The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Parenting and Economics
Episode Date: July 1, 2022Bryan 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)
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
about my wife.
Like,
I think I'm like the easiest guy
to be married to.
Yeah.
Oh,
if,
if you let me finish,
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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,
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,
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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
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
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
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,
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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
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.
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,
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
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,
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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,
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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,
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,
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?
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,
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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,
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,
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.
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?
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.
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,
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.
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?
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good night, everybody.
Good night, all.
Bye-bye.