#138 - Russ Roberts

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Russ Roberts. Russ is the host of the podcast EconTalk. He's also a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the author of several books, including How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life.
You can find Russ on Twitter at EconTalker, and I've also linked up his podcast in the description if you want to subscribe. All right, here we go.
So to start off the podcast, I want to talk about one of your previous episodes, the one with Jonah Goldberg. So you pulled out a passage from his book, The Suicide of the West, where he wrote, capitalism cannot provide meaning, spirituality, or a sense of belonging. Those things are upstream of capitalism. I really enjoyed your conversation, and I kind of want to talk about it in the context of startups. So what are your thoughts on this meaning, spirituality, and a sense of belonging in regards to creating your own company?

**Russ Roberts** (0:55)
Well, in a previous life, I was at a business school, and one of the things I did there was to connect MBA students with entrepreneurs.
We had something called the Hatchery, and entrepreneurs would come in front of the students, present their ideas, and the job for the students was to write a business plan for that idea.
And in the course of doing that, I met with a lot of entrepreneurs because obviously we couldn't take everyone who was interested, and I got to find out what they were interested in, what they cared about.
And one of the things that was very moving, and I actually stole this and fictionalized it and put it in one of my books, was the non-financial motivation that founders have. And obviously there's a financial motivation. If you're not going to make money, it's probably not going to get investors, and it may not keep your attention, and eventually you won't be able to pay your workers. So you do have to make money, and you have to make more than you spend to have a viable business. That's a beautiful thing. But I was struck by how much people care about what I would call the spiritual part of it. So I have a memory of an entrepreneur who started a software company, and I remember him, I don't know if he choked up or teared up, but he definitely had an emotional moment when he said to me, you know, I wish my dad had seen my company because his dad had passed away. He said, I wish my dad had seen what this product is. And then he stopped and he was brought up short and he said, I don't even like my dad.
And I thought, well, that's one of the deepest things I've ever heard, right? This incredible primal desire to, first of all, please your father or make your father respect you, earn the respect of your father. But the role of a startup or anything you create, it's not just startup, right? Anything you create, the mark you make on the world that you want your parents to see is way beyond, I think, the monetary part of it. So money counts, but I think obviously starting a business, creating something that can sustain employees and pay them is debting the world in your own way. And it's just the way we make our mark. And I think that's a really beautiful thing. I think it's a phenomenal thing that in America it's relatively easy to do. And I think that's really important and part of what makes America what it is.

**Craig Cannon** (3:28)
And was that your intention behind EconTalk, to make your own dent?

**Russ Roberts** (3:35)
Before I answer that, I want to go back to the Jonah Goldberg quote about upstream and capitalism. I think it's bizarre how capitalism bears the burden of human nature.
So people say, capitalism, the system is based on greed. This is a Milton Friedman thing. As opposed to what system doesn't have greedy people in it, every system, maybe not greedy, just at least self-interested. But to go back to your question, when I first started podcasting in 2006, before I started, the reason I got into it is somebody invited me to be on their podcast, and I asked them how many people would listen. I figure it would be 80 Mm-hmm. 114 He said, oh, 2,000 or 3,000. And I thought, whoa, if you told me that at 2 o'clock tomorrow afternoon, we're going to be in a large theater, and there's two chairs on that stage, and you can sit in one and chat, and these 2,000 people, 2,500 people, are going to be interested in what you have to say.