Some time ago, you wrote an essay about an economist named Albert O'Hirschman. Happens to be my favorite economist is an intellectual hero of yours. You brought him up in your podcasting as well and you were writing about one of his ideas known as the principle of the hiding hand, which is sort of this idea that we underestimate the scale, the difficulty, the challenges of a new project, but that's great because by underestimating it, we end up actually pursuing more daring kind of ventures than we otherwise would, but we also end up underestimating our ability to deal with those challenges once they arise. I want to just quote you to yourself in describing this idea. You write quote, the entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk taker because he operates under the useful delusion that what he's attempting is not risky. Then trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth and because it is too late to turn back, they're forced to finish the job. Unquote.

Do you think that you yourself were maybe a little bit deluded before co-founding Pushkin? You slowly deluded probably. Hirschman in his argument by the hidden hand uses an example of a railway tunnel not far from here in the railroad line between Albany and Boston, which had to pass through a mountain, presumably the Berkshires, and the people building the railway line made these absurdly optimistic assumptions to investors about how easy it would be to dig through a mountain. Every one of those assumptions turned out to be false, but they couldn't turn back. They got halfway through ran out of money, but what choice did they have but to go forward?

They were mid-mountain. They were half-mountain. They were half-mountain.

So I love that and I think it's actually almost everything Albert O. Hirschman says is true, that maybe even more so than others. But you also underestimate your capacity to handle more work. There's a lot more slack in the day, slack, another Albert O. Hirschman concept. There's a lot more slack in the working life of a professional than most of us realize. At least there was for me. And I've responded to this by becoming more efficient, which is not a bad thing.