#199: Stephen Dubner -- The Art of Storytelling and Facing Malcolm Gladwell in a Fist Fight

Stephen J. Dubner (@Freakonomics https://twitter.com/freakonomics) returns to the show. He is an award-winning author, journalist, and radio and TV personality. He is best-known for writing, along with the economist Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060731338/offsitoftimfe-20 (2005), SuperFreakonomics http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060889586/offsitoftimfe-20†(2009), and Think Like a Freak http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062218336/offsitoftimfe-20 (2014), which have sold more than five million copies in 35 languages. He is the creator of the top-ranked Freakonomics Radio https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519 podcast. His brand-new podcast, produced in collaboration with The New York Times, is Tell Me Something I Don't Know https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tell-me-something-i-dont-know/id1171534532 It is equal parts game show, talk show, and brain-tease. I had a chance to experiment with this format as a "panelist" alongside Malcolm Gladwell. It's a blast. In this episode, we cover such diverse topics as: Why cats wiggle their butts before they pounce How to grow a podcast If he thinks he could take Malcolm Gladwell in a fist fight Economics and the President's actual influence over the economy How virtual reality might affect education And much, much more Please enjoy this round two with Stephen J. Dubner! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you for free the exact portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service http://99designs.com/tim. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  No, we're seeing an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second.

• 1:05Tim Ferriss?

  I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax-loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, etc.,

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest. Invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast.

• 2:33Tim Ferriss?

  But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. When your business needs a logo, website, business card, thumbnail, or any other design, I recommend checking out 99designs. I use them myself. I've used them for many years.

• 3:15Tim Ferriss?

  I use them to create book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I've also used them for banner ads, illustrations, and much more. With 99designs, you get a variety of original designs from designers around the world. Give your feedback and then pick your favorite. Your happiness is guaranteed. So check out some of my competitions and designs and some of your competitions and designs from fellow Tim Ferriss Show listeners at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, you can get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. So check it out, 99designs.com/tim. Hello, boys and girls, munchkins and mogwais.

• 3:57Tim Ferriss?

  This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And I just realized, I don't know if the plural of mogwai is mogwais. Maybe a fictional linguist out there can tell me what the right answer is. The Tim Ferriss Show, as you guys know, probably, maybe, is about deconstructing world-class performers. And in this particular episode, we have a repeat guest. That is Stephen J. Dubner, perhaps best known as the co-author of the Freakonomics book series and creator of the top-ranked Freakonomics Radio podcast, which I had the pleasure to be on once. It is incredibly well-produced. And he is back to answer your

• 4:37Tim Ferriss?

  most burning questions, which I'll get to in a minute. And he also has a new podcast that just came out that you guys should check out. Tell Me Something I Don't Know is the name. It is a new live event and podcast from both The New York Times and Stephen Dubner. It's, you could think of it as equal parts game show, talk show, and brain tease. I actually had a chance to experiment with this format. Format. Format. I'll leave it to you what that might mean. Format as a panelist alongside Malcolm Gladwell in a prototype version. It was an absolute blast. So check it out. Tell Me Something I Don't Know. And in terms of topics, he covers a lot that I've been asked about, and he has

• 5:22Tim Ferriss?

  far more experience in many of these areas. There are some silly questions, like, why do cats wiggle their butts before they pounce? A lot of you submitted some pretty ridiculous, but nonetheless, pretty funny questions. So he covers a few of those, and then jumps into podcasting and radio journalism, questions about storytelling, editing, increasing the reach of your podcast, and then delves into a lot of personal and book-related questions. So the destiny, as it were, of the golf book that he was working on with his frequent collaborator, Levitt, the three books that shaped him into the person he is today. So the three books that most shaped him. And if you want to check that out, if you only

• 6:04Tim Ferriss?

  have five minutes, I would say, jump to that. It's 26 minutes roughly after the end of this intro. And does he think he could take Malcolm Gladwell in a fistfight? Then a segue to economics. So South Korea and digital currency, cryptocurrency. What influence does the president actually have in the economy? That's a separate question. Technologies related to or that actually are

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Part of VR, for instance, and how that might affect education, then life advice, teaching kids critical thinking, projects that you might pursue or give to your kids to get them excited about economics, et cetera, et cetera. It is very, very rich. And you can say hi to him at Freakonomics on Twitter, Facebook, and everywhere else. So without further ado, please enjoy this round two with Stephen J. Dubner. Hey, everybody. This is Stephen Dubner. Thanks for sending in questions to Tim Ferriss, and thanks especially to Tim for letting me take over part of the podcast today. I really appreciate it. I'm a big fan of Tim's. As you all probably know, we've had him on

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Freakonomics Radio. We've had him on a podcast I did for a while called Question of the Day with my buddy James Altucher. Tim was also a panelist on this live version of this game show that I was developing called Tell Me Something I Don't Know, which I'm happy to say now has been developed and it's releasing kind of this week as a, as a brand new podcast. So I'm a big admirer of Tim's and I really appreciate getting a chance to talk to people like me who admire the work that Tim does and how, you know, I guess there are a lot of things I like about it, but to me, the, the main thing is that it's a real hybrid of empirical and inspirational, which is, I think, a winning blend. So anyway, the

• 7:57Speaker 03

  way this worked is Tim sent out a call via his BatSignals to listeners and readers of his to solicit questions for me. And I got the questions. There are a lot of questions. I'll probably only be able to answer a relatively small share of them. The questions range all over, topics from economics, which I can talk about a little bit, even though I'm not an economist. My buddy Steve Levitt is the economist part of our Freakonomics partnership, but I've learned a little bit over the years. A lot of questions about Freakonomics Radio, our podcast, about the Freakonomics books, all kinds of questions. So I will talk about all that and much more, including, like I said, this new podcast that we're Launching right now. Tell me something I don't know.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  The questions range from rather substantial to less substantial. For instance, Alex Norton wanted to know, why do cats wiggle their butts before they pounce? So Alex, Alex, let me Google that for you. Why do cats wiggle their butts before they bounce? It is a way for them to get into position and brace themselves before they attack. Domestic cats share a similar feature. Instead of grinding the ground with their hind legs, they wiggle their behind vigorously to attain balance and leverage. Kittens learn to do this from their mother cat. So Alex, by the way, do you all know, do you all know the site? Let me Google that for you because if you don't, you should, and it will save you a lot of time in the end.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Here's a question from Marty Boisic, maybe. So this is one of several questions about podcasting essentially and radio journalism. So I don't know how many people really care about podcasting and radio journalism. Obviously, anyone listening to this cares about it as a consumer. I don't know about as a producer. On the other hand, there are something like between 3 and 350,000 podcasts being published right now. So maybe we're at peak podcast or in podcast bubble. I don't know, maybe they'll keep growing. I do think that the consumption is growing more slowly than the production. But assuming that, you know, judging from the number of questions that you guys had about podcasting, I guess that people do care. So I'll answer a few along these lines.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  Marty wrote to say, it seems like Dubner's unique ability to tell a great story. Oh, I like it. Flattery is what really adds a viral component to the deep science and typically boring economic research. How could that storyfication of help other hard sciences or traditionally boring subjects that are really important? Right. So Marty, here's what I would say. First of all, thanks for the kind words. It's nice. I agree that storytelling is incredibly important. There are many ways to argue for why that is true. I'll give one example. One example would be, what is the best read book in the history of the world? Arguably, not even really that arguably.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Most people would, most people would argue that it's the Bible. So what is the Bible? Well, it's a lot of things, but it contains the most famous set of laws in the history of humankind, right? The Ten Commandments. So you would think that everybody would know those since it's the most famous laws in the most famous, in the most read book. And yet, if you ask people, it turns out that I believe it's about 17% of Americans can actually name the Ten Commandments. And a relatively large share can't name even one of the Ten Commandments. So lest you think that this is just a product of people having a bad memory,

• 11:41Speaker 03

  I should say that, you know, 17% can recite all Ten Commandments. A higher percent can recite either all the ingredients of a Big Mac or all six siblings in the Brady Bunch. So that's pretty weird that the most famous set of laws in the history of humankind in the most read book of all time aren't that well-known, or at least that well-remembered. So what does that indicate? I would argue, this is just me making this argument. I would argue it indicates that we, meaning humans, really love stories and gravitate to stories. Because what we do remember from the Bible, even people who are not religious at all,

• 12:23Speaker 03

  even people who have no connection to Judeo-Christian biblical traditions at all, the stories from the Bible continue to be passed down and continue to be known and discussed and, you know, maybe not argued about. Some people argue about them in a, either academic or, you know, theological way, or sometimes even a political way. But people know who Moses was. People know about Adam and Eve. You know, once you get into Christian theology, people certainly know about Jesus and the stories about Jesus, despite, even if they haven't read the Bible at all. And so to me, that is a, an argument for...

• 13:04Speaker 03

  That and we can make a whole lot of other arguments about Gilgamesh and the Odyssey and on and on and on and Shakespeare and all the way up to maybe even including Paulie Shore, for God's sake. So I think that is a piece of evidence that argues that storytelling has a power that goes well beyond what you can kind of, it goes well beyond the sum of its parts. We actually did a podcast recently called, I believe it was called This Is Your Brain on Podcasts, a Freakonomics Radio episode, that looked at, an amazing neuroscientist named Jack Gallant looked at how people's brains in an FMRI, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, respond when listening to stories told in a podcast, he used the Moth

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Story Hour, Moth Radio Hour. So it turns out that the brain, the process, the production of language is fairly, happens in a relatively small part of the brain or small area of the brain, but the consumption of language and especially of storytelling, kind of goes all the way across the brain. And so there is a lot of argument for why storytelling is really important. Okay, so if that's the case, what do you do about that? How do you harness that for whatever your goal is? So Marty's question seems to be, how can this help other hard sciences or traditionally boring subjects that are really important? So yeah, I think storytelling can be a big help, whether the realm that you want to

• 14:32Speaker 03

  teach about or communicate about is physics, is accounting, is whatever. So I think the storytelling has components that are important, factual is important, empirical is important. The thing about a lot of the academic research, so Freakonomics Radio, we really, even though it's sort of based or rooted in economics,

• 14:57Speaker 03

  The fact is, is that we try to go way beyond economics and deal with a lot of the other social sciences, psychology, sociology and so on, but also, especially in the last couple of years, a lot of other disciplines, academic and otherwise. And I think that's important for a lot of reasons. A, it's fun to kind of explore those and teach those. And B, if you think about it, a lot of the best research that's being done in the world is being done in academic institutions. But the nature of academia being what it is, it's kind of a little silo where the experts speak to each other, they write for each other in a language of their own, for journals that only they read. And to me, that's a

• 15:41Speaker 03

  shame and a drag and a waste of taxpayer and other money. And so I'm all for taking that specialized research and knowledge and disseminating it to the public, to we who want it, to we who could use it, and to we who kind of deserve it, because, you know, we really do own a part of these universities. Even private universities get a ton of taxpayer funding. So I'm all in favor of taking that big well of material and turning it into stories. Again, not, when I say stories, I don't mean made up, I mean factual, empirical, researched, fact-checked and so on. And that's what we try to do, you know, pretty much every week with Freakonomics Radio. I should say, this new show, Tell Me Something I Don't

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Know, goes even further beyond economics than Freakonomics Radio. So we are getting ready to release the first six episodes. The first one coming out November 7, I believe. Then we'll do one a week for six weeks. And then we're already taping season two and we'll probably release another 10 roughly March or April, something like that. And we plan to do 30 a year. And what's fun about these is, even though this show doesn't feel much like Freakonomics, it's a live, we tape it in front of a live audience, it's a game show where contestants from the audience get up and try to tell us some interesting fact or story about whatever, whatever the theme of the night is, then I and the panelists

• 17:05Speaker 03

  discuss it. But like the themes we did for the first six, I'll read them off. There was one, the first, there's one that's called Strange Danger. So it's literally about things that are dangerous that you might not think about or know about. Number two is called It's Alive. So it's about literally anything in the animal-ish kingdom. Episode three, I believe, is called Things That Go In Your Mouth. So food, but could be medicine, a variety of other things. Episode number four, of course, things that come out of your mouth, language, singing, maybe vomit, you never know. Another episode called Passion Plays about people who are passionate, often beyond,

• 17:46Speaker 03

  you know, logic to some cause or hobby or whatever. And our sixth episode is called Fool Me Once, which is essentially about fakes and frauds of different kinds. So in each case, we kind of recruited contestants. Often, they're academics. Honestly, a lot of them were PhDs or MDs and they tell us their stories and facts. And often, the root of their knowledge is academic, even fairly arcane. But in story form, these academic or even arcane stories or facts in story form, they really do enlighten you. So you kind of come away with this feeling that, wow, I learned something that I never

• 18:26Speaker 03

  would have gone into some medical journal or economics journal or, you know, legal review, law review journal. I never would have gone looking, looking for that. But when it's told in the right way by the right people in story form, the idea is that it makes us all a little bit smarter. Yeah, sure, smarter is good. But also, you know, my argument is that the more we know, the, the more kind of, you know, I don't know if moderate is the right word, but the more that people know about the way the world really works, the less stupidity we are likely to engage in. I'm not saying we will engage in less stupidity, but we become less likely to. Now, there's not a lot of evidence that huge amount of exposure to knowledge and information

• 19:11Speaker 03

  necessarily makes the average person less stupid. And in fact, there's a lot of research that shows that the most educated people tend to hold the most extreme views on a lot of important hot button issues. But I'm a believer in finding out as much stuff as I can and telling other people about it because it's exciting to share that. And that's basically what I do as a, as a journalist, whether in writing form or radio form or whatnot. Here's another question about podcasts from Stan Isles, Isles, sorry, I'm gonna, I'm sure I mispronounce names. By the way, he's asking about tips for editing podcasts. One tip is, in a podcast, You always try to find out how to pronounce things, even when you're writing something, you don't have to know how to pronounce, but often a very basic rule of podcasting is

• 19:53Speaker 03

  when you're pronouncing a place, or a thing, or a name, you do try to go do some reporting with a first person, a primary source, to figure out how you actually say it, since that's important. You'll always make mistakes, but it's a good thing to try to do. So Stan wants to know top tips. Of course, I'm ignoring that advice now. I could have hunted down Stan Islis Iceless and written to him and said, how do you pronounce your name? And I didn't. So, you know, sorry. Anyway, Stan I, we'll call him, top tips to edit your podcasts to make them shorter without losing too much valuable information. He says, you cannot beat Freakonomics when it comes to quality info to length ratio. Well, it's interesting you write that because I've been thinking a lot about whether our podcast, Freakonomics Radio especially, is too long. And with the new show, Tell Me Something I

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Don't Know, again, we thought a lot about what's the optimal length. And on that one, it looks like our first six episodes are all going to be in the neighborhood of 45 to 50 minutes. So the problem is, we don't have really good data on what people really want. Not that I would make that the primary driver of what we do, because I think that when you're creating something, you have to primarily listen to yourself and your circle of people that you think are good and smart. If you pay too much attention to a big sloppy feedback loop, you'll get paralyzed, or you'll try to please everybody. But in terms of editing, so first of all, I do like editing. My podcasts probably do

• 21:17Speaker 03

  sound the way they do in part because I'm a writer and came to this, came to this as a writer, not a talker. And as a writer, editing is hugely, hugely important. So whether it's a book, or an article, or even an email, the first version is never the best. There are elements of it that are good, hopefully, but editing is really important. And so my feeling on whether it's Freakonomics Radio, or Tell Me Something I Don't Know, or even Question of the Day with James Altucher, or any podcast, you as the producer are, even though you're giving it to people for free, right? You're not charging them anything for it. You are charging them for it in that you're asking for their time.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  There's also advertising, which they might listen to and they might, and that's how most podcasts make money. But you know, if I'm asking you for 45 minutes, that's a lot that you're giving me. And so I feel it's important to work as hard as I can to make the 45 minutes worthwhile. So, top tips to editing to make them shorter without losing too much. It's just like writing. Every single sentence, every single story, every single sound effect, whatever. You really just think, you know, is this advancing the story? Is it telling us something we don't know yet? Is it not redundant? Does it move me? Does it interest me as a listener? And you know, there are a variety of intellectual ways to assess those questions.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Then there's also the gut check, which is when I listen to a rough cut of any episode, you know, do I find myself, do I find my attention drifting? And if I do, it's a pretty sure case, it's a pretty sure sign that it needs to be shorter. So yeah, I'm pretty ruthless. I would say for every 30 minutes of Freakonomics Radio that we put out as a finished podcast, there's probably at least, typically at least three to five hours of tape that doesn't make the cut. So that's the idea. One more question about podcasting. This is from Rob Moore. Pretty sure I'm pronouncing that right. Rob asks, what are your suggestions for growing the reach of your podcast? So, I think this is really simple.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  I think if you want to grow the reach of your podcast, you produce good and consistent content, period. So, obviously, that sounds like a smart ass answer. It's not meant to. And by good and consistent, that means a few things. Good, meaning you think about it, you produce it well, you edit it well, you publish it well, all that stuff. Consistent, meaning if you're going to be a monthly, be a monthly. If you're going to be weekly, be a weekly. If you're going to be a daily, be a daily. But to put one out on Tuesday and then another one out six months from now, then four in a hurry, then so on, that's tricky. But I really do feel that Almost everything else that people talk about for growing something like a podcast

• 24:08Speaker 03

  or a newsletter or a TV show, whatever it is, I think that almost everything else that most people, especially in marketing and advertising realms, talk about, almost everything else is overrated. So I think that promoting your work on social media is hugely overrated. I think that marketing is hugely overrated. It's hard to manufacture demand. If, however, you make good and consistent content, then social media can help and marketing can help. People will be enthusiastic about finding and consuming and even promoting for you what you're making. But it's all about making good and consistent content.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  And you should try to spend 95% of your time doing that and maybe 5% of the time worrying about growing the reach of your podcast. Now that said, look, I'm doing this podcast on Tim. I asked Tim if I could come be on his podcast to talk about this new show of mine and to talk about whatever else because I've made a show, the new show, Tell Me Something on a No, not Freakonomics Radio, that, you know, we've worked hard on for, gosh, I mean, I've been developing the show for like five years. And I care about it a lot. I like it a lot. And now what I'm doing right now is not necessarily making that content any better. This is mostly about trying to expose people to it. So this is my 5%. But even

• 25:32Speaker 03

  in doing that, I wanted to go to places that I thought were really, really, really, really good and worth it. And to me, Tim and Tim's audience is really, really, really, really worth it because you guys have the kind of, you know, brains and ambitions and curiosities and sense of, you know, what's interesting and what's not, what's worthwhile and what's not, what's funny and what's not that I like. So there you go. This is part of my 5%. All right, here's a new section of questions that are mostly, I guess these are mostly personal-ish stuff. So someone, can't really tell what this person's real name is. It's got a lot of letters typed fast. So Laurent, maybe? Laurent, maybe? Laurent Dub, maybe?

• 26:16Speaker 03

  He asked me, do I know the origin of my last name? So yes, I do. So Dubner was more typically pronounced Dubner.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Dubners were, my family came from, not originally, but in most recent history, from a city in what's now Ukraine called Dubno. And my family was Jewish. The Jews of Dubno and many other cities in that area were pushed out of that area when the new czar came in, and I think 1881. My family and a lot of other people from Dubno ended up getting pushed up into what is, what is now Poland, north of Warsaw, a place called Pultusk. And so most of, this also coincided with a time when many, not only Jews, but many people were now acquiring second names because, you know, for much of history, it wasn't like we had a first name

• 27:08Speaker 03

  and a last name the way we do now. And so many people, many of the Jews who came from Dubno became Dubner. So Shepsol Dubner was my grandfather, for instance. Shepsol is a derivative of a Yiddish for if you were born on the Sabbath, right? So Shabbat, or Sabbath, or Shabbos, all these words that mean in different, you know, tongues, languages, Sabbath. Shepsol was, it was just kind of a tradition in that part of the world at that time. If you were a male born on that day, that was a name. So Shepsol Dubner basically meant a guy whose family had been living in Dubno, and then this guy was born on the Sabbath, and then he was the one in my family, on my

• 27:49Speaker 03

  father's side at least, that came to America. And that's where my name comes from. And I know more than I should about this because my first book was actually a, an exploration of my family. My family has a strange, kind of wonderful, weird history in that both my parents, so Shepsol's son was my father, and my, and then my mother, both of them were kind of standard issue Brooklyn born Jews. Who first gen, you know, first generation Americans who before they met each other, both converted from Judaism to Catholicism, which was a very strange and unusual thing. They met, they married, they had eight kids. I'm the last of eight. I grew up very, very, very Catholic, but then very long story short, in my twenties, I moved to New York,

• 28:34Speaker 03

  got curious about my parents' Jewish roots, and I ended up returning gradually, slowly to Judaism, although I'm not very religious or observant, but it means the traditions mean a lot to me. And so that's why I know my last name. I wrote about all this in my first book, which was originally called Turbulent Souls, and then got retitled years later as Choosing My Religion. So that's that. Raymond Wakawaka, which I'm gonna assume is not a real name, but it could be, writes to say, what's happening with the golf book that you guys are writing and/or are there any new books on the horizon? So Raymond, the golf book that Steve Levitt and I were working on for a few years, just didn't work

• 29:15Speaker 03

  out the way we wanted it to. We were hoping to write a book that used essentially analytics and smart thinking to help the average golfer become quite a bit better without actually getting a little bit better. Because here's the problem. A lot of people love golf. Not many of them are very good. And the ones who are not very good would love to be better, but because of the nature of the game, because it's time consuming, because it's expensive, and because it's difficult, most people don't really want to spend a lot of time practicing. And if you have five hours a week to spend on golf, most people want to get out and play and not go practice, you know, chipping for two hours, putting for an hour and a half, and long game for maybe 45 minutes, and then, you know, play four holes, which

• 30:00Speaker 03

  would probably make you a lot better over time, but most people don't want to do that. And so we tried to do a series of experiments and analytics that would help write a kind of bible for how to make the standard golfer a lot better. Like I said, through strategy, through managing the game, through decision making and so on. And, you know, you know, not going for it, not going for the green in certain circumstances, you know, putting from off the green, all kinds of specific strategic ideas. And basically, we failed. We couldn't make people better. So Levitt is a pretty good golfer, really good golfer. His handicap, I don't know what his handicap is, maybe around...

• 30:42Speaker 03

  I don't know what it is. Four, five, six, maybe in there. I'm much less good. Levitt played as a kid. That's my excuse. I didn't play. I took it up seriously only about five years ago. And I've gotten a lot better, but the reason I've gotten a lot better is just because I practice a lot, take lessons, work on it. And it's not like I've gotten a lot better. I'm about now a 12 handicap. So that puts me kind of firmly in the middle of, quote, real golfers. So not very good, but I love it. So yeah, that book, that book is not going to happen at least anytime soon. We are, however, working on a new book whose completion is not guaranteed. We're not sure if it's going to work out at all. If it does, it'll be a couple of years. And because of the nature of book writing, I'm not going

• 31:23Speaker 03

  to talk about it at all, but we are trying to do another one. A question from Vitoudis Alec wants to know, what are the three books that shaped me and why? So, okay. In all honesty, I'll say the first one was a novel called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which is kind of a sappy novel about Brooklyn and the depression that happened to be hanging around the house when I was a kid. And I read it over and over and over, in part because I felt it was describing to me what my parents' life was like when they were kids. And as

• 32:04Speaker 03

  I mentioned earlier, my parents had this weird conversion story from Judaism to Catholicism that they didn't talk about very much. And again, I was the youngest of eight. So by the time I was a kid, this was ancient history. And so I would read this book kind of as a secret code to what their lives were like in Brooklyn and what their environment was like. And it was like having some kind of access to their lives that in retrospect, it wasn't very much like what their actual lives were like. But to me, that was an incredibly formative book. And so it shaped me. Another one that shaped me a lot was a book I remember, I remember where and when I bought it. It was on a remainder table in a Barnes and Noble

• 32:49Speaker 03

  that was on Broadway and 74th Street, I think. I think it was in maybe 73rd Street. It was in. Yeah, it's long gone. Anyway, it was a biography by Jonathan Yardley, the very good literary critic who was at the Washington Post for many years of Ring Lardner, who was a writer. Ring Lardner was a writer I liked a lot. If you don't know his work, you could look it up. It's very dated now, but I still think amazing. He was a sports writer. I love sports writing. I love sports. I played sports. I loved, loved, loved sports as a kid. But this biography of Ring Lardner, I'd never read a biography of an author that was so warts and all. I mean, a lot of things that he did were not so great. He wasn't a terrible

• 33:30Speaker 03

  guy at all, but he was whatever. He was kind of selfish and grumpy and so on. But also, it was really about what it's like to make a life as a writer. And I had just moved to New York. But up till this point, I was, I'd been a musician. So in college, so my big things in life when I was a kid were always sports and music and writing. And I would have liked to become a professional athlete, but that didn't happen. I don't know, even if I'd been in the better circumstance, I don't know if it would have happened. I was pretty good, but probably in retrospect, not nearly good enough. But music was a big thing for me, and I always played music. And in college, I got involved in this band called The Right Profile, and we were terrible for a long time, but then we got better and

• 34:11Speaker 03

  better. Ended up getting a record deal after a few years, moved to New York. And I remember buying the Jonathan Yardley bio of Ring Lardner during that time. And I was living in New York with the band, starting to make our first record. I ended up quitting music kind of dramatically because I realized that was not the life that I wanted, was to be a rock star, even though it would have been fun. And it was fun at a very minor level. But I wanted a somewhat more stable and more anonymous life. And I'd always been a writer. I loved the idea of writing. I loved the solitude. I loved the thinking. And I loved Ring Lardner. And so, reading this biography of Ring Lardner was, to me, again, kind of the way, a little bit the way A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was a, almost a bible for like

• 34:56Speaker 03

  a blueprint for like, this is what the life looks like. And what I loved about it was, it didn't make it out to be all amazing. And I needed that shot of reality. I knew that writing for a living was going to be very, very hard work. And that if I wanted to make it happen, there were going to, it was a process. Were going to be a series of steps that you had to, you know, get past or succeed at, and there'd be a lot of failure. And so that was, that book was hugely formative. I don't even remember the name of the book. I think it was called Ring. So that was book number two, that was incredibly influential. Book number three that shaped me, I mean, if I'm being honest, it's Freakonomics. That was a huge deal for me. You know, the success

• 35:38Speaker 03

  of it and the collaboration with Levitt, those were big, but also just, it was a project that as a writer has launched what for me is, you know, it was 2003 that I first wrote about Steve Levitt. And I wrote about him because I was in the middle of a book that was kind of about economics. And so I was asked if I wanted to go write about this economist, Steve Levitt at Chicago, who just won this award. And I turned down the assignment several times because I knew Levitt's work a little bit, and I knew it had nothing to do with the book that I was writing about. The book was about kind of behavioral economics, behavioral finance. It's what I call the psychology of money, which by the way, is how I met my friend, James Altucher. He was a subject in that, in that book that I was writing at

• 36:22Speaker 03

  the time. And so Freakonomics, you know, I wrote about Levitt. I found his work so interesting. I loved writing about that kind of stuff. And that led to this collaboration where we do books together, then we do other things kind of on our own. Levitt does a bunch of stuff on his own, consulting and academic research. I do, you know, the podcast. Levitt's on there, but that's mostly my thing. So Freakonomics has been gigantic and the, and the collaboration with Levitt has been gigantic and the amount of learning that I've been able to do as a writer and as a radio guy, using Freakonomics as a platform has been huge. I mean, every day, basically my day is to wake up and try to read or talk,

• 37:07Speaker 03

  read something interesting, talk to interesting people, ask questions, find out stuff, figure out how things work, measure it against an empirical standard, then tell the world about it. And I, I love it. I'll tell you one other thing that kind of inspired me and shaped the way that I Run my like business, my life, my work life was Tavis Smiley. So I really like Tavis Smiley as a broadcaster. He does radio, he does TV, he's written books. I found him to be a really good human. But what I discovered when I went out to California a couple of times and a couple of book tours to do his shows, I think you'd do radio shows and his TV show. He had this kind of complex and he had a production company and he just had this whole

• 37:52Speaker 03

  production set up. And the way it was set up made me realize that, man, if you want to do your best work, you should really control or set up as much of your production as you can. Because that is what gives you the latitude and the leverage to do your best work. So that's inspired me. Tavis, I've never even told him this and I probably should because it was really helpful. But the way that he, you know, it's a pain in the neck to set up your own production company and to do a lot of the structural work yourself. It's a lot easier to just have someone, you know, a book publisher, a newspaper, a radio station, a record label, a company of some kind.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  It's a lot easier for them to say, hey, we'll give you the opportunity to do X and we'll give you Y dollars for it and you plug yourself in there. That's a lot easier, right? Than setting up your whole own thing. But obviously, if you're listening to the Tim Ferriss Show, you have at least a little bit of an entrepreneurial inclination. So you know that the advantages to entrepreneurialism are huge and the headaches are huge. But watching the way Tavis operated inspired me to take on some of those headaches and set up, for instance, recently, my own production company to do Tell Me Something I Don't Know, but also my production company. I certainly, we certainly contribute a lot to Freakonomics Radio and everything else. And the reason is that

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Look, I mean, I've worked with all the institutions I just named. Record label, newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, book publishers, on and on. I've worked with all of them in partnership and they all try to exploit your work and your content. That's their job. I don't use exploit pejoratively. That's their job. But I think that in order for you to do things the way you most want to do them, you have to gain or keep as much leverage as you can. That doesn't mean you don't share the leverage, but I think it's hugely important to understand that if you want to do your best work, whether it's media, whether it's technology, whether it's manufacturing, whatever, obviously you need partners. I always try to be the best partner I can.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  I always try to make a deal and make content that makes everyone better off, everyone in the partnership. But I find that, for me at least, the best way to do that is to have the center of leverage or the center of gravity be in my court. So I can say, you know, I don't think this should be a daily show or whatever, because I think if we try to do that, I can see why that might appeal to you, the partners, more profitable ultimately, but the content's going to suffer. There's no way that this project, whatever project we're talking about, is scalable enough for it to be good on a daily level. And in order to have the right to make those kinds of decisions, you have to work hard

• 40:44Speaker 03

  to create the structure on your own, to have the leverage on your own, to have that power. Question from Daniel Rodic, Roditch, maybe. How did you meet James Altucher? What do you think makes James a good interviewer? And how does that contrast with your own style? So I met James when I was writing this book that I mentioned a little while ago about the psychology of money. And James, I met him, he was the friend of a friend. And I just, I mean, I love and admire James. I think he's an amazing human and very unusual. And he'd made a ton of money and lost all of it and then some by the time I met him. So it was very...

• 41:23Speaker 03

  I mean, bittersweet doesn't start to describe it. Fortunately, he's made a lot back and lost it and made it. So he's, he's pretty good at that. So he's, he's been a good friend for many years. I ended up putting that book in a drawer, unfortunately, to write Freakonomics. But one thing that came out of it was a friendship with James. In terms of James's style for not only interviewing like on his podcast, but talking to people generally, he just follows his curiosity purely and doesn't really think about or care at all about, you know, looking smart or cool or whatever. He just really, really, really wants to know what he wants to know. And I find that to be an incredibly attractive trait, especially if you're doing journalism and interviewing.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics co-author, is very similar in his research. And it takes us, it takes a certain amount of, I guess, courage to really not care what people think about you. And I wish I had more of that. And I work on it, but I think James has that in spades. Question from Lance Miller. Do you think you could take Malcolm Gladwell in a fistfight? So I don't think I've ever actually been in a fistfight. But I think I could take Malcolm only because, I mean, he's wiry, but I got a few inches and a few pounds on him. I think I could take him on. On the other hand, I think he, he could just outrun me. So I'm, I'm fairly fast.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Like I can sprint. I can do that. You know, I've played sports where you sprint and I was always relatively fast. But Malcolm's a distance guy. He still runs like, he still runs semi-competitively, a mile and more. So I think it wouldn't get to a fistfight. Plus neither of us, I think, you know, you have to take your glasses off. It's a lot to worry about there, but thanks for the question, Lance. Okay, here are a few questions about, you know, economics-ish stuff from John Nun. John writes to say, "South Korea announced that they will be developing a digital currency. What are your views on digital slash cryptocurrency and how will this development affect the dynamic of these currencies in Asia?" Hmm, I don't know about the second half.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  How will they affect the dynamic of the currencies in Asia? We actually did a Freakonomics Radio episode a few weeks ago called "Why Are We Still Using Cash?" And I personally believe that the data argue that the more digital we get with money, the better off more people will be. So within that, you have to say, well, there are some people who are going to be frustrated that cash is used less. There are people who worry about privacy. There are people who worry about government intrusion. There are people who worry about the flexibility and liquidity of cash. There are people who worry about technology of having digital money and what happens if it all goes, you know, if there's the biggest blackout in the world.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  And these are all legitimate concerns that need to be addressed and are being addressed by places that are converting to cashless or less cash society. I think the, but I think the advantages to having much less cash, especially big bills, is huge. So one thing we discussed in the episode of Freakonomics Radio is that I believe it's 80% of US currency now in circulation is in hundred-dollar bills. Very few people use hundred-dollar bills in the normal course of transaction. In fact, it's not very easy. If you give a taxi driver a hundred, if you go into a grocery store, give a hundred, people don't even really want them. So where all these hundreds are used by people who are buying and selling drugs, involved

• 45:03Speaker 03

  in other illicit activities, often corruption and bribery of different kinds. And so it turns out that eliminating, and maybe on a gradual basis, rolling down the ladder, the big bills would probably do a lot more good than bad. Another thing is, you know, in the US, people have a weird relationship with the government. Look, we just do. And I get it. I get both sides or all sides. But I think that some of the arguments, when you hold them up to the light, are kind of silly. So, you know, people who, a lot of people who complain about taxation, I feel, are complaining about the wrong side of taxation. If you're honest, you want good enforcement and good payment because the larger the tax

• 45:48Speaker 03

  gap is, the tax gap is the difference between what's owed and what's paid, the larger it is, the more the honest people are penalized. So to me, it would seem a no-brainer for everybody that's honest, which is most people, to close the tax gap. And one way to close the tax gap is to make it a lot harder to cheat. And one of the easiest ways to cheat is do business in cash. Just the way it is. So that's another reason for going to less cash. Peter Conley wants to know, what actual influence does a president have on the economy? So Peter, I love this question. I love it. Well, okay. Narcissistically, I love it because I've been asking this question a lot for several years. So it is a subject of great

• 46:31Speaker 03

  debate. I dealt with this at some length in an episode of Freakonomics Radio called, How Much Does the President Really Matter? And the argument there, from talking to economists and some legal and constitutional scholars and some political scientists, was not very much, especially when it comes to the economy. Because if you think about it, the economy is, you know, this big, complex, dynamic system with all these inputs and it's influenced by all these factors, many of which are psychological, not even just purely financial. And a lot of them would seem to be largely immune to any president's wishes. On the other hand, and we recently did another Freakonomics Radio episode called, Has the

• 47:14Speaker 03

  US Presidency Become a Dictatorship? And in some ways, this episode was a rebuttal to my own argument in that earlier episode. And in this episode, I talked to the legal scholar Eric Posner, who I find to be really brilliant and really insightful and a great communicator. You should read his stuff. I read, this was based on an essay he'd written for Dataless. But if you Google Eric Posner, he also happens to be the son of Richard Posner, who's a prolific and a very well-regarded intellect, a judge, but also writes a lot about economics and other things. So the Posner family is worth your time reading. So the legal scholar Eric Posner argues that

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Due to a long and interesting history of the US presidency and how it's evolved a lot over time and how it's veered a lot away from what was conceived as the original Madisonian system of checks and balances, that the presidency has attained much more unilateral power and therefore, especially through executive decisions and legislation, that the president now does often make policy, not necessarily unilaterally, but often close to it, that has a reach over huge swaths of the economy. So take just two specifics, healthcare and financial services. So healthcare is moving toward 20% of GDP, I think. Financial

• 48:38Speaker 03

  services, I don't know the number, but obviously it's huge. If you look at just those two, you could say, well, the president, him or herself, can't really do so, so, so much to shape the economy in those realms. But through, you know, through legislation necessarily, or at least we'd like to think that that power has been constrained. But if you look at the reality, you see that just during the Obama administration, and this is really what the episode of Freakonomics Radio with Eric Posner deals with a lot, is, you know, using executive order to make decisions and to push them. So neither Obamacare nor the financial regulations and financial legislation that came out of the recession, neither of

• 49:23Speaker 03

  them were achieved primarily through executive order. But they've been furthered and advanced and kind of enforced in that way. And so any way you look at it, the president has the ability to exert a lot more leverage than the founders certainly intended, partly because the Constitution is vague on this. But the point that Posner makes, it's really interesting to me, is the president gets this power

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Has gotten this power over the years and is constrained. We like to think that the presidency is constrained by Congress and the Constitution. But Posner's argument is that Congress and the Constitution don't constrain the president very much at all. The Constitution, almost none. And Congress, for all that Democratic Congress will come, excuse me, for all that a Democratic president will complain about Republican Congress being, you know, recalcitrant and not letting him get anywhere and vice versa. It turns out that Obama did a lot that a Republican Congress did not want him to do. And Posner's argument is that the main constraints on a president is that he or she represents three different constituencies.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  The public, the, you know, the country generally, the party, and the executive branch. So the president is the putative leader of those three things. He's the leader of the country. He or she is the leader of the political party, his or her political party. And he's, he or she is the leader of the executive branch. And here's the way Posner puts it, trying to be the leader of these three different groups with different interests and values turns out to be an extremely difficult task. So that is what creates the larger constraint, constraints over the president. That said, I've been making this argument for a while that the presidency, you know,

• 51:15Speaker 03

  we put way too much, you know, we think, we put way too much care and anxiety into, into thinking about the choice of president is so essential to everything that influences our daily lives. And I still think that's true. I think that the actual presidency doesn't affect us individually very, very much. But I have come around to the idea that the president, in ways that are kind of non-obvious, exerts a lot of influence over huge pieces of the economy that certainly does trickle down. Max McFarlane wants to know, how will technologies such as VR impact education? And will students being taught through online and digital medium?

• 52:00Speaker 03

  How might their intelligence be affected by teaching more through online and digital media? That's a really, I like that question a lot. So my thoughts on education are, I guess, voluminous for no good reason other than that it interests me a lot. We say we care about education a lot. I don't think we do. And when I say me, I mean, kind of, you know, the body politic. We care about our own kids a lot, but I don't think we really care about education a lot. I think if we did, we would do a lot of things in the education system that are really, really, really different. We'd have it be more accountable. We'd have it be more experimental. We'd have it be more empirical. And we'd have it be, well, yeah, let me go back to experimental. So in answer to Max's question about VR,

• 52:43Speaker 03

  virtual reality specifically, I have no idea. I don't predict the future because I'm as bad at it as everybody else. But I do think there are things going on in education, in education theory and in technology particularly, that are really interesting. So there's a, there's a startup, it's now called New Classrooms. It started out called School of One, and it was a pilot project within the New York City Department of Education, run by a guy named Joel Rose. And Joel Rose then took it private, I guess, private. Now it's called New Classrooms. And their model, this is just one, one small example that I'm impressed with. Their model is to go into, let's say, a fifth grade math classroom. And, you know,

• 53:22Speaker 03

  what's the standard model of education? A teacher and 20 or 30 kids in a room and some kind of chalkboard, whether it's digital or otherwise. And, you know, it's often been said that if you went to sleep about 120, 150 years ago and woke up today, you would recognize very little about America or the rest of the world. We, transportation's different, communications different, on and on. But you'd recognize the school classroom. It's basically the same as it was then. A bunch of kids, a teacher running things, right? And there's been some innovation and some use of technology and, you know, best practices. But honestly, compared to other industries, And I know it makes people nervous to talk about education as an industry, but boy,

• 54:07Speaker 03

  if you look at the funding, it certainly is. And it's an important one because the ROI is massive. If you look at it as an industry, you see that the amount of innovation has been really, really low. So School of One, for instance, would say, you know, we're going to take this classroom full of 30 kids. And instead of assuming that the best way to teach all 30 is to have all of them listen within the same amount of, at the exact same time, to the same teacher telling them the same thing. Well, maybe that's not optimal. What would happen if instead, we created several different modes for each of those kids to learn and engage in? So maybe, yeah, maybe the teacher is leading a group. Maybe it's a small group lesson for kids who happen to learn well that way.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  Maybe some kids are learning one-on-one with a virtual tutor. Maybe some kids are in a peer-led group. Maybe some kids are using virtual reality. Maybe some kids are doing drills on their own. And School of One, basically, or now called New Classrooms, basically takes this model and every day, you experiment with every kid, learning the same material through different modes to see which mode that kid happens to learn best in. And then, you have a test at the end of the day. That's how you know what mode works for each kid. And then the next day, your algorithm spits out a playlist for the following day to give each kid their own customized way of learning.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  It's very dependent on technology. In a good way, I would argue. It would make the role of the teacher, I would argue, even more important, although I think a lot of teachers fear that it would make them less important. And it does what, to me, the whole, almost every other facet of life has done, which is try to customize things, you know, to work better for you. None of us want to walk into a store, whether it's virtual or real, virtual or brick and mortar. And have a choice of one thing, you know, here's a clothing store, here's the coat we have today. Here's the shirt we have today. Here's the book for sale today. Here's the podcast to listen to. We all want choice. And it's not just about preference.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  It's about how we learn and people are really different. And so I think that the more we can use technology and also just logic and data to customize to some degree, the educational process, the better off we'll be. I think I've been talking for a really long time. Going to try to find one more question here. That would be a good one to end on. We've been talking a little bit about education. All right, so I'll combine a couple. Here's Christina Nishiva, Nishiva and Jill Bevan Craddock have questions.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Christina asks, I'd love to know how to best teach kids to have critical thinking and ask unusual questions. So I love that question, Christina. And Jill wants to know what's a great project for seventh graders to get excited about economics. So combining these two, I will say, first off, I'll start by saying, I have no idea how to, what's a great, what's a great project for seventh graders to get excited about economics? And I would kind of go back to my previous question, previous answer, which is that, you know, customization is really important. And so to that end, I'm a really big believer in letting people, whether it's adults, whether it's in your work career, whether it's people in their, obviously in their consumer choices,

• 57:40Speaker 03

  but even in education, I'm a big believer in letting people find the topics that they're fascinated by, almost addicted to, and then urge them to channel that fascination into learning a lot of different things using that topic or using that fascination. So one thing that strikes me as weird about school, the way we still do school, is we require every kid. To be involved for many years in every subject, art, phys ed and math and English and history. And, and obviously you want to have everybody have a certain core base, but almost nobody's good at all these things. And, and the, and the result of being in, in almost inevitably really bad at one or two is just to make you kind of hate the process

• 58:24Speaker 03

  or make many people hate the process, especially boys. You see, the boys don't do very well in primary education often because there's, there's just too much funneling and channeling your interest and your attention into things that are not interesting or that don't hold your attention. And then of course, we blame them, which I think is crazy. So I do think it's great if you can, like I said, let people or lead people to find a topic or a curiosity that is legit, that's organic for them, and then use that to learn a lot about the rest of the world. And I think, you know, if you're a good teacher, if you're a good parent or just a good, you know, adult, thoughtful person, you can find a way to learn about

• 59:06Speaker 03

  so many different elements, so many different disciplines within one thing. So I'll give an example. My son, who's now 16, he doesn't like school very much. He does pretty well in some subjects, not so well in others. It's just, it's just not a great fit. I don't think he's ever going to be a great school student. On some dimensions, he's really, really smart. And on some dimensions, he's really, really interested. And so I do try to encourage him. So his big obsession for the past like five, six years has been football, soccer, what we in America call soccer, which he calls football because he's kind of a snob that way. So like, you know, he really, really, he reads a lot. Most of the books he reads for fun are about football. Most of the, you know, journalism that he reads. I mean, he keeps up with politics and stuff more than, I think, pretty, pretty well for

• 59:51Speaker 03

  a 16 year old kid. He does it a lot through comedy, by the way, you know, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Colbert, those are, that's the way he gets a lot of his news, which I think is not a terrible way to get your news because I don't know if funny news about the news, I don't know if comedy about the news is actually any funnier than a lot of the real coverage about the news personally. So I'm personally pretty good with that. But then with, with football or soccer, like also he and I do, it's gotten more occasional lately. It was more regular for a while, a podcast about him basically teaching me about footy called Footy for Two. And the amount that you can learn about the world through something like football.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  About economics and politics and language and society generally and how the media operates. So if you follow football closely, as he does, I mean, you can learn all of this. And it's about as global as it gets. So that's what I would say to Christina and Jill and anyone who's looking for, you know, kind of ways to quote, "teach kids to have critical thinking, ask unusual questions," or what's a great project to get seventh graders excited about something is, you know, the excitement, try to find an organic excitement and then develop that and let it go as deep and wide as you can. For me, as a kid, the channels, the topics that I learned about the world through were

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  sports, which led to just, you know, you learn a lot about different things, personality stuff, political stuff, on and on. Music I loved, but back then especially, there was less kind of real good information about. But to me, the hobby that I did, which is, you know, super nerdy, whatever, but I love, was stamp collecting. It's like when I was a kid, collecting stamps, I did it. I didn't do it as a learning exercise. I did it for whatever reason, I thought it was really fun to collect different pieces of colored paper from around the world. I just thought it was fun. I liked the organizing principle. I liked the hunting them down. But the amount that I learned about, I learned way more about the world through stamp collecting

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  than I ever learned through geography or even world history. I learned about economics. I learned about royalty. I learned about political upheaval. I learned about art, all this stuff through this thing that I happen to love. So I think that, look, the fact that you are listening to the Tim Ferriss Show indicates to me that you are a person who is deeply passionate about something beyond like having fun and getting pleasure out of life. And don't get me wrong, I think having fun and getting pleasure out of life are hugely important and they're really what drive us at the end of a day. But I think the fact that you're listening to this also indicates that you have a real

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  burning passion for something either vocational, or career-wise, or creative, or artistic. And I think the more honest you can be about, you know, do the thing, the more honest you can be about doing what you love because you love it, and then try to harness and leverage that love. You know, it's really hard to work hard on something you don't love and that you're not passionate about. I think a lot of us, especially early in our careers, we try to fake it, try to persuade ourselves, "Oh yeah, I really want to go into, you know, investment banking because I think it's really interesting to get in there and learn about how companies work and da-da-da." Then you see a lot of people in fields like that where they go into them early, you find that really what they wanted was they wanted to make a lot of money, which is fine.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Money is hugely important, but you find that the passion doesn't match your, your energy. And so I think if you can align your passion and energy, you will work so hard and do so well that you'll, you'll become successful without even really noticing you're becoming successful because you're just doing it. You're just doing your thing. So, Tim, thanks for having me. Tim Ferriss Show listeners, thanks for having me. I do hope you'll keep up with the work I do. Can follow Freakonomics stuff at Freakonomics Twitter and Facebook. The new show that I'm really excited about, if you couldn't tell, is called Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Hoping to get Tim back on it as a panelist soon.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  And I guess that's all I have to say. It's been a real pleasure and a privilege, and I love the questions, and I very much appreciate the opportunity to come talk to all of you. Cheers.

• 1:04:22Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums. That I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:05:05Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. When your business needs a logo, website, business card, thumbnail, or any other design, I recommend checking out 99designs. I use them myself. I've used them for many years. I use them to create book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I've also used them for banner ads, illustrations, and much more. With 99designs, you get a variety of original designs from designers around the world.

• 1:05:49Tim Ferriss?

  Give your feedback and then pick your favorite. Your happiness is guaranteed. So check out some of my competitions and designs and some of your competitions and designs from fellow Tim Ferriss Show listeners at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, you can get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. So check it out, 99designs.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management.

• 1:06:32Tim Ferriss?

  In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the Risk Assessment Quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies

• 1:07:16Tim Ferriss?

  that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance.

• 1:08:01Tim Ferriss?

  Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you.

• 1:08:43Tim Ferriss?

  Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of.