Duke Behavioral Economist: Why You’ll Regret the Risks You Don’t Take | Dan Ariely - EP 811

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1:28What if the things you regret today aren't the things you'll regret most when you look back at your life? When I sat down with behavioral scientist Dan Ariely, we talked about why we tend to regret the risks we take in the moment, but often regret the risks we didn't take when we look back years later. And then he shared what his research is finding about where we're playing it safest. Take a listen to this. In the short term, we regret the things that we did. But when you look at it from the perspective of time, you're upset with the risks you didn't take. The biggest gap I find, the area of life that they don't take enough risk, romantic love.

2:09And people basically say, not willing to be vulnerable. It's your friend, John, and welcome to PassionStruck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

2:53Welcome back to PassionStruck episode 811. And today we're continuing our series, The Adaptive Brain, How Your Mind Learns, Changes, and Heals. Last week, we looked at change from three very different perspectives. Mark Manson challenged us to move beyond insight and actually change our behavior. Dr. David Perlmutter showed us how the biological environment we create can influence the health of our brains. And actor Josh Dumoul gave us a very personal look at how the environments we choose can shape the person we become. And today, we're turning to something that sits beneath all of those conversations.

3:29How do we make better choices? Because we can know what matters. We can know what we should do. We can even know what kind of person we want to become. And still, our brains have a remarkable ability to steer us in another direction. That's what makes today's conversation with Dr. Dan Ariely so fascinating. Dan is a behavioral economist, professor, and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational. For decades, he's studied the strange gap between what we intend to do and what we actually do, and why we're often far less rational than we think. But one part of our conversation really stayed with me.

4:08Dan has been studying how we think about risk, and his research suggests something counterintuitive. In the moment, we tend to regret the risks we take, but when we look back at our lives, we often regret the risks we didn't take. And that raises a much bigger question. Where in your life are you playing it safer than you really want to? We also talk about risk, relationships, work, education, bureaucracy, technology, and even what happens when we become so focused on efficiency that we lose sight of what makes life meaningful itself. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Dan Ariely. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters.

4:53Now, let that journey begin.

5:00I am absolutely thrilled today to have Dan Ariely on PassionStruck. Dan, how are you today? I am lovely. I am lovely. First of all, it's a very nice name for a podcast, but I should say that I was thinking about passion since you wrote me. What element of motivation you chose to capture. There's lots of motivations. And I think it's one of the most interesting ones. It's the top of all motivations, right? It's something that is driven by passion. You can imagine, I want to be professional. You can imagine, I want to do things well. I want to improve. I want to accomplish. There's lots of motivations.

5:44Lots of words to describe lots of elements of motivation. Passion is the highest order. I think when we get to that one, we've achieved a lot. Thank you for saying that. When I started this journey years ago, the term passion struck wasn't in my vocabulary at all. I happened to be having a conversation with a mentor and he made this statement to me that it goes, John, it seems like what you're describing is people go from being stuck to becoming passion struck. And I did what anyone would do after he said it, it clicked. And I went to Google to see if anyone owned the domain and there it was on GoDaddy and the rest is history.

6:27Very nice. Dan, when I look at your entire body of work, and I have been a fan for a long time, you go from predictably irrational to misbelief to your recent work on social connection. And to me, it feels like you've been studying the same question from different angles. Why do human beings repeatedly move away from the things that would actually make life better? Is that kind of a fair characterization? It's fair, but let me explain it a little bit. I think that I started by working on why people do things that are irrational. And very quickly I learned that irrational is not always not in our self-interest.

7:11So I started by thinking about the narrower definition of irrationality. Why are people influenced by irrelevant options? Why are we attracted to zero? All kinds of things that are clearly not in our best interest. But later on, I moved into describing things that don't make sense for our well-being, irrelevant of whether they're rational or irrational. And if we think about passion for a second, passion is an irrational term. If you wrote a model, often the rational person would go to work to get money to do something else, sit on the beer drinking beer or something. The standard model of labor is not a model that we enjoy labor.

8:03Labor is negative and we do it to get money so that we can do other things. And passion, if we said it's a high order thing, is a very irrational term. But I move to embracing those things as part of humanity and saying, okay, so let's look at what makes us human. And what makes us human is running marathons, which is not enjoyable, and climbing mountains, and writing poetry, and doing startup. And my challenge usually to people is to say, think about the most important three things you have done in your life. Write them down. And now write next to each of them how many years, months, weeks, days, and minutes they were accompanied by joy versus by tears, frustrations, and so on.

9:02And people end up saying the things that we are the most proud of are not the things that make the most momentary happiness. like this book I wrote did not result in years of laughter. It was frustrating and difficult. And I think that even though it's irrational, it's part of humanity. So going back to your question, I think that my role is to find out what are the things that we do that is actually in our long-term well-being and what are the things we do that are not in our long-term well-being. and how do we do less of the ones that don't serve us and more of the ones that serve us? Because if you look at passion, you can say, hey, people are doing this irrational thing.

9:51People go to work and they love what they're doing and they spend extra time and they research at home and they talk about work with their friends. It's irrational, let's stop it. I think it's one of those things that it's irrational, but in a good way, in a way that makes us human. We have a capacity to be kind and we have a capacity to be generous and we have a capacity to love and we have a capacity to care and we have a capacity to be passionate. Let's not turn it off. Let's recognize how important it is and let's figure out how do we stop the things that we created in society that turn it off and how do we increase the things that turn it on.

10:34And by the way, with passion, or all the words that create extreme motivation, we have sadly created lots of things that turns it off. Yes, we certainly have. And those things that are turning it off only seem to be growing. I'll continue. Stop me if you know what you want to talk about. but i started looking during covid and a little bit after covid at bureaucratic burden and covid was an interesting time because lots of companies moved to lots of things online and online meant procedures and it meant doing things without other people and doing it in a self-service way. And procedures are designed for some average case.

11:29They're not designed to cover all cases. So I'll give you an example for me. I work at Duke University. Pre-COVID, the people from HR sit not too far from our office. They would sometimes come for coffee. We would somehow have receptions. They talk about research or something and they would come. and we knew each other. And when I needed to solve something, like I had somebody in my lab from South America and their visa was delayed or something was happening, I would knock on the door and say, hey, we have a problem. And they would say, okay, let's see what we do. During COVID, and I'm telling you this specific example, but it's a representation of lots of things.

12:14During COVID, they worked from home. We worked from home. They never came back after COVID. They stayed working from home. And everything moved online. And now when there's somebody with a visa problem, there's a form. And there's nobody to say, oh, I think we should, we could do this, or we could do this, or we could be flexible here, or we could push this here. And as a consequence, and I'll use the visa example, I have many others, but as a consequence, I had people who their visas ran out. We couldn't do anything. And now we have an employee that we pay salary for, that we promised them working condition and salary, but also a visa because they couldn't work without a visa.

13:03And now we don't give them visa. And we're saying it's not our fault. There was a process. It didn't fit the process. This is what happens when it doesn't fit the process. How motivated is that person now to go above and beyond? And especially when people work in other countries, there are often cases that break the standard mold of employment. Sometimes you need to be on a call very early in the morning, very late at night. What's weekend for us might not be weekend for them. Things change. How likely is somebody going to say, you know what, it's Friday night or Saturday morning or 5 a.m., but we are connected to the mission.

13:51And it ends up that bureaucracy ends up killing people's motivation. I think we have an inner need to feel connected to our job and to be passionate about it and to want it. And often, not only we don't fuel and satisfy that need, we do the opposite. I was in a history archaeological museum a couple of months ago, and I had a tour and I got to see all the labs. And first of all, the people, they were amazing. There was one guy who was working, I think most of the day, to remove a speck of rust from an old coin. He didn't want to use chemicals. He wanted to remove it perfectly and to stay with the best specimen after that possible.

14:44But I asked him, I said, look, you're talking with very ancient artifacts. Let's say clay, for example. And you have people who lived in a very different period. They didn't have the luxuries we have. What percentage of the work, I asked him, do you think they did to create something functional versus to create something beyond that okay so create a vessel how much work went to create it a bit more pretty that needed to be or more symmetrical than needed to be right i asked them what is the percentage of effort that went not for the productivity itself but something beyond that and they said it a lot they further their opinions and so on but they said that a pot maker in the ancient world cared about their reputation and they cared about the aesthetics and they care about the symmetry and they cared about signs of beauty and they wouldn't let things leave the floor if they did not pass some self-standard that was way more important than It just is this carrying water.

16:01We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Dan Ariely. As you're listening today, I'd like you to sit with one question. What risks have you been avoiding that might actually matter to the life you're trying to build? Dan's research reminds us that our minds are often much better at protecting us from short-term discomfort than helping us think about the life we'll look back on years from now. That idea connects deeply with the work behind my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, coming this October. Because mattering isn't just about being seen by other people, it's also about having the courage to show up for the things, relationships, and purpose that makes our lives meaningful.

16:39If you'd like to go deeper, you'll find the companion workbook for the Adaptive Brain series inside the Ignited Life on Substack. You can find links for both the Ignited Life and my book in today's show notes. Now, a quick break for today's sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

17:00You're listening to PassionStruck on the PassionStruck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dan Ariely. When I look at my own experience, given the view that you were just talking about, at one point in my career, I was a senior executive at Dell, and I had thousands of employees who were working with me. And about 90 % of them lived in different geographies than the United States. And so during that period of my life, it was brutal. I was getting up at 4.30 in the morning because I was dealing with Asia and the staff in Europe. I'd then work my whole day, get off of work and then a couple hours later I was back at it working with folks I had in China, Malaysia, and India again.

17:51And after a while I just started to question, which really goes to the work I'm doing today, so much of what I was valued for was my utility, the output that I was delivering. But the more I was doing this job, the more I was losing every single sense of who I was. and really feeling more and more unseen personally. And my passion was just draining from me more and more every day till I reached a point of existential numbness. And I think this is happening more and more to people as we're losing the deeper needs that we have for identity, belonging, certainty, etc. And as I look at AI and what it's doing, I think it's only making it worse.

18:38What are your thoughts? Yeah, so let's take AI separately because it's worthwhile talking about it by itself. But let's think about ourselves. And let's say 20 years ago, what would be our expectations from our employers if something went badly? If we got injured? If we had a disability? If there was an emergency in the family and we need to take some time off to take care of somebody. If we had some psychiatric episode, whatever it is, what would be our expectations? And we as people, we said we developed evolutionary and we developed evolutionary in an environment where the entities that were with us were there for a long time and we created codependencies.

19:39This is friends. I help you, you help me, and we have expectations from friends. If you would call tomorrow to your best friend and say, hey, I'm moving, would you come and help me move this heavy table? And they would say, I have a form. Please submit the request and three copies for this will get back to you. Friendship, you expect. There's a set of expectations. And those expectations have gains and they have costs. They have gains because we expect and we give a lot. If you think about what you give to your friends, we give a lot to our friends. What if you had a friend that you knew that in a time of need, they will do nothing to help you?

20:26Here's a friend that's very happy to meet you, very happy to talk to you. But if you ever needed something, they would not be there for you. how likely would you be there for them? Not that much. It's just not part of our repertoire. Our repertoire is we live in a small group of people and we have this bidirectional relationship and we expect basically what we give. I'm not saying we expect exactly the same thing, but it's mostly the same. Now, as companies have transitioned to being less relationship and more functional, many of us are encountering the situation that says, oh, I had no idea. I thought we were in a different kind of a relationship.

21:13And sometimes we learn it about ourselves and sometimes we learn it from other people's experience. But all of a sudden we learn that relationship is very different. And now it is difficult for us to stay passionate. Imagine that being passionate about the work you do is good for the workplace, but it's also good for you. You go happy, you're excited, you're enthusiastic, you have extra energy from itself. All of those things are happening. It's great. But now imagine I tell you this organization that you work for, they really don't care about you. And they actually are putting you in the cubicle, and they give you a number.

21:57They move your cubicle from place to place. They have these policies. that show that they clearly don't care about your time or productivity or don't even want to hear your input. Nobody ever says thank you. You're just here. Don't confuse the facts. You're here for a salary. You're a functional, cognitive machine. How motivated would you be? And the answer is not so much. in the face of an organization that tells you that you are, they don't care about you, you're just the function that you are. It's very hard to look at the organization. I say, oh, but I really care. It's fine. I don't think people, many people can be like this.

22:44They say, I really care about you. You can really don't care about me. And this would last for a long time and I'm fine with it. It will not happen. So I think organizations became bureaucratic organizations communicate to people that we don't trust you. Please, you can go and have lunch, but we want 17 receipts and proofs. We don't care about your time because clearly what we're doing is not to optimize anything for you. We're doing things from some other goal. And please don't try and do anything different. Do the same thing that we set up for you to do. Everything else is going to be too difficult.

23:21Don't even try. Those organizations don't get to get our passion, and everybody loses. Imagine two factories. One factory is able to create motivation and passion. One is not. The factory that has motivation and power, people are happy to go to, highly productive, probably stay a little bit extra, maybe come on the weekend if needed. And then the management is happy and the shareholders are happy. What about the organization that doesn't know how to create? purpose, motivation, passion. People hate going. They probably come late, leave early, take more days off. If there's an emergency and something needs to be done on the weekend, they don't show up.

24:05Much harder to manage people in that organization. Certainly the shareholders are not happy. So I think it's one of those things that companies could be here and you could be here. and if they're here everybody's better off the employees are better off the management, the shareholders and if you're here, everybody's worse off live a dispassionate life and don't go to work for many hours a day but do the least possible to do and hate every moment that's the extreme of course but anyway, so that I think is the place we're going to and I think we're going there for two main reasons. The first thing is that there are things that are easily measurable and there are things that are not easily measurable.

24:57And we love the things that are easily measurable. What is easily measurable? What time you show up for work. What time you leave. Did you write any emails to anybody else during work? You remember all these technologies that surveyed us. Do you look at the screen while you're at work or do you look away? We can measure lots of things. And we focus on those things. And what can't we measure? We can't measure passion. We can't measure care. I used to run this study and I would ask people, I said, imagine that your current performance at work is 100. it how much lower you can go and not lose your job and people quite a lot i'm at the helmet now i can go quite a lot which means that at the moment people believed that they were creating voluntary effort i'm here i can go to let's say 80 without losing my job it means that All of these things I'm doing because I want to, not because I have to.

26:08And then I would ask them how much higher you could go above 100 if you're truly passionate about what you're doing. I said quite a lot as well. And that's kind of a waste of humanity. And so if you say, what's driving it? I think the first thing is that companies love to measure things. It's easier to measure some things and not others. and the things that are difficult to measure is things like passion. I can measure how many hours you sit by the computer. Very hard to measure your passion. And I used to go to Wall Street executives, people who invest in companies and say, you need to measure those things.

26:50You need to measure how connected people feel to the company, how connected they feel to the goal, to the mission, to the direct manager, how much they feel appreciated. being treated fairly, all of those things. So I have lots of evidence that all of this is important. And they would say, we love only measurable things. And I said, I understand. I would love for there to be measurable things, but you're wrong, I would say. So imagine that I asked you two questions. I asked you, how much in pain are you? And I would ask you, how much in love are you with your significant other? I said, I don't have an independent way to get those things.

27:30There's no neurological way for me to measure pain or love that is better than your number. I can't measure the number of emoticons you send your significant other. But pain on the negative side and love on the positive side, it's an internal state. And you can say, oh, I'm not measuring internal state, but then you're giving up a lot. Like imagine we thought about humanity without thinking about pain and love. it wouldn't be the same. So one big part of the puzzle, I think, is that we want measurable things. And some of the most important things in human motivation are not easily measurable. Okay, it's not that they are not measurable.

28:16They're not objectively measured. They need this subjective element. The other thing that happened is that companies are becoming very concerned with fear rather than progress. Imagine that we're creatures in the jungles. And imagine that we go hunting. And the hunting goes well and we hunt a rabbit. That's great. Imagine the hunting doesn't go well and a tiger hunts us. That's terrible. But the good is also only a little good. The bad is really bad. So nature has made us focus more on the bad side and on the good side. and they just, okay, hunting is great but you certainly don't want to be eaten by a tiger so let's first worry about the downside and it turns out that we still walk around with that tool we're still more afraid of making mistakes than we are to making positive progress and for organizations and by the way, it's worse with social media if you're a CEO of a company and you make a brilliant decision how much news cover would you have?

29:23If you're a CEO of a company and you made a terrible mistake, the opposite of the brilliant one, how much news cover will you have and how long people will remember it? There's something very much about that. So we as people don't like risk. We don't like mistakes. Organizations even more don't like risk and don't like mistakes. and the organization that is becoming a bureaucratic organization especially doesn't like risk so think about the bureaucratic organization the bureaucratic organization really becomes two sub organizations one is concerned with the mission one is concerned with making no mistakes right that's what the the bureaucracy is everything runs smoothly and no mistake imagine that you're a farmer company you have people who want to invent new indications take risk try new things and you want people want nobody should ever complain about anything and as organization become two sub organization one with the declared goal of the organization and one controlling the bureaucracy the bureaucratic one ends up winning and the bureaucratic one ends up winning because they are closer to the rules of the organization So there's a rule for a rule and things go worse.

31:01We said that we have this capacity for caring, but organizations have a desire for objective measures which make it tough. And organizations develop bureaucracies. And I understand why people develop bureaucracies. It's designed to prevent mistakes. And I studied lots of mistakes. I see people making mistakes. But at the same time, bureaucracies with no human judgment end up being not productive organizations. And then if I may, I know I'm giving a long answer, but the last thing is this question about AI. And I think it's, of course, there's a lot to talk about, but I would say the following.