The Peter Attia Drive - #154 - Steve Levitt, Ph.D.： A rogue economist's view on climate change, mental health, the ethics of experiments, and more

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:00:41.740 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. My guest this week is Stephen Leavitt. Steve is an economist and coauthor

00:00:56.040 of the bestselling book Freakonomics and its two sequels. He is the William B. Ogden Distinguished

00:01:03.680 Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He is also the founding partner of TGG,

00:01:11.580 or the Greater Good Group Consulting Firm. In 2003, Steve won the John Bates Clark Medal, which is one

00:01:20.720 of the two highest honors someone can win in the field of economics, the other being the Nobel

00:01:25.660 Prize. This award is given to the most outstanding economist in America under the age of 40. And in

00:01:32.900 2006, Steve was named one of Time Magazine's 100 People Who Shape Our World. He received his

00:01:38.980 undergraduate degree from Harvard and his PhD from MIT before heading to Chicago, where he is currently

00:01:45.520 a professor. In this episode, we talk about a lot of things, Steve's path through the world of

00:01:51.440 economics, why he chose it, and how unlikely a candidate he was for such study. And then we get

00:01:57.540 into the limitations of economics. We talk about one of the more controversial things that Steve has

00:02:03.500 written about along with his coauthor for Freakonomics, which was climate change and some of the confusion

00:02:09.100 around what they wrote and the implications of it and how things have changed in the decades since they

00:02:14.340 wrote it. We talk about some of the tragedies that Steve has endured in his life and how his very

00:02:20.420 unique disposition has allowed him to not only tolerate these things, but actually thrive through

00:02:26.660 them. We talk about Steve's recent appreciation for mental health and the importance that he believes it

00:02:34.320 plays in our education world. And we get off onto a couple of interesting tangents around things like

00:02:41.580 golf and horse racing, which even if you're not fond of either, I think you'll get a kick out of. So

00:02:47.160 without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Stephen Levitt.

00:02:56.100 Hey, Steve, it's awesome to see you today. Although I was really hoping we were going to be able to

00:03:01.780 figure out a way to do this in person if we waited long enough. But at some point, I just thought

00:03:05.400 we just need to sit down and do this and videos almost as good. So anyway, thanks so much for making time.

00:03:10.820 So excited to be here. Really looking forward to it.

00:03:13.660 I feel like I haven't seen you in person and it's been too long. It's probably been four years.

00:03:18.460 I think it was, we drove around in that really noisy car of yours was the last time that I was

00:03:22.640 with you. The little tiny thing that made so much noise. You know what I'm talking about?

00:03:26.200 Yes, I sure do.

00:03:27.060 Didn't go very fast, but it made a lot of noise for going slow.

00:03:31.180 I think a lot of listeners probably are familiar with you. Of course, they're familiar with you through

00:03:35.960 obviously your books, podcasts, things like that. But maybe it's worth actually telling people a

00:03:40.540 little bit about how you got interested in the study of economics. And obviously it's through

00:03:45.420 that study that your work became available to a much broader swath of the population than just

00:03:51.180 sort of economists. So what got you interested in studying economics?

00:03:56.100 So I was never interested in economics. I'm probably still not interested in economics,

00:03:59.360 but the way I became an economist was really through the back door. I was the worst kind of student

00:04:06.140 in college. I mean, I got good grades. I got into Harvard. I got good grades at Harvard,

00:04:10.020 but I didn't care about learning at all. All I really cared about was gaming the system.

00:04:13.880 And I had learned that the best way to pick classes was to find the classes that everybody

00:04:19.720 took because it turned out those were both really good classes in general and really easy.

00:04:24.540 And it just happened that at Harvard, EC10, the introductory economics course was exactly one of

00:04:29.120 those courses. So I took it not because I was interested in economics, but just because my rule of

00:04:32.700 thumb was to take classes like that. And I remember roughly, I don't know, the fifth or the sixth

00:04:37.980 lecture was on this topic called comparative advantage. And as the teacher walked us through

00:04:44.240 it, I was just disgusted. And I thought, my God, this is the easiest topic in the entire world.

00:04:50.340 I have literally known about the concept of comparative advantage since I was five years old. I mean,

00:04:55.660 I understood it deeply in my soul. I didn't know the name, like he was putting a name on it.

00:04:59.140 And I remember at the time going through and actually thinking, this is such a travesty.

00:05:04.700 My parents are paying this much per lecture at Harvard. It was a big number for this total

00:05:09.760 drivel. Like this is just an insult. And as I was walking out of the room, my best friend at college

00:05:15.780 was in the same class and he walked out next to me and he said, oh my God, that lecture was crazy.

00:05:22.300 I said, I know, how could they teach us such drivel? He said, no, that was the most confusing thing I've

00:05:26.660 ever heard. I don't think I couldn't understand that in a million years. And I had this moment

00:05:30.580 of clarity where I said, wait a second, I actually think like an economist. And even though I've never

00:05:36.060 been interested in the topic, from that moment on, it became clearer and clearer to me that I was just

00:05:40.260 born thinking like an economist. And it's not advice I would give to other people. In general,

00:05:45.100 I don't think it's great advice to just do what you're good at. But I was so lazy and so

00:05:49.820 intellectually unmotivated that for me, it turned out not to be a bad path was just to say,

00:05:54.660 who cares what I'm interested in? Because I wasn't really that interested in anything.

00:05:58.100 Let's just go be an economist. And I didn't go willingly. I didn't. It took a long time for me

00:06:03.060 to be an academic economist. I graduated. I did management consulting. It was only my deep

00:06:08.920 disgust and hatred with management consulting, which in desperation, as I looked for any exit,

00:06:14.720 I thought, well, the only thing I can even think of to get out of here is to go get a PhD in economics,

00:06:18.200 which is what led me to get a PhD in economics. And if I had known what it meant to get a PhD in

00:06:24.340 economics, I never would have done it. It was only complete ignorance of what I was getting

00:06:28.060 myself into that led me down that path, which turned out to be a lucky path. I mean, things

00:06:32.280 could almost not have turned out better for me, but it was only a series of mistakes,

00:06:38.260 miscalculations, and ignorance that led me to this lucky place.

00:06:42.520 But Steve, there's got to be some challenge and pain and resilience that requires doing

00:06:47.980 everything you just described. So, okay, maybe econ 101 or whatever the course was,

00:06:52.580 was a breeze. But at some point, you're taking senior courses at Harvard in economics. Were they

00:06:58.920 challenging? Did you find them interesting? I mean, what was kind of going through your mind as

00:07:03.080 you're plotting your way through undergrad? I didn't ever intend to be an academic

00:07:09.880 economist. So I didn't approach it the way a normal, like someone who wants to be an academic

00:07:14.880 economist approached it, taking a bunch of math. So it turns out at the highest level,

00:07:19.040 economics is all about math. And I didn't take, I didn't take any math. I took exactly one math

00:07:24.040 class at Harvard. It was called Math 1A. It was because I got a two on the calculus AP exam and I

00:07:30.560 couldn't place out. And so it was really high school calculus. It was the lowest math class they

00:07:35.560 offered at Harvard. And I did do quite well in that class. It was essentially me and the football

00:07:40.120 team and the hockey team were the only people who placed into that. And I smoked those guys.

00:07:43.760 So I just had fun. And honestly, in college, I just had fun. And I liked the economics classes and

00:07:50.500 they were easy for me because the intuition, economic intuition has always come pretty easily,

00:07:55.520 especially in microeconomics, pretty easily. And the classes just weren't that hard. They didn't

00:08:00.400 require much math. I didn't know any math. And it was, I mean, college in general for me was just so

00:08:05.800 much fun. I had good friends and good times and it was easy and I had independence. And I just,

00:08:12.700 you know, for me, those were the best four years of my life and I didn't take school too seriously,

00:08:17.000 but I did well. So, you know, it was all, that was just a breeze. It was the shock of reality,

00:08:21.920 the real world. I had no idea how unfun the real world was going to be when I actually got into it,

00:08:26.820 but college was fun. That is so funny to hear you say that. I will forever maintain that college was

00:08:32.340 the worst four years of my life. And I hope I can say that now, meaning that there will be no four

00:08:37.120 year period that is still in front of me. That's going to be as bad as those four years were. But I,

00:08:40.920 I always enjoy hearing people talk about college being the best four years of their lives.

00:08:45.540 You mentioned microeconomics. Maybe now's as good a time as any to explain to people the difference

00:08:51.140 between micro and macroeconomics, because it is almost a disservice to talk about economics as

00:08:57.560 though it's one broad topic. Yeah, you're absolutely right in that. So let's start with

00:09:02.720 macroeconomics because that's what most people think of when they think of economics. They think about

00:09:06.360 inflation and banking, unemployment and economic growth. And those are really important fundamental

00:09:14.960 problems, but they are, they turn out to be incredibly hard problems because the degree of

00:09:20.480 complexity in the macroeconomy is almost infinite, right? So it's this complex system built up of

00:09:26.500 billions of individual actors and you've got companies, you've got them. Look, it's just a mess.

00:09:31.280 And it turns out, just making a long story very short, that we haven't made much headway in really

00:09:37.300 understanding it because we've, we've approached the profession with a kind of discipline, which says

00:09:42.180 every model of macroeconomics needs to start with foundations that are really rational in the base,

00:09:48.580 micro foundations. And it turns out, I think the problems are just too hard. And that approach in

00:09:52.000 the end isn't going to win. Okay. But what is microeconomics? Microeconomics is instead the study of

00:09:57.660 individual decision-making. So in a, in a world in which there's scarcity and there's competition,

00:10:02.160 how do I decide how to spend my income? How do I decide what job to do and how many hours of work

00:10:10.040 I want to do? How do firms decide what to make and where to locate and things like that? So these are

00:10:15.100 much smaller decisions. And for me, much more intuitive decisions. And they're able to be analyzed both

00:10:22.820 with the formal models of economics, which historically have been very heavily predicated

00:10:27.880 on rationality simply because it makes the math easy, along with the last 40 years of behavioral

00:10:32.940 economics, where we've introduced a lot more psychology and mistakes and a lot more freedom

00:10:37.640 into the models that we use. But anyway, really they're almost distinct micro and macroeconomics

00:10:43.880 because macro in the end is really complicated, not to make all my macro colleagues incredibly angry

00:10:50.920 with me, but very self-referential models because the problems are so hard that you need to abstract

00:10:55.740 so greatly to try to deal with the macro problems that I think we don't have a good handle on them.

00:11:01.540 So I've really steered clear of the macro problems to focus on the individual decision-making, which is

00:11:06.740 I think both in my own life, much more relevant, but also I got something to say because I have some

00:11:12.580 intuition for it. Is there a hierarchy within economics the way, you know, so in physics, you sort of

00:11:18.720 have sort of the theoretical physicists and the experimental physicists and Nobel prizes will

00:11:23.740 go back and forth between the two of those. How does that work in economics? Do a disproportionate

00:11:28.640 amount of Nobel prizes or whatever the highest, I mean, I guess the Nobel, it's not technically a

00:11:33.400 prize, but it's close enough. When you look at the highest levels of excellence and awards that are

00:11:39.160 given in the entire field, do they disproportionately lie on one side of those or the other?

00:11:43.540 So historically, economics has been an entirely theoretical discipline. So the highest status

00:11:50.460 positions historically have been in theory, where I make the distinction between theory and the analysis

00:11:56.820 of data and econometrics and actually trying to take messy data and make sense of it. With the data

00:12:04.080 revolution and the emergence of econometrics, I think I switch in the profession. So there are two big

00:12:10.920 prizes in economics. There's a Nobel Prize. And then there's something called the John Bates Clark

00:12:14.920 Medal, which is given to the most influential economist under the age of 40, American economist.

00:12:20.540 You've won that prize.

00:12:21.500 I did win that. Yeah. And so that more reflects what's going on in the present time. And so those

00:12:28.260 prizes, the Clark Medal has mostly gone in the last 20 or 30 years, not always, but often to people at

00:12:36.420 the intersection of theory and data, which I think really is where the action is in economics. It's

00:12:43.160 people who can make sense of data, but are looking at it through a lens of economics and pushing economic

00:12:49.900 thinking in that way. I don't know if anyone cares about this, but economics is really at a crossroads

00:12:54.960 because it turned out when data analysis really started to emerge and we could start to say things

00:13:01.360 about causality in ways we couldn't before. The empirical part of economics really took off,

00:13:09.020 but all of the easy stuff has been done. And so we've kind of estimated most of the parameters that

00:13:15.240 we care about. And so the question is what comes next? And what's happening in economics is that the

00:13:21.280 push has been in the direction of, okay, it's not enough to just estimate what's happened in the

00:13:28.280 world in the past. That's really what empirical economics is really good at is saying, I can

00:13:33.060 look at what's happened in the past, I can estimate a number, and then I can build models to try and say

00:13:37.340 why. Now the task has become greater, which is to say, I don't just want to understand the past.

00:13:43.460 I want to be able to build a model that has the flexibility to tell me what would have happened

00:13:49.100 if instead of the US being a democracy, we were a dictatorship. Okay, so things that are so far

00:13:56.000 out of the realm of what actually happened, that it's almost like science fiction. And so what

00:14:01.280 economists do now is they're asked not just to estimate parameters really well, but to embed

00:14:06.220 those parameters into models, which then have enough degrees of freedom that you can start to imagine if

00:14:11.660 I turn this dial to that dial, what would happen? And I actually personally think that's a terrible

00:14:16.780 direction, because I think what has made economics great is that it's easy to understand the estimates we

00:14:24.680 create. And you can say whether you like them or not based on fact or the approach or whatever.

00:14:30.620 But I think when we get into these more fanciful models, I think we're going to end up running into

00:14:36.400 a huge dead end is that is that they're really too complicated to be estimated well. And so we're

00:14:42.560 just going to get into fantasy land of creating things that are really not grounded in fact. So

00:14:48.540 there's a famous physicist, and it's been attributed to so many that I actually don't know who

00:14:52.760 really said it. But the spirit of the quote is, all models are wrong, some are useful. And I feel

00:14:58.480 like economics is certainly a discipline in which that applies and suffers greatly. Even something

00:15:05.760 that I think was much simpler to try to understand was the extent to which coronavirus was going to be

00:15:11.220 a problem. I mean, those initial models were out to lunch. I don't fault the people who tried to put

00:15:18.580 those models together, the epidemiologists who worked on these models. But the sensitivity

00:15:23.180 around so many variables was so great that you couldn't even begin to extrapolate. And when you

00:15:30.520 did, the only thing I think the models helped you understand was how impossible it would be to predict

00:15:35.600 what was going on. And if nothing else, it was going to show you what parameters mattered.

00:15:40.220 But that was about the extent of what you could extract from that, which was the rate at which this

00:15:44.780 thing spreads and the length of time that it can lay dormant, those things are going to matter a lot.

00:15:50.380 And by the way, what we should have taken from that is earlier and more aggressive testing was a

00:15:55.380 better solution, as opposed to trying to pontificate or estimate whether 60 million Americans were going

00:16:01.160 to get it and 5 million were going to die versus 1 million were going to die. I mean, that was sort of

00:16:05.700 the wrong thing to be thinking about. But again, all of that's easy in hindsight. But I hear you in

00:16:10.340 terms of how that could be frustrating in this profession. Yeah. I mean, I have a very strong

00:16:16.220 view about the relationship between data and theory. And my view is that the sensible way to do things

00:16:24.960 is to make a really sharp distinction between the two, that we should really understand. You go to the

00:16:31.660 data and you just understand what the 3, 5, 9, 12 facts are. And in my view is that those

00:16:39.620 12 facts should be things that if any reasonable person looked at the data, you'd more or less

00:16:45.460 agree on those facts. And to just establish that that is the role of data analysis is to understand

00:16:50.720 those facts. And obviously, you want to get it in the direction of causality and whatnot. But you

00:16:55.840 never do that with the data alone. The data alone are never enough except in a randomized experiment to

00:16:59.920 tell you about causality. And rarely in economics do we get to do randomized experiments.

00:17:03.860 And then I think if you can all agree on the facts, then I'm all in favor of models going forward.

00:17:10.920 Because if I write down a model that is built off of the 12 facts I see, it turns out it's really easy

00:17:18.140 the kind of models that economists write down for other economists to say, OK, I understand whether

00:17:23.600 that's a good model or bad model, what it's sensitive to and whatnot. And if you make this bifurcation

00:17:28.260 between understanding the facts and then going into what those facts imply, because we really care

00:17:34.740 not about the facts themselves, but we care about the implications of those facts for the future or

00:17:38.640 what they tell us about causality or whatnot. I think it's a really powerful model. It's not the

00:17:43.340 model that we use in economics. And it's definitely not the model we use, say, in journalism, that it's

00:17:49.060 often incredibly hard or in debate. So it's often incredibly hard when a debate is going on

00:17:53.820 to understand, are these people disagreeing about the facts or are they disagreeing about the

00:17:58.920 implication of the facts? And so like if I had my dream about how we would do journalism,

00:18:04.100 every newspaper article would basically have a separate little feature that just said,

00:18:08.840 these are the five facts on which I am writing this article. And then it would be easy for me,

00:18:16.040 say, if it's an area I'm expert in, to say, oh, well, those facts don't make any sense or for a fact

00:18:19.920 check or different facts from them. Or in a debate to say, hey, before we debate, I would like each of

00:18:24.640 the participants to lay out the 10 facts that they believe to be true and see if they disagree with

00:18:30.200 each other's facts. If they disagree about facts, then we're in a very different situation than if

00:18:34.240 we disagree about the implications of those facts. And somehow I think that's gotten a lot like that

00:18:38.860 distinction. I've never really heard anyone talk about it except for me, because I'm probably it's

00:18:43.100 not important, but it strikes me as being really, really important.

00:18:45.820 Let's use an example of that where I think you and Dubner have got into some crosshairs of people

00:18:54.300 is around climate change. I mean, you wrote about this, God, has it been 10 years ago now? I've lost

00:18:59.800 track. Was it Super Freakonomics or? Yeah, Super Freakonomics. So I think it's been about 10 years.

00:19:05.440 Let's start with some facts. What did you actually write? Because I think that's been very

00:19:09.680 misconstrued over time. Yeah. Okay. So one thing you can never trust is for people to tell you the truth

00:19:15.300 about what they've done in the past. Number one, because they're going to lie. But number two,

00:19:18.400 they don't even like, I don't really know what I've written. I haven't looked back at that book

00:19:21.840 in a long time either. But here's what I think we wrote. We basically wrote that at that time,

00:19:27.580 there was evidence that the planet was getting warmer, but certainly it was not completely open

00:19:33.280 and shut. And we said, but look, we're not scientists. And what we thought was that the people

00:19:40.820 talking about climate change were asking the wrong question, right? What people talking about climate

00:19:45.240 change were saying is, how do we reduce the amount of carbon we put in the air? Which actually wasn't

00:19:50.960 the right question. The real right question was, the planet is too hot. We're not happy about the

00:19:56.360 planet getting hotter. What is the best way to cool down the planet? To me, that was really the right

00:20:01.940 question. And like the example I give is, I have a lot of babies. I have six kids. So the kids,

00:20:07.580 they poop all the time, okay? And it's a problem, okay? And because if they poop on the floor all

00:20:14.780 day long, it's a real problem, okay? So you could say, well, to solve that problem, let's figure out

00:20:20.340 how to keep kids from pooping or how to stuff the poop back in the kid or whatever. It's like,

00:20:24.760 but the answer is like, how do you get the poop so it doesn't go on the ground? Well, it's a diaper,

00:20:28.260 okay? And it's like a very different answer than if you get worried about like, well, poop shouldn't

00:20:31.680 exist. So I think the same with carbon. Look, carbon's coming out and you don't necessarily have to

00:20:36.220 stuff the carbon back in. You can find another way to cool the planet. Starting from that premise,

00:20:40.560 we then talked to real scientists who knew something who were working on what's called

00:20:45.240 geoengineering. So these are ways to try to cool the planet, okay? And look, they're not perfect in

00:20:50.840 all sorts of ways, but these really smart guys have come up with a lot of clever plans that we

00:20:56.120 might potentially be able to cool the planet. So things like putting sulfur dioxide into the

00:21:00.760 stratosphere. Turns out super cheaply, couple hundred million dollars a year, we could put

00:21:06.000 sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere. It mimics, but in a much more efficient way,

00:21:10.720 what big volcanic eruptions like Mount Pinatubo have done. And that could cool the planet.

00:21:16.980 The best idea I think that was out there was it turns out that certain kinds of clouds that have

00:21:22.240 the right kind of reflectivity and the right level can actually reflect a bunch of sunlight back and

00:21:27.300 oceans are really dark. So they absorb lots of heat. Clouds are really light. They reflect a lot of

00:21:32.180 heat. So a scientist had come up with a plan, never been tested even in the 10 years since we did it,

00:21:37.140 where a bunch of solar powered dinghies would troll around in the ocean, controlled by GPS,

00:21:42.940 throwing up salt from the water, which then seats the clouds, which then leads to a bunch of clouds

00:21:47.500 over the ocean, which his claim, their claim from simulations is that that would be enough.

00:21:52.600 10,000 of those dinghies would be enough to offset all of climate change, global warming. Look, all

00:21:57.260 these are probably short-term solutions relative to a real solution, a scientific solution or

00:22:02.780 behavioral solution to try and deal with climate change. So that's what we wrote about. And

00:22:07.180 admittedly, in retrospect, I regret that we wrote about it in such a lighthearted way. I didn't realize

00:22:13.020 that environmentalists had no sense of humor. And so you couldn't like poke fun at mistakes they'd

00:22:18.760 made in the past. And so we really aggravated a lot of people. But what we did was we unleashed

00:22:24.800 this incredible machinery. There was a whole machinery around the environmental movement,

00:22:32.640 which basically decided we were public enemy number one, and then set out to destroy us,

00:22:39.500 not really worried about what we actually said or whether we were right. I mean, I do think 10 years

00:22:45.600 later, almost everyone now thinks that geoengineering is likely to be part of the solution.

00:22:52.180 It was interesting. One of the magazines, I think it was the Atlantic Monthly, basically wrote

00:22:56.040 an article about us saying that we were the most evil, stupid morons who've ever existed in the history

00:23:02.560 of the planet. Four years later, the same magazine wrote essentially our chapter in our book with the

00:23:11.080 exact same examples we had used, with no citation at all of the fact we had written about it,

00:23:15.180 saying how geoengineering was going to be part of the future. So I think it's good not to worry about

00:23:19.620 whether you're right or you get credit for it. I think you just have to be happy that the movement,

00:23:24.540 although way too slow, has been in the right direction. I think for what's inevitable is that

00:23:28.820 the problem of climate change is one which will not, I claim, ever be solved by behavior change,

00:23:36.700 because it's all about what economists call externalities, that my own behavior has almost no

00:23:42.240 effect on me and a negative effect on the rest of the world. And I would say there's never in the

00:23:48.560 history of mankind been a problem that is fundamentally about externalities, which has

00:23:54.260 been solved by telling people, you should just do the right thing and hoping that suddenly everyone's

00:23:58.980 just going to start doing the right thing. Just literally has never happened. I don't see any

00:24:02.720 reason to think it's going to start now. Yeah, that's interesting. Can you think of any examples

00:24:06.880 where humans behave in that way? Where they do the right thing to help other people?

00:24:11.760 Yes, even if it inconveniences them. Are there any? I mean, there are social norms on the roads.

00:24:19.440 People don't really cut in line very much, a little bit, but I don't think it's because-

00:24:24.720 But is that also because there's direct feedback?

00:24:27.200 Exactly, because people yell at you because it's uncomfortable. But there's very few things

00:24:32.720 where we have private benefit. And look, little things we do around the edges, and certainly we

00:24:38.460 do it for family members and whatnot. But honestly, if you look at every big problem that's been solved

00:24:44.700 for mankind, I challenge you to find one that wasn't solved by technology. And it goes from everything

00:24:50.820 from disease. You know much more about this than me. But if you think about the health benefits that

00:24:56.500 have come from behavior change versus technology, invention, discovery, like I got to believe,

00:25:03.800 you know, smoking being maybe the one example where in the face of overwhelming evidence,

00:25:09.640 it still took, what, 40 years for people to cut down on smoking and still a lot of people smoke.

00:25:16.520 Well, and I would argue that it wasn't really due to just a straight,

00:25:20.240 it wasn't the knowledge that tobacco killed that actually led to the reduction. In fact,

00:25:26.180 if you look at the timeline of this, it's an interesting case study in behavior change. So

00:25:30.360 I think the Surgeon General's report on smoking, which was the first really unambiguous declaration

00:25:37.200 that smoking killed, it had been suspected in the 40s and 50s. But it wasn't until I want to say about

00:25:42.980 65-ish that you couldn't argue it anymore. I mean, we're talking hazard ratios of 14X, right? Like

00:25:52.280 there's nothing in biology that produces a hazard ratio of 14X outside of parachuting without

00:25:58.140 parachutes, that this is going to be, this is going to end in a bad way. And if there was really

00:26:04.460 no change in tobacco use after that for five, six more years, the first real dent in tobacco use

00:26:13.560 came with advertising. When a law was passed that said you couldn't advertise, a tobacco company

00:26:19.540 couldn't advertise tobacco unless the commercial was juxtaposed with an anti-tobacco ad. And it

00:26:25.420 turned out the anti-tobacco ads were so successful that the tobacco companies voluntarily stopped

00:26:31.100 advertising. And that was the first step in the reduction of tobacco. And then of course,

00:26:36.540 you threw in other things, which was laws that said, hey, you can't have tobacco sitting at the

00:26:40.460 counter. It has to be way behind. And obviously then you had excise taxes that were imposed and then

00:26:45.900 you had other environmental things. You can't smoke on airplanes. And so you could even make

00:26:49.880 the case that the reduction in smoking has been less about behavior change and more about a change

00:26:54.640 in the default environment around it, which just speaks more to your point. Yeah, no, I think that's

00:26:59.460 true. And I think also what's changed in the end is it used to be cool to smoke. And now look,

00:27:05.780 if you smoke, people think you're crazy, right? It's like, so, I mean, I think that those social norms,

00:27:11.240 again, speaking to your point, the costs and the benefits of smoking have changed dramatically.

00:27:16.720 And if anything, it's surprising how little behavior change has followed that as opposed to

00:27:21.460 how much. I mean, look at, I mean, again, we're in your territory and not mine, but look at diabetes

00:27:26.280 and how little behavior change has been in response to diabetes. It's surprising in many ways.

00:27:33.180 Let's go back to this climate change issue because again, it's very interesting. And it's one of those

00:27:38.800 things I think like nutrition where there's a very gray area between true scientific expertise and

00:27:46.640 propaganda. What is it about the use of science as a propaganda? I mean, frankly, I think in fact,

00:27:54.780 I think I'm somewhat sympathetic to people who are kind of losing faith in the scientific process a

00:28:00.940 little bit. I'm talking lay people, people who have never studied science, but who are sort of sick

00:28:06.060 and tired of hearing scientists stand up on TV and say something. And they're a little bit skeptical.

00:28:12.820 And so if you're sort of an elitist, you look at them and you say, well, they're morons. How can they

00:28:17.380 not believe in science? But the reality of it is they've kind of been a bit misled, haven't they?

00:28:22.480 And you look at the using science as kind of a weapon, I guess, has become a bit problematic, right?

00:28:29.000 I'm more favorable towards climate science than I used to be. So climate science suffers from the exact

00:28:34.480 same thing that macroeconomics does, which is that there's observations, but really much of it is

00:28:39.680 based on these models. And the models can't possibly have the kind of specificity because

00:28:44.620 it's such a complex system to understand. So like most of the leading models at the time we were

00:28:49.160 looking at it had carbon dioxide, but nothing about water vapor. And it turns out that many people

00:28:54.660 think water vapor is more important than the interaction between carbon dioxide and water vapor

00:28:58.740 would be more important than anything. But the model is just like computing power and the complexity

00:29:02.200 was too much. But I give some credit to, look, there's a part of climate science which is focused

00:29:07.840 on measurement, measuring the temperature of the oceans, the rising of the oceans. And I think that's

00:29:12.580 been done well. Now, what you're talking about, though, is that there's such a blurring of the line

00:29:18.240 between the job of measuring climate change and advocating on TV or in the newspapers for what that

00:29:28.160 means for public policy. And those are very different tasks. And I think as a scientist, you want to be

00:29:37.060 very careful about moving from one role to the other. And I think what climate science, as an observer,

00:29:44.440 a pretty close observer, has done a very poor job on is helping people, lay people, understand

00:29:50.840 when one is an advocacy role versus when one is in a scientific role. And the same people have played

00:29:57.060 both roles. And I think really, it's an unusual branch of science, because the people who go into

00:30:02.160 climate science, almost always share this view that the climate's really important, and we should

00:30:08.140 protect it. And we should be doing things not to have climate change, which is different, I think,

00:30:13.680 from, say, physics, where physicists don't have an inherent belief about whether the universe should

00:30:21.340 be expanding or contracting or whether a particular particle should or should not exist. It's just like

00:30:27.960 that's a different thing. And the other thing I think which has been completely unrealistic and

00:30:33.880 really problematic for climate science is that they don't think about economics enough, and they don't

00:30:39.380 think about the reality of human behavior and how difficult it will be to have behavior change.

00:30:43.680 And they don't think well about the costs of changing our economy. So the costs of going to

00:30:52.720 a zero car, a net carbon world are really, really big. And we pay those costs right away. And I'm not

00:31:01.680 saying that we shouldn't necessarily try to do that. It might actually be a good idea to do it. But to

00:31:05.980 ignore the fact that it's an incredibly expensive solution that's being offered, I think, has been part of

00:31:13.060 the problem because it's been a mix of ignoring that or at the same time saying, look, those costs are

00:31:21.580 good because we're immoral. Humans are awful. Humans are ruining the planet. And we should suffer for the

00:31:28.340 fact. We should have an enormous contraction in the economy. Like Al Gore was upset that there were way

00:31:34.060 too many kinds of cereal being sold in the grocery store. That's sinful that there are so many choices

00:31:40.160 about cereal. But it's like a weird religious thing about we should suffer. And again, I think

00:31:45.800 that doesn't work well to people who maybe aren't convinced or who don't want to suffer. So honestly,

00:31:51.940 I think if I were able to do one thing in the world, and I tried to do it and I failed at it,

00:31:57.920 it would be to have a sensible approach to figuring out whether there is a cheap solution to climate

00:32:06.500 change. Because right now, all we're talking about are incredibly expensive ones, like complete

00:32:12.280 rethinking of capitalism, da-da-da-da-da-da. And I don't think that the capitalist structure has worked

00:32:18.760 well on trying to solve the problem of if it were up to me, if I were president, the first thing I would

00:32:24.160 do is I would have what I call a Manhattan Project for Climate Change. And I would try to convince

00:32:32.280 the 1,000 smartest scientists in the world to stop whatever they're doing and to work on climate

00:32:39.340 change and to put them in a place like Los Alamos and to give them resources. Because it's a hard

00:32:45.720 problem and it's an interdisciplinary problem. And to say, look, for five years, let's just work and

00:32:51.000 let's figure out whether or not there's going to be a great way to do carbon sequestration or to do

00:32:56.980 something, you know, I don't know, something out of the box to do it. Either I think we'll get a

00:33:01.220 solution in five years or we'll figure out, oh, crap, this is never going to work. Like we have

00:33:05.880 no way out of this other than stopping to produce carbon or living in the world. Look, and that's

00:33:11.760 important information to know, because if I knew that the only way out of this was we're going to

00:33:17.480 have to live with the carbon we put in there, then the willingness of public policy to impose enormous

00:33:23.920 costs on carbon producing behavior should go way up. But I kind of doubt that's true. I have a lot

00:33:29.140 of faith in science. I think if we had the best 1000 scientists within five years, we would come

00:33:33.800 up with a reasonably cost effective way to deal with carbon. We'd pull it out of the air in some

00:33:39.060 way, shape or form. And we'd kind of like have the thing solved or we'd know we're never going to solve

00:33:45.340 it. And those are two important things to know. I don't disagree with you, Steve. I think where I'm

00:33:49.420 a little less optimistic than you and I love the idea of a Manhattan project for this. I'd back up one

00:33:55.180 step and reiterate what you said earlier, because I think it's so important. I phrase it in a somewhat

00:33:59.380 different way. But I like how you you discussed it, which is we confuse the objective, the strategy

00:34:04.900 and the tactics all day long. I mean, that that to me is like, if we were going to list the 10 human

00:34:10.420 failures, just as a species, it's that we are not wired to differentiate between objectives, strategies

00:34:15.880 and tactics. That's why 10 years ago, you were getting lambasted for talking about geoengineering,

00:34:22.300 which is a tactic, because the only tactic that was being discussed was the reduction of carbon.

00:34:28.600 And you were saying, well, wait a minute, we've lost sight of the objective. The objective is to

00:34:32.360 slow warming and warming is a much bigger problem than just how much carbon is in the atmosphere

00:34:37.460 that also deals with insulation. So let's look at different tactics, right? Okay. So notwithstanding

00:34:44.160 that problem, I think my biggest fear, Steve, is there's no question that in five years,

00:34:50.260 a well staffed, well resourced team could come up with what solutions might look like. I just don't

00:34:57.880 know that it could ever be implemented from a policy perspective. I mean, for example, I don't think

00:35:03.920 anybody who's really studied energy seriously disagrees that nuclear energy, next gen, not I'm not talking

00:35:12.580 about like the nuclear reactors of 70 years ago. I don't think there's anybody who doesn't think that

00:35:17.400 next gen nuclear would play an important role in electricity generation, but it's just not a

00:35:24.460 politically palatable solution. I don't know where geoengineering falls on that spectrum either for

00:35:30.080 that matter. So that would be my fear is you'd come up with solutions, but then you'd still be at

00:35:35.240 kind of a gridlock in the implementation of these things.

00:35:39.060 Yeah. So that is a good point. And that is possible. I do think, however, that even in that

00:35:47.620 world, there is a real insurance value in this investment now. So we might not be able to come

00:35:55.720 up with a sensible policy now, but if in 20 years, all of a sudden the ice shelf on Greenland just like

00:36:02.960 begins to slide into the ocean and things are desperate. My prediction is we will do something

00:36:08.940 like my Manhattan Project for climate change. The question is, when will we do it? Will we do it

00:36:14.520 as we're staring down catastrophe or will we do it in advance and potentially either avoid catastrophe or

00:36:22.060 at least get five years earlier? I mean, not that different than COVID, right? So for my podcast,

00:36:27.300 I interviewed Monsif Slaoui and six or seven years ago, he proposed, well, why don't we have

00:36:32.920 in the bank a vaccine for like everything we'd ever want, but not make very much of it, just like have

00:36:39.800 a little bit around so we know how to do it. And we have, and like, look, and everyone laughed at him

00:36:43.580 and said, how can you, how can you suggest that? That would cost $500 million. We can't waste $500

00:36:50.160 million. And then you come to a world where the US government is bleeding $6 billion a day in

00:36:58.400 deficits. And that would have been like literally the best investment of all time, probably if we

00:37:02.760 had done it. So I think that kind of insurance policy, I think would be valuable even in a world

00:37:08.040 of gridlock and poor policymaking that we live in today. I agree completely. Because the one thing

00:37:12.600 that I think we haven't stated here, but I think we both agree on is this is such an asymmetric risk

00:37:19.120 that it has to be taken seriously. And that's probably the thing that bothers me the most about

00:37:24.960 the other argument, you know, the people on the other side of the argument that say, well,

00:37:29.300 we don't have enough certainty. Therefore we shouldn't, you know, it should be status quo

00:37:33.420 business as usual, ignore this. And it's true. I think the uncertainty, the error bars on these

00:37:38.540 projections are bigger than people lead us to believe, but it's so asymmetric. It's so nonlinear

00:37:45.300 if this goes wrong that you have to take that seriously. There are very few things in economics

00:37:50.160 that shocked me, but something that shocked me was an analysis done a long time ago, 10 years ago and

00:37:56.600 more, where an economist, and I'm embarrassed that I can't remember exactly who it was, just worked

00:38:04.240 through the kinds of utility functions. So the basic models that economists use and said, in a world in

00:38:10.260 which bad things happen, how much are you willing to pay to avoid bad things? And it is, it is

00:38:15.420 completely shocking. So I'm making these numbers up, but I think they're in the right ballpark. So

00:38:20.200 if you have something like a 1% chance of dying, like how much will you pay? How much would you pay

00:38:26.220 of your total wealth to avoid a 1% chance of dying today? Okay. And it turns out the answer isn't 1%.

00:38:32.480 It's more like 10 or 15%. And as it goes up to 5%, you're willing to pay like 50% of your wealth to

00:38:38.140 avoid it. Because once you die, you're like done. And so there's this like otherwise really long flow.

00:38:43.000 And it's very counterintuitive. It really caught me off guard. And it really changed my thinking

00:38:47.700 about the importance of dealing with climate change. Because I was kind of of the, look,

00:38:51.720 you know, climate change, it's all in the future. We discount the future. Why worry about it? But once

00:38:57.060 I saw that, it really changed my perspective on it. So I've come to think that this investment,

00:39:03.160 and the other thing to stress is that the cost of R&D is so low compared to the cost of disaster

00:39:12.240 and of implementation that to do the R&D is just a no brainer, right? So I think for a billion dollars

00:39:18.180 a year, my guess is you could fund this Manhattan Project for a billion dollars a year. This is like

00:39:22.560 the kind of money that actual philanthropists could do as opposed to even government having to do it.

00:39:26.740 Look, if you actually wanted to put whatever solution is discovered into practice,

00:39:30.260 it would probably be enormously expensive. But to figure out the answer is just like trivial.

00:39:36.280 And the same is true of COVID, like talking to people who did the vaccines. I think at Moderna,

00:39:41.760 it took them like a day or two to come up with the vaccine, you know, and all the costs are in the

00:39:46.220 testing and the production. But the actual R&D part is so cheap compared to everything else that

00:39:52.460 to not invest in it just seems like a real mistake, first order mistake to me.

00:39:56.860 I agree. I'm glad we got off on that tangent because I actually did want to talk about that

00:40:01.140 at some point that it came up kind of quick. But I want to now go back to the beginning of

00:40:06.440 the story, right? So you graduate from college, you go off to work in management consulting,

00:40:11.180 which if I remember, you described as only slightly less uncomfortable than a root canal

00:40:17.160 without Novocaine. It's so painful that it in fact exposes you to a PhD. So you go off to MIT.

00:40:24.400 So you basically just didn't leave Boston. You went from, you know, Harvard to consulting to MIT.

00:40:30.060 So you really have a penchant for these cold winters. And then what did you decide to study

00:40:34.360 in your PhD? Because now you actually, you got to get serious, right? You actually have to pick

00:40:37.600 a problem and work on it. So I have to say, I didn't like consulting, but I learned something

00:40:43.360 incredibly important in it. And I learned it from the guy who happened to have the cubicle next to me,

00:40:49.580 a guy named Jeff Thomas, who I'm still friends with. And he taught me how to look at the world

00:40:53.040 strategically. And it was weird. I never did that before. It never occurred to me to do it. But

00:40:56.860 then I got to grad school and I did have a fundamental understanding while everybody else

00:41:02.440 was really busy working on problem sets. And essentially these were all people who've gotten

00:41:06.400 straight A's their whole life. And they figured, well, what worked for me before, that's what I got

00:41:10.760 to keep on doing in grad school because that's how I'm going to get ahead. And I looked at it and

00:41:14.800 partly it helped that I knew no math and I was completely overmatched. And I was like the worst,

00:41:19.540 I'm not exaggerating when I say that my classmates sat down about a month into it. And my friend,

00:41:25.460 Austin Goolsbee, who's now gotten famous as part of the Obama administration, later told me that they

00:41:30.340 went through the list of people in the class and tried to decide who was least likely to succeed.

00:41:35.140 And I was a unanimous choice that I was going to be the worst one. But I had a great approach,

00:41:40.500 which is I understood that you had to create research. You had to go from being a consumer

00:41:45.320 of knowledge to a producer of knowledge. And I also was kind of still, I have to say,

00:41:51.100 I wasn't internally motivated. So what I did was I said, well, look, who's at the top of the

00:41:56.180 hierarchy? I might as well try to be that guy. And it turned out that that was macroeconomics

00:42:01.360 at MIT at the time. So for the first semester, I tried to be a macroeconomist. And it became so clear

00:42:08.880 to me so quickly that I was never going to be a macroeconomist because I always thought that nobody

00:42:13.720 had intuition for macroeconomics until I started talking to some of the people at MIT who actually

00:42:17.980 understood, oh, if the exchange rate between the euro and the dollar goes up, then that's going to

00:42:24.100 trickle through. And how is that going to affect immigration? Like, oh, my God, like it made no

00:42:27.900 sense to me. I was smart enough. I've always been smart enough to fail quickly. So I realized I

00:42:32.360 couldn't be a macroeconomist. The theorists were number two. And so I tried to be a theorist. And I

00:42:37.640 actually spent a little longer being a theorist. I actually wrote a couple of papers being a

00:42:40.580 theorist. And again, it became really clear to me that I didn't have what it took to be a theorist.

00:42:46.020 So then I said, well, kind of the only thing left is doing data analysis. And it turned out I should

00:42:51.460 have been smart enough to know that from the beginning because I was a weird kid. The only

00:42:55.620 thing I liked to do was sit in my room and essentially study data. Like, as I look back on it,

00:43:02.140 this is how weird I was. When I was maybe eight, I asked for and received a pocket calculator as my

00:43:09.200 my birthday present. And it was overjoyed. When I was maybe like nine, I graduated to a scientific

00:43:16.920 calculator. And my pastime was I was into baseball is I would go through and I would by manually typing

00:43:24.420 into a scientific calculator, I type in a column of of like wins for a team. And then one by one,

00:43:30.600 I would type in each of the statistics like the team batting average or the team number of triples

00:43:36.060 variables and compute the partial correlation between those two. And what my dad, when my dad

00:43:40.460 came home from work, he would ask me what the correlations were between the variables I computed

00:43:45.360 like that was how I spent my time. So it should have been obvious to me that's what I want to do.

00:43:49.740 And the other thing I did, I would use data to try and answer real problems. Like when I was in college,

00:43:53.600 I became obsessed with the racetrack and I would try to, you know, use data to win at the racetrack,

00:43:58.780 which wasn't very significant. But like I should have been obvious to me that I that I should have

00:44:02.260 gravitated to doing empirical research. But but I didn't because I was still caught up in this idea

00:44:06.380 of, well, of a status. So finally, I just said, look, I'll do what I'm good at. But honestly, I was

00:44:11.420 so far behind the people around me. It was an interesting experience. It's kind of a sideline,

00:44:17.840 but it's interesting. I've been used to being really good at most of the things I did and

00:44:23.140 academically. And it happens for almost everyone where you get to a point where you look around and

00:44:28.300 you realize you were the dumbest person in the room and how you deal with that is really important.

00:44:33.960 And strangely, I don't know why that was roughly the greatest feeling I've ever had in my life.

00:44:38.860 When I looked around and I was the dumbest person in the room, it was just sense of joy. It was really

00:44:44.120 interesting. Somehow, I think maybe I had felt pressure my whole life. Once I was the dumbest person

00:44:49.000 in the room, I felt like, wow, I can do whatever I want. Like I don't you know, I can. It's just it

00:44:55.540 was such a joy to be around such talented people. And it freed me up to be myself. And instead of

00:45:01.940 always trying to follow the crowd, I started doing what I liked. And what I thought, well,

00:45:06.180 what do I like? And I said, well, I don't know. I like watching the TV show Cops. I love to show

00:45:11.460 Cops. I watch it every day. Like, well, why don't I do research on it? And so I somehow like found myself

00:45:17.100 and I began just studying the things I liked. And much to my amazement, even though no other

00:45:24.160 economists were really studying those questions. I really thought it was a it was a one way ticket

00:45:29.060 to getting a PhD and then doing something outside of academics. Because, you know, why would it be

00:45:35.180 the case that if these were topics no one else researched, they'd be interested in it. But I

00:45:40.260 didn't you know, I knew I couldn't compete on a level footing with these amazing people around me.

00:45:44.520 So I had to compete on like in my own space. And in my shock, people liked it, you know, and they

00:45:49.540 were excited about it got published in good journals. I honestly I look back and I say I'm

00:45:53.880 so lucky to have been so far below the bar that I didn't try to do what I think most people do and

00:46:00.980 what I had a tendency to do, which was to try to figure out what I should be because that's what

00:46:04.420 other people are. And I just was myself and it was such a great lesson. And I've really practiced

00:46:08.400 being myself ever since. Look, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But the great thing

00:46:13.040 about life is when things don't work, you can take a different path. And so so I just try to be

00:46:17.520 myself and and I stopped doing stuff when being myself isn't a good recipe for it.

00:46:22.640 So when you got to Chicago, that must have been another difficult decision because Chicago is a

00:46:27.360 powerhouse in economics, right? You could have taken your sort of offbeat approach to economics and

00:46:33.560 gone someplace that is where you're not going to be surrounded by a bunch of Nobel laureates. So why

00:46:40.120 did you I mean, were you so secure in your off the beaten path approach that you said, hey, I might as

00:46:46.480 well go to another cold winter city and be around smart people, but I but not have to compete with

00:46:51.900 them. I mean that what was the decision like there? I had a lot of choices and I loved Cambridge and I'd

00:46:58.680 been at Harvard and MIT and and I really what had happened is I'd given a couple of presentations at

00:47:04.980 Chicago. And I had been shocked at how different the questions I got were. And I really went to

00:47:13.020 Chicago because I wanted to get to know the enemy at that time. So Gary Becker is one of the most

00:47:19.600 influential economists of the last 50 years and he's since passed away, but was a real mentor to me.

00:47:24.900 He was demonized. I mean, when I first met him, I expected him to be a monster and it turned out,

00:47:29.480 well, he wasn't. He was super smart and he asked great questions. And and so I very self-consciously

00:47:35.300 said, I'm going to go to Chicago and I'm going to get to know the enemy from the inside for a couple

00:47:41.400 years before I go back to Harvard. And what I hadn't anticipated is that the thinking that goes on

00:47:47.500 at Chicago, it looks like it's really simple. It looks like one could learn it. I thought, look,

00:47:53.480 I'm good at economics. I can learn this. But I tell you, even 25 years later, I'm still not very good

00:48:00.560 at the kind of deep thinking that is done in Chicago economics. And I love it. And I think

00:48:06.560 it's powerful. But I'm still more of a spectator than an actual do of it. I really got co-opted into

00:48:12.860 the spirit of Chicago. But in some sense, I will say that I've always been probably unreasonably

00:48:20.580 overly confident in in my own ability. And and I was very I was at ease like I was going to do what

00:48:29.560 I was going to do. And I thought I could do a better Chicago than anywhere else. But I will say

00:48:34.200 it was it was unusual. So at that time, I think it must have been seven or 10 years since someone

00:48:41.980 who had a lot of options had chosen to go to Chicago economics over another place, including the

00:48:48.040 Chicago Business School, which was really getting most of the talent. And one of my advisors, so I

00:48:52.760 told one of my advisors at Harvard, I was going to go to Chicago. And he said, if you do that, I will

00:49:00.540 never speak to you again. And I said, why? And he said, because if you do that, it shows that you are

00:49:07.180 so effing stupid that you're not worth me wasting my breath. And it was interesting. That was how weird

00:49:13.360 it was to do that decision. But I did it. And he was happy to talk with me, you know, never stopped

00:49:18.000 talking to me. And I think he would agree. I probably did the right thing. It's funny now,

00:49:22.360 because it used to be there were these enormous differences between departments. Now, I think

00:49:26.460 they're all kind of the same Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton. I mean, there are yeah,

00:49:29.960 there are like all these great departments. We've all like blurred the lines together, not so

00:49:34.440 different. But I you know, but but at the time, there really was a distinctive personality

00:49:39.880 personality that for me was really, you know, really special. I'm so glad I did it. And I think

00:49:44.560 it's I've been a huge beneficiary of it. Do you think the field is better that the elite 10 programs

00:49:53.160 have become more homogeneous? Or do you think it did more for the field when you had these very

00:49:58.740 distinctive schools of thinking and Stanford had its way of doing it and Chicago had its way and Harvard

00:50:03.540 had its way? Such a hard question. I remember maybe five or 10 years into my coming to Chicago,

00:50:13.680 Milton Friedman came back and he was bemoaning the fact not just that Chicago was becoming more like

00:50:21.520 other places, but really that what was distinctive about Chicago, what's called Chicago price theory,

00:50:25.900 was basically dying out and how awful that was. And one of my colleagues, super smart colleagues,

00:50:31.700 Casey Mulligan said, Milton, I thought you believed in markets. Sounds to me like like pressure is

00:50:37.960 losing. And I thought, wow, that is exactly right. And even Milton Friedman in the end didn't really

00:50:43.460 believe in markets when markets moved against him. It sort of used to be that way in medicine,

00:50:47.860 right? There was a very clear line between East Coast medicine and West Coast medicine. And there was a

00:50:55.720 very different way cardiac surgery was done in Minnesota versus Stanford versus Boston. I mean,

00:51:03.120 those were so different and they produced remarkable innovations.

00:51:08.460 I think you're right. Like, I think these diversity of approaches are useful because number one,

00:51:13.780 there's data, right? It's like, let's especially take more something like cardiac surgery where you

00:51:18.280 get real data. Look, you know whether people are living or dying. And so you actually can figure out

00:51:23.040 whether one is better than the other. So in that world, for sure, I think this diversity of views

00:51:27.800 is really, really important. Now you might say, look, it doesn't have to be across departments.

00:51:32.220 It can be within department, right? You have one brilliant surgeon innovating in this way or that

00:51:35.940 way. But I do think in general that it's diversity of views is good. And it's especially good

00:51:41.960 in a dynamic world, right? Because in a world that's static, it's kind of like doesn't matter as much.

00:51:48.120 But when something radical happens, then often one model is much better situated than the other

00:51:55.320 to deal with whatever this radical occurrence happens, some new disease or some, I don't know,

00:52:00.420 maybe radical things tend not to happen so much in medicine. But, you know, sometimes radical things

00:52:04.860 happen in the economy. Again, I don't know how interested your listeners are in macroeconomics,

00:52:09.940 but I think macroeconomics is a case where it's Chicago style macro, more or less one.

00:52:15.000 And so all of the world of macro now looks a lot like what was going on in Chicago

00:52:19.740 40 years ago. And I think that's been a problem because I think there isn't this diversity of

00:52:27.140 thinking that puts you maybe in a better situation as different kinds of macroeconomic problems arise

00:52:34.020 to have a range of possible approaches and solutions to it. So I think it probably would be

00:52:41.500 better if there were greater differences between the departments. But it's one of these things

00:52:47.700 where like the facts of life are that it's impossible to maintain that equilibrium because

00:52:52.480 there are all sorts of private forces that are pushing for this homogeneity that like there's no

00:52:59.460 easy way to fight it in some sense. And so even though you wish it would happen, it's hard to see how

00:53:04.080 to make it happen.

00:53:05.560 Let's go on to talk a little bit about a colleague of yours outside of the world of economics,

00:53:09.660 Steve Dubner. How did you guys meet?

00:53:11.980 Dubner approached me to write an article about me for the New York Times. This is

00:53:16.920 after I'd won the Clark Medal, but well before Freakonomics. And I really was incredibly hesitant

00:53:24.600 to accept the invitation because I just didn't, I didn't really like to be written about. There was

00:53:29.360 no, I didn't have anything to sell. So I didn't really, I wasn't in the business of trying to market

00:53:33.640 myself. And in the end, I have this, my mom though, really likes it when I'm in the newspaper and on TV

00:53:40.160 and stuff. And so I really remember thinking, oh God, I'll take this hit from my mom because it'll

00:53:44.540 make my mom so happy if there's a piece about me in the New York Times magazine. And then Dubner came

00:53:49.500 out and it was unlike any experience I'd ever had with a journalist. I honestly think he had read

00:53:56.380 every academic paper I'd ever read. I mean, I'm talking about like 50 papers.

00:54:00.460 And he came out and he ended up interviewing me for, I don't think I'm exaggerating if I say maybe 25

00:54:07.980 hours over three days. And there was never a silence. So I would, he would ask me a question. I would

00:54:16.160 answer it. And as soon as I answered it, he would ask me another question. And this went on for 25

00:54:21.440 hours. And it was unbelievably painful to me because it's like, it was the last thing I wanted to do.

00:54:25.900 And I thought he was going to say for three hours, not 25. And one of the notable things about it is

00:54:31.240 that I literally did not ask him a question for the first 24 and a half hours. And I only thought

00:54:38.840 of him as like this parasite that was like sucking the life out of me. And after 24 and a half hours,

00:54:45.100 I actually had the thought to say, well, like, who have you written about before? And he started

00:54:49.960 telling me these fantastic stories. He was the only guy who had been able to interview the Unabomber.

00:54:54.380 And he had been in a rock band, like, and he was really interesting. And I learned something there,

00:54:59.180 which is like, especially when you're tired of being asked questions, ask the questions yourself.

00:55:03.820 It's almost always more interesting to ask questions than to answer them. But still we parted. And I

00:55:08.860 would have said I would never see that guy again. I mean, we were not friendly in any way. There was no

00:55:14.340 like meeting of the minds or anything. But he did write a piece about me in the New York Times that

00:55:20.500 people loved. And he gets so pissed at me because I always say like, he created this,

00:55:24.020 this personality about me as this incredible wonder boy genius who you give me a problem,

00:55:29.720 I type away at my computer, I solve it an hour later. And, and people love that persona,

00:55:34.580 even though it was completely and totally off. I mean, it wasn't right at all. But look,

00:55:39.060 I've been writing that for the last 15 years. So I can't complain. Like I've milked it for everything

00:55:44.060 I could. And people loved it. And then we ended up not through an easy buy, but we ended up deciding

00:55:50.300 to write Freakonomics together, not because we had some passion to tell our story, but just because

00:55:55.260 we both wanted to make some bucks and the publishers were willing to pay us to write this book.

00:56:00.300 And in the end, we had an amazing agent, Suzanne Gluck, who I interviewed for my podcast,

00:56:05.360 people I mostly admire. And like, you know, we relive that story, but she just like totally out

00:56:10.240 negotiated the, the publishers. And there we were with a super lucrative book deal

00:56:16.160 and no idea at all what we were going to write about. We like had no conception of what this book

00:56:20.980 was going to be. And I think part of the fun of it was, so we both assumed that we had just pulled

00:56:26.340 off like a bank heist and that like no one was ever going to read this book. And so we could do

00:56:32.000 whatever we wanted because it wasn't like my colleagues cared what I wrote about this book that

00:56:37.440 no one would read. And he was like a serious, you know, memoirist and his, you know, people would

00:56:42.620 understand he was just doing this to make some cash and they wouldn't hold it against them.

00:56:45.960 And it freed us up, I think, to write a book that was very different than what we would have written

00:56:50.280 if we actually had the fear that people were going to read it and judge us based on what we wrote.

00:56:54.760 So we had a lot more fun with it than we would have otherwise. And we kind of broke a bunch of rules

00:57:00.380 and we were super lucky, I think, to be in the right place at the right time

00:57:03.940 to have a book that ended up selling a whole bunch of copies.

00:57:08.020 Did it come out in 05 or 06?

00:57:10.000 I don't know. I have no idea. 05, I think probably 05.

00:57:15.420 I'm so good at dates. Usually I can almost remember. I mean, I remember reading it as soon

00:57:20.180 as it came out. I still remember where I first learned about it. I remember it's so odd that I

00:57:25.820 would remember this, but I was in the OR waiting for a patient to wake up, you know, waiting to come out

00:57:31.360 of anesthesia. So, you know, we'd finished operating and it was, you know, I was just sort of writing

00:57:35.020 the orders to get ready to take the patient to the recovery room. The chief resident said,

00:57:41.140 I just read this book, Freakonomics. You've got to read it. It is unbelievable. It's totally

00:57:47.220 incredible. And he just started raving about it. So I just went and picked it up and I couldn't put

00:57:53.780 it down. I mean, it was just, and it was very unusual for me to read anything outside of medicine.

00:57:58.480 You know, it was very hard for me to make time to do anything that wasn't immediately related to

00:58:05.120 sort of what I needed to do for work. So I'm trying to think which my favorite one was in there.

00:58:11.160 Which one did you guys get the most blowback on? Was it the seatbelt one, the car seat one? Did that,

00:58:16.120 did that create the most blowback? You know, we literally had like three lines on, on car seats.

00:58:21.100 We had like one, one paragraph on car seats and that probably did create about as much

00:58:25.960 negative feedback as anything. Strangely, we really thought abortion was going to be the

00:58:30.840 lightning rod and everyone was going to get upset about it, abortion and crime. But

00:58:33.860 the backstory is that when I couldn't control the story, like when the media reported on my academic

00:58:41.480 results about abortion and crime. Which by the way, that was in the late 90s, wasn't it? Or early

00:58:45.760 2000? Yeah, 2000, 2001. Yeah. And that, in that decade. And we had no control over the way it was

00:58:52.160 portrayed. It was deeply misportrayed. It was simplified. And it was a, it was a nightmare.

00:58:56.620 It just triggered hostility from all corners of the right and the left. And it just kind of made

00:59:03.520 it look stupid because it was easy to parody it. Because if you didn't understand how simple and

00:59:10.420 obvious the things we were talking about and how powerful they were in the data, it kind of looked

00:59:14.040 like we were crazy people. And in part because, look, nobody talks publicly about abortion unless they

00:59:19.660 have a stake in it, right? So all of the conversation about abortion is either stridently

00:59:25.300 pro-life or stridently pro-choice. But like, we didn't have a stake. We were just doing something

00:59:29.600 really different, which is we said something simple, which is abortion was legalized in the US.

00:59:35.540 And it turns out that there's this really strong relationship between unwantedness. So if a kid is

00:59:40.980 unwanted by his or her parents, that they tend to have a hard life. And after abortion was legalized,

00:59:47.940 there appears to have been a dramatic decline in the number of unwanted children that were born.

00:59:52.540 And so just like in a simple empirical like statement of fact, fewer unwanted children

00:59:56.340 with legalized abortion should lead to less crime 18 years later. It's like, gotta be true. It's not

01:00:03.020 hard to see why that's true. It's just a matter of, is it a big number or a small number? And back in the

01:00:07.800 umbilical calculations, Soda said it could be a really big number based on other studies of unwantedness.

01:00:12.600 And when you looked at the data, not perfect. We obviously didn't want a randomized experiment.

01:00:16.780 We didn't get to choose who didn't, didn't get abortions. We looked at things like

01:00:21.240 after Roe versus Wade happened, you look exactly at some states it was easy to get an abortion.

01:00:26.440 Some states it was hard. And then you look 20 years later and you see that, well, for the first 15

01:00:31.320 years, the crime patterns look really similar between those states. And they only started to diverge

01:00:35.220 once the kids who were exposed to legalized abortion were old enough to have, you know,

01:00:39.740 start committing crimes. So like, you know, it was a really simple, straightforward paper that

01:00:44.460 almost anyone could look at the data and make some sense of whether what we were doing was

01:00:49.180 reasonable and sensible. And so when we actually got to tell our story in Freakonomics,

01:00:54.840 nobody complained. And what was really interesting, just not just from a data perspective,

01:00:59.600 but from a storytelling perspective, is it was one of the great successes of storytelling

01:01:05.060 storytelling in that people who were pro-choice read that chapter and would pat me on the back

01:01:10.960 and say how amazing, like what a great chapter that was and how it pushed the pro-choice agenda.

01:01:16.940 And people who are pro-life would slap me on the back and say, you know, I'm glad someone finally

01:01:21.780 told the truth about pro-life. And it was interesting. The exact same chapter was read totally different

01:01:26.800 and everybody liked it. It was, I got to say, of all the things I've ever done,

01:01:30.800 that was one of the weirdest and most unexpected things that ever happened is that we wrote something

01:01:36.040 that everybody liked when we expected everybody to hate it. So Freakonomics, we wrote all these

01:01:41.720 stories and people just liked it. And we, you know, we kind of had this, like we offended lots of groups.

01:01:47.700 Like we talked about how real estate agents were like the KKK, but like in a lighthearted way that

01:01:54.380 even most of the real estate agents didn't get that mad at us. And I got invited to speak at the

01:01:59.360 National Realtors Association. So it was like, everyone's like a good sport about it.

01:02:02.900 Then when we wrote a second book, people got super pissed off because I guess we hit a little

01:02:08.680 closer to home with stuff like climate change. Then we wrote a third book. And by that time we

01:02:13.060 had alienated everyone. It turns out that like there was someone-

01:02:17.000 The third ones think like a freak, right?

01:02:18.740 Yeah. And so by that time there was like every person on the right and the left thought we were

01:02:24.440 jerks by the time we were done with the third one, which is more or less why we stopped writing books

01:02:27.900 because we had gone from, Oh, these are these fun loving economists who poke fun at everything to

01:02:32.620 like those jerks. They're like offended me deeply. And I'm never going to buy another book from them

01:02:37.420 again. And then remember one night we were having dinner. This was at my house in San Diego years

01:02:43.480 ago, maybe six or seven years ago. And I think you were toying with the idea of writing a fourth book

01:02:50.080 about like the Freakonomics approach to golf. And you really spent the entire night trying to convince

01:02:55.780 me to be the protagonist of that book. Do you remember this discussion?

01:02:58.760 Oh my God. Yeah. So I actually wrote large chunks of a book about the Freakonomics of golf

01:03:04.940 and liked it and enjoy doing it because I have, I love and loved golf and I wasn't that good at it,

01:03:13.140 but at the age of 40, I really in a semi-serious way dedicated myself to becoming a professional

01:03:20.020 golfer and never got nearly good enough, but improved a lot. But I knew I couldn't do it

01:03:25.200 based on physical talent. I knew I had to do it based on being smart and using data in a particular

01:03:31.060 way. And so I've developed all of these sets of tools that I think could be really helpful to a

01:03:38.020 golfer. And what I needed was I needed someone who had amazing physical talent and was a complete

01:03:46.140 maniac in the sense that I know you are of like willing to put 10,000% into anything that you

01:03:51.760 started. And I thought, wow, what a great chapter would be to take someone who's never golfed before

01:03:56.720 and to see how good you could get, that person could get in a year. And you were my number one

01:04:03.480 student to try to do it.

01:04:05.020 We talked about it seriously. I mean, I really did consider it just out of curiosity,

01:04:08.960 which was if I devoted one year to this, like I had devoted one year to swimming,

01:04:13.580 like how far could you get in a year if you were willing to put in two to three hours a day

01:04:18.640 of very deliberate practice, especially with your guidance, which as I understood,

01:04:24.140 it was going to make a lot of shortcuts. But in the end, I think my fear was just the addiction

01:04:29.020 that would come of that. Like golf is one of those things that just, it could consume someone like me.

01:04:34.320 It would be a terrible waste of your talent as well. I did eventually take on one student

01:04:39.360 and it's a funny story. So, so Larry Summers, who was the secretary of the treasury and the

01:04:46.140 president of Harvard and whatnot. So he came to, he came to Chicago one, one time to give a speech.

01:04:52.220 And this is, you know, not too many years ago when he was, was, and is incredibly eminent.

01:04:57.500 And like, I got an email that was addressed to like five Nobel laureates, the president of the

01:05:04.700 university. And to me demanding our presence when he comes to entertain him or, you know,

01:05:12.040 like, I don't know. So he could, we, he could hold court or whatever. And I was completely befuddled

01:05:16.880 at how I got on this list of, of these folks. So I showed up, I was maybe the fourth one to arrive

01:05:23.060 and he was deep in conversation with a couple of our Nobel laureates and the president. And he literally

01:05:28.320 like stopped. I walked in the room and he like broke off the conversation and he said,

01:05:33.500 sorry, gentlemen, this is who I need to talk to. And I'm like, wow, like my stature in the

01:05:37.800 profession of economics is really going up. And he says, Steve, I mean, I don't even really know

01:05:42.980 him. I've talked to him like twice in my entire life. He says, Steve, I have been needing to talk

01:05:47.800 to you. I'm like, wow. I'm like thinking, what, what, what am I going to tell Larry Summers? And he

01:05:52.260 says, I've heard that you're the one guy in the world who can get my handicap from 20 down to five in

01:05:59.140 golf. How are we going to do that? And it was hilarious that the thing he cared about was

01:06:04.540 golf. And so I had failed with you, Peter. I thought, okay, what a great chapter this will

01:06:09.700 be. I'm going to take Larry Summers from a 20 handicap down to a five. And he turned out to be

01:06:15.900 the worst student that ever existed in the planet. He like wouldn't do anything. Like he, I sent him all

01:06:22.120 my stuff. We worked out, you know, we were going to work out plans for talking and like, he wouldn't

01:06:27.200 practice. He was the exact opposite. Like the reasons I wanted you to be my student were the

01:06:31.980 exact reasons that Larry turned out not to be a very good student. Let's hold on to this. There,

01:06:36.680 there may be a day, you know, I don't know, maybe when my kids are in college or something and I have

01:06:40.840 a little bit more bandwidth, I might be willing to pick this up, but I, I, you, you have me very

01:06:45.100 intrigued by this. The title for economics, you got that from your sister, right? I did. So my sister

01:06:51.800 who unfortunately has since passed away from cancer, she was a force of nature. She, you know,

01:06:57.340 it's funny when you grow up, you're around a relatively small set of people and you kind of

01:07:02.880 gauge your own stature in the world relative to the people around you. And my sister was so amazing

01:07:08.640 that I always thought I must be like below average in terms of creativity and things because like

01:07:16.380 relative to her, I was awful, but she was also odd in the sense that she didn't really function that

01:07:23.760 well in the world. Like she wasn't that successful in traditional metrics because she was kind of,

01:07:30.280 she was a little bit like Robin Williams. Like, like the person most like her that I've ever seen

01:07:35.100 is Robin Williams and that she was incredibly creative, but like, I don't know, like didn't

01:07:39.700 necessarily fit in that well with how the world worked. So anyway, we tried to write this book

01:07:43.480 about nothing, right? So this was a book where we, we didn't have a theme and we were just,

01:07:48.620 you know, we didn't have a title. That's for sure. We had the worst set of titles.

01:07:52.080 And I knew immediately, my sister was the only one who would come up with a title for this book.

01:07:55.980 And so I told her what we were doing and she came back a half an hour later with, I would say,

01:08:02.060 10 titles that were better than any title we had come up with. But she basically just said,

01:08:06.300 look, but the title of the book is Freakonomics. And I'm like, you're right. The title of the book

01:08:10.340 is Freakonomics. And even Dubner was okay. Yeah. Freakonomics, that works. So we went to the

01:08:16.360 publishers and they just flipped. They're like, we paid way too much for this book to call it

01:08:22.080 Freakonomics. They like refused the title. They fought it. And it was months of back and forth

01:08:27.360 before they grudgingly said that they'd call this book Freakonomics.

01:08:30.640 What were they advocating for? What were some of the other titles? Do you remember?

01:08:32.860 Oh my God. You know, the one we were at, I think, I always forget it. I think one of the leading

01:08:40.560 candidates, just to put you where how bad we were off, was E-Ray Vision, like where E stood for

01:08:46.620 economics. And I think that was a not ruled out title before Freakonomics. But in the end,

01:08:54.880 I honestly think this same book with a different title might have sold no copies. Life in general,

01:09:01.720 publishing specifically, it's just a huge luck component to it. Like I think our book,

01:09:08.480 little things happened that made all the difference. We got a good review in the Wall

01:09:12.600 Street Journal. I went on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and somehow he like made it seem really

01:09:19.180 cool. And like little things happen with books that kind of determine whether they fly or they

01:09:23.860 don't fly. And I think if we ran back time and thought about this book and it going on, I think

01:09:31.420 99 times out of 100, it would probably wouldn't have sold very many books. We're just like super

01:09:36.860 lucky in a lot of things that happened. I mean, I think it was a good book. I mean, I'd like the

01:09:40.700 book. I'm not trying to say it's a bad book. But what is really amazing is if you actually sit down

01:09:45.060 and read books. And so people send me books all the time because they want me to blurb them.

01:09:49.180 It's incredible how good these books are. Like, you know, random books that I expect to be awful.

01:09:54.320 Well, there's so many good books and look, nobody reads them. So many good podcasts that nobody

01:10:00.660 listened to. But it's just really hard in the clutter of this world to break through. And I

01:10:07.140 think the tightness of the correlation between how good something is and how much attention it gets

01:10:12.100 much lower than I think most people give credit for. Steve, something you've been talking about

01:10:17.040 quite a bit lately. We spoke about it when I was on your podcast. I've heard you speak about it on

01:10:21.100 their podcasts, is kind of our shared appreciation in mental health and how underappreciated it is.

01:10:29.780 How long has this been something that's kind of been, at least to you, as important as I think it

01:10:35.020 is now? Is this recent or is it something that's always really mattered and you've only kind of come

01:10:39.380 to appreciate how underutilized these tools are? Look, I was raised by a father who was like,

01:10:50.220 no nonsense and the idea of therapy. I mean, such an embarrassment. Oh my God. I mean, like no real

01:10:57.420 man would ever think about certainly crying. Like I was, you were not allowed to cry.

01:11:03.760 You had a grandfather that committed suicide. Was it your father's father or your mother's father?

01:11:08.780 My father's father. No, but it wasn't a mental, like my father, my grandfather's suicide was not a

01:11:13.800 mental health issue. My grandfather, who loved life more than anything and was, I don't know,

01:11:19.360 maybe 90 years old, his wife, who he loved dearly, had terminal cancer. And so he decided to commit

01:11:27.420 suicide, not out of unhappiness, just because he had lived a great life and he was satisfied and he

01:11:33.040 didn't want to be a burden on people. So it was actually in some sense the opposite. It was, in many

01:11:37.980 ways, he was extremely far along in the mental health domain because he like accepted death as

01:11:42.760 being a natural part of the cycle of life and was not troubled by it. I think honestly, for me, the

01:11:47.760 big change was I got divorced and I met my wife, Suzanne, who is much more in tune with these issues

01:11:58.000 and got me thinking about them in a way that I never had before, whether it's like kind of

01:12:05.420 more esoteric stuff in kind of the spiritual domain or purely about mental health. And I somehow shook

01:12:13.180 off like a lifetime of teaching, which told me that mental health was a joke and you just got to like

01:12:19.500 fight through it and came to appreciate it. You know, seven years ago, really, is when I started

01:12:23.260 thinking about these issues. And I think you're right in saying that I've come to believe now that

01:12:30.000 they are dramatically more important than our education system or our society has traditionally

01:12:38.360 given them credit for. You've spoken about this a little bit. I mean, you've spoken about it with

01:12:43.780 me and you've explained that you'd be even comfortable talking about it today. But one of your children

01:12:49.680 struggles with an eating disorder. How hard has that been for you? And how have you sort of navigated

01:12:56.760 your appreciation for mental health with both her struggle and your struggle? Because I think that's

01:13:03.820 hard for both of you in different ways, obviously. You know, it's interesting that I, if there's one

01:13:08.840 thing I'm really good at, it's, I forget the serenity, the serenity prayer. I'm really good at

01:13:15.000 understanding the difference between things I can and cannot control and not worrying very much about

01:13:21.200 the ones I can't control. And if there's one thing that was clear to me that I could not control

01:13:25.740 directly, it was my daughter's eating disorder and that no amount of trying to push or pull or

01:13:32.440 whatever was going to do it. So it was weird. I approached it with a real calm. I mean, it was

01:13:38.540 awful to watch, but I didn't struggle in the way that I think most parents struggle, which is the feeling

01:13:45.800 of like, I should be doing something about it. Look, these are often lethal. And she was incredibly

01:13:52.260 accomplished as an anorexic. She was extremely effective, you know, at torturing herself.

01:13:58.860 And in a weird way, I think that calm was helpful in letting her be comfortable with me about it. And

01:14:10.180 eventually, I think I played some very small role in her recovery. I mean, obviously 99.999% of

01:14:16.900 recovery was her own. It was odd. I mean, that's probably not the answer you expected me to give,

01:14:21.580 but in a strange way, that was not. Maybe more generally with my adult children,

01:14:27.500 I really am maybe better than most parents at understanding that they're their own people

01:14:33.680 and that they live their own lives and that I'm just an observer and I can offer advice,

01:14:39.860 but I have no control over it.

01:14:41.560 Where do you think that transition takes place age-wise? I mean, a friend of mine,

01:14:46.340 Rick Elias, who was on this podcast once said something that has stuck with me. I don't think

01:14:51.180 a day, maybe two days would go by that I don't think of what he said, which is raising children

01:14:56.480 is playing a game of tug of war that you have to lose. And he said it more eloquently, but it was

01:15:02.600 like you lose it gradually, obviously, right? So when you're holding the tug of war with your five-year-old,

01:15:08.860 you're still winning. And with your 13-year-old, you're really starting to slip. And by the time

01:15:14.660 it's the child's 18, it's their rope, right? Or whatever. You seem to have navigated that better

01:15:19.440 than most perhaps. I had a son who died when he was one and that was far and away, like a thousand

01:15:25.920 times harder than anything I've ever experienced. In part because your real job as a parent in some

01:15:34.040 sense, your biggest job is to keep your children safe. And it was so difficult for me to navigate

01:15:40.280 the knowing that I had not kept him safe. And he was my first son. And six kids later,

01:15:48.240 I think that really affected my parenting. And he didn't die because I was abusive or neglectful.

01:15:56.380 He died because of a terrible disease, meningitis, that came out of nowhere and I couldn't protect

01:16:03.920 him from it. And I think there's one or two ways you can go. You can become incredibly fearful.

01:16:09.480 Like I just happened to watch Finding Nemo yesterday with my kids. And so you can be like

01:16:14.720 Marlon, the dad in Nemo, who becomes incredibly protective and doesn't want Nemo to do anything.

01:16:19.100 Or you can just understand that the world is one of uncertainty and of loss and of risk.

01:16:27.980 And I really, for whatever reason, I went that second way. And I just said, look, I can't control

01:16:32.580 the world around me. And I'm just going to do the best I can knowing that that's true.

01:16:38.160 So even from a very young age with my kids, I have a lot of acceptance of their autonomy and their

01:16:44.800 independence and the fact that I can't mold them the way I'd like to or shape them.

01:16:51.300 So even with, look, do I want my four-year-old to do what I tell her to? Do I get super pissed off

01:16:57.620 when she doesn't go to bed when I tell her? Yes. But on the other hand, I put an enormous value

01:17:03.980 on that autonomy and that independence. And when I'm calm and quiet, I'm more or less,

01:17:10.780 for better or worse, putty in her hands and will do essentially whatever she'll want

01:17:14.080 because I think a big part of her growing up in life is learning to have control over situations.

01:17:20.500 And what better way for her to learn about control than to be able to have some control

01:17:25.060 in her interactions with me, which is totally different than the way I was raised, I think,

01:17:28.560 in the way that maybe I would have raised kids absent the death of my son, Andrew.

01:17:33.440 But I really have gone in that direction.

01:17:35.160 So how deliberate was that process when he died that you made what sounds like a very conscious

01:17:43.580 or even a subconscious decision to accept it and move on without, as you said, basically,

01:17:52.020 well, look, I'd back up and say the following, right? I mean, I think one could say that many

01:17:57.560 parents who lose a child are never the same again. And I don't say that in a glib way. You're not the

01:18:02.620 same again. So let me rephrase that. No parent who loses a child is the same again. But you could

01:18:07.200 make the case that many parents are so damaged after that, that they're even externally never

01:18:13.380 the same again. Most people, I mean, I know this about you, but my guess is many people would

01:18:19.080 interact with you and never know that you've lost a son. So, I mean, what strikes me about it,

01:18:24.020 is that it's one of the core tenets of something called dialectical behavioral therapy, which I've

01:18:30.280 become very fond of, which is this idea called radical acceptance, which is super hard. But as

01:18:35.980 its name suggests, radical acceptance is basically just radically accepting things, not saying that

01:18:40.260 they're good. Radical acceptance doesn't mean it's good that my wife got cancer. It's I radically

01:18:45.780 accept that she got cancer. I work on this every day and it's the hardest thing in the world.

01:18:50.580 It's super hard. It's even hard with silly things, by the way. You know what I mean? Like it's even

01:18:56.280 hard with the most irrelevant things at times. So I want to understand that a bit more. How did you

01:19:02.100 possibly come to that type of profound radical acceptance of something so awful?

01:19:10.660 So it certainly wasn't conscious. It wasn't from deep thinking or anything. I just, I would say it

01:19:14.960 happened. And in many ways, I would say my hunch is that radical acceptance of big things must be easier

01:19:21.760 than radical acceptance of little things because it's so obviously beyond control. Look, my son had

01:19:29.480 died. There was definitely no undoing that. I have no real self-awareness of how it happened.

01:19:36.600 It did. And it wasn't, I didn't work at it. Let me put it that way. I didn't work at it. It wasn't

01:19:43.180 something like where I went to therapy and I came to eventually accept it. It just happened. I mean,

01:19:49.820 it was disjoint from the grief. I mean, the grief is one thing. The grief is real and is semi-permanent.

01:19:57.740 But how you behave in other situations, to me, that's just, you know, I don't know why,

01:20:03.460 but that's just how I reacted to it. If that makes some sense. It was really long before

01:20:11.280 I consciously invested any time, effort, resources into thinking about mental health or about more

01:20:21.520 spiritual things for lack of a better word. In the time that you've now come back and reflected

01:20:27.200 more heavily on these issues around mental health in the past, as you said, seven years,

01:20:31.680 have you learned anything new about that experience when Andrew died?

01:20:37.340 You know, I've never literally, I have not thought about it in those. I mean, obviously I think about

01:20:41.740 his death all the time, but I've never tried to make any sense of it. That's the answer. I've

01:20:48.580 literally haven't thought about the way in which I processed it. I haven't really talked about it. I

01:20:53.640 mean, other than talking to you right now, I'm not sure I've talked about his death and the

01:20:59.100 aftermath of it, but I've really never talked or in many ways thought about much about the

01:21:05.220 implications of it in a weird way. Probably seems strange, but it's true. What do you think would

01:21:11.200 be necessary to infuse this idea of self-care and mental health into education? You talked earlier

01:21:19.980 about how this might be even more important than education, which I don't think anybody would

01:21:25.140 argue is not itself important. How would you operationalize that? If you were education

01:21:30.440 czar, you know, whatever that might be, and you had a hold over the entire K through 12 system,

01:21:36.940 how would you infuse this type of thinking? Let me take a step back and just first make the case

01:21:41.040 for it, because I think that's what we're doing. I think if we went back to square one and we thought

01:21:46.080 about what we should teach children about navigating the world, we would radically overhaul the

01:21:52.900 curriculum and like we'd change math and stuff, but much more fundamentally, I think we would try

01:22:00.080 to teach them the set of skills that will make them happy and able to resolve conflict with other

01:22:06.980 people and to just get along in the world. I think like, at least for my kids, I'm much more worried

01:22:13.380 about that than whether they're like really good at calculus. That matters less to me that they have

01:22:18.740 good lives and they know themselves and they make good choices and like that. I think that wasn't

01:22:24.580 the spirit when we started school. And so our curriculum is very much built off of things from

01:22:30.000 a hundred years ago, and this wasn't in the air and maybe we didn't have the tools then.

01:22:34.700 So that's my case for why I think we should be teaching. And that doesn't answer your question at

01:22:40.260 all about how to do that. It's just my belief that as a parent or as a school, our goal should be

01:22:45.900 that we raise well-adjusted kids who have a set of tools that are helping them cope with the world

01:22:51.100 around. And that many adults like you and me have made a lot of investment in these tools later in

01:22:58.380 our lives. And maybe we could reduce the need for that if we had invested more earlier as a society in

01:23:05.360 that. How to do that? I have no idea. I mean, it's like impossible because it's impossible to change

01:23:10.120 anything. What's the problem? The problem is that time during the day is scarce in school. And every

01:23:16.520 minute you spend focusing on mental health or self-care, whatever, is a minute taken away from

01:23:22.920 something else. And that's really hard to do. The second thing is who in the world actually knows how

01:23:27.820 to do this well? I'm not sure I know how to do this well. And even if I did know a person who knew

01:23:35.700 how to do this well, do I know how to scale it? Absolutely not. I don't know what kind of training

01:23:41.520 you give teachers or who you'd hire. So look, I think it's very amorphous in my mind. It's a belief

01:23:46.800 that it's important. And I think it'll be a long, let's just say y'all agreed it should happen.

01:23:53.080 It will be a long, arduous process. What I believe the right way to do it is for the Department of

01:23:58.380 Education to mandate, like we have for the Common Core and math, that we should have a Common Core

01:24:05.020 in mental health and that there should be these 17 things that are hit each year, you know,

01:24:09.720 different ones for anything. Like, no. Obviously, it's the kind of thing where I think maybe you'd

01:24:14.540 want to experimentation, right? So let a bunch of models run, see what seems to work and grow into

01:24:19.640 it. I would be very much in favor of that, where we encouraged subsidized school districts to try out

01:24:25.820 things and encourage innovation. But I think we're a long ways away from that. I had the privilege of

01:24:32.100 talking to the Biden transition team not too long ago about education. And I threw out three

01:24:37.880 or four ideas and they listened quite intently to each of the ideas, except for the mental health

01:24:43.200 ones. Like they could not get off that topic fast enough. I was like total silence in the room when

01:24:49.460 I suggested that as an important thing to do. Have you ever gone back and spoken with your dad?

01:24:54.380 Because your dad is still spry as can be. Doesn't he still work?

01:24:56.880 Yeah, my dad is still a practicing physician at the VA hospital.

01:25:01.160 So have you ever gone back to your dad and revisited this idea of mental health and

01:25:05.240 his lack of interest in this topic?

01:25:08.200 I haven't. You know, it's funny. So I'm actually thinking hard about interviewing my dad

01:25:12.900 for my podcast. It's funny. I feel like somehow doing it via podcast should be the opposite.

01:25:18.740 But I somehow feel like, well, if I'm doing it on the podcast, I can ask my dad all sorts of

01:25:22.800 questions that I couldn't ask him otherwise, which clearly, like logically makes no sense at all.

01:25:28.300 Why would recording something and playing it for hundreds of thousands of people put questions

01:25:33.520 on the table instead of taking them off the table? But in a weird way, I think somehow it would be

01:25:39.480 easier for me to ask my dad questions like this in the context of a podcast. We'll see what happens.

01:25:43.900 I he's a very reluctant potential podcast guest, and I'm not sure he can do technology well enough

01:25:52.400 to hit the button to actually record it on his end. So we'll see whether it happens. But no,

01:25:57.520 I've literally never talked to my father about any of these issues ever. I've not talked to my father

01:26:03.140 about my sister's death or his father and mother's death. We're a family that doesn't

01:26:10.540 talk about stuff like that. It was a nice enough family. But the word love never, never used in my

01:26:20.160 household, except with reference to the family dog. People love the dog, but you would never,

01:26:26.400 ever say you loved another family member. Now, how different is that with your current

01:26:30.420 children and your current family? Is that different? So I have self-consciously been very

01:26:34.720 different about that. I tell my kids and they tell me they love me every time we hang up the phone or

01:26:40.200 whatever, which I don't know if that matters for anything, but it is like, I don't do that many

01:26:44.300 things self-consciously in my life, but that is one that I very self-consciously tried to propagate

01:26:49.400 was the idea that you could express your feelings of, of love and affection in my family, the family.

01:26:56.240 I'm the father figure. So you're fond of decision-making. What's the best decision you've

01:27:02.260 ever made in your life? And what's the worst decision you've ever made in your life?

01:27:05.460 I'm probably going to give you a terrible answer to this. I think my worst decisions,

01:27:11.660 I'm too embarrassed to talk about. Okay. That's, that's fine. I probably wouldn't

01:27:15.580 be able to publicly admit my worst, but I've made a lot of like, look, I will tell you all

01:27:19.660 of my worst decisions have been about inaction, not action. I know that, that of the hundred worst

01:27:25.240 decisions I've made, I'm sure that 99 of them were not doing something as opposed to doing

01:27:29.900 something. There are very few really bad things I've done. By the way, I feel the opposite, Steve.

01:27:35.060 My worst decisions have been decisions of bad action, not inaction, but that's interesting.

01:27:40.900 And then what's the best decision you think you've ever made or a subset of the best decisions you've

01:27:44.980 ever made? I don't know if you'd actually call it a decision, but the decision to not care what

01:27:51.580 people think about me, it's not a decision in like, oh, I went back to school, I didn't go to school,

01:27:56.040 but, but I somehow just made a choice. It's a choice. I don't know if you call it choice. I made a choice

01:28:00.440 to just not care what other people thought about me, which was a big choice for me because like most

01:28:06.280 high school kids, I, all I cared about was what other people thought about me. And at some point I

01:28:12.040 just broke with that and was happy to live with the consequences. And it's just a great way to live.

01:28:19.540 It just frees you up from so much burden. I think all my best decisions I wanted have relieved

01:28:27.720 burden. I'll give you another one, which is trivial in comparison, but important is I guess I used to

01:28:32.360 be super cheap. I used to worry about every transaction I made and like prided myself on

01:28:39.160 being frugal and thinking about, oh, you know, should I spend that dollar on a bottled water in

01:28:44.280 the airport or not? And at some point I just said, Hey, this is like, I could free up a lot of

01:28:49.580 mind space if I just didn't worry about decisions that were like under $5. And it was hard for me to

01:28:57.540 do, but I said, look, I'm going to stop. If it's under $5, when I start to go into this friend's,

01:29:01.260 I'm going to forget about it. And then I moved it up to like 10 or 20 and like the highest, like for me,

01:29:06.560 it's like the higher, the better. And it is just so liberating for me that I just have this rule of

01:29:11.340 thumb that like, if it's under some ridiculously large amount of money, I just don't worry about

01:29:17.020 it. And look, it adds up. I probably, you know, I waste tens of thousands, if not more dollars a

01:29:23.040 year because I'm not getting these decisions right. And that's awesome because I free up 10% of my time

01:29:32.420 to do whatever the hell I want. And I love doing the stuff I do. And it's just super liberating.

01:29:38.460 So I think many of the things I like are these things that have been liberating, where I stop

01:29:43.180 worrying about stuff. And maybe it's not that far off than your idea of radical acceptance. Like,

01:29:49.100 I don't know, it's like not radical acceptance, but it's like, it's just a total acceptance that

01:29:53.180 there's going to be these imperfections. I'm just not going to worry about getting things exactly right.

01:29:58.020 Do you think in general, we as a species are good at decision-making? Is there a way to evaluate this?

01:30:04.560 Good compared to what I'm not sure about. Good compared to optimal? No, we're terrible. I mean,

01:30:09.920 it's like behavioral economics of the last 40 or 50 years shows how bad we are at making decisions.

01:30:16.060 And I think the best evidence of this is the people who know the most about decision-making. So whether

01:30:24.160 it's these really prominent economists who've thought enormous amounts about backward induction and

01:30:32.340 optimized behavior in dynamic systems, or whether it's Danny Kahneman, who has spent more time

01:30:39.520 thinking about behavior. These are the worst decision-makers I've ever seen. I mean, Kahneman

01:30:44.780 even is like very forthright. He said, like, the reason I study decision-making is that I'm awful at it.

01:30:49.760 And with everything that he's learned, he's still awful at it. And so I don't think humans are good at

01:30:56.300 making decisions. And I think we can arm ourselves with tools. Like there are a lot of, like a lot of,

01:31:01.620 a lot of economics is really common sense codified into helping you make better decisions. I think a

01:31:07.840 fair amount of psychology and pop psychology is that as well. But look, and there's no one who talks

01:31:16.060 more than me about how we don't quit enough, you know, and how people get stuck in bad situations.

01:31:24.180 I know that. And I have so much trouble quitting. I mean, it's stuff I should quit. I eventually do

01:31:30.880 quit it, but it takes me usually like on average. I know I should have quit it two years before I do

01:31:35.000 it. Look, and I understand all of the problems. I understand exactly what the situation is.

01:31:40.100 But to overcome the complexity of the brain and all these forces, it's super hard to make good

01:31:46.080 decisions. Do you think there's an evolutionary force behind that?

01:31:49.420 When we were evolving, the kind of choices you had to make are so different than the ones that we face

01:31:53.860 now that it's not a surprise that evolution would not necessarily be our friend in these kinds of

01:32:00.120 decisions. I mean, just, I don't know anything about it really, but my sense is that evolution

01:32:05.400 has not been our friend in the nutrition realm, right? Because we evolved in an environment of

01:32:11.240 scarcity and now we live in an environment of plenty and all of the triggers we get from evolutionary

01:32:16.020 triggers we get are the wrong ones. Probably that's the same with decision-making, right?

01:32:19.740 We evolved in settings where we were facing life and death problems all the time. I mean,

01:32:26.620 I think one of the hugest problems that we face mental health-wise is this is trauma and people

01:32:32.580 are stuck in a trauma mode and reacting to trauma, which evolutionarily is probably fantastic because

01:32:37.940 the kind of challenges we faced when we were evolving were short-term, incredibly intense

01:32:44.900 risks, risks that you needed to marshal everything in your body and your mind to fight. But now,

01:32:51.720 now those aren't typically the kind of risks or challenges we're facing. And so people end up

01:32:56.180 using the wrong set of tools that the body is just not configured well for the kind of chronic

01:33:02.480 settings of we live in of too many people, too much information, constant fears and threats around

01:33:09.460 itself. Like, I don't know much about it, but, but like, I think there's zero reason to think that

01:33:13.300 evolution is our friend when it comes to difficult, complex decisions, because we just didn't, like,

01:33:18.800 how complex could the decisions have been when we were evolving? I mean, I look back at, this is maybe

01:33:23.360 off track, but it was something that really struck me. I went to Australia for a while and was talking

01:33:27.480 with some guides as we went around Ayers Rock, Uluru, and talking about how basically the Aboriginal

01:33:35.240 life had not changed hardly at all over the course of, of, I don't know, 5,000 years or something.

01:33:44.660 And it was interesting to think about, like, you don't need much innovation at all, right? You,

01:33:49.140 you innovate 1% per generation and over 5,000 years, life is completely transformed. So it was like,

01:33:54.820 there's literally no innovation going on. I mean, there are things like they didn't have the wheel

01:33:58.300 because in the bush, the wheel didn't do very much good. So like, it was interesting to hear about,

01:34:02.080 but it just, it really hit home for me, that observation, which is modern life and this idea

01:34:08.280 of progress and innovation and being better off than your parents. Like, that's a super, super modern

01:34:15.460 idea, not at all one associated with, with mankind's existence over huge, you know, except for this tiny

01:34:24.380 sliver of, of kind of post-industrial life that we're in. It makes it almost impossible to fathom what

01:34:30.440 another hundred years looks like for exactly that reason. Again, the non-linearity of what

01:34:34.700 the acceleration technology has been like in 100 years and what it looks, it looks like going

01:34:39.380 forward. Now, speaking of a lack of progress, this is totally off topic, but what you said kind of

01:34:44.840 made me think about this. Let's talk about horse racing for a minute. You're kind of a fan. Did you

01:34:50.200 get to see Secretariat at one point? I did. Yeah. So when I was in college,

01:34:56.120 I wrote my undergraduate thesis on thoroughbred breeding and it just happened to be the best

01:35:03.300 library was in Lexington, Kentucky. And that's where Secretariat was. And I didn't really understand

01:35:09.560 how the world worked very well. I just figured I could show up at Claiborne Farms and they would

01:35:13.700 invite me to go see. So I showed up unannounced at Claiborne Farms and I said, I would like to see

01:35:19.320 Secretariat. And, and they looked at me like I was effing crazy. And like two seconds later,

01:35:25.000 one of the part owners of Secretariat happened to drive up behind me and like walk up to them and

01:35:30.520 say, Hey, we were just going to go say hi to Secretariat. And for whatever reason, instead of

01:35:35.700 like shooing me away, they said, well, this like total clown here thinks he should be Secretariat too.

01:35:39.920 Do you mind if he tags the line? Like, okay, why don't you? So I did, I did get to meet because

01:35:44.340 you know, it's funny. I was six when Secretariat won the Triple Crown. It's one of my first sports

01:35:49.600 memories. Absolutely. I remember where I was and I remember in part because for whatever reason in

01:35:57.000 the Belmont, I had chosen Secretariat as the horse that I thought would win, probably based on heavy

01:36:04.140 guidance from adults who had suddenly like led me to think he should win. And then that was the race

01:36:10.640 he won by 30 lengths or whatever it was. And I still remember that vividly. I'm not a very good sports

01:36:17.600 fan in the sense that I'm not very good at remembering names of players and whatnot or

01:36:22.160 heavy heroes, but, but Secretariat was always one of my heroes. And then he died. I don't know when

01:36:26.260 he died. It was, I would have gone there in 1988. Yeah. So he didn't live very much longer after that.

01:36:32.220 Yeah. He was only 19 when he died. I mean, you wrote about thoroughbred breeding. Why do you think

01:36:38.360 that Secretariat was the peak of thoroughbreds and they've never gotten no, no horse has ever approached

01:36:43.440 Secretariat's speeds. I mean, I think for the listener, just to put in context, what's

01:36:47.560 the triple crown, you've got the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont to win all three of

01:36:53.580 those. And the three of those take place over what, about six weeks. Yep. So to win these three

01:36:58.740 races, which get longer, I mean, technically, I guess the it's a mile and a quarter, a mile

01:37:04.360 and three eighths, and then a mile and a half for horses. That's a pretty big difference in distance.

01:37:09.340 So that's speed and endurance in a short period of time. I mean, it's very difficult to win all

01:37:14.740 three of those. Secretariat came along and won in 1973, but did, you know, to this day

01:37:20.440 has the record for the fastest time in each. I think in the Kentucky Derby, what to me is

01:37:26.280 remarkable is negative splitting each quarter mile successively. So each of the five quarters

01:37:31.420 was faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. And then in the Belmont, not only

01:37:35.880 running 224, which is like six seconds faster than, you know, American Pharaoh won it, but also

01:37:43.040 winning by whatever, 30, 31 lengths. No horse has come close to this. Why do you think that is?

01:37:50.240 So I don't know. A couple of things to think about. So I've actually dabbled with trying to

01:37:55.160 think about, could you in a smarter way do breeding of horses? So the way they decide what horse to breed

01:38:03.020 do in others, not extremely scientific. They kind of look at the horse and they have some ideas. And

01:38:09.220 so my hunch is that it's not particularly well done. Although just like with humans, there's an

01:38:15.520 enormous amount of assortative mating, right? So it's, it's not like they mate the worst mares to the

01:38:20.540 best studs. I mean, they've made the best and the best, you know, in the same way that the best

01:38:25.840 basketball players end up getting married to the volleyball star. And then who knows what kind of

01:38:30.460 amazing offspring they're going to have? I think probably the best explanation for it

01:38:34.840 would be that in contrast to human sports, I'm not sure there's been any advances in training

01:38:45.320 techniques for horses in the last 40 or 50 years. Now, maybe there have been, but they're not obvious

01:38:53.060 to an outside observer. I have a few little secret dreams. And one of my secret dreams, which sounds like

01:38:59.020 a Disney movie or something, is that I would buy a horse, an average thoroughbred, and I would train

01:39:06.220 that horse the way Peter Atiyah trains for ultra marathons. And the horse would actually turn out

01:39:13.280 to be really good. I mean, I don't really know much about horse training, but I don't think I'm

01:39:17.880 greatly exaggerating when I say that the way that horses are currently trained is they stand in their

01:39:24.080 stall for something like 23 and a half hours a day. And roughly once every day or two, they bring

01:39:33.360 them out of the stall and they trot around and they run. And sometimes they run fast, but they don't

01:39:38.160 tend to run fast for more than like three eighths of a mile, even though their actual races are going

01:39:42.980 to be a mile, a mile and a quarter. They only like when they train, they only run three eighths of a mile.

01:39:47.320 And I think these horses spend almost no time swimming. So you might say, look, their legs are

01:39:53.900 fragile because their legs are fragile. You can't like run them all the time. But like in my little

01:39:58.300 fantasy world, I've got a horse sized pool with a strong current going against it. And my horse Silver

01:40:04.900 or whatever, you know, whatever the horse is that I have in my Disney movie is swimming in the water

01:40:09.240 like four hours a day. And I've got him hooked up to oxygen monitors and he's doing whatever,

01:40:15.860 the equivalent of stretching or whatever. That's an interesting point, right? You'd put

01:40:19.360 some zone two training and him build some aerobic capacity, mitochondrial efficiency. I mean, that's

01:40:24.560 I mean, I don't know enough about it to say if what you're saying is correct or not, that there

01:40:28.940 haven't been advances in 50 years. It's hard to believe there haven't been, but I don't know.

01:40:35.080 I mean, it would be interesting. I think though, if you let's forget about the golf project. I think

01:40:39.480 it would be super fun if you and I, you already know a lot about how humans work and I'm sure

01:40:45.720 you could figure out really quickly how horses work. I think it would be so much fun to claim.

01:40:52.460 Okay. Cause these horses, when they run, you can claim them for like $5,000. Take some total

01:40:57.080 losing. Well, the problem is that for the triple crown, you gotta be a three-year-old. So you can't

01:41:00.100 really do it. You just got to take some completely unspecial horse. And what we'd really want to do is

01:41:05.660 we'd want to win the triple crown like four years in a row doing our aerobic training. Cause look,

01:41:10.960 if it were humans, like imagine, just, just imagine you go back to, to the time when,

01:41:17.320 you know, much more than me, but like when Roger Bannister was running the four minute mile. And

01:41:21.080 I think there's still like not very good training going on at all at that time. I mean, I may be

01:41:26.480 crazy, but is it not true that good high school runners in the U S routinely break four minutes?

01:41:32.100 I think in the case of humans, we can definitely say that the biggest difference between Roger

01:41:38.700 Bannister and a good collegiate runner today is knowledge of training much more than equipment

01:41:44.760 or nutrition for sure. So it would be true. Like if you could magically understand

01:41:50.000 fitness and training and take today's fitness and training and take like a relatively good athlete,

01:41:57.320 but nothing special. I think you could have won the Olympic gold medal in a range of sports.

01:42:02.100 That would be my conjecture. Take a good athlete, a good college caliber athlete.

01:42:07.180 And the difference between like swimming would be probably a good example. Like I think you probably

01:42:10.580 the hundredth of the thousandth best swimmer today is probably better than the best swimmer in the

01:42:15.460 world 50 years ago in terms of times. I don't know. You wouldn't know that, but anyway,

01:42:19.580 that's what I'm talking about with the horse. So you take a good, but not great horse.

01:42:23.640 And it seems like you could, if you could get the same kind of advances in training,

01:42:27.840 you would just smoke the competition.

01:42:30.260 The other thing is how much of an outlier was Secretariat, right? I mean, I think there's still

01:42:33.820 some debate about was his greatness, how much of it was due to the size of his heart.

01:42:38.880 Unfortunately, his heart was not weighed at autopsy, but the same vet that did the autopsy

01:42:44.900 on Secretariat several years later did the autopsy on Sham, who was the horse that finished second.

01:42:51.080 It was basically the second best horse in the world in 1973. And Sham had a pretty large heart.

01:42:58.300 And he said Secretariat's heart was, you know, at least 15% larger, which basically put Secretariat's

01:43:04.560 heart at twice the size of a normal heart. And it's interesting that has been linked to an X

01:43:10.420 chromosome, which may partially explain why Secretariat's immediate male offspring weren't

01:43:17.240 that special because his male offspring would have got his Y chromosome. His female would have got the

01:43:22.640 X and only if that X made it into a male two generations later, would that have been particularly

01:43:29.840 fast horse, which I think also gets to your point about the lack of sophistication around breeding.

01:43:35.380 I don't know why I find this stuff so interesting. I think there's just something so beautiful about

01:43:39.300 these horses, but in particular Secretariat, I've always been so enamored with. And in fact,

01:43:43.720 when our middle son, before he was born, I was really lobbying hard for the middle name Secretariat.

01:43:52.600 Didn't even get like, that didn't even get a prayer, but I lobbied really hard for it.

01:43:58.320 Maybe if you lived in communist Russia, you would have had more, a better chance with the

01:44:03.800 middle name Secretariat.

01:44:05.080 Okay, Steve, a couple of last questions for you here, because I've been taking up too much of your

01:44:11.160 time. What do you think is the most interesting question on your mind that you don't have a clue

01:44:17.460 of what the answer is? So this is just, this is just pure weird, but something I think about,

01:44:22.960 and actually I think of it with you because it's your influence that led me in this direction,

01:44:28.480 because you introduced me to Sam Harris's work. And there was a few paragraphs in, in Sam Harris's

01:44:35.500 book, Waking Up, which have intrigued me, which I don't really know anything about, but I find them

01:44:42.160 intriguing. So this is what I find really interesting. So he talks about how the left side of the brain

01:44:48.360 has the ability to speak and the right side of the brain doesn't have the capability to express

01:44:53.300 itself through speech. And I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that, but, but it's a starting

01:44:57.820 point, that simple observation, I find interesting because it got me thinking about the degree to

01:45:02.340 which our lives are mediated through speech. So obviously when I talk to you, I have to use speech,

01:45:08.240 but my own inner life is incredibly dictated through speech. So I'm, I'm putting words on

01:45:14.240 everything. Like every, as I go through my life, it's not just this idea of chatter in the back of our

01:45:18.760 head. And like, is there some monkey on my back telling me I'm a loser or whatever. That's not really

01:45:23.340 what I'm talking about. It's much more about that in general, when, when I look at a computer,

01:45:30.020 I put the word computer on. Okay. So then it just got me interested in the question of, well,

01:45:36.220 he kind of makes a little suggestion that it's possible that you could think of the right side

01:45:43.520 of the brain as being held as a slave dominated by the left-hand side of the brain. And like the

01:45:49.360 right-hand side of the brain has all sorts of interesting things it could do, but because it

01:45:54.100 can't speak, it's relegated to this awful subsidiary role. And so I just got interested in the idea of

01:46:02.600 how could I introduce myself to the right side of my brain? How could I actually get to meet that

01:46:10.480 part of my brain? Which I don't even like, I know nothing about how the brain works. I don't even know

01:46:15.360 if that makes sense, but like given infinite time, which I don't have, it's actually, I think that's

01:46:22.100 one of the things I would pursue. So I've pursued it like in a little way, which is, I found it was

01:46:26.140 actually quite easy with concentration to train myself to, um, to be silent.

01:46:32.880 Silent and thought, you mean?

01:46:34.540 No, I want to think, I just don't want to think with words. Okay. It's really, so it's a way,

01:46:37.940 so it's, I think it's slightly like, I don't understand meditation and all the different kinds of

01:46:41.220 meditation, but I think what I'm trying to do is slightly different than what most people are trying to do.

01:46:45.360 I'm not trying to quiet my brain. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to observe the world with all

01:46:50.480 of my senses, but observe them without, but free of language. Okay. So that, look, it's, it's totally

01:46:58.220 possible as I, I don't know, peel a potato. Like I know how to peel a potato without calling it a

01:47:05.900 potato, without using the word peel. And almost everything we do in life, even, I think in some

01:47:11.260 sense, listening, well, I don't know about listening, but, but like most things I can do on my own,

01:47:14.740 I don't need language, but I constantly have language as my partner. And so it was an interesting

01:47:21.040 and surprisingly easy task to on demand, be able to try to put words aside and be word free. I

01:47:30.900 won't say that I can do it like at will or perfectly, but, but I was better at doing that than I thought

01:47:35.340 I'd be. And what followed was kind of interesting and intriguing and, and, and increased my interest

01:47:40.760 in the question as opposed to decrease it, which is, I find that it's very difficult for

01:47:46.880 me to be unhappy or angry without words. That words are really critical to feeling victimized

01:47:56.180 to feeling. It's not that I don't feel angry, but I feel very, very differently in the absence

01:48:01.320 of words than with words. And I can process it much better. So anyway, that's probably a crazy

01:48:06.300 answer to what you just asked, but it's something I have a hunch that it might be important.

01:48:13.320 I have no clue about how to actually do it. Well, um, I'm sure there are probably gurus out

01:48:18.720 there who could maybe help me do it, but I've actually never really heard anyone else talk about

01:48:22.200 it explicitly in that way. So when I'm trying to go to sleep, it's kind of thing where when I try to go

01:48:29.060 to sleep at night, I spend maybe five minutes a day playing around with this. And I think it's been

01:48:35.900 good for me in a weird way. Well, I think that last observation about how the,

01:48:40.720 the reduction of nomenclature around a negative emotion or an emotion, let's not that anger is a

01:48:47.380 negative emotion, but a negatively valenced emotion, at least can reduce its impact. That,

01:48:52.180 that alone is super interesting as an observation. The other thing I'd say is that strikes me as

01:48:57.240 something that could be probably augmented by medication. There could be certain plants or

01:49:01.960 drugs or chemicals that would probably really augment that state. That's interesting. That's

01:49:07.720 really interesting. Maybe you can help me with some of those. Last thing I want to ask you, Steve,

01:49:13.020 you've mentioned numerous times that the random controlled experiment, you know, the RCT, the gold

01:49:20.220 standard of medicine is a tool that is virtually never available to the economist for obvious reasons,

01:49:26.680 the scale would be enormous. If you could put all of that aside for a moment, if you truly had

01:49:33.720 billions of dollars and all the time in the world, what experiment would you conduct?

01:49:44.280 So it's funny. Um, I don't actually have big ideas about economics. I think economics isn't where I would

01:49:52.360 go with something like that because in some fundamental way, I think we understand

01:49:57.400 what's understandable about the economy. I mean, it isn't, it's not a lack of resources

01:50:05.000 that makes it hard to understand the macroeconomy is the fact that we have exactly one of them,

01:50:09.960 right? So absent a set of parallel universes, I don't think we're ever going to find out through

01:50:14.380 data or experimentation. So look, if you give me a different choice, which is if you could be God and

01:50:19.960 create enormous number of parallel universes, then I would have a bunch of interesting macro

01:50:25.000 experiments that I might want to do. So for me, when I think about big problems, they're much

01:50:29.640 more off. They're rarely about randomization. I'll give you an example where maybe there's more

01:50:35.320 you really talk about, but like, I think how we really blew it with COVID. So what have we done?

01:50:40.420 Well, we used randomized trials to figure out that we have really good vaccines. I fought with

01:50:47.660 Montefslavie about this, but look, I think we were idiots not to do challenge trials where we

01:50:52.560 actually went out and learned much more quickly by giving people vaccines and giving them COVID and

01:50:58.440 seeing if it works. You know, like, I think we were foolish given the stakes not to do that,

01:51:03.080 but much more fundamentally, I think that we have ruled out medical ethics and societal views have

01:51:12.080 ruled out really sensible. Like when we want to know the answers, the best way is a randomized

01:51:17.620 experiment. Okay. So there's so many, and you and I have talked about a little bit in my pocket as

01:51:20.840 well. There's so many cases around COVID where we just don't know the basic facts about, like,

01:51:26.860 I think you made a big point about the six feet thing, like six feet away. Like somebody just made

01:51:30.620 that up and we live with it. Or another one that just came up is there's a great op-ed piece that said,

01:51:35.420 well, why is everyone still wearing terrible masks? Because like at the beginning, people,

01:51:41.320 you know, like we're told, well, don't wear a mask because a mask won't help you anyway,

01:51:45.860 which was obviously idiotic because we were really being told that because they didn't want us buying

01:51:49.920 up all the good masks because they wanted to give them the frontline health professionals. Of course,

01:51:53.480 if they didn't work, why are the frontline health professionals wearing them? The real missed

01:51:57.320 opportunity in COVID was not to take the approach that I think is a hundred percent accepted,

01:52:04.340 which is the best way we are able to learn given the constraints of society about COVID is by doing

01:52:11.160 clever little natural experiments where we look at some particular airplane and some particular

01:52:15.920 person we know got COVID and then we go in and do contact tracing to figure out how bad it was.

01:52:20.720 Look, the best way to figure out whether airplanes are dangerous is to put people on airplanes,

01:52:24.360 some who have COVID and some don't, and to figure out who gets it. I mean, and people are like,

01:52:28.280 oh, you can't do that. This brings it back to the field of economics. You would argue if you pay people

01:52:33.660 enough as volunteers, there's going to be a subset of people that are going to say,

01:52:37.120 yeah, my risk of getting COVID and something really bad happening is sufficiently low enough

01:52:41.540 that I'm willing to be one of the healthy volunteers on that airplane who risks getting

01:52:46.300 COVID. And of course we would argue, well, that might not be medically ethical, but you're saying

01:52:50.220 desperate times call for desperate measures. There's a way to solve these problems economically.

01:52:55.600 Yeah. And then Montefi Slaoui, who ran Operation Warp Speed said, yeah, but that's no good because

01:53:00.480 you just have the healthy people and that might not tell you anything. But look, there are plenty

01:53:04.420 of people who are really, really sick and who are worried about their dependence and what's going

01:53:09.100 to happen to their family. Look, there are plenty of people who know their life expectancy is four

01:53:12.420 months who are going to be willing to get exposed to COVID if you say, well, take care of your family,

01:53:17.880 you know, if you die from. So look, I think I know I'm completely out of step with a mainstream

01:53:23.660 medical ethics on this, but I think medical ethics gets it really wrong because when they think about

01:53:29.880 money, they think about small amounts of money. And I, it's probably wrong. Like if you, if you're

01:53:34.760 willing to offer people a hundred dollars to do this, then the only people are going to do it are

01:53:38.300 going to be drug addicts and uneducated people who don't understand. But look, if you, when the stakes

01:53:44.160 are as high as COVID, you can offer people $10,000, a hundred thousand dollars. I mean, you can offer

01:53:49.020 enough money that everyone's going to be lining up to do it. And if everybody's lining up, then I think

01:53:54.000 medical ethics no longer has a real stake in this because it's just a different problem when everyone

01:54:00.460 is volunteering to do it. Volunteering because you're paying enough money, look, then almost every issue

01:54:04.920 of medical ethics fades away when you got a surplus of people volunteering.

01:54:09.700 You know, I never thought about it that way until you said it, Steve. That is a fantastic point.

01:54:13.400 Institutional review boards, IRBs are adamant about making sure honorariums are very small

01:54:19.900 in studies to prevent coercion. That's their big shtick is you can't overpay people. Otherwise it's

01:54:25.780 coercive. But the irony of it is it is coercive if it's low and it disproportionately targets the most

01:54:32.360 vulnerable. Exactly. It's so true. And on organ donation, this has been something I've harped on

01:54:37.780 for a long time. People, people are really terrified of the idea of a market for organs, for like live

01:54:43.380 donors and kidneys. And every horror story they tell is a horror story that's embedded in the idea

01:54:49.840 that it's going to be exploitative. Look, and that's because the market price would be too low.

01:54:55.220 It's actually an odd case in which you want to enforce an actual price, which is way above the

01:55:01.220 market price because the value to our, you know better than me, the amount we spend on dialysis and

01:55:07.520 the amount of suffering associated with it, it's like some even like measurable percentage of GDP,

01:55:12.440 like one or two percent of GDP or some crazy thing like that. And the value of a really good,

01:55:19.700 healthy, live kidney to society is enormous. It's, you know, on the order of, I don't know,

01:55:25.500 you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars at least. So you could easily pay people a hundred

01:55:31.680 thousand dollars for a good kidney. And if you did that, I think you might have, I don't know,

01:55:37.280 might have 10 million people who would, 50 million people who would sign up to be kidney donors in

01:55:42.280 that world. And in a world in which Wall Street stockbrokers are signing up to donate their

01:55:47.480 kidneys, not donate, I mean, not altruistic, they just want a hundred grand. Look, in that world,

01:55:52.940 the whole medical ethics is turned upside down. And the weird thing is I cannot get anyone

01:55:58.160 to take that scenario seriously. Even though to me, it seems completely and totally obvious that if we

01:56:04.180 could get, I don't know, Guatemala or Singapore, Mozambique or someplace to just do that in one

01:56:10.220 place, I bet it would work great. And that one example could lead the rest of the world to follow.

01:56:15.800 But we are so far from any place being willing to try it. I mean, the closest is Iran. Interestingly,

01:56:21.320 ironically, Iran is the one place on the planet that's paid for organs, but not the way I would

01:56:26.280 do it. Not that it's the most important problem in the world. That is a fan, like along with training that

01:56:32.060 horse, Silver, to win the Kentucky Derby. That's another of my fantasies is a world in which I

01:56:39.260 create this market for live donors. All right. So on that note, Steve, we've got three huge problems

01:56:43.880 to follow up on. We've got to, in order, figure out how to create a really good scratch five golfer

01:56:50.860 in 12 months. We've got to figure out how to take a B player horse as a one-year-old and get a triple

01:56:58.720 crown by age three. And we've got to figure out a market for organ donation with a really, really,

01:57:05.420 really high price premium paid for kidneys. Let me just add number four is we got to figure

01:57:09.820 out how to do this Manhattan project for climate change. That's the most important one. I'm going

01:57:14.780 to personally spend more time thinking about that one than the other three, but that's awesome to

01:57:19.760 come out of this podcast with four great problems to work on is more than we bargained for.

01:57:24.620 My prediction, the only one we're going to solve is going to be that five handicap golfer when you

01:57:29.120 get burned out and you get tired of doing everything else. The other three, I'm not too

01:57:33.140 optimistic about. Steve, thanks so much for sitting down today. It was awesome.

01:57:37.980 Thank you, Peter. It's awesome. It's always so much fun to talk.

01:57:41.080 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper

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The Peter Attia Drive - March 22, 2021

#154 - Steve Levitt, Ph.D.： A rogue economist's view on climate change, mental health, the ethics of experiments, and more

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