Jerusalem Demsas: preference

Transcript context

…There’s plenty of inertia keeping them from traveling, so I don’t feel I’m misleading them. [laughs] The behavioral bias is not to travel. If I nudge them, I feel it’s a better world even though it’s maybe not a happier world. I think that if you were to buy the idea that . . . Happier is just a hard metric. Am I happier if I’m more satisfied or more well-rounded? I’m not really sure. It depends on how that actually takes root. At the same time, it’s just like many of the things that I’ve gotten from really productive travel experiences that have also been analogous to experiences when I read very, very good books or I hear a very, very smart argument or something like that. Those are much lower-cost things to attain, and there are millions of those. It’s obviously costly. I think in part we travel to read better. If you’ve been to a lot of places, there are many more things you can read, and they make sense to you. If you’ve hardly been anywhere, so much stuff . . . I went to Kiev in 2019 — coincidence, but now, when I read about what’s happening there, it really does make more sense to me. I don’t pretend I figured it out at all, but I would have very little idea without that trip.…

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