The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Parenting and Economics

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

Bryan Caplan is a professor of Economics at George Mason University and New York Times Bestselling author. Dov Davidoff is a comedian, author, and real estate  investor. His mutiple television appe...arances include Crashing, Maron and Shades of Blue. He is a regular at The Comedy Cellar. 

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to live from the table here from the world's famous comedy cellar. We're on Sirius XM Channel 99. Raw dog. That was... Dove has no headphones. Dan. Yeah, plug him in.
Starting point is 00:00:38 Dan's in... Well, who are you? My name is Noam Dorman. I'm the owner of the comedy cellar. To my left is Perry Lashon Brand, our producer. And to my right is the fantastic Mr. Dove Davidoff, fantastic comedian, entrepreneur, real estate investor, thinker, philosopher.
Starting point is 00:00:58 A lot of thoughts. Part-time economist. And Coxman extraordinaire. As of 10 to 20 years ago, I was. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're out of the business. I don't do a lot of gunfighting anymore. No, I'm back in the day at a couple of dust ups in the street. But nowadays, but you're single, right?
Starting point is 00:01:16 Yeah, I am saying I am saying I'm not saying I wouldn't put it in under the right circumstances. I'm saying I'm looking for something a little bit more three dimensional. Thank you. I'm trying to be Dan for a moment. Yeah, no, it's a sticker. You're serious. I'm not as heated up as I once
Starting point is 00:01:31 was. He's a dad. I'm a father. And and yeah. And also the time. So you're looking for a meaningful relationship that you carried away looking for somebody who doesn't want to stay out till three in the morning. You want to bang me in the afternoon. I'm like it also is good. So you have to actually I want you to say it out loud. I'm looking for somebody who doesn't want to stay out till three in the morning. You want to bang me in the afternoon? I'm like, it also is good. So you have to actually I want you to say it out loud.
Starting point is 00:01:48 I'm looking for a meaningful relationship. Like I'm here with a straight face and I'm cracking a smile. I would like to be able to communicate with somebody on a regular basis that makes me feel diminishes the existential angst and general loneliness that one walks around the city with. But also you're just not as hot, hot to trot as Ariel, you're married. Is that what marriage gives you? How did you put it? I was just thinking something that diminished the sense of kind of psychological, emotional isolation. Sometimes
Starting point is 00:02:17 it's a Chris Fox, a boredom and loneliness, right? I mean, that pretty much captures it. You want to be bored, be married. You want to be lonely, be single. Does your marriage diminish the existential loneliness of the human experience? Is that what that what it gives you on our good days? It does. Yeah. But not all days are good days. Not. Well, of course. Yeah. No, listen, I would imagine it's like what's like ratios, like like like investor ratios. If if you're right 60% of the time, you can make a lot of dough, provided you're sizing your bets properly. Right.
Starting point is 00:02:48 In marriage, you know, you're not going to, it's not an 80-20 ratio. It's not a Pareto distribution. If you got 55% up and 45% down, you're beating the game of life. In a marriage. I think that that would be the most optimal vehicle to move through
Starting point is 00:03:05 existence with for the average person, provided the marriage is decent. If it's not, that's a horror show. I agree. I had my 12th year wedding anniversary yesterday. Of course, I'm trying to follow in your footsteps. It's our 12th year is our best year ever. Face did not match communication audibly. I don't know if it was our best year, but it was definitely not our worst year ever. That's for sure. Well, that's great. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:29 I mean, in honor of your co-host, who is currently on a plane back from Tel Aviv, Mr. Dan Natterman, doesn't he have a joke about that? Oh, yeah. Well, Dan, if you went to a car lot, something like that, and nobody talks about marriage the same way
Starting point is 00:03:41 you talk about something else in marriage, the guy says, well, you know, it's not easy. You went to a car lot and they said, this is a nice car. Yeah, the guy says, well, you know, it's not easy. You went to a car lot and it's a nice car. Yeah, yeah. But it's, you know, it'll give you a lot of trouble. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. I don't like your iPhone. This iPhone is the greatest thing ever. Oh, my God. I like marriage.
Starting point is 00:03:57 Well, oh, yeah. Well, I think some relationships, some people have much easier relationships than others. Yeah, no doubt about it. Like some relationships are more much more fraught. Like I've had long relationships that we didn't butt heads quite as much as my husband and I butt heads. Well, your husband has a tough task. I do feel that way, too, about my wife. Like I think I'm like the easiest guy to be. I, I, I do feel that way too
Starting point is 00:04:25 about my wife. Like, I think I'm like the easiest guy to be married to. Yeah. Oh, if, if you let me finish,
Starting point is 00:04:33 if she would just let me be myself, like, but you're a nightmare when you're yourself. No. What is that? What do we have fights about?
Starting point is 00:04:40 Taking out the garbage, cleaning up after my, like stuff, stuff that we could just with, with with you could eliminate that. We can eliminate it with money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could pay for that. And I say, I say, let's just hire a housekeeper to come actually and let them do all that stuff that I don't want to do. Sure.
Starting point is 00:04:58 I know that that bothers her immensely because she feels like there's something entitled to spoil the way that I should do it myself. Right. But I'm like, you know, I'm only on Earth once. Why should I have to? I mean, I'm so lucky I don't lose sight of the fact how lucky I am. But as long as you're grateful, get it, pay for it. Why not? I was like, why do I have to do this stuff? Just let me just let me do what I want all the time. I envy you. I you know, I mean, I wish I could have outsourced some of the challenges that i had in my marriage which were mostly real deep relational challenges and then i couldn't you couldn't you know you couldn't pay for it it's just and and for some reason they want
Starting point is 00:05:36 that pound of flesh well that's a different story because that's not about the garbage you're not paying for paying for it that's about some other aspect of the either. She ordered a rattan furniture set. Yeah. I opened this thing up. It had like 75 screws. Well, yeah, you got to get somebody to put that together. And she wants me to put it together.
Starting point is 00:05:58 You have music to play. Now, I can do it. Why couldn't we just buy the assembled one, right? Pay the extra $50. No. She wants me to put together the Rattan set all. Have you considered that it's an act of passive aggression to
Starting point is 00:06:15 cause you some level of discomfort? Because I don't think she cares whether or not somebody puts. No, no, it's not that. That's my wife you're talking about. Watch your mouth. no, it's not that. That's my wife you're talking about. Watch your mouth. No, that's not... That's my wife you're talking about. I can't.
Starting point is 00:06:32 You've got some passive aggression. You can't. No, it's not that. It's not active passive aggression. I don't know. The point is, I can't satisfy a woman. You know,
Starting point is 00:06:43 I've been... I've been married. I'm married satisfy a woman. You know... I've been... I've been married. I'm married two years now. And I'm in couples therapy with my wife. And I love her very much, but I'm still trying to figure out how to talk to her, you know? Like, how to communicate. My wife comes from a small town in Canada, and she tends to be a little underexpressive,
Starting point is 00:07:04 a little passive-aggressive, and I tend to maybe say too much, you know? But if I'm wrong, correct me. If you're wrong, let me correct you. It's a better life that way, you know? I'm driving. I'm driving near a beach, and my wife points in the distance, and she said, look at that life house.
Starting point is 00:07:21 Life house with an F. Apparently, she's been under the impression her whole life that a lighthouse is at that life house. Life house with an F. Apparently she's been under the impression her whole life that a lighthouse is called a life house. And so I said, all I said is, that's a lighthouse. And she said, that's what I said. And I said, no, you know, that's not what you said. You said life house with an F, you know. And then you could feel a cold Canadian wind
Starting point is 00:07:43 blow through the car. And she goes, she goes, well, you know everything. And I was like, you know, I mean... Honey, I don't know every... I mean, I know this. You know, what am I, making... What's it, an ego thing?
Starting point is 00:07:59 I know the name of the object. I'm not trying to make a big deal out of it, you know? But then I realized, I realized, you know, since I've been in therapy and I'm not trying to make a big deal out of it, you know? But then I realized, you know, since I've been in therapy and I'm getting older, hopefully psychologically, you know And so I realized I don't have to argue about every instance And so I just took a deep breath and I said, okay, and I kept driving, you know? I was proud of myself.
Starting point is 00:08:22 And then we were pulling into the hotel at night, and I stayed with the breathing and I just put my hand on hers I kept driving, you know? I was proud of myself. And then we were pulling into the hotel at night, and I stayed with the breathing, and I just put my hand on hers, and I said, I just said, DaHoney, I mean, it's got a damn light on it, you know? Like, I don't want to... You know what I mean? I'm not trying to make a big deal out of it. I'm just saying, you know, I mean, I don't want to argue.
Starting point is 00:08:43 I'd rather get a divorce than call it a life house, but I don't want to saying, you know, I mean, I don't want to argue. I'd rather get a divorce than call it a life house. But I don't want to argue. You know, it was a slow news week, I know. But I didn't want to talk about Roe versus Wade being overturned. But I guess we're not going to get to that. So we have to. Well, we can't. Maybe we'll do it after Brian.
Starting point is 00:08:59 So let's bring. OK, Brian Kaplan is the professor of economics or I should say rather a professor of economics at George Mason University and a New York Times bestselling author. He is also the editor and chief writer for Bet On It, the blog hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas. He's had multiple publications, including the New York Times, Atlantic, the Economic Journal, and many others, appeared on ABC, BBC, Fox News. And my favorite part of your bio is, quote, an openly nerdy man who loves role-playing games
Starting point is 00:09:40 in graphic novels. I live in Oakton, Virginia with my wife and four kids. That's me. So, Mr. Calvin, before we before we get started, I just want to ask you about George Mason University, because I've become kind of friends with Tyler Cowen and you're at George Mason University. And I had never even really heard of George Mason University as I was coming up through college and stuff like that. And now I've realized that it's a center for some of the world's most high-powered intellectuals. So what is the George Mason University story? Honestly, a lot of the story is Tyler Cowen. Tyler Cowen was hired in the, I guess, 1992. And he's extremely active in intellectual recruiting and doing ideas and raising money and making friends. And he's a great assembler of all these resources to make great stuff happen.
Starting point is 00:10:32 I owe him my job. He helped me to get hired in 1997 and really almost everything good that you ever hear happening out of George Mason Econ has his fingerprints on it. But he's also, he is surprisingly self-effacing. He almost never tries to get credit, but he deserves it. Now this guy is, we know him a little bit, you know him. Yeah. What an amazing person. There should be a documentary about him. Really? Yeah, absolutely. He would hate that.
Starting point is 00:10:57 Marginal revolution is the name of his blog. That's a cool name. Have you, do you read it? I read it. No, no, we competed, but I'm going to now i'm here to learn um you would like him he was also new jersey chess champion at like 11 to 12 years old not not in in the age group but actually champion of the whole state wow wow he knows everything about food of everything yeah that's what i talked to him about he's a beatles super fan he sends me stuff about paul mccartney all the time we know it's just you know in that case there's no bottom to it i'm sure mr cowan's done a lot of thinking and he's got a superior mind mr kaplan could i i don't want to without veering off course here
Starting point is 00:11:35 mmt modern monetary theory as it relates to uh inflation and how much of this kind of narrative has been substantiated through that other than a conceptual system of belief and academia? What do we really know here? Yeah, MMT, modern monetary theory, I'll just say it's a crackpot story cooked up based upon wishful thinking and somehow catapulted into popularity. I have one very smart friend in finance who believes it. And I have multiple arguments with him about it. But other than that, I just think it's a joke. So, I mean, I don't know much about it, but does it essentially mean that at least the United States can print as much money as it wants and it doesn't matter, correct? That's a little exaggerated, but not that exaggerated, actually.
Starting point is 00:12:30 Well, what would the limits be? What limits would MMT recognize? That's the problem is they're very cagey. There's a lot of hyperbole, but also a lot of insinuation. And you combine it by saying, hmm, well, it kind of sounds like you're saying something crazy. But when I tell you're saying something crazy, then you say, oh, no, it's so unfair. I think it's pretty fair, actually, to attribute the crazy views to people. Do we need to consider internalizing some more Austrian view of economics if we're going to sustain our current models? I mean, how can we suffer another collapse without printing ourselves into an interest rate environment that's unsustainable?
Starting point is 00:13:15 I have a lot of friends who were into Austrian economics when I was young. I liked it too. But now what I think is there's a standard textbook economics, which is better than better, definitely better than M&T, which is crazy. But I don't see that the Austrian stuff really adds very much. Professor Kaplan, is Nixon to blame for de-pegging us from gold in 1971? Hmm. There's something to that, although I think that you were able to get some really high inflation before then, just because when the government wants to print a lot of money, they would just go and temporarily suspend the gold standard. The gold standard that existed at the time of Nixon was already really watered down. So I don't think that last step really mattered that much. Oh, yeah. If you had kept the really hard gold standard of earlier periods, then, yeah, there probably wouldn't have been.
Starting point is 00:14:06 After Bretton Woods in 1931. You're just showing off at this point. I'm not showing off. I'm fascinated. I have to know these answers. He knows a few catchphrases. So, listen, by the way, this question of what's the limit, it was interesting. So you said I'm exaggerating and asked what the limits were. And then you, in good faith, tried to find what the limits were and then you in good faith you know tried to find what the limits were i saw something similar to this it was a debate about the the second amendment um uh with uh uh volokh eugene volokh you know the and he was and this guy was kind of uh they were disagreeing about what the
Starting point is 00:14:36 second amendment means and finally volokh says well okay then what would be prohibited by the second amendment right and the guys uh uh he could he couldn't quite come up with an answer of anything that would actually be prohibited by the Second Amendment, which I thought was a nice way of exposing that. He'd only thought it through so much. Yeah. If you really thought of it, you should be able to answer that question or just say it's completely you're comparing that to MMT in general.
Starting point is 00:15:01 I just it struck me that when it was kind of it's kind of the same thing. It's a very effective question sometimes to say, okay, well then what's the limit of this? Right. Yeah. So again, my very good and smart friend in finance, he has told me multiple times that he thinks that we could eliminate all taxes, fund the government by printing money. It wouldn't cause inflation. And when I say that's just crazy. Yeah. It sounds crazy. And like, again, like I was, I have so much respect for him, but on this one point I'm quite puzzled. Yes. Now does he, is he, uh, at all chastened by the, uh, inflation? Yeah, actually he is. So he's a practical guy. He's a finance guy. So when things change, he actually changed his mind.
Starting point is 00:15:39 Unlike academics who usually don't. Okay. So let's get to child rearing. Now, you're talking to three parents here. And how many kids have you got? I have one stepchild who I raised from birth and I have three
Starting point is 00:15:57 from my loins. Yes, from his loins. And they're 10, 9, and 5. Dove has one son. I have a three and a half year old son. And Peril has, 9, and 5. Dove has one son. I have a three and a half year old son. And Peril has a nine year old. Yeah, almost nine year old. So you wrote a book about this a while ago, right?
Starting point is 00:16:13 What was the name of the book? The name of the book is Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. And I'd known about this book and I'd wanted to get you on years ago. And then I heard you again on Barry Weiss's podcast. Cool. And, uh, you were so nice. I, I I'm sure you were kind of like rolling your eyes at some of the stuff that was being said, but you kept it very respectful, but I wanted to give you a chance to really explain it because I'm really, really fascinated by this idea. I'll, I'll let you, let you explain it, but essentially that it doesn't really matter all that much what
Starting point is 00:16:50 you do with your kids. They're going to essentially be who they're going to be, correct? Yeah. Well, this is something that people have been arguing about for thousands of years, and we've really made almost no progress until about 60 years ago, because there's a reason this is a hard question. In a typical family, you are combining biological relatedness with upbringing. And so anyone can look and say, ah, it's the upbringing
Starting point is 00:17:11 that done it, or it's the genes that done it. But about 60 years ago, some researchers said, well, wait a second. What if we go and study atypical families? For example, what if we study kids that are adopted, where you share upbringing, but you don't share genes? Or alternately, what if we go and look at separated twins, where you share genes, but not upbringing? And they started going and trying to revisit all the standard debates about why do people turn out the way that they've been able to make a lot of progress. And yeah, the punchline is with some exceptions that within the range of what we actually look at, we see very little effect of upbringing on how people turn out and very large effects of genetics on how people turn out. Some of the very best studies are Korean war orphans
Starting point is 00:17:59 that got handed out randomly to American families in mostly the 60s, or I guess the 50s, I just would be doing a 50s and then later some in the 60s. And here you can go and look, you get us randomly assigned to a family, and then we can go and see, all right, well, what predicts how well you wind up doing in school, or what predicts how much money you make, or what predicts whether you're a smoker or a drinker. And there you can see very little effect of the traits of the family that raised you, despite so much popular view that upbringing is all important.
Starting point is 00:18:30 Like a biological reversion to the mean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually one of the reasons probably why people get this so wrong is that we also definitely do see short run effects of upbringing. For example, if you get adopted by very high IQ parents, you actually do test higher in IQ when you're young, but come back and redo the test when you're 18. And that's where we see no longer any effect of the IQ of the family that raised you. But on the other hand, the IQ of your biological parents, if we happen to know, which usually we don't, but once in a while we do iq of your biological parents does predict your iq when you're 18 well so let me ask you a question
Starting point is 00:19:10 just from my own personal experience so in high school i began to not do any work and i got in big trouble and because i was in such trouble, I did my work and then ended up doing well. And I put me on track to an Ivy League law school. And although I never practiced, I strayed terribly from the path since. But it's hard for me to believe that if my father hadn't laid down the law with me, that it wouldn't have had a tremendous effect on the trajectory of my life. Now, is that just an outlier? What is that? Yeah. So partly I think it is an outlier. Another part is the evidence is very consistent with a story where sometimes parenting totally accomplishes just what the parents want. And about half the time, the kids rebel and do the opposite of what the parents want. So that is actually totally within the realm of possibility
Starting point is 00:20:10 that sometimes when you tell a kid, hey, you better straighten up and fly right or else you'll be harshly punished. Sometimes the kid says, yes, sir. And other times the kid says, F you, I refuse to do that. And you actually get a worse result than if you had done nothing. So that's part of it. Another thing that's worth pointing out is that there's almost no research on really extreme results like getting into Harvard or becoming a Nobel Prize winner or anything like that. Usually we're looking at things like how many years of education do you get or what's your income? So when you're studying outcomes like that, where we're just not looking for the really extreme results, then you are, you know, that those are the ones where we really know that we
Starting point is 00:20:49 have trouble finding effects of parenting for something like becoming an Olympic athlete. I think you're almost certainly right. If you have parents who just say, I don't, I refuse to get up at five in the morning, take you ice skating. I think that means you never become an Olympic ice skater because to get to that level of superlative achievement, you need to be, you know, you need to hit on all cylinders. You need to have everything going for you. You need to have talent, supportive parents, great coaches, luck, everything. So I think that becoming a Harvard lawyer probably is not the same as being an Olympic athlete.
Starting point is 00:21:17 So then, and by the way, Tyler thinks this, so the tiger parenting, tiger momming actually might make, like the kid might still have gone to college, but it might get them into a better college. Yeah. And again, here's something that I also have a book on. People greatly overrate how important it is to get into a top college. It's actually a lot more important to do STEM. If you can either do fine arts at Harvard or do engineering at George Mason, what's better for your income. Yeah. Sure.
Starting point is 00:21:49 Engineering at George Mason is better for your income. There's just a lot of overrating of how important college is, particularly which college you go to. There's also probably overrating of how important college itself is, but definitely the prestige of the college is not nearly as important as most people think. So maybe you can ride your kid, get them into a top school or bribe your way in. That doesn't mean the kid's going to be a superstar because he got, went into Harvard. Most people go to Harvard, end up being kind of mediocre in the broad scheme of things. You never
Starting point is 00:22:19 hear about them again. Yeah. I mean, I, I had a, I had a personal experience where through Facebook, I reconnected with like six people I went to grammar school with. And it was pretty interesting that I basically could have told you about where these six people would have been just from spending third grade with them. You know, they really all basically wound up kind of there were no surprises, you know. So water, I guess, kind of there were no surprises, you know. So water, I guess, kind of finds its own level. And then you might not see that right out at 21, but by 40 or 45, it seems to even out. And professor, correct me if I'm wrong, but as it relates to this kind of biological determinism, this notion, everything I've read about happiness and all of the social psychology studies done is that there is a set point and you can manipulate that set point within a kind of range. But to breach that set point is pretty challenging. And so do you feel like that fits into the notion of this determinism? Yeah. And so what I like to say is parental irrelevantism rather than genetic determinism.
Starting point is 00:23:27 There's a lot of luck in the world. Right. So, I mean, like I would say, actually, there's a whole bunch of people who turned out way better or way worse than I was expecting. I was the dumbest of all my friends. I've got one friend who became fabulously rich, but, you know, like another friend who was really like really clearly way smarter than me, who nevertheless did not set the world on fire. So there's a lot, just a lot of luck in the world. Important to keep that in mind. Yeah, like the best sign that we have that actually there is more order in the world than there appears to be, is that if you look at the other, there's like, it will be this way. One of the hardest things in the world to predict accurately is income. So this is one where you can get the biggest statistical model that you can find or that you've designed. And you still say, wow, there's just so much that we don't know, but there is one thing that you can know that will
Starting point is 00:24:18 give you a good predictor of someone's income. And that's the income of their identical twin. So now of course, most people don't have an identical twin, so you can't use it to predict anything, but the rare people that do, once you know that, then especially if you average income over a few years, then you can get a good prediction, which is better than anything else in the world that we know of for predicting income.
Starting point is 00:24:39 So that basically says there's a lot of hidden orders of the world. And there's just a lot of stuff that we don't measure very well, but it's there. Now, this is also very radioactive uh uh uh information right because this can be used to um i mean if you're essentially saying that you turn out the way you're meant to turn out then let's's say in Israel where the Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than the Sephardic Jews. Are we saying that that's the way they're born? Well, what we should say is maybe. Maybe. It's a definite maybe for one thing. Now, the limits of what I'm saying, I've actually gone over studies of international adoption and what
Starting point is 00:25:24 happens there. Right now, important thing to remember, pretty much no one gets adopted from America to Guatemala. Never happens that way. But there are people who go from Guatemala to the United States, that kind of thing. Right. And we've actually a very good data of kids adopted from poor countries into Scandinavia. And furthermore, there they've got fantastic record keeping, and they've also got universal male military service with a whole bunch of tests they do once you are 18 years old. So we can say there actually is that a lot of the deficits that we see in people born in the third world are actually caused by living in the third world and not by genes. So you can make up at minimum 40% of the deficits
Starting point is 00:26:05 that you would usually see in say, Sub-Saharan Africa by getting adopted at birth and being raised in Sweden. Right now you say, wait, 40%. So, you know, that's what we know for sure. You can, you can get rid of the numbers probably actually higher. Don't want to bore people with the details, but it was a possible that some of the remaining gap really is genetic. Yeah, it's possible, right? Someone who just says, I know remaining gap really is genetic. Yeah. It's possible, right? Someone who just says, I know for sure that it's not possible. It's like, how would you know? It's crazy. I chose Israel because I,
Starting point is 00:26:34 I want to stay away from the uglier aspects of it, particularly because I don't think, and we should ask you, but I believe you're going to agree. It's clear that, that, that deprivation and trauma and these things will lower your IQ and things like that. Right. The thing is, is that it seems like you need really severe, really severe deprivation. So growing up in a third world orphanage, definitely that is severe enough. We've got good measures of what happens to your, not just your IQ, but also your biological traits, or say your physical traits. So we've got height, weight, skull circumference, all of those things we can see get depressed very
Starting point is 00:27:11 heavily if you're in a third world orphanage. Now, as to whether just growing up in a poor family in the United States is sufficient to cause that, the evidence that we have, I say, says no. Now, you may not know, so the evidence for adoption, that's where you can say, well, like, we don't really let extremely poor families adopt. That Korean war orphan study that I was mentioning actually did allow poor families to adopt. You only had to be 25% above the poverty line. And even there, it's very hard to see that there's differences in long-run outcomes between the kids that are adopted by the very poorest families and the very richest families that uh that were adopting kids uh now what we do you know now this doesn't mean that the worst family in america wouldn't mess you up just means that out of the kind of people
Starting point is 00:27:56 that could that would ever be in a study they're good enough but let me let me get away from iq because it's um you know it's it's so fraught. But there's plenty of other traits, right? So could you imagine, let's say you took 100 Asian people and 100 Mexican people and switched them at birth? I guess what I'm getting at is- Switched them inside the United States? No, switched countries. Switched countries, yeah. Do you think that the culture itself is somehow a reflection of the gene pool? That these 100 Asian kids raised as Mexicans would not quite be like 100 Mexicans and vice versa? Or do you think the culture would just transplant? I think it's very plausible they would be different.
Starting point is 00:28:41 We actually know that there's a bunch of Latin American countries with Asian populations, and the Asians do actually a lot better. Brazil is probably the best known case. There's a big Japanese population, Brazil. Yeah, they are the economic and financial leader of the country. I just mean just in terms of personality, in terms of like the cultures are so different and you just wonder, is part of the reason? So if you had a gene pool that was especially musical, you would imagine that music would become a more fundamental part of that culture. And if you have a culture that's more laid back or there's a million traits or drinks more, whatever it is, a culture that really likes to drink.
Starting point is 00:29:16 And we know drinking is a genetic disposition. Maybe the culture would have a bigger part of drinking in it. Yeah, so that's plausible. There's actually a couple of things you could mean. You could mean that the culture itself reflects genetic traits, or you could mean, or do you mean the other way around, that if someone was, say, born to a non-drinking stock, grew up in a neighborhood where everyone drank,
Starting point is 00:29:38 would they be more likely to drink? I mean, I think the answer is yes, but just the effect would be smaller than what most people think. One that was maybe most striking to me, there's actually research on the genetics of religiosity. How do your genes affect how religious you are? And what we can see there is if you're 10 years old, then your church attendance is just determined by your family. Whoever raises you, they take you to church. Unless you're Damien from the Omen, you're not going to be kicking through the windshield
Starting point is 00:30:05 and stopping them from taking your church. But when you see that you're 25 years old, then actually genes matter a lot more. And by 35, we see pretty much no effect of upbringing. So yeah, there actually seems to be a strong genetic component to religiosity, which is not surprising because it's really kind of like a personality trait.
Starting point is 00:30:23 And there's a lot of genetic effects on personality. I'll add one more thing to it, then I'll ask my question. So in the Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler had a post a few weeks ago, how the heritability of politics works. And a quote here, estimates from the Minnesota Twin Study. That's Nancy Siegel. We had her on our show one time. She was a great guest. Estimates from the Minnesota twin studies show that sociopolitical conservatism is extraordinarily heritable 74% for the most informed fifth of the public, much more so than population level results, 57%, but with much lower heritability, 29% for the public's bottom half. And then he writes, here's the article.
Starting point is 00:31:06 One possibility is that you are born with the inherited values, but you need to be educated to learn where those values ought to put you on the political spectrum. So in other words, like it, that by you have the, you have the innate values, but you have to be raised or become informed in some way for them to kick in. Yeah, that could be the story. I mean, I think actually a simpler story is that people aren't very interested in politics. What they say is kind of random and whatever mood they're in, or just to get out of the conversation and people who are into politics, on the other hand,
Starting point is 00:31:39 they've got settled views that they've actually reflected on. I mean, you know, it's just generally true that for abstract topics to a lot of people, this is just so freaking boring that they would just, they just will say almost anything to get out of the conversation. Whereas people who like this stuff, then they're on the edge of their seats talking about it.
Starting point is 00:31:56 So I think that's probably a lot more to do with it. I'll tell you what this made me think of. I often think that my father was so influential on me, right? And my father would give me advice. I say, boy, where would I be without that advice? But then I've noticed that I've given the same advice to other people. Smiling at a dinner table with a bunch of Gentiles.
Starting point is 00:32:17 I've given the same advice to other people and it didn't take it all. That's right. It didn't take it all. One ear and out the other. At all. So I'm saying, well saying well yeah he gave me the advice but i but i was predisposed to understand it internalize it and and yes i know 100% what you mean and and that would kind of line up with everything we're talking about yeah totally so
Starting point is 00:32:38 there's like a kid that is predisposed to like basketball and you show him the game and he gets into it another kid who just wants to go and do dungeons and and you show him the game and he gets into it. Another kid who just wants to go and do Dungeons and Dragons, you show him the game and he falls asleep and says, you know, can we stop now? Can we go home now? I mean, something else that's going on actually is that most parents actually are not that persistent in trying to change their kids. So like the results are also consistent with if you really wanted to change your kid, you'd have to go and do 10 times
Starting point is 00:33:05 as much as you're doing right now. Right. So think about this, right? Some people successfully learn foreign languages, but hardly anyone does. Right. What's the difference between people who actually successfully learn a foreign language and those who don't. Right. So some of it's genetics, but I don't think that's the main thing. The main thing is the people learn it. They just put in like 10 times the effort of the other people, or maybe a hundred times the effort. So yeah, like if you really kill yourself, you can do it, especially at any age, but what are the odds that a parent is going to say, all right, so from now on, we're going to spend 10 hours a day on Chinese until you learn it. It would work if you really would stick to your guns, but almost no parent on earth who isn't
Starting point is 00:33:41 in a Chinese speaking country is willing to go to that extreme to make it happen but i also i i've known people who are extremely gifted at picking up languages i mean there's always that right yeah yeah like but like there's like there is no such thing as someone who actually has a photographic memory no one can really just go and read a foreign language textbook and memorize everything there are there's a world series of memory no one is that good on earth tyler no no not even you know tyler is not that good yeah are you familiar with that i forget what book it was in but they studied these chess champions ability to memorize the board and they could memorize it insofar as you had arranged the pieces according to the rules of the game yeah but you know once they weren't chunked associated with the rules,
Starting point is 00:34:25 they could no longer remember the board. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of people appear to have really good memories, actually have tricks that allow them to remember things with a lot less work. Meaning like, like here's something you were just, just mentioning being among the Gentiles. If you really want your kid to be ultra Orthodox, then you've got to move to an ultra Orthodox neighborhood and never basically cut them off from their society.
Starting point is 00:34:45 Oh yeah. Or move to a kibbutz, right. Do something radical. And then you can actually get that result. The question is, do you really want to go to that? You want to go there? Let's result.
Starting point is 00:34:55 Yeah. Are some people predisposed though, to being bilingual or multilingual? Like, it seems like I grew up bilingual. And so when I moved to Thailand, for example, and bisexual, when I moved to Thailand, when I was 20, I was able. When you moved to Thailand, when you were 20, continue, I was able to really become conversational
Starting point is 00:35:21 in my day to day Thai in a way that I really think was because I, you know, my brain was sort of wired with, with the language. Is that a thing or? Yeah. So I think the likely story is that some people are genetically better at languages. Right. The idea that if you learn a second language, then you're going to be better at learning a third language that's been tested and seems to be wrong. Even within a language language, then you're going to be better at learning a third language. That's been tested and seems to be wrong. Even within a language family, like for centuries, people have this idea that if you study Latin, then you'll be great at learning other romance languages. And that doesn't seem to be true because essentially there are some things that are easier, like you'll learn the vocabulary more easily, but there's something called interference
Starting point is 00:36:01 where if you learn one language that's different from another language, you will keep applying the wrong rule. So you'll keep using Latin grammar in Spanish, which is incorrect, or use Italian grammar when one language compared to the other, especially at a superficial level. Yeah. So this is particularly for sort of like learning a second language. But then for learning a really distant language like Thai compared to English, that's one where there's probably, you know, there probably is no gain of learning the second language, but there are differences between how good people are at languages, of course. Okay, now, with all that you've learned about raising children, what advice do you give us? What things do you sweat? What things do you feel that you can have an impact on?
Starting point is 00:36:57 Are some of those things just things you just can't resist, but deep down, you know, it's futile, but you can't help yourself? What, because it's very hard to just let things go, right? Yeah, yeah well the title of my book is selfish reasons and more kids so the thing that i'm really confident i can change is their existence so by having another one there you are you get to live gift of life uh in terms of how many do you have again how many do you have only four that he knows about only four back in the day certainty. But in terms of other differences you can make, so like the big differences that I am confident I've been able to make is changing the child's
Starting point is 00:37:40 happiness on the day that I want to do it. Right. So short run happiness. So you're right about happiness set point. Some people are just predisposed to be really happy. Others are predisposed to be miserable. And I know people who are incredibly successful and yet unhappy and other people where people consider them losers. And yet why are they losers? They have a great life. What are you talking about? Right. But there are a lot of ways that you can go and put a smile on a person's face that day. Right. That doesn't mean that you're going to make them happy 30 years from now.
Starting point is 00:38:09 One of the biggest differences I made in my kids' lives is my first two kids are identical twins who were kind of inspired the book. And they were getting more and more miserable in regular school. And then finally, when they finished sixth grade, I successfully lobbied my wife to let me homeschool them. And they were so much happier being homeschooled than being in regular school. Actually, they were sent back to high school for three weeks in ninth grade when high school began. And they were so despondent during those three weeks. And when they finally got to come back, they were dancing on air. they were so happy. Right. And I will say, you know, of course they were not super happy every single day, but compared to the misery they would have had being in regular school, like I know I did a lot for them there. Why were they miserable in regular school? Oh man. Where do, where do you even start? I mean, like you're comedians, right? You know,
Starting point is 00:38:58 how terrible, how much school sucks. Yeah. Right. I mean, just being treated like a child when you don't feel like a child anymore, that's terrible. And just the total oppression. And just the insipid stuff that you have to do, just the way they treat you like a baby. Like, no, let's go do posters. and eight, I went and prepped them for the advanced placement tests in American and European history. And they got top scores on that. And then they go to high school and they say, OK, now we're going to do advanced placement world history. And then I showed up and saw the teacher and like, hey, my kids could teach this class better than you could. Like, what are you talking about? You know, like you're showing them videos of Elvis. That's a joke. That's not what you need to know. This is, this is about mastering material, writing essays. That's what you need to do to do well in this class. Do you grade your kids essays when you're homeschooling them? Oh yeah. I mean, that, that was actually the most work that I put into it was, was going over the
Starting point is 00:39:58 essays and yeah, that's something else I was able to go and, you know, and just give them something that I don't think they would have gotten. That's where I just put in so much more time into their writing than you could ever get in a regular school. I don't care how fancy the private school is. The teacher can't go and spend two hours each week with every student going over their essays, but I could. So yeah, I mean, I think I got the writing up to a really high level by, you know, so I am a professional writer and I just told them what, showed them what I knew. And I gave them, I took out the red pen and, you know, was kind, but merciless, kind, but fair, kind, but fair, kind of tough, but fair, tough, but yeah. It's a tough man to make a tender chicken with what Frank produce. Um, I, uh, I have a little,
Starting point is 00:40:41 uh, thing with my son. One of my. My son is not good at sports. Yeah, I can relate to that. He was born pretty, either he's on a slower development, he was preemie, so either he's slower developmentally and not good in some combination of the two. But anyway, sports are very important socially in school.
Starting point is 00:41:08 So one of the things I've done is I try to push him to play basketball, me to do sports with me because I want to get him at least to be as good as he can be so that he won't suffer the social consequences of being the kid that's not very good. But this is caused unpleasantness for me at home with him. And it's caused stress for him. And I know I'm causing stress for him. And that's, that's very painful for me to know that, as you said, you know, one of the things we can control is their happiness. And here I am, in some way making him unhappy. And yet, I'm calculating that the by making him unhappy, I'm also going to spare him some unhappiness on the other end that may even be a worse unhappiness because I'm able to also
Starting point is 00:41:55 show him a lot of love as soon as the unpleasantness ends and maybe he's okay at the end of that. So that's kind of a bind. Do you have any comments on that? Yeah. I mean, maybe it'll work. I would definitely lower my probability a lot. It sounds like you're doing a lot more than my dad did. My dad found out I was bad at sports in 10th grade. And then he took me to the basketball court practice for an hour and then said, all right, problem solved.
Starting point is 00:42:21 Well, if I just pretend that I'm now okay in sports will you pretend that you don't know that i'm still terrible that was a good deal that we worked out but i mean i honestly i think what i would say if you're worried about him having trouble socially i would go and like you play you do the comedy connection and say hey this is you know like you teach him to be funny i bet he'd rather do that right and you know like hey you is, you know, like, you know, teach him to be funny. I bet he'd rather do that. Right. And like, Hey, you know, like, you know, introduce him to a bunch of cool comedians and, you know, let him, you know, let him know, let his friends know, Hey, hang out with me.
Starting point is 00:42:52 You can hang out with really cool people. Yeah. A lot of what I've done for my kids is travel around the world and just try to introduce them to cool people. Right. It's a, it's, it's a great gift. And it's something that in terms of, you know, like, like your law, your long, long run social connections, just knowing cool people all over the world is an awesome gift to give someone. I mean, as you probably know, people will be cool to your kids just because they like you at least for a while, but you know, fake it till you make it. So, you know, like, like you meet a lot of cool people and yeah, some of that coolness
Starting point is 00:43:22 rubs off. So I'd probably focus on that more if I were you. I think you're right. I went through a tomb with, I play guitar. I'm teaching guitar. We, and you know, it's been a bad dynamic and getting upset and crying and back and forth. And then he played at the talent show, third grade talent show. And he was great. Yeah. And, and he got a big round of applause. And then somebody came and offered to have him come play at an old age home. And he felt, he felt like a million dollars about himself.
Starting point is 00:43:48 And in some way, I said, well, okay, you know, I put him through a lot. And maybe it was worth it for him. It's a tough call. You know, it's a tough call. He doesn't seem to resent it. But maybe as he gets older, he will. But so is your central question question how much discomfort are you willing to kind of um allow to to see in the kid in the hopes that there will be a net benefit
Starting point is 00:44:12 at some point is where those lines are drawn i don't know it's i mean i mean for me really really honestly the only thing that i'll make my kids suffer for, for their long-term benefit is math. Yeah. I say, look, math is so vital for so many occupations. If you're 10 years old, you're too young to say, I never want to be a computer programmer, an astronomer, a physicist, a mathematician, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer. You just don't know anything when you're that age. And if you just don't learn math when you're young, you'll probably never learn it. That's the one thing that I push really hard. During COVID, I was homeschooling all four of my kids. And that was actually the worst homeschooling experience I got because I had to teach my eight-year-old
Starting point is 00:44:52 daughter arithmetic. Right. And man, that's the worst thing I ever had to do. I went through exactly the same thing. And, but I enjoyed the homeschooling and I, and I think I taught them better than they were taught at school and in less time. It'd be hard not to be better, right? Yeah. In terms of just learning material. I mean, really, really like, you know, like that was when I realized the only reason I'd send my kids to school is to have friends. Everything else I can do better. And it's easier, actually.
Starting point is 00:45:21 I was astounded by parents who would sit and supervise their kid doing Zoom school. It's like, hey, just turn off the Zoom and teach the kid yourself. It'll be a lot easier. They'll learn more and you'll spend less time doing it. Why are you being an unpaid school monitor? It seems crazy to me. You know, maybe all of us, an outside shot at that idea, but maybe all of the intentionality is overrated relative to like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, you know, the Undoing Project, the Michael Lewis book about all our cognitive biases. Maybe we can diminish some of the more negative biases that that, you know, happen over time
Starting point is 00:45:58 and encourage some of the ones that are less negative. And by way of that dovetailing with a biological kind of situation, you can optimize for a kid that feels like he's decent in the world that doesn't need a whole lot to confirm a status and lead to more happiness. Yeah. I mean, one of the best ways of thinking about this that I've heard is imagine that someone is about to get married. And they say, OK, now, after I get married, I have the following giant program for how I'm going to fix this person. Right. It's like, that sounds like a bad idea.
Starting point is 00:46:41 Not only is it not likely to actually work, but you're also likely to sour the relationship because people don't like being remolded in your mental image. You've got to find something you'd actually like. This is exactly what we were talking about before you came on. Precisely what we were discussing right before you came on. I say how my wife, I had my 12th year anniversary yesterday and we have a happy marriage. Congratulations. I'd be so much happier if she would just leave me alone
Starting point is 00:46:55 and let me not do the things I don't like to do. Like why she constantly tried to change me to take out the garbage and stuff like that. And I say, we're people of means. We could hire a housekeeper to come do it, but she wants me to do it myself. It's very important to her for some reason. Yeah, but then you look at a kid and you say,
Starting point is 00:47:12 okay, here's my job is to go and change something you don't want to be. Now, again, I do distinguish between training your kid to be a decent roommate. Yeah, totally in favor of. Absolutely. I've known parents who let their children kick them oh not just once repeatedly yeah look you outweigh this kid by 100 pounds why are you
Starting point is 00:47:33 allowing this to happen right like why do you let this terrorist go and ruin your life i've seen that but i'm but i'm gonna take the capital side of this so i've seen that and been involved pretty intimately in some of these relationships and i I haven't had it. Thankfully my family, it's very difficult to get them to stop these kids who do that. This becomes a, it's something with these kids and it's not so simple to get them to stop. And sometimes the parents just like, you know, just like you say, they don't want the kids to be miserable all the time.
Starting point is 00:48:03 So they just try to let it go sometimes. So like Ellie, I agree that there's some kids where it's just like, you know, just like you say, they don't want the kids to be miserable all the time. So they just try to let it go sometimes. So I agree that there's some kids where it's super hard, but there's actual experimental evidence on just using mild punishment to get kids in line. And the main problem, you know, again, I'm not talking about slapping kids or even spanking them. Just things like no computer for a day because you did that or no desserts, very mild punishments are able to get quite good results as long as parents consistently stick to the punishments. The problem is there's just a lot of parents who have a very short term outlook and it's like, I'm tired. So I'm going to let the kid misbehave without punishing him. Right. Like wrong. No. Like the, like, or all those other times, like I'm really angry. So I'm going to go and have an extreme punishment for something that barely was a problem. I said, look, that's
Starting point is 00:48:48 not that you're like, you don't punish your kids or not punish them because of how you feel punish them or don't punish them because it's part of a system of rules that you have clearly established and we'll stick to. So we can doing that actually does work quite well, but there's like just a lot of parents get really lazy. It also works by the way, for getting babies to sleep for the night. There are experimentally tested ways of getting kids to sleep for the night, which basically comes down to, like, I'm not going to go and pick you up as soon as you start crying. At minimum, you cry for 10 minutes before you get comfort. Right. And if you do that, you are able to get kids sleeping for the night within, within about three months, most of the time. And on the other hand, if you don't do that and you just pick kids sleeping through the night within about three months most of the time.
Starting point is 00:49:25 And on the other hand, if you don't do that and you just pick kids up whenever they cry, there's a lot of kids that will keep getting picked up and deprive you of sleep for years. My kids still deprive me of sleep. And I want to ask you two questions. The first question is, have you ever been out and one of your kids was misbehaving and you're and you're like, dude, people know who I am. I'm the guy who was on TV and radio telling people how to raise their kids. And now you're misbehaving. You're embarrassing me. Has that ever had that experience? So my worst behaved kids were actually the twins.
Starting point is 00:50:00 They were maniacs. The first two years they would scream in public nonstop for no reason, but that was actually before I wrote this book. So actually I was definitely not known for this child, for this book on raising kids at that time. So I didn't get any humiliation from that. And my younger two kids actually were much better behaved. So yeah, I don't think I've ever actually been scared. But again, it's not because of me and my incredible wisdom. It's just because I happen to get lucky and have the most difficult kids, most difficult infants. The twins, by the time they were four, were as well behaved as most adults ever will be. They got all their bad behavior out as infants and toddlers. Older kids are a bit harder know, teaching arithmetic to my daughter, there were some tears for that, but they were not, but it was COVID. So no one else saw the tears. We were, we were isolated. Let me ask the other question. I'll let them go. I'm almost done. Um,
Starting point is 00:50:54 so on the issue of a sleep training, yeah, this is something I did not follow your advice on and my, my reasoning, and I'm open to the, to the notion that I was wrong, but my reasoning at the time was, why would nature give these kids the instinct to cry and give the parents the profound instinct to comfort them if that was not the right thing to do? Yeah, great question. So there's actually two things going on. One is when human beings were evolving, we had much worse access to reliable food. Right. So, you know, we've always got backup food, or I guess if there's another sibling, that's less food in your mouth. So by going and basically preventing your parents from having more kids, or if your
Starting point is 00:52:17 mom keeps breastfeeding you, that means remember breastfeeding is a natural contraceptive. So by doing that, you are effectively reducing the number of siblings competing for that food supply. So that's another story about why kids would be pushing more that for more attention that actually is really a good idea from parents' point of view. So I think that that's another one that when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. You know, really like a lot of life is actually figuring out what are the things that we evolved to think about that actually no longer matter in the modern world. Like for me, the most obvious one is in a previous society, you really need to care about everyone else's opinion of you. You really need to worry about to all the other kids like me, because you're going to be stuck
Starting point is 00:52:58 with these people for your whole life. On the other hand, in the modern world, if some random strangers don't like you, you just move on and you find some other people to be friends with this is why i'm always encouraging people just don't worry so much about what other people think about you fine instead be the way you want to be and find people like you the way you are makes a lot of sense so and i pressure go ahead no no go ahead if you have something no i just i'm saying i spent so much time as just as you said having my sleep interrupted the kids climbing to bed with us. And now that's not all unpleasant memories. Honestly, there's something nice about that. And a lot of pleasant memories, but yeah,
Starting point is 00:53:33 we could have just sleep trained them 10 years ago and be done with it. Yeah. Yeah. Or think about the pleasant memories you could have had being fully awake and doing fun stuff with them. Yeah. Yeah. Professor your journey through, you know, observing human nature,
Starting point is 00:53:49 but also this part of a journey through economics and using, you know, in theory, both sides of your brain as actively as you have more than most. Do you feel like this large cultural problem that we're having in terms of, you know, this divided country as it relates to politics, as it relates to sensitivity around language, how much of this is baked in to an inflationary economic system where hope seems to be diminishing, how much of our hypersensitivity and active angst around language and culture currently can be explained by a lot of, by economics?
Starting point is 00:54:36 Hmm. I don't think very much, honestly, is we have thousands of years of economic stagnation. Right. It doesn't see, and those societies generally didn't have polarization or hypersensitivity. I stagnation. Right. It doesn't see, and those societies generally didn't have polarization or hypersensitivity. I love it. Right. So I don't think that story makes sense. You know,
Starting point is 00:54:51 I think it's got a lot more to do with social media. And there are plenty of poor countries that would argue against that story as well, against that narrative. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, like right now, like a lot of the good news the last 30 years is there's a lot of poor countries that have been getting rich, richer at a very fast rate. Not just China, India. There's actually a larger resort.
Starting point is 00:55:12 Singapore. Yeah, well, Singapore was actually rich 30 years ago. Oh, really? But yeah, if you go back how far? Let's see. If you go back 60 years, then yeah, then Singapore was poor there. So I mean, I would say that we've actually had. Oh, let's see if you go back 60 years, then yeah, then Singapore was poor there. So I mean, I would say that we've actually had, let's see. So basically the 90s was a period where economic growth increased again, and then it fell off
Starting point is 00:55:34 after the Great Recession. Then we had some really actually, so later years of Obama and the Trump years were all years of good economic growth and seemed like we had increased polarization and sensitivity. So I think that it's, you know, social media is critical. So, you know, social media, a lot of it is that it alerted people to the fact that there's a bunch of other people who have opinions that are hateful to them. Whereas before they didn't know, right. So there there's that it's just discovering what other people think. But then obviously there's also the, you know, the, the, the, the greasy wheel gets the oil, the biggest loud mouth jerk gets attention. So that's something else that's going on is we now have a strange competition
Starting point is 00:56:15 to be the biggest loud mouth jerk on your side so that you can go and achieve celebrity status by virtue of sticking it to the other side. That was not normal, like even 30 years ago, you know, like in the 1980s, you'd be hard pressed to say, who's the most famous Republican jerk? Or who's the most famous Democratic jerk? Like it would have been an odd question at the time. And especially the idea that it'd be people competing to be that person would have been weird. Whereas now there's thousands of people who want to be that person, actually.
Starting point is 00:56:50 So is there wisdom in keeping your child off of social media for as long as humanly possible? Hmm. Maybe. I mean, it's definitely one of the easier things to control. If you just don't start the kid, then he probably won't miss it very much. You basically, what I see is the kid, they're, you know, kids whose parents just don't let them do this stuff seem to be as happy as kids that do get to do it. So like, if you don't want your kid getting, you know, getting involved in this stuff, then I really don't see much harm and just don't give them the stuff. They go and do it when they're over in a friend's house. I'd say that's not really a big deal. And they, you know, like if they, as long as they can't do it when they're over in a friend's house. I'd say that's not really a big deal. As long as they can't do it themselves. I actually had to force phones on my identical twins once they went to college. We said, all right, you have to get a phone now. It's like, oh man, I don't even feel
Starting point is 00:57:33 like it. Are you hopeful? The trajectory of humanity, the globe, are you hopeful or no? So let me put it this way. So i'm very hopeful for economic and technological progress yeah uh for political progress no i think we're like we're just going to muddle through at best uh like my biggest worry honestly for humanity is nuclear war it's none of the weird stuff that people freak out about it's just like hey we got these weapons that could go and kill half humanity maybe more if people got really angry and just to say oh nobody would do it because it would be disaster um world war one happened world war two happened so like what makes you think that people wouldn't just get
Starting point is 00:58:15 really angry and one thing leads to another and total disaster there or accidents yeah yeah yeah exactly accidents yeah like you know so you, like there's multiple times when humanity got really close to nuclear war and some brave person just disobeyed orders and stopped it. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I'd say, like, I think you'd have to be pretty optimistic to say it's less than 10% chance of nuclear war this century. Wow. And, you know, by that, I just mean, you know, like two nuclear armed countries, each launching at least one nuclear weapon at the on the other one's population. And then you think about, gee, once one gets launched by each country, what are the odds they all get launched? What are the odds that everything happens? And it's like, yeah, like at least 10 percent that if one flies, they all fly. You know, that's to me what's most scary scary it's not like the other like the stuff well if we revert to the mean and the mean has always been conflict that that manifests in some degree
Starting point is 00:59:11 of violence and you add superior technology you get uh death at scale yeah you know there's this whole doctrine of mutually assert destruction it says no one would be foolish enough to do it right if you're a rational actor but the one thing we know about human beings yeah exactly so that you know that that's that's definitely disturbing and in terms of things how can you not be a little bit conservative politically if you listen everything the professor is saying no i mean to be in the current crop of progressives in the context of wokeness you can't possibly be intellectually honest and and espouse that viewpoint oh well that's actually you well maybe this is the way to end i'm not intellectually
Starting point is 00:59:51 speaking of the speaking of intellectually honest i i read you know i try to read a lot of the stuff that economists write uh like robert reich is i don't know if he's an economist or not but he he tweets close enough the dumbest things ever. Like what was that tweet I spoke about? He tweeted that Starbucks shouldn't raise its prices because it has a lot of money on hand. And I'm like, dude, if, if I was trying to sell cappuccino, I need Starbucks to raise its prices because a mom and pop can only compete
Starting point is 01:00:25 with Starbucks. If Starbucks raises its prices, like, like, like he, he, he understood it exactly the wrong way. He thought that if Starbucks were to hold its prices down during an
Starting point is 01:00:35 inflationary time, because they have a lot of cash on hand, that would be predatory. It put all their competitors out of business who don't have the money on hand. Also anti the shareholder. I mean, it's anti-capitalism. You understand? Like, yeah, no, I understand. The logic doesn't add up. He talks about Starbucks like it's pharmaceuticals or something like that.
Starting point is 01:00:52 And politicians talk about shop right like this. It's coffee. People don't need coffee. But if he's encouraging a big corporation to keep its prices low and take the hit as far, he's encouraging them to put all their competitors out of business in my mind. So, so, but, and, and, but even Krugman, like I saw these debates that he was doing with Larry Summers about whether or not the, uh, the Biden program would be inflationary. And to my mind,
Starting point is 01:01:16 I mean, I'm no expert, but I felt like I can recognize clear thinking. Summers was logical and clear. And Krugman was just full of crap. Like, you know, just every one eye or an eye and a half on the politics at all times. So it's a long way of asking, who are the intellectually honest economists that we should look to to not be swayed by their political allegiances besides you. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, of course, besides me, you know, like honestly in terms of intellectual honesty, people that I personally know and have known for a long time,
Starting point is 01:01:56 they're the ones that most cultural cultural comfortable vouching for. I have a colleague, Robin Hanson, who gets into Twitter a lot. I get in trouble on Twitter a lot because he's just so honest. And yes, he's kind of autistic, so he has trouble understanding what will upset people. Thank God. He's not trying to upset anyone. He's just speaking exactly what he thinks is really true. Like Musk. Yeah. Like Elon, of course, can't be relied upon in all cases. The way that I think about economics,
Starting point is 01:02:25 so there's a lot of people think of economists as being this uniquely rational discipline. And I say, no, no, I'm an economist. That's not true. What I would say is that economics is a discipline where most people, some of the time will say, maybe the thing that my ideology says is true isn't really true.
Starting point is 01:02:41 Yeah. That's what you can really hope for. You can't like to find people who just say, I'm just going to be totally honest all the time, you know, just the facts, just the truth. That's really hard, but to get people that will at least sometimes say, this is what I want to be true, but that's not true. And I hope that all my friends don't excommunicate me for saying that. And then realize, yeah, of course there's a lot of times when people know better, but they don't say it because they don't want to get excommunicated, which is, again, it is something that is one of the things that has gotten worse with social media is just the fear of ostracism. I mean, another way of asking this is why was Larry Summers such a lone voice in warning about inflation?
Starting point is 01:03:23 He's a lone voice among left-wing economists, not a lone voice among economists in general. Basically, you have a lot of people that really do not have Democratic sympathy. And then they said, just what do you expect them to say? Which is Biden's terrible and his ideas are terrible.
Starting point is 01:03:36 Summers is unusual in that he's more willing to risk his popularity among other Democrats. And again, if you go and read further left-wing groups like The Nation, I read The Nation very closely, they hate Larry Summers and they have for years. And they'll talk about him as if he's some radical libertarian. And it's like, that is ridiculous. Larry Summers is no radical libertarian. His values are very left-wing,
Starting point is 01:04:01 but he's just someone who distinguishes a lot more between what he wishes to be true and what he actually thinks is true. And he's a little autistic also, I hear, right? That's what they say. Yeah. There's a lot of self-identified people like that. So Tyler Cowen himself is self-identified as autistic or self-diagnosed, or he considers it positive. He's definitely made it work for himself. Dan Adaman hasn't figured that out about himself. He doesn't know Dan Adaman. But the thing about Tyler, though, is that he's very emotionally sophisticated. He gets people. He understands motivations. He writes deeply, actually, about what motivates people. So he's probably giving himself a bit of a bum rap. I would imagine that just being a super genius may appear as autistic, but it's actually probably not autistic, in my opinion. So my guess, so I met Tyler at this point 29 years ago.
Starting point is 01:04:59 So I'd say both of us have gotten better at dealing with people than we were when I was in my early 20s and he was in his early 30s. I think my guess is actually he probably had considerable problems getting along with other people when he was very young, but he just spent a lot of time really thinking about it and practicing and trying to improve. And that's how he's gotten as good as he is. My colleague, Robin Hanson, I've been friends with him for 20 years and he's learned a good as he is. Right. So, you know, again, like, you know, my, my colleague, Robin Hanson, like I, I've been friends with him for 20 years and, you know, he's learned a lot of lessons. He's improved a lot at dealing with other people. His main problem is when something new comes along, then he has trouble figuring out on this new thing, how will people react? And also, okay, well, here, here's the answer. How do you know that?
Starting point is 01:05:41 Are you saying you respect me also? I've actually done a couple of Twitter surveys among people and Facebook surveys among my close friends. And there's a lot of division on this. So you might say, well, the very fact that you would think to do a survey shows you're on the spectrum. I mean, I just like doing surveys on everything just to find out how weird am I really and what other people think about stuff? It doesn't seem spectrum-mediated to me. So like, my own self-view is that I'm not so much autistic as just iconoclastic.
Starting point is 01:06:12 And when someone has something that's sacred, my instinct is just to say, no, wrong, ha ha. Well, that's what George Mason stands for basically, right? It's just pouring cold water on everything, right? Well, so, I mean, to be fair to everyone concerned, there's really only two unusual departments at George Mason, and those are economics and law. The rest of George Mason is actually a very normal university with typical woke academic disciplines. And I actually do feel for them because I've talked to people in like GMU sociology and they say, hey, it's because of you economists that I go to a sociology conference and people give me the cold shoulder and say, you must be one of those right-wing fanatics from George Mason. And it's like, yeah, I guess that's not fair. You know,
Starting point is 01:06:52 they're overgeneralizing. You know, the econ and law schools just get so much more attention than the rest of the school, like so much more active in social media and media more broadly that a lot of people form their views of the school just based upon these two departments, but we're not representative by any means. I'm sending my kids. One more question. You're so interesting. Fascinating. Where are you on conspiracy theories? Yes. My friend who's really MMT is also really into the moon landing was fake. Of course he is. He's MMT. I've been to argue with them for so many hours about this finally i actually read like the hundred page wikipedia article on moon landing skepticism
Starting point is 01:07:30 and i came back to say i don't think so i think it really happened and he's like um yeah so it might yeah i will say that for you for vast majority conspiracy theories i am quite skeptical there are a few that i don't really consider. You might say that I have a few conspiracy theories that said that he actually had his testicles surgically removed and one of his accusers would did not know this and i was like what so yeah and there seemed to be a number of other discrepancies in the case so like i thought you would say about it but the one piece did make me think hmm maybe maybe not maybe not guilty actually guilty guilty of being a jerk uh i was talking about jeffrey epstein harvey why i'm sorry i got not epstein weinstein yes yeah yeah different steens yeah different steen yeah oh
Starting point is 01:08:38 no i yeah i heard no i heard that he he was weinstein was injecting himself with like a uh something to make give him an erection yeah we've all been there no yeah but he like some of the evidence has been you know based upon a supposed eyewitness testimony which was contradicted by the medical evidence for him so he doesn't have testicles so he i looked so like when i was reading it i believe it was he had gangrene of his testicles or something like this again again i like i only read this in one piece i have not verified it but the rest of the piece seemed very credible where where was this yeah yeah was this like us weekly no no no nothing like that so so you know i think if you just go
Starting point is 01:09:18 and go and google like you know like like you know like we don't like like Weinstein case skepticism, I think. Weinstein, gangrene. So I, I, I really, I was reading this with dismay of just like, I didn't even realize this was a medical condition, but my God, like, you know, first of all, horror that the condition exists. And secondly, that you could still be convicted after eyewitnesses didn't seem to be aware of that fact. That's crazy. The one, the reason I was asking, I know some very smart people
Starting point is 01:09:45 who are really either believe or have a very open mind about this 2000 mules movie. You know, that's, I do not know this one. You know what the movie is? It's this Dinesh D'Souza movie purporting
Starting point is 01:10:02 to prove that the election was won by ballots being dropped by mules to carry them. And well, if you don't know about it, it's not all that much point. But just my thought was, all right, there's 2000 apparently mules who carried the votes and then their families and their friends who might have known about it and the people who hired them. And we haven't seen a single like interview with a digitally altered voice and a blurred out, you know, somebody saying, I was a mule. I've been the moon landing skeptic. I've asked him, like who's the most prominent for a whistleblower for this conspiracy.
Starting point is 01:10:41 And he's got nobody, you know? And you're like his own reapprives. Look, they kept the Manhattan Project secret successfully and like that's the middle of World War II there's full media censorship there's no social media then right like you know like and even there actually like the like this is no conspiracy theory this is based upon the world's leading atomic atomic diplomacy and espionage expert at Princeton but But, you know, both the American, especially the British nuclear programs were very heavily infiltrated by Soviet agents. So it's not
Starting point is 01:11:11 true they kept it secret successfully. Professor, how high can interest rates go before we have trouble sustaining the national debt? I mean, where are we headed economically? I don't feel like that there's enough. I mean economic circles everybody's talking about this but normal people are not they're not hip yet well so there's multiple issues going on yes it might surprise you but these are complicated issues yes uh yeah so here's the thing actually is uh right now it is like i haven't i've not checked the numbers but i think it is very likely that the real value of our national debt is crashing, actually, because it's almost all of the debt is in just constant dollars. So when you have high inflation, that is basically a way of gradually wiping out the debt.
Starting point is 01:11:54 In the 1970s, inflation practically gave my parents a free house. Wow. It really did. My parents went and got a fixed interest rate mortgage in 1972. You pay it back in less valuable money. And after 15 years of high inflation, the actual real value of that debt was peanuts. All I remember is my parents complaining about how terrible inflation was the whole time. And like, oh, it's so expensive.
Starting point is 01:12:17 And like, it's only later. So like during the time you're bellyaching about the price of milk, you were given a free house. Does any of this substantiate the notion that a decentralized currency, a digital currency, I understand it's not a currency, like a Bitcoin on the blockchain, would be a bulwark against political processes that don't always add up and can result in Venezuelan hyperinflation? Not saying that'll happen here, but in general. You've got something, right? So yeah, anytime you've got access to the currencies, that makes governments at least somewhat more cautious about going crazy.
Starting point is 01:12:51 Right. This is why, excuse me, when you want to hyperinflate, then you also want to criminalize holding foreign currency, holding gold, all that sort of thing. So now that said, we had two decades of low inflation before crypto became important. In the last decade when it became important, now we've suddenly got really high inflation. So it's not something that is all that effective. It's, you know, it's something, it's like a moderate restraint, but it's not all that important in the end. Actually remember crypto is crashing right now.
Starting point is 01:13:26 Oh, crashing. Absolutely. Yeah. So like on this theory of people fleeing the eroding dollar, you think the crypto be going up right now, not down. So the world's always yet to be told. Professor, there's time. There's time in the next cycle. I mean, I wonder. I look. I don't know. I mean, I'm a real estate guy. But yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. We have to go. You were a fantastic. Fascinating. Man, you also you were also correct about Harvey Weinstein's testicles, by the way. OK. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. For four days. Gangrene. Whoa. He does not have testicles and it appears like he has a vagina.
Starting point is 01:14:03 Yes. And I and the prosecutor had this bizarre line where he told the jury inconsistency is a sign of truth i still think he's guilty but you are correct you must acquit i mean that that really did make me wonder actually after that one yeah so i mean for me it is such a privilege just to talk to people in comedy i really envy you could not be a privilege that is not a problem so my my kid my kids consider me funny and i actually during covet i've come up with a long list of stand-up comedy topics that i want to write up one day and then just do for my friends uh so i do i do have a daydream of getting my own Netflix special.
Starting point is 01:14:45 I know that's a real long shot, but I've got still, you know, you got a dream, right? Well, if you get five minutes together, we'll put you on. Would you? Yeah, we would. You would? Okay. All right. Like you'll be here. I'll be emailing you. That's just, that's just the kick in the pants. I need to actually write this stuff up.
Starting point is 01:15:02 Well, you should come down. Tyler comes down. It seems like once every two months. He loves comedy. Yeah, this is a dream for me. That's so weird because I've been such close friends with Tyler for 30 years and you told me two things about him that I didn't know. He loves stand-up comedy. He's never given any indication to me that he has any interest in stand-up comedy
Starting point is 01:15:22 other than talking to Louis C ck and chris rock at your club yeah no he likes him yeah but he's he's never given me any indication of that and what was the other thing you were saying let's see i don't know there's something else that you said that was the game is the beatles you know you know he loves the beatles yeah no no no so we have i have another colleague don boudreaux who's a Beatles fanatic. I knew that Tyler liked the Beatles, but like, I, I, I, I think of him as just someone who, who like is a, you know, like is a moderate fan. I never thought of him. He has deep, deep knowledge of the Beatles and Paul McCartney solo career.
Starting point is 01:15:58 This is one of the things about Tyler that I can't get over is he can write a whole book and then say, okay, I just finished this book on this. Like, how come I don't know about this? I had looked at you a hundred times. You never mentioned the book you're working on. Like when I'm working on a book, everybody in the world knows about it. I just keep blabbing about it. But he keeps his cards close to his chest in a way that's even after 30 years of being his friend, I'm still a little baffled by what's going on. He's an amazing guy.
Starting point is 01:16:26 All right. So yeah, we'd love to, we'd love to, to host you some night here. All right. So wait, wait, you're like, I would do it for the podcast or I do it live. Are you serious about this? So, okay. Yeah. I mean, like, like, like, okay. This is what we'll do.
Starting point is 01:16:40 You get, you get, get your five minutes together. Okay. All right. I guess, you know, like Norm MacDonald, just videotape yourself doing it. Okay. All right. We'll send it to Dove. Okay. Dove will... I'm the arbiter. Dove and we'll get some...
Starting point is 01:16:53 And Dan. We'll send it to the Autistic Comics. They'll give it to you straight. They'll tell you... All right. Look, even if you just say I suck, that's still a dream come true. Just to have working comedians say I suck. That's a dream. They'll tell you like, no, this is a hard no. Or they'll say, actually, they can help you punch it up a little bit. Yeah. Wow. You do that for me? Yeah, we do.
Starting point is 01:17:16 That's one of the best things in my life. Absolutely. That'd be a lot of fun. Right. That would be good. And then, you know, we'll see how it goes. All right. All right. Yeah. Like I that is all I ever wanted. But it's scary. I mean, it's a scary thing to be up on that stage. Look, here's the thing. Like I am a rational public speaker. I've talked before audiences of thousands of people.
Starting point is 01:17:35 I have no stage fright anymore. I'm pretty sure I would have no stage fright before a live comedy audience. I don't know. Well, if you say so. I mean, nothing to talk in front of people. It's another thing to talk and that space where they're supposed to laugh. I'm aware of that.
Starting point is 01:17:52 I should be, but like, look, honestly, like at this point in my, in my life, I would be scared not to do it because like, if I passed up that opportunity because out of fear, I would be kicking myself for the rest of my life. This leads people to misplace. That's how I live. No, it's great. And this comment of leads people to misplaced reverence.
Starting point is 01:18:15 I think you're going to find that comedians are on average. Some of them are very unique and very interesting. On average, less curious and less bright than we hope they would be. It has not been a happy, you know, you'll see what goes on. You're head and shoulders above the average committee. But but so don't you know, their approval should not mean too much. But yeah, right. All right.
Starting point is 01:18:38 So, wow. All right. So I'm telling my family about this dinner. I'm excited. All right. Well, I'm very nice to meet you. Thank you, sir. All right. Very nice to meet you. Thank you, sir. All right.
Starting point is 01:18:45 Fantastic. Privileged to be here. And yeah, I'm definitely going to be your comedy club. Can you go there without masks now? Yes. Go there without masks. All right. Fantastic. I'm going to be there soon.
Starting point is 01:18:57 I will email you and connect you with Noam. All right. Yeah. And can I bring my whole family? Yeah. Bring everybody. Awesome. Awesome. And you know, you know, Coleman Hughes, the. all right yeah and um can i bring my own can i bring my own family yeah bring every awesome awesome and you know you know colman hughes the yeah so i did a podcast with him like a year or two ago so he and i are very very close friends and we play in a band together every monday night wow i play guitar and he's a gifted trombone player all right so if you come early in the week you could see yeah wonderful real. Real high level. Call and play also.
Starting point is 01:19:25 Yeah. All right. Fantastic. But all right. Well, Mr. Kaplan, it was a pleasure. And thanks for all the advice. And that's it, right? Good night, everybody.
Starting point is 01:19:35 Good night, everybody. Good night, all. Bye-bye.

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