Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
24 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think that’s right. I guess we don’t have to figure out who’s right, we just have to wait.”
02 / commitment
“I have a pretty high confidence that I will because I don’t have a fear of death.”
03 / belief
“” My best playing was when I was about 20, as a matter of fact, is what I found. In retrospect, I think there’s a plausible physical explanation.”
04 / belief
“You’re saying, I think, that Trumpism is an equilibrium and Reaganism was a disequilibrium, and I’m saying the opposite.”
05 / commitment
“I think within 20 years that we will have something like the post-industrial equivalent of the fruit that was wrought by the Industrial Revolution, that that’s what we’ll see from what’s going on today.”
06 / observation
“The problem is that in modern society, we’ve been kicking everybody into the left hemisphere of the brain and walling off the right hemisphere because people spend all day on their screens, and the hustle and grind-engineered Silicon Valley culture that we live in has actually eliminated a lot of the mystery and meaning from life and the incentive to actually ask those questions.”
07 / belief
“Now, that said, that doesn’t mean that I think we should have open borders or radical policies where there is no control on immigration for anybody at any time, but I’m pro-immigration because I’m pro-America, quite frankly.”
08 / belief
“The best way to live, I think, to find the right balance of this came about from the teachings of William James, who really is the first social psychologist, the father of modern psychology.”
09 / belief
“I think AI at not-too-distant future, will do a better job at executing policy analysis, but will do a very poor job at asking the right policy questions.”
10 / commitment
“When I go to Barcelona, which is every year, a couple of times ordinarily, I will usually give talks and lectures at the university and in public in both Spanish and Catalan.”
11 / belief
“I think that there’s probably something to that, although there’s some pretty interesting new research that shows that the placebo effect is actually not real.”
12 / belief
“If I were a Buddhist leader, if I were a religious leader, as opposed to just a religious person, I’d be thinking about the opportunity for religious revival, and I think, quite frankly, we’re due for one.”
13 / belief
“I think that the reason that curiosity is important, because curiosity is ultimately a basic—I should say interest is a basic positive emotion that leads to happiness.”
14 / belief
“I think that there’s a difference in the ability of different populations to assimilate and different cultures in their willingness and ability to assimilate new people.”
15 / observation
“” The reason is because they’re living in a particular way, and they’re path dependent, and they might be addicted, and they don’t have very much experience.”
16 / preference
“By the way, this is one of the reasons I’m such an enthusiast for the free enterprise system, because it allows us to find the places where our skills and our talents can actually find each other.”
17 / preference
“Similarly, I think the most compelling definition of happiness is the combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.”
18 / preference
“One of the reasons I write my books is because I want people to recommend them to people that they love and to say, “I just read this book by some nerd at Harvard named Arthur.”
19 / preference
“Part of it is because sometimes when I don’t know what I think, I just read your blog.”
20 / prediction
“I think that the reason for that is that when people read most of the self-improvement literature, not just happiness literature, what happens is that they get a flush of epiphany, a new way of thinking.”
21 / evaluation
“I think that we probably haven’t tried to convert each other because when we talk to each other, we’re talking about things that are more important to us, like our religious faith because of our desire to actually lift people up in these bonds of happiness and love.”
22 / evaluation
“Now, this is important, right? This is an important thing because what that says is—if you’re taking it at its face, and again, the research is the research, and it could be updated, and everything’s contested—what this suggests is that if you’re doing it right, the more time you have, the more meaningful your life is going to be, and the more you’ll actually savor it.”
23 / commitment
“In other words, I’m practicing it in my research, and I’m sharing it constantly because I’m a teacher.”
24 / evaluation
“I think that’s wrong because you and I as economists understand the importance of scarcity.”