The Behavioural Economics Of How We Spend Our Time - Koen Smets - #127

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh yes, hello humans, welcome back. My guest today is Koen Smets, who is a behavioural economist. Now, the last few episodes with behavioural economists, including Rory Sutherland and Richard Schotton, are two of the most highly played episodes of all time. So I've got quite high hopes for this episode today. However, we're not just talking about behavioural economics. It can be behavioural economics. We are talking about time, and principally how we spend our time and how we relate it to money. Think about the language that I'm using, spending time. We talk about it as if it is a currency, but the difference is that time is going to be spent no matter how we choose to spend it. So what does that mean? What are the implications for how we should spend our days and how should we give up our time for money? How should we exchange the brief minutes that we have on this earth for value of currency, which allows us to spend some of those minutes doing other things? And where's the inflection point? I really enjoyed this episode. Koen is a very insightful and interesting guy with some great examples, including one from the Estonian Police Service. I bet you didn't think that you'd be learning about that today, but you are. In other news, upcoming episodes I've already mentioned it, but Kamal Ravikant, Naval's brother, is coming on to talk about his new book, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. I've also got Michaela Peterson, Jordan Peterson's daughter lined up, James Altucher. Who else? Charlotte Fox Webber, head of psychotherapy at the School of Life. There is an awful lot. And before I go, if you are thinking about making the most of your time in 2020, my advice would be to consider going sober for a period and focusing on your personal development. And the best way to do that is with the six months sober, 28 day, 90 day or six month challenge. Head to sixmonthsober.com. That's the number sixmonthsober.com/podcast. And you'll be able to find out all of the information about my new course. Hope you enjoy it. And now it's time for the wise and wonderful Koen Smets.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Koen Smets, who I've been fighting to pronounce that name, but I think I've managed to nail it. Welcome to the show.

**Koen Smets** (2:42)
Thanks very much, Chris. You did it proud. I think I've heard numerous strange mispronunciations of my name, all the way from Keen to Koen to Koen, and anything in between. So yeah, I think you passed with flying colors.

**Chris Williamson** (2:59)
Fantastic. Well, we've got over the first hurdle. To the listeners at home, I'm starting to calm down a little bit now. You might not know, Koen, but I was away in Bali, and while I was away, it meant I couldn't record. You do not know true fear until you have a twice a week podcast publishing schedule and no podcasts left to publish.
That is where I've been over the last couple of weeks. But very fortunately, for the people that are listening, I have this episode with yourself, which I'm sure is going to be fantastic. Behavioral economics and all sorts of decision making theory that we're going to go into, which I can't wait to do. Also coming up, Naval Ravikant's brother Kamal Ravikant talking about Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, his brand new book, and a bunch of other people that are really, really interesting over the next couple of weeks. But today, we're going to get to talk about some behavioral economics and some classical working strategies for organizations, human behavior, decision making, and motivation. That's right.

**Koen Smets** (4:08)
That's the kind of stuff I do, yes.

**Chris Williamson** (4:10)
I love it. I love it. So what have you been thinking about recently? We've got, the world is our oyster. The world of whatever you've been working on is our oyster.

**Koen Smets** (4:17)
Okay. Well, one of the things, one of the themes I've been thinking of recently is time. As you may know, economics is about scarce resources. It's about allocating scarce resources. It's about weighing up costs and benefits. This is in the economy as we know, it is usually to do with money or with some kind of equivalent of money, some resource that you need to manage.
But of course, another very important scarce resource we all experience is time. We get every midnight, we get 24 hours for the next day, so to speak. Once that's gone, it's gone. Of course, then there is another 24 hours, but just like we can spend a pound or a euro or a dollar or any other currency only once, so we can only spend a minute or an hour or a second once. If we spend it on one thing, we can't spend it on another. And so our general use of time follows similar patterns to the way we use money, in the sense that we are confronted with the fact that we don't have unlimited amounts of it, and so we need to be careful in how we use it up. And I think that is a fascinating topic for me, because in many, particularly also behavioral economics experiments and economics experiments, you get people in a lab, you give them some tokens, you give them a little bit of money. Sometimes you see people go to developing countries, to India, for instance, where amounts in dollar go much further, so you can really intervene in people's lives on the scale of magnitude that is like comparable to a month's wages, for instance, and still be affordable for research. But the problem is with whatever experiments you do with tokens or money is that it's usually in much smaller quantities than really impacts on us in real life. So my thinking is that if we look more at how we use time, where we all have the same amount of time, whether you're rich or you're poor, you get 24 hours a day. It's not because you're rich, you get 36 hours a day. We all have exactly the same amount of time. And I think how we would respond to having to weigh up gaining or losing time might reveal things or clarify things that perhaps are unclear or ambiguous when you work with, you give people 10 pounds or $10 and you make them bet on something or you make them pay for something.