YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen Dubner

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2014-05-19

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2014-05-19

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1. “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 free economics 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.”

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

2. “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, 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 had been 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 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.”

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

3. “Great. Yeah. So, first of all, I appreciate your thinking of me as hyper rational, but I'm probably not really. Even though a lot of the freak economics 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 kind of make us human and make us different, 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 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 I came from a really weird and wonderful family. So my parents.”

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

4. “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 this 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, a time element, a time series, and a narrative with”

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

5. “Like, let's say we're talking, let's say we're talking about drunk driving and the actual data and the numbers and so on. And I can tell you that, you know, the data seemed 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?”

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

6. “And they don't have any time. They don't have a time series attached to them. And I realize that Danny kind of 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”

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

7. “I follow 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.”

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

8. “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.”

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

9. “Prior to a lot of. The true purpose of the test. So I don't recall. But sorry to interrupt. No, no, that's interesting because Will 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. And 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 explain 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.”

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

10. “And the way I got interested in economics actually originally was because of the work of Danny Kahneman, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tersky, right?”

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

11. “Brainstorming was about 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, so I've always loved storytelling. I would argue that most people love storytelling even if they don't really think about it.”

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

12. “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 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. You know, I think anytime you're making something, whether it's building 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”

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

13. “Sometimes there's two or three ideas. So let's say there are roughly 15 principles, right, 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.”

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

14. “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, you know, or major global reforms, right? But before we got to that, we were like diluted 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 that that wasn't going to work. 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,”

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

15. “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. 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?”

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

16. “That's why any writer who's had a good editor knows how valuable that 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.”

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

17. “Hundreds of pages 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.”

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

18. “The collaboration honestly takes many, many, many forms because not all of our work is so needed 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. 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 where it's nice to have the tight in-person feedback loop for all other forms of collaboration, reading, editing, critiquing, saying this sucks. We threw away.”

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

19. “To some degree. And so when we're hearing a story, we maybe even subconsciously insert ourselves into the narrative to kind of see how we'd play. Like, man, I wouldn't have gone for that deal selling drugs for only eight bucks an hour or whatever.”

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

20. “But then, in addition to just translating it, one thing that I always try to do in writing Tell a story so you can have a conclusion, a set of data that reaches a conclusion. We talked about the economics of selling cracked 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. 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 in 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.”

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

21. “All right, so you asked, I'll answer, but I'll warn you it's 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, Free Economics and Super Freconomics. 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 ask him to explain parts of the paper, especially the theory parts.”

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

22. “Really useful model. I think it worked out pretty well for you. So whatever small, small part we played in, I'm glad it worked.”

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