

PARKER: Well, the troublemaker is a really useful role. Would you think of yourself as a smoother-over or a troublemaker?

DUBNER: Who, me? You haven’t figured that out by now? I’m plainly the troublemaker.

PARKER: So I think, in healthy contexts, if you share a common purpose, “troublemakers” can actually be really helpful. And one of the things that I often do in groups is have people raise their hand, who’s a troublemaker, who is a smoother-over, and then I ask, who’s both? And people who are both — and there are always a few in a group — are the ones who are most likely to be part of transformational conversations. And that’s because as a troublemaker, you’re willing to poke and prod and you’re not afraid of a little heat. But as a smoother-over, you’re also interested in repair and coming together. And going back to our earlier conversation, most human connection and gatherings suffer more from unhealthy peace than from unhealthy conflict. And in those contexts, if you’re a group of smoother-overs, I can diagnose immediately that this is a very unhealthy place.

I am happy to report that our listenership includes plenty of troublemakers as well as smoothers-over. They’ve told us about some very successful meetings:

Elise PIAZZA: My name is Elise Piazza and I’m a cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton University. I’m actually pretty lucky because I often hear people say, “That was an awesome meeting.” Lab meetings are opportunities for scientists to come together and share their latest data and then brainstorm next steps for the project, and occasionally we also discuss a recent, sometimes controversial, journal article. I often come away feeling energized because I’ve thought of a new question to test or an algorithm to implement. And sure, maybe science is inherently more fun and exploratory than other careers, but I think one of the reasons these meetings are so effective in general is that people with distinct skills and perspectives are coming together with the shared goal of helping their colleague improve.

And we heard about some less-successful meetings:

Al CHEN: Hey guys. My name is Al. So one of my one of the worst meetings I’ve attended was when I was working on my startup. We came together for our weekly team meeting, and the goal was to come up with new ideas for our mobile app, and we just ran into a creative block. We weren’t coming up with any good ideas. And I forgot whose idea it was, but one of my teammates suggested that we go outside and smoke some weed to get more creative. So we went behind the building in the loading dock, all of us got really high. And smoking weed was supposed to make us more creative, but in reality it just made us really unproductive and we just started hanging out and joking around, and I guess it made us better friends, but it wasn’t really a great meeting.

We also heard from some listeners who’ve taken an entirely different path.

John COSGROVE: My name is John Cosgrove, and I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I moved here from Ireland 20 years ago, and about seven years ago I started a company ironically in the meetings-and-events industry. And in the last seven years we have not had a single meeting, and our company seems to be running very successfully.

Indeed, the reputation of meetings is so poor that many people simply avoid holding them — Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, for instance. Some companies have instituted “no-meeting” days, to give employees a chance to do their work without being dragged off to the conference room. But still: 55 million meetings a day in the U.S. — that’s the reality.

Steven Rogelberg has found some other small measures to alleviate the pain. Snacks (of course). Getting people to switch out of their usual seats. Using anonymous surveys so people can raise objections without fear of reprisal. The research shows that just asking attendees to rate a meeting raises the quality of meetings at that firm. And what about when people sit through meetings staring at their phones?

ROGELBERG: One of the counterproductive behaviors we focused on was this idea of multitasking and really trying to understand why people multitask despite the fact that clearly it tends to bother others. But then the other piece of it is multitasking as a coping mechanism. When an employee walks into a meeting they are relinquishing control. And so how can you get that control back? Well, you can daydream. You can make lists. Or you can multitask. That’s how you can reclaim your power. So one of the techniques is trying to build a break in the middle of a meeting. So if I tell them, “Hey, I promise you in 30 minutes you can check your phone,” that’s going to help put their minds at ease.

And one final, important thing: how do you end a meeting?

PARKER: First, issue a last call. So the same way that a bar has a last call, they flash the lights or you literally say, “Last call.” And most meetings, most gatherings, don’t end — they stop. We run out of time, and then everyone scatters.

ROGELBERG: You know when to end the meeting because the questions have been answered. And if you can’t come up with any questions, you shouldn’t have a meeting.

PARKER: But then to help people understand, when we go back out into the world, who’s doing what? What was decided here, and are we all aligned?

ROGELBERG: People want to feel that their time was well spent. And this becomes a cue to tell you that indeed it was. If you know you have absolutely answered these compelling questions, then you leave there saying, “Ah, I accomplished something.”

PARKER: And to have a good memory at the end, which is what do you most want people to remember. And don’t end on logistics. End on what you want people to remember.

All right — job done, then. Thanks, Priya Parker and Steven Rogelberg. Thanks to our anthropologist and behavioral ecologist friends — and the African wild dogs, of course. And a big thanks to all the Freakonomics Radio listeners who sent us their meeting stories.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Zack Lapinski, Matt Hickey, Corinne Wallace, Mary Diduch, and Daphne Chen. We had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The post How to Make Meetings Less Terrible (Ep. 389 Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

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Why are lenders slashing credit limits? What should I do if my credit limit is cut? How do lower credit limits affect my credit score?

The post Credit Limits Are Being Slashed – Here’s What This Means for You appeared first on The Dough Roller.

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How do wild market swings affect our outlook on spending, saving and investing? A recent Kiplinger-Personal Capital survey found out.

The post Personal Capital Survey: How Market Volatility Affects Americans’ Financial Decisions appeared first on The Dough Roller.

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The things inside your home are valuable to you. Personal property insurance exists to make sure items in your home are covered in case you ever need to replace them. You may be wondering if this type of insurance is necessary. Personal property insurance can give you peace of mind if replacing the possessions inside your home would cost more than you could reasonably manage in a scenario where they are lost or damaged. Have you ever worried that your engagement ring could be taken during a robbery? Does losing thousands of dollars in electronic devices in the event of a fire worry you? Then it may be worth paying a few extra dollars every month for coverage. This is especially true f you keep valuable possessions like jewelry, art, or pricey electronics inside your home.

What Does Personal Property Insurance Cover?

Personal property insurance covers items in your home that have value. This type of coverage may sound like something that only people who keep flashy jewels or expensive paintings in their homes would need. However, it is actually designed to protect everyday people from having to cover the costs of damaged or stolen items. Not sure what you’ll need to cover? The insurance company will usually ask you to make a list of the items you own when you sign up for a policy. This ensures the policy has the coverage you need. What are some of the items in your home you might need to replace in the event of a disaster? Here’s a look at some of the basic items that most policies cover:

• Furniture
• Appliances
• Dishes
• Silverware
• Cookware
• Linens
• Computers
• Electronics
• Tools
• Clothing
• Furs
• Fitness equipment
• Guns
• Cash

It’s important to remember that specific policies vary when it comes to what is covered. What can you do if you own items that you don’t see featured on any basic coverage lists as you shop around for quotes? You may be able to purchase extended policies to cover specialty items that aren’t covered under a basic policy.

What About Homeowner’s or Renter’s Insurance?

Wait a minute, you might be thinking, I already have homeowner’s or renter’s insurance. Won’t that cover my personal property? Yes and no. Renter’s insurance basically is a form of personal property insurance. It’s not insuring a building, just the things you keep inside of it. And nearly all homeowner’s insurance policies also have some coverage for personal property. This is often in the form of a set amount of general coverage. So if you lost everything in a fire, your insurance company would pay out up to the maximum coverage for your personal goods. Even if you have this coverage, though, there are a few reasons you might want to check out personal property insurance, as well:

You have especially valuable items

If you have particularly valuable items in your home, like antiques or collectibles or even expensive electronics, you may need a personal property policy. In fact, some homeowner’s insurance policies specifically prohibit coverage for especially valuable items. In this case, you have a couple of options. You can either add a rider to your homeowner’s insurance policy to cover these items separately. Or you can purchase a separate personal property insurance policy. Either way, the additional coverage is likely to be quite affordable.

You’re Concerned About Deductibles

If the deductible on your homeowner’s insurance policy is average, it may be $1,000 or more. So if your $3,000 DSLR camera gets stolen, you’re stuck paying $1,000 of it to get the insurance coverage. That could be prohibitive for some of your items that are valuable but not worth paying a large deductible. Most personal property insurance policies don’t have a deductible at all, or have a minimal deductible. They can get by without one since they’re insuring items of lower value than your home. In fact, you might save money by increasing your homeowner’s insurance policy deductible and then adding personal property coverage as additional insurance!

Types of Personal Property Insurance

For the most part, insurance companies will package general personal property insurance with renter’s insurance or homeowner’s insurance policies. So this is where you’ll want to start when shopping around for these policies. You can typically customize your personal property coverage when you take out or change your insurance coverage. With your homeowner’s insurance, the property portion of the coverage may be called “contents coverage” because it covers the contents of your home. However, if you need specific coverage for particular pieces of valuable property, you can purchase this coverage separately. Some companies also allow for you to purchase this type of policy as a rider on your existing insurance policy. When you’re shopping around for broad property insurance, start with your current insurance company. Increasing your coverage may be more affordable than you’d think! But you can look at any of the insurers below for coverage for specific valuable items.

The Companies With the Best Rates

Personal property insurance can be purchased from companies that offer regular homeowner’s insurance. You’re not always comparing apples to apples when looking at policies from different companies, though. Rate differences are common because policies vary so widely when it comes to the types of items they cover. Your exact location will also be a big factor regarding the rate you get. However, some companies are known for consistently offering very affordable and reasonable policy rates. The property claims satisfaction scores for 2017, released by J.D. Power, are a great place to start your search. Here’s a look at the top five companies last year, ranked in order based on both customer satisfaction and price:

• Amica
• The Hanover
• USAA
• Nationwide
• Encompass

Amica ran circles around the competition when it came to receiving high scores for satisfying customers in all categories. The Hanover, USAA, and Nationwide also came in leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors in the very crowded marketplace of property insurance. It’s worth getting a quote from at least a few of these highly-rated companies to see if just paying a few extra dollars per month could help you have peace of mind. Or, again, you can call your existing renter’s or homeowner’s insurance company to get a quote for additional coverage.

The Bottom Line on Private Property Insurance

You should never acquire personal property insurance just as a formality. Your personal property insurance policy should be, well, extremely personal. The truth is that signing up for a policy that doesn’t cover the things you’ll actually need to replace is just a waste of money. However, working with an agent to find a policy — and potentially customize your coverage to make sure you have the level of protection you need is important. The best piece of advice to follow when purchasing personal property insurance is to never assume that something is covered without seeing it in writing. It may also be necessary to purchase coverage that goes above and beyond what a standard policy offers if you have rare or unusual items in your home that hold high monetary values. This is why it’s so important to scrutinize any policy before signing on the dotted line. The best strategy is to work directly with an agent to find or create a policy that covers exactly what you need.Finding the best personal property insurance is a highly-individual decision, but we've ranked the top options on the market.

The post Best Personal Property Insurance appeared first on The Dough Roller.

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Also: why do we treat pets better than people?

*       *       *

Question 1: Is Seneca’s advice on keeping your cool still valid?

Angela and Stephen have noticed that they’ve been getting annoyed by increasingly quotidian things. The challenges of going to the grocery store during the pandemic have been anger-inducing for Angela, and Stephen has been frustrated while cooped up at home. After reading an ancient guide to anger management by the Roman Stoic Seneca, Stephen wonders if the philosopher’s 2000-year-old advice can help people today keep their cool. Angela thinks that Stanford psychologist James Gross’s research on emotion regulation is the modern incarnation of Seneca’s work, and she shares some of his strategies for controlling and managing anger.

Angela DUCKWORTH: His advice when you’re angry is, first and foremost, to change your situation. Leave the room, change the actual circumstances that are making you angry. The second thing is draw your attention to something else. That’s why a lot of people read. I read before bed every night. And it’s specifically to take my mind off of everything that is bothering me. He calls that “selective attention.”

After discussing many bad ideas for how to deal with frustration (including a label gun that would allow pedestrians to brand the cars of jerky drivers, and seeking vengeance with Japanese throwing stars), Stephen and Angela talk through ways to effectively employ anger-management strategies from both Seneca and Gross in the future.

*       *       *

Question 2: Why do so many people treat pets (dogs especially) better than they treat other humans?

Stephen loves dogs, especially his own dog Fifi. Angela is not a dog person, and she doesn’t understand the mentality. She wonders why so many people treat animals better than they treat other people. They discuss a 2017 study by Northeastern sociologists Arnold Arluke and Jack Levin which found that humans were more disturbed by the abuse of both puppies and adult dogs than the abuse of adult humans.

Stephen DUBNER: I do find it troubling. But I think the simplest explanation is that it’s easier to feel empathy, or to exhibit kindness, toward pets — even strange pets — than to strange people, or sometimes even people we know well.

If you’re interested in learning more about the difference in moral outrage over the mistreatment of humans versus animals, Stephen suggests checking out a 2014 episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Avocado?”

The post What Is the Optimal Way to Be Angry? (NSQ Ep. 2) appeared first on Freakonomics.

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Every parent can attest they are willing to do everything in their power to give their children a good life. Once you have kids, the money will come because you become so motivated to work harder. Not only will you work harder and pay better attention to your finances, you’ll also likely get in better

The post Would You Risk Months Of Prison To Set Your Kids Up For Life? appeared first on Financial Samurai.

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Getting a preapproval credit letter is kind of like getting a college acceptance letter or a job offer letter. It feels great that someone likes and trusts you enough to welcome you into their community. Receiving a preapproval credit letter is also very satisfying since it often takes 2 – 5 weeks to get through

The post Here’s What A Preapproval Credit Letter Looks Like For Buying Property appeared first on Financial Samurai.

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Learning to save money is one of the best things you can do for yourself. 

Saving money can help you prepare for emergencies, start a business, retire, and more.

Financial security is one of the best reasons for why you should save money, and being prepared financially is one of the best feelings in the world. You can travel more, pursue your passions, quit a job you don’t love, try new things, and more.

But, I hear over and over again from people that they don’t want to save money now because they think they have the rest of their life to do so.

However, that’s far from true, especially if you want to be prepared for emergencies or retire.

When you decide to start saving money now, you will be ready to live the rest of your life. 

You can take chances, try new things, and be ready in case something awful were to happen. Saving money gives you the freedom to worry less and live more.

Now, there are some situations when people do have a harder time saving money. Maybe you are living paycheck to paycheck, are working to eliminate high amounts of debt, etc. 

Even though learning to save money can be hard, small amounts of money add up over time, and this is very true when you start now. Plus, there are lots of great ways to make extra money to make saving now easier.

Saving money takes discipline and some people may need to take extreme measures, but starting to save money now is one of the best things you can do for yourself.

Related content:

• How To Save Money
• Don’t Compare Your Beginning to Someone Else’s Middle
• Create a Life You Don’t Need To Escape From
• 4 Mindsets That Will Rob You Of Your Dream Life

Below is why you should save money even if you think you have the rest of your life to do so.

 

Learning a good savings routine now will help you later.

One of the top reasons for why many don’t start saving now and/or invest for retirement is because they claim that they don’t know how. Yes, it might feel overwhelming in the beginning – how to start investing, where to save your money, etc. But, these are things you can learn so it doesn’t have to be hard.

Once you get over the hump of getting started, you can create a routine where you regularly make contributions to a savings account or a retirement account. There are even investing and savings apps available to automate the process for you.

Acorns is a popular micro investing app that you can use to schedule deposits into your investment account – even just $5 at a time. You can also set up Acorns to round up transactions from a linked card to invest passively.

However you start to save and invest now and the sooner you do it, the more it becomes a habit and the easier it will become. By saving money as soon as you can, you will learn good financial habits that will help you well into the future.

Learn how to start investing at How To Start Investing With Little Money

 

You don’t need as much money as you think.

More and more people are choosing to live a minimalist lifestyle because they have realized that less is more. These people are living in smaller houses, not buying as much stuff, and being more thoughtful when they do make purchases.

These choices can lead to significantly spending less money on things, which makes it easier to save your money.

Now, leading a minimalist lifestyle isn’t for everyone. But, material items do not always equal happiness. Sometimes they just add stress, debt, and more. Think about it – the more stuff you have, the more likely that something will break, something will get lost or tossed to the side, and so on.

And if you think about the fact that the average household has 300,000 items (not a typo), that’s a lot of money spent on stuff.

However, do we actually need all of that stuff?

Probably not.

Spending money on a bunch of unnecessary stuff does not mean that you will have a higher level of happiness than someone else.

When you learn to live with less, you will find that you don’t need as much money as you thought.

Related: How A Minimalist Lifestyle Can Bring You Happiness 

 

An enjoyable life doesn’t have to be expensive.

One of the other things I hear about saving money is that it’s boring.

Yes, I have heard that if you are saving your money that you’re having no fun. In fact, here are a few myths I’ve heard about saving:

• “I can’t save money because that means I’ll just be eating rice and beans and sitting on my couch all day long.”
• “That person is only able to save money because they have a boring life.”
• “I’d rather enjoy my life now and worry about saving money when I’m old.”

These are not true, at all. You know what they say when a person complains about being bored – that they are actually a boring person.

If you think spending money rather than saving money will lead to happiness, then you need to change your mindset.

Life is all about a comfortable balance. You can save money, spend money, and have an enjoyable life. It’s not one or the other. And, really, it’s all about knowing what you can actually afford and thinking about whether buying something will actually benefit your life.

There are plenty of ways to live an awesome life while saving money. Yes, you can still see your friends, have fun with your loved ones, go on vacations, and more, all while staying on a realistic budget.

Instead of going out to eat three to four times a week, you can prepare meals with friends or family or host a potluck.

Instead of taking an expensive vacation, you can do a roadtrip or plan a staycation.

Instead of spending lots of money on an expensive weekend out with your friends or significant other, you can go for a hike, bike ride, and more.

There are so many ways to have fun for free or cheap, and finding new ideas now can help you start to save money.

Related: 

• How To Be Frugal And Fun (And Not Boring)
• Why I’m Not Sad That I’m Frugal – Frugal Doesn’t Mean Boring
• How To Save Money In The Summer And Still Have Fun

 

Compound interest matters.

Learning how to save your money is a wonderful thing, especially if you start investing. When it comes to investing, time is on your side because of the powerful impact of compound interest.

Compound interest is one important reason for why you should start to save your money now instead of waiting until you are older.

To put it simply, compound interest is when your interest is earning interest. This can then turn the amount of money you have saved into a much larger amount years later.

This is important to note because of inflation – $100 today will not be worth $100 in the future if you just let it sit under a mattress or in a checking account. However, if you invest, you can actually turn your $100 into something more. Investing for the long term means your money is working for you, potentially earning you an income.

For example: If you put $1,000 into a retirement account that has an annual 8% return, 40 years later that would turn into $21,724. If you started with that same $1,000 and put an extra $1,000 in it for the next 40 years at an annual 8% return, that would then turn into $301,505. If you started with $10,000 and put an extra $10,000 in it for the next 40 years at that same percentage rate, that would then turn into $3,015,055.

Side note: I recommend you check out Personal Capital if you are interested in gaining control of your financial situation. Personal Capital is similar to Mint.com, but much better. Personal Capital is free and it allows you to aggregate your financial accounts so that you can easily see your whole financial situation, including investments.

Related content:

• How This Couple Retired at 38 and 41: An Interview With Our Next Life
• How This Couple Retired In Their 30s and Now Travel Around The World: An Interview With Go Curry Cracker
• How Elizabeth Reached Financial Independence by 32 And Moved To A Homestead
• How Much Should A Person Save Each Month?

 

There’s no need to waste money just because you can.

There is no reason to spend all of your money just because you are able to. In my opinion, finding ways to save money will bring you greater security and peace of mind.

I’ve heard of people (even many who are close to me) say, “If I have money, I’ll spend all of it.”

If you decided to save your money rather than spend the last bits of it until your next paycheck, you will be on the road to saving more in the long run, meaning you can start to break free from a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle.

Even if you are only able to save a small amount, that is much better than not saving anything.

Like I said above, time and compound interest are both on your side, and this can turn the small amount of money you have saved into a much larger amount.

Related: 16 Alternatives To Cable TV That WILL Save You Money

 

Stop letting others dictate how you live your life.

One of the reasons that people spend more than they should (and save less now) is because it looks like that is what everyone else is doing.

We’ve all seen the pictures on Facebook or Instagram of a friend with their brand new car, someone on an amazing vacation, or in brand new clothes. But, just because other people have something, that doesn’t mean you need to as well.

You have no idea how someone paid for those things. Maybe they make more than you think, maybe it was a gift, or maybe they are going into debt to “afford” things.

You are the only one who gets to dictate how to spend your money. And you can choose to save instead of spending money on things to keep up with others.

In 10, 20, 30, or 40 years, you could be living a comfortable life without debt, not stuck in a job you hate, and be pursuing your passions. Doesn’t that sound so much better than a life of debt and comparison?

 

The less money you spend now, the less you need in the future.

By spending less money, you’ll decrease the amount of money you need in the future. This includes money for emergency funds, retirement, and more.

This will help you build your emergency fund quicker and reach retirement sooner.

Just think about it: If you are already living a frugal lifestyle, then you will be used to living on less in the future. This means your retirement savings doesn’t need to be as large, which means it may be easier to reach that savings goal.

Also, if you spend less money, you probably won’t need as much in your emergency fund, which can also help you fund that sooner!

When you spend less money now, you can save at a higher rate, and that means you can reach your goals that much faster!

For example, Mr. Money Mustache has a great graphic in his blog post The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement that shows you how your savings rate can dramatically impact when you’ll retire. For example:

• Saving at the average personal savings rate of 5%, it will take you 66 working years until you reach retirement.
• A 25% savings rate means it will take you 32 working years to retire.
• A 50% savings rate means it will take you 17 working years to retire.
• A 75% savings rate means it will take you 7 working years to retire.

So, by saving more of your money, you are likely to retire sooner. Sounds amazing, right?

 

There’s no guarantee that you’ll always have that income stream.

Time and time again, I hear from people that say they don’t need to save money now because they have a job.

Yes, you may feel safe and secure in your job, but the truth is that you never really know how long you’ll be making money or how long that job will last.

Many other people think, “But, I enjoy my job!”

While it’s great that you enjoy your job, you should still learn to save your money. Too many people think they can work forever because they love their job.

However, what happens when you can no longer work? You don’t know what the future will bring – you may encounter a medical problem, a serious life event, you may hate your job 20 years from now, and so on.

Why do people save money? One reason is because nothing is guaranteed.

So, instead of spending every last penny that you have, you should find ways to save more money.

Related: 12 Passive Income Ideas That Will Let You Enjoy Life More

 

 

The best things in life are free.

Stop for a second and think about your life. Do you have a friend you can count on? A family member who cares for you? A significant other to share your life with? Did a stranger hold the door open or offer you a smile? None of those things cost a dime.

Even if you just have one of these, you are still experiencing the happiness in life that comes free of charge.

There are so many free things in life to enjoy!

There are libraries, parks, free concerts, music on the radio, and more.

All of these amazing free things mean that you can stop spending as much and start to save money now.

Living a frugal life means you are taking advantage of what’s already around you. For some, this can be a hard mindset to get into, but when you realize you already have the most important things in life, you will realize that money isn’t the be all and end all.

There are many reasons to save money, and it’s never too late to start.

 

Starting to save money now will change your life.

Saving money is a mindset that you have to put yourself into. You have to make routines, make sacrifices, and change the way you spend money.

I know all of that is hard to do, but there is no greater feeling than being prepared.

And please don’t think that it’s too late to start saving. It’s never too late!

By learning to save at any age or stage of your life, you are making one of the smartest decisions you can for your future, even just a month or five years down the line.

What do you think? Do you think you should save money now? Or enjoy life and save later?

The post Why Save Money Now? 9 Reasons That Will Help You Start Saving appeared first on Making Sense Of Cents.

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If you live, or plan to live, in a condominium, it’s important to get the right insurance policy. Find out how to find the best condo insurance.

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The accidental futurist Kevin Kelly on why enthusiasm beats intelligence, how to really listen, and why the solution to bad technology is more technology.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. We have just launched a new, spinoff podcast with my good friend Angela Duckworth. It’s called No Stupid Questions. We take turns asking and trying to answer questions about everything from friendship and parenting to immortality and the classic conundrum of whether dogs are better than people.

DUBNER: I superimpose onto the face of every person who’s annoying me, the face of some dog.

DUCKWORTH: This makes you nicer to them?

DUBNER: Suddenly, I’m empathetic toward every person.

No Stupid Questions is the name of our new podcast. Please subscribe right now, wherever you get your podcasts. I’d like to tell you how hard we worked on it but honestly, we just sit down and unload our brains. But we have a great time making it, and I think you’ll enjoy listening. So: I hope you give No Stupid Questions a try, and let us know what you think. Thanks.

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Who doesn’t love a little wisdom once in a while? We all seek it out — in the people we know, or would like to know; in philosophy and science and religion; in adventure and travel and all sorts of mind-bending encounters. Most wisdom is presented in a manner befitting its ambition, with an important-sounding title and a package designed to impress. But sometimes the wisdom is just sitting there — on a website, with a title like, “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice.” That’s what Kevin Kelly called the list he wrote on the occasion of his 68th birthday. And he published it on his website: kk.org.

Kevin KELLY: Yeah. It bounced around far more than I thought it would. So it has gone viral.

And why did he compile 68 bits of wisdom?

KELLY: At the beginning of this year, I made a deal with my 23-year-old son, that we would each write something every day or make some art and that we’d try to hold each other accountable. And I decided to write some advice for him as my little thing for the day.

For the day that happened to be his own birthday.

KELLY: Yes. I decided to do what hobbits do. As you might remember, hobbits don’t get birthday presents on their birthday, they give birthday presents.

By now you may well be asking yourself: who is this 68-year-old hobbit by the name of Kevin Kelly? And why should I pay attention to his wisdom?

KELLY: I am officially the senior maverick at Wired magazine, a magazine that I co-founded 25 years ago.

He has founded some other things too.

KELLY: Yeah, things like The WELL, which was the first public access to the internet. Things like the Hackers Conference and V.R. jamborees. And these days, I package ideas.

Most of his ideas are packaged as books — like the 2016 book called The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. That book was read by many as a blueprint for how artificial intelligence will unfold. We interviewed Kelly back then, too. The episode was called “The Future (Probably) Isn’t as Scary as You Think.”

KELLY: Most of A.I. is going to be invisible to us. That’s one of the signs of the success of a technology — is it becomes invisible.

Kelly is often called a futurist.

KELLY: I don’t use that word for myself.

And how does he feel when other people stick that label on him?

KELLY: I understand where it’s coming from and I don’t refuse it. I think it feels like calling yourself a visionary. It’s like you can’t call yourself a visionary. But I do spend a lot of my time thinking about the future, which is paradoxical in many ways. If I was to come back from the future 100 years from now and tell you things, they would almost be unbelievable. Yet to be useful, you have to be plausible. So if what you’re talking about is too improbable, you won’t have any effect. If it’s too accepted, it’s not going to be useful. So there’s this really weird place in the middle where it’s just about implausible and just about plausible at the same time.

It strikes me that giving advice — especially 68 pieces of unsolicited advice — is similar to thinking about the future. You have to be original enough to be useful, but not so implausible as to be reckless. Kelly says his 68 bits of advice are meant for younger people. And in this age of virtual graduation ceremonies, a lot of them do feel like aphorisms you might hear in a commencement address. But (to me at least) they read like little wisdom bombs that can benefit anyone of any age — at least if you’re still looking to get better at something, or just to be a bit more self-aware.

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In addition to packaging ideas about technology, Kevin Kelly is also a hardcore tinkerer. So a few of his 68 pieces of unsolicited advice are coming from someone who’s plainly spent a lot of time in a workshop. For instance:

KELLY (68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Don’t trust all-purpose glue.

And:

KELLY (68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): If you are looking for something in your house, and then you finally find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.

But the vast majority of his advice is about dealing with other humans. Some of it’s pretty obvious; but quite a lot is devilishly original, or at least clever.

KELLY (68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Being enthusiastic is worth 25 I.Q. points.

DUBNER: This is one of my favorites. It makes my whole body smile to read that. It’s one of those things that in retrospect is so obvious, although I don’t know if it really is, provably, demonstrably true.

KELLY: Yeah, I noticed in looking at the kind of people that I wanted to hang around that often it was because of people’s enthusiasm and not so much because they were geniuses. And I also noticed that I probably thought they were smarter than they were because of that enthusiasm. And finally — this is a self-confession — I’m not the smartest person in the room by any means, but I’m often the most enthusiastic person in the room. And I will get invited back.

DUBNER: And what does enthusiasm produce that’s useful?

KELLY: That’s a great question. It produces — well, improvisation. In improv, there’s this fantastic bit of advice that you always want to say not “no,” but you want to say “and.” You want to add into what someone had built before you and add onto it rather than kind of undermine it. And enthusiasm is kind of — I have never thought about this — but it’s almost a kind of empathy in a certain way.

DUBNER: You know, when I was just starting out in New York journalism, and— I mean, I wasn’t terrible, but I was new at it. And one of the first assignments I had was for a rather high-minded literary magazine. And I wrote the piece. I thought I did pretty well. And the editor wrote back to say, one, we’re going out of business, so we’re not going to publish it. But two, I wouldn’t have published it anyway. He said — which was obviously a little bit on the gratuitous side — but I’ll never forget what he said. He said, “If I were you, I would consider myself less of a writer and more of a writing enthusiast.” And I, maybe it’s the enthusiast in me, I was not at all insulted. I know he was trying to insult me.

KELLY: It’s a compliment. Yeah. Right. I like the term enthusiast. You know, we have this word, “amateur.” But amateur is a little bit derogatory in some ways. Enthusiast is maybe the more dignified term. But it’s about people who are obsessively interested, you know, doing things. They are making things happen. And they have a deep interest that I think is often the fountain in the foundation of new things, big new things.

DUBNER: And is 25 I.Q. points at all a realistic estimation? Because that’s a lot.

KELLY: It is. But let me just qualify that with a caveat. I don’t believe in I.Q. at all. I think it’s a terrible, terrible, misleading idea.

DUBNER: Why do you say that?

KELLY: Well, because this complicated procedure that we would call intelligence — that we’re using right now — is probably made up of at least, I don’t know, 12 — maybe 100 — different types of cognition, ranging from deduction, induction, to memory, long-term memory, intuition. All kinds of things. And I think this is going to be one of the side-products of artificial intelligence as we try to make minds, is we’ll come to understand that there isn’t just a single dimension to intelligence. This idea that you can kind of rank things in this ladder. Up, kind of, a mouse or rat, you know, monkey and stuff, and then there’s us. And then there’s Einstein and then there’s A.I. Well, this is just ridiculous, because it’s a very complicated, multidimensional thing that we’re doing.

And as we make more of these artificially, we’ll begin to actually populate that space and we’ll find out that humans are way at the edge. Just like we are on the galaxy, we’re not the center of anything. We’re always at the edge. And we’re going to be at the edge in the corner of the space of possible thinking. And it’s not a single dimension. It’s much more complicated.

DUBNER: Do you think, therefore — or however, I’m not sure which one — that there are elements of human cognition that are not able to be replicated at all by artificial intelligence, or too early to say?

KELLY: Well, no. What I would say is that the mix would be un-replicable. And that’s because the substrate that you use to make thinking matters. So one of the kind of cornerstones of computation is this theorem, the Church-Turing hypothesis, which says that given infinite time and space, that all computational processes are equivalent. Well, the kicker is the unlimited time and space, which is not reality. So when you are limited, there isn’t the equivalency. And what the platform is that you’re using makes a difference. So the only way that we’ll get this mix of human cognition is if it’s running on the same kind of hardware that we’re running on. And there is really no reason to replicate that because it’s so easy to do with untrained labor in nine months. Okay?

However, the thing about these artificial minds — the benefit is we don’t want them to think like humans. That’s why we’re going to make them. It’s because they’re not thinking like us, because they’re going to think differently, because they’re going to approach problems in a different way. And so we’re going to make 1,000 different species of thinking — all different than us — because that’s where the value is.

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KELLY (68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Learn how to learn from those who disagree with you, or even offend you. See if you can find truth in what they believe.

DUBNER: So the value of doing this one seems obvious, especially in a moment where so many people are so quick to take offense, and to be offensive. Can you give me an example of where you’ve actually done this?

KELLY: There are parts of my books where I’ve written something, and somebody will say something very strong, about, “That’s dumb,” or it’s stupid, or wrong. And that’s pretty harsh. But my take is to say, “Let me see if there’s any truth to that.” Sometimes there’s not. Sometimes there may be some sliver of something. And what I’ve learned to do is to respond to that little sliver. To try to get underneath why they’re saying it and where is it they’re coming from. I don’t have to necessarily always agree with them or change it, but I have to pay attention to that signal. And so I’ve learned to treat these things as signals rather than as insults.

DUBNER: And is the goal there to learn more about the idea you were writing about? Is the issue to mollify a potential enemy? Is the goal to make yourself feel more right, perhaps?

KELLY: That’s a fair question. I would like to be right. I should add this to this list, but Esther Dyson says it so well, she says, “Keep making new mistakes.” So, yeah, I would like not to make that mistake again. It’s not to mollify my critics, because I have learned that’s a no-win game. It’s more of, I want my argument to be better. I want it to be right, but for the right reason. And it’s about educating myself, primarily.

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KELLY (68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.

DUBNER: I love that one, because I’m a golfer. And, to me, one of the biggest differentiators between a professional and an amateur, besides putting, is that pros hit bad shots and they recover twice as well as an amateur, if not more. And I was curious whether this had anything to do with golf. I’m guessing no. But where this comes from and if you could give me an example.

KELLY: Yeah, I’m the opposite of a golfer. But I’m a maker, and I watch way too many YouTube tutorials in the making field —people who are working in workshops. And it’s very clear as you’re watching them — if they’re an honest YouTuber — you see that they’re making mistakes all the time. And for the same dumb reasons that all of us make mistakes, where they just forgot. It was upside down. And what’s interesting to me is the way in which they have a set of tools or techniques for recovering, whereas my first impulse would be like, “I’m screwed. I’ve got to start over again.” No. They’re not going to start over again. They’re going to recover from this.

And I also had some experience in the speech-giving, talk business. And I had a couple of times when you have these sort of interruptions, we’ll call them, where the projector fails or the sound goes out or someone starts heckling in the back, whatever it is. And also being in the audience of other people doing the same thing, and the ones that I really admired were those to whom these were not like setbacks or disruptions at all. These were just little quirks in the turn. This was just another little plot twist in the talk itself.

DUBNER: So is that ability to recover about anything more than just experience, however? Is there an actual skill there?

KELLY: It’s both. The pros probably have a bigger toolkit because of their experience. But I think there is a mindset that is an attitude that you can learn, which is that these little things that happen are just part of the journey, that they’re going to happen, and that you should expect them to happen. And that you have to recover from it. And all the entrepreneurs that I know that are successful have also adopted that in the large scale, which is basically, there’s going to be a day when they’re not going to be able to make payroll. That is to be expected. And so they sort of incorporate that as part of what they’re doing.

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KELLY (68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love, keep asking them, “Is there more?” until there is no more. A rule of three in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they have just said. Then again, and then once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth.

DUBNER: So tell me a little bit about you as a listener and maybe something important you’ve learned that it took a lot of listening to get there.

KELLY: So, I’m married. Do I need to say anything more? I’m still married. I’ve been married for 30 years. And I have found that talking to my kids and my wife that the first answer is maybe more superficial, even though it’s genuine intent, and that you have to kind of probe a little bit more to get at a real reason. And that even that second one is not enough; you have to go for a third one. And then the kind of, “Is there more? Is there more?” It’s a very similar kind of a process where you are inviting the person to talk, and your job is to listen. You’re not judging, qualifying, investigating. You’re simply absorbing. And that stance of being open and hearing for some people is difficult. And you can learn to be better at it, is my point.

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KELLY (68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Learn how to take a 20-minute power nap without embarrassment.

DUBNER: I was kind of taken aback by this one because I do nap daily and I’m not embarrassed. I didn’t know I was supposed to be embarrassed by napping daily.

KELLY: Well, I am also a napper. In fact, I’m coming up to my naptime. But I— I do exactly a 20-minute nap and found that additional 20 minutes allows me to shave off two hours of sleep. So I go to sleep at 1:30 in the evening and at 1:30 in the afternoon. And the afternoon is 20 minutes. The other one is six hours. And so, that seems to be enough for me.

DUBNER: And you write about the need to do this without embarrassment. Do you have friends, family who ridicule you for this?

KELLY: Well, I’ve been doing it for so long. I guess when you’re like 68 or 70, people are kind of, yeah, it’s old grandpa. But when I was younger, it seemed like cheating or something. I mean, at least I was embarrassed by the fact that I’m taking a nap.

DUBNER: It was just the appearance of, you know, you couldn’t hack it, kind of, was the idea?

KELLY: Yeah. It’s like, okay, like I’m checking out.

DUBNER: Do you have any advice for lessening that stigma? There’s been really good research lately which shows that napping is demonstrably, a good thing for productivity — not to mention physical and mental health. And it makes sense if you look at the history of electric light and how we used to sleep, etc. But the stigma, like in a corporate environment, still seems to be pretty strong. So let’s just pretend that I’m a public-health official and I want to start a movement that everybody on every job around the world feels empowered — and obviously has the circumstances —  to take that 20-minute nap. Can you think of the biggest impediments, and any ways to address them?

KELLY: Well, one of the things that I know — because my wife grew up in Taiwan — is in Taiwan, it is a national thing that they do. I haven’t been there in a couple of years, but at least when I was in Taiwan, in the afternoon, everybody in the office had put their head on the desk and was asleep. And the office just closed down.

DUBNER: But how do you make it part of the culture if it’s not?

KELLY: Well, I think going to this word, “embarrassment.” I think today, if you found a coworker asleep with their head on a desk, they’d be taking pictures and you know, you’d be the butt of Instagram or Facebook. I think part of it is we have the sense that it’s undignified to fall asleep at your desk. And so when we were making Wired and kind of inventing the offices, one of the things that we wanted was a nap room, very early on. And in Silicon Valley, there are nap rooms. And I think more nap rooms would be a part of the culture saying, “This is okay. We expect this.”

DUBNER: So what if— let’s say there’s a financial firm and there’s all these young people who are really competitive, really smart, and the C.E.O. says, “You know, I’ve read the research. It’s a no-brainer. Everybody needs to take a nap every day.” But then there’s others who say, like, “Well, you know, I’m going to skip the nap because I’m competitive and I want to use that 20 minutes to do more work and get ahead.”

KELLY: Oh, it’s very, very easy. The C.E.O. has to take a nap. Then the C.F.O. takes a nap, and if all the C-suite are taking naps, you’re going to take a nap.

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Kevin Kelly is an author, a maker, and a sort-of futurist who’s had a hand in shaping our online culture for the past few decades.

DUBNER: And would you say the internet has turned out exactly as you and your fellow pioneers envisioned it would be?

KELLY: I think it’s far more powerful and pervasive than what we imagined. I would say so far, the net gains have exceeded net losses. So I am incredibly optimistic about where we’re going from here.

DUBNER: Say a bit more about that, net gains exceeding net losses. I think most people, if they stopped to think about it, would agree. I think, however, many people don’t stop to think about it, and their attention gets captured by some of the losses, some of the invasions, some of the noise. And they think, “Ugh, internet, what a pain in the neck.” So talk about the balance there.

KELLY: Yeah. It’s very clear that technology does not bring us utopia, that almost as many problems are created by each new technology as problems solved. I’m a little bit techno-centric and differ from maybe the critics of technology, because I believe that the solution to the problems that technology makes is not less technology, but better technology. It’s sort of like if I’m to sit here and utter some really dumb idea, you’re not going to say, “Kevin, you need to think less.” You have to have a better idea.

So I see the problems, whatever it might be — from having phones kind of take over their lives, or the way we have surveillance and we feel uncomfortable — that these things are there and they’re real and they’ve been made by technology. But that the solution to them is not to retreat, to say, “I’m going to give this up,” because everybody who tries it, it doesn’t really work. It’s to say, “Let’s do this better. Let’s figure out a way to civilize this. Let’s figure out a way to tame it, domesticate it, and make it better.” And that will take new technology — which, by the way, is going to make new problems.

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KELLY (68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist, you don’t have to ignore the many problems we create; you have to imagine improving our capacity to solve those problems.

DUBNER: So let me ask you this. Many of the optimists I know happen to be people who are rather successful and comfortable in life. And many of the pessimists I know are not. So I’m curious whether you think optimism is a cause of material comfort or a result. And if it’s only a result, then maybe it’s not so trustworthy as an indicator of where the future lies.

KELLY: No, it’s a fair question. But I have noticed that, over time — if you read history carefully — it’s people who have visions about where they want society to go, those ideas, in the end, triumph. And just as there are people trying to make things happen today, there are also people who are concerned about what’s happening today and want to slow it down, to stop it or to change it. But it’s the vision of the builders, of the makers, that actually, in the end, will triumph. And so I see it almost like a car. It’s like, there’s two kind of instrumental parts in the car. There’s this engine, which is running forward. But there’s the brakes. And without the brakes, you can’t steer. The brakes are essential. We need them. But it’s the engine that’s actually going to determine where we go.

DUBNER: Let’s talk for a second about this pandemic. There are some elements of the pandemic itself and the resultant lockdown where technology has been a huge help. I mean, it’s hard to imagine a quarantine like this without the technology and the digital communication that we’re all really used to now. You know, everybody is Zooming and communicating and watching Netflix — and access to email and text and so on. And in medicine, there are multiple technologies, obviously, that are helping to some degree, at least, in the search for therapeutics and a vaccine and so on. On the other hand, technology seems a little bit impotent in some realms, like, “Wait, we don’t do that already? We don’t have that capacity now? How can that be?”

KELLY: Yeah. So my wife is a biochemist. She works for 23andMe genetics. It’s very clear that biotechnology is very different from digital technology. We get used to the speeds of digital technology and how it improves and how we can apply it. And biology is just so much slower. You can’t really speed it up. There was an old joke about trying to speed up the nine months of pregnancy by having two women do it in half the time. It just works at kind of biological time. And that’s sort of what we’re confronting, is we have this expectation of the digital era and we want this thing to happen instantly. This whole thing is happening faster than the speed of science happens, which is slow and requires consensus. And so I think technology’s not letting us down. It’s just that we have to understand that biotechnology operates at a slightly different speed than the digital.

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KELLY (68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Anything real begins with the fiction of what it could be. Imagination, therefore, is the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everybody else knows.

DUBNER: Okay, that’s interesting, an argument in favor of ignorance. Can you explain a bit further?

KELLY: Right. So I’m really interested in the idea of what everybody knows and doesn’t know. Because in the world of Silicon Valley and innovation, there is this belief or this honoring of the hero who challenges what everybody knows. Everybody knows that you can’t have a business of people staying in your bedroom. That’s crazy. Everybody knows you’re not going to have a business where strangers are going to pick you up and drive you around town. But it turns out that, actually, most of what everybody knows is true. And it takes this process we call science to check and have this very long back and forth to determine whether or not something we believe is actually true. And so we have this— we have a way in which we can kind of know things. And I’m really interested in how we— how we know things are true or not true. And I— I just lost my train of thought. I’m sorry.

DUBNER: It really is naptime. I can tell.

KELLY: Right. So — but in looking at how science actually works and trying to come up with a new idea, that’s a moment where you actually don’t want to pay attention to that process of what we know. And that moment of not being blinded by what we know or what we think we know is difficult, because we know what we know because everybody else agrees with it. And that kind of a group mind or that kind of a consensus is very powerful. And I’m not exempt from it. And you’re not exempt from it either. We don’t have the bandwidth to challenge every single statement. We have to accept most of the things around us on faith. We have to accept on the consensus.

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KELLY (68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Trust me: There is no “them.”

DUBNER: What’s that about? Is that about paranoia? Is it about discoordination, the fact that people aren’t organized to form a “them”?

KELLY: Yeah, both of those. One is, I’m very anti-conspiracy theory, because generally— conspiracies require a lot of coordination and aptitude that most systems and institutions don’t have. So it’s usually incompetence rather than conspiracy. So I’ve had the privilege to talk to C.E.O.’s of Fortune 500 companies, to be in the highest levels of governments and three-letter agencies and other kinds of things. And when you get there, you realize there is no adult supervision. It’s sort of frightening and alarming. There isn’t a “them” trying to do something to “us.” And I think that kind of a stance is actually harmful and is something that would diminish your chances of accomplishing good things, because that kind of us-versus-them stance consumes way too much resources and energy. And if you can be released from that, you’ll be unleashed in a way that’s very powerful.

DUBNER: So not only do you write, “There is no ‘them.’” In other words, take your paranoia or your conspiracy theory and set it aside. As one of your later aphorisms, you write the following: “The universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success. This will be much easier to do if you embrace this pronoia,” which I gather is the opposite of paranoia, yes?

KELLY: Yes. Pronoia is exactly what I define as this idea — you have this hunch that “they,” the universe, they’re actually out there to help you. And so this is probably the closest that I have in this list here of disclosing my spiritual and religious orientation, because I actually— I do believe that. That, all things considered, there is a way in which the universe is moving towards goodness, is moving towards all the things that you want, as well.

Now, not everybody is starting at the same place. And for many people, even getting going in that direction is hugely difficult. But even behind that difficulty is a more underlying bias. And that bias is towards the things that we find good, which means diversity, increasing options. It means love, empathy, all those things. And I would make the argument that that bias is visible in looking at the history of the universe, which is moving in this general direction.

DUBNER: You mentioned your spiritual and religious orientation. Can you put some labels on that for those of us who like labels?

KELLY: Yeah, I’m reluctant to put labels on it, but Wikipedia says I’m a devout Christian. Okay. That’s true. But it doesn’t really say very much, because the Christ I follow is a kind of the universal, cosmic Christ. And so I fully endorse the idea of God, that there is a God. And my agenda in life is to believe in the biggest God possible, because I think whoever has the biggest God wins. And so my God, is a God that has unleashed this universe and — he’s unleashed the universe to be surprised by it. And so I think it’s our religious duty to surprise God.

One of the things that we have with our complicated consciousness is a sense of being able to put ourselves into others and make everybody’s life more interesting and better by understanding how they think. And part of this idea of progress, of moral progress, is that we keep widening that circle of things from our brothers and sisters, to families, to a clan, to a state, to other ethnic groups, to other species now. And I believe in the long-term that we’ll also go into machines, and we’ll be able to have empathy for even artificial intelligences. And so, from that empathy, I think then comes good behavior — all the other things that we would want to be, I think in some way stem from that primary step of being able to see the world outside of our own eyes.

DUBNER: Yeah, that’s a really nice way of putting it. And I guess that multivariate empathy you’re describing is a form of enthusiasm really as well.

KELLY: Yeah. And then what I just said would — I don’t think anybody within an organized religion would disagree with. You know, especially the Buddhists have been probably preaching that for a very long time. And I think as we start to change ourselves, we’re going to have to change the vocabulary and the framing of those beliefs. And so I think the surprise brought by, you know, first Darwin and Freud, and now A.I., is that humans are far more malleable than we thought.

And as we understand more about our past, we understand that actually we have invented ourselves. Humanity is our first invention. And that humans are the first animals that we domesticated, okay? And that we are in this process, still, of inventing ourselves. So we’re making up what humanity is. And the question is not so much who we’re going to be as, like, who do we want to be? Which is a much more difficult question to answer.

DUBNER: I had imagined this conversation would be fun, but it was much more fun than even I had imagined, so thanks.

KELLY: Well, you have a great imagination. Thank you, Stephen.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Matt Hickey, Zack Lapinski, Corinne Wallace, and Mary Diduch. We had help this week from James Foster. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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