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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Today we re talking with Russ Roberts.
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He s an economist and a research fellow at Stanford University s Hoover Institution.
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So he s a pretty sharp cat, and we re gonna be talking about another sharp cat named Adam Smith, but we re not talking about The Wealth of Nations.
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We re talking about his other book that came before that that was all about human behavior, virtue, and the way that people are, sort of a philosophical treatise on how we should treat each other, and it s really interesting.
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I had no idea this even existed.
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We re gonna talk about his deepest insight, Adam Smith s deepest insight into human nature, what really makes us tick, the concepts of being loved and lovely, which are words that no one uses anymore, or at least lovely anyway, something called the impartial spectator, Smith s basis for our conscience, and the dangers of self-deception both at work
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and at home, so enjoy this one with Russ Roberts and through him, Adam Smith.
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And with that, welcome to The Art of Charm.
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I m Jordan Harbinger.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, dead or alive at this point, teachers and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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Imagine having a mix of experienced mentors teaching you their expertise and packing decades of research, testing, and tough lessons into a curriculum.
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We may not have all the answers, but we certainly have all the questions.
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Make sure to stay up to date with the Art of Charm and get some great stuff that we don t or can t share on the show by signing up at theartofcharm.com.
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We ll also email you our Fundamentals Toolkit that covers topics like body language and nonverbal communication, persuasion, business networking, public speaking, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
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In fact, we ve got guys from all over the world, which shows that no matter where you are,
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Get in touch with me directly is fine, jordanattheartofcharm.com.
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I also want to encourage you to join our social capital challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444.
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Now onto the show.
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Here s Russ Roberts.
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I studied economics at the University of Michigan, but I mean, you know, undergrad, not quite getting all the way to 400 level.
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So I would put in a very heavy, bold set of air quotes that I studied economics.
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And I also blended it with another concentration so that I didn t have to do the, I don t know what it is with, are you a professor then of economics?
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I was for a long time.
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Now I m a research fellow at Stanford University s Hoover Institution.
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So you re familiar with the idea that professors somehow, they don t want you to really just be interested in economics for the sake of it.
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They want to put you through this super painful, what are they called, like, filter courses where it s so hard and the professor s so strict and the TAs are so fascist that if you don t hate economics after that, then you get a PhD in the subject or whatever.
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That s a tragedy, actually.
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and take other econ classes until you had passed this one after a certain point.
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And I figured it was because you needed those skills, but people told me, no, not really.
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I mean, you kind of need some of the concepts, but you don t really do that stuff ever again.
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So they just want to scare people away.
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They ve just dumbed down the graduate level and make it as uninteresting as possible for reasons that are mysterious to me.
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Your work is interesting because most people who ve studied econ in the West have heard of Adam Smith.
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I guess you ve probably heard of it if you studied it in the Soviet Union.
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It s just that he was probably wrong, right?
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That s probably what you were taught.
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There s a lot of folks that are very familiar with the book, The Wealth of Nations, which, how old is Adam Smith s book, Wealth of Nations?
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Are we talking like 17-something here?
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Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, or a good year, and that was the book that made him famous.
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His first book, though, was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which he published in 1759, and that s what my book is about.
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That s the forgotten Adam Smith book.
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It s funny because you d think Adam Smith is like this well-known, super famous, legendary, literally, legendary economist that kind of founded capitalism, or put it all on the paper, and then meanwhile, he had kind of a, I don t want to say a stinker, but something that just wasn t very popular before that, you know?
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No, it was popular in today.
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Oh, it was.
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It made him famous.
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It wasn t a loser book.
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It wasn t like a dog that got remaindered.
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It was a very respected book.
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It just didn t last much beyond his lifetime, except among scholars and philosophers and a few economists.
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So today, most people have never heard of it, and they certainly have never read it.
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other than a handful of academics.
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Right, such as you.
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Yeah.
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And you ve studied this in depth, and I think one of the things that s so interesting about it is it sounds kind of like
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the precursor, precursor, precursor to How to Win Friends and Influence People with Dale Carnegie.
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Except he didn t write it that way.
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It s a book that has tremendous lessons for life, but he wrote it as a scholarly study of how people behave and the philosophy of morality and how
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we treat each other and how we respect or don t respect each other.
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And he was in competition, essentially, with other philosophers trying to explain those questions.
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So he wrote what s a pretty dry book or a kind of book you d expect in 1759.
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but he s a great writer.
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So it s entertaining, their language, but the sentences are long and he s writing about some issues that are hard for us to relate to that we re not so aware of in terms of the philosophical issues.
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So what I was trying to do is take his philosophical treatise and cull, harvest from it, the lessons for life that are embedded in it.
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and there are many, and so it s a very rich book with lots of ideas.
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It s just not easy to get them in today s language.
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Sure, right.
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I would imagine because personal development maybe wasn t super popular in the 1700s.
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Correct.
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As I joke in my book, the self-help section of the bookstore was kind of small.
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Right, yeah.
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It probably had the Bible, which is a great book, but that was probably about it.
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It wasn t a category in the 18th century.
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Right, so he wrote this not as that.
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He wrote this as, here s a bunch of ideas I have about human behavior.
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Here are my theories about morality and where virtue comes from and why are we nice even though we re basically self-interested?
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Why do we ever do anything generous for other people?
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Where does our conscience come from?
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Things that a moral philosopher, which is what he called himself and thought of himself as, would try to explain.
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And in the course of doing so, he gave us a guide to what is the good life.
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So that s a really interesting first question though.
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Why is anybody actually anything but self-interested?
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Because one of the things that I ve learned, I was an exchange student in the former East Germany and then I ve traveled through Eastern Europe, North Korea, things like that.
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I know a lot of people with a very socialist education and one of their biggest criticisms is
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especially if they ve never been to the United States, is, well, the only thing people do over there, it s always some kind of self-interest, because that s what capitalism is, whereas socialism, communism is, you have to sort of enforce this education that you should be doing things for the greater good, which is obviously, I mean, we saw how that turns out.
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It didn t work so well.
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Right, it didn t work so well.
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Whenever you try to fight human nature,
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It s a losing battle, but why does anybody do anything that helps other people if we are, according to his book that he wrote right after that, pretty much self-interested?
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So, you know, he would argue, and I would argue as well, that self-interested is not selfish.
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Not the same word, right?
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Not the same concept.
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We are naturally self-interested.
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We put ourselves first.
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We think of ourselves first.
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We inevitably are worried about our survival.
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It s hardwired into us.
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So it s not that we re selfish.
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That s a pretty brutal, bleak view of humanity.
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It s that we care inevitably more about ourselves than we do about other people.
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It doesn t mean we can t love.
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It doesn t mean we can t care.
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It doesn t mean we can t be kind to other people. 
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But Smith went a little further than that, and he said, you know, actually, the truth is, is that our benevolence, our altruism and compassion is pretty limited.
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It s not zero, but it isn t big enough to explain the fact that we do very generous things and we don t always put ourselves first.
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Early on in the book, he gives this ridiculous and fascinating example.
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He said, suppose there s an earthquake in China that kills millions of people, and you re told about it.
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go, oh, my gosh, that s horrible.
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And you go home, and you might talk about it with your family, or you might make a donation to a charity, even.
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And then you sleep like a baby, because it s not in the front of your mind.
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Even today, certainly not in 1759, when they didn t have cable television, but even today, you can see a terrible tragedy on television.
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You can watch about it for days.
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But
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you kind of forget about it because you re mainly worried about your own life and your own troubles and your own problems.
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So it s not that you don t care about other people.
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It s not that you don t feel bad for people who were killed in a tragedy, but it doesn t weigh on you as your own tragedies do.
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And he gives sort of a reductio ad absurdum, a kind of ridiculous example to make this point.
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He says, instead of this earthquake, suppose you were told that
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You needed to have your little finger removed tomorrow in surgery for some medical condition.
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It s your little finger.
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You know, it s not your thumb.
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It s not your index finger.
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It s your little finger.
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And you re told you re going to have surgery.
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Well, you toss and turn all night.
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You d be anxious about it.
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So which do you care more about, your little finger or millions of deaths in China?
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Right, yeah, you would care more about what you re gonna look like drinking your fancy cup of tea without a little finger.
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Right, and your guitar playing is gonna be handicapped, and et cetera.
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And just, you re scared.
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It s just like, oh my gosh, what could go wrong?
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What s gonna happen tomorrow?
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So he takes that example, which I think is, for better or for worse, I think he s right.
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I think most of us could sleep pretty well after a tragedy, as long as it s far away, not to happen to our friends and neighbors, or our family.
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Our own tragedies are very, very present in our mind.
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So he says, if that s true, that s a reality, that s the way we re built, then why is it that if I gave you the chance to save Littlefinger and avoid the surgery, but to do so you had to kill a few million people in China, would you do it?
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And Smith s answer is, well, of course you wouldn t.
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Right.
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No way.
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Yeah.
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Right.
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It s horrifying.
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You wouldn t even consider it was like, well, it might be worth.
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No, it s disgusting.
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So he says, how is that?
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Your emotional reaction clearly shows that what you care more about is yourself.
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And we don t put that into action.
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We often step aside.
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We let people get credit for things that they should get credit for.
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We don t claim all the credit for ourselves.
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We take time out of our schedule to go to a funeral, to console a friend.
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We make sure that our children get our time, even though we d rather watch the football game.
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We help them with their homework.
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Not every minute.
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We re still going to watch the football game sometimes.
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We should be with our kids, but a lot of times we do the right thing.
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Why do we ever do the right thing is what Smith wants to understand.
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And he suggests that the reason is that we care about how we are perceived.
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by other people, because we realize deep down that even though we are self-interested, we want to be around others.
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We want their approval.
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We want their respect.
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We want their love, their affection.
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That is the essence of being human.
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So we want and need to be around other people.
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We re not self-sufficient.
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We don t want to just be around, be with ourselves, either economically or socially.
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We need to interact with other people.
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And if we do, we want to interact with other people.
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We better treat them decently or they re not going to respect us.
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They re not going to want to be around us.
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And so he argues that we act as if we have an impartial spectator, someone watching us, who s judging us, who s not self-interested, doesn t share my interests, is impartial.
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not against me, but not in favor of me, the way I naturally look at my own self.
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And that person, that judgment, weighs on me and keeps me from doing some of the things that I might otherwise do in my own self-interest, and that s my conscience.
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It s almost like he predicted Facebook, actually.
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Yeah, well, we could talk about Facebook and some of the ways this runs amok, actually.
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But Smith, he has one sentence that really, to me, summarizes his view of human nature.
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He says,
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Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely.
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And by loved and lovely, he didn t mean the way we mean the words today, although partly that, but more than that.
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Loved, he meant respected, honored, admired, that people look up to us, that we matter.
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And lovely meaning we do the right thing.
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We earn the respect.
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We earn the praise.
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We earn the honor.
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We re honorable.
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We re praiseworthy.
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And if you think about human nature, instead of thinking about it as selfish versus altruistic or kind versus cruel, what Smith s saying is we re complicated.
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We want the affection and respect and honor and praise of other people.
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but we want to earn it honestly.
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And to do that, we sometimes have to do stuff that goes against what is in our natural self-interest to do.
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And that s a very deep insight about how we interact with other people and how they interact with us.
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And I think he s 100% right.
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It s almost like the invisible hand for the economy, only for your own human behavior in some ways.
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Exactly, and it s the invisible hand that s working in our day-to-day, one-on-one interactions.
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Not just what we do in the marketplace, not just what we do in our careers, or when we think about the whole macro economy, it s about every little
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but important interaction we have with our coworkers, with our colleagues, with our family, with our spouse, with our neighbors, our different communities that we might be members of.
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So you want to be respected and honored and praised.
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And I don t want to make this sound like it s all ego.
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If you miss, you exaggerate.
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It s like, yeah, all we care about is your ego is huge.
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You just want people to think a lot of you.
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Think about it in a more
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pleasant way.
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Think about the fact that what really matters in our lives is the friendships we make.
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It s the people who care about us and we care about them.
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It s the bonds that we establish through these day-to-day interactions with the people we work with, that we play with, that we love, that we interact with, whether it s in business, whether it s in our social life, whether it s our hobbies, our religion,
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Those personal interactions, those are the essence of life.
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It s not how much money you make.
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It s not how many promotions you get.
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It s not how many cars you d have, how fancy they are, how big your house is.
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Those things, Seth Smith, they don t give us real satisfaction.
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The source of real satisfaction are the human connections we make with others, and we only make those by restraining ourselves from our natural self-interest and remembering that we are small and the world is large.
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that we have to deal with other people.
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It s not just about you.
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It s about all of us.
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And that is a very strange concept coming from somebody that people think of as the creator and the father of capitalism.
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But that s the way he saw the world.
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Yeah, that s exactly what I was gonna say.
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It seems like a completely left-field sentiment from somebody who s known as the father of capitalism.
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It s just, hey, now, you don t wanna have too many material, I mean, it s like, what, who are you?
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Adam Smith, it s like, I don t even know you.
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He says, now, he explicitly says in this book, and if you look at The Wealth of Nations, he never contradicts this in The Wealth of Nations.
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In The Wealth of Nations, he s interested in understanding why some countries get rich and why some countries are poor.
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Why some people get paid more than others.
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The standard things we talk about in economics all the time that he really created the field in through that book.
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He never says, this stuff s great.
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We want to get really rich.
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He s just trying to understand it.
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He s just looking at it.
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In this book, the book we re talking about, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in his first book, he s actually very critical of the desire to accumulate stuff, the desire for material success.
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He says it s a trap.
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He says we want to be loved, and one of the ways we want to be loved
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One of the ways we can be loved is to be rich and famous or powerful.
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He says, if you re rich, famous or powerful, people pay attention to you.
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He says, you walk into a room and the person I think of today is Donald Trump.
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Donald Trump walks in a room, all eyes go to him.
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They want to know what he has to say.
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They want to know what he has to what he s wearing.
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They want to know even how he wears his hair.
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Strangely enough, he counts.
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He s important.
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And we have a natural urge to look at him for that reason.
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And so it says, don t pursue that path.
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That s the wrong way to be loved.
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Because you ll do things along the way that will degrade you.
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They ll corrode your soul.
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They ll cause you to do things you re going to be ashamed of.
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They re not virtuous.
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The right way to be loved is to be wise and virtuous, to be lovely, to do the right thing, to be kind to other people, even when it s not in your interest to do so, and even when you don t want to.
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And when you act honorably and keep your promises, you will be loved for the right reasons, because you won t be as famous.
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He says, that path isn t as glittering.
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It s not as obvious a path and not as attractive as a path.
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He said, but it s the better path.
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Don t be fooled by money and power and fame.
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He says, those are bad places to go.
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And it s fascinating to read in Smith s day about the cult of celebrity.
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You think, what kind of a cult of celebrity could they have in 1759?
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The answer is, well, they did.
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It just wasn t like ours.
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They didn t have cable television.
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They didn t have Facebook.
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They didn t have Twitter.
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They didn t have reality television.
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They didn t have People magazine.
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But what they had was they still had people striving for status.
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And they had the nobility.
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And Smith just hated that.
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He hated how people could be looked up to just because they had a title.
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in his, you know, England and Scotland of his day.
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He had no respect for that.
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And so he said the real way you earn respect is by being a good person, by cultivating your friends, by being a kind, good family member.
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That s what Smith says is the right way to be loved.
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How did he come up with these ideas?
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I mean, obviously he s a pretty observant cat because it s not like he invented much of the concepts, especially in Wealth of Nations.
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He just put it all on paper and systemized it, right?
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Well, he was, what did you call him, an observant cat, I think?
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Yes.
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He was.
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He was an extremely observant cat.
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And like a cat, I think you meant it in the hip way.
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I meant it in the jazzy way, but yes.
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Right.
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But he was also a very curious cat, which is a very good phrase to think about.
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He was very, you know, he had a very dull life on the surface.
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He never married.
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Most of his life he lived with his mom.
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He cherished his friendships.
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His best friend was David Hume, one of the great philosophers of all time.
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But he had a quiet life.
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He was a professor.
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He worked for the government for a while.
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He traveled in Europe for a while because he was the tutor to the son of the Duke of Buccleuch, a fancy duke of his time.
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Speaking of celebrities with titles, right?
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Yeah, exactly.
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He was like, I think, one of the richest men of his day.
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And his ancestor is one of the biggest landowners still in the United Kingdom, interestingly enough.
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But my point is that Smith did not lead a dramatic life.
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He wasn t a sailor, and then an explorer, and then a guy who ran six companies and created a new product.
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He was a scholar.
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He was a teacher.
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He cared about the world, but he looked at it from an armchair mostly.
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But he looked at it very, very wisely.
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He was very thoughtful.
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He was very observant.
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He could see things that other people couldn t see.
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And the reason his two books are so great is that he was—well, it s two reasons.
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One is he could see things other people couldn t see, but
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equally important, he wrote very beautifully.
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He wrote very clearly.
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If you go back and try to read his contemporaries, you put the book down after about 30 seconds.
2
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But Smith, even though his books are difficult to read cover to cover, because they re written a long time ago when he uses words and talks about things that aren t in our vocabulary so much anymore, any one page is full of charm and style.
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He was a great stylist, a great writer, a great communicator.
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So he used examples, he used stories, he had wit, he has irony.
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So that s why he s so effective in looking at and communicating to us today, even though it was written over 200 years ago.
2
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Very insightful and says it well.
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Having looked at his work back and forth and over and over again, do you have any idea why slash how he was able to be so insightful and observant?
2
SPEAKER_03
I mean, have you learned anything sort of meta from that research?
2
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Not really.
2
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Not really, okay.
2
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No, he s just an exceptional, you know, people come along like this every once in a while.
2
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If you think about the people that you ve learned from the most in the modern world,
2
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There s nothing in point to it.
2
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It s like, wow, he just really got into my bones, these insights, or he really saw things that other people don t see that they re out there.
2
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It s not like he finds gold that s hidden under the earth s surface.
2
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These are things that other people could have seen.
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But there s just some people just have an eye and a perception and a wisdom.
2
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He obviously was a voracious reader.
2
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He understood lots of complicated things about life and his time, but that s not enough.
2
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There were a lot of people who had those insights, who had that background.
2
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Why did his insights, why were they so interesting?
2
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Why were they so valuable?
2
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The answer is, you know, he was a one in a million.
2
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He was just a, he s a rare bird.
2
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So wait, how old was he when he came up with all of this, when he started creating all these things?
2
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So he was born in 1723, so his first book gets written when he s 36, comes out when he s 36.
2
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His second book comes out when he is 56, 53, excuse me.
2
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Uh, you know, again, nothing dramatic was like he was a wounded kid who who figured out something when he was 17 years old.
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It wasn t like, you know, Einstein or Newton, who, you know, is a genius from scratch.
2
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He clearly had a first rate mind.
2
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He was respected by other scholars of his day.
2
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I don t think people knew at the time that he would become the
2
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you know, one of the most talked about intellectuals of the 18th century, that he would still be relevant today.
2
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You know, that Maggie Thatcher would carry the Wealth of Nations around, supposedly, in her purse.
2
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The sign of hers, I don t know what she carried it around as.
2
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It was pre-Kindle.
2
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I was reading when she was in line at the grocery, I don t know, or whether it s just like a talisman or some kind of sacred object she liked to have with her to inspire her.
2
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And I talk about this in the book.
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It s remarkable that this man who
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constantly talks about don t pursue wealth, don t pursue fame.
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Those are phantoms to be shunned in favor of wisdom and virtue.
2
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And yet he becomes world famous.
2
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Even in his lifetime, he was famous.
2
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Not as famous as he is now, of course, but he was well known.
2
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He did very well economically, wasn t rich, but he lived very comfortably.
2
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But the key point is he didn t pursue those things for their own sake.
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That was the key to his advice.
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He s not anti-money.
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He doesn t say you should live a life of poverty.
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He doesn t say that a monk is the highest level of human achievement because they give up things.
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He s saying don t pursue them for their own sake.
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Don t be obsessed with them.
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And I think the biggest challenge in the modern world where there s so many opportunities
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for wealth accumulation and financial success for so many people.
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And it s a glorious time for that reason.
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And we have a wonderful economic world despite the current economy, which is not so exciting and not so great and very hard for certain people who are struggling.
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So I don t want to minimize any of that.
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But overall, in historical terms, this is a glorious time for most people to be alive in the Western world.
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It s unparalleled for how comfortable we are and the opportunities for accumulating wealth and financial success.
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And Smith says
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Just be careful, don t overdo it.
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And he wrote this at a time when it wasn t so easy to gather money, and people who wanted to really had to probably do many things that were corrupt.
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But it s just as true today, that if you re not careful, the pursuit of money, the pursuit of wealth, the pursuit of fame, all those things can seduce us to do things we really shouldn t be doing.
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Yeah, and if you don t believe us, look at the Kardashians, or anybody on reality TV for that matter.
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Adam Smith talks a lot about the dangers of self-deception.
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You mentioned this in your work as well.
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How does that sort of parlay in here?
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Because we talk a lot about self-deception both at work and at home on the show a lot, because it s one of our major enemies are the processes in our brain that say, well, I m good enough right now as I am, or I don t need that, or I already know that, et cetera, et cetera.
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Any sort of form of self-deception can be really toxic.
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Yeah.
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And my particular interest is how our worldview, our whole perception of the economy or politics, is the way that we look at evidence and data is often very imperfect.
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We just want to be comfortable.
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We don t want to be challenged.
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So we only listen to people who already agree with us.
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When we see a
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fact that disagrees with our view of the world, we just push it aside and say, that s probably wrong or, you know, that study was badly done.
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And somehow the studies on your side, those are all the good ones.
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So I m very interested in this question.
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And it comes up in Smith because Smith says, think about this, if the essence of humanity, if what makes us tick, if what inspires us and drives us is this desire to be loved,
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And at the same time, deep down, we want to earn that love honestly.
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We want to be lovely.
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We don t just want to get fool people into thinking that we re good people.
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We really actually want to be good people.
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We want to do the right thing.
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If that s true, Smith understood that one of the pitfalls of that worldview is that oftentimes we won t be lovely.
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But we ll convince ourselves that we really are and we ll fool ourselves about our real nature.
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And we ll say, well, even though I m going to be fired as football coach, but I m going to I m going to resign before I m fired.
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And I m going to say it s because I want to spend more time with my family.
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So why do people say that?
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Or they ll say, you know, they really want to take another job, but they resign temporarily.
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I mean, football coaching, I like because I use it in the book a couple of times because there s only 32 head coaching jobs in the National Football League, if I have the number correct.
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I think there s 32.
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So that s it.
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You can t say, well, I ll be the 33rd.
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It s not as good as being in the top 30.
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No, there are only 32 jobs.
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So the people who have those jobs work unbelievable hours.
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They work seven days a week.
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They work 12 plus hours a day.
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They re obsessed.
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And part of the reason they re obsessed is they love football.
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But the other reason they re obsessed is because they know if they don t work as hard as the other people, they re not going to keep their job.
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They re not going to be one of the one of the 32.
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So they work incredibly hard.
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So when they have problems in their families, which happens all the time, and you read about it, I always you always hear the sports announcer say, yeah, he s a great husband and dad.
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But you know, something went wrong.
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I m thinking, well, he s a great husband, maybe he should be a football coach.
3
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Because you really can t give your kids or your spouse quality time when you re working 100 hours a week.
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I mean, it just isn t going to happen.
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You re fooling yourself.
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So in that world, you think about that world, those folks, when they say, I m quitting to spend more time with my family, I always want to say, well, how long is that going to last?
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About a week before you take the next job?
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Because it turned out, oh, yeah, well, I did want to spend more time with my family for a few minutes.
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Then I realized I really also want to be a good football coach.
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So I m going to jump back and take this other job.
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So those folks, I used to think, oh, they re fooling us when they say they want to spend more time with their family.
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That s because they want us to like them.
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They want to be loved.
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So they think that ll help me be more respectful of them.
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So they couch it in those terms.
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And a lot of times they re also fooling themselves.
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They ve convinced themselves that they really do want to spend more time with their family.
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You know, or the famous, you know, example, after some tragedy or horrible thing, somebody has to decide whether to play in the football game or not, or play the soccer game or play the basketball.
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They say they always, you know, they always choose yes.
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Because they say, so-and-so, the person who died, that s the way they would have wanted it.
3
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And I m thinking, maybe they wouldn t have.
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Maybe they would have preferred that you mourn for them.
3
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And sometimes maybe that s true, but that s hard for us to accept.
3
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We want to do the thing that gives us pleasure.
3
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So we often couch our self-interest.
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in altruistic terms, and that s a deep insight into human nature.
3
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Smith talks about it, he says, he talks about how hard it is for us to judge ourselves.
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It s easier for us to judge other people.
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This person s selfish, this person does the wrong thing, but me, I m a saint, right?
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Yes, I mean, that s, it sounds like you re in my own head, Russ.
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Yeah, well, that s what we all are, and I think growing up is accepting the reality that we re deeply flawed,
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that we re not as good as we think we are.
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And if we want to be better people, we want to be better friends and better husbands and better fathers, wives, daughters, you name it.
3
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We have to accept the fact that we have trouble looking at ourselves honestly.
3
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And yet we don t want to hear that from other people.
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We don t want to hear when we say to somebody, so what d you think of my talk?
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Or how d you think of, was I, did I do a good job in that situation?
3
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We usually want people to say, you were great.
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It s hard to accept criticism.
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Sometimes it s because it s not meant with good intentions, obviously, but also it s even hard when it s meant with the best of intentions.
3
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One of the things you learn from Smith is it s incredibly difficult for us to face the fact that there are flaws in our character.
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We really don t want to hear criticism.
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It s very hard to accept criticism from other people.
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And yet, if we don t listen to criticism from other people, it s going to be hard to improve because we re not very good at criticizing ourselves.
3
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And I think Smith points the way to that.
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He has this great quote.
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He says, he is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person.
3
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And he is often equally bold, who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers the deformities of his own conduct.
3
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We don t want to see our own weaknesses.
3
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I love that line.
3
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Bold is the surgeon whose hand does not tremble when he operates on himself.
3
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Right.
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I can operate upon you just fine.
3
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I m relaxed.
3
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Right.
3
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You know, the joke, minor surgery, that s surgery that happens to somebody else.
3
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Yes.
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When it s you, it s never minor.
3
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It s all major surgery.
3
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So, you know, hey, I m going to critique you.
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Give me an hour.
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I can make a long list.
3
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Critique myself.
3
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Well, it s really not that much.
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I m a pretty good guy.
3
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So that s our natural impulse.
3
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And Smith reminds us of that challenge and gives us some hope for
3
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finding our own ways to improve by being critical of ourselves and observing ourselves, standing outside ourselves.
3
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You know, this idea of the impartial spectator, if you imagine somebody standing outside you, not you, not partial like you are about your own self, you re very
3
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willing to justify and rationalize what you do, but an outsider can see your actions differently.
3
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If you can use that method, you actually have a way to see yourself the way others see us.
3
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And Smith says, by the way, that s unbearable, literally.
3
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You know, the idea of standing in the shoes of others and looking at our own behavior, it s so uncomfortable.
3
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But he said, if you can do it, to the extent you can, you can t really do it.
3
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But to the extent that you can a little bit,
3
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you can start to be better and more successful, too, of course, not just about self-improvement in terms of morality.
3
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It s everything.
3
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We don t like to look at ourselves.
3
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It s uncomfortable.
3
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And Smith s saying, you know, really, he s giving us the opportunity to think about taking a step in that direction and stepping outside ourselves and seeing ourselves as others see us.
3
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And if you do that exercise, it s very powerful.
3
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It s painful, but it s very powerful.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, back to the show.
3
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Yep, which means you tend to see your failings, your shortcomings.
3
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When we re forced to see ourselves as others see us, we re forced to watch that tape.
3
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It s very easy to see what we wish we could do differently.
3
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And it s very hard to change those things, obviously.
3
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So how does Smith advise us to use our conscience, our impartial spectator, to also become more mindful?
3
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Or was that exactly what you meant by the previous exercise?
3
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Well, it s related, it s not exactly the same.
3
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Again, to be honest, Smith s not, he s not into mindfulness.
3
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Because mindfulness didn t exist as a term in 1759.
3
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Now, mindfulness is a fancy word for paying attention.
3
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And Smith was very into paying attention.
3
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He wanted you to and encouraged you to observe your own behavior.
3
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And I think to some...you asked me earlier, how was Smith so good at this?
3
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I think he was a very good observer of himself and those around him.
3
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and noticed what they did that was uneasy, that was proud, that was vain, that was arrogant, that was humble.
3
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And he saw how people interacted with each other in those settings.
3
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And mindfulness is a
3
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You know, it s the psychological philosophical term that we use now really for just paying attention.
3
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And paying attention is strikingly difficult.
3
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Right.
3
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The modern world, we re moving so fast.
3
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We have all these distractions.
3
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We ve got our iPhone out all the time.
3
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We ve got the TV going.
3
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We have the computer screen.
3
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And a lot of times we d much rather pay attention to those things than to what is going on right now in this moment.
3
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So mindfulness, I think, is greatly underrated.
3
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as a behavioral action and as a way for us to live.
3
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So I m talking about it as a way to improve that when you watch yourself with all your flaws, interact with other people, you step outside yourself and you say, oh, that was selfish.
3
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That was cruel.
3
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I should have been more patient.
3
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I should have asked the other person more questions and not talk so much myself, right?
3
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That s one aspect of mindfulness.
3
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But the other aspect, you know, this is not Rory Smithian, but it s the same technique.
4
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is to step outside yourself and realize, hey, look at this situation, look what s happening right now.
4
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Instead of stepping outside the situation, instead of being absorbed with some distraction, I m gonna hone in and I m gonna focus on this.
4
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And the mindfulness comes in and noticing, oh yeah, I m looking at my phone.
4
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I m at my kid s basketball game, and I m checking my email, and my kid just made a great shot.
4
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And he looked up in the stands, and I was looking at my phone.
4
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It s crazy.
4
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For me, the power of mindfulness isn t...to me, it s two things.
4
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I can be a better person, I can be a better friend, I can be a better colleague by being aware of when I m putting myself forward too much and not making room for the other people around me.
4
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At the same time, I can savor life if I m mindful, if I can notice what s going on and be in it in this moment instead of thinking, oh, I gotta get that deadline, I got that deadline coming up, I gotta write that paper, I gotta write that memo, I gotta write that email.
4
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Instead, I m here, I m with you right now,
4
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And let s savor this.
4
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This is life.
4
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It s short.
4
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It doesn t last that long.
4
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Enjoy every moment.
4
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And I think mindfulness helps you, and paying attention helps you enjoy life in a very different way than if you just are a, what I think of as a cork.
4
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You know, a cork in the ocean and just bouncing over here, bouncing over there, not very focused, not noticing what s going on, just being swept along by the tide.
4
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And if you re not careful, a decade can go by.
4
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It s not just 30 seconds.
4
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Your life can just be swept along.
4
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You don t think about it.
4
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You re not paying attention.
4
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And you find yourself down some path.
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And that s the way your life goes.
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And mindfulness is a way to really be in the journey all the time.
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When you tell people things like it s important to pay attention or don t let life just pass you by and get swept along and don t be distracted all the time by your devices like your cell phone, when you say that, people go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know, and then they go back into their email.
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Because that s their habit.
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And I think the challenge of mindfulness is to find practices and habits that can break the ones that you ve developed for the first 30, 40, 50, whatever it is years of your life.
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And that s the challenge.
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Everybody knows it s a good idea.
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The challenge is figuring out a way to actually do something about it.
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And that s why it s worthwhile to read, say, The Theory of Moral Sediments or whatever is your favorite book that focuses your head and gives you some ideas and gets into your bones because otherwise, you ll just miss it.
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So I think it s really important.
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You can t overstate this.
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I mean, everybody I know that s successful that comes through on the program all the time, every entrepreneur that I know, it s almost, it s a little trendy, but it also gets great results.
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The entire idea of being more mindful and the practice of cultivating mindfulness, which is why mindfulness exercises and meditation and things like that are so popular.
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Smith also, and in your work, we see that he also implores us to use the impartial spectator and this concept of loveliness, which is kind of a word that s not super in fashion, so I ll have you define it for us, can keep us from unethical behavior.
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Can you go through that a little bit?
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Man, I can t remember the last time I heard the word lovely.
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So, really, for Smith, there s two aspects of being lovely.
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And by lovely, he meant...and by loveliness, he meant being lovely.
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Well, for Smith, loveliness was being
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worthy of respect, honor, and praise.
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It s being, in Smith s day, a gentleman.
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It s a word that s out of fashion in our time, of course.
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That meant something to Smith, right?
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There were certain codes of behavior, certain expectations that he expected of his friends and that they expected of him.
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that determined whether a person was lovely or not.
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And for Smith, there were two aspects to it.
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The first is a very old-fashioned work called propriety, what we would call today proper behavior.
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And proper behavior in 2016 is really kind of out of fashion in and of itself, right?
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We kind of break the rules of proper behavior.
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We don t wear a hat when we go out.
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We don t even wear a collared shirt sometimes.
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We don t... We live in a time when
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for better for us, mostly for better, a lot of the rules of society are gone.
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And that s okay, because a lot of them aren t so important.
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A lot of them are important.
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And those are things, I mean, some of them are cliches, like saying, please and thank you, eating with your mouth closed, not talking all the time to your friends, letting them have a chance to talk.
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These are basic rules of social interaction.
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Please, thank you, respect, kindness, etc.
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So for Smith, there were sort of two levels.
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There was the minimum level,
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And then there was the gold standard.
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The minimum level was propriety.
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The minimum level is you do the right thing.
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You do the thing that people expect of you.
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That is, you alternate your merge, to take a trivial example from daily life.
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You don t take somebody s seat when they get there first.
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You let them have the seat.
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You don t push them aside.
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These are all common things we don t even think about.
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They re all
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built into us now from years of interacting with other people.
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Because if you break those rules all the time, people glare at you, they might punch you out even, you might get in a fistfight or get some road rage pointed at you.
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So we learn very quickly what the rules are of propriety.
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The rules of propriety are kind of obvious, even though they change over time.
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Like I said, you know, it used to be that if you went to the World Series, a man wore a hat.
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a real hat, not a baseball hat, not a baseball cap, but a fancy fedora.
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Go look at the old pictures of the 20s of World Series games that every man in the stand is wearing a hat.
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And it s usually in a jacket and tie.
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And we look at that and say, that s crazy because that isn t proper behavior in 2016.
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Proper behavior in 2016 is you dress whatever way you re comfortable.
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And if you wear a jacket and tie and a hat, you kind of look like a fool.
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And that s very rare in today s world.
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So the standard of what s proper varies over time.
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It evolves, it changes.
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But at any one time, we kind of know what the right thing to do is in terms of courtesy, etiquette, et cetera.
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Again, we live in a more informal time.
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Maybe your waiter introduces yourself.
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his or her first name.
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Those are things that would be unimaginable in Smith s day.
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But they re still rules.
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They re just different rules.
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And those are the basics.
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Those are what Smith says is sort of the minimum standard for loveliness, but they re not the gold standard.
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The gold standard is to go beyond that and to be virtuous.
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And, you know, when Smith talks about virtue, it s basically three big things.
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It s
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Take care of yourself.
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Be prudent.
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He calls it prudence.
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Don t hurt yourself.
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Don t get overweight.
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He doesn t use these terms, but this is the modern version of prudence.
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Don t eat too much.
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Don t smoke.
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Take care of the gift that you have of your body.
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Don t gamble your money away.
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Don t invest in high-flying stocks that are unlikely to succeed.
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So be prudent, prudent with your health, prudent with your money.
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This is because you re of no use to anyone else if you can t even take care of yourself, I would imagine.
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I m not sure exactly what the reason is, but it s almost self-evident that you should take care of yourself.
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Then he says, don t hurt other people.
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tells us justice.
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Don t steal from them, don t hit them, don t bash their car, don t be rude.
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These are also pretty basic.
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We know what those things are.
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The next level is a little bit harder.
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The next level is be kind to other people.
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And that s a lot trickier because it s not always obvious that what we wanna do to help other people actually helps them.
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He says the rules of benevolence are loose, vague, and indeterminate.
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We don t always know what s the best thing to help somebody.
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And so...but those are the big three, don t hurt other people, don t hurt yourself, and be kind to other people when you can be.
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Those are the three areas where those are hard, right?
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We wanna sometimes invest in the riskier thing.
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Sometimes we do put ourselves first and we end up hurting other people.
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Sometimes we wanna help other people and we still hurt them because we do something for them that we thought was good that ends up not being so good.
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And so if we can achieve those goals, though, we can be just, prudent, and benevolent, it s actually beneficent.
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then we will be virtuous, and then we ll really earn the respect of the people around us.
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So when you think about what your friends think of you, again, we talked earlier about how hard it is sometimes to see ourselves as others see us.
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If you imagine how our friends talk about us when we re not around, they say, what do you think of so-and-so?
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and you could overhear those conversations, what do you want those to be?
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Oh, he s a great drinker.
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Gosh, he could chug a beer faster.
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Is that really the important thing, right?
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Right, that s not what you want.
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Yeah, that s an interesting thought exercise.
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Right, the extreme version of it is think about your funeral.
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Boy, he had a nice car. 
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That s not what they say at your funeral.
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They say, he was a great father, you hope.
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He was a great husband.
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He was loving, he was kind, he was thoughtful.
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He always went out of his way to do the right thing.
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He always went out of his way to be helpful.
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He would give up time if he knew I needed him.
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Those are the things we want people to say at our funeral, not, boy, was he a fantastic report writer when we got a deadline.
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So that exercise is an exercise in mindfulness.
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But I think, you know, coming back to Smith, Smith s saying, we really wanna think about how our friends perceive us.
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And if we want them to perceive us as lovely, coming back to our loveliness point, we want them to see us as virtuous, not just as successful, not just how clever we were or how skilled we were at our job.
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Those are nice things, right?
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Because a job can be a wonderful thing to make the world a better place, right?
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I don t wanna understate, and we often forget how important work can be in helping other people.
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But when we think about the sacrifices we make, when we think about the virtues that we have, skilled work is one of them.
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There s nothing wrong with that.
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But the other virtues are the ones that Smith was talking about, which were prudence, justice, and beneficence.
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interesting at the time that all of this was not necessarily revolutionary because there are, you know, Old Testament, New Testament type things that had to do with this, but he started to observe these traits in people who were actually very successful, I would imagine.
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Is that accurate?
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Did he observe this in people that were happy, successful in his estimation and reverse engineer it?
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That s a good question.
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You know, he didn t get out much.
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You know, a lot of his life was spent
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in hanging out with very talented people.
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And I think he respected some of them, maybe most of them, right, that he chose to hang out with.
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And I think he observed why it was, as you said, why did he like them?
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What did he respect about them?
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What was special about them?
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It s just an amazing thing.
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It s just, it s wild.
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By the way, I don t think he s particularly interested in happiness the way we are or the way we talk about happiness.
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He was very interested in
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I would say the right word would be serenity.
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He was interested in what it takes for people to achieve deep satisfaction, not momentary pleasure or happiness.
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I ve got a copy of my book here.
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I m leafing through it.
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I find this example when Smith s best friend, David Hume, the philosopher, passed away
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He wrote a letter about Hume, and the respect that he had for Hume as a human being, as a friend, and for Hume s character, for Hume s ability to put money in perspective, for his kindness, for his wit that wasn t cruel, that s what shines through.
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And I think for whatever reason, whether it was the way he was raised, whether it was because of this impartial spectator idea,
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But he looked at people in a very rich, thoughtful way about what we really care about and the people around us.
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And we have a lot to learn from him.
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So having studied this so much, so in depth for so long, you ve almost had almost like a personal encounter with Adam Smith at this point.
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Yeah, in fact, I feel like when you write a book like this, you re hanging out with the guy in a real sense.
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But I actually had almost a real encounter with Smith when I went to England
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to lecture about Smith when the book came out about a year ago.
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So I was invited by the Royal Society of Arts, which is, it s a club, it s a society, it s a lecture series, they do other things as well.
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So I came to give a lecture on Smith and when I got there in London and went to the Royal Society, the person who greeted me said, this is so exciting because Adam Smith was actually a member
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of the Royal Society of Arts.
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That s just sort of cool.
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So, that s neat.
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That s great.
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So, before my talk, I went into what s called the green room where they just, you hang out before the talk.
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And, you know, they put out some cookies and some drinks.
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It was pleasant, but a very nondescript room.
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The building itself was very beautiful in parts because it was old.
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I was in a modern part.
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It wasn t anything special.
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But in the corner,
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There s nothing else interesting in the room besides the drinks and the food, except this.
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In the corner was this enormous green armchair.
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And it said it was a gift for the president of the Royal Society of Arts.
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It must have been like the chairman s chair at the time.
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It was designed by a famous architect and furniture maker.
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And it said it was delivered to the Royal Society in 1759.
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And that was the same year I realized that Smith s theory of moral sentiments had been published.
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So it crossed my mind that Smith may have actually sat in that chair.
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Maybe when the president wasn t around or maybe just used it occasionally, there was an armchair.
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I could put my
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posterior in this chair of posterity, this chair that was a couple hundred years old.
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It was so exciting.
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Now, why was that exciting?
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In a way, I mean, who cares, really?
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It s kind of silly.
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But I tell a story in my book, which is almost the same story.
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It was kind of weird.
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It was like life imitating art.
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In the section of my book on celebrity, because Smith talks about celebrity, I told a story that I had read about Ted Williams, where Ted Williams had a Cadillac
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that a cream-colored Cadillac that used to drive around town, and he had a friend who usually was his driver, just a normal guy.
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And Ted Williams liked him because I think he treated him like a normal person.
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And one time, Ted was out of town, and his driver, Jimmy, said, Ted, is it okay if I take your car?
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I ve got a date.
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So he takes the car, Ted says, sure.
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And he takes the car, he takes the date out to dinner.
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And as he pulls into the restaurant, a cop pulls him over and says, hey, what are you doing driving Ted Williams  car?
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Because evidently, people knew it was Ted Williams  car.
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The police did.
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And Jimmy said, oh, I m on a date, Ted s out of town.
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He somehow convinced the officer that it was okay that he had Ted Williams  car.
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So he goes into dinner.
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Before he goes into dinner, the cop said, hey, wait a second.
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He says, would it be okay if I sat in the car for a minute?
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And the guy s, oh, sure.
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So he leaves the cops sitting in the car and goes into dinner.
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Comes out after dinner, there s six cops sitting in Ted Williams  car.
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The guy was so excited to be sitting in Ted Williams  car, he called his friends to go sit
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which is weird.
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Yeah, that is weird.
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Ted Williams isn t there.
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I mean, what s the excitement?
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But there s something iconic and fun about this object that this other famous person had.
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So I tell the story because it s such a great example of how obsessed we can be with famous people.
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But here I was in London with the same kind of moment.
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But there was one problem, so I could sit in Adam Smith s chair, except for one problem, which is there was a sign that says, don t sit in the chair, because it was built, you know, in 1759.
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And if everybody sits in the chair, it s gonna disappear.
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So that was the problem.
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The good news is there was nobody in the room.
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So the question is, there s no spectator, impartial, partial, just the imaginary one that Smith talks about over my shoulder.
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So the question is, did I sit in the chair?
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Did I not sit in the chair?
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What do you think?
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Well, I guess I should let you cap that off, because I hope you did.
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So the answer is I didn t sit in the chair because it would be wrong.
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It would be unlovely.
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It would be a terrible thing to sit in the chair.
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It s selfish.
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It s not the right thing to do.
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But even if I did sit in the chair, I wouldn t tell you because I want you to think I m lovely.
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So to me, it was an example of this very Smithian moment where I was forced to think about Smith in so many different ways when confronted with that simple green chair.
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Thank you so much.
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This has been great.
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I appreciate your time.
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And of course, anything we can do.
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And we ll link to your podcast and your work in the show notes.
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Interesting stuff.
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Jason, I had no idea Adam Smith had another book.
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Most people probably don t.
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And it was his first book.
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It s called The Theory of Moral Sentiment.
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It s fascinating to me that we have almost the invisible hand only for our behavior, not just for economic markets, and that those concepts kind of cross over and come into play there as well.
5
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So I hope everybody enjoyed that.
5
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And of course, if you did, don t forget to thank Russ on Twitter.
5
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We ll have that linked in the show notes, as well as his podcast and the book mentioned on the show.
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You can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the show notes right on your phone.
5
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I m also on Twitter, at theartofcharm.
5
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It s a great place to engage with me there.
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I m pretty quick.
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I share a lot of insights, a lot of articles, and frankly, mostly funny stuff, so if you like my sense of humor, you ll love the Twitters.
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