YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen Dubner

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72
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2014-05-19
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2014-05-19
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  1. “Me too. Me too. It was really fun, and I would love to talk again in any circumstances, and I really appreciate you having me on, Tim.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Yeah, so freeconomics.com is, I guess, the best single compilation. I don't really do a lot of personal writing or tweeting or anything, but frequently.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “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 on some, in some form, intimidated or scared. Look, I still deal with that all the time. And so that would be it. And like I said, I haven't, you know, 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 fact is nobody gives a crap what I do. So that's what I would say. Don't be scared, yeah.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “And like I said, my son has gotten really into soccer in the last couple 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.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “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 Kotkey.org, I look for, I find it really inspiring. And I love sports. So I read a lot about sports.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “So I probably have a pretty typical media diet in a lot of ways. You know, 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 Cowan and Alex Tabrock, which is great. I love the browser, the guy who puts together the browser, I can't recall his name at the moment, but”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “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 really underestimating how, you know, I wouldn't say how fragile our brains are, but how complex they are. So yeah, I think all that matters a lot.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “And so one reason I became a writer is so I can control my environment. So 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 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,”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “What's that? Not yet, at least. So, you know, 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't like them.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Oh, yeah, definitely. Oh, yeah, hugely. So, this is one of the ways in which I'm oversensitive to my environment and surroundings. So I'm not like Howard Hughes-ish quite, but I need...”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “You never want to send the angry email to somebody that's postmarked 5.15 a.m. Because now not only are you the jerk who's writing the angry email, but”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “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.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “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 a half to get a little bit of stuff done, but mostly it's almost like a mental physical warm-up so that then”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “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 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 bring, 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. And I'm a little bit”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “So I would say the seven up series of documentaries by, is it Mike Aptid, 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 reality TV before there was reality TV. It was done incredibly well, incredibly sensitively, incredible candor. But it is, if you were at all interested in any kind of science or sociology or human decision making or nurture versus nature, it is the best thing ever.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “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 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”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “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 carrying around swords and even metal buckles on their clothes. And 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 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”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “It was just because, you know, that's not the kind of writer. You know, we try to be kind of the opposite of preaching. We couldn't help it get out of being preaching. 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, Deborah, this is terrible. He just said, yeah, it's kind of meanders and it's a little bit. 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, hundreds of years ago, when sailing ships first started to become really reliant on a ship's compass.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “And you believe that really one of the biggest tragedies of the last hundred years is the 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 first and foremost, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. You're going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “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 You almost certainly, 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. So if you're an environmentalist, if you're an environmentalist,”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “But this one we wanted to be sequential, and moreover, the biggest thing we wanted it to be 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 to. Be, hey, you should think like a freak because you can fix the world and this and that are wrong and you better get out there and do it. We didn't want to be that. This one idea that we had that we felt was really, really, really important, but we couldn't pull it off in the original form was this concept that we called first put away your moral compass.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “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. Ours are just a perfect.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Circumstances too. It's just so much easier to kind of get in the main flow of the conventional wisdom where you want to look like the smart guy who has all the answers even if the answers are not true.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “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 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? a 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 Ferris, 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...”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “In the realm of public intellectualism and media and stuff, just people totally preaching through the choirs. 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. And 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 sophisticated”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Exactly. And I very much agree with you that it's a drag to see these people with huge mental CPU either doing 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”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “If that is your 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.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Yeah, so I mean You're right, it's both very, very, very hard, but really simple. But the simple and the harder 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? We have reputations, we have egos. Depending on what circle you're in, if you're in an academic or a high-end business or tech circle, there's a finance. 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.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “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 probably, right?”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “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, quasure, but because it's an experiment. You need to fail and move on to know what's going to work. But with something like writing or with sports or with just patterning your life on somebody else's, I think if you can look at the mistakes, the things that don't work, I think it's a lot easier to not do the terrible things than it is 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.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Because when things are really good, 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, A, a, a, a, a, a lot of inputs, and B, some of them you're not going to have. And C, 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, Donna Tart, 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 natural, your best natural version of yourself. On the other hand, if you read really bad stuff and you look at failures,”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “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 wanted to, you know, I didn't know exactly what kind of writing I wanted to do, whether it was academic, be a professor, write 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.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “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 know 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. 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.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “They're very, very close. I mean, you know, they fight sometimes like all siblings do, but yeah, they're kind of weirdly like this little old married. 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, do you have kids?”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “I'm going to do this. I may be good. I may be bad. I'm doing this. This is what I like to do, whether it's 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 you'll be unhappy for it”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “And what I see that doing on young women and girls is that it puts a lot of pressure, they seem to care a lot more about what 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.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “I get, and I didn't know this having not been a girl, but my wife having been a girl knew this that girls, the social circle pole thing is so intense like in middle school.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “I try to be teach him a lot of the kind of rules of free economics, which is, and I have to say, he really picks up on it really quickly. 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's 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”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Yeah, yeah. So I very much value the idea of a human being who's consistent across circumstances. That said, I realize that to be a good parent. I feel like I need to be really different with the two of my kids because they're just a totally, they've got a totally different set of likes and dislikes, talents and flaws and curiosities and so on. So with my son, he really wants to be like a soccer journalist. That's his dream. And so with him.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “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 know, 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. It bums me out. Yeah, the hero is placed.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Otherwise. Yeah, so it's interesting to ask that question because my kids, it's a, 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 of 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 really different answer for the two kids. Great. 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 my kids to death. But my feeling for him is like... Very, very deep in a way”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “That had been informed by Judaism, and that extended to culture. He was an acting teacher. This wasn't about religion per se. It extended to culture. It extended to sports. It extended to politics. And it resonated with me the same way that for Steve Levitt studying econ at Harvard resonated with him. And I just thought, man, this feels substantial to me. Feels interesting, feels productive, 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 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.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “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 Cronenfeld, 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 physical real people to be mentors. I just think there's, you know, as a kid who grew up kind of without a father, I never wanted to find like a substitute father. That just seemed cliched. Yeah, I did have a series of men in my life who were incredibly generous and wise in teaching me. And sometimes, you know, some of what they said didn't resonate at all. You have to be your own editor. But Ivan Cronenfeld was this guy who was not religious, really, at all, but had a deep, deep, deep well of learning and wisdom.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “And you end up going to Harvard, and you got to Harvard, and as Levitt tells the story, he was really bad at math and had always been pretty bad at math. And so he didn't thrive in a math setting at Harvard, but when he took Econ 101 or 10 or whatever it's called, he said, he would come out of class 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 lens that fit his eye. And for me, when I started, when I moved to New York after quitting my band, I just accidentally”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Yeah, that's a great question. I would say definitely those two things and probably another four or five things. Like, you know, it's funny, my co-author, Steve Levitt 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. He was a very smart kid. Super, super smart kid.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “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.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “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”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “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 was gradual and slow. I decided that I was going to return to Judaism. 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 never met until I started to seek them out. So I returned to that and became, you know.”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Some exposure to some people who've been really successful in rock and roll just getting to meet, 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”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “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 dead father kind of middle of nowhere, no money, and very, very, very, very Catholic family. And all that said, all that said, which might sound like bad stuff or tough stuff was, you know, I was very happy. It was a great experience. You know, my family was great and I felt loved and I felt encouraged to do stuff that made me happy. So years later, 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”

    2014-05-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 7: Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT