Sendhil Mullainathan Thinks Messing Around Is the Best Use of Your Time (Update)

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Speaker 6 Whenever we replay an old episode, like we're doing today with one of my all-time favorite conversations with Sendal Mulinatin, I always had a few words of context at the beginning to give listeners an idea of why we chose this particular episode.

Speaker 6 And with Sendal, I thought, I'll just say he's one of my absolute favorite people in the world.

Speaker 6 But then I had the good sense to re-listen to our original conversation, only to realize that it's the exact phrase I used to introduce Sendel in the original episode a few years ago.

Speaker 6 For me, there's no one more fun to talk to than Sendal.

Speaker 6 I am especially excited about today's episode because my guest is Sendel Moulinaten, one of my absolute favorite people in the world.

Speaker 6 Sendal is a world-class economist and MacArthur genius recipient and holds a university professorship at the University of Chicago.

Speaker 6 That's a special position reserved for only the most highly esteemed faculty. Only 10 of the university's 3,000 faculty members have that title.
What makes Sendo so special?

Speaker 6 His mix of brilliance and childlike curiosity make him unlike anyone I've ever known. His research reflects his curiosity.

Speaker 6 He's written about everything from racial bias and artificial intelligence algorithms to the psychological effects of poverty, from the determinants of CEO pay to corruption and who gets a driver's license in India.

Speaker 3 Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

Speaker 6 I've known Sandal for 25 years, but it wasn't until he left Harvard to come to the University of Chicago a few years back that I came to fully appreciate him.

Speaker 6 Lots of people are interesting if you only talk to them once a year, but not many people can make everyday conversation fascinating.

Speaker 6 He just never fails to amaze me with his creativity and breadth of knowledge, and I'm quite confident that once you hear him talk, you'll agree.

Speaker 9 Sendale, I always eagerly look forward to our conversations.

Speaker 14 And two reasons I love talking to you are, first, there's always something that has you so excited you can barely contain yourself.

Speaker 18 And second, What that something will be is completely unpredictable.

Speaker 20 So the last time we talked, it was an Oculus virtual reality headset that had transformed your life.

Speaker 21 So is your love for the Oculus still going strong?

Speaker 23 Absolutely.

Speaker 24 I have to say it is one of the more amazing inventions.

Speaker 26 I'm sure that lots of people out there who've been using it for years are like, how is this an insight?

Speaker 31 But these media for communication by which we can translate ideas to each other, they may start off as novelties, but they have profound consequences on how we live our lives.

Speaker 15 So I was convinced when we talked and you were so excited.

Speaker 9 I went right home and I immediately bought an oculus for my research center because one of our goals is to transform the educational system.

Speaker 20 And the way you described your experiences, all I could think about is that the possibilities if we got this technology into classrooms must be infinite.

Speaker 16 And I must say, the workers in my center, I've never seen them tackle a project with such gusto.

Speaker 21 Our oculus has been in use, I'd say, 10 to 12 hours per day, every day.

Speaker 34 And all that time, I'm sure, is devoted to exploring the educational potential of the device.

Speaker 38 One thing I know about you is you don't think small, you always think big.

Speaker 20 What's your big vision for what happens with VR?

Speaker 31 Let me throw out an idea for you and see what you think.

Speaker 41 Why do we go into offices at all?

Speaker 42 I mean, at all? Why do we fly across country?

Speaker 43 Why do we do any of it?

Speaker 47 And it's because there is still a reality that somehow when you and I talk on the phone or when you and I even talk on Zoom, it's not quite the same as being in person.

Speaker 48 Now, it's entirely possible that we can recreate that experience 100% with virtual reality, which if you think of the knock-on consequences, let me give you an example.

Speaker 54 One of the things that people say is that the cell phone decoupled a phone number from a location.

Speaker 54 Suddenly, the cell phone made it so that a phone number referred to you, not the address at which it was sitting.

Speaker 57 If similarly, your office location was not a physical place, but was you, you can work from anywhere, you can do anything.

Speaker 53 It totally transforms our capacity to interact with each other and how we interact.

Speaker 23 So I'm curious what you think of that one.

Speaker 62 I actually thought you were going to say something different.

Speaker 11 I thought you were going to emphasize the fact that with virtual reality, you can bring any place to you.

Speaker 63 Oh, I love that.

Speaker 20 As well as you bring you to any other place.

Speaker 10 So you can be in the Grand Canyon or under the water or inside a molecule.

Speaker 34 You can be miniature now moving around.

Speaker 20 NaCl, sodium, and chlorine atoms.

Speaker 41 Yeah, that's a great idea, including places that aren't really places per se.

Speaker 45 You could be inside of the brain watching neurons fire.

Speaker 64 You've seen this, right?

Speaker 56 Like a good figure, a good drawing of some effect suddenly changes your understanding of it.

Speaker 49 So people say Maxwell, for example, came up with his equations for electricity in large part because he came up with these good diagrams.

Speaker 68 And the same is true of Feynman diagrams, et cetera.

Speaker 28 Imagine what it's going to do for science if you can put yourself in high-fidelity simulations of the thing that you're studying.

Speaker 33 Bring the place to you is a terrific way of putting it.

Speaker 11 What's the path?

Speaker 19 One problem is you've got this two-sided market issue, which is that let's just say schools are the target.

Speaker 10 If schools don't have the technology and adopt it, then it doesn't make sense to develop the programs for it, but the schools won't adopt until you have the programs.

Speaker 51 If you look at a lot of the early day uses of computing, they weren't blow you away.

Speaker 52 They're just things that really got some people excited.

Speaker 70 Like I remember calling up bulletin boards to do virtual Dungeons and Dragons with like, there was a modem.

Speaker 24 I still remember it going,

Speaker 70 now you would have said, we built all this technology so you can play a role-playing game, whatever, but it's related to your research assistants who work at your center.

Speaker 40 They're playing and play is so underrated because it just fuels this first phase of all sorts of infrastructure building.

Speaker 43 And so I think even if 10 years out, we imagine all these grand changes, it heartens me that right now people who start playing with it enjoy playing and then start tinkering and make stuff they enjoy because that gives you that kind of base layer of stuff and just creates demand.

Speaker 66 And from it, you get all this other cool stuff.

Speaker 6 And never having done it myself, what makes it so special?

Speaker 53 Here's a psychological fact that I think many people may not realize.

Speaker 40 It's like when someone says to you optical illusion, you think, oh, I know that.

Speaker 24 It's like this image where it's an old lady or a young woman.

Speaker 24 You can look at it both ways, but they forget that like every photograph, every TV screen is an optical illusion because it is truly two-dimensional, but your mind creates three dimensions.

Speaker 68 There's no three dimensions, it's just two.

Speaker 42 But that optical illusion is actually relatively low fidelity.

Speaker 31 You put on the VR set and it feels 100% like 3D.

Speaker 43 So, for example, there's this little thing with Jurassic Park and a dinosaur.

Speaker 76 And I was like, oh, let me play this video.

Speaker 29 Your heart is beating.

Speaker 23 And when the thing's tail comes at you, you say to yourself, it's not a real tail. Do not duck.

Speaker 39 And then you're like, I'm ducking before I know it.

Speaker 44 It taps into this very basic sensory system.

Speaker 56 And that's just amazing.

Speaker 6 We'll be right back with more of my conversation with economist Sendal Mulanaten after this short break.

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Speaker 15 This is going to seem off point, but about 20 years ago in a seminar, you said something, Sandal, and I remember virtually nothing from 20 years ago.

Speaker 9 It's incredible that I remember this.

Speaker 15 You were giving a seminar. We were both just young professors getting started.

Speaker 89 And you said something like, a stranger tells you some random fact.

Speaker 9 You're far more likely to remember that fact if the stranger is wearing a bright orange clown wig than if she's average looking, even though it's the same fact.

Speaker 11 And your point was about salience and how things that are unrelated to the actual content have a huge impact on how people perceive it.

Speaker 36 Now, I find it so ironic that I can remember this point you made about salience.

Speaker 34 Somehow you turned into the clown.

Speaker 35 Do you remember saying that?

Speaker 60 I don't remember the clown specifically, but it is something that stuck with me.

Speaker 55 The mind doesn't code information because it's important.

Speaker 24 or you really want to remember it.

Speaker 44 It codes information because of these kind of salient things.

Speaker 44 And it reminds me of, I'm not going to ask if you read it, but have you at least pretended to read Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past?

Speaker 18 No, I've never even pretended to read it.

Speaker 91 Some of us have pretended to read it.

Speaker 74 It's six volumes or something. So at a minimum, you can say things like, I read volume one, even though you basically bought it.

Speaker 45 So the opening scene in there is exactly this.

Speaker 55 He's in bed and he bites into this Madeleine, this pastry, and suddenly he's flooded with this memory of being at his aunt's house.

Speaker 41 And he realizes it's because the flavor of this pastry is strongly associated with that time at his aunt's house.

Speaker 64 And something as simple as the smell and flavor brings with it these evocative, beautiful memories.

Speaker 59 And you'll notice this in yourself, like smell, so salient, brings with it so many things.

Speaker 64 The memory system doesn't work the way you want it to work.

Speaker 11 And so is it your hypothesis that lessons taught through virtual reality might be much stickier than other means of learning?

Speaker 93 Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 54 I'd say that in general, we learn so much better when we're we're doing things than when we're just listening to things.

Speaker 44 I'll give an example.

Speaker 75 If I say to you, think of one of your favorite meals from a past vacation five years ago, you can probably remember, like you had it exactly once, but you can probably remember the dish and you can probably remember what was in it and you remember the feeling you had.

Speaker 44 That's astonishing.

Speaker 24 If I said to you, remember a good conversation, I'd be like, I don't know, we talked.

Speaker 74 It was nice.

Speaker 91 It was fun.

Speaker 22 But taste, smell, these things, they're just hardwired back in.

Speaker 35 So along those lines, I told you something I remembered from 20 years ago, but I also want to make a confession to you.

Speaker 16 You wrote a book and I don't know, it must have been almost a decade ago, and the book was called Scarcity.

Speaker 7 And I love the book.

Speaker 35 I read it in two or three sittings.

Speaker 20 My blurb is on the cover of the book, and I raved about it to anyone who would listen.

Speaker 37 So as preparation for this conversation today, I went back and I looked at the book for the first time in ages.

Speaker 19 Obviously, I remember the key thesis of the book.

Speaker 37 Like you have a really simple point that has stuck with me.

Speaker 9 But I would have sworn I have never read the book before.

Speaker 15 It's loaded with these stunning experimental results and these interesting stories.

Speaker 9 And as I read them, I felt like I had literally never read about this experiment before.

Speaker 22 Obviously, I had.

Speaker 13 I would have thought that, oh, yeah, of course, this is the study when the people weren't allowed to have lunch and then they had to do the word search. Oh, yeah, I came back.

Speaker 36 Nothing.

Speaker 11 I wonder if my chronic lack of sleep from having too many kids has really left me somehow deeply mentally impaired. What do you think?

Speaker 50 So that's at the heart of this app that we're releasing that I want to tell you about in a second.

Speaker 45 But I also want to tell you that your experience is the experience everybody has.

Speaker 27 Lately, I've asked people the following question.

Speaker 64 Hey, what's a novel that you really like?

Speaker 39 And they'll tell me the novel.

Speaker 7 And I'm like, great.

Speaker 40 Can you tell me how it ends?

Speaker 23 And they're like, oh, I said, okay, fine. You can't do that.

Speaker 70 Can you tell me?

Speaker 44 two of the main characters names.

Speaker 4 They're like, I remember one kind of.

Speaker 77 And it's amazing how quickly things that you've read, they come in and they go out the other ear.

Speaker 55 It's just astonishing.

Speaker 15 Do you think that's particular to reading?

Speaker 35 Is reading an especially bad way to gather information?

Speaker 9 Or do you think it's more generic?

Speaker 44 I think it's two things.

Speaker 92 We imagine the mind to be this sort of warehouse of information.

Speaker 44 but don't appreciate how much is just open doors.

Speaker 24 It's like a train station that people walk through.

Speaker 44 Like ideas are just going through the train station of our mind. Not many things stay behind.
but you're on to something.

Speaker 4 I think reading is just such a bad way to learn because in many ways it's passive.

Speaker 24 It's not experiential. Like you remember your experiences.

Speaker 27 You remember the feeling of being on a roller coaster, those physical highs, those ahas that you yourself have experienced, but not the things that you've read about.

Speaker 69 One of the things, therefore, I try to do in class is rather than teach people things, I try to create little experiences for them.

Speaker 27 You'll like this one, Steve.

Speaker 40 So do you know this $20 auction?

Speaker 26 You basically say, I'm going to auction off this $20 bill.

Speaker 20 Where both people have to pay.

Speaker 68 Both people have to pay.

Speaker 20 I love that. Yeah.
Tell people about it. It's incredible.

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 43 In class, I hold it up.

Speaker 68 I say, here's a $20 bill. I'm going to auction it off.

Speaker 45 And so I'm going to give it to the winner just to make things interesting.

Speaker 47 The highest bidder wins the bill and pays.

Speaker 28 The second highest bidder doesn't get anything, but they also pay.

Speaker 43 So at first, everyone's a little hesitant.

Speaker 53 You're like, okay, $20 and minimum increments of bids of a dollar.

Speaker 43 So of course, somebody says a dollar.

Speaker 66 And you say, okay, a dollar.

Speaker 28 Going once, going.

Speaker 77 I'm going to let this guy get $20 for a dollar. So someone else bids two.

Speaker 49 And that's all you need.

Speaker 20 So the key is that, unlike every other auction in the world, both the high bidder and the second place bidder both have to pay.

Speaker 22 They pay whatever their bid was.

Speaker 44 Exactly. And the highest bidder wins the bill.

Speaker 68 Yep.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 44 So once you have one person bid a dollar and somebody else has bid two dollars, think of what is about to happen.

Speaker 28 I say, okay, going once, going twice.

Speaker 77 The dollar bidder is like, well, I'm not going to get it for two to get to three.

Speaker 40 And they just keep leapfrogging each other.

Speaker 74 A crucial thing happens when someone has bid 10 and 9.

Speaker 44 The $9 bidder says, I'll bid 11.

Speaker 23 At that point, I'm making a profit. I've now just auctioned off the $20 bill.

Speaker 66 At a minimum, I'm making a dollar profit because Someone's bid 11, someone's bid 10.

Speaker 60 I'm getting 21. I'm giving up $20.

Speaker 23 It seems absurd that I'm making a profit off of this.

Speaker 74 And the second crucial thing that happens when the highest bid is at 19, because at that point, both players know this is not going to end well, but they don't want to be the one for whom it ends badly.

Speaker 45 So the $18 bidder is, wow, I'm going to lose 18 anyway.

Speaker 40 Let me bid 20.

Speaker 11 I've seen this happen.

Speaker 35 It's always the same.

Speaker 17 Until that point, they don't feel that bad.

Speaker 11 Because they feel like this is going to end at 20.

Speaker 11 So I think, okay, fine. I'll bid 20.

Speaker 18 I'll break even.

Speaker 35 The other guy will bid 19.

Speaker 18 He'll lose 19.

Speaker 11 We'll be done.

Speaker 8 But then when you get to that point, something awful sets in.

Speaker 6 Because what happens then?

Speaker 73 The $19 bidder is like, I'm losing 19 and I'm not getting anything. If I just bid $21

Speaker 29 for this $20 bill, I can at least recoup some of my losses.

Speaker 44 Once you cross that boundary, there is no stopping this freight trade.

Speaker 77 It's especially awesome to do in classes when you have these sort of more broish because they just won't let go.

Speaker 75 You have to just pull the plug.

Speaker 74 You have to say, I am calling it here at $42 bias bid. It's absurd.

Speaker 49 Obviously, the two people involved feel the lesson, but so does everybody else, having been part of it.

Speaker 23 And I'd say, now let's talk about the sunk cost fallacy, the idea of throwing good money after bad.

Speaker 49 Now, when you talk about the sunk cost fallacy, it has real personal resonance.

Speaker 43 Like people will remember this experience and that lets them understand sunk cost fallacy more than if I just talked it through, don't throw good money after bad, et cetera.

Speaker 10 I never thought about that in terms of sunk costs.

Speaker 11 What's always been to me so interesting is it's a game that once you start it, it doesn't have an obvious equilibrium.

Speaker 9 Because if I've bid 40 and you've bid 41, each time I'm faced with roughly the same problem, which is for $2 more,

Speaker 9 I get a chance at winning 20.

Speaker 11 And so if the other guy will quit with a 10% probability, it makes sense to do it.

Speaker 76 Yeah, exactly. I should walk through how I do it.

Speaker 68 I say, here's a sunk cost fallacy, throwing good money after a bad.

Speaker 28 Here's something called escalation of commitment, where you consistently keep ignoring.

Speaker 24 You're like, we've already done it. It's only a little bit more.

Speaker 27 And I think a lot of sunk cost fallacies play out like this $20 bill auction.

Speaker 76 They're like these little escalation of commitments, if that makes sense.

Speaker 31 It's like you're in a bad relationship.

Speaker 55 Let's give it another week.

Speaker 76 Okay.

Speaker 73 But a week from now, where are you going to be that's that different than today?

Speaker 76 This project doesn't look that good.

Speaker 28 Let's give it another $10,000 thousand dollar investment and let's see how much so there's this element of the thing where you've spent some resources put yourself actually ironically not that differently from where you started and you don't step back and say where does this whole thing end locally every single extra dollar seems to make sense but if you step back you're like where does this thing end up Yeah, the fact that every time you've spent the extra two dollars, the other guy has topped you.

Speaker 21 Over time, that should change your probability about what's going to happen next.

Speaker 90 And related to that decision making i woke up in the morning for maybe five straight years and the first thing i thought about every morning is should i quit my job as a professor and every morning i thought god i would so like to quit but i can always quit tomorrow and maybe something will happen today that will make me change my mind and so i literally delayed my decision because i had this third option which is well as long as i wait till tomorrow the cost of waiting is really small like a good example in this game is if you weren't given the chance to go up by $2, which is essentially like pushing the decision till tomorrow, if you just had to make a decision, look, I'm either going to play this game until I'm dead or I'm going to stop now, everybody would stop now.

Speaker 35 It's the fact that you introduce this third option, which is like a wasting away option that completely defines my life.

Speaker 16 I would say my entire life, that has been my rule of decision making.

Speaker 29 Your point about deferring to tomorrow is so profound because I think there's a deep psychological bias that you tend to think tomorrow will somehow be different.

Speaker 45 It shows up in so many aspects of life where if you just say to yourself, if tomorrow is a repeat of yesterday, how would I behave differently?

Speaker 55 And so many things change.

Speaker 46 There's an employee, they're not that good, they haven't done very well.

Speaker 45 And you're like, well, let's give them a chance.

Speaker 44 The first time, giving them a chance may make sense.

Speaker 29 But after four times, you're like, if tomorrow is going to be a repeat of yesterday, what am I doing?

Speaker 58 And that simple heuristic, tomorrow is a repeat of yesterday, really cuts through a lot of clutter, like so much decision clutter.

Speaker 35 Do you use that in your own life?

Speaker 30 I try to use that in my own life.

Speaker 36 The place where I've gotten better and better at it is in trying to decide what I should do.

Speaker 98 What should I work on?

Speaker 43 And it's tempting to work on things that give you some pleasure in the future, but they're painful right now.

Speaker 45 And you end up with so many of those things.

Speaker 27 You say, wait a minute, will tomorrow be like today and yesterday, which is just a lot of grinding out in the hope of some big payoff in the future?

Speaker 91 That doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 44 It's like I'm lifting weights for some weightlifting competition that doesn't seem to ever appear.

Speaker 61 I loved your coin experiment.

Speaker 6 The coin experiment that Cyndel refers to is a research project I did to learn about whether or not people make good choices. I built a webpage for people who were struggling with a hard decision.

Speaker 6 So should they quit their job or not? Maybe should they end a relationship or stick with it? And I invited those people to be part of an experiment. And if they agreed, I did something really simple.

Speaker 6 I flipped a coin. And if the coin toss came up heads, I encouraged them to make a change, to end that relationship, to quit the job.
And if it came up tails, I encouraged them to stay the course.

Speaker 6 And the amazing thing is, almost 20,000 people flipped coins, and the outcome of the coin toss actually affected the way people behaved.

Speaker 6 And six months later, I surveyed those people to figure out how happy they were with their choices.

Speaker 65 I've taken away the fact that when you're near indifference, which is a lot of the people in your coin experiment, they're like, hey, I'm indifferent.

Speaker 27 I'll let you decide.

Speaker 59 And when you're near indifferent,

Speaker 59 you're not actually near indifferent.

Speaker 70 So

Speaker 42 you should be able to figure out which way the bias goes.

Speaker 76 You're like, I'm indifferent. Guess what?

Speaker 43 You have status quo bias.

Speaker 59 So if you're near indifferent, it's easy.

Speaker 4 Change.

Speaker 45 And there's so many things like that.

Speaker 70 You're like, if you're near indifferent, what's your bias?

Speaker 54 You tend to pick the better known option.

Speaker 24 Great. You're near indifferent, pick the less known option.

Speaker 76 I found that just a very powerful situation, a powerful tool.

Speaker 11 Yeah, for me, it's just a great heuristic because every problem ends up turning into the same problem.

Speaker 35 As long as I have strong preferences, I follow my preferences. When I don't know what to do, I know that I'm just messed up because history tells me that I'm always stuck with the status quo.

Speaker 35 And so I should always make the change.

Speaker 18 Now, even knowing that, I don't make enough changes.

Speaker 35 It's interesting that I'm the author of a study that says when you're indifferent, you should make a change.

Speaker 21 And my whole body convulses at the thought of change. And I don't do it.

Speaker 22 It's like incredible.

Speaker 7 I completely and utterly know that I am doing something crazy.

Speaker 11 And I do it anyway.

Speaker 20 That's how powerful my status quo bias is.

Speaker 43 Oh my God, status quo bias is so powerful.

Speaker 39 I don't know if you're into food, but one thing I've noticed with food is if you say to somebody, try this, and they're like, oh, it has mushrooms.

Speaker 54 I don't like mushrooms.

Speaker 77 Go ahead, just give it a taste.

Speaker 4 No, I couldn't. I don't like my.

Speaker 63 Are you allergic or poisonous to my?

Speaker 75 No, no, no.

Speaker 61 And I am completely like this.

Speaker 54 So much so that my ex-wife, I didn't like soy sauce.

Speaker 93 I was like, I don't like soy sauce.

Speaker 49 I don't like that at all.

Speaker 74 So she would secretly cook me things with soy sauce that I actually liked.

Speaker 44 It's this thing of like, why am I so wedded to this status quo that I don't even experiment a tiny bit?

Speaker 33 What does one mouthful cost me?

Speaker 39 Nothing.

Speaker 71 And it has got to be a given that I don't dislike everything with mushrooms.

Speaker 76 That is absurd, right?

Speaker 33 I'm sure I dislike some mushrooms, but not all.

Speaker 43 And so in food, I really see it because the cost of experimentation is zero.

Speaker 64 And yet we do so little of it.

Speaker 60 I often say to people, oh, they'll say, oh, let's go to this restaurant.

Speaker 68 I have a favorite dish here.

Speaker 76 Okay, great.

Speaker 91 Have you tried any of the other dishes?

Speaker 70 No. How many times have you been here? Like 30 times.

Speaker 67 Each time, though, I have my favorite.

Speaker 53 I don't want to give up on my favorite. It's like, you tried one thing.

Speaker 70 Try a few others.

Speaker 11 I have a rule of thumb at restaurants, which is I try one thing.

Speaker 9 If I like it, I'll go back there over and over.

Speaker 11 And if I don't like it, I will never go back.

Speaker 18 I almost never sample two things on a menu.

Speaker 44 Go back a second time. Do you try something else or you just?

Speaker 74 Oh, never, no.

Speaker 11 I wouldn't even think about it.

Speaker 35 Almost every restaurant I frequent, I hit the jackpot the first time.

Speaker 10 And I can't imagine how anything could be better than the thing that I got the first time, ever.

Speaker 7 But I'm happy about that.

Speaker 36 Actually, that one doesn't bother me.

Speaker 11 I do a lot of things that bother me, but that one seems to me, that's sensible. Once you hit something good, why would you ever mess with success?

Speaker 70 Next time you go to your favorite restaurant, order the thing you like.

Speaker 39 And since I know you have the cash, order something else on top.

Speaker 49 It's like costless experimentation.

Speaker 41 Just see what it tastes like.

Speaker 71 Who knows? If they did one thing, maybe they do a second thing right.

Speaker 3 You're listening to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with economist Sendhil Molynaton.

Speaker 3 After this short break, they'll return to talk about Sendhil's new app that helps people retain new ideas.

Speaker 3 Listen.

Speaker 82 That's the sound of the fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron.

Speaker 82 The sound of captivating electric performance,

Speaker 82 dynamic drive, and the quiet confidence of ultra-smooth handling.

Speaker 82 The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV.

Speaker 82 This is electric performance redefined.

Speaker 82 The fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron.

Speaker 81 Honey, do not make plans Saturday, September 13th, okay?

Speaker 83 Why, what's happening?

Speaker 81 The Walmart Wellness Event.

Speaker 84 Flu shots, health screenings, free samples from those brands you like.

Speaker 83 All that at Walmart.

Speaker 85 We can just walk right in. No appointment needed.

Speaker 86 Who knew we could cover our health and wellness needs at Walmart?

Speaker 87 Check the calendar Saturday, September 13th.

Speaker 81 Walmart Wellness Event.

Speaker 5 You knew.

Speaker 83 I knew.

Speaker 88 Check in on your health at the same place you already shop. Visit Walmart Saturday, September 13th for our semi-annual wellness event.
Flu shots subject to availability and applicable state law.

Speaker 88 Age restrictions apply. Free samples while supplies last.

Speaker 99 Add a little curiosity into your routine with TED Talks Daily, the podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday.

Speaker 99 In less than 15 minutes a day, you'll go beyond the headlines and learn about the big ideas shaping your future.

Speaker 100 Coming up, how AI will change the way we communicate, how to be a better leader, and more.

Speaker 99 Listen to TED Talks Daily, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 6 This has been such a typical Sindle conversation.

Speaker 13 In a few minutes, he managed to go from Feynman diagrams to Marcel Proust to the sun cost fallacy to not liking soy sauce.

Speaker 6 Now, I want to hear more about this new app. Since when do econ professors develop apps?

Speaker 6 So earlier in our conversation, you referenced an app that you developed. It's a learning app.
What does it do?

Speaker 41 It's called Peak, P-I-Q-U-E, like Peak Your Interest.

Speaker 53 And at its core, it's trying to say, look, we have a fundamental problem in learning new ideas.

Speaker 42 We read about them.

Speaker 51 But reading is a bad way of learning.

Speaker 33 So what it tries to do is it takes books and the ideas in the books and says, we're going to turn those into experiences.

Speaker 46 So like the dollar auction, you're actually going to go and experience something in the app and then we'll say, look, you've learned about escalation of commitment.

Speaker 20 You say books. What do you mean by books?

Speaker 11 Like real books?

Speaker 69 Yeah, like real books.

Speaker 53 The first set we're doing right now is behavioral economics, behavioral science books.

Speaker 43 I'll give you an example.

Speaker 27 There's this great book by Lightye Klotz.

Speaker 32 It's called Subtract.

Speaker 92 It just came out.

Speaker 20 It's awesome. Oh, yeah, yeah, I've heard of that.

Speaker 22 I haven't read it.

Speaker 68 It's really nice.

Speaker 53 It's one of the books in our app.

Speaker 70 And what we do is he has an experiment where there's a grid okay so people come in the app they see a grid and the grid has different colors and so your job is when you click on a tile it changes the color and flips it it's a little game and what you want to do is you want to try to make the grid symmetric color wise okay

Speaker 23 and you find that in about 12 flips you can make it symmetric.

Speaker 51 And there's actually a much easier way to do it than 12.

Speaker 65 I think it's four or eight steps, much fewer.

Speaker 42 But when you do the 12, it's because you're looking to add colors to create symmetry.

Speaker 51 The way you do four is you remove colors to create symmetry.

Speaker 40 And Leidy's point in the book is that in many situations, we look to create good changes by addition.

Speaker 42 We rarely look to get to where we want through subtraction.

Speaker 61 Reading Leidy's book is a delight, but playing games like this where you're kind of struggled with the game, you're like, I can't get it.

Speaker 53 I can't get to the best.

Speaker 39 And then you have the aha moment. You've learned the subtract lesson by doing it.

Speaker 54 And you remember that far more.

Speaker 41 And so with the app, Peak takes these books and creates these experiences.

Speaker 11 Is your thought that people will read the books first and get the lessons reinforced through the app or that the app potentially becomes a very time efficient way to avoid having to read 300 page books that only make a couple of points?

Speaker 65 Yeah, I imagine that for a lot of people, they will do the app and then for some, it'll motivate them to read more detail in the book.

Speaker 65 Because it's also more interesting to read a book when you've got a lesson from it motivating you and pushing you through.

Speaker 53 And I do think there's a time efficiency gain of doing the experience.

Speaker 57 It's like teaching.

Speaker 35 So take a book that many people would know.

Speaker 53 We have one that I like, which we can try on your listeners and I can try on you as well, Steve.

Speaker 44 It's a memory experiment.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 54 I'm going to list a bunch of words.

Speaker 65 I don't want you writing anything down.

Speaker 77 And then I want you to, after I list the words, write down whatever you remember.

Speaker 27 I'm going to list about 10 words.

Speaker 54 So it's pure memory.

Speaker 46 I'll say them out loud.

Speaker 28 Don't do anything. And then after I say go, write down as many as you can remember.

Speaker 22 Okay, here we go. Bed.

Speaker 8 Rest.

Speaker 48 Awake.

Speaker 5 Nap.

Speaker 39 Dream.

Speaker 48 Wake.

Speaker 39 Doze.

Speaker 75 Snore.

Speaker 54 Slumber.

Speaker 39 Blanket.

Speaker 75 Snooze.

Speaker 93 Tired.

Speaker 28 Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 51 Just write down as many of these words as you can remember.

Speaker 10 Did you write them down so you know what you actually said?

Speaker 4 I did, yes.

Speaker 4 Okay, do you have it?

Speaker 11 All right, so I got seven written down.

Speaker 27 Okay, so let's see.

Speaker 77 Do you have the word bed?

Speaker 95 Yes.

Speaker 22 Tired?

Speaker 7 Nope. Oh, yeah, I do.
Yep. Dream?

Speaker 34 Nope.

Speaker 39 Slumber?

Speaker 48 Yep. Sleep?

Speaker 4 Nope.

Speaker 44 So for your listeners, let's just say you did, Steve.

Speaker 57 Let's just pretend you had sleep.

Speaker 4 Okay. Okay.

Speaker 75 So this experiment, over 50% of people remember the word dream, and over 50% of people remember the word sleep.

Speaker 57 But there's a big difference between those two words.

Speaker 72 Dream was on my list.

Speaker 57 Sleep was never on my list.

Speaker 54 You can reliably induce a false memory of the word sleep.

Speaker 92 And you can see what's happening here.

Speaker 29 Sleep is in the sort of network.

Speaker 74 of these words.

Speaker 29 It's like that party where your friend says to you, hey, you remember that party you were at?

Speaker 72 And you're like, I wasn't at that party.

Speaker 7 They're like, No, you were there.

Speaker 74 It's because every one of your other friends was there.

Speaker 69 They're like, Well, you were there too.

Speaker 44 And sleep is like that.

Speaker 43 And so, this is a false memory inducement.

Speaker 40 And you can give all sorts of lectures about people's memory is fallible, don't trust your memory.

Speaker 77 But you do an experiment like that, and suddenly people are like, I really remember the word sleep.

Speaker 70 And in fact, you did not remember the word sleep.

Speaker 46 And it teaches you a lesson around the fallibility of memory.

Speaker 15 I brought up your scarcity book before.

Speaker 11 One of the things I found so unbelievable about that book is that I saw the title and it's called Scarcity.

Speaker 10 And I thought to myself, this is so arrogant because economics is the study of scarcity.

Speaker 37 And for the last 200 years, we've all been studying scarcity.

Speaker 96 So who does Sendle think he is that he's going to have something new to say?

Speaker 72 And I read the book and I'm like, wow, sandal had something new to say so first tell us what you had new to say and then i think bring it home with the experiments so economists study the physical fact of scarcity you know everything is scarce you buy something you're not buying something else there's a constraint what we are studying here is the psychology of scarcity the feeling of having too little and the hypothesis is that when you have too little of something, that tends to capture your attention.

Speaker 26 Your mind automatically goes towards it.

Speaker 25 When you're very busy, your mind goes towards the things taking up your time and the deadlines, the things that are due.

Speaker 97 For the poor who are scarce in money, their mind automatically goes towards, oh my God, will I be able to make rent?

Speaker 25 And for me, the most satisfying thing about the book, it's the sheer amount of feedback I've gotten.

Speaker 4 from

Speaker 80 people who have experienced poverty or who are experiencing poverty saying, this captures my experience of being poor.

Speaker 71 And I've had periods of poverty, and that's what you feel.

Speaker 67 Your mind just keeps going to this thing.

Speaker 50 So, I'll give you the example.

Speaker 51 This is a study not from the book, this is with Anud Shah.

Speaker 41 And what we did was we re-ran the same word study that we just did around the word sleep,

Speaker 25 but we ran it with a new set of words.

Speaker 72 They're words like cash, pay, loan, dollar, gas, grocery.

Speaker 29 For rich people, if you give them that list, there's no word that they remember having heard that wasn't there.

Speaker 28 They remember some of these words, but they don't make up a word.

Speaker 53 But for poor people, when you give them the same list, a huge fraction of them remember having heard the word money.

Speaker 50 Because for the poor, you hear grocery, they think money.

Speaker 66 You hear gas, they think money.

Speaker 50 And it's like many roads lead back to money.

Speaker 31 The consequence of this is that if your mind was a processor, like a computing processor, a fraction of it beyond your control is constantly churning on these concerns about money, which obviously makes it much harder to think about anything else.

Speaker 20 I love these studies.

Speaker 36 Can you tell the one about when you bring people into the lab and you tell them not to eat beforehand?

Speaker 43 Oh, yeah, yeah. This is great.

Speaker 53 People were brought into the lab.

Speaker 25 Everyone's hungry when they show up, but some of them were given some food and now they're less hungry.

Speaker 47 And they're all given the same word search task.

Speaker 50 Imagine a grid of letters and you have to look for a word.

Speaker 92 And we say, okay, first word, cookie.

Speaker 66 And so you search for cookie.

Speaker 47 Second word, tent.

Speaker 50 And what you're really testing is after you've seen the word cookie, how long does it take for you to find the word tent?

Speaker 28 If you're not hungry, whatever, it's just another word. Just go right along.

Speaker 72 If you're hungry, it takes much longer to find the word tent because your mind is still on that cookie.

Speaker 43 Not even that real cookie, but those letters, C-O-O-K-I-E.

Speaker 66 All it takes is a a little bit of a prime for the hungry people, and suddenly their mind is off thinking about food.

Speaker 57 And I think that's an experience I'm sure everybody's had, that it's very hard to think about something else when you've just been reminded of a cookie.

Speaker 13 And in these studies, the effects are huge.

Speaker 96 I mean, you talk about effects that when you prime people to think about what their problem is, we're talking about like a difference of 10 IQ points between otherwise identical people, some of whom are primed to be thinking about the problem that fills their mind?

Speaker 66 Yeah, exactly. The hypothesis is, because it's taking up our bandwidth, as we call it, the effect on your effective IQ can be quite large.

Speaker 72 There's a study by Claire Duquenois where there are these sort of math exams that have word questions, and some of the word questions involve monetary things.

Speaker 27 Bob has $10.

Speaker 69 Fred has $5.

Speaker 72 And she basically shows that only for poor students, after you get a monetary-themed themed question, you do much worse on the question that comes after.

Speaker 31 So much so that just having one in 10 more monetary questions in an exam reduces the performance gap by 6%.

Speaker 16 Wow, that's crazy.

Speaker 31 I should tell you one other study that we're just finishing, because what's been fun for me in the last 10 years is seeing people take these ideas and do new different studies.

Speaker 32 So this is a study by Suanna Oh and Supreme Court and Frank Schobach.

Speaker 69 So what they do is these are workers in India.

Speaker 78 They get paid every two weeks.

Speaker 72 Now, this is lean times.

Speaker 67 So you know what it's like.

Speaker 31 You haven't gotten paid yet.

Speaker 29 So you're pretty far away from your payday. So you're like,

Speaker 31 you're pretty tight on money.

Speaker 27 And what you find is if you just give them some of their paycheck, like four days early, their actual productivity goes up.

Speaker 31 They're actually just more productive because they can focus more at work.

Speaker 29 And the way that they're focusing more at work is pretty cool because what these people are doing is they're making leaf plates.

Speaker 78 They're taking lots of little leaves and stitching them together to make a plate.

Speaker 31 And when you look at the workers who have just gotten a little cash infusion and don't feel a strained, you can look at the plates they make and they just have far fewer errors.

Speaker 64 Whereas the ones who did not get the financial infusion, you can see places where they made a mistake, had to take the stitches out and do it again and again.

Speaker 45 It's striking. You can see it in the way people work.

Speaker 72 And I've started to notice how much of my own work comes from, is my mind fully there?

Speaker 50 That's just a big part.

Speaker 79 If I have anxiety or something that my mind keeps going to, that's the biggest detriment to all my work.

Speaker 12 This makes total sense, but it doesn't really give a lot of clues of getting out of poverty other than giving people a bunch of money.

Speaker 8 Are there other implications?

Speaker 30 I think there's definitely other implications. Economists are very sensitive to taxes.

Speaker 31 Like we try not to tax when we can avoid it. But we're very insensitive to cognitive taxes.

Speaker 101 If I said to you, okay, you want to get financial aid, go ahead, fill out this 50-page form.

Speaker 97 Yeah, that's a time tax.

Speaker 45 It's whatever. It's two hours.

Speaker 77 In fact, our theories say that's a good thing because, hey, if you really need it, you can fill it out.

Speaker 66 But you forget, just like those kids in the math exam, asking a poor person to fill out a 50-page form all about their finances is incredibly cognitively taxing.

Speaker 43 It's like asking you to think about the thing that's stressing you out the most.

Speaker 48 And so we impose these cognitive burdens on the poor without really realizing that we're imposing these cognitive burdens.

Speaker 28 And when you start looking at that, you realize how many of our programs are cognitively silly.

Speaker 4 So like TANF, this is welfare.

Speaker 49 It's a welfare program.

Speaker 12 The way you find out that you're about to hit your five-year max is you get a letter in the mail with two, three months left.

Speaker 32 How does this make any sense that we're asking you to keep track?

Speaker 27 It's absurd, especially once you realize these type of results, that it's cognitively very challenging to think about these things.

Speaker 68 So I think that angle of rethinking how we design all the programs that poor people encounter through this lens, I think of as a promising angle.

Speaker 18 So you were in Cambridge, back and forth between Harvard and MIT for over two decades.

Speaker 9 Why did you decide to move to the University of Chicago after all these years?

Speaker 29 The honest answer is actually very related to your flipping a coin study, actually.

Speaker 44 One of the things that was most influential was when I was trying to decide what to do, somebody said to me, sometimes change is good just for change's sake.

Speaker 75 That really stuck with me because on my pro-con list, nowhere was there written change.

Speaker 72 It's like they're material aspects, but when you reflect on it, what's the biggest aspect of this decision?

Speaker 4 Change.

Speaker 28 I'm going to be in a whole new city, whole new environment.

Speaker 41 And so once someone gave me me that advice, I was like, oh, this seems like a relatively straightforward thing.

Speaker 61 Change by itself is just good.

Speaker 29 It's related to where we started.

Speaker 54 We ridiculously underweight the value of change.

Speaker 67 You know what I mean?

Speaker 45 Like you think you're the same person wherever you go.

Speaker 80 That is absolutely not true.

Speaker 45 You're exposed to new things.

Speaker 98 Your mind changes.

Speaker 27 In many ways, I think people become stagnant as they get older because they're not doing enough to expose themselves to truly new situations.

Speaker 7 Do you have advice for young people who are trying to figure out their place in the world?

Speaker 31 The one piece of advice I would give comes from this awesome paper.

Speaker 72 I think it's Dan Gilbert.

Speaker 31 It's called The End of History Illusion.

Speaker 30 If you ask people, how much have they changed in the last five years?

Speaker 77 Most people say a lot, especially young people.

Speaker 28 Like take a 22-year-old.

Speaker 25 Oh my God, who was I when I was 17? My God, 17 to 22, I changed so much.

Speaker 28 Then you ask people, how much will you change in the next five years?

Speaker 68 They're like a little bit.

Speaker 7 Pick any age.

Speaker 27 You always act as if history has ended.

Speaker 28 All the change you're going to do is done, which is absurd because from 17 to 22, you change a lot.

Speaker 31 22 to 27, you change a lot.

Speaker 79 So I think the biggest error people make is they think they are choosing for who they are right now.

Speaker 98 What they're actually choosing is for...

Speaker 31 this person five years from now who's going to be very different from them.

Speaker 79 So if you say, I'm deciding whether to go work at company A or company company B, if you think you're set, what you're choosing is between two companies, if you think that you're changing, what do you change towards?

Speaker 29 You change towards the people around you.

Speaker 31 So what you should ask yourself is, I am going to become like the people at company A or like the people at company B.

Speaker 67 That's who I'm actually going to become.

Speaker 31 Which of these kinds of people do I want to be as a person?

Speaker 28 That puts a whole different perspective on it because now you no longer think of yourself.

Speaker 25 You're actually choosing versions of you, and you really have to accept that.

Speaker 45 Whenever I try to tell students this, it's amazing how much they resist it.

Speaker 28 People say this to me, I'm going into consulting, but I'm not going to be the stereotypical consultant.

Speaker 91 I'm like, My best guess is you are going to be the stereotypical consultant.

Speaker 5 What do you want me to tell you?

Speaker 15 I've never heard anyone say what you just said. It's so interesting to hear it.

Speaker 79 I want to hear your advice.

Speaker 13 It's actually evolved a lot.

Speaker 15 It's been affected by this podcast and hearing what other people say.

Speaker 15 But I have come to believe that the single most important thing to recognize when you're young is that life is long and it's not a race.

Speaker 9 And there's this sense of urgency of not getting off the track of having to do something tomorrow.

Speaker 6 So before I went back to get a PhD, I spent two years doing consulting and I was panicked that I was behind the other people.

Speaker 35 Look, it made no sense to be panicked about it.

Speaker 14 So that's really to me, not being in a hurry and the luxury of knowing that you can make mistakes, you can experiment, you can dabble and still have all the time in the world to be what you want to be.

Speaker 79 The most interesting people we know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do.

Speaker 45 And some of the most interesting people don't know at 40 what they want to do.

Speaker 55 And that's good.

Speaker 45 If you're embracing life, that's what's going to happen.

Speaker 67 Yet somehow you feel like you ought to know.

Speaker 26 There's this fixation on it.

Speaker 41 It's okay.

Speaker 93 There's a lot of other stuff coming down the road.

Speaker 15 And I think society has gotten much worse on that.

Speaker 38 As I look at my teenage kids, the amount of focus they have about what college will they go to, what activities am I doing when I'm 13 that will positively influence my chance of getting into college?

Speaker 15 And that is a kind of rat race that I think we've done such a disservice to our kids.

Speaker 43 I feel like kids get less and less play.

Speaker 72 I mean, I went to Cornell. It was very good school.

Speaker 31 And I remember being stressed about it, but I also didn't think to myself, I needed to check off a bunch of boxes to try and get into the best school.

Speaker 41 I just felt like I just had to be myself, like a ton of time to just explore and just play and acquire interesting ideas and things.

Speaker 67 It made you able to enjoy and really become intellectual in a way that I couldn't imagine doing if my only goal were to get good grades and check the right boxes.

Speaker 31 It goes back to your Oculus point.

Speaker 43 I really liked it when you said these guys were playing with it.

Speaker 68 Like play is ridiculously underrated.

Speaker 49 Every time I've licensed myself to mess around, great things have come because that's how you get into really good ideas is you mess around.

Speaker 6 What a great place to stop talking about play because I really do believe that Sendle's willingness to play is a huge part of what makes him special.

Speaker 4 And I have to admit, I used to love play.

Speaker 6 But wow, do I find it hard to play these days with all my other obligations? But I'm making a promise to myself at least for one week, inspired by Sendal, I'm going to make play a priority.

Speaker 6 A few years have passed since we recorded this conversation, but I did have the chance to catch up with Senda recently and I asked him, what new project are you most excited about?

Speaker 6 Here's what he had to say.

Speaker 103 A project I'm working on right now can best be seen by thinking back what it's like to learn anything. It feels like you're stuck in a maze and somebody is telling you what the exit looks like.

Speaker 98 Oh yeah, you'll see a red door.

Speaker 103 That's what it looks like to understand this thing.

Speaker 94 But you're just in this maze.

Speaker 104 You try going this way, you try going that way, and all the teacher can say to you is, look for the red door.

Speaker 94 You're like, I don't see a red door.

Speaker 6 Then keep going.

Speaker 103 It happens because there's a fundamental problem between the teacher and the learner.

Speaker 5 The learner doesn't know what they're trying to learn.

Speaker 103 The teacher knows what they're trying to teach, but they don't know where in the maze the student is stuck. They don't know what the misunderstanding is.

Speaker 103 It's very hard for someone who doesn't understand something to articulate why they don't understand it and how they don't understand it.

Speaker 103 The project we're working on tries to get past this mind-reading gap by actually using a huge amount of data on how students solve math problems.

Speaker 103 We're focused on math right now, ninth grade, eighth grade, seventh grade math, and saying, if we can just use this trove of data on students describing the steps they take in solving these breath problems, maybe algorithms applied to this data can actually learn what

Speaker 103 the ways that the the student misunderstands.

Speaker 104 Once we have that, we have a map of the maze.

Speaker 104 If we had a map of the maze, we'll be able to look and for each student, be able to say, oh, now that you've told me this, I know where in the maze you are and this is the way out of the maze and this is the way to get to that red door.

Speaker 103 The end result that we have in mind here is an algorithm that can take in what students are doing and help us understand what they're thinking and what they're misunderstanding.

Speaker 59 And we think that could be revolutionary.

Speaker 6 Next week, we're back with a brand new episode featuring Ingrid Newkirk.

Speaker 89 She's the founder and leader of the animal rights group PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Speaker 6 I have no idea how this conversation is going to go.

Speaker 106 While that was happening, I was thinking, oh God, I'm going to die. And that's the end of my activism.
And I was really furious.

Speaker 106 And so I thought, is there anything I could do to carry on when I was dead? And I thought, yes, you can.

Speaker 106 You could give a part of your liver to whoever is the president of France at the time to protest foie gras.

Speaker 20 As always, thanks for listening and we'll see you back soon.

Speaker 3 People I mostly admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Frekonomics Radio, No Stupid Questions, and the Economics of Everyday Things.

Speaker 3 All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and mixed by Jasmine Klinger.
Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra.

Speaker 3 We can be reached at Pima at Freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at Freconomics.com.
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 11 If somebody provides me detail about anything and I have no recollection, I believe it's true.

Speaker 97 Steve, do you remember that $10,000 bet that we had?

Speaker 68 I was trying to figure out when you were going to pay me because you gave me that one won that bet.

Speaker 15 No, it's not good because there's not enough detail.

Speaker 1 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

Speaker 88 Stitcher.

Speaker 108 This is the exclusive table with the view. This is your name on the list.
This is three times points on dining with Chase Sapphire Reserve and a $300 dining credit.

Speaker 108 Chase Sapphire Reserve, the most rewarding rewarding card.

Speaker 109 Learn more at chase.com/slash Sapphire Reserve. Cards issued by J.P.
Morgan Chase Bank and a member of FDIC, subject to credit approval.

Speaker 81 Honey, do not make plans Saturday, September 13th, okay?

Speaker 83 Why? What's happening?

Speaker 81 The Walmart Wellness Event.

Speaker 84 Flu shots, health screenings, free samples from those brands you like.

Speaker 83 All that at Walmart.

Speaker 85 We can just walk right in. No appointment needed.

Speaker 86 Who knew we could cover our health and wellness needs at Walmart?

Speaker 87 Check the calendar Saturday, September 13th.

Speaker 81 Walmart Wellness Event.

Speaker 5 You knew.

Speaker 83 I knew.

Speaker 88 Check in on your health at the same place you already shop. Visit Walmart Saturday, September 13th for our semi-annual wellness event.
Flu shots subject to availability and applicable state law.

Speaker 88 Age restrictions apply. Free samples while supplies last.

Speaker 109 Hey there, I'm Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio.

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