The continuation of discussions about end of life. As you know, I became an end-of-life doula and I’m going with somebody for the first time to Switzerland to end their life at Dignitas. A place where you can do it legally and safely and at the right time.

I was thinking about timing. So, we got the documents from Dignitas, and there’s meeting one meeting with a physician and meeting two with a psychologist, and then there’s the meeting for the medication.

It’s at 10 a.m. on a particular date.

When I think of the people who I helped toward the end of their lives or the people from my family that I got to see—nobody had a date and an hour that was this precise. Think about it. When is it that we have a date so precisely?

You might be summoned to a court date. Or maybe there’s a discussion with your boss and you think that maybe they’ll ask you to leave. There are a few things that we have dates in advance, that are very, very precise. But even the dates that are very precise, maybe the meeting with your boss you think will not go well but you’re not 100% sure. You have a court trial, you’re not really sure how it will turn out.

This one is so precise. And I think it’s a unique perspective.

I have to say that this question has probably crossed all our minds. Would you like to know when you’re going to die? I think I would like to have like a general sense. Is it five years or ten years or twenty years from now? Would I like to know the exact date well in advance? I don’t think so. If I knew in ten years on April 13^th that I’ll die? I don’t think I would want that. But in the short term, the person I’m escorting, he’s finding that date incredibly positive.

He knows there’ll be a date when he stops suffering. He has a list of things he wants to accomplish between now and then. He’s meeting with lots of people. He said he’s not explaining his choice to anybody. We can talk about other things, but he’s not interested in explaining his choice over and over.

Maybe for me—and I wonder what it is for you—I would like to have a general sense and only when I get very close, I think I would like to have a specific sense, like the exact time to prepare, to settle things.

You know, when I thought about getting that letter, I thought it would be frightening for him. I thought the date would be, even though he wanted it, I thought that every day that would pass would be that hour and that date would be difficult, but no, it’s just positive.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be in his shoes and able to make such decisions. I’m very curious. The good thing about all of this is that he is positive. Very positive. And much more positive than I was expecting with that.

Some things to think about.

This person decided to end their life in Switzerland at a place called Dignitas. It’s a place that you can legally go and physicians are allowed to end someone’s life. There are lots of terms, forms, conditions, somebody has to be terminally ill, etc. A little while ago, this person I’m helping received the date on which they would give him the medication. I asked him how it was to get the letter with the date—there’s something very concrete about that—and how his well-being has been before and after receiving the date. He told me two things: one I think is interesting and one is fascinating.

The first one, interesting, he said how much relief there was to get the letter. He wasn’t dreading it. He was waiting for it. The moment he got it, he was hoping for it. He filled out all the paperwork and so on. And he said how much relief was in that. I think that’s interesting.

What’s the fascinating part? The fascinating part is when I asked him about his quality of life. How was his day to day since? And he said it has been dramatically better than before. He said that before, he was paying a lot of attention to his body parts that were not working. Getting up off of a chair, the pain here, the pain there—difficulty in all kinds of things. He’s had cancer for a while and there are lots of systems that don’t work as well. He said that before he got the letter and before he had a date, most of his attention was directed at the things that were not working. If he was trying to get out of a chair, for example, the things that were not working took his attention.

He said that after he got the letter, he stopped paying attention to the negative things and started paying attention only to the positive things. He said the signals of the illness (things that were getting worse, things were not working well), he knows will be taken care of in three weeks and he can focus on the positive things. He said it was a shift in attention.

It reminded me of research by Lara Carstensen, who showed that young people focus on the negative and the positive, but often more on the negative. As people get older, we start focusing less on the negative and more on the positive. This is why young people think they must be really miserable. They’re not. They’re focusing more on the positive. She attributed it to the idea that there’s lots to learn from negative things. And when you’re young, you should focus on the negative things. But as you get older, there are still a lot of things to learn from negative things, you just have less time to use it, so why not focus on the positive things?

In my friend’s situation, it is an extreme. Negative things in life give us information, signals, what to avoid, and what to worry about. But the moment he knows the date that thing becomes less important, and suddenly he has room to only think of the positive. He said he’s expecting a fantastic three weeks ahead, focusing only on the positive things.

I hope you find this both sad, as I do, but also important and fascinating. I’m both heartbroken about him and also relieved for him that his suffering will end soon.

It’s a complex emotion.

Bye for now.

So, I gave a talk in an organization. We covered lots of topics and among them, we talked about romantic life. Not my area of expertise but clearly it has important relevance to social science. Toward the end there was a very nice woman who described very openly and caringly and with concern, that she had been with her husband for a very long time and they were diverging for a very long time. He had his career, she had her career, they met to do all kinds of chores but they’re very divergent. She said that it’s very clear that she needed to make some real adjustments. It’s possible that he would make some adjustment, but she needed to make some real adjustments—giving up things in her career, timing, and so on to make it work. She asked me why she couldn’t make those changes. She was on this path, she knw what she was supposed to do to reunite with her husband or at least noticed some of the things that she should do for them to get back on the same path but said she can’t do it.

I told her to imagine her husband had an accident—I’m not wishing an accident on anybody—but imagine he had an accident and suddenly needed more of her time and attention. Would she find the time? Would she be able to adjust things in her life to help him. Even if it was a long-term injury, not just something for a week. She answered yes. And I asked if she would go ahead, and do it? Not whether she could, but would she actually do it? She said that she loved him very much and would make all the changes. I asked, why not do it now? (By the way, this applies for all genders and all roles.) But I said, if you recognize the need, and recognize that if it was a sharp need created by injury, you would be there, why not when it’s not a sharp need? When it’s just something that happened slowly over a long time. She said she didn’t know exactly. That the two things felt very different to her. An injury feels like the commitment is easy to come up with—it’s urgent, it’s important, it’s now, it can’t be delayed by another day. She said on the slow divergence, there’s no forcing function. She didn’t use those terms, but basically there was no forcing function for her.

More generally, I think it raises the point of what is easy for us to do on our own. And how easy it is for us to delay things that we know are good, but we’re still tempted to delay. The things that we think we will do another time and the benefit of forcing functions. I’m hoping nothing bad will happen to your loved one but think about this as a thought exercise: If you’re not finding the time for something, how would you behave differently if there was an injury involved? Can you turn around and clear some time?

That’s the thought exercise for today.

Let me first tell you what the researchers actually did.

What happened in the lab

In 1997, the psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues — Edward Melinat, Elaine Aron, Robert Vallone, and Renee Bator — published a paper with the unromantic title “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings”.

Notice that the word “love” does not appear in the title. Neither does “romance.” Aron was not trying to build a matchmaking device. He had a much more mundane problem, the kind researchers complain about over bad coffee: closeness between two people normally takes months or years to develop, and you cannot ask a grant committee to fund a study that runs that long. He needed a way to manufacture closeness on a schedule — in about the time it takes to watch a sitcom — so that he could then study it.

So he built a ladder. Thirty-six questions, arranged in three sets of twelve, each set slightly more revealing than the one before. Pairs of strangers were sat down together in the lab and given forty-five minutes to work through them, taking turns.

Set I is gentle and almost silly: Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest? By Set II you are on shakier ground: What is your most treasured memory? And by Set III the floor has quietly disappeared: When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself? And: Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how they might handle it.

The control condition is the part almost nobody mentions, and it is the part that makes the study a study. A second group of strangers spent the same forty-five minutes together answering a matched set of small-talk questions — pleasant, harmless, the conversational equivalent of an elevator ride. Same room, same time, same amount of talking.

The pairs who answered the designed questions ended up reporting substantially more closeness to each other than the pairs who made small talk. Forty-five minutes with a stranger, and some of them reported a sense of connection they described as comparable to their closest relationships.

Also, one detail that has been retold so often it has become folklore: a pair from Aron’s lab reportedly went on to marry, and invited the research team to the wedding. Aron himself tells the story. But it is an anecdote.

Then the internet got hold of it

For eighteen years the procedure lived where such things usually live — in citations, syllabi, and the occasional conference talk, under the affectionate nickname the “fast friends” paradigm.

Then, in January 2015, the writer Mandy Len Catron published an essay in the New York Times Modern Love column called “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” She had tried the questions in a bar with a university acquaintance. She wrote about it beautifully. The essay went off like a firework, and the Times ran the full list alongside it as “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.”

On the staring. Catron and her partner finished by looking into each other’s eyes for four minutes, and this has since fused onto the 36 Questions exercise as though it were step 37 of the protocol. It was not part of Aron’s 1997 study at all. The idea comes from a separate line of research — Kellerman, Lewis, and Laird’s 1989 work on mutual gaze, which had strangers hold unbroken eye contact for two minutes and found increases in reported feelings of passionate love. It is a real finding from a real study. It is simply a different study. Catron combined them, which was a lovely piece of writing and a slightly confusing piece of citation.

The dinner party where small talk was banned

A few years ago Kristen Berman, my longtime collaborator and the co-founder of Irrational Labs, hosted a dinner for twenty-seven people with exactly one rule: no small talk. Not less of it. None. Guests all had to arrive at the same moment, so that nobody could ease in with the weather while the host took their coat. Where the place cards would normally go, there were index cards with questions on them. And the enforcement was handed to the guests — if a conversation drifted toward traffic, or real estate, or what somebody did for a living, anyone at the table could call it and change course.

People were still talking three hours later. Some of them were still thinking about those conversations a week later.

The line from Kristen’s account of that evening that I have not been able to stop repeating is this: the questions are not the technology, the permission is the technology. Asking someone at a dinner party what they would spend the hour on in a therapy session is prying — you made a unilateral move and you own the consequences. When a card asks it, nobody made a move. The card is the one being nosy, and if the answer gets uncomfortable you can both blame a piece of printed cardboard.

The basic idea is that we are not choosing small talk because we like it. We are simply following the social norm of not asking anything that could be interpreted in a bad light.

That dinner party eventually became a deck. Kristen and the team at Irrational Labs turned the index cards into No Small Talk, tested it in the field, and put up a free online version:

nosmalltalk.cards

Recently I took that version of the No Small Talk cards and built it into an app for two people, sequenced and tuned for romantic purposes rather than for dinner parties, and it is the version I recommend for couples when people ask me about the 36 questions:

decisionaids.danariely.com/romantic-journey

Three design choices in it are worth explaining, because each one is there to solve a specific failure of the original.

You choose the deck together, before you start. Aron’s list has a fixed depth, decided in 1997 by people who had never met you. Here you decide how far you are both willing to go, and you decide it jointly. That negotiation is not a preamble to the game — it is the first move of the game, and it is important as well.

You alternate. Every card gets two answers. This is the symmetry constraint from the lab, enforced by the software instead of by your goodwill.

You can always skip — and the skip is visible. This one I am fondest of. Forcing an answer turns a game into an interrogation, so passing has to stay available. But a pass that vanishes without a trace is just an escape hatch, and you will use it forty times. So the app keeps count where you can both see it. Nothing happens as a result. Nothing needs to. Knowing that the other person can see that you have skipped four times is quite enough to make you answer the fifth — and if it is not, then the pattern of what you are skipping has become its own conversation.

I recommend this exercise for people who are just starting dating and for people who’ve been together for a long time. Try it out, even if just a few cards to get the conversation started. I’m promising you that it’s going to be more meaningful than you expect it to be.

decisionaids.danariely.com/romantic-journey

So when #MeToo happened, it was clear that something had to be done. And there were lots of things, the details don’t matter now, that went overboard. The justification was that the way to fix things is for the pendulum to swing the other way, and then it would swing back. I have to say that I didn’t always buy that argument because I was worried about the swinging back that would happen later.

Well, I just heard about this term, masculinism. And I have to say with a very broken heart that I think the pendulum is swinging back in a way that is much worse than I thought was possible. I don’t think any of the people who said that the pendulum would swing back at some point imagined anything like this. And it got me to think a lot about the conflict in the Middle East and how there is no question that hate begets hate. We will overreact and they will overreact. We will overreact and maybe they will be deterred, etc. And it just gets worse and worse and worse.

I think that this model of the pendulum swinging is the wrong model. Think about it, the idea that there’s gravity and the pendulum swings, but over time the swinging stops. It’s really about friction, right? If there was no friction it would continue in the same way. But the physical model we have of the pendulum swinging is that it’s too much in one direction, it will swing in the other direction, then it will swing back. And slowly, slowly, slowly it would swing into very small changes and maybe even stop at its natural point.

I don’t think human nature fits with that model. I think when the pendulum swings, it actually swings in a more extreme way. Not always, and not for everybody, but to some degree. I think that conflicts like the one in the Middle East are like that. Without real external intervention, I think things are getting out of hand. I think that the model of things getting out of hand is stronger than this. And in masculinism, I’m not justifying it, of course, but there are now people who are not just mistreating women badly but are using it as an ideology.

So first, it’s very sad. I was terribly sad to read about this phenomenon. I had no idea it happened, but once I started reading, I went into my own rabbit hole of reading about it. If you want to have a difficult day or week or a month, go into it. But if not, just make yourself aware. It’s a very sad movement. Sad for humanity, sad for people, sad for women.

In addition to that, I’m wondering whether the pendulum model is just not the right model. And what we need to understand is that overreaction creates overreaction. That the model is a model of acceleration and not a model of slowing down. And what we need is strong external forces to add some force, because naturally things tend to get more out of hand instead of evening out.

I wanted to end this with something optimistic. I don’t have one. I just think we need to understand it and then try very hard not to think that if the pendulum overswings, it will correct itself.

The sad thought of the day.

I was reflecting this week about the good old times. I know, I know . . .

I was thinking about a discussion I had with the CEO of a very large pharmaceutical company. Years ago, I met this CEO and it turned out that we had overlapping interests. He was very interested in medication adherence—how often people take their medication as prescribed. I was interested in this question as well. It has to do with motivation and habits and what happens when people fall off the wagon and so on. And I proposed that he fund a research project so we could work on this question. He asked how much it would cost. I said, $500,000 a year. And he asked what exactly we would do? I told him I didn’t know exactly but we would dedicate some manpower and explore different aspects to justify the cost.

A few days later, I got a call from his assistant letting me know that he—let’s call him B—didn’t feel comfortable committing to a contract for $500,000 a year without knowing what the exact deliverables would be. I thought about it for a couple of seconds. And I said, “Would you tell B for me that if he doesn’t think that research should be flexible, and if he’s not willing to risk $500,000 a year on flexible research, then I don’t think he should be the CEO of this large company.” I’m sure you’re guessing how the story ends. We got the contract. We worked with them for quite a while. We produced lots of valuable research. But the point was not just my audacity (which I’m still proud of) but rather that flexibility is incredibly important.

Let’s say you get into a new topic. You don’t know exactly where it will go. But while creating the contract you add strict deliverables. What happens if, along the way, you find out that there could have been something better to do? What happened to first exploring? I think that the lack of trust and the lack of flexibility are basically killers of productivity. They look like they’re the right thing to do. But if you know exactly what you’re going to do, is there really a real point in doing it? I mean, there is some, but not as much. The whole point of doing research is to explore what we don’t know to try to understand something.

Anyway, I was lamenting. I was thinking about the time that we had flexible research projects where there was trust and flexibility between us and our sponsors. Everybody gained more when they existed. These days, this is no longer a possibility. These days, nobody has the flexibility. Everybody wants an exact process. How many hours? What’s the deliverables? When will they be delivered?

What is the outcome? The outcome is less exciting research, more predictable processes, and everybody loses. The research sponsors lose, the university loses, the students who are part of the research lose—all because we love bureaucracy.

Let’s think about how we can reintroduce flexibility into the process.

But I want to focus on the shelters in the city. Often what would happen is we would all run around, looking for a shelter, and people would invite us into their shelters. By the way, lots of apartment buildings kept their doors open all the time so that people could go into shelters. But there was one occasion that somebody saw me. They stepped out, opened the door, and invited me in. I went with them into their shelter. And there we were, a group of strangers, brought together by an alarm, a fear of a missile landing somewhere. And there’s a feeling of stress. There’s no other way to say it. Everybody’s a little worried. What would happen here? What would happen elsewhere? Are people going to be injured? Will somebody die? Is this the last missile? Is more going to come? How many? A lot of stress.

What I found reminded me of old research in psychology. Imagine there’s a bridge, a very, very narrow, shaky bridge over a canyon. They tested people who were walking on that bridge. So, imagine a guy walking across this bridge. And there’s a woman, the experimenter, who catches him, let’s say, in the middle. And she asks him lots of questions about some research—nothing particularly interesting. But at the end, she gives him her phone number with the offer for him to call her to find out the results of this study. Sometimes she meets him at the middle of the bridge where things are shaking the most and people are stressed. And sometimes she meets him at the end when nothing is shaking and he’s already in stable ground. When do you think is the guy more likely to call her?

The answer is on the bridge when things are shaking a lot and much less when he finished crossing the bridge. Now why is that? Well, in the middle of the bridge, the arousal is the highest. The arousal comes from being afraid, but it is attributed to experimenter. They feel their heart pounding; they might be sweating. And they think it’s because the experimenter is just a wonderful person. People who crossed the bridge didn’t really care about the research that much and didn’t want to call. The people who were in the middle also didn’t care about the research, but they cared about the research assistant and felt kind of an arousal toward her and wanted to talk to her.

The same thing happens in shelters. You get into shelters, there’s arousal, fear, anxiety, and some of it creates a wonderful community. Suddenly, it’s us. We care about the people we are with; we share something. Now, I can’t say that I miss those days. It’s been quite a few months since we had the last bombing. But there was a feeling of wonderful camaraderie. There was a feeling of something that united us, that got us together. People helped each other, like the person who opened that door for me. I just wish we could keep that without the missiles.

So sometimes there’s a silver lining even in bad things. In the case of the missiles, it was very, very small compared to the tragedy. But it’s good to recognize that the camaraderie, the caring, the shared arousal, all were quite wonderful.

There’s a rumor that sometime tomorrow, or maybe even later today, there’ll be a new round of war between Israel and Iran. I don’t know how these rumors start and I don’t know what they’re based on, but there’s this rumor. Of course, we’ve been through a few rounds of this. They were all tough and scary and stressful and with no sleep and lots of bad things. Lots of destruction on all sides. I think that when we’re in a war and running to shelters multiple times a day and hearing the bombs and the sadness of the injured, the dead, and destruction and so on, there’s a certain level of getting used to it. Not a lot of getting used to it, but a certain level. And then it stops. Let’s say there’s a wave of war that lasts a month. Every night we run to the shelter as well as during the day. It’s tough and we get used to it—to some degree. Then—at least in the center of Israel—there’s a couple of months without missiles. And suddenly, the idea of going back into war creates this unbelievable heaviness.

I think that once you’re in that period, you deal with it and then you get out. Now I’m with such a heavy heart of going back into that. A real cloud of depression, I would say, is coming on. Because when you’re in it, you kind of use all your resilience and then breathe. And then now I have to fight another wave of this. Let’s hope it won’t happen. But the feeling since yesterday is, “Here we go again. Do I have the resilience to deal with it?” I know I will. I know I’ll get used to it. But the need to get into it again is very tough. But I wanted to say something else. Not just talk about the waves of difficulty, how we deal with them, and the dread of the next wave.

In a previous round with Iran, I was sitting in this house, and a group of Iranian students asked me to talk to them about the psychology of money. Of course, I was very happy to do so. We talked over Zoom. My camera was on. Their cameras were not. I think mostly because of bandwidth. It was scheduled for an hour, and I finished about 10 minutes early. And I said, “Before you ask questions, I want to tell you I’m calling today from Israel. It’s true that I’m a professor in the U.S. at Duke University, but right now I’m in Israel. I know that you are bombing us and we’re bombing you. More correctly, our government is bombing you. Your government is bombing us. And how are you feeling?”

We all had a very, very shared experience of lack of control and fear. Not really understanding what the purpose is. It was a very sad and very beautiful human moment of people who are stuck, supposedly, on two sides of a war, really being on the same side. There were no negative emotions between me and them and them and me. There was no clarity on what was really going on, why it was going on, who has incentive. We all felt like pawns in a war, where the birth lottery decided where we were born, and some big forces were playing with us. It is depressing because we all felt that we really don’t have a say. And what’s going on in the name of our country does not really represent us. So that was the sad part. I’m part of this country. These things are happening to this country. This country is doing things. But I don’t feel connected. Nobody asked us. Nobody consulted us about this. That was the pessimistic side.

The optimistic side is that we felt a very, very strong connection to each other. Despite the war, despite the missiles flying on that day in both directions, we felt that we, as people, are highly connected—and could be more connected.

So, the waves of emotions come, and we need to gather energy for the next wave in case it comes. We’ll see. And then we, the people, must figure out what we do with our leaderships to create a better and saner world.

Bye for now.

I would like to propose that in general we’ll have a problem, but I want to propose one part that I think is interesting, bright, and hopeful. It’s the idea that consumption of information is influenced by who produced it. Think about a painting. Is the painting the same no matter who produced it, no matter what you know about the person, about the time in history? Of course it’s different. What about the poem? What about the bottle of wine?

The point is that a lot of time when we consume something, we also consume the background, the history, what came before, and then what became part of it. Think about one of my books (if you happen to have read one of them). When you read one of my books is it really independent of knowing something about me? I don’t think so. I think those things are connected. So, imagine you read one of my books and you either thought it was produced by AI or you thought it was produced by me and I told you some things about myself. Which one will be a more fulfilling consumption experience? Which one would you read more carefully? In which one would there be a paragraph that is less interesting, but you would say, “I’m trusting that this will be OK.”

I think that the person producing will still have an impact. Now, I think that’s important. It means that when I produce something, it has to be me. I can’t tell you that I created it when it was really AI. I think we need to differentiate between those things. But eventually I think that we will be surrounded by lots more. And I think we’ll have a choice. Do we consume things that are made by AI? I think then we will enter into a production mode. We will read as quickly as possible. Digesting. It’s not about enjoyment. It’s about processing. And then there’ll be a different mode. Consuming with some thought and appreciation and understanding of the person behind it. I think there’ll be both of those. I think we’ll have some consumption that will be just about quickness and efficiency. And some that will be about the value underneath it and the meaning that it gives. In those instances, I think we will read slower and enjoy and savor more, maybe even take more seriously.

So, I think we’ll have these two buckets. The question will be how much time do we spend in each of those buckets? How much time do we spend in the bucket of efficiency and how much time do we spend in the bucket that’s more meaningful? I think it will be hard to compete with AI producing things very, very quickly and very, very efficiently compared to human effort. But I think that we will still pay for good wine, good poetry, paintings that are made by a person, a movie that has a story behind it, good books, and so on. Maybe less than now, but I still think we will.

So, the bad news is that we’ll be absolutely bombarded by lots and lots of information. But I think the good news is that the information produced by humans will continue to have a story behind it, have a meaning, and I think we’ll treat it differently and enjoy it more.

That’s my prediction.

So, I think about ideas for experiments a little bit like art. If you think about somebody who is drawing or painting, they’re usually not representing the whole thing. They’re representing the essence of it. And they have to convince us, the viewer, that they have captured the essence. And I think about experiments in the same way. They are field experiments, but regular experiments are like that. So maybe I do an experiment on how much people are willing to pay for annoying sounds and how that changes over time. Or do people choose a chocolate that costs three pennies or one penny? Or what about building Bionicles? When I do these experiments, it’s not about the specifics. Like I would hate to say, “I have a conclusion about chocolate for one penny” or “I have a conclusion about building Bionicles.” No, we’re trying to create an idea and represent that idea in a way that the audience, hopefully you who are reading about it, will be convinced that we have captured the essence.

So very much like art, I look at the problem in the world. People seem not to make a lot of progress with something. People seem to not take their medication. People seem to not save enough. And I try to distill it down to some principles, and I try to create an experiment to test those principles. But between me, who is designing the experiment, and you who are reading about the experiment, I need to convince you that what I represent, and I leave some things out, but an experiment—not field experiments—regular experiments abstracts things, and only some of the information remains, some of it is outside the system.

Even if I say, “This is like a prisoner dilemma game,” it’s only a very small part of the whole system, but I have to convince you that it is the essence. So that’s what I think is the real nugget—is to look at the world and ask yourself, “What is the essence here?” And once you convince yourself that you know what the essence is, then you decide to prove that. Let me change the essence one way or another and see how the behavior changes.

So for example, I can take an experiment, let’s take the Bionicle example, and I can get people to build Bionicles and they stand or they build Bionicles and I take them apart and I basically say that there’s a difference between those two conditions. In one, people don’t feel their work being destroyed in front of their eyes. In the other one, they feel that it’s futile because they don’t see any kind of progress and let’s see how that changes.

That’s basically the story. Okay, taking reality, abstracting, focusing on the essence, abstracting it and then playing with the essence. And I think it’s a very good skill. It’s a very good skill because it tries to help us understand the essence of something, the social science essence of a situation.

Okay, so this is how we come up with experiments.

Now, why do I want to talk about this and AI? There are lots of things that AI can do to make people very productive and get more out there. But one of the things that I find about myself is that I don’t use AI for any of my core tasks. I don’t use it to write. I don’t use it to think. I don’t use it much to plan. But instead, I use it to do all kinds of things that I’m just not good at.

So, for example, I created an app for smart electricity in my apartment. I created a decision aid to help think about finances. I’m now thinking about another decision aid to think about whether we should stay in the same job or not. But I’m doing all of this and it’s not my top skill. I’m taking AI to use for something I’m not that good at, And I’m using it to do something that I could never achieve without it. And I’m unbelievably grateful.

But why do I connect this to structured procrastination? Because what I find is that I do lots of little things that don’t matter that much, but it gives me a sense of progress. I change the icons. I change the size of the font. When I say I change, I mean, I look at the output and I give Claude Code my instructions on how to do things differently. And I’m creating all of those things, or I’m giving instructions to create all of those things, and there’s lots of extra effort and extra time that goes into things that are not real progress. Eventually those things are just for me to look at. Nobody else sees them. Why is it that important? It is important.

And I do want to say one other thing that is more positive. It sounds like I’m blaming AI for giving me more structured procrastination. And I’m doing that a little bit. But I also think that it’s giving me an artistic outlet. You know, I think that people in general have a desire for an artistic outlet. And I think it’s not easy to generate one. But with AI, we can create more artistic outlets. Now, is it an artistic outlet at the level of real artists? No. Would it be a shame if all artistic outlets are satisfied with what AI can provide? Absolutely yes. But for me, it gives me a few more hours of structured procrastination and a few more hours of something that I feel is an artistic outlet.

So, let’s not fall too much into structured procrastination—but a little bit of it, especially if it comes together with an artistic output, I think it’s certainly worthwhile.

So first of all, we need to recognize that since payment methods have become electronic in the way that they have, there are many more places that ask us for tips. It used to be that tips were reserved for taxis and restaurants and very few things. A hairdresser for sure, but now they’re everywhere. You order coffee and you pay with a machine and the machine asks, would you like to add tip? Suddenly, we pay tip in all kinds of ways. maybe grocery stores will start asking for tips soon. Lots of places are self-service now include tips.

For me, tips are about the power of the consumer. We have a service person and we have a consumer. If I pay a tip, I have some power. To a waiter it says, “If you’re nice to me, you’ll get more of a tip. If you’re not nice to me, you’ll get less of a tip.” I like it as a way to balance the powers, right? You’re going to give me a service at the end, but I want you to think about the fact that you need to give me good service. I like it for this reason. And because of that I don’t like tips that are not about service that I can reward. Like if I buy coffee from behind the counter, it’s just a way to hide the price. The price is $5; it will become a bit more. It’s a way to extract more money from me, but it’s not really about the power between me and the server.

By the way, I’ve used tips as a power the most with taxi drivers. Some of them are great, some of them use their phone while driving, some of them drive a little bit too fast, and I usually say something, and if they listen, I give them the regular tip, or maybe a little higher, if they don’t, I give them less. Clearly, there are many of them that when I ask, “Would you please drive slowly? Would you please not use your phone?” they get angry at me rather than the other way around, and I think the tip in that case is important. So, I like tips that are responsive to service, and I don’t a tip that is a way to get us to pay more but has nothing to do with tips. But of course, not all services are the same. For example, in restaurants, what if the dish comes out not so good? Is it the waiter’s fault? Not really, it must have been something in the kitchen. In taxis, I feel that the tip is exact to the person. No other people are involved. They are making the decision to use their phone while driving. In restaurants it’s much more complex.

Okay, so back to the question: do we like tipping or not? I think in most cases the answer is that I don’t. I would have preferred that the restaurant is in charge of paying the waiters a living wage and it’s not about tips. In cases when the service is clearly observable and directed at the person serving, like taxis, then I think the tips are a good mechanism. I know that the taxi driver has an incentive to drive me extra fast to get the next ride. I don’t want him to drive extra fast. Tipping is good in this case but I think that the cases where tips are good are very minimal.

And even when tips are good, we can easily replace them. Imagine, for example, that a taxi company would send me a little survey afterwards that asks, “Hey, did the person drive at the speed limit? Did they use their phone?” And I would respond to them directly and they would then be able to have a discussion with a taxi driver. I think that would be even more convincing.

So anyway, do you like tips? I don’t. In most cases, I think that tips are just a way to extract more money from us as a consumer in a way that we don’t really think about and I don’t like it. Just charge us more from the beginning. Let’s see if people want to pay that amount or not. Don’t hide the price. I don’t like situations where tips to the person involve lots of other people and we don’t know who to reward or not. And even when it is direct, I think there are better ways to try and improve service quality. Let the person get their wages and let the company deal with drivers in cases that are not great.

So to more balance of power between service providers and consumers, to clear pricing, to the ability to give feedback that creates better service.

And, he said, that this is a metaphor for how to do research. You can take the trodden path, read all the literature and kind of define your path based on what everybody else has done before. And then you can say, “Person A observed this, Person B observed this, but maybe these are the conditions under which person A is correct.” And then you can work on a paper and show something critical in the literature, in a new light. On the other hand, if you take the untrodden path, you will find lots of wonderful things in the middle. What is the analogy in terms of research? The analogy is that if you read everything in advance, you will force yourself onto the trodden path. You will have created constraints of how you understand the problem. Every paper you read reduces your creativity. Every paper you read says, “Oh, this is how people have defined the problem. This is how people have thought about it.” And your mind will set onto that path. The other way is to not start with reading all the literature, but to start exploring yourself, thinking, and wondering. Start even by doing experiments before you find out everything in the literature. Sometimes it will be costly because you’ll do an experiment and find that somebody else has already done it before or something very similar. But, he explained, that many times you will have more creativity and will start something that is unconstrained by what other people have done. And his recommendation to us was to take the untrodden path.

And that’s basically what I’ve done in my career. When I had something that I wanted to examine, I didn’t start by looking at all the literature and then thinking about what I really wanted to do. I would start with what I really want to do, sometimes even doing the first or second experiment see where the was going, then reading the literature, and redefining the problem, and so on. Sometimes I wasted my time. But most of the time it was a good approach.

Now where’s the AI connection? I think the AI connection is exactly what Tom warned us about. Imagine that every idea we have now, we will go to AI first to help us define, refine, and rethink the idea. What will happen? Our idea will be constrained by the literature. AI, by definition, takes all existing current knowledge and helps us integrate it. So, what will happen to Tom’s approach? Imagine all companies now consult AI in thinking about how to innovate within dating apps or how to innovate within applications for compliance in healthcare. All of this could be very good, but it will not involve exploration. It’s not random. It assumes that there’s a right answer that’s knowable from somewhere in the literature and will do it.

I think that’s what AI is likely to do to us. It’s likely to make us more constrained. It’s likely to reduce human creativity. In the short-term, I think, it will save lots of energy and time and so on. But I think long-term, we might get solutions that are too homogenous. Imagine that everyone wrote essays with AI. Everybody wrote poetry with AI. Everyone invented the next new car with AI. I think it would be a shame because it would be way too similar. Productive and efficient, yes, but way too similar.

So, let’s worry about becoming too homogenous and letting AI do it to us.

The topic today is AI and efficiency. When I wrote Predictably Irrational, which was quite a while ago, I did the final round of editing by printing it on paper and editing it at Burning Man. Burning Man, as you probably know, is a festival in the desert. In the middle, there’s a tent. It was the only place you could use money and only for coffee. And I would take my wooden clipboard, the pages, and a pen to the tent. And my hand is not so good, so I can’t use a pen for long. But I would sit there and I would read what I’d written very slowly. I would make notes, I would propose changes, I would listen to the music playing, I would stop and look at the people. The process was very slow and very deliberate. Also, because my hand gets very painful very quickly, I would take breaks. And it was a very inefficient process. It took me six days, I think, to edit. I would write very slowly. It was very inefficient and very wonderful to edit this way.

This was almost twenty years ago and I remember it. I remember some of the music. There were also some people who gave little lectures and so on and it was a beautiful, beautiful way to edit a book. I went to Burning Man with one other book. But with other books, I do similar things. I take things to edit on vacation or when I go abroad. I sit in different places. I do all kinds of things like that. It always makes the editing process slow, inefficient, but wonderful and memorable.

As I’m writing now and AI is a possibility, it’s a very different story. Imagine I edited with AI. I would not print anything. I wouldn’t waste that. And I would sit with, let’s say, Claude, and I would ping questions and get answers. The process would be very efficient. And if I wanted to change something, I would say, “Hey, Claude, please change X across all the document and show me all the places you’re changing it to double check.” And it could be very efficient. Would I enjoy it? Ten years from now would I remember the day I edited the book? The answer is of course not. And I worry about this. I worry about efficiency versus deep enjoyment and memory and satisfaction.

Imagine I could just produce another book that would just be there. Printed. Would it feel like mine in the same way? Would I be connected to it in the same way? My answer is no. So, if you think about this axis of efficiency versus meaning, investment in human capital, and our memory. I worry that we’re going to be tempted to be more efficient but not do things that are good for us in the long term. Like imagine that I could have written each of my books with AI in a more efficient way. And therefore, I might have produced three times as many books. You can ask whether the world would have been a better place. I think the answer is no. And if you ask, would I have been in a better place? I think the answer is also no.

Here’s my thought: We should seriously think about which cases efficiency is undermining some of our most important elements like feelings of connection, mastery, improvement, learning by trial and error, all of those things. And then be very careful not to use AI for efficiency when efficiency eats at the core of what we really want. Now the temptation is going to be tough because efficiency is very tempting. But I think we will all need to learn how to fight that urge for efficiency at our own expense.

Good luck to all of us.

So, I get a lot of people who call me to talk about their injuries. I wrote about my injury multiple times in an open way and when I did, I was trying to explain how I got to where I am and the ideas that I have. What was unexpected is that people reached out to me and asked for advice about what to do regarding their own injuries. You see, when somebody gets injured, the loss is very clear. There was one guy, for example, who used to be a cartoonist. He lost much of the use of his hands. He could never be a cartoonist again. What he lost was very clear. Where he could find happiness and what he could gain, was less clear.

I don’t try to minimize tragedy, but among the things I tell people (and I’m not going to give you the full approach and the full speech) is about the end-of-history effect. By the way, please do the following exercise with me.

I ask them, “How much do you think you’re going to change in the next ten years?” And people generally say something along the lines of “Not that much. I’ve arrived.” And then I ask, “In the last 10 years, how much did you change?” People usually say they changed a lot. If you’ve had an injury, it’s extra. But outside of an injury, people say a lot. And the moment they answer, they realize that something is inconsistent. Why is that momentthat I’m asking a transition between changing a lot and not changing that much? Then we discuss why people think they’ve changed a lot in the last 10 years and won’t change a lot in the future?

The answer is that when we look back, we see lots of change. But when we think about change, we don’t see exactly where it would come from. A lot of change comes from all kinds of small things: Somebody we met, a job that we took, a course that we tried, a romantic partner we met. When we say, “In the next 10 years, how many new wonderful people will I meet?” We don’t know. We have no idea. We can’t even imagine. But when we look back, we say, “Oh! I met that person. He introduced me to somebody else. Here is what happened . . .”

So, we have this general idea that we think we’ve arrived, and we underestimate how much we’ll change. This, by the way, is also very important for couples. Because if you think that as a couple, you’re stuck, you’re wrong. You’ll both change. The question is, will you change in the same direction or a different direction? But for people with disabilities, it’s extra important because if you’ve just had an injury and you’re just out of it, you’re underestimating the change, then you don’t have the same motivation to look and find and search. But to understand that the next chapter could have just as much change as any other chapter in a ten-year period gives lots of motivation.

And that’s the end-of-history effect and why it’s extra important for people with disabilities (also for couples).

So, to continuous change and to our understanding that we’re going to keep on changing.

I don’t mean, of course, real wind. I mean metaphorically. Imagine you are walking and feel a headwind. You lean into it and you correctly understand that all your effort is extra hard and difficult because the wind is at your face. Now, what happens when we have a tailwind? When we walk the same route on the same terrain, but the wind comes from behind us? Now the wind is helping us. Do we recognize its help in the same way?

The argument is that when it comes to real life, we don’t. (I think also when it comes to wind.) If we think about the metaphor, the idea is that when we have forces that fight against us, we notice them to a minute degree. We understand every nuance about them and the small ways in which they make our lives more difficult. In my case, bureaucracy is one of them.

But when things are helping us, we don’t notice them in the same way. Think about your current situation. Think about how you got to where you are. Probably the obstacles are quite salient and clear. What about the forces that helped you? I can tell you, for example, that I have a lot of trust in people. When somebody wants to meet me, I usually say yes, and meet them. Sometimes these meetings don’t work out well, and the times when it didn’t work out well are very, very clear and sometimes painful. The times when it worked out for me are not as salient. Because I met somebody who introduced me to something and something happened and so on and so on. By the way, when it comes to thinking about our success in life, we often attribute our success to ourselves and our failures to forces against us. Why is this? Because the forces against us are very clear. But the forces that help us, the tailwind, we don’t recognize to the same degree.

I would like to propose that we have lots of headwinds and we have lots of tailwinds. In my own life, I think I had much more tailwind than headwind. But the obstacles, the headwinds, are much more noticeable, clearer, and painful. The tailwinds are not as countable. Because of that we attribute too much to ourselves, too much of our success to ourselves, rather than to all kinds of help that we got. But we also don’t recognize how helpful the world is.

So, when you look at the world and ask yourself if there are more headwinds than tailwinds, realize that you’re probably very biased and probably overemphasizing the headwinds but underemphasizing the tailwinds. If you can—and I try to do this, though not always successfully—try to observe and focus on the tailwinds. Try to understand all the forces that helped get you where you are.

Here’s to recognizing the tailwinds and to trying to do things that increase them for ourselves and for others.

There are a lot of gender differences. If we think about the distribution of lots of things, men’s distribution ends up being wider. There are more men on the negative side and more on the positive side. Is this for everything? No. But it is for lots of things.

Let’s think about mental illness, for example. There’s no question that the distribution on the negative side for men is larger. There are more people with mental illnesses. The same thing is true for people who are born with genetic abnormalities, negative abnormalities. There are more men on that side. The list goes on and on. Men develop more mental illness. I never know the current correct terminology but think about things that have to do with emotion, mental capacity, and so on. There are more men on the negative side. And I’m starting with the negative side because nobody’s arguing about that. Now it’s also true that there are more men on the most extreme side. If we look at the top performance of intelligence, whether it’s connected with some genetic mutation that we know about or not, there are more men on those distributions. So, I’m not talking about the average, I’m talking about the distribution. What has happened is that the tails of the distribution for men are wider. I think that’s not debatable. (A lot of the time people debate about the average. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the width of the distribution.) Nobody argues that there are more men on the negative side of the distribution. More men are hospitalized in mental facilities. But the evidence is also that there’s more men on the top side. So that’s the basics.

Why might that be sensible from an evolutionary perspective? Imagine you are mother nature. And as mother nature, you create mutations. You decide to roll the dice with every kid that is born and make some mutations. Is there a difference in reward for nature to gamble with men versus women? To create more mutations for men that could cause more things on the negative side and more on the positive side. If you were mother nature and you were gambling with mutations on genetic differences, it might work out well or it might not. It’s a risk. So, should mother nature take more risk with men, or should mother nature take more risk with women?

Here’s the argument and whether it’s true or not true, it’s beautiful. If mother nature gambles with men and the gambles turn out to be correct, work out well, and fall on the positive side, what will happen to the genetic mutation? If it’s good, more women would procreate with that man and that genetic mutation will end up well. On the other hand, if the gamble doesn’t work out well, what will happen? Women as gatekeepers of procreation will not have kids with that man and that genetic mutation will die. In other words, if nature gambles with men, good outcomes would be rewarded. There’ll be kids coming out for this genetic mutation that would keep it going and negative mutations will be (maybe not 0%) but will be less likely to propagate.

Now, what happens if nature gambles with women? If the gamble is correct, men will procreate with that woman and there’ll be more kids. But if the mutation is not that good? Would men now be the barriers for procreation? And here the argument is not so much. Because historically, not now, but historically, men would have sex with any woman and would try to procreate. Men are not good barrier mechanisms, and women are. Because of that, because women have more vested interest and stay longer with the kids and so on, the evolutionary argument goes, it’s better for women to be the gatekeeper and better for nature to gamble with men.

Now, I’m not sure if this argument is correct or not correct, evolution and so on. But you have to admit, it’s quite interesting to think about nature this way, deciding to gamble more with men than with women.

I arrived in Israel a few days, maybe a week after the most recent war with Iran started. Consequently, I spent lots of time in bomb shelters. And spending time in bomb shelters at night is just awful. There’s no way around it. You wake up, you try to get dressed, you walk to the bomb shelter in the right time. People in the north have less time. I’m in Tel Aviv, so there’s more time. At nighttime it’s terrible and then when you get back from the bomb shelter it’s hard to fall asleep. Hear explosions houses get destroyed—lives.

But I do want to also point out something positive. I know the whole thing is terrible and I wish it never happened. I wish wars would stop. Within that, here’s an observation. I have nothing good to say about bomb shelters at night. But during the day, sometimes I would be walking around the city and there would be an alarm and I’d have to find some shelter. Sometimes there’s a public shelter, sometimes it’s an underground parking lot. And sometimes people would invite me to their shelters. There was a house and people would run into houses and say “Hey, come join us.”

Those meetings with people in their shelters were wonderful. It’s not exactly somebody inviting you to their living room because it’s a shelter for a building. It’s not a living room. But it’s very intimate. I mean, people are inviting strangers to come into their shelters. People had lots of practice with these shelters. There were tables and chairs, and one shelter even had a television.

It’s a stressful time. There’s a general alarm that tells you to get close to a shelter. Then if a missile is really coming to your area, they tell you now go to the shelter. You have 60 to 90 seconds. You run to the shelter—stress, adrenaline, you come in, you’re in a small place with lots of people. And then you wait. And you wait. Will we hear something? Will we not? Will a building get bombed? Will shrapnel fall? Will they fall here? Ther’s stress getting in and stress within that. And it creates lots of camaraderie.

I met lots of wonderful people. The discussions are useful and meaningful. People don’t talk about politics because it’s heated and complex, but it was an unexpected feeling of connection to go into shelters of people’s homes and experience these stressful moments together.

We’ve been in a ceasefire for a while. I hope this war—and all wars—will end soon. But I did meet some wonderful people. I love the feeling of connection, under stress with people. And some of them I think I’ll meet again. Okay, that’s an attempt to find something good in an awful situation.

I’m talking, more generally. Think about your life and ask yourself whether, in general, you would be better off spending more time alone or more time with other people. I want to propose three mechanisms at work that would help us think about this question.

First, there are individual differences. Some of us are more of the kind of people who enjoy time to ourselves, some of us enjoy more time with other people. There’s just a variety of original types and we should just follow our type.

But there’s another thing which is our habit. Well, not exactly a habit but a thing that we have become used to. The reality is that we used to be more social and then Covid came along and we became less social. The thing about these kinds of habits, or ways of being, is that they self-reinforce. So, if we are, let’s say, the kind of people who like being with other people, who thrive on the social interaction.

We had a long period that we had to be by ourselves, we managed that. And deviating from that is tough for us in the moment. Long term it might be good for us. But in the short term we were comfortable with that.

Maybe somebody became used to waking up in the morning, leisurely having their coffee, and reading their paper They have lots of things that make it easy for them to keep on doing that. Now, is it best for them? No. But will the first few days with other people going to disrupt their routines? Yes, absolutely.

So, there are individual differences but if we get into a particular pattern of living, either more social or less social, that pattern becomes comfortable for us. And deviating from that becomes uncomfortable in the short term. Maybe in the long term it will be good. But in the short term it’s comfortable to keep on with what we’re doing. Now, it might not maximize our long-term well-being, but in the short term it’s good.

The first two questions to ask yourself is: What type are you, naturally? And what are your habits—what have you become used to in recent times, are the things that you’ve become used to been forced on you or is this really what’s good for you?

Then there’s the third element. And the third element is that often our intuition misleads us. There’s a beautiful study by Nick Epley where he asked people, “What would be better for you? If you sat on the train and nobody talked to you and you were just by yourself. Or would it be better if you talked to a stranger??

In general, people said, “Oh, I don’t want anybody to talk to me. I prefer to just be alone.”

Then he asked people to participate in the experiment, and they were assigned to a condition where they had to talk to somebody. And guess what?

They were happier.

So, we have individual differences. We have things that we get used to. But then we also have a bias. And that bias is something that we should think about. We think we like our privacy and being alone more than we actually do.

Now, when we talk to people, sometimes it’s not that great. But on average, we’re better off for it. So, think about it. Think about what is your recipe for your life right now between being alone and being with other people? And is this recipe serving you? Is it serving your personality? Is it something that you got used to? Is it a pattern that maybe is comfortable for you but not good for you?

And finally, think about your own bias. Are you biased to thinking that you’ll enjoy more time alone when, in fact, you might enjoy more time with other people? Not all the time! Sometimes it might backfire—but on average.

To all of us, to better decisions about how we allocate our time between spending time just with ourselves or with others.

All the best.