Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 67: TIM HARFORD on Leaving Academia to Become a Bestselling Writer

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

In today's episode I interview bestselling author Tim Harford. We talk about his path from economics to writing and broadcasting, his thoughts on using data to make sense of the world (without getting tricked), and his experience working for Malcolm Gladwell's podcasting company.His latest book, called THE DATA DETECTIVE in the US and HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD ADD UP everywhere else, comes out this week and is available wherever you buy books.Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 67. In today's episode, instead of me answering questions, I will be asking questions of our special guest, Tim Harford. Tim is one of my favorite thinkers and writers. He's a UK-based writer, trained in economics at Oxford, who turned his attention to applying those tools he learned to best. to better understanding our world. He's written nine books. His first book,

his breakthrough book, was the undercover economist, which has sold something like 1.5 million copies and counting. His newest book, which just came out, the day you're hearing this, it's just coming out,

is called How to Make the World Add Up. That's the title if you live not in the U.S. If you live in the U.S., the same book has the title the data detective. This is the same book, and it is fantastic. He tells you how to make sense of data when trying to understand your world, how to use data to gain a better understanding,

and how to avoid being tripped up or tricked by data being interpreted in ways that are a little bit less rigorous. He's a great writer, very numerically savvy, but also very good at telling stories. So in this episode, we cover a lot of ground. As I like to do, I got deep into Tim's story. How did he transition from an academic trajectory into a writing trajectory? What is his current setup right now as a writer? What has been going on during the pandemic?

We talk about his very popular radio show in the UK. He has a show called More or Less on Radio 4 in the UK, which looks at the world through the lens of numbers and has been doing quite a bit of coronavirus coverage this past year and what that has been like. We get into his new book, The Data Detective. In general, what I'm trying to do here is get both a portrait of an interesting deep life trajectory while also extracting wisdom about Tim's expertise, you know, extracting wisdom from how he sees and understands the world, how to make sense of a world in which numbers play a big role.

A little bit of a change from some of my prior interviews, I decided to not try to ask Tim to help me answer audience questions. I thought it might be better to just ask Tim questions that I think cover territory that you, the audience seems to be interested in. We've done 67 episodes now, so I have a pretty good sense of the types of topics you're interested in.

So I figured we would try the straight interview format. Two quick evergreen announcements. If you want to find out how you can submit your own questions for the normal format episodes of this show, you can get that information at calnewport.com. slash podcast. I would also be remiss if I did not mention my new book, A World Without Email, which comes out on March 2nd. It is my magnum opus on the topic of tech and the workplace. If you pre-order a copy, which I really appreciate, hold on to that digital receipt.

We will be imminently announcing a really cool bonus for people who pre-ordered the book. All right. That's enough announcements. I'm excited to get going with this interview with Tim. Before we get started, the last thing to do is just say thanks to one of the sponsors that makes the show possible. And I am talking about Monk pack, M-U-N-K, not M-O-N-K. Now here's the thing, healthy snacks have a bad reputation. I don't know if you're like me, but I get frustrated when I'm reading books by experts on

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Deep Questions podcast. It's my pleasure, Cal. I'm a loyal listener to the podcast, so it's going to be really weird when I finally get to listen to this episode and hear my own voice. But thank you. Really glad to be on the show. I mean, in some sense, this is a sort of low fidelity makeup for what was supposed to be. It was a delightful event. You know, last March, I was coming out to London. We were going to be on stage together. There was a theater. They had sold out all the tickets. And then there was this virus. It started spreading to do it. So this is like our makeup.

Yeah, but it's always important to look on the bright side. So this is coinciding with the publication of a book of yours and a book of mine. And also, I'm guessing 100 times as many people will hear it as would ever ever have come to that event. So can't feel too sad. It's true. That's right. We were not in full disclosure selling out the, what, the O2 arena or whatever. I remember at some point Jordan Peterson was on some book tour and was in like stadiums or something like this.

Yes, I think our theater would have been a little bit more intimate, but that's good. That is the bright side. Technology is advanced, and now this is a parable for distributed digital communications versus old school communications. So there we go. Digital technology works if you know how to use it. That's the message I drew from digital minimalism. You've just got to be mindful about the way you use it, and we're using it right, I hope. Exactly.

Well, so I like to do with the show when I have on guest, special guests, I like to go back into their story a little bit. My listeners are interested in people who live interesting deep lives, how they got there, and what principles guide them. So I'm going to walk you a little bit through your story, and then we will from there move on to the data detective, your new book, which is coming out just as, I believe, podcast will be posted. So we will get into the nitty gritty of that. Let's start with you. I'm trying to understand your early story. And as far as I can tell, we go back to the 1990s. You're at Oxford. Then you get a Masters at Oxford. And I'm not sure if this is a true quote or not. You'll have to tell me if this is true. At some point, you asked your main advisor about doing a PhD. and he said, you seem to have everybody out there fooled about your abilities.

So I don't think you should come here to demonstrate your manifest. That can't possibly be true, is it? He's a good friend of mine, still a good friend. We went for a socially distant walk together just last week. He's a great guy. But one of the important things, apart from being a brilliant economist, his name is Paul Klemper. He's a great game theorist, auction theorist. one of the things that makes him great is he's honest and direct.

And he said to me, basically, yeah, you can be an academic, you'll be fine. But you seem to be doing really well as a writer, as a journalist. You're having fun. Why would you come back here and be a not terribly good academic? And I think that's a great piece of advice. So I took his advice and I haven't regretted it. So when I look at your CV, I see this jump from 98. You're sort of finishing up your education to you joining the Financial Times in 2003.

But as you just mentioned, even as a student, your advisor was talking about you having success as a journalist. So walk us back. What is the lead up to you joining the Financial Times in 2003? So I'm probably misremembering exactly what he said because I wasn't a journalist at the time. but what I did was a year of teaching at a university in Ireland before I did my master's degree. That was kind of weird. It was a bit of a historical accident, but I was basically teaching students who were my age. I'd just finished my bachelor's degree and I was teaching undergraduates who were the same age as me,

which was weird and wonderful and a privilege. And that's what made me think maybe I did want to become an academic. But after I finished my master's degree, I did a few things. the most interesting one was working for the scenario planning team at Shell International. Of course, people will know Shell, it's a great, big, bad oil company. And I don't want to persuade you that it's not a great big bag at oil company because it is. But the scenario planning team was fascinating, full of amazing people, really trying to think deeply about what the future holds, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years out, interdisciplinary,

full of mavericks, full of people who didn't fit in to an oil company, including my wife, who I met there. She was an environmentalist. She had joined Shell because she wanted to get them to clean up their act. And so it was a very interesting place to work stressful and I had mixed feelings as I had a love, hate relationship working for this big oil company, but I learned a lot and I had great colleagues. And I think that was then the the launch pad to the next step, which was in my spare time writing a book called The Undercover Economist. No agent, no publisher, no reason to believe anybody would ever publish it. But I just got it done.

I carved out the time, wrote the book, and then got an internship at the Financial Times. And that's really where it all took off. I mean, the details are actually quite kind of complicated and nobody cares about the details. But that's where it all came from. That's interesting. So the scenario planning you were doing at Shell, this was a place where you were seeing applied economics happening? Applied economics, but not just that, because a lot of what the scenario planning methodology calls for is to really deeply immerse yourself into all of the different possible lenses that you might look through to try and figure out what's going on in the future. So the idea is that rather than going, okay, we got some data, we got some economic theory, here's what we think is going to happen to the economy, you sit down with a political scientist, say,

who will tell you, oh, well, you've got this theory about the economy of Brazil, but wait until I tell you about the politics of Brazil. And then you sit down with someone who really understands, say, hydroelectric power and Brazil's investments in hydroelectric power. And then somebody else who really understands the international relations, So this is, for example, if you're doing a scenario for the future of Brazil, and someone else who studied social movements and environmental campaigning in Brazil. And so you're trying to see a problem from all kinds of different angles. And I mean, that's something I've done ever since.

One of the fun things about what I do is to be able to try to see things from different angles to bring different disciplines to bear. Of course, it's also a tension because you can end up spreading yourself too thin. So that's why I like to read your books just to keep me on the straight and narrow and not get too distracted. Yeah, but that is interesting. So data in context is maybe a good umbrella. And that now makes a lot of sense, this origin story, that you're in the scenario planning group where data and applied economics are being combined. with other types of information expertise to try to figure out what's going on,

which is all radically different. I'm looking at what you would have been doing. I took a glance at your master's thesis. So you were pretty hardcore game theory, right? Sequential auction with financially constrained bidders. So it's not, this is not a Levitt style story where you were a microeconomic economist

who was specializing in fine-tuned data analysis and was like, I will now use my tools honed in my expertise as an academic to analyze data sets in interesting ways. I'm now going to apply that to new problems. You were actually coming out of a strain of economics. This is hardcore mathematical, not very, if I'm understanding properly,

not very data driven at all. So that was the path that you turned away from if I understand it, would have been I have to do competition against math guys, trying to do same game theory. I have to be John Nash. I'm doing John Nash stuff. And that's a pretty daunting competitive, whatever,

perniment tree there, I would assume. Game theory can get very abstract and very mathematical. I should say, Cal, I'm extremely impressed that you've looked at my thesis topic. I've done a lot of interviews over the last 20 years. I don't think anybody's ever bothered to go and look at what the thesis was about.

But yeah, it's... I would probably be exaggerated to say it's pure math, because I know pure math gets really pure. But yeah, it's theory. And I loved it. I really enjoyed it, but I wasn't great at it. I was fine, but I wasn't great.

And so it was good, I think, to get out into the world and to find something that maybe I had more of an advantage and put my skills to broader use. Yeah. Well, okay, now there's a brief diversion, but let's just do it because I'm fascinated by it. So the game theory of the type you're studying, it's in a very similar family, I think, of mathematics like I do as a theoretical computer science, by which I mean it's a applied mathematics. And so, yeah, the pure mathematicians are like, why are you, these applications, like the auctions are so, you know, so prosaic, but to other scientists, it seems hopelessly

mathematical. And I was around at MIT, a lot of superstars. And I'm sure you were around some superstars at Oxford. Yeah. It comes to this type of John Nash stuff. And I'm using that, actually, this is John Nash stuff, but I'm using that just more generally so people have an image of it's, you know, drawing equations on the glass, uh, that type of work. work, what separates? What was your opinion, because you had to decide whether to do this or not, what separates? What's your theory on what makes some people stars in that? When you're trying to do the nature, nurture, background habits, did you have a working theory that you applied and helped you make the decision not to keep going? If I'm honest, I would say, I didn't Newported. I didn't,

I didn't have my theory that said, this is what I should be doing or this is what I shouldn't be doing. I asked Paul for advice. He gave me advice and I think it was good advice. And I don't think that was such a bad thing. If you ask the right person for advice, you're going to do all right. But what did separate out the top theorists? I think the ones I admire the most were able to make really serious conceptual or theoretical breakthroughs while at the same time keeping it practical. So you may know that auction theorists shared the Nobel Prize in Economics, or I should say to be correct, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics just a few months ago, Milgram and Robert Wilson. And they are guys who were very sophisticated in their theory, but at the same time we're constantly going back to real world problems and trying to solve real world problems and ask, well, does the theory help us solve the real world problem?

And if it doesn't, let's go back and do a better theory and then go back to the real world and then go back to theory. It's something I admired in Paul Klemperer as well. And in a very small way in my own thesis, the idea of studying sequential auctions under budget constraints, what does that mean? Basically means, let's say you're bidding in an auction against somebody and you know they're going to be back tomorrow and they're going to be back the day after and the day after to bid in a different auction. But maybe you could use up their money, so they run out of cash and then you can win the auctions cheaply, maybe not today or tomorrow, but further down the track. How do you think about that problem? Which, by the way, anybody who plays Monopoly knows that this is the basic problem you're faced within Monopoly. That was a theoretical problem that hadn't been well studied,

but it came from a practical problem because I had a conversation with someone at Shell who was thinking in exactly this way, I want to enter an auction and bid against somebody. I don't actually want to win the auction. I just want to make them burn through their budget, and then I'll win something cheaper next time there's an auction. People just hadn't properly modeled that real-world application, so that's what I went to do. Yeah, I think a lot of people don't understand the degree to which in some of these applied mathematical fields. There's so much of it is the question. It's not just coming up with an interesting question. but it's this line of having an interesting question that is not trivial, but is also trackable.

And that describes my academic life is struggling to find, struggling to find that sweet spot. And then convincing people, it's interesting. There's, there's an interesting connection to the type of salesmanship you might think is relevant as an author. Hey, I want to convince you about this idea. People don't realize the degree to which that runs through applied math. But moving on to you as an author, so you, you, you, you, Join Financial Times as an intern, move up to a columnist. You're working on the side on this book, The Undercover Economist, which the column you end up writing for the Financial Times is in the same style.

So I don't know what the chicken or the egg is here, but this style is very successful. That book was a runaway hit. How did you develop the style that worked for that book and your column? Where did that come from? This let me take something in the real world and apply this sort of economics hat to it. Where did that come from? So it always began with curiosity. I would see things.

Before I had any thought that I would ever be a writer, I would see things in the world. Like I'd walk into a Starbucks and I'd be looking at the prices on Starbucks, and I'd be going, huh, that's interesting. I wonder why it's like that. I wonder why it's not some different way. Why are there that many coffers? Why are the price differentials the way I see them? there was a particular thing I noticed that they were charging, this wasn't Starbucks, it was

another coffee chain, but they were charging 10 cents extra to put fair trade coffee in your cappuccino. And I was thinking, I don't think the fair trade coffee costs 10 cents extra per cup. I think it costs nothing per cup. So why are they doing that? Why would they actively discourage people by penalizing them for buying fair trade coffee? So just thinking through these sorts of questions and going, ah, I know I have an economic idea. I went to a lecture, which answers that question or which throws light on that question. So that's really where it all started. It was this love of the subject, the academic subject that I've been studying, plus observing and being curious about the real world. And so you had no shortage.

That's what made this a rich vein. There was no shortage of examples, which must have been exciting once you realize that. But once you started looking around, there was no shortage of examples where economic thinking was influencing these things we were seen. And it could be explained. And the explanation sort of made sense, which is, again, it goes back to the math problem. It's non-trivial, but it's also tractable. Yeah. And the world is full of really interesting phenomena. And you can ask lots of interesting questions about it. And of course, it's nice if you can come up with some answers as well. And that's what I did. And I think at the time, I was very lucky. I didn't realize that there was so much enthusiasm out there. The undercover economist was in some ways

a very naive book. I didn't really understand how to write a book. I didn't understand how to sell a book. And maybe people found that rather appealing, actually. That there was just something quite charming about that. I don't know. I really don't know, actually. Did it take off right away? it did it immediately sold out in the US so it came out in the US late 2005 and they assured me hey you know if people buy it don't worry we can print more and of course sold out straight away and then they spent three weeks trying to get the printing presses rolling in the UK it was a it was successful but it was one of those books where it just floated on the outskirts of the best sell a list and just stayed there and stayed there and stayed there. I think it was in the top 30

nonfiction paperbacks for over a year. I don't think it ever made the top 10. They just sat there solidly selling and selling and selling, which I guess indicates that it wasn't about the publicity or some breakthrough review. It was just people picked up the book and they liked it and so did other people. They told their friends, which is the best way for a book to catch Yeah, sure. Well, that's definitely the deep work story. You know, it just kind of kept selling, selling more. Never, you know, number one book in the country. We, you know, featured on whatever, whatever, just sold. And if you just multiply that by enough years, though it has not done undercover economist numbers. What do you think opened the, uh, made people receptive? This was around the time of Freakonomics, right? So that was, that was kind of in the air. I'm trying to think 2000. I'm thinking of what this time period was like in the U.S. It was the Freakonomics era. Funnily enough, Cal, we're having this conversation. About an hour ago, I stopped an interview with Steve Levitt. So Steve Levitt just interviewed me for his podcast. So I'm having a really exciting day. I'm getting to talk to all of my heroes. But we were remembering because

I actually interviewed Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics, a month before Free Economics came out. I was still, I wasn't working for the financial times, but I was doing some freelance work for them. And I was living in the States in D.C., in fact, and I emailed my editor and said, hey, there's this book coming out. It looks like it's going to be really good. This economist is really interesting. He's got a great reputation. Why don't I fly to Chicago and have lunch with him and interview him for the Financial Times? And my editor said, yeah.

So off I went to interview him. And, yeah, Levit just said, hey, I just assumed you were a real journalist. I didn't realize you weren't a real journalist when you interviewed me that time. But so that was in the air. Undercover Economist came out about six months after free economics. So I was very lucky. Some people said, oh, you were cashing in on the success of free economics. Well, I was accidentally, but you can't write and publish a book that quickly.

So I was riding that wave. these people were looking around and going, I love free economics. Let me read another cool economics book. And all of the copycats of free economics, well, they weren't going to be out for another year and a half, whereas my book was right there. So I think, I think that was part of it. It also took off in Korea, South Korea, something crazy. And I got no idea why. Sometimes these things just happen. People buy your book and you don't know why, and you just got to be thankful. So then what is your, if we get like 2005 or 2006, what's your professional configuration, You describe yourself as a full-time journalist, you describe yourself as a writer that did some writing for Financial Times.

How did you see yourself? Like what was the professional setup at that point? So at the time, I was working at the World Bank. I did two years at the World Bank, very interesting place to work, quite like Shell in some ways. Really smart people, thinking deep, long-term thoughts about the world. But I left there to become a full-time writer at the beginning of 2006. So undercover economists had just launched in the US. It was doing really well, just about to launch in the UK, where it also did well.

And the FT, I've done this internship with the FT, and they brought me in and they put me on the editorial board, effectively just writing editorials, writing leaders. Which is a great place actually for a young journalist to be because in some ways it's a very senior position because you are the voice of the newspaper. On the other hand, like if you say something stupid, a colleague can just lean over and tell you to change it. Whereas if you're a junior reporter, you go out and you misreport something, you make a mistake. People won't necessarily know you've made a mistake. So it was a great place to be. And I did that for three, four, five years. I forget exactly, probably five years.

And then said, okay, I've got this column. I was writing the column through a couple. out, I'm going to go part-time, just do the column, not do the editorials. And the time that frees up, that's more time for my BBC radio work, it's more time for more books. So in principle, I'm a staff writer on the Financial Times. They are my employer. But like you, I've got these various side hustles that turn out to be a lot of fun and consume a lot of attention. Yeah. Well, I'm interested in this model. I mean, well, for one thing, I couldn't help but notice and impresses me.

You know, you published your first book right around the time I published my first book, but you've published, if I count right, nine books with this new one where I'm only up the seven. So I'm already impressed by that. How do you see, how do you understand Tim Harford Incorporated, right? As a, you have the part-time staff job financial times. you have a pretty regular book rhythm. You've done a lot of other media.

As you mentioned, a TV show in 2007. You've done various BBC radio shows. You're now involved with Gladwell's podcasting company. I'm assuming you applied your economic skills and you have a brilliant model that the rest of us authors should all know about. So how do you think about it? What is the engine here? What's the business plan?

So I think the main thing, it's partly that I've taken advantages is taken advantage of opportunities as they've come up. So when the BBC said, will you present a radio show for us? I said, yeah, that sounds great. And that gradually moved from quite a small niche thing in a time that not many people listened to, to more repeats, better time slots, more shows. So it's gradually grown partly as a result of these big number stories,

like the referendum on EU membership and more. recently coronavirus. So I've grabbed onto these opportunities when they've come. But the main thing I see is as being there's risk mitigation. So I've had the experience, you've had the same experience of all paid lecture work just drying up with coronavirus. People used to very kindly pay me to go and stand on a stage and show off, which I really enjoyed. They don't do that anymore. Hopefully one day they will. Are you finding virtual? I found virtual has become a thing in the last few months in the way that it wasn't early in the pandemic. I don't know if you're seeing that, where people are now willing to pay for Zoom. Yes, I have seen that. There was a moment where

you had pre-existing speeches and some of them went virtual. Then things went very quiet. And the virtual has picked up a bit. But it's not the same. It's not as fun. It's not as well paid. There isn't as much work, but there is that. And I do that. And it's fun, it's been fun to try to get good at that. My wife's a photographer. So she helps me with a camera and the lighting and, you know, to try to, there's a, there's a craft to enjoy in trying to get better at this new form. But the, the point is that when that happened, the BBC called me up and said, we need more shows from you. We need, we need, the, the country needs to understand this pandemic. you're our numbers guy. We want you on air more often explaining the numbers behind the virus.

So, you know, one thing went away, another thing picked up. And it wasn't as well paid, but it felt really satisfying and really important to be at the heart of that story. Is this, now, are you talking about your radio four show at this point? Yeah. So this radio four show is called, more or less. I'm doing another radio four show now called How to Vaccinate the World. No prizes for guessing what that one's about. But that's a weekly current affairs. The shingles vaccine, right? We got the scourge of singles.

Can you briefly explain for the U.S. listeners, how do we understand Radio 4? When you think of this as like a national NPR show, like what's the right equivalent? Yeah, I think if you imagine a nationally syndicated NPR show, that's your best model. It's publicly funded, so there's no advertising on radio 4. It's a BBC channel and it's the premier talk radio channel. So the morning news on Radio 4, you know, all the agenda setters, all the politicians, all the journalists are listening to the morning news and that's setting the agenda for the day. And my show more or less is broadcast at 9 o'clock in the morning.

So immediately after the morning news, then you get more or less and we do that weekly. So that's, I mean, that's been very good for, for my profile in the UK, of course. Can you explain the premise of the show for the US listeners? So the basic idea is we use numbers to understand the world, which is also the premise of my book, The Data Detective. So partly we're debunking dubious statistics. A politician said a thing.

It's not true. So we're going to fact-check them and we'll tell you what's true. But more importantly, to also say, well, we want to help you understand not only what's false, but also what's true. want to help you understand the world by looking at the data. Over the last year, it's been 90% coronavirus data, of course. But we always have room for a story about something else. But more broadly, there might be just a fun story about recreational maths. Somebody might have

made some claim about, I don't know, the value of sleep or something. And we say, well, what does the evidence actually show us about the value of sleep? We get a lot of listener emails and basically just have fun with numbers for an audience who are not necessarily numerous at all. It's just on standard on the radio, primetime radio. So we're trying to explain numbers to people who maybe don't necessarily feel comfortable with them. So that's a, it's been a real privilege to be involved in that. How many people are involved with a show on terrestrial radio like that? I mean, what's the overhead?

I was going to say in response to you earlier a question about the business model, one of the things that is fun about doing these things is that the process is very different. So the column, it's just me. I write the column and then I send it to the FT and then a group of super smart editors, you know, fact check, fix any problems and publish it. And it's very solo operation. More or less is totally different. So there will be an editor who, he's basically the guy who gets blamed if something goes wrong.

as a producer, she's the person who actually makes everything happen, and there'll be an assistant producer and a researcher. So we've got, on the front end of that, editor producer, second producer, reporter, so that's four of them, plus me. There'll be an assistant helping with the admin, and then separately there'll be a studio engineer who will mix it. So you're talking five people maybe, and three of those people are probably working full-time on the show. I'm not working full-time. I'm part-time. And the editor will have other shows to supervise. The production assistant will be helping with other productions.

But it's a full-time job for quite a few people to produce half an hour of radio. When you say you work on it part-time, but I mean, you are the host, right? So you're just saying that the time required from you to actually finish writing the episodes and come and record is like a part-time job. Yes. But it's not as a other host. No, I'm the host. The other people will appear on the radio. So I will sometimes interview our reporters about a story they've done.

But I'm the host. For those who listen to this American life, for example, I'm the I'm the Ira Glass. I frame it. I write the words. The words come out of my mouth. but I'll be introducing other stories. And so the process of that will be, I'll get emails from my team saying,

are you free to do an interview at 2 o'clock tomorrow? Here's the brief, here's who we're interviewing, here's the link to record the interview. Back in the day, I would actually have been in a physical office doing all this stuff, but now it's, of course, all remote. And so I'll read the brief. If I've got any questions, I'll ask the questions. I'll do the interview, and then the interview, the audio will go off to the producer who will decide what goes in, what goes out, how it's going to be edited, and then it'll be mixed by the sound engineer to make it all sound beautiful.

So there's a big team involved. Now, how would you compare that to your new Cautionary Tales podcast? Now, you're doing this with Pushkin, so there's people involved, but you're doing this kind of simultaneously, right? These are both shows, one podcast, one radio. they started very roughly the same time. I'm interested in the compare and contrast there. Yeah. So they're very different shows.

So actually, more or less has been going on for 15 years now. Well, nearly 20 years, but I've been involved for nearly 15 years. But cautionary tales, it's just been going for the last year or so. And that's a podcast about things going wrong and what we learn from the things that go wrong. So I'm telling a story of an oil tanker running into rocks in broad daylight or a jazz concert, just turning into a complete car crash or the Oscar being given to the wrong movie. I'm telling these stories and then I'm trying to say, okay, what's the social science behind what happened?

The psychology or the engineering or the statistics, what can we learn to prevent that sort of thing happening in our own lives? it's a really fun project. It's quite different in terms of the production process. So there's much more of me up front. So I'm deciding what we're going to do. I'm doing all the research. I'm scripting everything.

So there's no reporter saying, oh, we're going to do a story about drug deaths in Scotland. Here's the guy we're talking to. Here's what you need to know. Dial in at 2 o'clock to do the interview. It's much more. I want to tell a story about the invention of D&D and what went wrong when there was a massive panic about D&D in the late 70s.

I'm going to research all the story. I'm going to tell the story. I'll write the script. That's all me. Then I'll send the script to colleagues at Pushkin and they'll give comments. We'll do a table read. I'll read the script. It's amazing what you learn when you just read out your own script.

You go, oh, that doesn't make any sense. Why didn't I see that already? but when your lips are moving, you learn something new. Get all the great feedback from these table reads, go back, edit it, change it, then record it. And then, of course, it goes back to my producer, Ryan, who then works further magic because we have actors, we have a composer, sound mixing.

So again, there's a big team, but the workflow is very different. It's much more front-loaded for me. I'm involved very intensively at the beginning in creating the basic structure and the basic script and the basic audio. And then it just goes off and magic things happen to it. And then I've got nothing to do with any of that until it drops into my feed. And I hear the podcast and I can't quite believe how beautiful they've made it sound. Yeah. Well, and let me just quickly offer my apologies.

I got before the timeline wrong. I didn't realize that more or less you'd been doing that for 15 years. So what you're saying is recent was just the shift to coronavirus. as the main topic? Yeah, sorry to be unclear. Yeah. So there was a shift to prime time about a year ago that was purely coincidental and that had been discussed.

And then before we even did it, having just decided we were going to do it, the virus hit. Everyone was locked down. And they said, actually, you know, we wanted you on in April. We want you on now in March. We want you on immediately. It was kind of exciting. I felt, you know, it's like a little bit of. Oh, wow, people really want me.

I mean, it's pathetic. There's people dying. It's a global crisis. But just the sense, I was very grateful to have something to do that I felt I could contribute and I could help at the time when so many people were just being told, sorry, you know, the theaters are closed, the restaurants are closed, just stay home. There's nothing you can do. Yeah.

Were you able to go into the studio or were they doing your audio remote? It was remote for months. And then over the summer, things really died down. We had really low caseloads. I mean, we're having a really bad time this winter, so it's tragic that we've let it come back. But so I was back in the studio, you know, socially distanced, and we were all spaced out in the summer.

And then, yeah, more recently, he's been back under the duvet, which is a fight, I mean, I feel sorry for my children who are tiptoeing around the house. Seemingly for hours, they're all homeschooled right now. they're all studying from home. And, I mean, I've been talking into a microphone feels like all day. And I'm still talking into a microphone.

I'm having fun. They're all hiding somewhere so they don't disturb us. So it's tough on them. But I think it's surprising. A few things do slip between the cracks. There are some process issues. There are some problems, misunderstandings occasionally. That it is surprising what you can get done.

And I would never have believed it was possible. So this is maybe going a little bit too deep, a little bit too psychoanalysis here, but looking over your background, there's this one kind of trajectory with your career, which has kind of come to full fruition with more or less moving the prime time that starts back with the undercover economist. And it's, you know, your superpower is, I can understand data and how, um, how, you know, you're, your superpower. what explains what happens in the world and what's going on in the world. And numeracy as a way of understanding of issues beyond just a realm of numbers is this important literacy. And you're very good at that. And undercover economists is like that.

The data detective is like that more or less is, you know, very well respect to show that's like that. And then there's this other thread where you're trying different things, right? So there's a, there's a period in your book writing where it seemed like you were maybe moving over to more more broadly to the business space. So you had like Adapt or messy or this is not a business book, but you have that fascinating book I really enjoyed about the objects, this collection of objects that explains a lot in history. And then I would put cautionary tales, your podcast,

your new podcast is sort of in that, okay, here's going somewhere new. It's social psychology, it's storytelling. So how accurate or not accurate am I in seeing there's these two trajectories? and both of them are being pushed ahead in kind of fits and starts in your career. I think that's reasonably accurate. I mean, you've imposed a pattern on it that I think it's actually more random and sporadic than that. So I, for example, I wrote Adapt, which is, I think, yes, it's a business book.

It's a book about experimentation. I mean, it's not an out-and-out airport, Who Moved My Cheese, kind of book, but it's a book about the importance of experimentation, trial and error in business and in life. But then the book after that was The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, which was a book trying to explain macroeconomics in a kind of fun, accessible way, which was a really good challenge. I had more fun than I expected writing that book. Then the book after that was back to Messi,

which in a sense was a sequel to adapt. It was about the importance of improvisation and spontaneity and things that can't be planned and things that can't easily be quantified. And then the book after that was 50 inventions that shaped the modern economy. So it's a technological history. All of that's going on while I'm also writing my columns, giving my talks, doing my radio. So, yeah, if you can find a pattern in that, I'm impressed. I think the pattern is it's this simple, which is I'm really interested in stuff.

All kinds of stuff. I find the world very interesting. and when I come across an interesting idea, I want to tell people about it. And the common thread in everything I do is, hey, I thought this is really interesting and I wanted to tell you a story about it or I want to explain it to you.

Or best of all, I want to explain it to you while telling a story about it. That's the best. And so how, this is a British question. You have, you're an OBE or have an OBE, the most excellent order of the British Empire. Is that the designation that gets you called Sir? Or can you explain this to us?

I've watched some crown, but I'm not up to speed. To be called Sir, I think it's, I have to have a K-CBE, which is a Knight Commander of the British Empire. Sorry, I'm just officer of the British Empire. So I know it's super weird. Basically, it's a medal of honor. I'm very, very lucky to have it, given that most people who get it

have done amazing charity work or have taken big risks. They've worked for the police, the fire service. They've worked in the army. And here I am. I'm just kind of having fun and doing in perfect safety, doing exactly what I love to do and get paid perfectly well for it. And now they give me a medal as well. So I'm very lucky.

Right. But the medal was specifically for public understanding of economics, though, right? So it's another sign that that thread, there's something that you're doing there. that is at a level that very few people are doing. That was what the, yes, the citation was for, I think, for services to improving economic understanding. So, yeah, it's for helping people understand economics.

And yeah, and it's like a mini knighthood. There were a lot more OBEs than there are knights. But it's all dressed up in the regalia. You go to Buckingham Palace. I met Prince Charles, and he pinned the metal on my chest. And it was extraordinary. But fundamentally, I suppose, it would be like being given a medal by the president or by Congress. It's the British state saying, we think you're doing a good job.

Keep going. Does your publisher pressure you about topic, or do you have a setup where it's, we kind of, whatever you want to do, you kind of just ride at a regular rhythm and you kind of have that figured out with them? Or do you get, we want more economics? How does that, how does that really? in terms of their role in helping you figure out what you want to do? It's mostly pushed by me, but we have conversations. So, for example, the book about inventions, 50 inventions that shaped the modern economy.

In the UK, I published two of them. They were based on a totally different radio series. So, Cal, this is the secret. If you can do a radio series that also the scripts of the radio series make a good book, then you can be more productive. So it's really very simple. Yeah. Have a good to do list.

Do a radio series based on what you want to write a book about Time Block. All right, got it. Yeah, absolutely. It's right up there with Time Block. So in the UK, my publisher said, oh, this is great. Yeah, we'd love to do one book based on the radio series. And that's it. We don't want to do a second book because diminishing returns.

But then they actually changed. their mind, the first book had sold sufficiently well. They said, actually, we do want to do a second book. Whereas in the US, they were like, first book's fine. It's fine. We enjoyed it. Sold perfectly adequately, but didn't sell well enough that we would want to do a follow-up. So that's the sort of push you're getting. But I was making it anyway because I was doing it for radio because I was having fun. Yeah. Now, do you have a set schedule for book writing? Every two years, and that means when I'm one year out, I should be here? Or is it more spontaneous? It's more spontaneous. What I find nice about book writing, a number of things that are a tremendous pleasure and privilege about book writing, but one of the things that is nice is that it is squishy. So the deadlines are squishy. You've got a really big, challenging, interesting, engaging goal. But it's always possible to drop it this week, this month, this afternoon.

because something else comes up. And I've found that that means that you can ask more of yourself, be more demanding. You can squeeze things tighter because the book can always give in the short term. Clearly there's a risk there that the book just gives and gives and gives and you never write the book. But hey, I'm nine books in, so I'm willing to say that doesn't actually happen. I do, in fact, write the books. but in the short term it means I can pack other things in. I can take advantage of opportunities that come up at fairly short notice.

And if it was on a more rigid schedule, I would have to pack in, build in more spare time, more flexible time to accommodate the unknown. So this is insider baseball, but are you of the school of thought that locks in a multi-book deal and you're like, I don't have to think about it now, I just write? Or you have the school of thought of each book, on its own. I take my agent's advice and my agent is of the view that single book deals the best. So why she thinks that, I don't know. I just trust her. So that's what an agent is for, right?

Yeah, my agent says something similar. I don't know why either, but there must be, there must be some, there must be some sense in that. Now, you live, you live near, you live in Oxford or near that area? I live in the center of Oxford. I'm just looking out of my window now. I mean, it's pretty dark now, but I can see the dreaming spires of Oxford from my window. Beautiful city. And you have a fellowship at one of the colleges there? Yes, I have. Actually, these days it's a membership.

So I had an eight-year visiting fellowship, which is, I mean, it's a great honor, but it's a fairly loose affiliation. I get to use the library. I get to go for dinner, but I'm not paid money, and I'm not expected to contribute in a formal way. So it's a nice association.

And at the end of the fellowship, they said, well, look, we like having you around. You're a local. We can't extend the fellowship anymore, but we can make you an associate member. So I still get to use the library and go for dinner. That's what matters. So that's what I was going to get at. So now you have access to these libraries. They're great libraries.

They're amazing. When I was an undergraduate, why did I not understand quite what a privilege it was to be able to go to these amazing spaces? in Oxford the libraries are particularly beautiful, but really there are no ugly libraries in the world. All libraries fundamentally are wonderful places because they're all full of books. Why didn't I get it as an undergraduate? Just what a privilege it was. Yeah.

To walk through those and to sit among those carols and to bring out those books. So I'm hoping in non-pandemic time just so you fulfill my own daydreams that you go and sit and think and write. You walk the grounds of Oxford and, and in my dreams for some reason the dons are wearing graduation robes. So I don't know what into your library where you know, it's like, imagine it's like a Bertrand Russell style character

in his office with a fire going in a pipe and you go into your into this beautiful library and think deep thoughts. Oxford always just seemed like, and this is on my mind because Georgetown has a, they have an apartment there. I think it's, I think it's Oxford, not Cambridge.

I think it's Oxford. And so they have a like sabbatical fellowship you can apply for, which is, you know, you can go live in our house or apartment that's like right there in downtown Oxford. It has an association with one of the colleges. I forgot which one. Yeah, you've got to try it. You've got to try it. I mean, it's it's, it is actually almost as dreamy as you imagine. It's really quite close to being what you think of in your imagination.

It is an amazing city, a beautiful city and a beautiful university. and feel very lucky to live here. And yeah, I do go to the libraries regularly and just spend time checking out the literature or just going somewhere else or just a different space to work where you're freer of distractions and no one can phone you.

And it's great. Even during the pandemic, I've been going to the libraries, they've been open on a partial basis, very socially distance, everyone wears a mask, it's not as much fun. And in the most recent weeks, things have got really bad. Even the libraries have closed. And that's probably wise.

But I'm looking forward to getting back there when it's safe. Yeah, I'm always, the U.S., we're too new. We're too young. But the value of aesthetics for cognitive context is something that's often ignored here. I mean, Georgetown built a library in the 1960s or 70s in a sort of brutalist. concrete style. It's like, why? But they do have a beautiful old library and the main castle on the campus.

I do miss going, I do miss going to that. That notion of the aesthetic context, I talk about it a lot, you know, on the podcast. This is the advice I used to give college undergrads when at U.S. universities that would get burnt out on their work. and I used to encourage them to go find the most exotic possible place to do their work. And it was a big challenge. It would egg each other on

and they'd go into the woods and they'd send pictures of I'm doing Spanish flashcards next to a waterfall and there's this physics student who figured out how to break onto the roof of the physics building. You could see all the stars. And I enjoyed that because we don't,

this one I also had my sort of infamous Heidegger with Hefeweisen article I wrote about like, look, go to a pub. and like have a drink and like change the context and there's something that's interesting and stimulating and aesthetically engaging and just not your dorm room. I'm totally with you on this. I think this is wisdom and I think more and more people are realizing how important location is.

Now we're all lockdown one way or another. It's really hard to go somewhere new. I was listening to your recent podcast and it was, I'll put on a really thick coat and sit by a fire pit. I was thinking, yeah, that's good advice, but it's, excuse me, it's pretty sad that that's where we've got. You see, I'm choked up, even thinking about it. I hope that people remember and they learn from this, that the value of a different place, a different context, because we need variety. And it can give yourself a healthy variety by going to an interesting new place that inspires study, inspires deep thoughts, rather than variety from, oh, I'll check my

email again, I'll check my phone again. Yeah. Yeah. We need to satisfy that need in a productive way. Yeah. Well, I'm with you. I hope that's one of the many, one of the many insights, one of the many insights that come out of, come out of the period. The other thing I've heard, the other prognostication is look back to the Spanish flu. What happened in the U.S. after that terror was the roaring 20s, people just went nuts. So I think it's probably, that feels a little bit more on brand, at least for the U.S. that like as the pandemic passed, instead of like a deeply reflective reset to our life and our values, people are going to get drunk at sports arenas.

Well, we'll see. Maybe both. There's room in life for both. Yeah, exactly. I'm willing to, I'm willing to do a couple sports arenas when the time comes. So we'll see. All right. So let's move on to the book.

So your new book in the U.S. is called the data detective. This is one of those confusing things that happen sometimes where it's a different title everywhere else. But I think, I was going to say most of my listeners are here, though, I got a report from my podcast hosting company

that said the number one location from which this podcast is downloaded. I had to look it up. It was a suburb of London, where I think there's a data center. So actually, I think the single city, that's most represented is actually probably the greater London area.

So I shouldn't just assume that everyone here is going to see the US style. So in the US, it is called the Data Detective. And what's the name in the UK version? Yeah, if you're listening in London or really anywhere outside North America, it's called How to Make the World Add Up. But it's the same book, different title, same book. Now, is this connected strongly to the radio show? I mean, just in terms of the spirit of like,

trying to give people the tools to understand the data that's relevant to life. Yes, the spirit is very much there. So I'm trying to help people think more clearly about the world. And my argument is looking at the data, looking at the numbers, is going to help you think more clearly about the world. But that's not the only thing. If you're looking at the evidence, you're looking at the data, and you're stuck at the bottom of a great big hole of ideology or emotion,

wishful thinking, preconceived ideas. Having more data, having more expertise is not going to dig you out of that hole. In fact, it may actually dig you deeper in the hole. So you need the numbers, but you need to ask the right questions about the numbers, and you also need to ask the right questions about your own preconceptions and biases. And that's really what the book's about. And I give 10 pretty simple rules of thumb. it's not a super technical book.

A lot of it is just, here are habits that I have learned from years of thinking about numbers in the news. These are the questions you need to ask if you want to really understand what's going on. I want to take a moment to thank another one of our sponsors, Green Chef. Now, here's the thing. Our family has not been, obviously, eating out at restaurants a lot recently. We try to do takeout to help the local. establishments, but we live in a small town.

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Ladderlife.com slash deep. And now let's get back to my interview with Tim Harford. Now, the philosophical context is what I find really interesting, you know, about your work, right? This notion of, you're taking these numbers, they can serve something greater, but you have to know what that something greater is. In other words, numbers the neutered of context are whatever you want them to be. And it feels like we see that. The pandemic, I guess, was a good example. There's tons of numbers on everything that can be wielded, wielded for almost anything.

Now, would you say, though, your approach is there's a way of approaching numbers that can help you identify if you have a sort of bias or blind spot? Or would you say the approach is there's a sort of greater work and pursuit of truth and philosophical purity that you should also be pursuing in your life? and that you can then deploy numbers to help it. I mean, how do we best understand your prescription for letting numbers do more good than harm? I think the starting point is you need to want to understand the world. You need to understand what's true and what isn't true. And if that's where you're coming from,

I can help you and the numbers will help you. If instead you're trying to win an argument, convince yourself that your side are right, that your team of the good guys and the other team of the bad guys, anything like that, I'm not sure I can help you unless you're willing to change, and I'm not sure the numbers will help you either, because those numbers, you can use them in an argument,

you can twist them, you can twist them without even knowing you're twisting them to convince yourself of what you want to be true. So I think it starts with that open-minded desire, to understand the world. Once you've got that, everything else, I think, falls into place. It's actually not as complicated as people think. I can give you a really simple example. The health secretary here in the UK, a guy called Matt Hancock, possibly to distract from this catastrophic pandemic, over the summer he made a statement, he said, oh, if everyone in the country

lost who was overweight, if they all lost five pounds, then the UK's health system would save $100 million over five years, which is about 100 million pounds over five years, about $150 million. And people emailed me and said, how does he know that? Is that true? What's he, you know, why is he fat shaming? Was he just all this? I just said, look, you just, what are the questions we need to ask?

The questions are actually really simple. Is 100 million pounds, about $150 million. Is that a lot? It's not a lot over five years, over 67 million people. In fact, it's about 30 pence each per year or 50 cents. So you don't need a calculator. You might need Google to tell you the population of the UK, but I think if you live in the UK,

you probably should know the population of your own country. You don't need any maths that my nine-year-old son, it doesn't know. You just need to stop and think for a second, and you can figure out what this guy actually said, which is that actually the sums of money involved are trivial. And that's just a really simple example of it's not complicated maths. It's just that process of taking a deep breath and saying,

what does that number actually mean? And how can I put it into some context? Having that habit, right. Like an example from here is surrounding coronavirus vaccines. there was this sort of innumerancy going around for a while where people was mixing up different things. Oh, this is 95% effective. The coronavirus has a 99. whatever percent survival rate.

And somehow then without thinking much, jumping from like, oh, I'm better off getting the coronavirus and why bother getting the vaccine or something like this, right? It's something that it takes like a minute of pulling that apart to be like, oh, that's not what none of that fits together. That conclusion does not follow from these axioms. You're missing a couple propositions in there. But that was another example that seems where it's, you don't need a lot of math, but you have to just wait,

what exactly does this mean? What's effective? What a survival rate? I mean, these aren't the same things. What's the, etc.? And it turns out that it's actually a really interesting question.

What does 95% effective mean? And trying to explain what that means. I've asked several experts on, my radio show to explain it, and they often get tangled up. It's not a straightforward thing. And it's basically, okay, we gave thousands of people the vaccine. We gave thousands of other people a meningitis vaccine instead, or maybe some salt water. We gave them a placebo. And then for every hundred people in the placebo arm who didn't get the vaccine, for every hundred people who got sick, only five people who received a vaccine got sick. So 20 times as many people in the placebo

arm as in the vaccine arm. So then you're starting to understand what this means. But you could go further. You can say, look, nobody who got the vaccine went to hospital. I mean, it depends exactly which vaccine. But that's basically, there's a very, very low hospitalization rate. And I think nobody has died who's received the vaccine in the trials. So, nobody's died of COVID. So you could say, actually, in a way, these vaccines are more efficacious. Or you could ask a different question. You could say, well, do they prevent against becoming infected in an asymptomatic way? And maybe you're still passing on the virus. Well, we don't know the answer to that question yet. So these are not complicated questions, but they're not straightforward to answer. And I'm really

encouraging people to ask, well, hang on, that thing, that 95% do I even know what that means? And if I don't know what that means, I should be, I should be looking for a media source that would tell me. I should be looking for a journalist who will explain this to me, rather than a journalist who just prints the number 95 in really big font and calls that data journalism. Well, I mean, I guess even more, another example that's even more basic, but more interesting even, is when you're talking about vaccinations at a large scale, you use. You start to run into the background rate of lots of bad things. And that's like an interesting point. I was reading about the background rate of like Bell's palsy, for example. It's high enough that once

you give a certain number of people a vaccine, there's going to be some who have this reaction within a day of it or near it or something like that, but it's completely unrelated. Or if you're vaccinating a lot of people in long-term care who are near the end of their life, you have a pretty high background rate of people dying. And so you just assume once you get to a million or two million, there's interesting numbers here, like, well, there's going to be X number of people who are going to die the same day they got the vaccine, completely unrelated. It's another interesting.

But again, as you're saying, you begin to numbers are interesting once you begin back of the envelope sanity checking. Yeah. But we did the numbers on this for my BBC radio show. and we figured out that of the most vulnerable groups who are top priority in the UK to be vaccinated, so this is people over the age of 80. They're right at the front of the queue to be vaccinated.

As I speak to you, most of them have been vaccinated. We figured out a thousand of these people die every day. Because it's the entire population of a big country all over the age of 80. Of course, a lot of them die every day. A thousand die every day. And now they've all been vaccinated. And to be honest, I'm impressed that I haven't seen more stupid, unfounded scare stories about vaccines based on that.

But there must be people who've been vaccinated and died the next day, just purely as a matter of statistics. There's a lot of US outlets now saying, hold my beer. We'll get there here. I'm sure we'll generate those stories. But I am impressed the UK didn't it? Because, yeah, a lot of people die. So what is your... Having covered, I don't talk a lot of pandemic on my show because I figure people, you know, are not, not everything in their life should be talking.

They need something worse. We're not talking about it. And I'm no expert. So it's best it's not me. But you are an expert in the sense that you've been doing radio for the last 10 months that gets at this. So having talked to all the experts and looking at all the numbers, what is the Tim Harford take on not even what we went wrong? Give us the silver lining. Give us the, not the silver lining, the optimism.

We're in a hard time. Sure. But what's going to happen? Well, here's the hostage to fortune. But I think that in rich countries that have plenty of vaccine, it's going to get, it's going to seem like nothing is happening, and then it's going to get a lot better very quickly. Okay.

Let me give you the rough guide to the mathematics of that. So I know the situation better in the UK, but the broad story is going to be very, similar in the US. So in the UK, two-thirds of all the people who died were either residents of care homes or over 80. Most of them, of course, were both. Almost all of those people have been vaccinated already now. Just the first shot. Just the first shot. It's a good, that's a good point because it's coming. The drop-off is coming once you get that second dose. Well, actually, the first dose gives quite a lot of protection as far as we can tell. The reason the second dose is

there is for a booster. And there's an interesting controversy as to how important it is to get the booster immediately or whether you can wait a bit. The data is real, which is changing. Yeah. It was an interesting part of the UK controversy. Was that initial Israel study that said, oh, the first dose is not as effective as we thought.

And then they come out a few days later. And actually, wait, we're seeing the first dose is really effective. Yeah. One of the mistakes people make in that is the first dose is, very effective for the first two weeks. It doesn't matter whether you got a booster shot or not. The booster shot, you have to wait at least three weeks before the booster anyway. So if you look at the first dose the day after the first dose is given, it doesn't work. But there's nothing to do with the booster. If you wait two weeks, then the first dose seems to

work pretty well. Now, I'm not an immunologist and people disagree about the details of how important the timing of the second dose is, but everybody seems to agree the first dose doesn't a lot of good. And it does a lot of good after about two weeks. So, you know, we don't know how amazing it is. We don't know whether it's 100%, 95%, 80% effective at preventing hospitalisation, but there's some reason to believe it will prevent most hospitalizations. But it takes time. So you've got a two-week delay after vaccination, after your first dose. Then you've got maybe another two weeks before any infection would actually send you to hospital. Then maybe you, you're you've got another two weeks before, if you're going to die, it's going to take you two more

weeks to die. So there's this inertia in the system. A vaccination now, it will not show up in the death statistics until the end of February. No, middle of March. But the vaccination is going to start working. And if you target the vaccination on those very vulnerable groups, it makes a huge difference. So we're sitting here in the UK, as I say, they've all the vulnerable groups pretty much have been vaccinated by the end of January.

We're going to see nothing for another couple of weeks, and then it's going to start coming through. And then in March, it should be quite dramatic, particularly the death rate, but hopefully the hospitalisations as well. And then everything else just gets easier and easier. So the longer you extend the lockdown, you're suddenly, you've been pushing uphill, pushing uphill, that it's constantly been threatening to kind of roll backwards and crush you as you,

and suddenly you're over the hill and it's not Sisyphus anymore, right? Suddenly it's just rolling down, you're rolling down the other side and away from you, and it's getting easier and easier and easier to push because the vaccine's helping all along. That is what I think we can expect in countries that have got plenty of vaccine. Of course, there's a lot of the world that doesn't have plenty of vaccine, and they're going to have to wait a long time. Yeah. Well, that is, okay, but there's some optimism there.

What would you recommend for someone, let's say like a standard listener in my show, let's say you're, you've got kids, you're a knowledge worker, your, you know, whatever, your kids are remote learning, your work is remote, you're stressed out. Should we, to what degree, like whenever I dive into like data on coronavirus, I go down rabbit holes and I get stressed out and confused. And I'm a pretty smart guy. To what degree should someone like me or one of my listeners, should we, should we be just, I'm getting to your slow data consumption idea from your book here. I'm trying to lead up to it. But to what degree should we be pulling away? What is the responsible news or information consumption right now?

Because at a high level, it seems to give a lot of heartburn. And there's always something. And some of them go away. And now we have to think about variants. And now we have to think about spike protein mutations and how this affects high, tighter, immune responses. And as you can tell, I read about these things and I have the superpower

if I never forget anything I read. Should I just not be reading this? Like, it's not going to change my behavior. I kind of know what to do. I don't go to, I don't have an office to go to. It's not hard like the mitigation you're supposed to do. So am I making it better or worse? What should we do?

What's the responsible civic thing to do here in terms of exposing ourselves to this information? I think news consumption, it does you more good and gives you more insight and is less stressful if you slow it down. I know I feel like I'm betraying the tribe here. I write for a daily newspaper, although in my defence I write for the weekly magazine in a daily newspaper. So I think a lot of the news consumption you need to be informed, to take responsible choices in everyday life, at the ballot box. you're going to get that from good weekly news stories.

I recommend the FT weekend supplement, of course, on Saturdays, but The Economist, the New Yorker, we can go monthly, go to sources like the Atlantic, the new scientist, nature, whatever it is that interests you, you can't read them all, but you're going to learn a lot more on a weekly basis. It's really interesting to reflect, if you look at, say, the economist, on writing about financial markets versus, say, Bloomberg TV on financial markets. They're both good, serious sources, well-funded, really focused on what's going on.

But for most people, you don't need to know what's happening in financial markets on a rolling basis. For a few professionals, it's extremely valuable, but for most people, it's not helpful. The economist is going to give you a much better perspective. They'll sit back, they'll think about it, they'll put the data into perspective, A lot of the noise you don't need to get. And 10 times less information, or more formally, I should say, one-tenth the information with proper context is vastly more valuable. Just a simple example, every day on the evening news, we have a press conference here in the UK

where the death toll is reported. This is how many people died today. Except it's not actually how many people died today because there are big reporting delays on the number of deaths. So people are fixating on this terrible number, which is, A, stressful, B, noisy, it bounces around all the time, doesn't tell you about the trend, and C, it's not even the number that people think it is. If you instead check every week, then you really get a sense of what's happening to the curve

and whether we're, and it looks like in the UK, cases are coming down fast now, hospitalisations slowly coming down, deaths, it'll be a delay before deaths come down. but we've got through the second wave, I think, if we're careful. But you don't need to do the daily news to see that. So slow it down, get the context. If the journalist isn't answering those questions about context and perspective, find a different journalist. Yeah.

So weekly scale, I like this. We listen to more or less once a week is what you're saying. It's podcast. You can listen to it in the U.S., no problem. And that will go. I like that. Yeah, slower consumption. What do you think in a counterfactual where we did not have public, I go back and forth on this, but these counters you're talking about, like what's going on today?

It's not even, by the way, daily CNN now does deaths so far today, which is like, you literally like they have a number moving, like an odometer while you're watching TV. I know those numbers are very important for public health officials, very important for politicians to understand what's going. on, you need to know where the virus is and what the trends are. But I don't know. But what about a counterfactual world where we weren't exposed to them for some? I don't know why that information would be hidden, but it feels like people might be better off almost if it was. All right, here's the state of this week.

Our hospitals seem full. The virus is at a heavy spread level now still. You know, I don't know if that would just be better than looking at these graphs and is it coming down? Is it, you know, looking for the daily, is this a reporting lag? were we going down the hill and looking at those numbers? Is that like too many numbers? I'm just comparing this to like in the Spanish flu,

1980 flu, they didn't have these numbers. Of course, probably a lot more people died because of that. But it must have been a different experience. It must have been like, oh, things are fine.

Oh, things seem terrible. There's people outside of the hospitals on stretchers in the streets. Oh, that's not happening anymore. Okay, I guess things are fine. And it was,

I don't know if that's an ignorance is bliss type thing, or if it's an example. of maybe too much numbers is overwhelming somehow to our day-to-day ability to function. Well, I read a great book a couple of years ago called Digital Minimalism. And I don't know if you've heard of it, Cal, but it's really good. You should check it out. I think the author should give it an OB-E is what is that. I think so, too.

One of the really important lessons of that book is to be mindful and deliberate in the choices you make about the tools that you use. And of course, the particular focus was digital tools, but that's a principle for life. And the principle works with data as well. So, okay, I should write a book called data minimalism or mindful data or something. I don't know. What is it that we want these numbers for? If you're a public health official, you need the data as quickly as possible, and it needs to be really detailed. You need where it happened, what the circumstances were, an inside transmission event or an outside transmission event. Here in the UK, we have great data on genetic sequencing.

So we can track mutations of the virus. It's really useful. As a consumer of news, why do I need these numbers? I would say I need these numbers, maybe every week, to understand where we are. Are things getting worse? Are they getting better? Is there a chance the schools will reopen soon or not? Should I be extra careful because there's a lot of virus around or not?

These things don't change that fast. Weekly is fine. Monthly, to be honest, is probably fine for some of this stuff. Yeah. So it's all about what you want to use the data for. What skills from a math or numeracy perspective, what should we all have? If people have time, they can do some online classes. My listeners like self-learning, they're autodidacts.

what should we all learn in a perfect world? So as far as consuming data and making sense of data is concerned, I think it's astonishing how few real quantitative skills are needed. The questions are actually often about things like, what is this number actually measuring when we had that conversation about vaccine efficacy? What do you mean by efficacy? It's not a question of what you mean by 95%. It's a question of what you mean by efficacy.

What does it mean for a vaccine to be efficacious? What is it actually preventing death, hospitalization, illness, infection? So so many of the mistakes that people make are mistakes of not getting the context, not comparing one number to another number, not asking about definitions. And so the skills that I think people would do well to hone are actually not skills you're going to learn in the statistics. course. They are just skills of being calm, noticing your emotional reaction, which may be coloring the way you interpret data, slowing down, asking questions about context, about comparisons, about definitions. So I'm not aware of a course that teaches those. It's, that's, yeah, I mean,

is there, is there, well, yeah, step one read a data detective. Um, Is there an equivalent in the numerical world to the advice I often, you know, give my, my listeners in just the world of ideas in general, cultural ideas about any sort of topic. I often tell them, take a page out of Socrates. You got to take the idea that appeals or you have some intimation that's correct, but or what have you, you want to understand it better. If you really want to understand it better, take an opposing view and clash them together. Read the best possible other view on it. the best possible critique, read the best possible alternative, let them crash. And in that dialectical collision, like real roots of understanding, if you've done that, then you really know

something. Whereas if you just have the idea you like, then you just are, you have sort of an intellectual groupieism. It's not knowledge, it's information. Is there an equivalent when, with numbers? So that can be helpful, although it can sometimes confuse, because when it gets super technical, then you could have, we see this with climate change. So you see, see serious scientists and you see basically chances and trolls. And they're all using loads of squiggles, loads of graphs, and it's really hard to know who to trust. So unless you're willing to do a lot of technical work, that doesn't necessarily work. But I do think it is always worth getting a second opinion, asking yourself whether the person you're reading is giving you the context

you need is explaining these terms. Or is, are they trying to persuade you of something? Are they trying to win some argument or are they just giving you useful comparisons and useful information? I think it's not hard to notice whether that's happening or not. Another useful discipline is to just try to explain something to someone else. You feel you can actually explain it. You've probably gone some way to understanding it. If the first question that this person you're explaining it to asks you, you realize, oh, actually, I don't understand. I don't understand. I don't didn't, then that's exposed a weakness in your knowledge that you can go back and fix. And I write towards the end of the data detective.

It's quite a bracing experience trying to explain even simple everyday stuff like how does a flush laboratory work, let alone how does a MRNA vaccine work. The experience of trying to do that can be really informative because it tells you yourself about what you do and don't know. It's very easy to tell yourself this kind of comforting lie that you're really on top of the story. And then the moment you actually try and explain it,

you realize you're not. That's interesting. This is an interesting distinction because I'm thinking about the context where I normally give that Socratic advice is usually the issues will be more either like political or philosophical of nature. In which case,

it's not too hard to find here as like a well-respected thinker on the other side of this. You know, because in those worlds, there's a sort of public intellectual class and they fall on different parts of the philosophical and partisan perspective. So it's not hard to be like, oh, I here's a common belief of, let's say, like, the American progressive left. It's not hard to find here's a well-known public intellectual on the right who has a different view. And then you can clash them. But what you're saying, which I, which I 100% agree with is that when you're talking about technical stuff, that's no longer so clear.

Right. It's not like, oh, well, you know, here's this like professional intellectual class of philosophers and I can just kind of choose for my people. When it's technical stuff, it's, I don't know, I saw a chart on Twitter. And like, this is something I noticed during the pandemic when I'm searching for information. You'll come across like these charts and I'll be interesting because they'll have a little watermark. Like, well, who, okay, so who built this chart? And it's just, it's the most random things. It's like a guy who runs a financial consultancy in Arizona.

or a political operative or, you know, so there's a context collapse, I guess, to borrow that Dana Boyd turn. There's a, there's a context collapse with numbers sometimes. Where it's like, well, because I guess their purity, their abstraction, just they just seen numbers put out technically, they bring with them their own authority. It's very different than if I'm looking for a philosophical or political argument that pushes back on something I believe, I would never just look on Twitter and just find some random person. tweeting about it. I'm like, oh, of course, there's no authority

in that. But if that random person puts out a graph that's superimposing, I don't know, whatever, Swedish ICU cases versus blah, blah, blah.

You're like, well, that's a graph. Looks pretty good to me. That's an interesting distinction. The world of technical, in the world of technical information, you can't necessarily,

because it's hard to identify the sources. Yes. You are more on your own. Right. Interesting. In a way that I will not tell someone in a philosophical context, like,

look, you just need to start, like, just build up a, philosophy of your own critical theories from scratch or something and see if it makes sense. It's like a different type of beast. So that's a very interesting distinction. Yeah, I give you a simple example. So there was this big movement in the UK against lockdowns, which I think philosophically is completely defensible. You can say, yeah, I know lives are at stake,

but freedom's really important. So we're opposed to lockdowns. Okay, fine. I don't, I don't fully agree, but I really respect where that argument is coming from. But then a lot of the lockdown skeptics, which is what they called themselves, would then start saying, oh, well, actually the infection fatality rate of this thing is really low. It's like flu. And you'd look at the data and you're like, hang on a minute,

but you've taken the worst flu pandemic for the last 120 years. And you've compared it to the infection fatality rate in India, which has a very low, is a very young demographic, and we know that this virus tends to kill the old, not the young. And so you can't make that comparison. And then when you push back and you say, well, look, 100,000 people have died in the UK. 400,000 people have died in the US. How could it really be so safe?

And then they'll say, well, but the WHO, they exaggerated the fatality rate. They said the infection fatality rate was 3.4% back in March. And they were completely wrong about that. And you look at the article and you say, oh, yeah, it does look at the WHO said the infection fatality rate was 3.4. But it wasn't. That's actually a misunderstanding of what a fatality rate is and how a fatality rate is calculated. But then you're starting to go really deep in the technical weeds. And the trouble is if you're dealing with someone who's acting in bad faith, they can confuse you and confuse you.

It's amazing to watch some of the really good fact checkers dealing with streams and misinformation. Just the sheer effort involved to correct point by point by point. I think it's often better to say, okay, I'm going to find some sources I trust who don't seem to be lying, who don't seem to be contradicting the mainstream of public opinion, who aren't making really weird claims that don't seem to match up with common sense. So, I mean, I'm all in favor of Socrates, but it gets hard. When it's really technically, it gets hard. Yeah, that's interesting.

Well, the one I saw, like you just mentioned, was let's look at the IFR for a bad flu year. And now let's look at the IFR trunched out for young people. And say, look, for young people, it's better than a bad flu year. But it's like, well, wait a second. you're comparing the IFR for young people to the IFR for everybody. And why would you do that? Of course, most of the... Only afforded to misleaders, right?

Yeah. So if you want to do a comparison, I guess you could compare IFR for young people to IFR for flu, and that's an interesting question. There's not great date on it. But yeah, that's another one I noticed. It's a subtle slip. But you're like, yeah, but most of that IFR for flu was also among older people. Older people in general, if you're going to, are going to be the preponderance of deaths

than anything that is affecting the immune system. So what you're saying is basically you have to think a lot more about who the person is delivering the information. And maybe some of this is specific to, I was going to say specific to coronavirus, but no, you're right. Climate change has a similar issue because we're talking about philosophy or politics. It's not so much that I'm trying to understand. There's like a truth and people have competing claims that sort of you understand what

laying someone is in. Like, I'm a member of this party, or I am a part of this intellectual school. And I'm trying to do my best to argue for that intellectual school. And then you can say, okay, what intellectual school has a different take? And we can compare them. Whereas with coronavirus or something like climate change, it's just, there hasn't been time for these schools to develop or anything. It's just everyone is making truth claims on this is just the, what's happening, you know? And then it matters. Yeah. So you're saying we have to be like, we have to get in the, we have to, what's the right role for it? We have to understand people and their intentions, which, yes, that's hard.

It is hard. And, of course, that, that there's a classic logical fallacy as well. You know, you're criticizing the person rather than the argument ad hominem. I mean, that, you're not supposed to do that. But actually, it probably is not a bad idea to go, oh, okay, so this is Anthony Fauci. He's been serving United States of America all his life, studying viruses and infectious diseases all his life.

My neighbor. He lives, not my actual neighbor, but we live near each other in the city, so there you go. So this is what he says, and this is what some random guy on Twitter says. Now, it is possible that Fauci is wrong. It is possible that Fauci is lying

to us. But I think Occam's Razor suggests that probably the considered opinion of one of the leading disease scholars in the country, backed up by most other epidemiologists, that's a good place to start, not some random guy on Twitter. It's always conceivable that the random guy on Twitter is right and that Fauci is lying or that he's making it on his mistake. But I think you have to start from, on a Bayesian perspective, you know, your prior should be that actually the mainstream experts are probably right on most of these issues.

Mainstream, basically. It's a good heuristic. Mainstream experts, publications that have good editors and hire good people. And then there's some skepticism to remain, but that's a good heuristic. It's the Financial Times, New York Times. It seems to me like the quote-unquote biases you might see with something like the New York Times is not going to be, let's trick people into believing the wrong thing, right? Like, you're not going to have that issue or like, or we just get things really wrong.

You might see, they tend to do more like nudging towards like we want people to, maybe we're trying to nudge towards a particular whatever. So we might the tone in which we cover something or maybe what we emphasize or not. But that's a lot, that's a lot less of a problem than this is the wrong conclusion from the numbers, right? Or this is, is not going to lie to you. They may accidentally tell you something that's not true. They may focus your attention on things that you could focus attention on other things,

maybe emphasizing particular kinds of stories. They may emphasize stories about how Donald Trump is a bad president. They may emphasize stories about social justice, for example. They may emphasize stories about the dangers of COVID. They'll make editorial choices. And I don't write for the final. I write for a rival newspaper. Sorry, I do write for the financial times.

I don't write for the New York Times, but the New York Times is not going to lie to you out and how that's... Yeah, you won't be outright misinformed. You're not going to think the IFR is less than the flu. Yeah, absolutely. I saw a wonderful thing on Twitter, and I know you were right to distrust Twitter, but every now and then you do get a little pearl. a German scientific journalist called Kai Kupfschmidt,

who's been tracking the mutant variants. He's really good on that story. And he just wrote, on misinformation, the most important point is not to teach people to distrust what they read and to critically appraise sources of information. The most important point is to distrust, is to teach people to distrust what they think and to critically appraise their own biases

when consuming information. I think that's a really insightful... I mean, that's... Whole chapters of the data detective in one tweet. What is more likely that a serious mainstream scientist or journalist is going to lie to you or that you're going to fool yourself? The latter is actually more likely.

We're very, very good at fooling ourselves. in trying to believe things that we want to believe. Yeah. Well, and in the American context, I think something that's often overlooked is taking the public health disease response perspective to misinformation, which is there's a,

there's this Harvard professor, she writes for the Atlantic sometimes, and she worked a lot on HIV mitigation. I think her name's Julia Marcus. And she talks a lot about... She's really smart. She's interesting. Yeah, you work.

Okay, right. So she talks a lot about what's the right way to actually do disease intervention in populations, and she always comes back to you. You need to understand what, like, what's the underlying need that people have and how is that, you know, how is that need maybe driving people to do behaviors that are maybe epidemiologically not optimal. But I think that could be writ large. Like in the American context, I'm a very empathetic guy. I know a lot of people from lots of different backgrounds and lots of different, you know, political aspects, you know, often underneath a lot of sort of misinformation consumption, like, well, what's the underlying?

need that's driving them there. And there's like, well, there's this underlying host, just hostility or feeling of, of rejection or condescension. Like, there's these underlying cultural things. Like, you know, if, if they just, if you were just reasonable with this person, they didn't, there's a lot in the America context where it's people are just working backwards from like, I've just pissed at this group. And I'm just tired of these people.

I'm tired of whatever. I'm tired of these elites or I'm tired of. to these people in the country or whatever it is. And then once it is you have a group like I just don't like, I just feel whatever, I'm mad towards this group, then yeah, the information will just follow that emotion. Like, well, good. Then I'll just, I don't really care about this information. I know it's really probably really wrong, but whatever, it helps my team and hurts the other

team. So sort of just being less tribal. There's this tribal element to misinformation propagation where it's serving a deeper purpose, which is I want my team to win. And so it's like the problem. is, well, why are these teams so divided? And why do these teams hate? And so when we just look at the surface of like, well, if we could just, you know, whatever, teach those hicks not the this or teach those elites not to this, you never get to the underlying issue, which is the need to be served

is I'm really mad at that other team and I want my team to gain advantage. And I don't want to give ground. And like, once that's the basis, yeah, great. I'll follow this guy. I kind of know he's probably nonsense, but whatever. He's helping my team hurting the other team, you know, Twitter, The one thing I'd slightly tweak, I completely agree, but you said be less tribal, and that's really hard. And here's an easier thing that is almost as good, which is when you're considering a claim, reading a newspaper headline, scrolling through social media, although, of course, you shouldn't be scrolling through social media.

It's probably not a good use of your time. But you're consuming claims. You're getting a social. assertions about the world, you should just stop and go, how does this make me feel? Is it making me feel vindicated? Yeah, I always knew that that guy was a crook. Is it making me feel angry? Is it making me feel triumphant, joyful? Am I laughing? Just noticing that emotional response is so useful. It's just a habit I try to cultivate. It takes three seconds. You don't even need to count to 10, count to three, notice your emotion, and then you're in a position

to start thinking a little more calmly and clearly, and you can still say, okay, I'm feeling angry, this is an outrage, this fact that I've just learned, this is a tragedy, the number of people who are dying, it's okay to feel the emotions, but don't feel the emotions and let them constantly be washing over your cognition without realizing it. Well, I like that advice. And so I'll try to summarize this. We're short on time here, but, and you tell me if I'm getting this summary right. But when it comes to data-rich information consumption in a time of a lot of that information,

but a lot of frotness and emotions surrounding it, go slower, have less but higher quality. So sort of read less, read better. So less things, but high-quality things where, again, as we said, there might be some biases here, there, but it's not going to miss inform. So you're, so no social media probably, right? Get this from some magazines, newspapers, things you, things you trust, a podcast that you really trust. You know the host has been doing the show for 15 years for Radio 4.

You trust them. So slower, less. And, and then consume it mindfully. When it does come time, okay, I need to know what's going on in the world. I'm doing my weekly check in. Notice the emotions. You're saying separate a little bit from them. make sure that you maybe have some skepticism of like let me just make sure where these numbers are

coming from and what what you know who is this person are there any other like agendas here update your priors build in that model of your world a little bit better and then you know go for a walk around uh no field college or whatever or have some coffee outside with a friend to move on and do other things am i is this so it's like read less read better both the of what you read and in the quality of the skills you bring to it, and then let the rest of your life not be that. I think it's fantastic advice. The only thing I'd add is to try and let the spirit of curiosity infuse that throughout. So begin with curiosity. I want to understand the world. And as you're going through asking yourself, is this actually answering questions I

have about the world? Is this journalist providing me or this media source providing me with the information I need to answer further, deeper questions that I might have, do I know where to go? Am I getting the context I need? If your curiosity is being simultaneously satisfied and then you're being made curious for more, that's a really good sign. Right. Okay. So if it's, here's why you should be mad at these people or here's why you should just be really afraid. You're like, there's only so much of that I need, I guess. That's not, that's not furthering my curiosity. It's not. I'm not learning more. I'm not learning something useful or new. So I like that. So bring a critical eye to what do I want to get? What do I want to get out of consuming data? And is it serving

something I wanted to serve? Yeah, that does sound very minimalist. We have some conciliants here. I'm got to hear it. All right. Well, Tim, you've been generous with your time and I really appreciate it. I do look forward to when we can we can do this again very inefficiently in front of a small crowd. Except for here's my hack. We will do this in a, we'll do this in a theater at some point. and we will record it for our, you know, record it for a podcast at the same time and thus gain the advantages

of the intimacy of a crowd plus the efficiency of digital delivery. I look forward to when that is possible, but until then, this has been really useful, both to hear about your thoughts on data and how to consume it in the data detective, which sounds like a great book,

but your story was also interesting too. It's just an example of one particular trajectory through the crafting of a deep life that's focused on a small number of things that you do well and opens up lots of interesting opportunities. So I think just your life story is an interesting tale as well. I'm really glad to hear it. So thank you very much, Cal. It's been a pleasure. And if I may offer you a piece of advice, stay deep. All right, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Tim Harford. His book, which in the U.S. is called The Data Detective, and elsewhere is called How to Make the

World Add Up is available this week. I also recommend checking out his podcast Cautionary Tales. I'll be back on Thursday with the Habit Tune Up mini episode. And until then, as Tim just recommended, stay deep.