The Tim Ferriss Show - Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics

Episode Date: May 19, 2014

Stephen J. Dubner is an award-winning author, journalist, and radio and TV personality. He is best-known for writing, along with the economist Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics (2005), SuperFreakonomics (2009), and Think Like a Freak (2014), which have sold more than 5 million copies in 35 languages.In this podcast, we discuss dozens of topics, including: his writing process, religion, how to "think like freak," parenting, favorite documentaries, and much, much more.Show notes and more at http://www.fourhourblog.com Just search "Dubner" Enjoy!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Hace mucho que no te veo. Happy to have you guys. This episode is an experiment. The guest is Stephen J. Dubner. You may recognize his name. He's an award-winning author, journalist, radio and TV personality, best known probably for writing, along with economist Stephen Levitt, Freakonomics, which was a massive global bestseller, along with Super Freakonomics. They've sold more than 5 million copies in 35, probably plus, languages at this point. This is the first episode where I attempt to interview someone I've never met before, never spoken with before. And it's amusing and perhaps

instructive for some of you and maybe entertaining because you'll notice it takes me a good five to 10 minutes to find my footing. I'm very nervous. I've never done this before. And Stephen is very gracious, but there's a clear difference in the beginning of the interview, the middle of the interview, and the end of the interview. We delve into some very deep stuff. And my goal, because Steven's been interviewed dozens, hundreds, probably thousands of times, was to ask questions perhaps he had not been asked before and to take him places perhaps he had not been before in interviews like this. I think it was a success. I'm very happy with this.

I had a blast doing it and I hope you enjoy listening to it. Without further ado, here's Steven. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue of a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. All right, well, Stephen, thank you for joining everybody on The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an interview I've been looking forward to for some time now, so thank you for making the time, first of all. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm delighted to try to figure out how to deliver something that has historically been very intimidating for people. Often there's a mathematical component in a way that is really easily digested. And I thought Freakonomics just knocked that out of the park. And I'm sure a lot of people would agree. And certainly that's spoken

to by the number of copies sold, what is it, 5 million plus in 35 languages. But I just wanted to thank you for that. It served as a really useful model. You're welcome. I think it worked out pretty well for you. So whatever small, small part we played in it, I'm glad it worked. Yeah. And I've consumed a ton of your material. And the first question, just as a writer, or someone who would like to think of themselves as a writer that I'd love to hear a little bit about and I think the at least in my particular case the way that I've approached books has changed a little bit over time as I've had more success and more resources and things like that so the question I want to ask is, how do you collaborate with your co-author on any of these books, Stephen? What is the process for getting the material together and then threading it into the narrative?

All right. So you asked, I'll answer, but I'll warn you, it's a probably not very interesting or useful answer. I don't know. Maybe it is. But so, yeah, the way this works is I have this great, phenomenal co-author named Steve Levitt, who's an economist at the University of Chicago. And what Levitt does mostly is empirical research. Find a scenario where he can find some data, or maybe you find some data first, or you come up with a question, you go hunting for data,

and he writes academic papers. At least this was what we did pretty much for the first two books, Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics. And in some cases, it's pretty simple. He would have written an academic paper that I would then take and essentially translate into common English. And then we would talk it through certainly a lot. And, you know, sometimes I'd have to ask him to explain parts of the paper, especially the theory parts. But then in addition to just, you know, translating it, one thing that I always try to do in writing is tell a story. So you can have a conclusion, a set of data that reaches a conclusion. We talked about the economics of selling crack cocaine, for instance, or the data seeming to show that sumo wrestlers, for instance,

collude with one another to manipulate the rankings. So the data in and of themselves are a good story, but most people don't really assimilate data or theory or rational argument the same way that they do a story. And I think that the power of a story is just unbelievably strong. And I don't think I'm saying anything that people don't know, but I think that a lot of really smart people, when they're trying to get a point across or when they're trying to persuade someone of their point of view, they forget why stories work so well. They work so well, I think, for a number of reasons, one of which is that we're all narcissists to some degree. And so when we're hearing a story, we maybe even subconsciously insert ourselves into the narrative to kind of see, you know, how we'd play like, man, I wouldn't have gone for that deal selling drugs for only, you know, eight bucks an hour or whatever. So the collaboration honestly takes many, many, many forms because not all of our work is so neat as having an academic paper.

So I would say that for every single story, every single page really in any of our books, there's kind of a different iteration or version of how the collaboration takes place. Sometimes Levitt will have done a lot of heavy lifting and produced a story in data that I then translate. Sometimes it's something that I go out and do a lot of reporting on and then write a narrative, then I'll throw it to him and see what he has to say with it. You know, he lives in Chicago, I'm in New York. We don't work together physically all that often. And honestly, there's only one kind of work together that is practical at all, which is basically brainstorming. It's nice to have a tight in-person feedback loop for all other forms of collaboration, reading, editing, critiquing, saying this sucks. We threw away hundreds of pages on Think Like a Freak.

However long this book is, we definitely threw away many more pages than we ended up with. So, you know, there's a lot of that back and forth. And honestly, I think it's great. I mean, I think one of the hardest things about being a writer is critiquing your own work. And that's why any writer who's had a good editor knows how valuable it is. So if you have a collaborator who thinks like you do, but with a different angle, he's the economist, I'm the journalist, I think it helps make it stronger. So that's the collaboration. No, I love digging into the process. And I have a few related questions. The first is,

and I want to get to your background in a little bit, but having come out of music, I'm really fascinated about how that came to be. But let's start with something very granular, which is, how do you make a good story? What are the elements of a good story for you? And secondly, when you're brainstorming with Stephen, what types of things are you brainstorming and what's the format for that? All right. So I'll start with what types of brainstorming. So for this book, it was really different. For Think Like a Freak, we had this idea, you know, we weren't sure we were going to do a third book. We didn't want to do a book if we thought it would be redundant or bad. And so we struggled with ideas for a while. We came up with one idea that we thought it would be redundant or bad. And so we struggled with ideas

for a while. We came up with one idea that we thought was great for about a week. We thought this was the best idea ever. Then it turned out to suck also. What was that? That was a book that was basically, in a way, a kind of big professional version of the idea that became Think Like a Freak. In other words, Think Like a Freak is meant to be a sort of a guide for people who want to solve problems, whether it's minor life hacks or major global reforms. But before we got to that, we were deluded and wildly overambitious where we thought we would actually describe and try to solve some of the world's biggest problems. We had this whole research agenda that we thought we could really make some headway. And then we realized we were just out of our minds and that wasn't going to

work. So once we came up with this idea, the brainstorming was what are the kind of concepts that go into thinking like a freak. And we ended up with a book that has, I think, nine chapters. And within each chapter, sometimes there's two or three ideas. So let's say there are roughly 15 principles of thinking like a freak. In the brainstorming periods, which went on, I would say for months, not constantly for months, but whenever we'd see each other, I think we probably came up with like 120. And some of them turned out to just be not so interesting. Some of them turned out that we didn't really believe in them. Some of them turned out to be maybe interesting and true, but they didn't have any data or stories that really illustrated them. And some of them we collapsed into others. So that was a really, you know, it's a really involved process. It's like, you know, the other things

I've done in my life before I became a writer all the way, writing music and like even doing some carpentry. And I think at any time you're making something, whether it's buildings with your hands and wood or writing music or writing words, you learn different ways of, you know, how do I know if this is a good idea or not? And it takes a lot of experimentation. And so that even became kind of part of the message in this book is how to experiment, how to fail, how to quit things that aren't going well. And so our brainstorming was about, you know, let's come up with as many ideas as possible and then put them under scrutiny and basically try to kill them off.

And if they were unkillable, then we'd keep going with them. In terms of what makes a good story, so this is really, you know, I've always loved storytelling. I would argue that most people love storytelling even if they don't really think about it. And the way I got interested in economics, actually, originally was because of the work of Danny Kahneman, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, right?

I was one of Danny's test subjects way back in the day at Princeton, in fact. Oh, you were? Not that he would remember me. It was some excruciatingly boring, I think it might have been called the blanking a T test. It was a cognitive test where you had to click a button every time a certain square or circle appeared in the corner of a black screen for hours.

What was he looking for? You know, I don't recall because at the time, I didn't think of him as, you know, Danny Kahneman in the way that he's thought of now. This was prior to a lot of the fame and attention and awards and whatnot. But oftentimes also as a subject, I mean, I've been a subject and an experimenter or really an assistant to an experimenter at UCSF in their Sandler Neuroscience Lab with Adam Ghazali. And in many, many cases, more often than not, perhaps you're not actually telling the subjects the true purpose of the test. So I don't recall, but I'm sorry to interrupt. Yeah.

No, no. That's interesting. Cause you know, well, Kahneman, I mean, look, he's a good – Dan, he was a very good scientist for a number of reasons. The reason that I was so attracted to his work – and look, I was hardly alone. He did go on to, as you say, become very well-known, rightfully so. His partner, Amos Tversky, who died young, you know, Amos would have won a Nobel with Danny. Danny went on to win the Nobel in economics, even though he's a psychologist. And what made their work so fascinating to me was it was trying to explore how people make decisions, right? Incredibly basic,

but incredibly important. But the way that they explained the ideas were in the version of stories. And so you'd say, you know, there's a military commander and he's got 500 men. And if he goes route A, there's a 100% chance that 80 of them will be killed. And then you take the same story and you flip the numbers so that it sounds like a lower probability, but in fact, it's the same exact outcome. And you ask people, which would you prefer? And this is how you learn about risk aversion and loss aversion and all kinds of great, valuable ideas. So like I said, what appealed to me is that they weren't just recitations of theory and data. They were stories.

So I followed that work. It got me into economics generally. I found Steve Levitt. We started to do this for economics work and so on. And then years later, I got to know Danny Kahneman a little bit. And once I said to him, you know, that the reason I got into his work so much was because of what I thought was the power of stories in his research.

And Danny said, oh, stories are terrible. You should never tell stories. Storytelling is the worst. I said, oh, great. Why? What do you mean by that? And he said, well, stories don't contain any data and they don't have any time. They don't have a time series attached to them.

And I realized that Danny kind of – what Danny thought I was talking about was not so much what I think of as a story but what I think of as an anecdote. An anecdote would be – like let's say we're talking, let's say, Kim, let's say we're talking about like drunk driving and the actual data and the numbers and so on. And I can tell you that, you know, the data seem to show that if I'm a drunk driver versus a sober driver, I'm 13 times more likely to get involved in a fatal crash, right? So that's what I tell you, the data say. And then you say, well, you know what? I've got an uncle or my uncle's accountant drinks every night at the tavern and drives home and he's never even had a fender bender. That's an anecdote. That's like the anecdote, which is often the story that kind of disproves the rule. But to me, what a story is, is it's got the narrative, but it does include the things that danny kahneman said

you need to include which is data right and time series so data because you need to know the magnitude of the story is it really important and time series because you need to know if it was a kind of blip or if it really you know persisted and that to me are the elements of a good story is data uh a time element a a time series, and a narrative with characters that people can identify with. Oh, and by the way, it needs to all be true. So, you know, I'm a journalist by training. I'm a nonfiction writer. And I believe that, you know, the best kind of storytelling is where you've got real reporting, real numbers, and you can make an argument that acknowledges, you know, my argument is not perfect.

It's not meant to be, but it's compelling because it is true. No, definitely. And I'm sure a lot of listeners have heard the expression, the plural of anecdote isn't data. In the self-experimentation world, we're on N equals one a lot of the time. It's been very fascinating just to watch the quantified self movement for instance where i was one of the first attendees i was at the very first quantified self meetup at kevin kelly's house in pacifica and it's been very interesting to see how much uh how much good science has come of that if people are able to actually rationally look at the amplitude of the delta and the changes in various things,

but also how many correlations are thought to be causation and how many spurious connections there are and how it's so easy to manufacture those if you want to find them. But I want to come back to stories for a second because your background is, and I don't want to, we don't have to go line by line through your entire upbringing. But one thing that struck me is very fascinating. Thinking of you as, in many ways, a sort of hyper-rational person, I would love to hear how you chose your own religion. And to give people a little bit of background, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you were raised sort of devout Roman Catholic after your parents had, it appears,

converted to Catholicism, but then chose to, as yourself, as an adult, practice Judaism. So I'd love to hear how you made that decision and why you made that decision. Great. Yeah. So first of all, I appreciate your thinking of me as hyper rational, but I'm probably not really. I mean, even though, you know, a lot of the Freakonomics stuff has been about trying to, you know, apply rational theory to things, a lot of it is also about understanding that we've all got these biases that, you know, kind of make us human and make us different, which I, you know, which I think is good. So the idea is not, I would say the idea is not for all of us to strive to be purely rational. The idea is to strive to, you know, achieve the greatest collective and individual

good we can while acknowledging that many people often do things that don't seem rational. So I would just add that caveat. So yeah, so my, so I came from a really weird and wonderful family. So my parents were this pair of Brooklyn-born Jews, kind of typical first-generation American Jews here, who before they met each other, they were both, my mom was, I guess, they were both early 20s, early to mid-20s. Before they met each other, this was in New York during the Second World War. They both ended up converting to Catholicism for very different reasons and under very different circumstances. My dad was a soldier in the Second World War, so he'd been overseas and had a kind of realization that he needed a big change in his life. My mother was a ballerina, very serious, kind of becoming successful at that here in New York. And she fell under the tutelage of a mentor,

a dance mistress who was a Roman Catholic. And so the two of them, like I said, before they met each other, both converted. And this was, as you can probably imagine, pretty big deal in their families at that time, especially, but that caused major, major, major trauma within their families. Then they met at a Catholic church as these two former Jews who had this huge thing in common. They happened to fall in love. They both became and remain very, very devout as Catholics, and they really started a life over. You know, we talk a lot in Freakonomics about quitting and the upside of quitting. My parents, I mean, I sometimes think I've been a little brave in the stuff that I've quit. My parents quit everything. They quit their religion, which meant quitting their families.

They left the city, the only city they ever knew. And they were city people. And they moved to the boondocks of upstate New York on this little kind of broken down farm where my mom, I mean, my dad was a wonderful human who had a lot of health issues and died quite young when I was a little kid. My mom was just this incredibly strong, forward-thinking, productive person who just picked up the whole family on her back and carried us on. So there were eight kids. I was the youngest and, you know, dead father, kind of middle of nowhere, no money, and very, very, very, very Catholic family. And all that said, which might sound like bad stuff or tough stuff, I was very happy. It was a great experience.

My family was great, and I felt loved, and I felt encouraged to do stuff that made me happy. So years later, I went to college, started a rock band. The rock band was my life for five years. We took it very seriously. Got a record contract with Arista Records in New York, which led me to move to New York. And at that point, I kind of decided, having gotten some exposure to some people who've been really successful in rock and roll, you know, just getting to meet, you know, often for really short time to talk to like someone

like Bruce Springsteen about what life was like and REM, who we knew a little bit more because we were from the South and they were from the South. And I realized that that dream was awesome, but it wasn't the dream that I really wanted for my life to live that kind of life on stage and traveling. So I quit the band. And then here I was in New York, and I decided to pursue writing full time. And living in New York, I started to, you know, I was exposed to a whole world of Jewishness and Jewish thought that I never really encountered. And I knew my parents had been this thing called Jewish, but I knew so little about it, Tim. It's like comical and embarrassing now.

Like most of what I knew about being Jewish came from Woody Allen movies, which is, you know, not necessarily, you know, normative. So anyway, I began to study and explore and to make a very long story relatively short. I decided that I, you know, it was gradual and slow. I decided that I was going to return to Judaism. And even though I'd been brought up in a very devout setting, or maybe because I'd been brought up in a very devout setting, I didn't have a lot of appetite for being very observant. So I did what I think of as return to being Jewish, return because my parents had been, my entire extended family, most of whom I didn't even know about. I'd never met until I started to seek them out. So I returned to that and became, you know, now I'm just another typical Upper West Side Jewish New Yorker, not particularly observant, but very, very, very appreciative of a lot of the traditions in Judaism, as well as a lot of the traditions in Catholicism and in other faiths and so on. And, you know, to me, a religious way of looking at the world is not that dissimilar from, you know, whatever, an economic way of looking at the world, a

psychological way of looking at the world. In all the, you know, religion, I always think of the word comes from a Latin version, I think, religare, I want to say, and, how to be productive, how to get what we want while treating other people with the right kind of balance of respect and all that. And so I don't see religion and science as being anywhere near as, you know, contradictory as some people do. I think there's just a lot of value in a lot of systems for looking at the world, seeing how people get to where they get, how they make decisions. And yeah, that's the story. Was there something – what drove you to explore re-embracing or embracing Judaism?

Was it, for instance, simply the social environment? And I think that's not a bad reason, certainly in New York. That opens up a lot of conversations you wouldn't otherwise have, a lot of relationships you might not otherwise have. Or was there some type of longing for something that you didn't have or hadn't experienced that led you to that or something else entirely? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say definitely those two things and probably another, you know, four or five things like, you know, it's funny, my co-author Steve Leavitt sometimes talks about

when he realized that he was born to be an economist or at least a certain kind of economist. And it was in college and, you know, he was a very smart kid, super, super smart kid. And he ended up going to Harvard, and he got to Harvard, and as Levitt tells the story, he was or 10 or whatever it's called, he said, you know, he would come out of class feeling that feeling as if everything that had been said in the class was the most obvious thing in the world. It wasn't the math that clicked with him. It was a certain way of looking at the world and feeling like you intuitively got it, identified with it, appreciated it, and it got you excited. And that's when he decided that, you know, econ was the way, the kind of lens that fit his eye. And for me, when I started, when I moved to New York after quitting my band,

I just accidentally, you know, fell in with a bunch of people. I had a girlfriend at the time who was studying to be an actress, and she had this acting teacher, a guy named Ivan Kronenfeld, who became and remained for many years and still to some degree one of the most important people in my life. I'm 50. I'm guessing many of your listeners, if not most, are quite a bit younger. I can't stress enough the value in finding real people to be mentors. I just think there's – as a kid who grew up kind of without a father, I never wanted to find like a substitute father. That just seemed cliché. But I did have a series of men in my life who were incredibly generous and wise in teaching me. And sometimes some of what they said didn't resonate at all.

You have to be your own editor. But Ivan Kronenfeld was this guy who was not religious, really, at all, but had a deep, deep, deep well of learning and wisdom that had been informed by Judaism. And that extended to culture. You know, he was an acting teacher. This wasn't about religion, per se. It extended to culture. It extended to culture. You know, he was an acting teacher. This wasn't about religion per se. It extended to culture, it extended to sports,, it feels worthwhile. And by the way, this is the tradition in which I was meant to be born, but wasn't. And so that's kind of, it was very accidental. I was not looking to make any kind of, you know, I was a very happily lapsed

Catholic and planning to stay lapsed. I wasn't looking to reinvigorate my religious life, but I fell into, like I say, a kind of a tradition and a set of ideas that really resonated for me. No, it's been – I love that story, and it's been fascinating for me to witness some of my close friends who have re-embraced religion, most often Judaism. One who comes to mind, you may have bumped into him at some point, is A.J. Jacobs. Oh, sure, yeah. I loved his stuff. He's great. So he described his relationship to Judaism up to having children as, I think he said, I am to Judaism as the Olive Garden is to Italian was the way he put it. And it was the children, having his first child that really brought about the question, how do I raise this being? And I wanted to sort of segue in a way to think like a freak. Obviously, there are all these principles, and I've really enjoyed reading the books that help one to test assumptions

uncover biases become a better thinker ideally get better results and those include learning to say i don't know putting away your moral compass uh thinking small well i want to revisit a few of these uh certainly but what are what are the if you could choose one or two of these to from the book to instill in your children, you have two children, is that right? Yeah, yeah. Which would they be and why? If you had to kind of choose the one or two, what you would view as force multipliers or otherwise for your kids, what would they be? Yeah.

So it's interesting you ask that question because my kids, it's, you know, look, I think parenting is the most awesome science experiment ever. So you've got an N of one or two or maybe three or four these days. And what's so interesting among many things is how different two kids from the same gene pool can be. So I will say this. So in answer to your question, I would have a really different answer for the two kids. So my boy is 13. His name is Solomon, which is my dad's name before my dad became Catholic and became Paul. So Solomon Dubner is my son and was my original Jewish father. And Solomon is, God, I mean, you know, I love my kids to death. But my feeling for him is like very, very deep in a way that is unusual, from an angle that is just really different from my love for my daughter. And it's

because he is attracted to things and thinks about things just in a very different way from my daughter. And so I, you know, I think a great virtue in a human is when you are yourself in all circumstances, right? I love the idea that you meet someone who's, let's say, well-known, or at least you really admire their work, and then you meet them, and they turn out to be as substantial as you thought. Meanwhile, it really depresses me when you meet someone who you think is like this really great whatever, public servant or whatever, and then you see them tearing into somebody and being a real shit you know that bums me out yeah the hero with clay feet experience is pretty horrible

yeah yeah so uh i i i very much value the idea of a human being who's consistent across circumstances that said i realized that to be a good parent, I feel like I need to be really different with the two of my kids because they've got a totally different set of likes and dislikes, talents and flaws and curiosities and so on. And so with him, I try to teach him a lot of the kind of rules of Freakonomics, which is, and I have to say, he really picks up on it really quickly. So like today, this morning at like six o'clock, we both get up early and he came in and he said, you know, ever since I bought that Juan Mata jersey, Mata has been on a tear and he scored in like almost every game. And then he looks at me with a smile and says, I'm sure it was my buying the jersey that caused him to score all those goals. And then he says to me, correlation does not equal causality, right, dad? So I love that. I love that he finds, you know, obviously it's a simplistic version of a

mistake that we all make, but I like that he's kind of thinking that way. So that's the kind of thinking I talk about with him. With my daughter, what's really interesting is in our world, at least living in New York City, girls, I find once they get, and I didn't know this, having not been a girl, but my wife having been a girl knew this, other girls and occasionally boys think of what they're doing than getting just organically excited about what they're doing. In other words, the boys seem to just charge off and say, I want to do this. You know, I'm going to do this. I may be good.

I may be bad. I'm doing, this is what I like to do, whether it's, you know, karate or writing or whatever. And with girls, from what I've seen, and this is not scientific at all in this circle, is that, you know, there's a lot of social comparison and stuff like that. So with my daughter, I'm just always talking to her about thinking on your own and what it means to really figure out what your preferences actually are and whether you're choosing a preference because it's what everybody does and it's kind of conventional and convenient or whether it really turns you on. Because, you know, I just think that if something doesn't turn you on, you're not going to want to do it very much. If you don't do it very much, you're not going to get very good at it. Then in the end, you'll be unhappy for it. No, that makes perfect sense. How old is your daughter?

12. 12. Oh, got it. All right. So are they close? Are your kids close to each other? They're very, very close. I mean, they fight sometimes like all siblings do, but yeah, they're kind of weirdly like this little old married couple. When they're out of sight and they don't know where around you see them, they look exactly like a married couple. He'll do things for her. She'll do things for him. She'll complain about the food a little bit, but in many ways, they're total, total opposites. He would be very happy eating nothing ever, ever, ever except for meat.

And she became a vegetarian at age nine. So that's just, you know, that's the... Do you have kids? I do not. I do not. I think about kids a lot. I do want a family, ultimately. I've got to figure out the girlfriend-wife component first.

Yeah, that can help. That can help. Although I live in San Francisco where all formats are possible. So who knows? Right. Yeah, yeah. But I don't have kids. I think about, I'm trying to do, I'm trying to dig my wells before I'm dry in the sense

that I'm trying to do as much research and talk to people who appear to be good parents. The anecdote that you brought up about your son in New Jersey and saying correlation doesn't equal causality, right, Dad? It reminded me of a friend of mine, Kelly Starrett. He's one of the top athletic coaches in the country. He works with Olympic athletes, top CrossFit Games athletes, etc. And his kids really know all of his principles. They've embodied them all, so for posture and whatnot. He was having 60 minutes where somebody was over at his house, and the woman who was interviewing him was having a lot of trouble

performing a deadlift with no weight, just picking up a box off the floor. He goes, well, let me show you some good technique. We can pull in a professional athlete athlete and he pulls in his five, I think it was like five or six year old daughter who can explain exactly, you know, how not to pronate your feet and everything. But I don't yet have kids, but I am thinking about it a lot. And you know, the question of how much you can form someone versus how, how much of it is nurture versus nature. And what's been so fascinating to me, as many of my friends have kids is that, as one example, this isn't always the case, but I, you

know, I went to, I grew up on Long Island, then went to, transferred to a boarding school, went to Princeton. You know, the women that I've spent and the girls, the women I've spent a lot of time around tend to be very well educated and power women in a lot of senses. And a good portion of them, up until the point they have two kids, boy and a girl, tend to have very sort of nurture-focused views of gender stereotypes, if that makes sense. Like, well, you know, like, like men and women, maybe they're different on some levels, but

a lot of it is socialized. And then they have a boy and a girl, they're like, Oh, my God, these two could not be different. Yeah. And I'm curious to know, you know, if you were trying, if you were trying to form someone who's helped help form someone who's a little bit older, let's just say that you're the mentor in this case. And I was very fortunate like you to have, as I traveled around and was away from home, a wrestling coach. I can point to very specific people who had tremendous impact on me and other boys around me. So if you're the mentor and you have, let's say, a boy, to keep it simple, or just in context for me, who's in, say, 10th, 11th grade, and you're trying to improve their thinking, and this relates to a lot of what you've written about, what are some

of the sort of key, if you were going to lay out a curriculum for them to try to train their brain, train their behavior, what would some of the first steps look like? That's a really good and really hard question. It's a tough question. It's a tough one. It's easier for me to ask it than for you to answer it. I like it a lot. That's the kind of question that I would like to have thought to ask someone much smarter than me to see what they said. So I'll tell you, I think I'm going to have a hard time coming up with the actual curricula. But here's one thing I've noticed that I think is really valuable. So I think one, I don't quite want to

call it a mistake, but one bias or blind spot that I think a lot of people have is they try to pattern their success after people who have been really successful. And the problem is that most of the people that have been really successful are anomalous for one reason or another, or maybe for 10 reasons. So like, if, you know, if there's a kid out there who says, you know, I like design and I like technology, I would like to be Steve Jobs. So let me read everything I can about him and try to do everything he did. That should work, right? And I think that's a prima facie, a spurious idea. But beyond that, whenever you're dealing with anomalies, people who have been super, super, super successful, you have to appreciate how rare that is. And there's a counterpoint to that, which is this. And I learned this when I was studying writing. So after I quit playing music, I didn't know exactly what kind of writing I wanted to do, whether it was academic, be a professor, write in journalism and so on.

So I went to graduate school and I got an MFA in fiction writing at Columbia, which was a great experience for me. And I learned there that among many other things is that it was a lot harder, at least for me, to learn writing from great writing than it was to learn from really shitty writing. Oh, that's fascinating. Okay. Because when things are really good, you know, if you read a great book or listen to a great piece of music or even look at a great athlete, you know, there's a kind of natural inclination to want to copy it or mimic it. And like I said, a few minutes ago, all the forces and inputs that went into producing that, you know, there are a

lot of inputs and be some of them you're not going to have and see there are these elements of randomness and luck. Right. So if I read, you know, a novel that I think is a great novel, it's Dostoevsky or Philip Roth or whatever, or whatever, Donna Tartt, whatever I think is this great book I've read, and then say, oh, this is my model. This is what I should pattern myself on. There's just all kinds of reasons why that can't or won't work, including the fact that it's going to take you away from being your best natural version of yourself. On the other hand, if you read really bad stuff and you look at failures, I think there's a tremendous amount to be learned by failure. So first of all, we do try to celebrate failure to some degree in this new book.

Not failure, qua failure, but because it's an experiment. You need to fail and move on to try to do the amazing things. So that's what I would – that's one kind of very, very narrow part of the gospel I would preach if someone was foolish enough to come to me as a mentor. No, that makes perfect sense. I mean, the more I think about it, the more sense it makes because you have, for instance, these savant-like performances on the soccer field just to bring up soccer again. And it's very difficult to dissect that excellence. Like you said, because of all the inputs, whereas if, if, if you're even a mediocre writer starting out and read something terrible, there's a good chance you could pinpoint a handful of the things

that make it terrible, at least for you subjectively. And, and no, that makes, that makes a lot of sense to me. never and never do them again never do them again one of the things that popped up in in this new book and i underlined it and and started for myself was uh the the origins of the word sophisticated uh i thought this was so fascinating so the footnote i'm just going to read this. And it says, let's see here. The sentence leading to the footnote is because they don't pass the smell test or have never been tried because they don't seem sophisticated enough. And then it goes down to the footnote, which is, it's not even clear that sophistication is such a worthy goal. The word is derived from

the Greek sophists, or sophists, you can me, uh, itinerant teachers of philosophy and rhetoric who didn't enjoy a good reputation, which is hilarious. Uh, that that's in quotation marks. One scholar writes, they were quote, more concerned with winning arguments than arriving at truth and quote. And I, I have just encountered, and I'm sure I'm guilty of this as well. So many people who seem to waste their intellectual horsepower on winning arguments as opposed to arriving at truth or getting results. And how would you suggest that someone try to cure this? I think it's a huge problem. And there's just this cognitive surplus of smart people who waste their innate horsepower on just nonsense, kind of mental masturbation.

I'd be curious to know how you, if it's possible, and if so, how to just help someone overcome that tendency. Let's just assume that they kind of want to fix that. Do you have any thoughts? Well, you know, what we advise, I mean, what you just read from is a section where I guess we're talking about the advantages of thinking like a child. That's right. That's it. That's the section, right? Yeah. So, I mean, you're right. It's both very, very, very hard, but really simple. But the simple and the hard are not the same category of option here, because what I mean is it's hard because you understand why people want to appear sophisticated, right? what circle you're in, if you're in an academic or a high-end business or tech circle, there's a huge, or finance, there's a huge, the coin of the realm is appearing to know a lot. It's appearing to know more than other people. It's appearing to know the kind of thing that other people may not know. And it's appearing to have a clever, quote, take on something, right?

And all of that is good. All that can be great. I don't mean to downgrade any of that. The problem is if that is your, you know, MO constantly, then you'll often miss a lot of the lower hanging fruit, which are simple, clever, more obvious points that can be just as fruitful, if not more so. Right, the Occam's razor type of stuff, yeah. Exactly. And I very much agree with you that it's a drag to see these people with huge mental CPU either thinking about something

or working on something that's just not very, whatever, fruitful or productive for a lot of people, or just as often, especially in the realm of public intellectualism and media and stuff, just people totally preaching to the choir. So that's, I mean, look, pick a media outlet, any media outlet just about that features, you know, some kind of public intellectual, whether it's an op-ed page in a newspaper or a cable news channel with the talking heads and so on. And what you basically find is people on either side of the aisle who present themselves as extraordinarily sophisticated, making arguments that are absolutely never going to actually persuade anyone. They're totally, they sound super, super, super, super smart and sophisticated, but they're doing nothing more than preaching to the choirs. You can say,

well, okay, that's a way to make a living. That's fine. Who am I to judge that? But if your goal is to actually persuade anyone of anything or to actually enlarge in society in any way, I think it can be a real detriment to act as if sophistication is a goal in and of itself. And so that's why it's hard. There's a lot of incentives to appear that way. The reason it's easy, though, or why it can be easy is all you have to really do is stop faking it and stop BSing and stop pretending you know everything. And, you know, think a little bit more like a child, follow natural curiosities if you acknowledge what you don't know you can start to like you've done you know I want to do X better whether it's cooking or working or whatever how do I do it I

have my head full of preconceptions and old ideas and conventional wisdom are they true maybe some of them are but if I want to find out what's most true for me, I can experiment, I can get a lot of feedback, and I can figure out what's actually true. And so look, I think the problem is for someone like you, Tim Ferriss, per se, you know, these tendencies aren't so foreign for a lot of people, for a lot of us. And I'm sure for you in some circumstances, too, it's just so much easier to kind of get in the to stay in the main flow of the conventional wisdom where, you know, you want to look like the smart guy who has all the answers, even if the answers are not true. No, it is. I mean, it is the easier path, right. Uh, and I was looking at the, you know, at the new book and at some of the,

the principles and what struck me living in Silicon Valley and being very heavily involved in tech is that if I, if I try to dissect the failures and the successes within my portfolio of startups, right. And you look at say the, uh, Uber, the, the app for instance which has just exploded and i was one of the first three advisors three to five advisors precede money to uber and well done thank you i mean a lottery ticket to be sure but on the other hand i people think of uber as this ubiquitous service and you start to i can draw these examples from my own experience, be willing to think small, right? I mean, Uber started with two or three, well, certainly one, cars. I remember testing the prototype, you know, driving around San Francisco

when nothing had really been figured out aside from the market opportunity and a basic, minimally viable product. And then you have appreciating the upset of quitting. I can point to serial entrepreneurs who have been successful, I think, in large part because they've known which projects to quit, which to put to bed. And perhaps the one that really jumps out at me, even more so than those, is make sure you're asking the right questions, solving the right problems. So the solving the right problem, it doesn't matter if you get the right answer, if you're solving the wrong problem or a problem that is not worthy of your talents, and this is a continual question among venture capitalists is, you know, are you guys solving

the right problem? Like I will back you guys, but not for this company because you're choosing the wrong opportunity. And what I'd love to know is, like you said earlier, you'd come up with 120 or so principles. Which were the last to go? Were you like, oh, these are my babies. I don't want to kill them. I love these. I really want to put these in. What were some of the principles that didn't make it in the final cut that you're like, you know, in an alternate universe where there were a version B, these would be in? Yeah. So the single most prominent example by a long shot is one that didn't quite not make the cut, but went from being about 30 pages to maybe half a page. And that was this

idea. Like I said, this book was a real struggle to get started right because it needed to be a fairly sequential thing, which might sound like, of course, books are sequential, but ours are usually not. It made perfect sense because my books are modular in the same way as your right is your right but this one we wanted to be sequential and moreover the most the biggest thing we wanted it to be that like the tone and pace and weight and all that stuff had to be right because we didn't want it to feel preachy right we didn't want it to be like hey hey you should want to be like us and be like us like this and we also didn't want it to feel preachy, right? We didn't want it to be like, hey, you should want to be like us and be like us like this. And we also didn't want to be, hey, you should think like pull it off in the original form, was this concept that we called First Put Away Your Moral Compass. And so it did survive in literally like maybe a page in the book, but this was like maybe a 30-page chapter that began the book. And the whole idea was that if you want to solve a problem,

any problem that you care enough about to want to solve, you almost certainly come to it with a whole lot of ideas about it, ideas about why it's an important problem, what is it that bothers you exactly, who are the villains in the problem, all these kind of things. If you're an environmentalist and you believe that really one of the biggest tragedies of the last hundred years is people despoiling the environment, the minute you hear about an issue that kind of abuts the environment, whether it's honeybee collapse or something having to do with air quality, your immediate kind of moral position is, well, I know exactly what the cause of that is. It's caused by people, human beings being stupid and careless and greedy and so on. Now, that may be

true, but it also may not be true. Our point is, if you operate, if you try to approach every problem with your moral compass, you know, first and foremost, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. You're going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions. You're going to assume you know a lot of things you don't. You're going to assume you know a lot of things when in fact you don't. And you're not going to be a good partner in reaching a solution with other people who don't happen to see the world the way you do. And so we wrote, you know, reams and reams and reams and reams and reams about this with all these kinds of examples. And it was just terrible. It was some of the worst writing I'd ever done. And I think in retrospect, it was just because, you know,

that's not the kind of writer, you know, we try to be kind of the opposite of preachy, and we couldn't help it get out of being preachy. And then I have a friend, a dear friend named Jonathan Rosen, who's a wonderful writer and editor. And Jonathan, I brought in toward the end of this book, and I asked him to read some chapters and just give me some feedback. And I gave him this unwieldy version of this moral compass chapter. And he's very sweet. So he didn't say like, you know, Dubner, this is terrible. He just said, yeah, it's kind of meanders and it's a little da da da. And then, so I killed it. I totally, totally, totally, totally killed it, threw it in the trash. And then like three days later, he calls up and he says,

you know, I was thinking about your moral compass idea. And it reminded me of how sailors, you know, hundreds of years ago, when sailing ships first started to become really reliant on a ship's compass, it worked out pretty well most of the time. But then they found that sometimes they would get thrown really, really, really off course by following the compass and they couldn't figure out what it was. And it turns out that they were using more and more metal in their, you know, they're carrying around swords and tools and even metal buckles on their clothes. And those, the metal was throwing off the compass and they didn't know it. And he said, so as a way to fight that, they had to like isolate the compass. Like sometimes they would build a big lead box for the compass or something, or just have like a no metal zone. And he said, that is actually really what you're talking about is don't throw away the moral compass and don't

be preachy about it, but learn to protect it so that you can whip out your moral compass when you need to, but that it doesn't get thrown off course. And once he gave me this unbelievably beautiful metaphor that I think I used, you know, I wrote maybe two sentences about that to kind of place the moral compass idea in the book, then it felt like we could sort of rescue it. So that was a long, unwieldy explanation for your much better question about, you know, what it was that bit the dust. It didn't quite bite the dust, but it was resurrected only by the intervention of a friend who had a better way to help frame the argument. Oh, man, I would love to chat with you another time just about writing. Honestly, I any time. Honestly, it's my favorite subject. Most normal people couldn't care less about writing.

I love it. I love talking about it because it's talking about crystallized thought. It's talking about refining thought and what could be respectful of your time, and I know you've got a lot on your plate right now, is to just ask a couple of rapid-fire questions. Sure. And, of course, I'll have links to your books and so on, the podcast and everything else that you're up to in the show notes for everybody, so that will be very easy. But I'm just going to knock out a couple of rapid-fire questions, and we'll see where they go.

So the first is what is your favorite movie or documentary or two to three that come to mind and why? So I would say the seven up series of documentaries by Mike Apted, I think is his name. So, you know, this is a series of documentaries of a whole bunch of British kids from different socioeconomic classes. And every seven years, they updated it and checked in with the kids. And it is an unbelievable, it's incredibly, it was like, you know, reality TV before there was reality TV. It was done incredibly well, incredibly sensitively, uh, incredible candor, but it is, uh, if you were at all interested in any kind of science or sociology or human decision-making or nurture versus nature, it is, you know, the best thing ever. I love that. Okay. Fantastic. I need to go

out and watch that immediately. It's reality TV that is reality with the quotation marks removed. Exactly. Yeah. But you know, even just the way it was produced and created and called will be, you know, it's really great. Interesting. Awesome. All right. That's a that that is a keeper. I will be checking that out. What is the first hour of your day look like? What is your routine, if you have one, for the first hour of your day? So that's pretty – so I like to get up early in part because I like the energy of the body and the mind in the morning. So I'm, you know, it takes me a while to get going, but I like – I really love that first hour and a half. And because I have young kids who get up

relatively early too, it's kind of an arms race. So I've had to get earlier and earlier. So now I usually get up usually around 5 a.m. and need some coffee. And I sit down with coffee and the computer. And on the computer, what I will do is usually start to read a little bit, start to write a little bit, and try to do the kind of writing, however, that doesn't require the full brain. So it's dealing with emails and stuff and really planning the day. I'm a little bit spatially and organizationally challenged in certain ways, I really need to understand the shape of my whole day to have a successful day. So I kind of use this as a kind of throat clearing hour and I have to get a little bit of stuff done. mental, physical warmup so that then whenever I do whatever I do next, which is maybe go for a run, or if I can get in a little golf practice, which is my new addiction and obsession,

then when those hours come, I usually try to keep a nice big, big, big block of totally unbroken time. I have no obligations or commitments. So maybe it's going to be from like 8.30 to 4 p.m., or maybe it's from 10 to 5, where then I know that I'm going to have those many hours to sit and think and read and mostly write. So it's about as boring as it gets, but I love it actually, that early morning, you know, sit with the coffee computer. Then the kids come in and the stuff starts to happen. I've found if I just provide a buffer of that type of throat clearing space for an hour to an hour and a half by waking up early or otherwise for each day, my, to use a boring Seligman term, my self-reported well-being, my happiness is so much higher consistently just to have, instead of dodging bullets when you first wake up as opposed

to jumping right into the heavy stuff you mean yeah we're just jumping into anything hugely reactive i guess yeah i put it yeah yeah yeah also you know if you get up as early as i do you know you never want to send like the angry email to somebody that's that's postmarked 5 15 a.m because now not only are you the jerk who's writing the angry email but you're doing it at 5 a.m you're a lunatic right exactly or honest with email which doesn't make any sense so uh does that random question do you do the does the clothing you wear affect your mood or attitude uh why or why not oh yeah definitely oh hugely. So this is one of the ways in which, yeah, I'm oversensitive to my environment and surroundings. So I'm not like Howard Hughes-ish quite, but I need things lined up. What's that? I said no bottles of urine lining the walls.

Not yet, at least. So this is one reason I became a writer. I like to control my environment. I'm talking to you today now from an empty office in my publisher's building where the temperature isn't quite right. The light is definitely not right. There's these hums coming from the wall. I don't know what they are and I don control my environment. So like when I watch golf now, like Bubba Watson, I'm transfixed by Bubba because plainly he's really, really affected by the circumstances, you know, by the crowd, everything, you know, will say, man, this course does not fit my eye at all,

et cetera, et cetera. And I really identify with that. I need to, so yeah, absolutely. Something as simple as clothing. I noticed this when I play golf. If I'm wearing a particular set of shoes or pants and when I'm looking down in my setup and if I look to my eye like a quote golfer, then I play better. I'm going to swing better. So I think that people who think that you don't derive feeling or confidence or whatever from something as quote silly as dress or whatnot, I think they're who think that, you know, you don't derive a feeling or confidence or whatever

from something as quote silly as dress or whatnot. I think they're really underestimating how, how, uh, you know, I wouldn't say how fragile our, our brains are, but how complex they are. So yeah, I think all that matters a lot. Okay. I have a, as a side note, I have a friend, this is part of, part of why I became fascinated by, by clothing when I never really was before. I just kind of threw on whatever I had is I've, i have a friend who's a little bit older than i am a massively successful real estate guy and he somewhat like men in black he has the same he has about 30 pairs of the same khaki shorts and 30 pairs of the same black shirt and 20 of the same hat. And literally that is his,

that is his uniform that he wears every day. And he's one of the most, he's more, I mean, I'm not going to go that far, but he's one of the most effective, uh, calmest people I've ever met.

I just remember though, just remember my son's one matah Jersey lesson. That's right. No, understood. Understood. The uniform is not necessarily responsible, but as you say, it may in some part be. Absolutely.

What are some of your favorite sources of information or just guilty pleasures with reading? So you mentioned waking up and reading. What are your go-to sources if you any, or how do you curate that? So I probably have a pretty typical media diet in a lot of ways. I read a lot of New York Times, read a lot of Wall Street Journal. I read a lot of other papers and blah, blah, blah. I read Marginal Revolution, economics blog by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabrak, which is great. That's a great blog.

I love the browser. The guy who puts together the browser, I can't recall his name at the moment, but it's just a great daily, I think, or maybe a couple times a week compilation of good stuff from around the web.

I love Jason Kotke, if you know kotke.org. Definitely. Again, I'm not naturally a great visual person. My wife's a photographer, so she is, but I love people who do astonishing things with whether it's design or whatnot. Partly it's because when I look at it, I'm just astonished that someone could even think of that, much less execute. So kotke.org, I look for, I find it really inspiring. And I love sports. So I read a lot about sports. And like I said, my son has gotten really into soccer in the last couple of years, European, MLS, you know,

of course, upcoming World Cup. And so partly out of my devotion to him, but also because, you know, I've always liked soccer, okay. But now because of him, that's been the new reading passion, both with books and journalism and whatnot. Have you ever read Levels of the Game? Yeah. Oh, God. Levels of the Game is one of my very, very, very favorite books ever. It's so amazing. For those who are not familiar, this is John McPhee's book about a single tennis match, a stanza play. But I actually was very lucky, and I don't— Oh, did you have McPhee? I had McPhee for the Literature of Fact seminar in school, which was just a mind-blowing experience.

So I'll ask you just one last question, and then I'll let you run. Hopefully we can have a round two sometime. This was really fun. I would love to. Yeah, this is a blast. Actually, I lied. There are two questions.

One is a sort of substance question, and then the next is a where do we find you question. But if you could provide your younger self, and I know this is just one of those questions, but I'll ask it anyway, with one or two pieces of advice, let's just say yourself in college or high school, what would those pieces of advice be? I would say it's pretty simple. Don't be scared. I was just, you know, there are a lot of things I did not do, a lot of experiences I never tried, a lot of people I never met or hung out with because I was in some form intimidated or scared. And look, I still deal with that all the time. And so that would be it. And like I said, it's not like I solved that problem, but that would be what I'd go back and say to my younger self is that almost always the thing that you fear

is ridiculous. And it also plays into what psychologists call the spotlight effect. Like everybody must be caring about what I do. And the fact is nobody gives a crap what I do. So that's what I would say. Don't be scared. Yeah. That is excellent advice. Well, I'm going to give some advice to everybody listening. That is check out everything that Stephen has written. I've really been a fan for a long time and have looked to you as a virtual mentor in many respects with the storytelling and so on. It's informed my own writing and therefore my own thinking. For those who haven't seen the new book,

Think Like a Freak is very much a fantastic companion. If you've read, for instance, a lot of you are already readers of The 4-Hour Body, 4-Hour Workweek, 4-Hhour chef. It's a guide to better thinking. And what better tool could you possibly want or have? So I'll recommend that. Stephen, where would you like people to find you more about you? Obviously, they can find everything related to the books on Amazon or elsewhere. But where do you spend your time online? Where can people find more of what you do? Yeah, so freeeconomics.com is, I guess, the best single compilation.

I don't really do a lot of personal writing or tweeting or anything, but freeeconomics.com and freeeconomics on Twitter is where we kind of write what we've got going on in our work life. And so that'll lead you, and it work life. And so that'll lead you. And, you know, it's one of those websites that'll lead you into 10 levels in if you really want to go. And you can find a lot of stuff about related projects, et cetera, et cetera, most of which are not very good, but that's okay.

We try. We keep trying. We throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall for some of it to stick. Wonderful. Well, this has been a blast. I will let you get on with your day and hope to chat with you soon. Maybe see you on the East Coast. Me too.

It was really fun and I would love to talk again in any circumstances. I really appreciate you having me on, Tim. Absolutely. All right. Okay. See you, man. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Thanks. If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to 4hourblog.com, where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter. It's twitter.com slash tferris. That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S.

Or on Facebook at facebook.com slash timferris. Until next time, thanks for listening.