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

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Starting point is 00:02:43 Friday subscribers. So check it out. Tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls, munchkins and mogwais. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And I just realized, I don't know if the plural of mogwai is mogwais. Maybe a fictional linguist out there can tell me what the right answer is. The Tim Ferriss Show, as you guys know, probably maybe is about deconstructing world class performers. And in this particular episode, we have a repeat guest that is Steven J Dubner,

Starting point is 00:03:33 perhaps best known as the coauthor of the Freakonomics book series and creator of the top ranked Freakonomics radio podcast, which I had the pleasure to be on once. It is incredibly well produced and he's back to answer your most burning questions, which I'll get to in a minute. And he also has a new podcast that just came out that you guys should check out. Tell me something I don't know is the name. It is a new live event and podcast from both the New York Times and Stephen Dubner. You could think of it as equal parts game show, talk show, and brain tease. I actually had a chance to experiment with this Formass. Formass. Formass, I'll leave it to you what that might mean. Format, as a panelist alongside Malcolm Gladwell in a prototype version. It was an absolute blast.

Starting point is 00:04:25 So check it out. Tell me something I don't know. And in terms of topics, he covers a lot that I've been asked about, and he has far more experience in many of these areas. There are some silly questions like why do cats wiggle their butts before they pounce? A lot of you submitted some pretty ridiculous, but nonetheless, pretty funny questions. So he covers a few of those and then jumps into podcasting and radio journalism questions about storytelling, editing, increasing the reach of your podcast, and then delves into a lot of personal and book related questions. So the destiny, as it were, of the golf book that he was working on with his frequent collaborator, Levitt. The three books that shaped him into the person he is today. So the three books that most

Starting point is 00:05:12 shaped him. And if you want to check that out, if you only have five minutes, I would say jump to that. It's 26 minutes roughly after the end of this intro. And does he think he could take Malcolm Gladwell in a fistfight? Then a segue to economics. So South Korea and digital currency, cryptocurrency. What influence does the president actually have on the economy? That's a separate question. Technologies related to or that actually are part of VR, for instance, and how that might affect education, then life advice, teaching kids critical thinking projects that you might pursue or give to your kids to get them excited about economics, et cetera, et cetera. It is very, very rich. And you can say hi to him at Freakonomics on Twitter, Facebook, and everywhere else. So without further ado,

Starting point is 00:06:03 please enjoy this round two with Stephen J. Dubner. Hey, everybody, this is Stephen Dubner. Thanks for sending in questions to Tim Ferriss. And thanks especially to Tim for letting me take over part of the podcast today. I really appreciate it. I'm a big fan of Tim's. As you all probably know, we've had him on Freakonomics Radio. We've had him on a podcast I did for a while called Question of the Day with my buddy James Altucher. Tim was also a panelist on this live version of this game show that I was developing called Tell Me Something I Don't Know, which I'm happy to say now has been developed and it's releasing kind of this week as a brand new podcast. So I'm a big admirer of Tim's and I

Starting point is 00:06:50 really appreciate getting a chance to talk to people like me who admire the work that Tim does and how, you know, I guess there are a lot of things I like about it, but to me, the main thing is that it's a real hybrid of empirical and inspirational, which is, I think, a winning blend. So anyway, the way this worked is Tim sent out a call via his bat signals to listeners and readers of his to solicit questions for me. And I got the questions. There are a lot of questions. I'll probably only be able to answer a relatively small share of them. The questions range all over. Topics from economics, which I can talk about a little bit, even though I'm not an economist. My buddy Steve Levitt is the economist part of our Freakonomics partnership, but I've learned a little bit over the years. A lot of questions

Starting point is 00:07:41 about Freakonomics Radio, our podcast about the Freakonomics books, all kinds of questions. So I will talk about all that and much more, including, like I said, this new podcast that we're launching right now, Tell Me Something I Don't Know. The questions range from rather substantial to less substantial. For instance, Alex Norton wanted to know, why do cats wiggle their butts before they pounce? So Alex, Alex, let me Google that for you. Why do cats wiggle their butts before they bounce? It is a way for them to get into position and brace themselves before they attack. Domestic cats share a similar feature. Instead of grinding the ground with their hind legs, they wiggle their behind vigorously to attain balance and leverage. Kittens learn to do this from their mother cat. So, Alex, by the way, do you all know the site? Let me Google that for you, because if you don't, you should, and it will save you a lot of time in the end. Here's a question from Marty Boizik, maybe. So this is one of several questions about podcasting, essentially, and radio journalism.

Starting point is 00:08:48 So I don't know how many people really care about podcasting and radio journalism. Obviously, anyone listening to this cares about it as a consumer. I don't know about as a producer. On the other hand, there are something like between three and three hundred and fifty thousand podcasts being published right now. So maybe we're at peak podcast or in podcast bubble. I don't know. Maybe they'll keep growing. I do think that the consumption is growing more slowly than the production. But assuming that, you know, judging from the number of questions that you guys had about podcasting, I guess that people do care. So I'll answer a few along these lines. Marty wrote to say, it seems like Dubner's unique ability to tell a great story. Oh, I like

Starting point is 00:09:31 it. Flattery is what really adds a viral component to the deep science and typically boring economic research. How could that storyfication of help other hard sciences or traditionally boring subjects that are really important? Right. So, Marty, here's what I would say. First of all, thanks for the kind words. It's nice. I agree that storytelling is incredibly important. There are many ways to argue for why that is true. I'll give one example. One example would be what is the best read book in the history of the world? Arguably, not even really that arguably, most people would argue that it's the Bible. So what is the Bible? Well, it's a lot of things, but it contains the most famous set of laws in the history of humankind, right?

Starting point is 00:10:22 The Ten Commandments. So you would think that everybody would know those, since it's the most famous laws in the history of humankind, right? The Ten Commandments. So you would think that everybody would know those, since it's the most famous laws and the most famous in the most read book. And yet, if you ask people, it turns out that I believe it's about 17% of Americans can actually name the Ten Commandments. And a relatively large share can't name even one of the Ten Commandments. So lest you think that this is just a product of people having a bad memory, I should say that, you know, 17% can recite all Ten Commandments. A higher percent can recite either all the ingredients of a Big Mac or all six siblings in the Brady Bunch.

Starting point is 00:11:07 So that's pretty weird that the most famous set of laws in the history of humankind in the most read book of all time aren't that well-known or at least that well-remembered. So what does that indicate? I would argue, this is just me making this argument, I would argue it indicates that we, meaning humans, really love stories and gravitate to stories. Because what we do remember from the Bible, even people who are not religious at all, even people who have no connection to Judeo-Christian biblical traditions at all, the stories from the Bible continue to be passed down and continue to be known and discussed and, you know, maybe not argued about. Some people argue about them in a either academic or, you know, theological way or sometimes even a political way. But people know who Moses was. People know about Adam and Eve. You know, once you get into Christian theology, people certainly know about Jesus and the stories about Jesus, despite even if they haven't read the Bible

Starting point is 00:12:10 at all. And so to me, that is an argument for that. And we can make a whole lot of other arguments about, you know, Gilgamesh and the Odyssey and on and on and on and Shakespeare and, you know, all the way up to, you know, maybe even including Pauly Shore, for God's sake. So I think that is a piece of evidence that argues that storytelling has a power that goes well beyond what you can kind of, you know, it goes well beyond the sum of its parts. We actually did a podcast recently called, I believe it was called This Is Your Brain On Podcast, it's a Freakonomics Radio episode, that looked at an amazing neuroscientist named Jack Gallant looked at how people's brains in an fMRI, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine,

Starting point is 00:12:55 respond when listening to stories told in a podcast. He used the Moth Story Hour, Moth Radio Hour. So it turns out that the brain, you know, the process, the production of language is fairly, happens in a relatively small part of the brain or small area of the brain, but the consumption of language and especially of storytelling kind of goes all the way across the brain. And so there is a lot of argument for why storytelling is really important. Okay. So if that's the case, you know, what do you do about that? How do you harness that for whatever your goal is? So, you know, Marty's question seems to be, how can this help other hard sciences or traditionally boring subjects that are really

Starting point is 00:13:36 important? So, yeah, I think storytelling can be a big help, whether the realm that you want to teach about or communicate about is physics, is accounting, is whatever. So I think the storytelling has components that are important. Factual is important. Empirical is important. You know, the thing about a lot of the academic research, so Freakonomics Radio, we really, even though it's sort of based or rooted in economics, the fact is, is that we try to go way beyond economics and deal with a lot of the other social sciences, psychology, sociology, and so on. But also, especially in the last couple years, a lot of other disciplines, academic and otherwise. And I think that's important for a lot of reasons.

Starting point is 00:14:26 A, it's fun to kind of explore those and teach those. And B, if you think about it, a lot of the best research that's being done in the world is being done in academic institutions. But the nature of academia being what it is, it's kind of a little silo where the experts speak to each other. They write for each other in a language of their own for journals that only they read. And to me, that's a shame and a drag and a waste of taxpayer and other money. And so I'm all for taking that specialized research and knowledge and disseminating it to the public, to we who want it, to we who could use it, and to we who kind of deserve it, because, you know, we really do own a part of these

Starting point is 00:15:08 universities. Even private universities get a ton of taxpayer funding. So I'm all in favor of taking that big well of material and turning it into stories. Again, when I say stories, I don't mean made up. I mean factual, empirical, researched, fact-checked, and so on. And that's what we try to do pretty much every week with Freakonomics Radio. I should say this new show, Tell Me Something I Don't Know, goes even further beyond economics than Freakonomics Radio. So we are getting ready to release the first six episodes. The first one coming out November 7th, I believe. Then we'll do one a week for six weeks. And then we're already taping season two and we'll probably release us some interesting fact or story about whatever, whatever the theme of the night is, then I and the panelists discuss it. But like the themes we did for the first six there's one was called Strange Danger. So it's literally about things that are dangerous that you might not think about or know about.

Starting point is 00:16:28 Number two is called It's Alive. So it's about literally anything in the animal-ish kingdom. Episode three, I believe, is called Things That Go In Your Mouth. So food, but could be medicine, a variety of other things. Episode number four, of course, Things that come out of your mouth, language, singing, maybe vomit, you never know. Another episode called Passion Plays about people who are passionate, often beyond logic to some cause or hobby or whatever. And our sixth episode is called Fool Me Once, which is essentially about fakes and frauds of different kinds. So in each case, we kind of recruited contestants, often

Starting point is 00:17:13 they're academics. Honestly, a lot of them were PhDs or MDs, and they tell us their stories and facts. And often the root of their knowledge is academic, even fairly arcane. But in story form, these academic or even arcane stories or facts in story form, they really do enlighten you. So you kind of come away with this feeling that, wow, I learned something that I never would have gone into some medical journal or economics journal or, you know, legal review, law review journal, I never would have gone looking for that. But when it's told in the right way by the right people in story form, the idea is that it makes us all a little bit smarter. Yeah, sure. Smarter is good. But also, you know, my argument is that the more we know, the more kind of, you know, I don't know if moderate is the right word, but the more that people know about the way the more we know, the more kind of, you know, I don't know if moderate is the right word, but the more that people know about the way the world really works, the less stupidity

Starting point is 00:18:11 we are likely to engage in. I'm not saying we will engage in less stupidity, but we become less likely to. Now, there's not a lot of evidence that huge amount of exposure to knowledge and information necessarily makes the average person less stupid. And in fact, there's a lot of research that shows that the most educated people tend to hold the most extreme views on a lot of important hot button issues. But I'm a believer in finding out as much stuff as I can and telling other people about it because it's exciting to share that. And that's basically what I do as a journalist, whether in writing form or radio form or whatnot.

Starting point is 00:18:44 Here's another question about podcasts from Stan Islis. Islis, sorry, I'm going to, I'm sure mispronounce names. By the way, he's asking about tips for editing podcasts. One tip is in a podcast, you always try to find out how to pronounce things. Even, you know, when you're writing something, you don't have to know how to pronounce. But often a very basic rule of podcasting is when you're pronouncing a place or a thing or a name, you do try to go do some reporting with a first person, a primary source to figure out how you actually say it. Since that's important, you'll always make mistakes, but it's a good thing to try to do. So Stan wants to know top tips.

Starting point is 00:19:18 Of course, I'm ignoring that advice now. I could have hunted down Stan Islis Islis and written to him and said, how do you pronounce your name? And I didn't. So, you know, sorry. Anyway, Stan, I will call him top tips to edit your podcast to make them shorter without losing too much valuable information. He says you cannot beat Freakonomics when it comes to quality info to length ratio. Well, it's interesting you write that because I've been thinking a lot about whether our podcast Freakonomics radio especially, is too long. And with the new show, Tell Me Something I Don't Know, again, we thought a lot about what's the optimal length. And on that one, it looks like our first six episodes are all going to be in the neighborhood of 45 to 50 minutes.

Starting point is 00:19:57 So the problem is we don't have really good data on what people really want. Not that I would make that the primary driver of what we do, because I think that when you're creating something, you have to primarily listen to yourself and your circle of people that you think are good and smart. If you pay too much attention to a big sloppy feedback loop, you'll get paralyzed or you'll try to please everybody. But in terms of editing, so first of all, I do like editing. My podcasts probably do sound the way they do in part because I'm a writer and came to this as a writer, not a talker. And as a writer, editing is hugely, hugely important. So whether it's a book or an article or even an email, the first version is never the best. There are elements of it that are good, hopefully, but editing is really important. And so my feeling on whether it's Freakonomics Radio or Tell Me Something I Don't

Starting point is 00:20:56 Know or even Question of the Day with James Altucher or any podcast, you as the producer are, even though you're giving it to people for free, right? You're not charging them anything for it. You are charging them for it in that you're asking for their time. There's also advertising, which they might listen to and they might, and that's how most podcasts make money. But you know, if I'm asking you for 45 minutes, that's a lot that you're giving me. And so I feel it's important to work as hard as I can to make the 45 minutes worthwhile. So top tips to editing to make them shorter without losing too much. It's just like writing every single sentence, every single story, every single sound effect, whatever.

Starting point is 00:21:40 You really just think, you know, is this advancing the story? Is it telling us something we don't know yet? Is it not redundant? Does it move me? Does it interest me as a listener? And, you know, there are a variety of intellectual ways to assess those questions. Then there's also the gut check, which is when I listen to a rough cut of any episode, you know, do I find myself, do I find my attention drifting? And if I do,

Starting point is 00:22:06 it's a pretty sure case. That's a pretty sure sign that it needs to be shorter. So yeah, I'm pretty ruthless. I would say for every 30 minutes of Freakonomics radio that we put out as a finished podcast, there's probably at least typically at least three to five hours of tape that doesn't make the cut. So that's the idea. One more question about podcasting. This is from Rob Moore. Pretty sure I'm pronouncing that right. Rob asks, what are your suggestions for growing the reach of your podcast? So I think this is really simple. I think if you want to grow the reach of your podcast, you produce good and consistent content, period. So obviously, that sounds like a smart

Starting point is 00:22:47 ass answer. It's not meant to. And by good and consistent, that means a few things. Good, meaning you think about it, you produce it well, you edit it well, you publish it well, all that stuff. Consistent, meaning if you're going to be a monthly, be a monthly. If you're going to be weekly, be a weekly. If you're going to be a daily, be a daily. But to put one out on Tuesday and then another one out six months from now, and then four in a hurry, then so on, that's tricky. But I really do feel that almost everything else that people talk about for growing something like a podcast or a newsletter or a TV show, whatever it is, I think that almost everything else that most people, especially in marketing and advertising realms, talk about, almost everything else is overrated.

Starting point is 00:23:32 So I think that promoting your work on social media is hugely overrated. I think that marketing is hugely overrated. It's hard to manufacture demand. If, however, you make good and consistent content, then social media can help and marketing can help. People will be enthusiastic about finding and consuming and even promoting for you what you're making. But it's all about making good and consistent content. And you should try to spend 95% of your time doing that and maybe 5% of the time worrying about growing the reach of your podcast. Now that said, look, I'm doing this podcast on Tim. I asked Tim if I could come be on his podcast to talk about this new show of mine and to talk about whatever else, because I've made a show,

Starting point is 00:24:22 the new show, tell me something on a no, not Freakonomics Radio, that we've worked hard on for, gosh, I mean, I've been developing the show for like five years and I care about it a lot. I like it a lot. And now what I'm doing right now is not necessarily making that content any better. This is mostly about trying to expose people to it. So this is my 5%. But even in doing that, I wanted to go to places that I thought were really, really, really, really good and worth it. And to me, Tim and Tim's audience is really, really, really, really worth it because you guys have the kind of, you know, brains and ambitions and curiosities and sense of, you know, what's interesting and what's not, what's worthwhile and what's not, what's funny and what's not that I like. So there you go. This is part of my 5%. All right, here's a new section

Starting point is 00:25:09 of questions that are mostly, I guess these are mostly personal-ish stuff. So someone, can't really tell what this person's real name is. It's got a lot of letters typed fast. So Laurent maybe, Laurent maybe, Laurent, maybe? Laurent, maybe? Laurent Dub, maybe? He asked me, do I know the origin of my last name? So yes, I do. So Dubner was more typically pronounced Dubner. Dubners were, my family came from, not originally, but in most recent history, from a city in what's now Ukraine called Dubno. And my family is Jewish. The Jews of Dubno and many other cities in that area were pushed out of that area when the new czar came in. And I think 1881, my family and a lot of other people from Dubno ended up getting pushed up into what is what is now Poland, north of Warsaw, a place called Płtusk. And so most of this also coincided with a time when many, not only Jews, but many people were now acquiring second names because, you know, for much of history, it wasn't like we had a first name and a last name the way we do now. And so many people, many of the Jews who

Starting point is 00:26:23 came from Dubno became Dubner. So Shepsul Dubner was my grandfather, for instance. Shepsul is a derivative of a Yiddish for if you were born on the Sabbath, right? So Shabbat or Sabbath or Shabbos, all these words that mean in different tongues, languages, Sabbath. Shepsul, it was just kind of a tradition in that part of the world at that time. If you were a male born Shepsil, it was just kind of a tradition in that part of the world at that time. If you were a male born on that day, that was a name. So Shepsil Dubner basically meant a guy whose family had been living in Dubno. And then this guy was born on the Sabbath. And then he was the one in my family on my father's side, at least that came to America.

Starting point is 00:27:03 And that's where my name comes from. And I know more than I should about this because my first book was actually an exploration of my family. My family has a strange, kind of wonderful, weird history in that both my parents, so Shepsil's son was my father and then my mother, both of them were kind of standard issue Brooklyn born Jews who first generation, you know, first generation Americans who before they met each other, both converted from Judaism to Catholicism, which was a very strange and unusual thing. They met, they married, they had eight kids. I'm the last of eight.

Starting point is 00:27:40 I grew up very, very, very Catholic. But then very long story short, in my 20s, I moved to New York, got curious about my parents' Jewish roots, and I ended up returning gradually, slowly to Judaism, although I'm not very religious or observant, but it means the traditions mean a lot to me. And so that's why I know my last name. I wrote about all this in my first book, which was originally called Turbulent Souls, and then got re-titled years later as Choosing My Religion. So that's that. Raymond Waka Waka, which I'm going to assume is not a real name, but it could be, writes to say, what's happening with the golf book that you guys are writing and or are there any new books on the horizon? So Raymond, the golf book that Steve Leavitt and I were working on for a few years, it

Starting point is 00:28:25 just didn't work out the way we wanted it to. We were hoping to write a book that used essentially analytics and smart thinking to help the average golfer become quite a bit better without actually getting a little bit better. Because here's the problem. A lot of people love golf. Not many of them are very good. And the ones who are not very good would love to be better. But because of the nature of the game, because it's time consuming, because it's expensive and because it's difficult, most people don't really want to get out and play and not go practice, you know, chipping for two hours, putting for an hour and a half and long game for maybe 45 minutes and then, you know, play four holes, which would probably make you a lot better over time. But most people don't want

Starting point is 00:29:14 to do that. And so we tried to do a series of experiments and analytics that would help write a kind of Bible for how to make the standard golfer a lot better. Like I said, through strategy, through managing the game, through decision making and so on. And, you know, you know, not going for it, not going for the green in certain circumstances, you know, putting from off the green, all kinds of specific strategic ideas. And basically we failed. We couldn't make people better. So Levitt is a pretty good golfer, really good golfer. His handicap, I don't know what his handicap is. Maybe around, I don't know what it is. Four, five, six, maybe in there. I'm much

Starting point is 00:29:56 less good. Levitt played as a kid. That's my excuse. I didn't play. I took it up seriously only about five years ago and I've gotten a lot better. But the reason I've gotten a lot better is just because I practice a lot, take lessons, work on it. And it's not like I've gotten a lot better. I'm about now a 12 handicap. So that puts me kind of firmly in the middle of quote real golfers. So not very good, but I love it. So yeah, that book is not going to happen at least anytime soon. We are, however, working on a new book whose completion is not guaranteed. We're not sure if it's going to work out at all. If it does, it'll be a couple of years.

Starting point is 00:30:32 And because of the nature of book writing, I'm not going to talk about it at all. But we are trying to do another one. A question from Vitalis Alek wants to know, what are the three books that shaped me and why? So, okay. In all honesty, I'll say the first one was a novel called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which is kind of a sappy novel about Brooklyn in the depression that happened to be hanging around the house when I was a kid. And I read it over and over and over in part because I felt it was describing to me what my parents' life was like when they were kids. And as I mentioned earlier, my parents had this weird

Starting point is 00:31:17 conversion story from Judaism to Catholicism that they didn't talk about very much. And again, I was the youngest of eight. So by the time I was a kid, this was ancient history. And so I would read this book kind of as a secret code to what their lives were like in, it wasn't very much like what their actual lives were like. But to me, that was an incredibly formative book. And so it shaped me. Another one that shaped me a lot was a book. I remember where and when I bought it. It was on a remainder table in a Barnes and Noble that was on Broadway and 74th Street, I think. I think it was in maybe 73rd Street. It was in. Yeah, it's long gone anyway. It was a biography by Jonathan Yardley, the very good literary critic who was at The Washington Post for many years of Ring Lardner, who was a writer. Ring Lardner was a writer I liked a lot. If you don't know his work, you could look it up. It's very dated now,

Starting point is 00:32:23 but I still think amazing. He was a sports writer. I love sports writing. I love sports. I played sports. I loved, loved, loved sports as a kid. But this biography of Ring Lardner, I'd never read a biography of an author that was so warts and all. I mean, a lot of things that he did were not so great. He wasn't a terrible guy at all, but he was whatever. He was kind of selfish and grumpy and so on. But also it was really about what it's like to make a life as a writer. And I had just moved to New York. Up till this point, I'd been a musician. So in college, so my big things in life when I was a kid were always sports and music and writing. And I would have liked to become a professional athlete, but that didn't happen. I don't know, even if I'd been in a better circumstance, I don't know if it would have

Starting point is 00:33:08 happened. I was pretty good, but probably in retrospect, not nearly good enough. But music was a big thing for me. And I always played music. And in college, I got involved in this band called The Right Profile. And we were terrible for a long time, but then we got better and better, ended up getting a record deal after a few years, moved to New York. And I remember buying the Jonathan Yardley bio of Ring Lardner during that time. And I was living in New York with that I wanted was to be a rock star, even though it would have been fun and it was fun at a very minor level. But I wanted a somewhat more stable and more anonymous life. And I'd always been a writer. I love the idea of writing. I love the solitude. I love the thinking. And I loved Ring Lardner. And so reading this biography of Ring Lardner was to me, again, kind of the way, a little bit the way a tree grows in Brooklyn was almost a Bible for like a blueprint for like, this is what the life looks like. And what I loved about it was it didn't make it out to be all amazing.

Starting point is 00:34:14 And I needed that shot of reality. I knew that writing for a living was going to be very, very hard work. And that if I wanted to make it happen, it was a process. There were going to be a series of steps that you had to get past or succeed at, and there'd be a lot of failure. And so that book was hugely formative. I don't even remember the name of the book. I think it was called Ring.

Starting point is 00:34:41 So that was book number two that was incredibly influential. Book number three that shaped me, I mean, if I'm being honest, it's Freakonomics. That was a huge deal for me. You know, the success of it and the collaboration with Levitt, those were big, but also just, it was a project that as a writer has launched what for me is, you know, it was 2003 that I first wrote about Steve Levitt. And I wrote about him because I was in the middle of a book that was kind of about economics. And so I was asked if I wanted to go write about this economist, Steve Levitt at Chicago, who just won this award. And I turned down the assignment several times because I knew Levitt's work a little bit and I knew it had nothing to do with the book that I was writing about. The book was about kind of behavioral economics, behavioral finance. It's what I called the psychology of money, which, by the way,

Starting point is 00:35:29 is how I met my friend James Altucher. He was a subject in that book that I was writing at the time. And so Freakonomics, you know, I wrote about Levitt. I found his work so interesting. I loved writing about that kind of stuff. And that led to this collaboration where we do books together. Then we do other things kind of on our own. Levitt does a bunch of stuff on his own, consulting and academic research. I do, you know, the podcast. Levitt has been gigantic and the amount of learning that I've been able to do as a writer and as a radio guy using Freakonomics as a platform has been huge. I mean, every day, basically my day is to wake up and try to read or talk, read something interesting, talk to interesting people, ask questions, find out stuff. Figure out how things work. Measure it against an empirical standard. Then tell the world about it. And I love it. I'll tell you one other thing that kind of inspired me and shaped the way that I run my life, my work life, was Tavis Smiley. So I really like Tavis Smiley as a broadcaster.

Starting point is 00:36:43 He does radio. He does TV. He's written books. I found him to be a really good human. But what I discovered when I went out to California a couple of times and a couple of book tours to do his shows, I think you do radio shows and his TV show. He had this kind of complex and he had a production company and he just had this whole production setup. And the way it was set up made me realize that, man, if you want to do your best work, you should really control or set up as much of your production as you can,

Starting point is 00:37:22 because that is what gives you the latitude and the leverage to do your best work. So that's inspired me. Tavis, I've never even told him this, and I probably should because it was really helpful. But the way that he, you know, it's a pain in the neck to set up your own production company and to do a lot of the structural work yourself. It's a lot easier to just have someone, you know, a book publisher, a newspaper,

Starting point is 00:37:44 a radio station, a record label, a company of some kind, it's a lot easier for them to say, hey, we'll give you the opportunity to do X and we'll give you Y dollars for it. And you plug yourself in there. That's a lot easier, right, than setting up your whole own thing. But obviously, if you're listening to the Tim Ferriss show, you have at least a little bit of an entrepreneurial inclination. So you know the advantages to entrepreneurialism are huge and the headaches are huge. But watching the way Tavis operated inspired me to take on some of those headaches and set up, for instance, recently my own production company to do Tell Me Something I Don't Know, but also my production company.

Starting point is 00:38:24 We certainly contribute a lot to Freakonomics Radio and everything else. And the reason is that, look, I mean, I've worked with all the institutions I just named, record label, newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, book publishers, on and on. I've worked with all of them in partnership, and they all try to exploit your work and your content. That's their job. I don't use exploit pejoratively. That's their job. But I think that in order for you to do things the way you most want to do them, you have to gain your best work, whether it's media, whether it's technology, whether it's manufacturing, whatever, obviously you need partners. I always try to be the best partner I can. I always try to make a deal and make content that makes everyone better off, everyone in the partnership. But I find that for me, at least the best way to do that is to have the center of leverage or the center of gravity be in my court.

Starting point is 00:39:30 So I can say, you know, I don't think this should be a daily show or whatever, because I think if we try to do that, I can see why that might appeal to you. The partner is more profitable ultimately, but the content is going to suffer. There's no way that this project, whatever project we're talking about, is scalable enough for it to be good on a daily level. And in order to have the right to make those kind of decisions, you have to work hard to create the structure on your own, to have the leverage on your own, to have that power. Question from Daniel Rodich, maybe, how did you meet James Altucher? What do you think makes James a good interviewer? And how does that contrast with your own style? So I met James when I was writing this book that I mentioned a little while ago about the psychology of money. And James,

Starting point is 00:40:17 I met him. He was the friend of a friend. And I just, I mean, I love and admire James. I think he's an amazing human and very unusual. And he'd made a ton of money and lost all of it. And then some by the time I met him. So it was very, I mean, bittersweet doesn't start to describe it. Fortunately, he's made a lot back and lost it and made it. So he's pretty good at that. So he's been a good friend for many years. I ended up putting that book in a drawer, unfortunately, to write Freakonomics. But one thing that came out of it was a friendship

Starting point is 00:40:50 with James. In terms of James's style for not only interviewing like on his podcast, but talking to people generally, he just follows his curiosity purely and doesn't really think about or care at all about, you know, looking smart or cool or whatever. He just really, really, really wants to know what he wants to know. And I find that to be an incredibly attractive trait, especially if you're doing journalism and interviewing. Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics co-author, is very similar in his research. And it takes a certain amount of, I guess, courage to really not care what people think about you. And I wish I had more of that. And I work on it. So I don't think I've ever actually been in a fistfight, but I think I could take Malcolm only because, I mean, he's wiry, but I got a few inches and a few pounds on him. I think I could take him on. On the other hand, I think he could just outrun me. So I'm fairly fast. I can sprint. I can do that. I've played sports where you sprint,

Starting point is 00:42:07 and I was always relatively fast. But Malcolm's a distance guy. He still runs semi-competitively mile and more. So I think it wouldn't get to a fistfight. Plus, neither of us, I think, you have to take your glasses off. There's a lot to worry about there. But thanks for the question, Lance. OK, here are a few questions about, you know, economics-ish stuff from John Nunn. John writes to say, South Korea announced that they will be developing a digital currency. What are your views on digital slash cryptocurrency and how will this development affect the dynamic of these currencies in Asia? I don't know about the second half. How will they affect the dynamic of the currencies in Asia? We actually did a Freakonomics Radio episode a few weeks ago called Why Are We

Starting point is 00:42:54 Still Using Cash? And I personally believe that the data argue that the more digital we get with money, the better off more people will be. So within that, you have to say, well, there are some people who are going to be frustrated that cash is used less. There are people who worry about privacy. There are people who worry about government intrusion. There are people who worry about the flexibility and liquidity of cash or people who worry about technology of having digital money and what happens if it all goes, you know, if there's the biggest blackout in the world. And these are all legitimate concerns that need to be addressed and are being addressed by places that are converting to cashless or less cash society. I think the but I think the advantages to having much less cash, especially big bills, is huge. So one thing we discussed in the episode of Freakonomics Radio is that I believe it's 80% of U.S. currency now in circulation is in $100 bills. Very few people use $100 bills in the normal course of transaction. In fact, it's not very easy. If you give a taxi driver 100, if you go into a grocery store, give 100, people don't even really want them. So where all these hundreds are used by people who are buying and selling drugs, involved in rolling down the ladder, the big bills would probably do a lot more good than bad. Another thing is, you know, in the U.S., people have a weird relationship with the government.

Starting point is 00:44:35 Look, we just do. And I get it. I get both sides or all sides. But I think that some of the arguments, when you hold them up to the light are kind of silly. So, you know, people who a lot of people who complain about taxation, I feel are complaining about the wrong side of taxation. If you're honest, you want good enforcement and good payment because the larger the tax gap is, the tax gap is a difference between what's owed and what's paid. The larger it is, the more the honest people are penalized. So to me, it would seem a no-brainer for everybody that's honest, which is most people, to close the tax gap.

Starting point is 00:45:17 And one way to close the tax gap is to make it a lot harder to cheat. And one of the easiest ways to cheat is do business in cash. Just the way it is. So that's another reason for going to less cash. Peter Conley wants to know, what actual influence does a president have on the economy? So Peter, I love this question. I love it. Well, okay. Narcissistically, I love it because I've been asking this question a lot for several years. So it is a subject of great debate. I dealt with this at some length in an episode of Freakonomics Radio called How Much Does the President Really Matter? And the argument there from talking to

Starting point is 00:45:53 economists and some legal and constitutional scholars and some political scientists was not very much, especially when it comes to the economy. Because if you think about it, the economy is, you know, this big, complex, dynamic system with all these inputs, and it's influenced by all these factors, many of which are psychological, not even just purely financial. And a lot of them would seem to be largely immune to any president's wishes. On the other hand, and we recently did another Freakonomics Radio episode called, Has the U.S. Presidency Become a Dictatorship? And in some ways, this episode was a rebuttal to my own argument in that earlier episode. And in this episode, I talked to the legal scholar Eric Posner, who I find to be really brilliant and really insightful and a great communicator.

Starting point is 00:46:44 You should read his stuff. I read this was based on an essay he'd written for Daedalus. But if you Google Eric Posner, he's also happens to be the son of Richard Posner, who's a prolific and very well regarded intellect, a judge, but also writes a lot about economics and other things. So the Posner family is worth your time reading. So the legal scholar Eric Posner argues that due to a long and interesting history of the U.S. presidency and how it's evolved a lot over time and how it's veered a lot away from what was conceived as the original Madisonian system of checks and balances, that the presidency has attained much more unilateral power. And therefore, especially through executive decisions and legislation, that the president now does often make policy, not necessarily unilaterally, but often close to it, that has a reach over huge swaths of the economy. So take just two specifics, health and financial services. So healthcare is moving toward 20% of GDP, I think. Financial services, I don't know the number, but obviously it's huge. If you look at just those two, you could say, well, the president him or herself can't really do so, so, so much to shape the economy in those realms, but through legislation necessarily, or at least we'd like

Starting point is 00:48:08 to think that that power has been constrained. But if you look at the reality, you see that just during the Obama administration, and this is really what the episode of Freakonomics Radio with Eric Posner deals with a lot, is using executive order to make decisions and to push them. So neither Obamacare nor the financial regulations and financial legislation that came out of the recession, neither of them were achieved primarily through executive order, but they've been furthered and advanced and kind of enforced in that way. And so any way you look at it, the president has the ability to exert a lot more leverage than the founders certainly intended, partly because the constitution is vague on this. But the point that Posner makes, it's really interesting to me, is the president gets this power, has gotten this. But the point that Posner makes that's really interesting to me is the president

Starting point is 00:49:05 gets this power, has gotten this power over the years, and is constrained. We like to think that the presidency is constrained by Congress and the Constitution, but Posner's argument is that Congress and the Constitution don't constrain the president very much at all. The Constitution, almost none. And Congress, for all that a Democratic president will complain about Republican Congress being recalcitrant and not letting him get anywhere and vice versa, it turns out that Obama did a lot that a Republican Congress did not want him to do. And Posner's argument is that the main constraints on a president is that he or she represents three different constituencies, the public, the country generally, the party,

Starting point is 00:49:53 and the executive branch. So the president is the putative leader of those three things. He's the leader of the country. He or she is the leader of the political party, his or her political party. And he or she is the leader of the executive branch. And and here's the way Posner puts it, trying to be the leader of these three different groups with different interests and values turns out to be an extremely difficult task. constraints over the president. That said, I've been making this argument for a while that the presidency, you know, we put way too much, you know, we think we put way too much care and anxiety into into thinking about the choice of president is so essential to everything that influences our daily lives. And I still think that's true. I think that the actual presidency doesn't affect us individually very, very much. But I have think that's true. I think that the actual presidency doesn't affect us individually very, very much. But I have come around to the idea that the president in ways

Starting point is 00:50:50 that are kind of non-obvious exerts a lot of influence over huge pieces of the economy that certainly does trickle down. Max McFarlane wants to know, how will technology such as VR impact education? And will students being taught through online and digital medium, how might their intelligence be affected by teaching more through online and digital media? That's a really, I like that question a lot. So my thoughts on education are, I guess, voluminous for no good reason other than that it interests me a lot. We say we care about education a lot. I don't think we do. And when I say me, I mean kind of, you know, the body politic. We care about our own kids a lot, but I don't think we really care about education a lot of things in the education system that are really, really, really different. We'd have it be more accountable. We'd have it be more experimental. We'd have it be more empirical. And we'd have it be, well, yeah, let me go back to experimental. So in answer to Max's question about VR, virtual reality specifically, I have no idea.

Starting point is 00:51:56 I don't predict the future because I'm as bad at it as everybody else. But I do think there are things going on in education, in education theory and in technology, particularly, that are really interesting. So there's a startup. It's now called New Classrooms. It started out called School of One, and it was a pilot project within the New York City Department of Education run by a guy named Joel Rose. And Joel Rose then took it private, I guess private. Now it's called New Classrooms. And their model, this is just one small example that I'm impressed with. Their model is to go into, let's say, a fifth grade math classroom. And, you know, what's the standard model of education? A teacher and 20 or 30 kids in

Starting point is 00:52:39 a room and some kind of chalkboard, whether it's digital or otherwise. And, you know, it's often been said that if you went to sleep about 120, 150 years ago and woke up today, you would recognize very little about America or the rest of the world. Transportation's different, communication's different, on and on. But you'd recognize the school classroom. It's basically the same as it was then. A bunch of kids, a teacher running things, right? And there's been some innovation and some use of technology and best practices, but honestly, compared to other industries, and I know it makes people nervous to talk about education as an industry, but boy, if you look at the funding, it certainly is. And it's an

Starting point is 00:53:21 important one because the ROI is massive. If you look at it as an industry, you see that the amount of innovation has been really, really low. So school of one, for instance, would say, you know, we're going to take this classroom full of 30 kids. And instead of assuming that the best way to teach all 30 is to have all of them listen within the same amount of at the exact same time to the same teacher telling them the same thing, well, maybe that's not optimal. What would happen if instead we created several different modes for each of those kids

Starting point is 00:53:52 to learn and engage in? So maybe, yeah, maybe the teacher is leading a group. Maybe it's a small group lesson for kids who happen to learn well that way. Maybe some kids are learning one-on-one with a virtual tutor. Maybe some kids are in a peer-led group. Maybe some kids are learning one-on-one with a virtual tutor. Maybe some kids are in a peer-led group. Maybe some kids are using virtual reality. Maybe some kids are doing drills on their

Starting point is 00:54:10 own. And School of One basically, or now called New Classrooms, basically takes this model and every day you experiment with every kid learning the same material through different modes to see which mode that kid happens to learn best in. And then you have a test at the end of the day. That's how you know what mode works for each kid. And then the next day, your algorithm spits out a playlist for the following day to give each kid their own customized way of learning. It's very dependent on technology in a good way, I would argue. It would make the role of the teacher, I would argue, even more important, although I think a lot of teachers fear that it would make them less important. And it does what, to me, the whole, almost every other facet of life is done, which is try to customize things, you know, to work better for you. No, none of us want to walk into a store, whether it's virtual or real, virtual or brick and mortar, and have a choice of one thing. You know, here's a clothing store. Here's the coat we have today. Here's the shirt we have today. Here's the book for sale today. Here's the podcast to listen to. We all want choice. And it's not just about preference. It's about how we learn and people

Starting point is 00:55:29 are really different. And so I think that the more we can use technology and also just logic and data to customize to some degree the educational process, the better off we'll be. I think I've been talking for a really long time. I'm going to try to find one more question here that would be a good one to end on. We've been talking a little bit about education. All right. So I'll combine a couple. Here's Christina Neshava and Jill Bevan Craddock have questions. Christina asks, I'd love to know how to best teach kids to have critical thinking and ask unusual questions. So I love that question, Christina. And Jill wants to know what's a great project for seventh graders to get excited about economics? So combining these two, I will say, first off, I'll start by saying I have no idea what's a great project for seventh graders to get excited about economics. And I would kind of go back to my people, whether it's adults, whether it's in your work career, whether it's people in their, obviously in their consumer choices, but even in education, I'm a big believer in letting people find the topics that they're fascinated by, almost addicted to, and then urge them to channel that fascination into learning a lot of different

Starting point is 00:57:03 things using that topic or using that fascination. So one thing that strikes me as weird about school, the way we still do school, is we require every kid to be involved for many years in every subject, art, phys ed, and math, and English, and history. And obviously, you want to have everybody have a certain core base, but almost nobody's good at all these things. And the result of being in almost inevitably really bad at one or two is just to make you kind of hate the process or make many people hate the process, especially boys. primary education often because there's just too much funneling and channeling your interest and your attention into things that are not interesting or that don't hold your attention. And then, of course, we blame them, which I think is crazy. So I do think it's great if you can, like I said, let people or lead people to find a topic or a curiosity that is legit, that's organic for them, and then use that to learn a lot about the rest of the world.

Starting point is 00:58:10 And I think, you know, if you're a good teacher, if you're a good parent or just a good, you know, adult, a thoughtful person, you can find a way to learn about so many different elements, so many different disciplines within one thing. So I'll give an example. My son, who's now 16, he doesn't like school very much. He does pretty well in some subjects, not so well in others. It's just not a great fit. I don't think he's ever going to be a great school student. On some dimensions, he's really, really smart. And on some dimensions, he's really, really interested.

Starting point is 00:58:37 And so I do try to encourage him. So his big obsession for the past five, six years has been football, soccer, what we in America call soccer, which he calls football because he's kind of a snob that way. So like, you know, he really, really he reads a lot. Most of the books he reads for fun are about football. Most of the, you know, journalism that he reads. I mean, he keeps up with politics and stuff more than I think pretty, pretty well for a 16 year old kid. He does it a lot through comedy, by the way, you know, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Colbert, those are, that's the way he gets a lot

Starting point is 00:59:10 of his news, which I think is not a terrible way to get your news. Cause I don't know if funny news about the news. I don't know if comedy about the news is actually any funnier than a lot of the real coverage about the news personally. So I I'm personally pretty good with that. But then with, with football or soccer, like also he and I do, it's gotten more occasional lately. It was more regular for a while, a podcast about him basically teaching me about footy called Footy for Two. And the amount that you can learn about the world through something like football about economics and politics and language and society generally and how the media operates. So if you follow football closely as he does, I mean, you can

Starting point is 00:59:55 learn all of this and it's about as global as it gets. So that's what I would say to Christina and Jill and anyone who's looking for, you know, kind of ways to, quote, teach kids to have critical thinking, ask unusual questions or what's a great project to get seventh graders excited about something is, you know, the excitement. Try to find an organic excitement and then develop that and let it go as deep and wide as you can. Me as a kid, the channels, the topics that I learned about the world through were sports, which led to just, you know, you learn a lot about different things, personality stuff, political stuff, on and on. Music, I love. But back then, especially, there was less kind of real good information about it. But to me, the hobby that I did, which is, you know, super nerdy, whatever, but I love was stamp collecting. It's like when I was a kid collecting stamps, I did it. I didn't do it as a learning exercise.

Starting point is 01:00:52 I did it for whatever reason. I thought it was really fun to collect different pieces of colored paper from around the world. I just thought it was fun. I like the organizing principle. I like the hunting them down. But the amount that I learned about, I learned way more about the world through stamp collecting than I ever learned through geography or even world history. I learned about economics. I learned about royalty. I learned about political upheaval. I learned about art, all this stuff through this thing that I happen to love. So I think that, look, the fact that you are listening to the Tim Ferriss show indicates

Starting point is 01:01:30 to me that you are a person who is deeply passionate about something beyond having fun and getting pleasure out of life. And don't get me wrong. I think having fun and getting pleasure out of life are hugely important. And they're really what drive us at the end of the day. But I think the fact that you're listening to this also indicates that you have a real burning passion for something either vocational or career wise or creative or artistic. And I think the more honest you can be about, you know, do the thing think the more honest you can be about doing what you love because you love it and then try to harness and leverage that love, it's really hard to work hard

Starting point is 01:02:18 on something you don't love and that you're not passionate about. I think a lot of us, especially early in our careers, we try to fake it, try to persuade ourselves. Oh oh, yeah, I really want to go into, you know, investment banking because I think it's really interesting to get in there and learn about how companies work and da da da. Then you see a lot of people in fields like that where they go into them early, you find that really what they wanted was they wanted to make a lot of money, which is fine. Money is hugely important, but you find that the passion doesn't match your energy. And so I think if you can align your passion and energy, you will work so hard and do so well that you'll become successful without even really noticing you're becoming successful because you're just doing it.

Starting point is 01:02:56 You're just doing your thing. So Tim, thanks for having me. Tim Ferris Show listeners, thanks for having me. I do hope you'll keep up with the work I do. Can follow Freakonomics stuff at Freakonomics Twitter and Facebook. The new show that I'm really excited about, if you couldn't tell, is called Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Hoping to get Tim back on it as a panelist soon. And I guess that's all I have to say. It's been a real pleasure and a privilege. And I love the questions. And I very much appreciate the opportunity to come talk to all of you. Cheers. Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email

Starting point is 01:03:45 from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out.

Starting point is 01:04:24 Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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

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