Dan Ariely
speaker
111 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dan Ariely’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
If you ask me whether it's better in this world to be a trusting person or not trusting person, I would say that the trusting person would have much more improvement, but they would feel more the pain of mistrust. The non-trusting person will not make much gains in the world, but they will not experience the betrayals. So that was a betrayal.
If you think about the question of cancel culture, society, negative feedback, and so on, I think it's the same thing. Lots of people are basically saying, you know what? I'm out of the game. I'm not interested. I'm not participating. I'm not playing. And I can see why in the short term it's tempting, but I don't think it's the recipe for a good life.
I think at the end of the day, the recipe for a good life has to involve lots of progress. And lots of progress means lots of scars, metaphorically.
I think about this adventure with the misbelievers. I think of it as like climbing Mount Everest. Intellectual, not the real thing. I can't climb the real thing. But when people climb Mount Everest, they get injured. Nobody gets out of there without frostbite. Some people lose their lives. I mean, it's a very, very tough thing to do.
And I think a lot of the things we do that are worthwhile are kind of like that. We need to figure out if that's our life strategy. And I think that more of us would be better off by taking more of these challenges. One of my favorite stories from economics is a story from Paul Samuelson, the famous economist at MIT.
And Samuelson goes to a friend of his in the department and he says, look, I'm going to offer you a bet and I'm going to give you slightly different numbers. I'll toss a coin. If it comes on head, I'll give you $120. If it comes on tail, you'll give me $100. I'll give you $120. You'll give me $100. Do you want to play? And his friend said, no, I don't want to play.
And he said, I understand that the expected value is positive, that on average it's a good deal. But if I win $120, I'll be slightly happy. If I lose $100, I'll be very miserable. So winning $120 is little happiness. Losing $100 is a lot of misery, not worth it. And then Samuelson says, and what if we play this a thousand times? His friend said, of course I'll play.
And then Samuelson says, look what you're telling me. You're telling me that if I came to you every day and said you want to play this, every day you would say no. And three years later, a thousand days later, I would ask you, how were your decisions up to now? And you would say, my goodness, why did I play this way?
And I think that when we look at life one decision at a time, we tend to be too timid. We tend to think about the losses and the gains and the losses are more painful than the gains are happy. And because of that, we don't take enough risk. But I think we need like a portfolio approach. When we look at our life, we say, that's not the life I want to live. I don't want to live a timid life.
So I think we need to figure out It is painful. It's terrible. I'm not recommending it to anybody. But on the other hand, living a timid life is no way to live either. We have to try and we have to learn to accept it. And then there are things we can do to prepare. So you said thick skin. I think the thick skin is really resilience.
I think the thick skin is really developing a good group of friends and that trust us and support us in those moments. I don't think anybody could look at hateful comments about themselves and not care. I think it's about having those people around us who reflect to us who we really are.
We're certainly not doing well. We have record number of people who are on all kinds of SSRIs. And we have lots of people who are not doing so well. I think part of it is the attention economy. Part of it is the fragmented day. Part of it is the fact that we're not feeling in control. Part of it is the fact that we feel helplessly and hopelessly behind.
And my field, behavioral economics, basically believe that it's very hard to change people. and much easier to change the environment. We also believe that the decisions people end up making are a function of the people, but mostly the function of the environment. And we have designed an environment that is just not good for us. And I'll give you a metaphor for this. Every year, cars get better.
How does the car get better? Yeah, they get a little bit more efficient and so on. Mostly they get better by assuming correctly what shitty drivers we are. We used to think that if we had anti-lock brakes, it will help. Then we had a seatbelt and a rear view mirror, then side mirrors, then we have little lights, then we have all kinds of things.
Every year, the main advances is to realize the extent to which we're shitty drivers and to make it a little more difficult for us to kill ourselves. So if you think about the development, the development is accepting human nature and building around it. Nobody in the car industry says, oh, let's send people to a workshop on how to be a better driver. No, no, no. It's hopeless.
People are shitty drivers. Let's make cars. It will get people to have more difficult time to kill themselves and other people. In the world of information, technology is the opposite. Every year, information technology is becoming less compatible with human nature. less comfortable, less conforming to our limitation, more demanding and so on. It's kind of a shame, right?
You could say, okay, what would IT, what would information, what would the calendar look like? If it understood, we can't just focus eight hours straight. What would the calendar look like if it understood that we need to pee between meetings? You don't have to go far. But it's not just a calendar. It's email and it's every different platform like this.
So I think that our digital world eventually is very, very badly designed for our health and our mental health. We'll see its effect on health in 30 years from now, but we see the mental health effect very much now. And people have to take control. And I think people who are high up in organization need to do it for themselves and they need to do it for the people who work with them.
We need to control the flow of email and we need to control what we do on social media and we need to figure out how we go to sleep without screens and all of those things. There's this term called structured procrastination. is the idea that we do things that make us feel like we're making progress, but without actually making progress.
Like getting to inbox zero or making a to-do list and then checking things off. It's not really making progress, but there are a lot of things in the digital world that gives us a sense that we're making progress and we gravitate to them and we do less. So here is one simple advice. I'll tell you what I do. I go to the office every morning
Showing 81–100 of 111 · page 5 of 6
← Previous
Next →