The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Alvin Roth: Moral Economics, from Prostitution to Kidney Transplant Markets

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

Alvin Roth is a Nobel Prizewinning Economist whose work on designing markets has had real world impacts that may have saved thousands of lives around the world, while arousing strong emotions both for and against the programs he has helped put in place. Clearly not one to shy away from controversy, he represents the best of what The Origins Project is trying to promote: applying science and reason to public policy. In short, connecting science and culture!Roth’s new book, which is fantastic, and comes out the same day this podcast is released deals with issues that often raise the public’s ire, from legalizing prostitution, to assisted suicide, and finally to a rational market for kidney transplants. For example, everywhere there is good date, legalizing prostitution reduces not only incidents of sexually transmitted disease, but also violent sexual assaults. It may also combat illegal human trafficking. As far as kidney transplants are concerned, in the US alone, over 130,000 kidney failures occur each year, and only 20,000-30,000 transplants are performed, because of a lack of suitable kidney donors. Roth has already helped resolve one bottleneck, connecting donors with those in need, through a kidney exchange, which is actually more complicated than it may seem due to medical incompatibilities even within closely related individuals. More generally, not only could lives be saved, but as he shows, it would save considerable money if a rational system of reimbursing prospective donors could be devised. Beyond his remarkable work tying empirical testing to theoretical ideas, as a human being, Roth is a saint. I have direct knowledge of this. On the day this podcast was recorded, we had an amazing 3 hour dialogue… one of the best I have had. Only problem was, I forgot to press record! We lost it all. With patience and grace that I never expected, Roth agreed to re-record another podcast on the same day. A friend of mine told me was a mensch. But I never expected that. I am eternally grateful, and I hope you will thoroughly enjoy, and have your perspective of the world altered by my conversation with this remarkable gentleman and scholar. Enjoy!As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Well, welcome Alvin Roth, a remarkable economist, a remarkable human being. I've learned even more recently how remarkable you are. And for full disclosure, I should inform people that Alvin and I finished one of my favorite podcasts they've ever done that was three hours long earlier today. And the problem was I forgot to press record. And with the show of unbelievable altruism and generosity, he agreed for us to record. So this will be an abridged version of it. Maybe even better, I hope so.

But I thank you very much for your patience and kindness. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, sure. Well, that's not true, but I appreciate it. Well, for some values of the word glad. Yeah, it's right. Well, for me, anytime I can spend with you is better, I'm enjoying it. Well, the reason I want to have you on originally was when I learned about your new book,

which comes out May 12th, Moral Economics, from prostitution to Oregon sales. what controversial transactions reveal about how markets work. And the idea intrigued me. And I had no idea how really intriguing it would be. But if you look, you'll see every page has tons of comments because it was worth thinking about. And it prompted my thinking about issues that we don't normally talk about. And that's one of the things I like to think about in this podcast.

there are many amazing topics from paying for kidneys to to legalizing prostitution and other things that should be discussed. And one of the things that I particularly realized, especially by the end of our first version of our podcast, is how perfect this topic is for the origins podcast, which is about science and culture. And really, if I think about your book, it's really about the collision of science and culture in a way, about how reason and empirical evidence should be applied to public policy and could make the world a better place if only we allowed it to,

but what generally gets in the way is something called repugnance, which we'll get to. And that we should overcome our a priori ideas when they're wrong, which is what science is all about. And for me, that's the great strength of science and why it's an important part of our culture. And then you build things and you experiment and the market fails,

but maybe then is improved. And that's a part of not just entrepreneurship and marketing, but also science as well. So the story is perfect as well as the topic being incredibly important. And some of these ideas should be discussed more broadly among the public. And I hope your book prompts that. Well, as you now know, this is an origins podcast. And I do want to talk a little bit about your origins,

not as much as I perhaps we had a chance to. I've learned a great deal about you in the interim. And because you won the Nobel Prize, economics, you have a great biography that people can read. But I'm always interested in what led people to what eventually they did that caused us to have a podcast. And I'm interested in people's growing up. Your parents were high school teachers who I understand, and we talked by the fact that they taught secretarial studies and you learned to type, which is something both of us learned and valued greatly. I think you said it was the only useful thing you learned in high school.

I hope I didn't say that, but I might have. It might have. But it is true. Well, we'll get to the fact of high school, your high school. But one thing I wanted to ask is that you said there are lots of books around the house. Books are important. I think books, one of the things that find to be ubiquitous from people who've been successful in intellectual ideas and in many areas is reading is incredibly important. And what were the books about what did your parents read?

Did they, was it novels? Was it, what were the books that were lying around? Were there re-referenced? I think they just read voraciously. They read everything and anything. So they read newspapers, they read magazines, they read books. And I quickly became a habituary of the public library that was near our house in New York City. Public libraries, what a great thing.

Okay. And but you got interested in science. And it wasn't your parents that turned you on? I think it was your older brother who was interested in science? Yes. How much older is. Four years older than I would. which made him older and wiser.

Yeah, exactly. And my older brother was three years, and he impacted upon me. He became a lawyer, so it probably got me interested in politics and history, in addition to the science that I knew I wanted to do. But you, interestingly enough, also got your interest in science expanded by an amazing program.

And programs that excite students about science, even if you don't get a lot out of them, are incredibly important. This was out of Columbia. You grew up in, did you go up in Manhattan, or did you grew up in Manhattan? You're both up in Queens, is that right? Group in Queens. Yeah.

And so I would take the subway into the Columbia on Saturdays and go to the Columbia Science Honors Program. It was a great thing. And it really excited your interest in all of science or you didn't remember anything specific? You know, I was already sort of interested in science, but it gave me, I think, a community of other high school-age students who were interested in science. And that was something that I loved. Yeah, you know, I think often I tell students that, you know, when they choose a school later on to go to, that your peers are probably as important, if not more important than your professors in terms of citing your interest people to talk to and that sort of thing. You went, and what's amazing is that caused you to not graduate high school in a way.

Well, I don't know that it caused me to not graduate high school, but it threw me a lifeline so that I could enroll in Columbia School of Engineering, which is the part of Columbia that ran it. Kids today will be amazed that you could get into Columbia without graduating high school, and apparently not stellar grades either. And I think we said earlier that it was references, the key references. So why do you give the advice that I think students should hear? Well, I think letters of reference are important. And what I tell people who are applying to graduate programs at Stanford now is they need to get letters from people who know them and who know us in the sense of knowing

what a PhD program is so that they can plausibly recommend that this person will do well in your PhD program. Yeah. And I think nowadays the letters of reference probably don't matter so much getting into college, but it was great that you were able to get in and you were 16, I think, right? You were very young. I think that's right. Did you live at home when you went to school? I'm sorry, say again. Did you live at home when you went to school? No, no, I lived in a dormitory. They let you do that at 16. Okay. And you entered, you entered school in engineering. And I did ask you this, why engineering and not physics, which is so much better? Engineering was easier to get into, and I didn't have stellar credentials.

Ah, okay. And then, interestingly enough, you went a division of engineering with something called Operations Research. And you want to describe what that is briefly? So, Operations Research is a collection of applied mathematics tools, mostly that were developed in World War II and later. So the name applied mathematics had already been taken by people who did differential equations and didn't want to do anything else. And so my hope at the time was OR was going to be all of the rest of applied mathematics.

That turned out to be a little optimistic about the way OR would develop as an academic discipline. But that was my hope that we've been learning new kinds of math to solve new kinds of problems. Well, you didn't think of yourself as a mathematician. I asked you earlier why you didn't go into math. and you didn't think of yourself as a great mathematician. That's right. And I thought of myself as someone who was interested in problems in the world and trying to solve them. And more applied, which is rather interesting because then operations research, which at the time was, I mean, Nash and other people, game theory was just, was it had become a key part of operation research, which, and game theory is a way to sort of,

have people with potentially competing goals, but essentially either allowing one to win or allowing an optimum solution where they both win, right? Well, right, there's a narrow part of game theory called zero-sum game theory where someone has to win and someone has to lose, but most of economic interactions, most strategic interactions, have people with different goals. And sometimes you and I can both achieve our goals, sometimes we can't. Did you think, so applying game theory was what got you started and thinking about the more formal aspects in some sense of game theory, stable solutions, Braun Neumann and your eventual co-winner, I guess, Shepple, working on game theory. And in fact, your prize is for the theory of stable allocations and market design.

So there's a theory of stable solutions, quote-unquote, solutions in games. Did you know your interested in game theory was going to apply more generally to what you might call markets and we'll define markets in a little bit? Or was it the more formal aspects that got you interested? Well, I liked both. But, you know, when I studied operations research in the 1970s, mostly the focus was on operations of what were thought of as unitary companies, so companies that had some objectives, and the idea of the operations researcher was to help them operate in ways that

achieve those objectives. But of course, game theory is about studying situations in which multiple people with different objectives interact with each other, and so I was attracted to that. And some of the work for which you've been recognized was expanding it's basically expanding exactly that where there are multiple individuals and finding sort of stable, what you might call stable equilibrium solutions for more complicated situations that have been than have been considered earlier. Is that reasonable to say?

Well, so I studied something that in its formal study began with a paper in the 1960s by David Gail and Lloyd Chapley, which has come to be called matching theory. And I was interested in matching, and we can talk more about that. And, yeah, I wrote a book with my colleague, Marilla Sotomayor, on two-sided matching, so we sort of compiled all that was known, including a lot of our own work in 1990, so a long time ago. And in the course of doing that, I also studied a number of different matching markets. Now, it's interesting when we talk about, we go from game theory to matching in general, and

your earliest work was, and you're also known for being kind of an experimentally cononymous, which appealed me when I heard that because I don't see what else matters. But the idea, but you actually able to do laboratory experiments where you could model certain what might be considered games or matching problems and test the ideas. Because one of the things you all, I also, I thought it was interesting that your prize talked about the theory, but one of the things you've done is by doing experiments is often showing when theory doesn't work, right? Absolutely. So I worked on a number of dead ends earlier in my career,

and one of the things that made them dead ends was they made predictions that didn't pan out. So it takes me so long to prove a theorem that I wanted to be a theorem about something that describes something. It's wonderfully novel to imagine that, to have something you can test, and it doesn't work and you give up. It's such a, maybe it's even novel in certain areas of economics, I'm not so sure, but I won't make any more comments there. But one of the earliest things you looked at was a kind of well-defined but real game, which had to do with medical students, right?

You wanted briefly talk about that? Okay. So one of the things I looked at was the market for new doctors in the United States. And new doctors in the United States, in order to be licensed to practice medicine, have to take what's called a residency. They have to take a couple of years of supervised practice in a hospital. And it's considered their postgraduate education. And different doctors need education in different things.

Internists take internal medicine residencies. Surgeons take general surgery residencies. But you need a residency. And they all need them sort of at the same time, which is around July 1st, typically, you know, after they've graduated. So there's a big rush. There's a lot of congestion. There's a lot of people looking for jobs that are going to start at the same time. And that market historically had a lot of problems for that reason.

It unraveled. So there was a period in the 20th century where doctors were getting their jobs two years before they graduated because of a competition among hospitals, things like that. But eventually they settled on the idea of a centralized clearinghouse. And they thought of this themselves in the 1950s with a little trial and error. And they had a pretty good system going. And so I started to study it. So the area of economics that I've helped develop is called market design. And design is both a noun and a verb.

So game theory allows us to study the rules of the market, which are big parts of its design as a noun. And so I was studying market design as a noun. And this market started to develop some problems. And in particular, it developed problems that reflected big changes in American society, which is in the 1950s, almost all medical school-go-year-old. graduates were men. And today, half of medical school graduates are women. And around 1970, it was about 10 percent of American graduates were women. And one of the things that started to happen is that some medical students married their classmates. And when it came time for them

to get residencies, they needed two because they were a two-career household. And that turns out to present practical problems and also theoretical problems. And I initially engaged with the theoretical problems. And I wrote, incidentally, I mean, this is part of my intellectual evolution. I wrote a great paper in 1984 that was, I think, the first paper in the Journal of Politically Economy cover paper. And it ended by saying, by, I proved that dealing with couples with two career household was hard. And I sort of ended with that observation. It was provably hard. And if you were a theorist, as I felt myself to be, that was a victory. I showed it was hard. And I stopped that I'd done my job.

But then later I was asked to fix it. And then I knew that it would, that was in much later, 1995. And that's when I became a market designer, when I agreed to engage with it at the level, not just of describing it, but of fixing it. Where you move from a noun to a verb? Yes. Yeah, okay. And that's a great word. Redesign the medical match.

And that, yeah, and that's one of the things that was acknowledged, that kind of finding a stable, stable situation for a more complex situation of couples. and you were a married, two academic coupled yourself, so that was something that was... But actually, did you do that when you were at Illinois? Is that when you were there? I began studying the design of the market when I was in Illinois, but we moved from Illinois to Pittsburgh in 1982, and I continued working on that.

And it wasn't until 1995 that my phone rang in my office in Pittsburgh, and I was asked to take up. on this problem. Well, and the reason I brought this up is that you went, you did, you were offered a job in a math department and game theory and you could have just ended up being a formal game theory prover and probably done a fine job, but you actually were interested in the real world and, and the operations research thing came up in Illinois. But what's interesting to me is you won the Nobel Prize in economics and you're called an economist. I always thought you were an economist when I first looked this up. And happily, something we share, I've been a professor, I was a professor

of astronomy as well as physics for many years. I never took an undergraduate course in astronomy. I think you're correct. You told me that you never took an undergraduate course in economics either, is that? Right. But you, but it was, but you decided that the place where game theory was being used was not in operations research. Is that, and that's what, what did you do? I didn't exactly decide that, but it was clear to me that, that, um, economics was a good source of problems for a game theorist. And so when I got my first, when I got the job offer that I finally took, not the one in a math department, it was in the operations research group in the business school

at the University of Illinois. And I asked for a joint appointment in economics. And part of the thing about asking was I had already almost decided to go to a math department. I had some offers and I was about to accept one. And then I got this call to go interview at Illinois. And I was completely relaxed because I thought this was just. before I went to work for a math department. So whenever I thought of anything, like,

wouldn't it be nice to have a joint appointment in economics, I just learned it out because I was going to a math department. Yeah, the Hutzpah, you didn't care. And they gave it to you, and that's how you became an economist, essentially, or at least. Well, not exactly. So I was in an operations research group, but economics was the place where game theory flourished.

So I started publishing in econometrica, which is one of the nice economics journals. And it became the home for modern game theory. So there I was. I was suddenly an economist. Yeah. Well, as you say, was economics, which is trying to figure out how people handle scarce resources

and how to do that is really a study in some sense of game theory, of trying to match people, of trying to optimize systems. And, yeah, which is what you did at some level. I think of economics is studying how to deal with scarcity, both how to efficiently and equitably allocate scarce resources and also how to make them less scarce. How to make the world more efficient. I think you said somewhere, but not necessarily equitable, but efficient.

But now, I noticed you had a 2000 more relevant to the book, which we're now going to get to. You had a paper in 2007 called repugnance as a constraint in markets, and we'll talk about what repugnance is. but I learned, I mean, one of the key things that you're going to talk about here, and one of the things where you have saved thousands of lives, probably, and the work you've done has to do with kidney exchanges. And the remarkable fact that 100,000, 130,000 people a year in the U.S. have kidney failure, and about 20 or 30,000 kidney transplants are done. But there are many more kidney transplants that could be done

if we were willing to consider things that some people consider repugnant, like the possibility of paying people. And we'll talk about that in more detail. So I thought that 2007 was when he began to work in this, but you began to think about kidney stuff. And you said earlier about 2000 or something like that. Well, so we started to do kidney exchange. We started to help our surgical colleagues do kidney exchange around 2000.

That's when we started to think about how to help them. And it was around 2004 that we helped my colleagues and I helped our surgical colleagues organized the New England program for kidney exchange, which was, I think, the first inter-hospital kidney exchange. But in fact, I had written papers on what turned out to be kidney exchange before I had thought about kidney exchange. There was a 1974 paper by Lloyd Chaplin and Herb Scarf called, I forget exactly what it was called. It might have been called instabilities or something like that. But it was about trading discrete objects, trading objects that couldn't be divided and that you weren't allowed to use money for. And they used as their example

houses. They said, supposing we couldn't use money to trade houses. And this was in the first issue, Volume 1, number one of the Journal of Mathematical Economics. So it was as far from applied mathematics as you could get. And when I started to teach that to my students, because I did some follow-up work on it. They would say to me, but, professor, we use money to trade houses. And I would acknowledge that I knew that. But when I moved to Pittsburgh, there was kidney transplants going on. And so I would say, just to let them let me teach. I'd say, well, let's think about kidneys. Supposing we had to exchange kidneys and couldn't use money. Oh, okay. That's a remarkable thing. In fact, you talk about how much you got out of, how many ideas you got out of teaching and learning things.

one of the things that I've found, and I think many of us find, is that you don't really understand something until you start to teach it, and then you realize what you don't understand, and it can be very useful. And it's interesting to me, the reason I thought kidneys were later was I was very surprised the Nobel Prize statement didn't mention that. It mentioned stable market allocation and stable allocations and market design. But in fact, you say that the recognition of the,

significance of one of the implications being saving many lives and kidneys was something that certainly probably impacted on the eventual decision, or at least on the statement. No question. I mean, the Nobel Prize committee puts out a couple of documents, and there's one that's called the long document for people who want to know what you did. And they mentioned kidneys quite a lot there. Okay, well, speaking of kidneys, so I think my own sense is that this whole question of repugnance, something you had to face when you talk about kidney exchange, the problems

that people have with something that should be logical and clearly can help people save people's lives. The fact that that even is confronted by concerns or bans obviously motivated what ended up being this book, I think. I think that's right. I first started

to think about these controversial markets in the context of kidneys. Yeah, and of course as the book describes, there are many, kidneys aren't the only example and there are many, many more where things are controversial that in principle, if if you look at the evidence and rationality would be quite sensible to do, but repugnance gets in the way.

So let's first talk about what, let's define some terms in terms of repugnance. But first, define a market. You say at the very beginning of the book, I think of markets as tools to help determine who gets what. Why do you describe that? Because most people think of markets as where you trade money. Okay. So, well, so many people think of commodity markets when they think of markets. And commodity markets are markets where money does all the work.

If you're buying shares of Microsoft on the Newark Stock Exchange, you don't care who you're buying them from because the shares are all the same. And they don't care who they're selling them to. But when you're looking for a job, you care which job it is. And when you're looking to hire someone, you make offers to particular employees, not to the general public. You know, we need someone to teach economics at Stanford. And this is what we're willing to pay, you know, who comes. So labor markets are a kind of matching market. They have an element of matching in them that's a little like marriage, which is you can't just choose who you want.

You also have to be chosen. And you can't just choose your spouse. Your spouse also has to choose you. You can't just choose your job. You have to be hired. And the job can't just choose who to hire. They need to compete with other jobs. So in matching markets, you're forming relationships.

And in particular, you can't just choose what you want, even if you can afford it. So think about college admissions, which is a match. market, it's expensive to go to Stanford. So not everyone who wants to study at Stanford can study there. You have to be admitted. And of course, Stanford can't just decide who will come and study here. We admit students, but some of them, for some reason, go to Harvard or somewhere else. And so it's a matching market. So matching markets are markets where prices don't do all the work and where you're developing relationships. Okay, perfect. Now, Republicans, which I've mentioned three times without defining. Why don't you define what you mean? And I think you introduced a term.

Did you not repugnant? Well, it was of course always a word in the English language. Yeah, it was already a word, yes. But I use it as a technical term, which turned out not to be perfect for my book. So I'll tell you about that too. But I say a transaction is repugnant if some people want to engage in it and other people don't think they should be allowed to for moral or religious reasons. And I also want to say that the people objecting don't suffer any obvious direct harm from it. And the way I said it in the book is this will be a transaction that some people want to engage in. Some people think they shouldn't be allowed to engage in it. And these objectors don't even know whether the transaction has taken place unless someone tells them. And so a

prototypical example is same-sex marriage. Two people want to marry each other. Some people think same-sex marriage shouldn't be allowed, but you can't tell whether someone is married unless they were a wedding ring or find some other way to tell you. So it probably doesn't cause direct harm to the people who object to it. But the reason it's not in the title of the book, it was in the working title is people say to me, oh, so you wrote a book about repugnant transactions and controversial markets. What transactions do you think are repugnant? And I would say to them, well, you know, how about same-sex marriage? And they'd say, you don't like same-sex marriage. I'd say, no, no, no. When I say something is repugnant, I don't mean that I don't like it or that you

shouldn't like it. I mean that some people don't like it, even though other people like it a lot. Okay, and that's important. Was it your editor that suggested changing the name, or was it or was it your editor? So, no, I think I figured out to change the name. So then I had controversial markets in the title and my, my editor at that, Hachette, thought that moral economic sounded like It is a good title. I don't, I don't, I have a lot of editors for my books and I have mixed feelings about them, but this was a good one. I think it was a good call.

The other thing you talk about, which is another example where you'd never know, and we'll talk about later too, is in vitro fertilization, which, again, is something you'd think that would be great and everyone would be in favor of, but in fact, it is a repugnant transaction in some sense. But it's a clear example. You know, when someone's born, you don't know how they were conceived. At least most people don't. And millions of people have been born through in vitro fertilization.

Millions of families have been started, so millions of people's children have been born using IVF. And so it's, you know, it's a life-affirming technology for people who can't otherwise conceive. Robert Edwards won a Nobel Prize in 2010 for it. But at the same time as he won the Nobel Prize, there were pickets who said that he was a murderer because IVF typically creates more than one embryo, and some of the embryos aren't used. They're discarded. And so people who think that an embryo is a human being think of it as murder. So I wasn't originally going to include that kind of thing, because it might not fit my definition of repugnant transaction where no one is obviously harmed.

But that turns out to be part of the controversy in controversial markets is whether someone is harmed. are the small number of cells embryo? Yeah, our embryos are harmed? I mean, yeah, are they, is that the harm that, you know, are they able to be harmed? And that's obviously that you're right. That's the controversy. It's interesting to me, and I think it's worth bringing up here, we talked about it a little bit, but the Catholic Church, of course, continues to be opposed to it partly for that reason.

But to me, it also represents something that I think is so important about that is a theme that goes throughout the book, which is reality confronting apriori moral, ethical, or biases of any sort. And my feeling always is that reality should win, because nature cannot be fooled, as Richard Feynman once said. And the Catholic Church, this argument about embryos being destroyed is a refined version, but the original argument of the Catholic Church

against in vitro fertilization, which I think is really almost more interesting to look at, was that these children would not have a soul because they weren't created the natural way. And what's fascinating is the minute the first quote unquote Tesbub baby was born, that argument went out the window because it was obvious that they were totally the same as anyone else. And it's an example where reality eventually has to confront an a priori repugnance, but then they found other things to be, you know, to find repugnant about the whole thing, even when their original one went away. So anyway, I'm not an expert on insolment, but we might have similar issues coming up with AIs in the years to come.

Yeah, we indeed may. We may indeed exactly. I think that'll, that'll be, at the end of your book, you talk about futures. We didn't talk about AI, but it's certainly a case. And it's another, you know, given, you know, limited time, I want to try and get out many of the themes that we, we were able to explore that helped, I think me and understand the significance of the book even more, is that repugnance evolves. It evolves due to social mores as they change. Some things get more liberal, like same-sex marriage. Some things get less liberal, like human, male-female interactions in the workplace, which are becoming much more restrictive now than they were, saying, in the 60s or 70s. We used to have markets for slaves, and we don't approve of those.

anymore. Yeah, absolutely. But the other thing that causes them to change, and which we have to deal with one way or another is technology. And technology, of course, we'll talk about sex in a bit, but changed everything when contraception came through, and also surrogacy and IVF. And it'll continue to change things, and that will require, either it'll develop new repugnances, or it can overcome some. For example, One of the more poignant things you say at the end of the book, which I don't know if we'll get to in this particular round is that you hope your grandchildren, this whole idea of kidney transplants, which are a major source of repugnance, should we pay for them in order to be able to encourage people to have them, may go away, you hope, in the long run, right? That whole issue. Absolutely. I hope that we're going to develop technologies that help us cure kidney disease without needing to transplant human organs.

or to cure the causes of kidney disease before they cause kidney failure to cure diabetes and hypertension. But I think it's really important to realize that as technology is changing, we need to, I mean, it's extremely difficult to change our biases. But the only way to probably try and find out whether with new technologies what works and what doesn't, whether something really truly is wrong or evil is to see. It's to actually look at the data and see

and try and then design your policies around that. And we'll see over and over again this conflict of looking at the data and seeing what's good, what at least works, maybe good is not the right way to put it, but what works versus what you like or don't like. So that's the point of view you're expressing is what I'm very sympathetic to, and I guess the philosophers call it consequentialism, that think about things by their consequences. But of course, moral philosophers have other ways to think about things too.

and some of the objections that we see in certain kinds of markets are not consequentialist, but sort of deontological. Well, as long we're talking philosophy, I also, I mean, I also see it as this issue of utilitarianism, which is the greatest good for the greatest number. And we'll see many, I mean, saving many more thousands of lives if we could say pay for kidneys at some level in a way in which, as we'll talk about, maybe it could be regulated. so people weren't being exploited, would certainly appear to be the greatest good for the greatest number

without harming people who didn't have kidney failure and without harming people who didn't partake in the transaction and in the market. Okay, well, let's let's, one of the things you do say, before we go on to the specific topics, is that you can get a sense of this, by looking to see when there's long lines for scarce resources, when you see long cues for scarce resources, it means that there's something not being done right,

that the market cannot adjust. Prices aren't adjusting right or something's not adjusting right. And that's a characteristic, certainly of the kidney exchanges, but we'll see that in numerous cases, blood adoptions. It's a characteristic of kidney transplantation, right? there's only about 30,000 transplantable kidneys available. And as you remark, there's 100,000, 130,000 new cases of kidney failure each year in the United States. And there are half a million people on dialysis right now. Half a million people on dialysis. And most of them will die.

Most of them will die without getting a transplant. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And many of them, half of them will die in the next five years. Dialysis is pretty brutal. And so, so, market design as the verb, as you point out, is deciding what tradeoffs we can't avoid and how to accept those tradeoffs or examine them and decide what they are. And some of that is determined by empirically. Some of it, I guess, is theoretical, but some of it is just seeing what works and doesn't work. Is that right? Absolutely. So, you know, when I think about broken markets, I think of markets like the market for heroin. You know, we ban heroin. We would like there to be no heroin, but there's a lot of Okay, well, let's talk about one of the problems of banning.

And I asked you this because when you look through the book, it often, and it may just be a case of selection effects here, it seems to me almost universal when it comes to issues of things that some people want and some people know that banning things almost, it never empirically works out to be as well as regulating things through some kind of matching market. And you weren't quite in agreement with that, I think, when I brought it last time. But I'm not, well, you know, it seems to me, give me a counter example. Well, so we ban murder, and there are some murders, but I think few people are in favor of dropping the ban on murder, instead having a regulated murder market. We do have a regulated murder market, though, right?

Right? Because war, capital punishment. Well, war isn't as well regulated as we would like. But that's right. I mean, there certainly are deaths, but there are criminal murders in the United States. Many fewer than drug overdose deaths, but I think fewer than 20,000 a year. But the one I talk about in the book is I say, why is it so easy to buy drugs and so hard to hire a hitman? And, you know, hiring a hitman is a kind of market that we really don't like.

And the police will, if you were to call the police and tell them that I had confided in. knew that I was looking for a hitman, they would try to set me up with an undercover officer who I could try to hire. So we're pretty effective at squelching the market for contract killers. They don't even make it into the national crime statistics. But that's very similar to the way we try to ban heroin. If we catch dealers, we put them in jail for a long time. And more than 40 percent of our federal prisoners have drug convictions, and there are lots and lots of opioid overdose deaths. So we're doing great on Hitman, and we should keep it up, not have a regulated market. But it's possible that we should start to treat addicts somewhat more like patients and somewhat less like criminals in order to cut down the number of overdose deaths.

And maybe even help the addicts, yeah, and help society in general for lots of reasons we may talk about. But one of the things are that when you talk about the difference of the murder and drugs, and as you point out, if you were a professor and say, ask someone, where can I get some drugs? and they reported that to the police. It's less likely police would come find you than if you said, where can I find a hitman? But I think the difference is that one is sort of controversial. Some people have mixed feelings about drugs.

But a ban is effective when basically there's almost a universal human moray that says no, like murder. And then it's very successful. But if it's something that is controversial, in particular, something which is either people are addicted to or by evolution is an essential part of human. being a human being, then it's going to happen no matter what. And a ban can never be effective. And drugs are an example that even if we would like there not to be heroin addicts,

they're addictive. And murder is not necessarily an addiction for the general population, at least. I've never tried, so I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. But the idea that there's controversy, and that, well, anyway, I already said it. Yeah.

Well, so I agree with you, and that's why I started the book with chapters on sex and reproduction, because, as you say, you know, it's genetic. We're all descended from, you know, generations of people who never in any generation forgot to have children. So it might very well be that we're selected to want to have sex and children. Well, it might very well. I mean, it's clearly a central feature of our being and almost all species beings. reproduction is a central feature.

And that's kind of interesting. That's what I was going to get at. Not just addiction, but evolution has told us that sex is an essential part of our being. And so sex, reproduction, marriage, and adoption, all things that in principle, sound wonderful and not repugnant, but every single one of them, as you point out, has its own repugnance. And either in the case of same-sex marriage. but I think you basically say that the key part about sex, about all of these things, is that two or more people want to have sex and others don't want to have them to have sex

for a wide variety of reasons. And why do you talk about the different reasons that come up for that? Okay. Well, I think that over the long span of human history, some of the social concern was that sex often led to babies, and we wanted babies to be born into families, and therefore there was this idea that you should have sex only with someone you were married to and prepared to raise children with. But of course there were also other ideas about sex that we carry forward today, even when there's effective contraception.

You might worry that people would be too young to handle the emotional stress. You might worry that it might not lead to marriage or that it might lead to marriage. you know, I think Romeo and Juliet. So, you know, people have lots of strong opinions about sex who can have sex. Or that, you know, or that it's against God's law in the case of same-sex marriage or something like that. Or something like that. So I think, again, I think a lot of history, you know, that now I'm speculating beyond my expertise, but I think a lot of the social history of bans on sex have to do with reproduction

that we wanted babies born in families. but now that there's contraception, you can have sex without babies. And now that there's in vitro fertilization, you can have babies without sex. And so those things, I think, have probably helped broaden our notion of who can have sex with whom and who can form a family with whom. Well, they broaden the notion, but they've also produced a whole new set of repugnances, as we pointed out. I mean, there was no worries about in vitro fertilization before there wasn't and before it existed. And each time there's such a new thing, it's a new opportunity, but a new potential

inbred, a priori argument against it without really knowing what the problems are. And maybe we'll get to some in vitro or surrogacy at least. But the first one you talk about

which I think is important is prostitution. The fact, you said somewhere, beautifully in the book, that money may not be the root of all evil, but paying for a thing, but using money as the root of all repugnance or something like that.

Well, root of a lot of repugnance. A lot of repugnors. And clearly, people may not be opposed people having sex, but people are apparently opposed almost universally to people paying for sex. And that's a problem. And it's illegal in most places. And what you point out is that one can actually ask the question, is it good for, is it what are the positive versus the negatives? What are the tradeoffs and benefits of, say, legalizing prostitution? Now, that can be an abstract question, but one of the things that I, I mean, that I love about this,

and you point out that there are a different place around the world, like in, you know, Holland and where it's legal, but there's a different society so much. But you point out there's a wonderful experiment, and you're also classified, as I say, as an experimentally economist, that was done for you by Rhode Island. And I found this fascinating. So why don't you talk about it? Well, it wasn't done for me. It was done accidentally in Rhode Island.

This is what can be sometimes called a natural experiment. But Rhode Island accidentally legalized indoor prostitution for a period of around six years. And so how do you accidentally legalized prostitution? They rewrote the law. They amended their law on prostitution. And sort of as a word processing error, they defined prostitution to be on the street solicitation. So that didn't change very much. And police still cracked down on brothels and massage parlors that offered sexual sexual

services. But eventually, one of those massage parlors hired a lawyer who went to court for them and said, we don't contest that they offered sexual services to an undercover policeman who was investigating whether they were a brothel. But it turns out that's not illegal. Read the law. And indeed, the law said prostitution had happened outdoors, that involved outdoor solicitation. So it took six years for the state of Rhode Island to close that loophole by reamending the law to say prostitution involved, accepting or offering money for sex. But in those six years, two intrepid economists, Cunningham and Shaw, Scott Cunningham and Manisha Shah, studied the effects of having this legal prostitution in Rhode Island as compared to, say, Massachusetts, which was other

very similar but hadn't had this accidental legalization. And what they found was compared to other states and trends, that there was less transmittal of sexually transmitted diseases in Rhode Island during the time that prostitution was legal. And there was less sexual assault. So they found that it had what looked like good effects on public order and public health. But the Rhode Island legislature then, closed that loophole. So now they close the loophole. And it wasn't it's it's um it's it's it wasn't

unique to Rhode Island. I mean there was a work done I think in the Hague as well that you talk about that we're showing that that basically the that legalization of prostitution there result in a 30 percent reduction in rape and sexual assault which so there's been a bunch of studies in the Netherlands where different cities regulate prostitution differently but where it's largely legal. It's also legal in Germany. I mean, there are a number of places where prostitution is legal. And I'm not aware of any places that has stamped it out. And in the United States, we don't really seem to be trying to stamp it out. We have laws about sex offenders that are pretty serious and follow people for life, you know, after they get out of prism. But none of that has to do with prostitution.

Neither prostitutes nor their customers become sex offenders. It's more like a traffic violation. in many places it's a misdemeanor. Well, this brings up two things. First of all, something that you don't mention explicitly in the book, and I guess I understand why, but I couldn't help think about it in your book. It's very politically incorrect to say, but it does suggest, since in Rhode Island,

that having prostitution reduces a number of rapes and sexual assaults, that, you know, it's a, it's the politically correct thing to say is that rape is a power has nothing to do with sex, has to with power. It's not 100% clear from this that that's true, that at least there isn't a sexual component. And it may be very politically incorrect to say so, but that's what the data seems to suggest, at least, as far as I can see. Well, so that has been a little controversial. I heard Maness Shah, one of the authors of that paper, a woman who's a fine economist and also a feminist, say that, that she got a mixed reaction from her feminist colleagues who liked to think of rape as a crime of violence against women

rather than a sex crime that could be reduced by making sex available in some non-criminal way. But that's what she found. But, you know, and as we mentioned before, and worth mentioning now, and it's really hard when it comes to people, but in physics it's a little easier, to not confound correlation with causation.

and so things are sometimes correlated, but there could be some intermediate cause. In societies, there's so many intermediate variables or confounding variables that might make a difference. And to be fair, I was talking to my partner about this after I was commiserating about having not recorded our first conversation. And she was saying, well, you know, it can be that there's an urge, you know, an urge to sexually dominate

or something like that. That is, you know, it's not sex per se, urge to dominate, but you can do in a... So it's not 100% clear that there's not some power relationship, but it's... Absolutely. There can be multiple causes of crimes of various sorts. But one of the things it is clear about confusing causation and correlation and causation is confusing substitute for complement.

And as you point out, so it appears that in some sense, prostitution is, a substitute at some level for some sexual violence, whereas some people would argue it complements it, namely one, and why don't you describe the difference in substance? It shouldn't be me. Okay, so compliments are things that go well together and that if you have more of one, you're likely to want more of the other.

So one of the examples I used in the book is peanut butter and jelly. If peanut butter gets cheaper, then Americans might consume more jelly also. And substitutes are things that when one gets cheaper, the other one, the demand for the other one is reduced. So beer and wine are often substitutes at dinner, if not at breakfast. And, you know, if you have beer for dinner, you're unlikely to have wine for dinner and vice versa. So one of the questions, the question you're asking is, is legalize sex, a compliment or a substitute for sexual assault.

And it appears from the Rhode Island data that at least to some extent it's a substitute, not a compliment. It's not that having legalized prostitution did increase the market for prostitution in Rhode Island, but it reduced sexual assault and sexually transmitted diseases. So those are complicated things, as you say, but it suggests that it didn't develop an appetite that turned into sexual assault. You know, the other place where compliments and substitutes are really important to me when we talk about prostitution is the labor force in prostitution consists of two kinds of people. There are voluntary sex workers who think that's the best job they can get, given their circumstances. And we're not helping them in that effort when we make them criminals. But there's also trafficked women and children, people who are not getting the benefit of being sex workers. Rather, they're more like slaves.

And what we'd like is to have many fewer of those. So one of the questions is would legalize prostitution be, you know, how would it affect the number of trafficked women and children? And this is where market designers think about how to run experiment in different cities in the Netherlands, in other parts of Europe. And my colleague Petro Pearson has an idea that I endorse as an experiment. You know, I'd like to see it tried, say, in Las Vegas, which is to license voluntary sex workers and try to make sure that they're not traffic, but they are voluntary and could then. as part of their license to have health inspections and things like that. But to make it a crime to patronize unlicensed sex workers. And the idea there is to try to reduce the market of selling trafficked women and children. So often I think those two things are lumped together.

And some of the opposition, some of the idea of making it a crime to be a prostitute is that we're trying to shrink the whole market because we hate the idea of trafficked women and children. but even they are not benefited by being made criminals. It makes it harder to go to the police if what you're doing is a crime as opposed to if you're the victim of a crime which a trafficked woman or child is. Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, something that did occur to me after reading the book and also after our last discussion was that for both bans and markets, unintended consequences, are the real bugaboo, are the real issue that you have to worry about in both cases.

I mean, as a market designer, there are unintended consequences of doing certain things, and certainly unintended consequences of bans. I mean, I'm not sure when alcohol was prohibited that people realized the gangsters would become so ubiquitous. Similarly, making, well, and drugs being illegal, making cartels so powerful, and the case of trafficking prostitutes,

where, of course, if you can't report, if it's illegal and you're trafficked, you can't report it because you're involved in legal activity. If it's legal and something happens, you can report it. But as you say, there'll be other issues if it's made legal that we'll have to deal with. But you point out... But the way I put it in the book, I mean, one of the big themes of the book is that markets need social support to work well, but so do bans on markets. Absolutely.

And that's the point I said earlier. If there's not as ubiquitous social morades saying something's wrong, the ban never works. And it also probably never works if there's a compulsion like that. sex or addiction at some level. You actually say, and this comes back to the question I asked if there's any example of ban on repugnant markets that's good, you say that a central premise of economics is that allowing people to voluntarily participate in markets improves their welfare. And isn't that akin to saying that basically designing a market for every one of these

repugnant activities, which is in some sense voluntary, will always improve people's welfare? Well, so no. I mean, again, think of addiction. You might not anticipate how you'll be enslaved by heroin. And so we want to make it unavailable. There might be consumer protection things to think about complicated financial transactions when you buy a car might be something we want to regulate if we find that people are being fooled into buying coal. But regulation doesn't mean a ban. It's, I mean, you know, you can imagine a voluntary market associated with heroin that somehow requires you to, you know, buy it, but at the same time, do X, Y, or Z to try and overcome your addiction. So you can imagine a regulated market.

You can definitely imagine a regulated market that would work better than the current black market that has arisen in the face of the legal bans that we impose on heroin, absolutely. But whether you can always do that, I don't know. I mean, there are, you know, we ban murder, even though we don't completely eliminate it, but we're not eager to have a regulated market from Earth. And, well, I think the summary of this is quite important, because, again, it's evidence versus bias, science versus ideology. What we have seen is that there's now a modest...

There's more than your microphone. I'm having a little trouble hearing you. Yeah, and if you are, then so is everyone else may be. But what we've seen is that there's now a modest amount of quite high quality evidence based on careful controlled comparisons that legalization of prostitution increases the availability of prostitution, of prostitution, of course, while reducing at least some kinds of sex crimes

and the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. And so empirically, it seems that it's a clear example of overcoming one's aversion, religious, or worrying about complimenting versus substituting, that some kind of regulated market would probably be better for everyone. Well, so, you know, when you say something, kind of regulated market, I agree. But we have to be careful here because remember, making

prostitution legal increases the demand for sex workers for prostitution. So we have to be careful not to increase the demand for trafficked women and children, right? We'd like to make voluntary sex work more safe. It's one of the most dangerous professions in the world on street solicitation. We'd like to make it safer for the sex workers. But we'd also like to really kind of down on the market for slaves. For slaves, yes. Yeah, absolutely. For trafficked women and children.

For traffic people. And you're talking about that. People who don't consent but are compelled. But again, a ban doesn't help that at all. I mean, obviously it makes it difficult. It makes it a criminal activity. So you have to be a criminal. But it encourages trafficking in a sense because if you're going to involve a criminal activity.

I think that's right. I think that legal markets can often outcompete illegal markets. And that's certainly what we noticed after the end of prohibition, right? Prohibition doesn't solve the problems of alcohol. There's still alcoholism. But you can't buy whiskey from gangsters anymore. You know, you instead get it, you know, aged in oak expensively from Scotland. Yeah, absolutely.

Another example where out-competes, at least for a while in this country, was legalized abortion. I mean, out-competed the backroom abortions that were done illegally and dangerously. But we may see them come back. Yeah, and we'll talk about that in the context of kidneys. Let me ask you, Alvin, it's now 58 minutes. And we've done what was two hours before. Are you okay for another 20 minutes or 30 minutes, but I don't want to abuse you. But I want to get to, I want at least summarize and get to kidneys.

Let's do another 30 minutes and get to kidneys. You are a saint. Okay. That's what I was going to ask for 30 minutes, but I figured I asked for 20 minutes. but I figured I'd ask for 20 and see what you said. Great. Okay, we'll cut that. Well, maybe we won't cut that out. I want people to see how nice you are.

So, okay, the next one we talk about, and we mention it, is reproduction, is surrogacy. And again, the notion, it seems counterintuitive that groups that would be so desirous to say, banning contraceptives, because having children is a central part of God's plan for us, except for priests, as you pointed out. And that they would at the same time be against both IVF and in this case, let's say, surrogacy and maybe even call it a crime against humanity or something like that. And why? Well, let me just ask you that. Well, so that's a good reason. I think that they are, you know, the different transactions arouse different reasons. But it's worth noting that every aspect of reproduction is subject to repugnance, right? It's only in the 1960s that the Supreme Court

struck down bans on selling contraception in some states, right? So that's the desire to not get pregnant. And then, as you point out, IVF and surrogacy are repugnant. So IVF is, you know, trying to ban the ability to get pregnant and surrogacy, you know, the ability to have a child. And of course, now abortion is once again no longer a right of every American woman under special circumstances. So also the right to end a pregnancy is repugnant. So, you know, you can't win for losing. Well, and I suspect, speaking of how technology changes things, I mentioned to you, and I think I know people are investing in this, one may get rid of the whole process in the first place, that there are groups that are now looking at artificial placentas,

basically removing humans from the equation, direct human involvement from the equation, from conception to birth. And I'm certain that that will bring up a whole new set of repugnances. It certainly will, and we'll have more to talk about when we talk about designer babies and things like that. Absolutely. But what causes the problem with surrogacy is this point, you pointed earlier, that money may not be the root of all evil, but it's root of some repugnances. And the idea of, I mean, there's some groups that are totally against any idea of surrogacy,

the major opposition that has occurred is the notion that people somehow get paid for it, that people somehow get paid. And the idea, I guess, I don't know whether it's confusing substitution and complementarity, but the idea is somehow, well, that that is a bad thing and it will encourage bad things if we pay people for their wounds. Do you want to elaborate on that? Well, so the French law against surrogacy, I've read some of the commentary on the law when it was past says we understand that there are some families that need help to start a family.

There are some couples, some people who need help. And we understand that there are some women who would be willing to offer this help as surrogates, particularly if they were paid. But this is a wrong thing, and we don't do wrong things in France. So this is against public policy and against the law. Now, you know, we've talked about bans that give rise to black markets, but that's a ban that gives rise to fertility tourism. That is, if you are a person of means, you can come to California and have your names on the California birth certificate when you have a surrogate baby in California,

or in most American states now. So, of course, when bans don't work, there are people who circumvent the bans. That's what I mean when I say the ban doesn't work so well. But if you're trying, But if the ban is on surrogacy and the ban doesn't work so well, if it sometimes fails, then they're going to be babies. And the idea of banning surrogacy was you were going to protect vulnerable people, where the vulnerable people you had in mind were the women who were going to bear the babies. But there's nobody more vulnerable than a baby. So the French family courts, not the high court de cassation, not the constitutional court. The family courts have to decide with whom should this baby go home. And a really natural answer is babies go home with their parents.

So the French courts have made avenues for French surrogate parents to adopt their own children. And we've seen the same thing in Spain and in Germany. Whereas in Italy, there's movement to criminalize going to California to have a surrogate. They want extra territoriality on their laws against surrogacy. So we'll see what happens in Italy. But, you know, this is, as a. you say, we're all descended from generations that never failed to have a child, and some of us really want children, therefore, and adoption doesn't seem like a substitution all the time,

right? I mean, you could think that it might be, but it isn't always. In particular, in Sweden, where surrogacy is illegal, they pioneered uterus transplants. So people who really want to have their own baby can go to great lengths to have an old baby, get a uterus transplanted from a deceased donor or maybe from a relative who's through with childbearing. It's interesting that, and this is something actually we didn't discuss for, I'm glad we have a chance now, that we, when you say people are worried about vulnerabilities, that seems to be at the heart of a lot of these things. People are worried that people don't know what they're getting into or they're coerced to going into. But it's well-meaning people, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It seems to me, and it's sort of symbolic, I think, when I think about it, you have a colleague who's still around Thomas Sowell.

at Stanford, who has pointed out that this is enlightened people who think they know better than the people themselves, what's good for them, and they want to protect them from themselves. When people know, so Thomas Sol and a lot of people say government should not decide for people what they can decide for themselves. In these cases, there's another example that you talk about, which is payday loans, where it looks like you're worried about people being exploited because there's huge interest. but as you describe in the book, people in general who are doing that know what they're getting involved in, but these people who are trying to protect them from themselves and they end up hurting them

because they don't have an avenue to pay for X, Y, or Z today when they need the money today, even though you might be exploited. This is another example. The assumption that people who are, I don't know if there's data about how many people who feel they were tricked into doing surrogacy, but I suspect it's small because it's such a severe and owner. activity that I think it's not like, you know, I mean, it's nine months of having a chance to think about it. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and so, circuits are mothers, incidentally. And I think that's part of the New York state law, one of the more recent laws. But, but,

but, but let's not go so quickly over, over condemning paternalism, right? So, that's a word that, that's sort of a dirty word, uh, for government intervening, intervening in your affairs. But if you didn't behave paternalistically to your small children, you might be neglecting them, right? Sometimes they, they, you know, want to stay up late, then you know, that will make them ill or sleeping for school. Those are children. I mean, that's the whole point of paternalism. Treating adults as children, which is what a lot of this is doing is does them a disservice. Don't, at least I think, but I don't know if you agree. Let's take that a little carefully, because there's now a whole

field of behavioral economics, experimental and behavioral economics, that says that even those of us former children who've had enough birthdays to be legal adults might not always perfectly be able to to exercise our willpower and our judgment to do what we think is good for us, right? So drug addiction is one thing. Prescription markets are another, right? We don't let you take certain drugs, even if you've decided that, you know, you've got something that this powerful drug would cure. We like to have a doctor in the loop to tell you whether that's the right drug for you.

And in New York City, it failed, I mean, because of resentment about paternalism. But Mayor Bloomberg wanted to ban giant buckets of soda pop at fast food stores. So it's all you can drink. And the question is, can you put all you can drink in one big glass and take it to your table? Or do you have to go back to the soda fountain and get more? And his idea, which I think has a lot to be said for it, is, you know, we like to finish what's on our plates, even if it's not good for us. If you take more soda than you should drink, you might finish it. And I think if we go to dinner at a fancy restaurant in the Bay Area, we'll find that the fancier the restaurant, the smaller the portions are.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But, you know, I think your point is well taken. We don't, I didn't press record, which would have been a good thing to do. We all make mistakes, and we all do things that aren't necessarily good for us. That's part of being an adult and making mistakes. But the question is, and I'm not necessarily a libertarian here, but I understand the argument that, well, but why should we? we coerced to do what things that other people think are good, who don't know our circumstances.

Maybe in the end, while we will make mistakes on balance, we know our circumstances best, and therefore we can make the best judgment as opposed to some enlightened government bureaucrat or liberal or economist or whatever who says, well, no, no, this is really not what's good for you. Well, but if we see some mistakes that lots of people are making, we might try to help them avoid those mistakes. And that's what Consumer Protection Bureau is for.

It's also what Social Security is for. It's hard to save for retirement. And if you make a mistake and don't save for retirement, then by the time you notice it's too late. So Social Security is a form of required saving for retirement. And we think it'll leave fewer old people on the streets. As an old person who are retired from academia before you, I'm very happy about Social Security.

There you go. So that's something where there's a ban on not saving anything for retirement. I mean, no, that's why I'm not a pure libertarian or even a necessarily libertarian. But it's an issue that at least I respect the argument, that sometimes, you know, there are consequences. When we think we're doing good for people, there are undercutting consequences, especially when it's for someone remote where we're not part of their circumstances, like a payday. I mean, I didn't think about it until I read the book. And that's another thing I raised. And the last question I asked will probably be, there were a number of things I'd never thought. about in that context that caused me to ask questions, which is one of the reasons I like the book so much, and I want to commend you on it. But payday loans, I always thought about payday loans.

You know, I see them and I think, oh, what awful are those, you know, because everyone is going in is getting screwed. And then you think, well, no, but, you know, in fact, a lot of them know what they're doing, and they need it, and it works for them. So who am I to my highfalutin? So while we're on the subject of payday loans, let me jump ahead to pay for blood plasma. Okay, sure. In a lot of countries, it's illegal to pay for blood plasma. Yeah, let's go ahead. But the United States exports tens of billions of dollars of blood plasma. We have plenty because we pay for it.

And there's a pair of economists, I'm blocking on their name, so I'm not going to misremember them now. But there's a pair of economists who notice that when a facility that pays for blood plasma opens up, the number of payday loans goes down in that neighborhood. That's the example I was hoping, I was trying to remember myself. It's exactly the case. look, you know, exactly, because people are getting something they need. They're finding a new outlet to get some money and they don't need those payday lanes. So you're giving people the option, and it sounds like they're being exploited,

but in fact, it saves them, you know, oh, heaven forbid they sell their blood. But you also brought out with the, and as long as we're there, let's talk about the other issue that seems ridiculous, which is that in many countries there's this argument, which seems to have no logic whatsoever, that the country has to be self-sufficient in blood or plasma or, and that whereas we can buy oil from some, or we can buy food, but somehow buying blood from somewhere else is immoral.

And it's hard to understand why. And it's one of the rare cases where the U.S. is way ahead, right? Yeah. Let me explain some of the history of that, which makes it less hard to understand. What people were worried about in the 1970s, before there was a test for hepatitis in the blood supply, things like that, they were worried that the global north, the rich nations would suck the blood out of the poor nations, out of the global south, and that it would be low quality. That is, people who had diseases would nevertheless be undetectably donating blood, so it would be bad for everyone, and it would be repugnant. It would be repulsive. And it turned out that many nations don't pay for blood or plasma, but that there isn't the same kind of shortage that there is for kidneys because you can, you don't have to pay your domestic donors for blood plasma.

You can buy as much as you need from the United States. So right now, the places that are short of blood are in sub-Sahara Africa, places that can't really afford or aren't allowed by the terms of their foreign aid to buy plasma. and the use of blood plasma and blood in sub-saharan Africa is like World War I. I mean, it's very different than the medical uses in rich countries today. It's people who are bleeding. So people bleed to death because there are shortages of blood and plasma. So, you know, you'd like to fix that. But in the meantime, plasma is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines.

If you want to open a hospital anywhere in the world, you need plasma pharmaceuticals for, not just for hemophilia, but for all sorts of immune deficiency diseases and things like that, as well as for transfusions. So that's a case where many people think it's immoral to pay for blood, and you don't have to because you can buy it from America. Well, that's the hypocrisy. Once again, of people who make certain claims about abortion or medically assisted. dime, which you may get to. When you're buying from the United States, you're buying plasma that's been paid for already. So you're opposed to paying people in your country, but you're

fine with paying Americans for it. And it's, again, there doesn't seem to be any... I think the moral principle, I think the moral principle that's involved is called out of sight, out of mind. Yes, yeah. That's undoubtedly the case. Well, I, I, I will, I want to sort of skip for, well, before I want to get to kidneys because we won't be able to do a lot and maybe we'll talk about medically assisted dying and kidneys and then the future. I think that's how we'll end because we'll have to leave some things

out but people can read the book or actually what I will do by the way I think is when we post this I'm going to post the AI notes on our original dialogue so people who really want to can see some of the other issues we discussed which I think will be used to

at least we do that. But you know I do want to touch on adoption for a little bit because it's an issue that we talked about that I think is worth raising because it's politically incorrect to say what I'm going to say. And that is that there are obviously clearly repugnances to paying for babies and that and you know, rich versus poor and all that. But what surprised me is the is the arguments that seem to be one would say racist arguments against it. Namely, and you're not the kind of racism that you'd think about. In this case, you know, where repugnance is political,

I would argue, as much as anything else. I mean, there are historical antecedents, and I'm sure you're going to bring them up, but the National Association of Black Social Workers came out against black children being adopted by white families, which, by the way, if the reverse had happened, would be intolerable in our society. No one would, you know, there is no, of course, national association of white social workers. But, um, But, and the argument is, you know, one of, I guess, post-cultural appropriation at some level or something like that, that it's a bad thing for them to, for white people to adopt black children.

And you pointed out that, okay, there's a history of this, and why don't you explain the history? So the history that might be relevant is the history of taking Native American children and First Nation children in Canada and Aboriginal children in Australia, away from their families and trying to civilize them by raising them in boarding schools. And that didn't work very well.

It wasn't very good for the children. So we don't have a good history, you know, of rich people dealing with poor people, of always making good judgments about what's in the best interests of the child. And so I went into thinking about adoption, thinking that that was going to be my conclusion that I thought.

But in each case, the overriding concern should be best interest of that child. But we have now laws about Indian nations that say that the Indian nation can preclude a decision to allow an Indian child, American Indian child, to be adopted by, you know, a white family if there's an Indian family that's willing to adopt them without necessarily letting the best interest of the child be decisive. So that's really quite striking because most of our laws about children have that phrase in the best interest of the child. But part of the system that you have to think about is maybe judges aren't good at judging that. So what you'd like is great judges would make wise decisions about the best interests of every child. But if that's not happening, then you might want to put some handcuffs on some of those judges. You have to think about it.

But I wanted to take this chance and it's a little community content to point. out that I think some of this is generated, that groups that want us four political points, claiming that there are systemic racism here or there, we use it. And in your book, it's the only error I thought I found in the book, at least factual error that I could. And that was the claim that in Canada, for example, children taken from inter-residential schools, there were these mass graves, unmarked graves, and it caused a huge change in Canadian social policy, as you pointed out, the Prime Minister of Canada talked about it and it's affected everything. But in fact, there hasn't been a single grave unearthed that that claim in the residential

schools in Kamloops of 250. Nothing, not a single body exhumed, no evidence that it actually happened, but it's changed policy. And it is such a sensitive social issue and so effective in causing this concern about oppression of indigenous peoples. if you're a university professor like Francis Woodison, who was in Canada, was just arrested for trespassing at a university, University of Lethbridge, for going to, and more or less talking and asking the question about whether, or making the point that these graves hadn't been

discovered. That was viewed as doing harm to students to talk about that. So these issues are more nuanced. And so I'm, I guess, I'm more suspicious about the, I, I, I'm, I think the key point you made there is that in every case, the well-being of the child should be what matters, not the identity of necessarily of the groups or the past or transgressions of the past. It should be the present and the future. And what really matters in terms of adoption or anything else should be the well-being of the child, that individual child. But you're right.

Your point is well taken that judges and systems often don't get that right either. Okay. I know. I've made my... Incidentally, you know, another controversial market that we're witnessing these days. it has to do with academic freedom, what professors can write and teach. Well, and again, to self-promote,

my last book, which we've done a lot on this podcast for, is about the war on science, which is the war on free speech, which is of great concern to me because it's an anathimate, not just to science, but to all of scholarships. And, well, I do want to briefly touch on medically assisted dying, because I think it's another topic where, well, there's a lot of repugnance,

but the question is, is what is wrong with committing suicide? I mean, you know, I was strongly influenced in that discussion by Kammu when I was younger, and it seems to me the ultimate freedom at some level to be able to commit suicide. But the idea is that once again, people, will be exploited or vulnerable. And yet, and also the claim, these, these absolutist claims that any, I think, I think you quote Neil Gorsuch in a place I can't find right now.

But he's against medical aid and dying. He's definitely against, oh yeah, here I found it. With Apria, no matter what, as he says, and as he said, I guess before becoming a Supreme Court justice, the theory rests on the notion that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong. That is, it seems to me, to be so ludicrous as, I mean, to make such an absolute statement, you know, he's also, you know, if you're in favor of capital punishment, for example, or a case like that if he was adjudicating as a judge of self-defense, if someone comes into your house with a gun is about to shoot you,

it doesn't happen often, but you happen to have a gun and you kill them, clearly it would argue that that's not always wrong. And so to argue something is always wrong because it proves what you want and make an absolute claim, either it's a crime against humanity or always wrong as a way of just stopping the discussion and not allowing a rational question of what's better for people is a problem. And it's where ideology confronts reality.

I don't know if you want to comment on that at all. Well, so, you know, medical aid and dying in the U.S. And in Canada is very controversial. It's controversial in England, where it looks like they're not going to legalize it, although they got close a couple of times. partly it's controversial among doctors who think that, you know, they're supposed to try to prevent death rather than to assist dying. But, of course, it's controversial because lots of doctors think they're meant they're supposed to help alleviate suffering.

And medical aid and dying is mostly about elderly advanced stage cancer victims who would die in pain if, you know, if they didn't get help. And of course, in places where medical aid and dying is not legal, that doesn't mean. there's no medical aid in dying, precisely because pain drugs can end life as well as reduced pain. So I think that's part of what we're talking about is that it's irregularly available, probably more to richer people than to poorer people, and that it might work better if it were made more transparent and if people at death's door were able to have, you know, to die with dignity. Now, the laws in different places are different. We're going to learn things. from them. So in the 12 or 13 American jurisdictions that allow medical aid and dying, a medical

team has to declare that the patient who wants medical aid and dying is dying. We'll be dead in six months in the ordinary course of events, and this is meant to ease the pain of that transition. But in Canada, the law says just that you have to have something that can't be fixed. You have to have irremediable pain that might not kill you. And that's a different law and different you know, not so many people, but some people in Canada take advantage of Canadian medical aid and dying who wouldn't be eligible for American medical aid and dying.

It's a big critique in Canada that it's a lot easier to get a prescription to die than say a MRI and much quicker. Other people say, but at the other side, and it's actually, the repugnance issue is going to get worse, as you probably know, because there is the potential for legislation to say for people who have mental illnesses as well.

So that, and that would, that's a huge. It's a huge. That's been put off a number of times. They keep saying next year when we have the right regulations in place, we're going to do it. And that's been for several years now. But at the same time, it's interesting. And I think when we discussed this before, neither of us really quite knew the answer, that our mutual friend, Danny Kahneman, who's a famous economist, I guess, or psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for economics as a psychologist, went to Switzerland. And I wouldn't say necessarily perfect health, but not, and no evident, neither an immediate disease or mental illness and said, you know, time's up.

And yet there doesn't seem to be any controversy in Switzerland, which is kind of interesting. It seems to be much more lax than either country. So it's a clearly... You know, I don't speak well, I can't keep track of all the controversies in Switzerland. Well, as I, having spent a year in Switzerland, numerous times in Switzerland in both Geneva at CERN and Zurich, I can understand how the Swiss people would let people die. But you know, this question of medical aid and dying isn't a modern one. the Hippocratic Oath, you know, ancient Greece.

Hippocrates wanted his students to say they wouldn't take part in medical aid and dying. And of course, what that means is people who were at death store were asking for help and dying in ancient Greece. Yeah. Okay, there we go. Let's now get to end here to kidneys, which is a real, I mean, it's a hope and a tragedy. the whole, well, the fact that progress has been made is one thing, and progress has been made through your kidney exchanges, which I don't think this time we've talked about. Why do you explain what you managed to do? Okay, so there's a big shortage of kidneys for transplant.

We talked about that. There's 130,000 new cases of kidney failure in the U.S. each year, and we do fewer than 30,000 transplants. Some of them are from living donors. Healthy people have two kidneys and can remain healthy with one. So if you are healthy enough to give one of your kidneys, which many people are, you might be able to save the life of someone you love. But sometimes you can't give them a kidney because kidneys are a matching market.

The kidney has to match the patient's physiology. You can't have antibodies to your proteins. And so there are fewer living donor transplants than that. there would be if that weren't an obstacle. And one way to overcome the obstacle is to allow people, allow patient donor repairs to exchange kidneys so that each patient gets a compatible kidney from another patient's intended donor. And, you know, the simplest kind of exchanges between two pairs, you want to give a kidney to someone you love. And you're healthy enough to give a kidney, and I'm healthy enough to give a kidney and want to give it to someone I love. But the

person I love, who maybe is the mother of my child, might have developed antibodies to the paternal proteins during childbirth. So I can't give her a kidney and neither can the child. But I could give your intended recipient to kidney, and you might be able to give mine a kidney. That's a basic kidney exchange. And there's many more complicated kinds of kidney exchanges now. Some of them are chains started by non-directed donors, donors who want to give a kidney to someone, but don't have a particular person in mind. And we have more than 500 a year of those in the U.S. And they are really effective in helping people get kidneys

because they can start a kidney exchange chain that doesn't have to circle back to them so it can be long. It can be a long chain. It can be non-simultaneous. So each pair waiting for kidney exchange, but hard to match because they have a lot of antibodies, each pair can get a kidney before they give one. And some of those chains can be pretty long.

So there's a lot of transplants that now, thousands of transplants a year that come through kidney exchange, but it's not enough. We have much more kidney disease than we have kidneys. So there's always the question of, would it be okay to be more generous to kidney donors and to amend the law that says you can't pay the donor? And so there's a bit of legislation in front of Congress now, you know, trying to gather sponsors called the end kidney deaths. Act and it proposes to pay an income tax credit to non-directed donors. So we're not talking about something that's very expensive. And of course, it would save the American healthcare system money because dialysis, which is the alternative treatment, is not only, not nearly as good of treatment.

It has much less longevity, much more mortality. It's also much more expensive because a year of dialysis costs roughly around what a what a transplantation costs, what a transplant cost. But after a year of dialysis, you need another year of dialysis. So we pay for most dialysis and most transplants in this country through Medicare. So it's taxpayer money. And a lot of, not only would lives be saved, lots of lives if kidneys were not so scarce, but a lot of money would be saved.

Medicare spends $55 billion a year on kidney failure, almost all of it on dialysis. Well, there's a lot to unpack there, but let me just say to give you credit, because you didn't do it here, that I think one of the many things that your works that it was acknowledged with that prize and among your colleagues and changing the world as well, was the fact that the matching thing, you know, it doesn't, it's probably not that frequent where you have a two-person match, where one person can be a match for the other person's needed kidney and vice versa. So chains, so the complicated chains, and that is a more interesting mathematical problem. And my understanding is that your theoretical work was also seminal in extending the... I contributed to the theoretical work.

My colleague, Etayashlagi, is very important in this. Okay, that you and your colleagues, and we point out it's a science is a social activity, not an individual one. But the other thing that we should mention is that while that kidney exchange works well, if the chain must end at a border, which is another ridiculous thing, that somehow you can't go to the rest of the world and there's lots of reasons for that. And that, again, seems to be problematic. And one hopes there might be some kind of international agreements, right, that would help that. Right.

And I've been working on that. I was at a transplant conference in Cairo in November, and we're trying to forge a new consensus on international cooperation in kidney exchange. And we've started to invite some foreign patient donor pairs into American kidney exchange. But it's very controversial. Well, and let's talk about, okay, this kidney exchange, and you mentioned that the paying, and people are horrified by the idea of paying for someone's kidney, you know, oh my God, people will be vulnerable, they're poor, they're going to give their kidneys up and all

the rest. But given the number, there's one number you didn't, which you quote in the book, which you didn't mention here, which I think is really important. And we alluded to it in our last discussion, I think it's worthwhile. People are opposed to me paying you for your kidney or some private person. But a team of healthcare researchers carefully estimated that paying American donors about $80,000 for a kidney would not only save tens of thousands of additional lives each year, but would also save taxpayers about $7 billion annually since Medicare covers dialysis for patients of all ages, something I hadn't realized. So one could imagine something where there isn't a commodity one person buying for another, but where the government simply pays people,

so it's not an individual, and the government is going to start, you know, isn't going to start going at the street corner saying, hey, can I have your kidney, where the government is an intermediary and simply pays people and says, if you want to donate a kidney, we'll pay you $80,000. And that seems to admit like it shouldn't be repugnant. And it would be rational and workable in every way. Well, you could imagine things that would go wrong. But the way you could tell whether you'd have a success in a market like that would be after a while there'd be books in airport bookstores with titles like the kidney donor-sellers guide to nutrition and fitness. You too can qualify to give a kidney.

Absolutely. And there's two, just bear with me for three or four more minutes, but here you point out that their opposition for this remarkably comes from among other places from kidney surgeons, transplant surgeons. And the interesting thing is, once again, I want to point out, it's a difference between a scientist and science. The surgeons often come up with anecdotal reasons. They don't like it or they don't think a market would work, but they're not economists.

And they're not being scientists. They're basically saying, I don't like it. And instead of being a scientist saying, well, would it work? What would be the implications? What are the examples where it works, et cetera, et cetera? And so I find it very interesting that just because they're kidney transplant surgeons doesn't mean they have any expertise or any really value more than anyone else in our about the overall repugnance or utility of solving this problem.

I found it a very interesting... So kidney surgeries, of course, are divided. There are some that we'd like to see... But there are two of the major ones you talk about in the book. But the example, and again, I'd be remiss if we didn't just mention this example before we go to the conclusions, which is there are experiments, and I know you love experiments. And when I read at this, I laughed because I thought from a marketing perspective, it's the

worst possible, if you want to say, let me point to X. There are two places where we can point to X where Kines are paid for, and that's China and Iran. The two places that, at least in this country, are not going to get you, score you a lot of points. Let's not talk about China, which has issues about prisoners and all that. But I was fascinated to learn about Iran. So if you wouldn't take three or four minutes just talking about what goes on in Iran, which is remarkable. So Iran has a legal market for kidneys, supervised by two national charities, I think. And but but the you know, so people pay for kidneys in in Iran, living donor kidneys. They also have deceased donor donation.

And one of the things that it strikes me about it is, is that everyone agrees, I think, that the kidney donor sellers in Iran and the kidney patients in Iran who go through this market, this monetary market for kidneys, nevertheless get excellent health care. Everything is done in top-notch Iranian transplant hospitals, which they apparently have, you know, world-class hospitals. So that's very different from black markets that operate elsewhere in the world where some of the surgeries, the nephrectomies and the transplants aren't even done in hospitals because there's a law against doing transplants with paid donors. And of course, when patients come back to their home country, they still need care. and often they need a lot of care because they've gotten, if they've gotten a black market transplant, they've gotten a really poor quality medical care. So they come back with opportunistic

infections and things like that. So it's a little bit like thinking about heroin and overdose deaths. You know, we hate heroin. We'd like to have none of it. But maybe we could reduce a number of overdose deaths given how much heroin we've got. So even for people who hate the idea of paying for kidneys, I think they also hate the bad black markets that that give really substandard medical care. And just as with whiskey, you know, legal markets can outcompete substandard black markets. And yeah, whenever there's something that people need, they're going to look for it. And it's whether it's sex or drugs or in this case, a kidney, they're going to look for it.

And if we can have a market, then it can out-compet black markets. And that alone is one reason to at least begin thinking about it. And in general, I want to quote the quote you gave from Frank McCormick, who said, if you're against kidney plant,ance, but this works for many things for which there are tradeoffs of monetary tradeoffs or other things. He said, those who argue against those who argue against compensated kidney donors should preface their remarks with a statement such as the following. even though I realize the position I advocate will result in the deaths of tens of thousands of kidney failure patients each year, I nonetheless think my arguments are sufficiently important to justify those deaths. And that, as I say, that isn't just necessarily for kidneys. It could be for prostitutes or anything where you're going to result in death or harm to people.

You've got to say, well, but my argument works better. And it may be true in some cases, but if you're not willing to make that statement, then at some level you're not willing to address the empirical realities of the world and I think you're saying I don't like this independent of reality and the whole point

as we'll get to in a moment is that if we don't make based public policy on what's reality we're always going to end up at some level harming people we didn't need to harm anyway I want to in the last little bit you know you talk about emerging controversies

we've already talked about a number of them, and we've talked about how technology changes things and brings about more repugnance. I do want to, if you don't mind, mention this, you cause me to think of something, and I want to point it out because when someone causes me to think about new things that I never would have asked before, I just think it's one of the great virtues of a book of reading and thinking.

And one of the things you talked about was banned substances and performance-enhancing drugs, the Lance Armstrong scandal and all the rest. Where we can, at a priori, we would say, well, it's obvious it's a bad thing because it gives unfair advantage to some people. But on the other hand, lots of people are going to be using it anyway,

and there are new technologies to overcome that. So should we just have a regulated system? And as you point out, actually, repugnance views are changing in that regard, that because of new technologies, there's more considerations of potentially having at some level what are now banned performance sensing drugs allowed. So certainly soldiers and truck drivers use amphetamines, not just bicycle racers.

And for bicycle racing, it gives you an unfair advantage. But if you're a soldier and you're a special operator and you're doing something dangerous in the night, you don't want to be sleepy before you get home. And similarly, you know, if mathematicians who were undergraduates and you're used Adderall to help them study. If they use Adderall to help them prove that P equals NP, we won't discard the theorem because they cheated and used a stimulant to prove an important theorem. And ultimately, as we said earlier, I mean, I may sound harsh when I say this, but athletes are,

first of all, most of them are genetic mutants in one way or another that have abilities that the rest of us don't. But we also, in other ways, I mean, we take them to high altitudes, increase their red blood cells. we, in rich countries, given the best coaches and best costumes, it may have less friction. And so, you know, maybe we should just say, you know, go for it. And I think you pointed out that there's a group that's suggesting just that, right? Right, right. There's a group that's trying to organize some what they call enhanced games, which is getting people who were pretty good athletes but didn't break any world records and having them, I guess, secede from the general's

sporting organizations and see if they can break some records by taking as many steroids as they want or whatever. Well, at some level, as I say, athletes are a separate community that is doing this. And I, at some level, I say, well, you know, we shouldn't pretend that they're not enhanced one way or another. Just let them go at it. But even if it's more than genetics. But the thing that it would cause me to think about, which I never would have thought about, because I had an inherent repugnance to the notion of transgender athletes, you know, competing, because they have an unfair advantage, you know, you'd think. in not every sport, not in curling or other things,

but maybe in running or swimming, that biological males have an inherent advantage compared to females. And you can see it all the time, and there's lots of media about this. And my initial response was, well, they should be banned because it's unfair. But what reading your book caused me to think, well, maybe I'm just jumping to a conclusion. Maybe there are markets,

maybe there's a way to regulate this in a way that allows some more fairness and allows also people who want to be athletes, but happen to be transgender when one or another other to compete. One can imagine many things. One can imagine special competitions. But that, I think, is different.

I was thinking just after we talked about another possibility, which is instead of having a universal ban, having a case-by-case analysis and looking at each transgender person and saying, okay, well, there's a cut. And you may not have an unfair advantage, even though you're trying.

But there's lots of possibilities, and I never would have even considered the possibilities of a market or regulation if it hadn't been your book. Okay. Well, that's not something I talked about in the book, but it might be something that we'll see more discussion of. You know, we'll see.

I mean, it may not be important, but I think the idea that, you know, I got feeling that it's wrong and unfair, but the question is, are there ways to make it fair or at least acceptable? And will technologies, you know, change that result? Will technologies that can allow us to assess,

say, the fairness advantage of a given transgender, individual, will there be technologies that allow us to do that? Well, in a case... There was a case, not transgender, but of a double amputee who was a runner, and he could choose the kind of prosthetics he used, and just as in running, they try to regulate your running shoes about how much energy they return from each stride. That was an issue.

You know, what kind of springs could he run on? He had other complications since then. Well, yeah, it'll always bring on these new things, but it's worthwhile thinking that we have to be able to respond to new things without, we can't solve, Einstein said it, we can't solve new problems with thinking that solved old problems all the time. And he was talking about atomic weapons at the time, but I think it's true more generally. That's a good line to end on. Yeah, well, I want to end it on your line, if you don't mind. but you know you end the book at the last page talking about the last page of the book so what should we do when we can't agree on what's right and what's wrong we should be

suspicious of strong opinions including our own and as I pointed earlier I think I think that's I would change that word to be especially our own so Richard Feynman always said the person you should trust least is yourself when it comes because you have your biases if you're a scientist based on weak evidence it will be productive to collect evidence conduct experiments and listen hard to each other as we try to find effective and ethical ways to fix markets that aren't working well and to build support for doing so. And that I think is poetic for me because that's science. That's what science is all about. And what you're advocating is something you said at the beginning, which is if we just apply the principles of science,

we're likely to result in policies that are more rational and better for everyone else. And this podcast is all about science and culture. And here's an exact case where science applied to culture can make the world a better place. I really applaud your work as a professional academic and your individual thoughts about this. And I, once again, and your kindness to doing this for me. But I've really appreciated this. Appreciate the book. And I think it's a very important issue.

And thank you for the redo and for the book. Well, thank you. And I hope not to do this a third time. Yeah, yeah. No, no. Well, third time may be a charm. No, it's okay. Thank you very much.

Yeah. Thank you.