Alvin E. Roth (on moral economics)

- I'm Dan Shepherd and I'm joined by Lily Padman.

- Hi. - Today we have Elvin E. Roth. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a Stanford professor, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding. - My goodness. - His previous book is Who Gits What and Why. And his new book is called This is Tasty Moral Economics

from prostitution to organ sales, what controversial transactions reveal about how markets work. - Really interesting. - Super, super interesting. We learn about the difference between repugnancy and disgust.

He himself pioneered this kidney market that has saved tens of thousands of lives. Yeah, really, really great topic. Please enjoy Elvin E. Roth. ♪ He's in our chance, bro ♪

♪ He's in our chance, bro ♪ ♪ He's in our chance, bro ♪

“- You're visiting, I presume, from the Stanford area, yeah?”

- Yeah. - You're originally from Queens, both parents or school teachers. - Yes. - And what was their specialty? Were they just generalists? - They taught in high school, and they taught

a discipline that no longer exists. It was called secretarial studies. And they taught mostly young women who weren't planning to go to college and become secretaries. And they taught them typing and stenography.

So one of the skills that a secretary needed to have in those days was to be able to take by hand dictation. - Yeah. - Right, and then your words per minute was your currency, I imagine, and accuracy. - Yeah, both parents, specialized in that?

- They did. - And they meet in pursuit of that knowledge. They probably did, and they were both New York City school teachers, and part of the implicit contract was your supposed to go back and get a master's degree.

And I think they met them. - Okay, they met in graduate school. - Yeah. - How many children is your older brother than you? - Four years.

- Four years, and did you look up to him? - Absolutely. - So he started this. He started taking classes at Columbia on the weekend, and that encouraged you to do the same.

- He did. - Yeah, what grade? - The entrance exam was in ninth grade. I don't think I started classes until 10th grade, but I'm not positive about that.

- All to say, you end up beginning college full-time at Columbia before you've gotten a degree, yeah? - So if we're talking about a high school degree, I don't have a high school degree. - Yeah, you don't have a high school degree,

which I like a lot. And you started full-time at 16 at Columbia? - Yes. - So you were of under-can? Do you reject that term or do you embrace it?

- I don't think I embrace it. I was not a great high school student. - But they let you end the college without it. They did, it's a private college, and the thing about having some acquaintance

with Columbia professors was, they let me in. - Wow.

- And you got your first degree quickly, young, three years,

and it was in operations research. What was operations? - Well, operations research was and is a collection of applied mathematical tools. Mostly their tools that had their origin in World War II,

so various kinds of optimization and some kinds of statistics, things like that. - And then you went to graduate school, quickly thereafter, which you went to Stanford. And you get your master's in PhD there in three years.

Again, this is accelerated, and I did, yeah. - What was the hurry? Was it just happening? - It was mostly just happening. I wasn't in a hurry, but again,

I wasn't a talented student. I liked being a student, but I was ready to also think about things on my own.

“- Okay, how do we transition from operations to economics?”

- It's a good question. I'm often asked about my story, which I'm sticking to, is that I didn't change what I did, but the disciplinary boundary is moved around me.

So I studied game theory was the topic of my dissertation. And in the 1970s, it looked like operations research might be the natural home of Game Theory, but then economics adopted Game Theory and doing Game Theory made you an economist

and there I was. - Oh, okay. Did you love Yonnisvant Neumann? He's a father of Game Theory. It would be delightful to have met him.

- He was a polymath and an usual man. - Most of the Game Theory we do today isn't very directly related to what he did. - I'm fascinated with him. I read a great biography about him last year.

He is the one who basically comes up

at the concept of mutually assured nuclear annihilation, right? This is what he models out. - So he didn't ever talk about things like that. He may have thought about it or talked about it, but not written in his Game Theory book,

but you might be thinking of Thomas Schelling, who was a Game Theory, who also shared a Nobel Prize in Economics with Bob O'Mon. And he worked in the Rand Corporation and thought a lot about nuclear disarmament and armament

and mutually assured destruction.

“- But that is based on the shoulders of Game Theory, no?”

- Yeah. - You have a lot of long stints. You do University of Illinois for seven years?

- Eight years? - That's before '82.

“- And then you do University of Pittsburgh”

for a long time as well, '82 to '98. - Are you astounded when you look back that you've had kind of full careers at all these different places? 'Cause you then also went to Harvard for 14 years.

Like these are really long 10 years at any one place. - Well, you know, I'm old. (laughing) We did different things at each place. I met my wife at Illinois.

We had our children in Pittsburgh. We saw them off to college in Boston and then we moved to Stanford in 2012. - Does academia not delay you from this or do you feel like you were able to pick up the world view

of all these places you spent all this time?

And I always think of myself as being from Detroit

and then I've been here for 30 years. And I definitely downloaded a different world view through being here. And I want more of those world views. And I just wonder if you could feel that you absorbed

the culture and the points of view. - I think I can absorb the culture of the different places. Partly, there's a lot in common about fancy economics departments wherever they are.

People sometimes ask me what's the difference between Harvard and Stanford. And in many ways they're pretty similar, if you're in economics department, you're reading the same journals,

you're seeing many of the same people. So 78% of it is pretty similar. The difference is, at Harvard, when you look away from campus, what you see in the foreground is Wall Street in Washington.

And at Stanford, when you look away from campus, you see Silicon Valley.

“You know, I think they changed a little bit”

what students study. Not completely, I have Harvard students who are working in the valley. And I have Stanford students who go to Wall Street in Washington. But it's a little more close to you.

It's more likely that those are the data you think about those are the people you need. - Right. - Okay, so in 2012, I guess you're last year at Harvard. - Yep.

- You win the Nobel Peace Prize with Lloyd Shapley? - Not a Peace Prize, that's a prize for peace. - Oh, we won an economics prize. - Still buying the Nobel committee is the same. - It's different.

There's a Nobel Prize in economics. There's one in physics and one in chemistry and-- - Okay. - One in physiology and medicine and-- - Of in literature.

- So you win that for the theory of stable allocations in practice of market design. So it is in your designing of markets. And one in particular, which we'll talk about. But I think as we get into your book, moral economics,

I think we need some base shared vocabulary and understanding so we can march through them. And I think the best place to start is how do you define a market? What is a market for the laborers?

- That's a good question. So I have a very expansive view of markets because a lot of the markets, I study aren't primarily monetary exchanges. So that surprises even some economists

that I speak of markets that way.

“But I think of markets as tools that human beings build”

so that we can cooperate and compete and coordinate with each other. And so there are lots of markets. There are commodity markets where you don't care who you're dealing with. You can get 5,000 bushels

of hard-red winter weed from any farm. They're all the same. Or they can be marriage markets where you care precisely about who you're dealing with. That's the whole point that I'm adding market

that gets you married. And there's lots of things in between like employment, labor markets. - Yeah, I think we're all most familiar with thinking of markets in terms of the commodities markets

or what is the supply in the demand and how is that gonna affect the price of things. And that's certainly one specific kind of market. - Yep, let the giant kind of market.

- But ultimately we could think of markets

as just being a broad tool that matches anybody with something that they want or need with someone else that has it. Now whether that's gonna be done through pain for that with money or if two people are just going to agree,

I want you and you want me. That's more of the matching model. That's ultimately what your Nobel Prize was for was matching markets that you designed. - Or help design or redesign, yes.

- Yes, so let's talk about matching markets 'cause there's a bunch of different ones that may be people would and realize or markets. - That's a good question because in fact, I wrote a book in 2015 called Who Gits, What And Why.

And that has some things in common. One market in particular in common with my new book, morally economics. But that's a sort of optimistic book about how sometimes markets are broken

and don't work well and if we think hard about them and learn about their details, we can sometimes fix them. And so there were matching markets of that sort that I helped intervene in.

And one of them is the market for first jobs

for new doctors, new American doctors. And that's a market that if you know someone who's graduating from medical school this year, right around now, they'll already have interviewed at residency programs and they'll have submitted

a rank order list of how much they like places. First choice, second choice, third choice. And the residency programs, the employers will do the same thing. And then an algorithm that the algorithm is now is one that I help design.

And algorithm will match them to each other.

What were the baked in challenge?

“There were long standing kind of inefficiencies”

that had to some extent been resolved before I got on the scene by creating a centralized clearing house. And those are when you think what marketplaces have to do, they have to make the market thick. They have to bring people together

who want to transact with each other. Then they have to deal with congestion. If there are lots of jobs, it's hard to consider the offers in a timely way and not be pressed to answer more quickly than you'd like because you'd like to see

what else is coming along. In the congestion, right, is everyone's going to pick the top three tier hospitals in a very populated area. That place is going to be inundated with requests.

And then as we try to move on to someone's second choice,

then now another new moment of congestion. It also is that people are going to make lots of applications and therefore employers are going to get lots of applications. And that's something we've seen in a modern way that the cost of applying to things has dropped faster

than the cost of evaluating applications. So colleges get lots of applications, residency programs, get lots of applications. Undating sites, people with nice pictures, get lots of things.

Yeah, if you're the hospital and you get all these applications, and you go great, I want these 20 graduates. You have no clue if you're their ninth choice or their seventh. So you've wasted all this time on an applicant who really doesn't intend to go there,

but might have sent it as a backup plan. So a centralized clearinghouse helps coordinate that. But one of the particular things that hadn't kept up to date with the way medical education

and the labor market of doctors work was the first centralized

clearinghouse dates back to the 1950s. But in the 1950s, almost all graduates of American medical schools were men. And by 1970, about 10% were women in today, it's 50%. And so more and more, there are couples graduating

from medical school who need two jobs, not one job. And if they need two jobs, you can't do a good job of getting them two jobs unless you ask them which two jobs do you want, what's your first choice of two jobs?

“Because that's what they want, what's your second choice?”

Yeah, that sounds very complicated. It's a little complicated to build an out-of-win that can handle that. Yeah, it makes it simpler for couples who are looking for two jobs to look for them in a sensible way.

Instead of getting one job in Alaska and one job in Florida. Yeah, I was going to say there probably is some rank priority if they'd like to be at the same house, but other than second to that, they'd like to be at two hospitals in the same city. And they have opinions about which hospitals

and they may be in different medical specialties. So they have a lot of things to think about. But one of the reasons it's important is when the clearing houses didn't take care of that, the married couples didn't go where they were matched because I'd like to say that the iron law of marriages

that you can't be happier than your spouse. So if me and my spouse get matched to a pair of jobs that doesn't suit us, we can keep looking for jobs. Yeah, that disrupts the match for everyone. So that's something that's been fixed.

OK, so now, what's interesting about markets is that globally, there is very little consensus about what market should and shouldn't be allowed.

“We have much different laws in the US as we do in Europe,”

as we have an Asian so on. Here are some of the markets that exist somewhere and don't exist other places, selling plasma, kidneys,

surgacy, sex, work, and the concern generally does ultimately

find its way to fear that the ritual coarser, the poor, or under-privileged. And most of those cases, I just said, that's the primary fear. But you have some countries that allow one thing and not the other. So it's not like it's even consistent against like,

oh, there's no part of the body that can be sold. Well, no, that's not really how it works. And you attempt to explain this through repugments. And so I'm in love for you to explain repugments in a repugnant market.

In the book, I say that what I call a repugnant transaction is a transaction that some people want to participate in and other people think they shouldn't be allowed to participate in, largely for moral or religious reasons. And furthermore, that these are transactions that the people

object to them might not even know that they have happened if they haven't been told. And by that last thing, I'm trying to rule out things that do obvious harms to people. I can easily object to markets if they harm me.

But that's not what my book is about. My book is about these other markets where moral considerations come into play. Yeah, gay marriages are a great example of it. If the two people that are married don't inform you

that they're married or they don't wear a ring, you have no sense of whether or not this market transaction happened. That's right. So same-sex marriage is sort of a prototypical

opugnant transaction. There are two people who want to marry each other. There are other people who think they shouldn't be allowed to. But it's not clear what the harm is that's done to the people who object.

But this has been a giant political issue in the United States and in many other places. So it's clear that some people have strong objections to same-sex marriage. And implicit in them as well, like discuss you use the example,

like we don't serve saliva in glasses at restaurants because universally everyone thinks that's gross. That's discussed. Whereas a repugnant transactions have to have fans and foes.

So there aren't any laws I don't think about. You can't serve beverages made of spit. But there are laws in California.

“You can't sell horse meat for human consumption.”

You can go up and down. Los Angeles, the restaurants,

and you'll never find horse meat on the menus.

And that's because it's not an ancient cowboy law. It's the result of a 1998 referendum that passed by a big majority in California. It was that recent. What that means is that there are people

who think you shouldn't eat horse meat. But the reason there's a law against it and not against drinking saliva or eating worms is that you don't need a law against eating worms. No one particularly wants to eat worms.

But people do want to eat horse meat. There's lots of places in the world where horses are delicious. And we in all a green, I don't think you could establish a hierarchy of horse cow sheep.

I think the same referendum that made it illegal to sell horse meat for human consumption made it illegal to sell dogs for human consumption. So I think it's pet is the idea. But it's such a fine line.

Yeah, pigs are pets.

Well, no, not in California.

People have brought food. Of course, yeah, yeah, but they're not-- And you could leave it like that. We have a law in California that you can't sell horse meat for human consumption.

It's a felony. There's another concept that's relevant to bring in to the repugnant transaction, which is, it does seem to overlap with this concept of paternalism. So what do we mean when we talk about paternalism?

So I don't think the bad on horse meat has much to do with paternalism. We don't think that eating horse meat is bad for you. But we think that drinking too much alcohol is bad for you. We think that taking addictive drugs is bad for you.

We might think that being served sugary soft drinks in giant glasses is bad for you. I mean, there've been attempts to ban that. So since you know better than the person knows for themselves. And paternalism is a very interesting word because, of course,

often we apply it to children. And if you don't properly supervise your children, you might be neglecting them. Sometimes you're small children.

“You have to say they can't do things that they really want to do.”

But that will harm them in some way. And you have to stop them because you, their parents, no better than they do. So there's a whole field now of experimental and behavioral economics, which says that all of us former children,

just because we had enough birthdays. This is necessarily mean that we know what's good for us. And we might also like some laws that limit things you can do. So one that comes to mind that isn't that controversial is prescription drugs.

There are lots of drugs that might be good for you. But we think you need advice before taking them. - Yeah, we're evaluating whether getting what you want

is going to be ultimately destructive to you.

So for the kid, the kid wants to stay up late, but we know we got a prioritized tomorrow at school or the child wants to eat a bunch of sugar before it goes to bed. Play on the freeway, play on freeway.

I think that would have appealed to me. (laughing) When morally contested issues are criminalized, they often can give rise to black markets. So let's talk about that a little bit.

Okay, well, a famous example in American history's prohibition in the 1920s, we passed a constitutional amendment against most forms of selling alcohol. And not many years later in the early 1930s, we again amended the Constitution to repeal prohibition.

And part of the reason was in the meantime, there hadn't been that much reduction in sales of alcohol. It's just it had been handed over to criminals to administer that market and the criminals were sometimes violent, they sometimes made things to drink that weren't good for you,

in ways that alcohol itself isn't bad for you. You know, they weren't quality controls, you know, methulence that of alcohol. And the country got tired of feeling like they were accomplices in a crime that many Americans didn't really think

should be a crime. And it's a great example of the difficulty of banning things that people want to do, but also of the fact that regulations don't magically make the problems of alcohol go away.

We don't let children by alcohol, although they're a children who get access to alcohol. But even us adults, you know, those of us with enough birthdays not to be children anymore, can drink too much and then maybe get in a car and drive.

There are laws against that, but alcohol causes a lot of premature deaths still. As it continued to do during prohibition, one thing that has really changed, though, is you can no longer buy moonshine whiskey from gangsters.

They've been out competed by the fancy liquor stores that'll sell you aged in the barrel scotch and things like that.

“Yeah, okay, so the other thing I think we need to understand”

again, because your book is trying to evaluate the economic morals, not the moral imperatives. We're not trying to levity a verdict whether something is right or wrong. Well, I think about that.

And I end up with by saying that when things about morals is you can't be morally obliged to do something that you're not able to do. But the nature of moral obligation has to do with something that you can do and can choose to do.

So we weren't able to ban alcohol and that makes it less of a moral issue. Some of us might still like not to have alcohol sold. And even those of us who enjoy fine wine and age whiskey might be prepared to give that up if the problems

that alcohol causes would go away. But that turns out to be something we don't know how to do.

to try to put people in jail for selling alcohol.

Right. But the concept of trade-offs is really, really important

“because that's how we're going to attempt to evaluate”

these different situations as we go through a list of very exciting and provocative, repugnant transactions. So talk about trade-offs. Economics is about trade-offs because economics is about how to allocate scarce resources

efficiently and how to make them less scarce. But if there were no scarcity, if everyone could do whatever they wanted, then we wouldn't have to deal with trade-offs. But if we live in a universe where things are scarce, attention is scarce resources of other sorts of scarce,

then we have to decide how to allocate those scarce resources and that involves trade-offs whether or not we want to make them or willing to make them.

We have to think about the consequences of our actions.

Even if we're not pure consequence-less, even if we don't necessarily think that all moral judgments should be made only in terms of consequences. I think it's very hard to make moral judgments without paying any attention to consequences.

Now, this becomes one of my primary acts as I like to grind, which is I feel like there is currently we're in an era of rejection of trade-offs. In that there's some notion that's my one. Oh, that was a good idea.

No, your finder's one to make sure it wasn't mine. Last year I was scheduled to go to Israel and didn't go because there was a war in Iran and on the days I was supposed to be there. But I now mode in an app that gives me an air-rated alert

when I feel like there's one in Israel. Oh, that's what we're hearing. Oh, whoa. We're getting intel. Okay, I feel like our modern era and I don't know

what's driving it whether it's the internet or social media. But there seems to be a willing naive rejection of trade-offs.

“Is there's going to be a perfect solution to something?”

And anytime there's any downside, we must reject it wholesale. I can think of the war on vaccines, which is certainly you can produce for me some people who have experienced side effects.

If you graph that number of side effects versus life-save from that polio vaccine or name the vaccine, it's preposterous. They're not comparable. One is magnitude bigger.

But because there's a trade-off, the whole thing must be thrown out.

And I wonder do you think that's always been how people

felt about trade-offs? Or do you think that's kind of new and accelerating? Well, I think it's a very bad way to talk about trade-offs. You know, if you don't think about cut sequences, then you can be led far straight.

And one of the examples I talk about at some length is addictive drugs. We all would like there to be no heroin addict. But simply throwing them in jail turns out not to solve the problem. We still have heroin addicts, even though our jails are full of drug dealers and drug addicts.

So if we don't like heroin addiction,

“I think we're morally obligated to think about how to abolish it,”

having tried one way and so on a big fan of experiments. I don't know what to do about drug addiction, but I would like to see an effort to figure that out. Yeah, I think people choose to not acknowledge that this country fundamentally in the Constitution is trying to service two goals,

liberty and equality that cannot exist at 100% both. So just implicit in our whole system is the notion of trade-offs. We're going to constantly be measuring how we lost too much liberty for this equality, or if we lost too much equality for this liberty. And so admitting we're setting out on a journey that's going to involve compromise and

trade-offs and we're going to try to figure out what balance is suitable for us, I think needs to be applied everywhere. You can't really compute the world without acknowledging we're not going to get perfection in any one of these without some cause. I agree and also I think we have to learn from experience.

It makes a lot of sense to say let's make heroin illegal. But what makes less sense is to say let's make that our only tool for fighting drug addiction given that it yields a lot of drug addiction. And then the last thing I think and then we'll jump into some of the topics is just we have to somehow evaluate what we can and can't get.

We have to be able to determine whether or not these goals are achievable. And how do we do that? You mentioned already that there are different laws in different places. Some years ago before COVID I gave a talk in Berlin about controversial markets. And the three I chose to talk about in Berlin were prostitution,

surrogacy and kidney exchange. And the reason those made sense for an American to talk about in Germany is the German laws are just the opposite of the American laws. So in Germany the only one of those three that's legal is prostitution, surrogacy and kidney exchange are not yet legal.

So let's take surrogacy and answer your question about how can we tell and things aren't working. The places that don't like surrogacy see themselves as protecting the vulnerable, the place that bands surrogacy. And the vulnerable they identify are women who might be surrogates and bear children for someone else.

you can come to California and have a surrogate baby and have your names on the birth certificate

in California where it's perfectly legal. So then the German courts had to deal with how do we make this baby a German citizen so that she can go home with her parents. And so the family courts started to have to create procedures where German surrogate parents could adopt their own child in order to have the child because no one's more vulnerable than a newborn baby.

So one way you can tell the law isn't working is you're trying to protect the vulnerable and you're in danger of creating stateless babies who can't go home with their parents. Right, right. Now you were working in fury and then I admirably started working and like,

“okay, I think I understand how this works. Can I actually fix something?”

And you were called to help with the kidney exchange.

That's a matching market, right? And I may love you and want to donate my kidney to you. But you and I might not be a match unfortunately. And now there's another couple, that couple wants to donate the kidney to their loved one and they're not a match. But long behold, I might be a match. So there is some way to make everyone happy. And this is the system that you helped design. So what was happening and where did we get to? Okay, so that has a long story.

My personal part of that story may not be so interesting. But the big market part of that story is there's a terrible, terrible shortage of organs for transplant. So right now in the United States, we have about 500,000 people on dialysis. And we have about 100,000 of them on a waiting list to receive a kidney transplant. But we only do fewer than 30,000 kidney transplant a year. So the weight on dialysis is long and dangerous and people buy while waiting.

“And these are the top 10 killer in the U.S. A kidney transplantation is the treatment of choice.”

But most people who need a kidney transplant will die without getting one. So there's a real shortage of kidneys, not just in the U.S. but around the world. And part of that is related to the fact that it's against the law almost everywhere in the world to pay someone for a kidney. I should take a step back and say, we get kidneys from deceased donors, from dead people. But also from living donors because healthy people have two

kidneys and can remain healthy with one. So as you were saying, if you loved me and I needed a kidney, you might be able to save my life by giving me one. What's the breakdown of that? How many are coming from cadavers versus living folks? 20, something thousand are coming from cadavers and about 7,000 are coming from living donors. Okay. So still the majority is from cadavers. The large majority is from cadavers. Only a small majority of the donors are deceased because

deceased donors give two kidneys and living donors only give one. Right. Right. So we need more

“donors of all sorts. But it's flatly against the law to pay a donor for a kidney. We've just recently”

in very recent years started to make progress on reimbursing the costs that donors pay in becoming donors. That is, if you wanted to give me a kidney, if I had kidney failure, I'd probably in a hospital in the Bay Area and you would have to come and get hotel room and you'd have costs. And it would have been a legal for you to reimburse me for those. It wasn't clear whether it was illegal, but it certainly was impractical. So mostly there was little or no reimbursement.

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which platform you watch that new show on, so frustrating. Fifteen minutes later, you've logged into seven apps, reset two passwords, and still haven't found it. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check all state first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with all state. Potential savings vary subject to terms conditions in availability all state North American insurance, co-in affiliates North Brigham, Illinois. Yeah. Yeah, you're insurance is not going to

pay for you to donate a kidney. Well, my insurance would pay for the surgeries for yours and my needed for you to donate a kidney to you. Okay. Okay. But they wouldn't pay for the child care that you needed while you were in Palo Alto. Travel all that. So there were lots of things that they wouldn't pay for. I was on the board for a number of years of a federally funded organization called Maldec the National Living Donner Assistance Center, which had permission to pay certain expenses of

means tested donors, donors who were poor enough. And that's been liberalized. What can be paid for over the years. But it's still the case that it's flat leg and it's the law to pay for a kidney. And that's one of the reasons why there's a terrible shortage of kidneys. What was the number before you came up with this algorithm that could match two different couples wanting to or maybe okay. I don't know how big it can fan out. So there was hardly any kidney exchange. We came

in at the beginning of kidney exchange. And the thing about kidney exchange that's so relevant to this discussion of what's allowed and what's not is in kidney exchange, each patient gets a compatible kidney from another patient's intended donor with no money changing hands. But it adds the no money

the American law, the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, doesn't speak about money. It speaks

about valuable consideration. It says, you can't give valuable consideration for a kidney. And so the question was, was a kidney exchange valuable consideration? Congress passed unanimously without any descent and amendment saying that that isn't what the law meant. Kidney exchange is legal under the National Organ Transplant Act. Right. So once you were able to start pairing up compatible people who had already agreed to donate, what did the number go from? So it went from a handful

a year when we started doing it, to it's about 1,500 more than 1,000 a year now. There's a little

“carefulness you need to do in counting because somewhat more than 1,000 people receive”

kidney transplants through kidney exchange. But some of the donors are non-directed donors. There are a couple of hundred donors each year in the U.S. Who want to give a kidney to someone and don't have a particular someone in mind. I've heard about these people. I consider it. So Admiral, you have. Yeah, because like, who needs it? Yeah, I already have one. Yeah, I'm suspicious.

I'm going to have damage on a mine and need the second one. Well, I mean, yeah, that's fair.

You've gone further, at least I've heard you in conversation with other people, open up the idea. The obvious threat of buying kidneys is, of course, rich people will go to poor countries and take advantage of people who are very, very desperate in need the money. And so you have some solutions to that, though. So let me take a step back and let's talk about blood and blood plasma because there are also laws in many places in the world against paying for blood or blood

plasma. These laws date from the 1970s from many of them right around 1970. Before there was a test for hepatitis in the blood supply and so part of the concern was that poor people, even when they weren't feeling well, but because they were being paid, would donate blood and it would

add infection to the blood supply. And there was this worry, just as you annotated that the

rich countries of the world, the global north, would suck the blood out of the poor countries. And there'd be this flow of blood from poor countries to rich countries. In most countries in the world, it's illegal to pay for blood and also for blood plasma, which is a blood product that's

“actually very important. And in the United States, those things aren't illegal, but there's a”

regulation that says that whole blood has to be labeled with whether it's been donated voluntarily or for pay. And so the equilibrium we're in is that whole blood in the United States is donated without payment. When I donate blood, they offer me an orange juice and a cookie afterward, but that's so I don't fall down. Yeah. But plasma is a product of blood doesn't have to be labeled in the United States. Not only is it legal to pay for plasma, but we export tens of billions

of dollars of plasma product every year. Yeah, you call this the Saudi Arabia of blood plasma. Right. So it turns out that only in a handful of countries is it legal to pay plasma donors. And those are the only countries that are self-sufficient in plasma. Everyone else who can afford it buys plasma mostly from the US. It's fascinating. Those are the little arbitrary lines we draw. Nevertheless, there's still a lot of concern that if you allowed blood plasma to be

sold internationally, which we do that somehow the rich countries would be sucking blood out of the poor countries. But of course, that's not the situation we're in. The United States supplies 70% of the world's plasma and we're not a poor country. And we're the richest. So we should worry. It's a real thing to worry about that somehow rich countries would suck the blood out of poor countries. But that's not the present danger that we're in. The present danger that we're in is

there are countries particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where there isn't enough blood and people are dying in large numbers because of shortages of blood and blood plasma. And in Western Europe, there aren't those deaths because they can buy it from the US. And in Australia, they can buy it from the US. So it's worth worrying about that we shouldn't have rich countries sucking the blood out of poor countries. But that's not what's happening. So it's important to think about the consequences.

And one reason it's not happening is it turns out you need a sort of sophisticated medical industry to safely process and store and fractionate the plasma into useful pharmaceutical components. Right. Okay. So then that brings us back to kidneys because I was impressed with your solution to this. So there have been lots of proposed solutions regularly. There's some legislation being proposed that would try to relieve the shortage of kidneys. And right now there's an act that's

being sponsored by quite a number of congressmen called the End Kidney Deaths Act, which is very vicious title. I'll get a headline. It's suggesting a very modest change in the National Contranspone Act, which is that it would allow non-directed donors.

“So just a very special class of donors to get a tax credit over a period of, I think, five years”

for being a non-directed donor. One reason they're saying a tax credit and one reason they're spreading it over five years is to get away from this idea that somehow people would have

Right. This is meant to be a considered decision. We owe a lot to the non-directed donors.

A pretty high fraction in the input of half of the kidney exchange transplants that happen are in chains initiated by non-directed donors. But I heard you say you can imagine a scenario where we set a standard price for a kidney. Let's say it's a hundred thousand dollars. That was the example you gave. And an individual is not allowed to buy the kidney. The U.S. government has to buy the kidney. And then the U.S. government

administers those kidneys with the same system we already have in place to prioritize people. None of those factors are their wealth. When a donor can't need from a, could ever become available, it doesn't go to the richest person. There's some criteria.

“So that's why the legislation that I just mentioned. Of course, only the government can give you”

a tax credit. So the advantage of having the government do it is we're getting away from the

idea that rich people would buy kidneys from poor people. Which is our primary concern. No one would be able to pay for kidney except the federal government. And then, as you say, we would avoid all the moral problems associated with having rich people buying kidneys from poor people and potentially exploiting them. Then I guess you get into a debate about whether it's significantly more risky to donate a kidney than it is plasma. Like how do we

gradient that difference? Yeah, that's a good question. It's not unreasonable to donate a kidney. You know, the deaths are one in 10,000. So that's a pretty modest risk. There are streets that you can cross in Los Angeles that give you a bigger risk than that, especially if you cross against the light. So I think that's something to seriously think about. And I talk about that.

And again, that's part of the market design issue is as we're talking about these things,

we should think about what are the objections. What is it that we're trying to avoid when we ban paying for kidneys and part of it's that, you know, the richer, exploiting the poor. But you know, we're also making it difficult for people to donate kidneys when they have to pay the costs associated with that. So that's something we have made some progress on, although

“it's still costly. I think that if you wanted to donate a kidney to me, you would probably have”

some out of pocket costs that wouldn't be reimbursed, just because it's time consuming it's time away from work. And we have to keep the alternative in mind, which is some 80,000 people a year dying, because they didn't get a kidney. Absolutely, that's exactly the alternatives. Okay, so let's get into intimate affairs. You start with what brought us here, which is sex. How do we apply this lens to sex? Well, there have been lots of laws against sex,

homosexual sex, for instance. And some of those laws were declared on constitutional in Supreme Court decisions are very, sort of laws against the thought of me, for example. But just incidentally, when Rovey Wade was not so long ago reversed by the Supreme Court, just as Thomas, in his concurring opinion, suggested that we should also revisit the laws that make banning the thought of me in constitutional and contraception. And of course,

same sex marriage. So these controversies are not over and done with. So historically marriage, how is it evolved? Where did it start? So marriage is even older than I am. But of course, society has a lot of interests in marriages. And one of them, not the only one, but one of them is the care of children. So for a long time, sex with high likelihood lead to pregnancy, which with high likelihood lead to children, we as a society developed all these rules that said

and on a woman who have sex with each other, had better be prepared for raising the child that might result. And a good way to be prepared is to be married and have formed household and so that the child will have a mother and a father and someone will take care of the child. I mean, that's been true for the very largest part of human history. But good contraception changed that a little bit. That starts to make it possible to have sex without having children.

The trade-offs have changed. Yeah, the trade-offs have changed and so maybe it's okay to have sex without being married. And therefore, maybe it's okay to have sex without the intention of having children. And therefore, maybe it's okay for people of the same sex to have sex with each other, even though children don't result. And therefore, maybe marriages don't have to just be about children.

“So I think social norms and technology, I mean, I mentioned contraception there, but there's also”

in vitro fertilization. Maybe a lesbian couple can still have children. Maybe a gay male couple can still have children. Just a single person. Yeah, a single person, right? So maybe our idea of who can be a parent should be different. And then maybe our idea of who can adopt a child should be different. There was a lot of reason for society to think that people who can have sex with each other should be married to each other, to be ready to catch the baby. But many of those things are no longer

so urgent. And we have come to recognize that marriage has other advantages to the people who are married to each other than just their ability to help each other raise children. And so we came to feel in the United States, not everyone, and not quickly and not easily. But we came to feel that maybe people should be able to marry each other, even if they couldn't have children. We bring up Alan Turing, you talk about him a bit, and this child. Okay, so Alan Turing is a

great man. I mean, people should know his name, every computer scientist does. He's sort of

you mentioned randomon and game theory. There's a sentence in which you could mention Turing and computer science. During World War II, he was also a codebreaker and helped shorten the war by breaking the German and a nuclear code by helping break the German, a nuclear code. He was British. But he was homosexual. And after the war, he was convicted of being homosexual. If I get the criminal phrase, he was sentenced to be chemically castrated. And he committed suicide. So today,

it's legal to be homosexual in Britain and in the United States. You know, and this is sort of an ancient horror, but it's not that ancient. Wow, so he didn't get the chemical castration. You know, it got it. He got it. And then killed him. Yeah, yeah, he was too often happy. Oh my goodness. How does this wrap in marriage and adoption? So the question is, do we allow people of the same sex to marry each other? That was a repugnant transaction. You don't remember. I use the

weird repugnant not to mean that I don't like something or that you shouldn't like it. But some

people don't like it. That was a big fight. The first legalization of same sex marriage in the

United States came in the early 2000s in Massachusetts through a court decision. The Massachusetts Supreme Court. And then what happened wasn't that lots of other states fell on to law. And what happened was lots of other states amended their constitutions to make same sex marriage the only kind of marriage allowed in their constitution. And the reason was the way the Massachusetts court ruled is it said the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a constitution that requires

equality before the law. And we're not treating gay people equally. Yeah, there's a legal right marriage. Right. The first thing wasn't that everybody legalized same sex marriage. It was that they made constitutional amendments so that their courts couldn't find a right in their constitution. But eventually in Obergefeld is the name of the Supreme Court decision. Eventually the Supreme Court decided that equal protection of law especially once many states recognized same sex marriage.

And others didn't equal protection of law required everyone to recognize. And that's where we are now. This is another Nobel Prize winner, the IVF doctor. So what's the repugnant nature on a

thin Edward? So he invented he and colleagues. Nobel Prize as always are, you know,

leave out colleagues. He and colleagues invented in vitro fertilization in the 1970s. And by the time

“he got the Nobel Prize in the late 20th century. Maybe later than that, I think his Nobel Prize”

was just a little earlier than mine. So in the 2000s millions of people that had been born through IVF over, you know, the last 40 years. So he wanted Nobel Prize for it. But at the same time there were people objecting that he was a murderer. And the objection specifically about murder for IVF is that more embryos are created than are fertilized into viticism become people. And if you think that the embryo is a person and person who the ones that are not used are perhaps

murders especially when they're discarded, the nature of repugnant transactions is you can be vastly celebrated, you know, the Nobel Prize is a giant weeklong party in Stockholm. And at the same time, have people picking and pulling you a murderer. So these are fundamental disagreements we have when we talk about repugnant transactions and morally contested markets. But of course, IVF, some people think it's murder. But millions of people are alive because of it. They think

of it is life-giving. And of course, millions more, you know, it allowed them to have children. But the children, the people born of IVF, they don't think of it as murder.

“How can we come to some conclusions through an economic model on that issue?”

So it turns out to be hard to prevent IVF. When you look at Western Europe,

there are countries that prevent these laws are always subject to change. But I believe in Germany,

unmarried women are not allowed to have IVF. That's a shocker. But in Spain, there's not a obstacle. So if you are an unmarried woman who needs to become pregnant and doesn't have another way of doing it, you could go to Spain and become pregnant. Then you come back to Germany and you're a pregnant German woman. You're undifferentiable from other pregnant German women and you go into the health care system and

you have a baby and the baby is a German citizen. So it turns out making a law that says we don't recognize IVF can stop people who can't afford to travel to Spain. But they don't stop everyone. And so maybe it's an unequal law in that respect too, right? It allows the rich to do things that we don't think should be the preserve of the rich. Yeah, it's almost reverse engineered eugenics and some bizarre way. It's like, okay, we're going to select for who can do this.

One of the things I talk about in the book or economics is often you ban something and you hand it over to criminals, which is very often not a satisfactory solution. But it's also hard to ban things that are legal in some nearby jurisdiction. Hence the abortion issue. The abortion and surrogacy. Yeah, IVF.

“Surrogacy is well complicated because you have to bring a baby home with you. But IVF,”

you know, you're pregnant German woman. Yeah, you're going to happen on vacation. Yeah, yeah, perfectly legal on vacation. You're allowed to be a single woman. You just have to have gotten pregnant naturally. True. It's so interesting. Interesting. Yeah, exactly. Okay,

probably the ones I'm personally most interested in. So step one is alcohol and drugs.

And you do this fun thing where you list a lot of different drugs. You say caffeine, tobacco, heroin, marijuana, opioids, alcohol. And if you are asked to put those in order of threat, based on your community, where you live, the order would be what? The order of acceptability. Yeah. So coffee is most acceptable in my community. You know, it's a great performance enhancing drug. We regard it as food. I don't think we live at children. Now it's great.

So everyone likes coffee. Then we start to get to tougher drugs. Wine. Wine in California is pretty popular. Not in Utah. But, you know, it's a big industry in California, which is in trouble. Now, you know, as wine consumption goes down, our friends in Napa Valley, some of them

are going to grow condominients instead of grapes. Yeah. Which might make California less nice in

“some ways. Yeah. But marijuana is also popular in some circles. I think I had trouble ordering those”

in what I guess is acceptable. You know, hard drugs are definitely not acceptable in my community. But some people have troubles with them. And some of them have gotten into trouble with them sort of inadvertently. That is for medical reasons. They've been prescribed opioid and then become addicted. I think you're right. Your assertion is that most places are going to end on opioids. Of that list of things, drugs, I just gave you. Most people are going to put

opioids as the worst. Yeah. And there's significantly troubling. There's been years in the last decade where we've had 100,000 people die overdozed death. Yes. It's a very real threat. But let's talk about the numbers for tobacco. Yep. So tobacco kills more people than opioids. And alcohol kills more people than tobacco. In your book of 3 million people that die from CDC 500,000 are cigarette related a year. And then for alcohol, it's 175,000. I think you're right. As I recall

now, what I say is just conjecturing maybe the tobacco deaths are less repugnant because they're

“not sudden. Yeah, the suddenness is really fascinating, isn't it? Why that elevates it so much in our mind?”

But of course, alcohol includes some sudden deaths, right? Both behind the wheel and just alcohol poisoning. Yeah, like 60,000 people, you're due die of a sudden version of alcohol. Yeah. So I think some of this just has to do with what you're used to. We allowed tobacco. There was small attempts around the time of prohibition to make alcohol illegal. When I started writing the book one of the

things I thought might be true was that tobacco had never been illegal. That turns out not to be true.

There have been laws against tobacco in various times and places. Oh, really? But, you know, you say, "Oh, really?" Right? We're now restricting tobacco and marijuana are sort of on opposite trajectories. Right? Marijuana used to be illegal, schedule one, you know, like heroin. And tobacco, we'd give agricultural subsidies to tobacco farmers. And now, more and more, we're saying you can't smoke inside buildings and on airplanes. And we're making it tougher to smoke

tobacco, and we're making it easier to smoke, or otherwise, and just... Well, just anecdotally, I've seen people confront people for smoking cigarettes in public outside multiple times. My children will do it. Well, I see people smoking marijuana. No one says anything.

“I think that's really interesting. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.”

You walk around New York City now and people are smoking joints everywhere. No one's like making a big thing of it. Part of it's societal what we just have decided is in Vogue and not. I mean, smoking's coming back. Yeah, that's a lot of younger people are smoking again. What is vaping? And vaping, too. But even cigarettes, it's weird. I don't know what. I mean, I think maybe because people stop talking about how bad it was for you.

But people are kind of back on it, which is not good. Yeah. I think it's suffering from the same reality that the polio vaccine did, which is like no one alive today saw someone walking with a walker at 19 years old from polio. So they're not afraid to not vaccinate their kid. I remember seeing people. Sure. Sure. My grandfather's throat was permanently paralyzed from polio. But young parents who are deciding whether or not to get a polio vaccine, they didn't see it.

So it's out of mind. And there's a big up swell of younger. Influencers are smoking in public. And I think it's because they've stopped seeing the lung cancer patients that we grew up seeing plastered everywhere as cautionary tales and people missing their mandible from dipping. Like those went away. It was on the downward decline. And I think they took their foot off the gas. And now it's on the incline. But let's talk about prohibition. So what happens in

19, 20 or 30? Yeah. Yeah. We prohibited most sales of alcohol. Not sales for religious purposes. Not sales for certain kinds of medicinal purposes. But in large we prohibited the sale of alcohol. In the vaults that act, you could brew in your home. So there was a big up surge in the sale of wine grapes. synagogue membership in synagogue. Wow. That's really funny. Yeah. Yeah. I taught for many years at the University of Pittsburgh. And the state of Pennsylvania had and I think still has a

But the door that sold. Judact, Jewish things. And they could sell kosher wine, even on Sunday.

Wow. Really? They went from no business. And you had to scribble something that was supposed to be what, surely you went to. What synagogue you belong to. But you could have gone in and scribbled something they were interested in your scribbles. Wow. Kind of like the medical marijuana card.

“Yeah. Remember how? Yeah. Yeah. There's a great comedian that said he went to get this medical”

marijuana card. And they said, "Are you having troubles slowly being 12 hours of night?" He said, "Yes." He said, "Yes." He said, "You can only sleep for about eight hours." Here you go. You mean this? Yeah. So that's right. But that wasn't the main way that alcohol came into the US. Some was production. It was stills. It's only NASCAR. You know, the stock car racing. In their national museum, they have a still. And one of the reasons is some of the heroes of NASCAR

racing were people who they were modeled on. You were coming into town from the still. And you had to be able to outrace the police. And particularly you wanted to plain looking car that was super modified to be really fast. So you went draw attention. To be really fast. You didn't have a lot of product in the back. Yeah. Yeah. And so stock cars, these big gangily cars are what they decided to race, not coups, not corvets or even sedans. You can tell right away that a band is going to

have trouble when it starts generating focus. You know, when the people who violated or Robin Hood not alcohol, now they were also alcohols. In the canadies, famously got a lot of their wealth through this. There was a lot of importation from Canada. Canada went through various forms of prohibition and trying it without ever stopping the production and say, "Oh, alcohol." And so you could legally buy whiskey sequimbs in Canada and then illegally bring it into United States.

“There's a big border. There's a big Atlantic seaboard. I think the St. Valentine's Day”

massacre in Chicago was gangs fighting over importation, not just production. How is all the Canadian liquor going to get into the United States and be sold? Yeah. So it was very hard to stop. You know, much is the hard to stop surrogacy by making it illegal in Germany if people can come to the United States. It was hard to stop drinking alcohol if it could be legally sold in Canada. Yeah, it's funny. We've only had success in the war on drugs one time, really. And that was during

the quailude epidemic of the '70s and '80s. Because it turned out there was only a single chemical factory in Switzerland that was capable of producing this. So if they could shut that one down, they could succeed and they did succeed. But that's about the only factory where they've tried to do math. It's like you've got several hundred chemists in India that are making the precursor compound. So it can go elsewhere. It's like unless there's a single source to these

things, they're nearly impossible to ever shut down. But we got to evaluate what the efficacy of trying to pinch it as much as we can. So let's talk about drugs because I grew up saying, I had a very libertarian view on it. I thought that should be decriminalized. I thought it should be taxed and regulated and get rid of the black market. And then the experiment was running front of my eyes in San Francisco and import linen a few other places on the west coast. And I

got to say, I have completely reversed my position on it. And there's a lot of these trade-ups

that aren't maybe not obvious when you're first evaluating it. Like, okay, let's even say that

addiction went down and the dust went down. Well, the city itself now, it's an open air market. We were in San Francisco doing a live show. And there's people TV-trays just sign it. People shooting dope in the stairwells of these nice brown sunsets. Like, well, the whole city is now paid a price for this. So there's so many variables we need to evaluate. Tell me about drugs

“and how you make a case for both sides and what you think it leans towards. I think drugs are”

a case where we don't know what to do. We're losing the war on drugs, but it's not accepting our surrender. Our federal prisons have 40, some odd percent of the prisoners have drug convictions. So we're imprisoning people like mad by the millions, but we're not making drugs so scarce or even so expensive that poor people can't buy them. So we're losing the war on drugs. But as you say, when we just say, so we're making it non-criminal, that doesn't drive down the number of addicts.

All overdoses, they are overdoses, right? Absolutely, and having people who are not kind of able doesn't exactly solve the problem either. So we need to think of better things to do,

and we need to experiment to find better things to do. So I don't know what the solution is.

The solution may well involve incarceration as part of the solution, but incarcerating people and then letting them out still drug addicts or soon to, again, be drug addicts isn't helpful. So if incarceration is going to continue to be part of the solution, it seems to me we have a responsibility to make treatment part of incarceration. Yeah, and really quick, talk about the paradox between contracting a killer and selling drugs. Right. So I have a sentence in the book that

says something like, "Why is it so easy to buy drugs and so hard to hire a hitman?" And that has to

a year of hires, not even in the FBI crime statistics. And they carry a virtually similar penalty.

“That's right. In both cases, if we catch you selling narcotics or killing for hires,”

we will lock you up as long as we can. And we're pretty effective at both of those, but again, the prisons are full of drug dealers and they're hardly any hitmen. So the way I thought about that in the book is the following. Supposing at the end of our chat, I say to you, you know, you're a guy from Los Angeles, you probably know where I can buy heroin on my way home. Well, you'd be really surprised, probably most of your podcasts don't end with that kind of

request for information. Yeah. And you'd think, whoa, you know, this guy, Al, is crazy. It's not. That's really too bad. Yeah, yeah. That's really too bad. You know, he seemed so cool here and we're talking to him, but he must be getting seen out. And that would sort of be the end of it. Maybe you decide not to publish the podcast because you wouldn't want to have guys like me on your show. But supposing I said to you, you know, how many academic and every time I

write a paper, there are referees. You know, the joke in academia is referee number two. You know,

he's always the one who hates your paper. And I just can't take it anymore. I've identified one of my

academic enemies. And you see, and you look to me like the kind of guy who would know where I could hire a hitman. What do you say? Well, probably you don't know where I could hire a hitman. But even if you did, you wouldn't tell me because I wouldn't be a good thing to do. But afterwards, you wouldn't just say, oh, that should took a strange turn that conversation. You'd say, maybe we should call the police. Yes, sir. Here's someone who wants a murder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we should

call the police. And if you call the police, first of all, if you'd call the police, when I said, where can I buy heroin, they'd say to you, so you met a professor who asked you where he could buy heroin and you're calling the police. You know, we're very busy. There's lots of real crime in Los Angeles. Leave us alone. But if you call them and said, I talked to this professor

from the Bay Area and he wants to hire a hitman to kill someone in Los Angeles. They'd say,

it's a too late call him back and tell him you know, before he gets on the plane, he should come to this bar in Burbank, ask for Joe and Joe will take care of him and Joe would take care of me. A lot of the convictions for attempted hiring of killers is when the person doing the hiring talks to an undercover policeman. There are so many drug deals. It doesn't make sense to try to preempt them one by one. But there was so few murders that it makes a lot of sense to try to preempt them one by one. And

the police would be glad to send some tough looking guy and plane clothes to talk to me and have me explain who I wanted murdered and then arrest me. What fresh perspective do we need to

“apply to this drug? First of all, I think we're doing great on Hitman. We should keep it up.”

So yeah, well done. We have this really tough law against commercial killing and it seems to be largely working. Most murders people are killed by people who love them or who they know or who live in their neighborhood and commercial killing is very little. Let's keep it that way. So I like the laws that say if we catch you eat though you and Jail as long as we can. The same laws are not doing the same good job for addictive drugs. So I think we ought to be

experimenting with what to do and I applauded the experiments of decriminalizing. We had to try it. And I agree with you that they didn't work. Even the plan, you know, the thing about decriminalizing is that's cheap. Whereas the other part of the plan, which is make treatment readily available and easy to get when you need it, which is like right now before I go take another dose of drugs. That turns out to be expensive. So we let people buy and sell on the street and we didn't do anything

to help them or didn't do very much to help them kick the habit. Yeah, we kept sighting these different experiments that were run in Portugal and Spain. But we just applied one side of it, which is none of the resources, none of the help. We just like, oh, God's decriminalized.

“Well, I think in Portugal, they're also having recognition that they weren't giving enough help”

and they were getting open air markets and things like that. And that's a real cost. Right? Cities have to be good to live in. I mean, most of us live in cities. Yeah, and you're evaluating their rights against mine. Absolutely. So you don't want to find habit of remittals in the school playground. No, no, no, no, no, once I live in that city, you're playing that playground. Right. Stay tuned for more armchair experts. If you dare.

So what kind of experiments do you think would mean? Well, run. One of the things we don't like is deaths with overdose. So one thing that people have been talking about is safe injection spaces. So that wouldn't cut down on addiction, but it might cut down on overdose deaths. So that you're in a place where there's someone keeping an eye that you stay conscious. Now, that's pretty controversial because a place like that would need some police protection. Not everyone who comes

as a nice person. Where's the police thing? Do you want us to protect these guys? Our job is to arrest them. So we'd have to think hard about how to organize the laws and the rules and what would happen. Again, what you'd really like is treatment. So we need to understand more about how to treat addiction. There have been some technological progress in that, you know, things like methadone. Well, GLP ones are now starting to show a lot of absolutely so that would be great if there

be mandated to take them sort of in the manner of methadone. So I think we need to be on the lookout and we have to be thinking about how we can combine police services and chronology and housing for the homeless, you know, a lot of addiction is to painkillers and people who are homeless in a certain sense in a lot of pain. Some of that process, if we made it easier to get decent housing, these things all probably touch each other in various ways that I don't claim to

“understand. But I think we have to be thinking about them that way. Not just as a criminal problem”

that we have to solve. I think we have a really interesting example in our labs right now that we don't fully understand yet, which is we all recognize alcoholism's an issue. No one disagrees with

that. We tried through prohibition and it only decreased alcohol consumption for the first three

years and then it rebounded beautifully. We're weirdly in a phase right now where alcohol consumption is in a nose dive. And I don't know that we have a great explanation of what's driving that nose dive. But I think we had better find out what it is because I think it's very interesting that we're getting the thing we wanted, but we didn't do anything. Right. Now there are surveys that suggest that the number of daily users of marijuana now exceed the number of daily triggers.

So my current theory, but again, I haven't seen any of the work on this. But yeah, my assumption is that where you're seeing weed consumption available, you're seeing alcohol go down. And for me, objectively, I'd rather see people consume marijuana than alcohol. I think it's far less dangerous.

“Jonathan Height would say and does. I think that the reason alcohol is down and also probably”

why the reason marijuana is up. Marijuana, you can do that in isolation. People smoke at their

house by themselves. They do gummies. Alcohol is a social drug. Not alcoholics. Well, for alcoholics, but I mean generally, alcohol is a social drug. And as younger people are being more isolated on their phones, social media, they're staying in. They're not going out and hanging out with friends and getting a drink. They're on their phone. So I think he would say, yeah, that looks good, but actually it's not good because everyone's so isolated. And I think there's something to that

potentially probably dynamic and multifaceted. Yeah. But yeah, I was pointing out to him because his world view is everything about the internet and social media is bad. And so what about this uptick and healthy eating and reduction and drinking and better savings? You can't ignore all these other things that are upticking hugely as the suicide rate goes up 9%. But yes, that's his explanation.

But regardless, I think we need to know what the explanation is, right? There might be multiple

explanations, but there's no question that a lot of things are affected by social norms, but social norms aren't things that we know very much about how to change. You can't legislate them. They seem to change slowly. You said that there's an upsurge in tobacco smoking. It's not just health concerns that drive down alcohol. One thing that's driving it down is they used to be some thought that maybe alcohol had some protective properties. The drinking

red wine was good for your heart. I'm so sticking with that a little bit. Yeah, I miss those. It's doing my heart of favor with this class of wine. Yeah. Exactly. So that cuts it down a little. Yeah, there's probably different causality within each socioeconomic wrong. I'm meeting a lot of people in my circle that are limiting their drinking because of the new studies that have come out, that are concluding it's terrible for you, right? But that's not why

a 19 year old. There's long Japanese, not at the forefront. That's not why they're doing it.

“But I think there are these cycles that are generational too. In other words,”

if you have grandparents, drink cocktails, then your parents drink wine. Right. Right. Now you're smoking weed. Yeah, you don't want to do what your parents did in some way. There's some rejection. Okay, can we talk about vaccines for a bit? And then I just want to talk about what emerging controversies you see coming our way and how we can apply this market view to them. So vaccines, we kind of brought up a minute ago. Okay, so vaccines turn out to be controversial.

Who would have thought? And their controversial at the highest levels of government right now. So we're seeing measles again. We sort of had measles beat, but it used to be a really dangerous disease. And of course it has negative externalities. If your kid goes to kindergarten and there's somebody with measles in the kindergarten, then your kid is going to bring measles home, especially if your kid is vaccinated. So it's an interest disease. So we just went through COVID where

miraculously technologically vaccines would develop with uncanny speed. I remember the long trek to polio is when I was a small child and eventually getting for a soft and then sabon in elementary school they lined us up and walked us through the gym and we all took a sugar cube with a purple liquid in it. It was a oral. So it was a shot and sabon was oral. Okay, that was a big deal because I had contemporaries who were in leg braces and parents

wouldn't let you go public swimming pools in the summer. Polio was our real vivid threat, but it took years to get a vaccine. So we very quickly got COVID vaccines. Now of course, after you got COVID vaccines, you have to test them. And testing vaccines is a little complicated

because testing them in a place that COVID has already swept through isn't a good way to test them.

“So the way you test vaccines is you have to predict it a little bit. You find a hotspot.”

You enroll 40,000 people in your trial. 20,000 of them you give the vaccine to. And 20,000 you don't. You have to wait a couple of months because even in a hotspot people can go through their daily life without getting exposed. So you have to wait till enough people have gotten exposed in the two groups so that you can see the big difference hopefully between the vaccinated group and the unvaccinated group and that tells you that the vaccine is working. One of the

ethics of giving half that group of the placebo, though. People don't seem to object to that because you don't yet have an authorized vaccine. So the whole population is not getting the vaccine. But there was a movement for what are called human challenge trials or human infection trials.

So there were a lot of people who signed up with an organization called one day sooner.

Their argument was we mostly we young healthy males males are willing to test vaccines. So we're willing to be exposed to the disease to be part of a vaccine trial. Some of whom

“would get the vaccine and some wouldn't. But we also don't know if the vaccine is going to be effective.”

And the argument was young healthy males, people in their 20s who have no co-morbidities, it's mostly not a dangerous disease. And if we could even get a vaccine available one day sooner hence the name of the organization, think of the trillions of dollars that would save given that the world is shut down for COVID. Well, we didn't do those because by a large people thought it would be immoral to give people COVID when you didn't have a vaccine for it. Even if they're signing

up and thousands of people signed up because we were all locked down. People signed up and they

were passionate about it. They'd say this gives me a chance to make a difference instead of just

passively hiding in my house from this dread disease. But we didn't do it. And there was a lot of discussion I got involved in some of it about maybe we should. I mean we'd let people fight fires even though running into a burning building that everyone else is running out of is dangerous. And we don't have a vaccine for fires, but we honor firefighters who protect us. And so these people had that kind of feeling. They wanted to be firefighters. They wanted to help you beat the pandemic.

But we didn't allow them to. And possibly that was a mistake in the sense that it really was costly to the world to have all those locked-outs, just as the disease itself was costly. But of course that's now a minor story. Now that we have government officials who are against measles vaccines, we already know that measles vaccines work. Here's where I think the moral conundrum comes with vaccines. So I'm very outspoken vaccine advocate. There are people that

protest my wife and I when we go places, they anti-vaxxers. So I'm very declared on but I also totally in a libertarian way think if you don't want to get you, Alvin, don't want to get the measles

“vaccine. I believe that's your right. I don't think you should have to put anything in your body. You don't want to.”

So I'm fine with that. If you can track measles, that's on you. Should I be able to send my child to public business where I'm going to go? Where the moral conundrum for me lies is the children of someone making that decision. Their minors should they have to inherit your decision on it. And are you putting a minor at risk? That's where it's most juicy in a moral debate. So how do you feel about that zone? I think it depends on what the morality argument is. What

comes to mind is there are small groups of Christian believers who don't like blood transfusions. Jehovah's Witnesses are among them. And they don't like blood transfusions because they're reading of scriptures says that God is omnipotent and if God wants to say if you say if you and if he doesn't want to say if you, he doesn't say if you and you shouldn't rest with that decision. But of course, they also have children and sometimes their children need blood transfusions.

So witnesses have a population center in Boston and there are some hospitals in Boston that are used to treating witnesses and the children of witnesses. And if you're a Jehovah's Witness and an adult and you say no transfusion, they won't give you a transfusion and you might die of whatever your disease is or you might have to forego certain kinds of surgery that would require a transfusion to make them safe. But there are now hospitals that treat witness to

children and there's sort of a well-gloved pathway where the parents say no transfusions, where witnesses and everyone understands that. And if the child needs a transfusion, there are judges who you can go to for an injunction and they say this child needs a transfusion right now and you can get it and everyone understands that. And from the point of view of the witnesses we said no, God works in mysterious ways. Our hands are kind of clean. And God wants it to live there.

God could have stopped the injunction. So we're good. There's some work around. Yeah, there's like the homage can be driven to the hands of the car but they can't operate the car themselves. My mother is boyfriend Dan. His mother died. She's Jehovah's Witness because they refuse the blood transfusion. As you say, an adult can refuse but the question for children and the fact that I know about these hospitals means the Jehovah's Witnesses know about these

the children of witnesses and God works in mysterious ways. And I think that we have more difficulty seeing the merits of opposing views when we're talking about something that we think is a matter of morality than when we're talking about other things. Yeah, can economics help us through that? There are ways of arguing that might help us. In other words, there aren't enough kidneys for transplant but we were able to get kidney exchange going even though there are people

who are pretty opposed to most ways of increasing the number of transplants but that was a way of increasing the transplants that didn't derouse so much opposition. That's not true everywhere. Kidney exchange still isn't legal in Brazil and in Germany. Even if you're a donor. Yeah, the rule in both places is you couldn't give me a kidney. My brother could give me a kidney

but you can't. Yes, has to be a first-order member of the family. And the German prosecutors

have no sense of humor about this. So if my brother wants to give me a kidney and you want to give a kidney to your brother but we're incompatible. The fact that everything has been satisfied except the medical compatibility issue, they wouldn't allow you to give me a kidney and my brother to give your brother a kidney. But those laws are subject to change. The German health ministry has a draft that they're trying to put through the Bundestag. And they'll have us as an example

running the trial. Exactly. Oh, so we have permission to do clinical trials in Brazil. Right. So it's against the law to do kidney exchange in Brazil. But just as unapproved drugs, you can do clinical trials. There are now a few small number of kidney exchanges going on in Brazil as a clinical trial to see if it works in Brazil. And we're confident that it will work

in Brazil because it works everywhere else. The hope is once we have 20 or 30 people who got

transplants that way can go to the Brazilian legislature and say, this works. Let's make it legal. Yeah. Okay. So what about the road ahead? What are some emerging controversy? So one is betting on sports or on other things for that matter. Sports betting on apps and prediction markets.

“And for a long time, we didn't allow betting on sports. Or we'd limited it. I think you could always”

pretty much bet on horse racing in the United States. Because after all, I think you're not bet on horse racing. Don't eat them, but you can eat that. Exactly. That's part of the fun. That's why you don't eat them. They're betting not for eating. Exactly. But still, you would go to a race track to do it. So one problem with sports betting on your phone is it's potentially addictive. Yeah. Not potentially. You could bet throughout the game on specific things. Will the next

free throw go in? So it's addictive. Another thing is you can try to influence the athlete so that your bets will come in more. Those are coming out more and more. Yeah. Almost daily, we get another

scandal. And it used to be that there was always this climb associated with gambling and sports

about influencing the game. And it used to be that the for typical kind of involvement of criminals in sports was in point-shaving. So you're a basketball player. And I'm asking you to not win by so much. Cover the spread. Your team will still win. Could even be losing. As long as you lose by six, you'll still win. So there were some famous scandals of that sort in the 1950s. One of them that I get to follow occasionally on the internet because one of

the protagonists was named Alvin Roth. Oh, wow. So in the book I had to fruit-free the index and they had one entry for Alvin Roth and I made them change it. I hope they've changed it to Alvin quote "fat" and quote "wroth" which is how he's talked about in Wikipedia. But he was banned for life from the NBA and would have gone to jail but was allowed to join the army instead. Yes. And this is where we get back into paternalism a little bit because we had, of course,

Michael Lewis on and he had a great ten-part podcast about the impact on young males of this online betting. And it's stark. The rate of bankruptcy, the rate of suicide, all these metrics are skyrocket. No, it's a real addiction. Not everyone is subject to it, of course. But it's

“significant. And again, we have this little bit of a crossroads which is like, you should be”

allowed to destroy your life. And some sense, you know, we believe that in this country, you should be allowed to drink alcohol if it's on you. But we know better, right? We know better for these young men. It's very paternalistic for us to say you should have the right to become insolvent. You should be allowed to drink alcohol but we don't serve it in elementary school cafeterias. We try to regulate a little bit. bartenders have a certain responsibility. They can cut you off and

they may have to. You know, they may be liable. There's a warning label on the bottle. Also, we stop serving alcohol in public at certain times. So gambling, maybe it'll benefit from being re-regulated that way. It's a pretty recent thing that we've allowed the sports betting. A Supreme Court decision again. So there's two things we've talked about. One is the addictive feature of betting on the game. The other is the effect on sports. If you're asking athletes, if you're pressuring

athletes, not to make the last free throw because you've got a bet. And of course, we're seeing this now with prediction markets. If you know someone who knows that the president of Venezuela is about to be abducted, you could make a lot of money on a prediction market by betting on that. It's a little worrisome if you worry about co-option in high office and what's for sale and

“what isn't. Yeah, I think prior to this, you just had the credit default swap market,”

which heavily incentivize these people for businesses to go bankrupt and heavily incentivize them

because it's always changing. We've learned a lot about regulating financial markets. We don't

believe that insider trading is okay on securities markets. I'm sure in Congress, but unless you're in Congress. Yeah, what can you do? Yeah, how can you do it? So I'm a big fan of regulation. Regulation is part of market design. We shouldn't be just thinking about banning things or allowing them unrestrictedly. We should be thinking about managing them, especially when they're things that we can't ban, even if we would like to. Like alcohol. So decriminalizing drugs, we probably

need to treat addicts more like patients than like criminals compared to what we're doing now. But maybe not completely not like criminals because it's very compelling to be addicted to something.

“You know, I think there's a quote, I found that's attributed to Mark Twain, which probably”

means he never really said it, which says quitting smoking is easy. I've done it a thousand times.

We can regulate the amount of nicotine in cigarettes here. We've had all sorts of financial settlements with tobacco companies having to do with what they knew about the addictive qualities of nicotine. And similarly, we've started to restrict and think about how to regulate vaping, which might have something to be said for it. If you're a two-pack a day, cigarette smoker, maybe switching to non-combustible is good for you. But if you are a middle school

student, it's a terrible idea to get addicted to nicotine, which is apparently a very powerful adicter. I'm the product of this law it happened. I was furious. They outlawed in California flavored tobacco, and I liked winter green. So I was having my father-in-law bring some from Nevada,

“right? I'm smuggling it in every time someone would come to visit. They'd have to bring me a sleeve.”

And then I finally quit like two years ago, a New Year's, but I'll say it was largely helped by

when I walked into 7-11. It's not even there. There was a hurl for me that I would be lying if I said didn't help dramatically. Sure. And it's all but gone now because everyone liked all the flavors. And I'm like, "God, I hate to admit that that kind of work." The aging libertarian me was like, "I hate the helps and it's true." Now that's right. So the morally contested market's behavioral problems with things like addiction are not going to be zero-one solutions. It's not that you

pass a law. We're done. We pass the law. Everything's good. We're going to inch towards a better and better percentage as I work. And we're going to have to think about trade-offs and do experiments and learn what works. And that's really what I'm concluding in this book.

“Yes. Well, Elvin Roth, it's been a blast getting to talk to you. The book is moral”

economics from prostitution to organ sales. What controversial transactions reveal about how markets work. I love your book. I hope everyone checks it out and it was a delight to me. Thank you so much. Nice to meet you guys too. Hi there. This is Army and Permium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact that it was his book. I have my glasses on. Not to cover up my style. Oh. My journal entry this morning

started as such. My style's the captain now. Okay, so I just want to read you. I got a couple of screen grabs I want to share with you. Wait, we're not done talking about your style. Well, I just hate it. I wanted to say I have my glasses under read this, not to cover my style. How does it feel that the same? I've been on antibiotics, right? Drops, drop, not all, and I've been

hot compressing like a very good boy. I know what I've been hot compressing. Okay. But what I'm going to read is in reference to our foot fetish debate. Okay. Or us trying to figure it out. Okay. So this was interesting. This is from Miss Miss 13. Watching the fact check, Rachel mentioned the homunculus and brain mapping. Your foot fetish combo is explained in big part by this. If you look at a diagram of what your brain thinks your body looks like, WRT, nerve sensation, EG sensitivity,

the genitals and feet are right next to each other and huge. Hence the arousal stimulation is very subjective and nuanced based on the topography of someone's nugget. Interesting. That's pretty fascinating. Yeah. I have no way to fact check that I'm not going to consult neurologists. I thought it's green. We're having another one. Another one was just really walking us through why she loves feet. Her thing is like bare feet represent. It was a woman. It was a woman. Okay. And she's like bare feet

for her represent a level of comfort and safety that you can take your shoes off and be vulnerable. Like the whole thing to her reads is this like intimacy. Yeah. I can see that offering a vulnerability. Good. Definitely see that. It's like my sick thing. Ding ding. Dang. I took the Dremel to my toenail last night. I didn't even, I wouldn't even know I was going to talk about

so lazy with my footwear. I love a slip on nowadays and when I decide to wear these shoes, these high top converse, I literally go, well, I'm going to lace them up now and I'm not taking them off till I go to bed. I don't want to be, I don't want to be. I know you even put your shoes on the bed. Don't say that. I see that. I see that. I see that. Maybe I'm going to put your offering those because like probably you just don't feel like taking the shoes off. Yeah. I'll kick off normal

shoes. We've got to bend over and. But you wear enough loafers for someone who likes to slip on. Well, but I have slip on vans and I have my low top converse loose enough that I can

swipe in and out. But you've never tried out a loaf. I hate loafers. I've tried many times.

Yeah. They're look great on you. And everyone should wear a loafers. They look great on

“everyone. On me they look preposterous. If anything is like outside of my vibe, I really think”

a loafers where the rubber meets the road. No, I could see you in a loafer with like a sweater. That's a different person, but yeah. You wear sweaters. I've got you. That's all the pulls sweaters. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. I've got you sweaters. You wear them all the time. That's true. You have a you have a Mac for choosing sweaters. I love. And you are a cardigan for some of my great burberry one. Mm-hmm. That's a massive rotation. Yeah. That's a great one. Just wore the green

row one. Yeah. Great when you go wear definitely wear that with a loaf. Monica, I know you

like you're picturing it. It seems organic. But I promise if you saw me in a loaf or you were like, hold on. What's going on? Because then I got to wear a dress pant. No. Lovers and she is a very specific dude and I'm not going to do that's a Connecticut went to

“Harvard. No, no, you have to. You have an old school like given old school mentality.”

Old school flare. Yeah, no, you have an old school mentality about what you can more loafers with and who's wearing loafers and that kind of thing. Yeah. You have an old school event. That a lot of blue color tradesmen wear loafers. I'll just say that. That's kind of where I

anchor my. I know, but like go ahead. Your new color tradesmen aren't wearing burberry sweaters either.

Oh, I would have been to tell you. You're just not him anymore. Yeah, I know. But I, I, I intend to stay that way. Okay. Yeah. Um, okay. I have something so sim. Okay, tell me. So I was at a restaurant with Jess that I frequent a lot. Okay. And that we frequent a lot. And the server said, you know, I just want to flag for you guys that on our system and I think multiple, a lot of systems. On our system, it just shows the last three digits of the credit card. Mm-hmm. And the him and I have the

exact same last three digits of our credit card. Sarah and Dippity. Isn't that crazy? Kismet. Which is like, I was like, oh my god. Like, I thought that was so cool. Yeah. And then it's a immediately scared Jess. Oh, which the reason the guy was flagging it is like, so when you guys like, if you split, there's a chance that it's going to go to the wrong card. It's going to be like a tributed to the wrong card. Why do either of you have credit cards on file at restaurants? We don't.

I'm so why don't we? Well, how are they going to, how are they going to mix up a split if you've handed the person your credit card? Well, no, we put it on the table. Yeah. Still not understanding. What sounded like to me is a, it's in the computer system and that they might click the wrong thing. No, it's not that. Then what is it? I don't know. But Jess, of course, went back there. He wanted to see on the computer. Oh, and he did. He said, yeah, it is like the last three.

I still don't understand what the issue is. Because you're going to hand them the credit card every single time, right? You don't have a long, you don't have an account or a tab of these places. No, we don't. But maybe they swipe it. That would be a problem. Okay. Maybe they swipe it and type in the amount. Because with tip, it's like with tip and stuff. Like if I'm tipping $50, maybe they type that in the back of the credit, or like they're like, oh, this is the credit card that

gets $50 tip. This credit card gets $100. It was obviously enough of a thing in their system for him to have brought it up. Yeah, I just wish I understood how it could go. He says it shows up F, and then the last three digits. And ours are the same. Isn't that crazy of all the numbers in the world? Yes, that part's very exciting that you guys have the last three numbers. And isn't

“it the last four? Or are my credit cards? That's why the last four is not. They don't match. Yeah,”

that's where it breaks down. Do you want to tell us what they are to help people pack your credit card

cards do not all end in this. Well, I know that. Well, I just- Because I've had different cards.

I have multiple MX cards. And only one of them ends in and we're not going to say the number but the same now as it turns out as you and Jess. That's nuts. But maybe like maybe there's only a few endings. Okay, while MX cards often end in similar digits like a hundred X or two hundred X due to how they are issued and replaced. Right. It says many users report last four digits ending in. One, zero, zero, one, one, zero, zero, three, one, zero, seven, one, zero, eight, one, zero, one, three,

et cetera. Well, don't say et cetera. Anyway, wow. This is the three of us split at this restaurant.

“Hooyy! Anyway, that was just very sad. Yeah, yeah. The thing I had wanted to remember to talk”

about, continuing with my grossness. So we got the pink eye, which is not pink eye. It's a style. We got the pig style. It's a pig style. The toenail, just ground it, gross. So. Because why it was getting fluffy? I don't know. It won't grow out, which is only good up. I don't want to talk about it. So, oh, I even brought it out. I know, but I didn't detail. I don't need you to be able to, like, hit tree exactly. You want to talk about gross stuff.

Well, I'm already hitting you with a third thing. So I have this style. I have the toenail.

So I'm trying to just limit those two things. Okay. So I can tell you that your style is perfect. I love a certain t-shirt. You know, I wear the same brand t-shirt mostly all the time.

“I'm velvet. Uh-huh. Velvet by. I'm in substance. Gram and crackers. Yep. I've been noticing lately that there's a lot of, uh,”

right out of the wash directly from the washroom dryer. There's anti-purspirant build up in the armpit in the fabric. Really? Yes, because I am kicking out my anti-purspirant that I'm wearing the shirt and then somehow it's so much as transferring that it's not coming out in the wall. Yeah, and it affects the armpit, it makes the armpits of the shirt not fully clean and exciting. It's like got a film of anti-purspirant over at a post-walk. Okay. And so my response to that is like to order more

shirts. Okay. Because it can't have this like gooey kiki armpit. Okay. And so I guess two weeks ago, we can have a gun like stop wearing the odor. Stop wearing anti-purspirant. Okay. Stop wearing the odor. Uh-huh. My expectation was like that's not going to be a thing. I might have more sweat, but you're not going to smell. I don't smell. Uh-huh. Oh no. Monica, I'm hoping this is a detox period, where it's like my body's still smelling all of this. Clearly I'm putting all of it out because it's like

ruining my shirts. Right. But I'm like, okay, it's just got to get all out. It's probably it's trying to find homeostasis. It's been kicking me out. Sure. That could be true. Yeah. I have been pretty regularly, but like, oh my god, my armpits smell it. You smell it. Oh within a day. And I'm like, what is going on? I don't smell. I'm having a real crisis of kind. I understand that would really strike any crisis. But what you said one time, you smelled one time. No. Every day. No, no, sorry. I'm

talking about like years ago, you were like, you said you're like, are you like, my armpits smell everywhere? Oh, I mean, you have a memory of this? Yeah. Um, and you said it smelled like bacon. Oh, I wish it smelled like bacon currently. Uh-huh. This is a classic bio. Classic bio,

classic. And I'm like, no, I don't have, I don't know like that. I never, I never smell

beer. I've got this whole story about myself. I've brought this as a home. So, what does it smell? What I'm having to do? Thank you. And then you would agree, I don't smell it. I have never smelled you smelling

“that. Well, that's what I smell. Fuck. I know. So now I'm having to, unless I want to shower every”

single day, which I don't love doing, but so now I've been showering every day. Yeah. But I'm also washing my armpits out like after I work out in this sink upstairs. Oh. I'm constantly like washing with a bar soap and a sink. I'm using soap. Well, what else can you use to get rid of the water? I don't know if that's going to deal with it. Okay. Anyways, this is all like I've started a journey. And I hope to report in like a month, everything's leveled out in my body's back to like

in the actual state. But I'm not, I've not liked this at all. I'm like, what's going on? Okay. Well, I haven't smelled it. I have another theory, though. Okay. Because there have been periods where I didn't, and I don't remember smell. I didn't wear it in a person or an ordeal. And, um, and it would be

good. And it's mixed with some other good thing. I'm supposed to have. Okay. And so what I noticed, I don't know, at some point I noticed every time I opened up a thing, I finally set out loud because Kristen takes it to I go, hey, do you think the creatin sense? I didn't even get the full sentence out. She said, B.O. Oh, no. And I'm like, yes, so I used this powder that has a light smell of B.O. We didn't. And then her father, it smells like it even when you open it. We'll go inside after this,

and I'll like you puff it. Okay. Um, we haven't helped it. Yeah, you don't need to get rid of it.

I've never so be able to smell. Maybe, maybe that's why I haven't smelled you because my,

nose is all clogged. That could be it. So, Kristen's father and shout out to Tom Bell, I've never met a man who researches things more than my father and law. Because he's in the news.

“Yeah, I think that's why, but like if this guy is going to buy a TV set, he's going to read about”

every single TV set and every review. And he likes to do this too, Andy Rosen. Okay. Yeah, it's a personality. It is. So, her father's been getting into weight training, which is I love it's adorable. We have more stuff to talk about. Yeah. And, um, so we wanted to start using creatinine found out that that's good if you're lifting weight. It's good for you, guys. I'm on it. So he, he, before he buys it. Yeah. He's like, what kind of you use? And we're like, we use this brand. And then,

like a couple days later, he said, I'm thinking about buying your brain, like he hasn't pulled the trigger on. Uh-huh. He's like, but I'm reading a lot that it smells like B.O. Stop. I'm like, oh, it's definitely that. How did you, how did you, you didn't research this thing that far that you went on a message, where's your people are starting to talk about that smells like B.O. So he already knew. And we were like, at the time, we were like, yeah,

does have a little smell like that, but, but it has not made us smell. But it has. So I guess the move would be for me to stop taking that or replace it with a different one for a while. I got to be on it.

“Yeah. And see if that's it. Okay. Because maybe that's what's going on is I'm taking this”

thing that's already smells like B.O. When I take it. I can't believe it. Oh, that's how much I want premium health. No, you can take another brand. I think it's the thing that's making it, you know, well, it's not just pure creatures. It's this other thing. I mean, MBM. It's got some mac, but I'm okay. And I think maybe that's the culprit because I've had a lot of different creatins and none of them have ever smelled like anything. Exactly. Literally, and it tastes like

nothing too. It's not even a thing. I don't think it's placebo, but it works. Yeah. Yeah. I'm on it. And I don't smell like B.O. And I don't use, I don't do it. Do you know? I have not used the odor and in like 10 years or like 15, maybe 12. No, I know a lot of people quit any perspiration out of the fear of the aluminum, which I do think was just recently. It doesn't matter, but you're not, you're not even to use anything. I don't use anything. You can put anything in there.

No perfume. Oh, do you twoll that? No. Wow. And I don't, I do not. I've never smelled that. No,

never smelled you either. Yeah. And Rob doesn't smell. We all got lucky. But Rob, do you use the

“odor it? I do. Yeah. I think you put three co-workers together in a small room. We've hit the”

lottery. Oh, yeah. One for a small one for a small one. Yeah. For sure. I agree. No one smells here. We're so lucky. Because it's impossible to address. We've gone over this. I know. Hey, Rob, I got to talk to you. You got to, you got to wash arm, but it's better or something. Like, how do you bring it? Oh, you can't. We had, we had a nanny. She, it was perfume though. It was very strong. That's easier. Yeah. Natalie talked to her. Oh, great. Natalie's top right. She

handled all that stuff for you, Rob, all the confrontation. Yeah, yeah. She likes it. I was a

surprise. I've never had a negotiate with Natalie for your way. Oh, yeah. Oh, you're, you're, you're, you're dropping.

You're dropping out. How was your event last night? It was good. I was invited to an event. That was dream event for you. It was exciting. I got, I got to go to a preview of some clothing. That was very rare. They all know what one it is. I don't know. Yeah. I know you're not going to say it. You signed an NDA. I can't talk. How was the event? What was the thing? It was a fashion. He shows up. Well, it wasn't a fashion. It was just like fall previews. I was from winter. I was invited to

see a winter preview. This is what I know. This is how fashion works. I was invited to see a winter preview of clothing that is not available yet, obviously. Off the runway, if you will.

Did anything tickle your fancy? Yeah. Of course. Of course there were some items that tickled. Did you make any purchases? No, because so they're not available yet. Oh, I thought you said you were going to maybe have acts. I thought it was like so I can say like I want that. Okay. You're flying in it. I want that. So like put one, you know, they're like put one aside. Make sure they have my size, you know, make me one. It's a pre-order kind of. Kind of. Yes. Yes.

But was there any celebrities there? No, not all I was there. Oh. Not all I was there. It's like, you know, you can think there are different slots. No, there are not slots. There's it was two days.

“Yes, today and today and it's a chunk of time. Are you going back today?”

Oh, I already saw it. I already saw it. I already did it. And then I did make a purchase of just the clothes that are available while I was there. Okay. Yeah. They're going to get you on the front end of the fact that the walk out. You know, they got me. I almost bought something for way too much money.

He need tiny, clutch, clutch purse. It was tea. It holds like, it's like a card case, basically.

For one credit card. Yeah. Gold had diamonds on it. It was vintage. It was, and it was engraved, like from way back when I was there. Some of wore it, you know, on the runway, they wore it with their, with the stress. He pointed out the dress and they wore it. I was like, fuck, I want, I wanted it. What was the price tag on that? I didn't get it. Okay. How much do you think? Gold's in diamonds. Yeah. And a one Ruby. $13,000. Why?

More. I didn't get it. I know. Congratulations. I'm doing so good. Not getting good. But it's not,

but I'm not. See, this is the problem. It's like, I should just get that instead of ultimately,

I buy a bunch of things. I totally disagree. You're doing it right because you're the illusion that that's going to say she knew it. It's not. I know. You're right. So in fact, if anything,

“you should just buy even cheaper stuff and more often, and just get cheaper and just fill yourself”

with items in your house until you're like the kid and a shell silver steam poem, the garland. So far my house is like, it's, it's still clean. Yeah. And clutter free. It's kind of free. But you're going to do your best to change. I'm not. You're going to have $7 or nine armores still. Even in that big house, you're going to find out how to. I'm not. Okay. The whole point of my house is the only of one armwar. Well, you have a huge closet now. Exactly.

The armwar doesn't, it doesn't hold clothes anymore. Okay. We, we need to. Sorry, keep all your edibles in your grave. No, it's in my, it's in my water closet, actually. Oh, you're turlet. Yeah. So I keep towels in there. I keep toilet paper in there.

“Feminine products. Your spanksies? Are they folded up? No, they're in my closet. Okay.”

And they're not spanksies. You're trying to say nixies. Nixies. But God, it was nixies. Oh, nixies. But mine are, um, mine are. Good. I nixies. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. For the thinking lady. They, yeah. But it's with an x, you know. You got to have an x in women's clothes. I know it's weird. It is interesting. It is really weird. Okay. Speaking of shopping, so I had a westside day last week. Okay. I feel hot all the sudden.

No great. Well, it's good. You know, I always like to get it cold in here. Yeah. I had a westside

day went to Venice. Okay. Ooh. I know. Yeah. Very far away from where we live because so it was like a real adventure. I decided to do. Mm-hmm. And, you know, I went to Abakini, very famous popular street in Venice where there is a lot of, um, stores and, and, and, and foodies and things like that. And, um, I did not enjoy myself. Go to punchline. And what way? I, I, like, what am I doing now? The westside is not for me. It's really just like what I took from it. I felt grateful that I lived on the

east side of Los Angeles. Mm-hmm. Stay tuned for more armchair experts if you dare. What things were erking you or not to your liking? So many people walking, but I'd like that. I'd like a New York so many people walking, so it can't be that. It was hard for me to put my finger on what was going on with me. Um, I think also, so many people walking with their dogs,

I saw a dog eat somebody's pizza. Okay. Well, out of their hand, or they discarded it on the ground. No. Like, they were sitting outside eating their pizza at a restaurant. Yes. Oh, my goodness. In eightest strangers pizza, and again, I'm not blaming the dog. I blame the owner who was like, oh, oh, sorry. It's like, oh, sorry is your reaction? That dog ate somebody's pizza. And he was like, oh, it's okay. Like, you could tell he hated it. I got with the pizza, obviously.

And then he's like, he's stuck with, okay. And now do I eat the rest of this pizza? It has dog slobber on it. Yeah. This is hard. No, there's that you're not eating the rest of the pizza. The dog owner has to go get you a new pizza. Exactly. But that was an offer. Do you see if he's stick around long ago? No, I walked away, but yeah, but he was walking away. Like, he was like, oh, sorry. He was on a walk. He wasn't a fellow diner. No. Oh, that's insane. He loves the guy.

Penny Les was he Penny Les? No. He's walking his dog on the street. His dog jumps up. Eat somebody's pizza. And he's just like, sorry. This is one of these examples of how I constantly was seen men yell at women in public. And I'd have to defend them. Yeah.

Because my world view is that nice. I somehow saw that all the time. Like, I would never see a

dog leap up. You would. You're gonna. Oh, but you're gonna, of course, of course you saw that.

“I mean, man, if that's it, it just depends on what you think about dogs. Is they're unruly?”

Not what I think about dogs. Well, first of all, yeah, dogs love pizza, of course, you know. Well, everyone. Yeah, I want, I want pizza right now. I'm having a issue. What's your issue? No, I'm like, so I'm like, all of a sudden sweating. Let's turn the era out. Let's make it cold. But I don't know if it's internal. Okay. Oh, my god. Are we catching my first hot flash? Okay. And I'm sick. You're gonna give it yourself a second to let's let it cool down for a second.

Remember when you were addicted to halls? Yeah, I didn't know me then. I know, but you just talked about it. Yeah. I'm currently addicted to halls. They're addictive. I had four all we were. So I want one now that you say, you know, at my height, I was getting the family pack every day. I know. Every day, like, going to get a pack of cigarettes. I know, I'm eating too many halls. I want one now. I'm under fat. You have anything in your satchel? I've won.

“No, is it bad for you, halls? It gave me farts because I had so many of them and I think the”

binding agent. I always think it's a binding agent, even though I don't even know what that means. I

believe all those mint type things have binding agents. Well, they have the menthols, the thing I'm addicted to. I know. But to keep all the ingredients together, they need a binding agent. It's menthol bad for you. No. Okay. Great. No, yeah. Okay. Smoking menthol cigarettes is bad for you. But that's the cigarette that's bad though, right? That's right. Yeah, okay. But the main thing, menthol and fire is probably not great. But no menthol's great for you. Okay.

Yeah, halls meant to lip this. Vicks, Vicks, baby, baby, baby rub, baby rub. Okay. Well, I love them. I got to recommend to show. And I know you're not going to try it, because it's a reality TV show. But we like it so much. Well, I'm not so sorry. I'm not done. Oh, okay. So sorry. Can you do the long break? I know, because I'm something that's going to know my body. It's like, I feel really strange. Are you? Speaker's breaking or something. Maybe

“I've had a fever and it's breaking. Let's hope that's what it is. Yeah. You're sweating. Yeah, I'm sweating.”

Okay. I feel really weird. No, I'm worried I smell. I might have given it to you. Oh, my God. By power of suggestion. I mean, I do feel like I kind of smell all the sudden. But I think it's the sweat mixing with this cashmere. Okay. So you think the cashmere smells not you? Sometimes certain sweaters, if they're sweat on them, it activates something. It does. It does. It wakes up some dormant thing. I know. I hate it. I hate it. All right. So I'm in Venice.

Adagate someone's pizza and I'm like, "E, this place is wild." You know? And then I go into the store. I won't say what it is because I'm going to be nice. Okay. I guess they're known for having like vintage Levi's. Okay. When I walk in, I'm the only one in the store. There's vintage Levi's on the left and then there's other clothes. So I like I kind of go and I like look at the vint

like for a second. I'm like kind of looking at the jeans, but then I meandered and the woman

working at the store ignored me at first. But then she was like, "Let me know if you need anything." And I was like, "Okay, great." And then I was looking at some vintage shirts. Then some more

One lady goes up to her and is like, "Do you have like a darker wash than the one she's wearing?"

So they go over to the vintage jeans. They're looking. I then go over to the vintage jeans.

“And I'm looking and she goes, "Honey, if you want to look at these, I'm going to need to help you."”

That's the worker there. Uh-huh. Okay. And I was like, "That's crazy." Uh-huh. Yeah. And I'm not allowed to look at the jeans without supervision. Exactly. How do I make exact sentence? I know what you can't look at the jeans without supervision, is the policy here? I know. That would have been great. Great to start with the question. Questions are made a question with the question. Yeah. They're a judo move.

Uh-huh. I make them explain what they just said. What did you just say? She said because, and then she made, like, she says something about sizes, but she just kind of threw it out. Like, she just was like, "Because it's like sizes." Or something. When really she just didn't want me messing with the jeans when she was over there. It was the title. She was over there. You're going to get them out of order?

Maybe. Yeah. But like, "Sorry, bitch. Do you want your clothes?" I don't mean to say that. Okay. You're going to take that. Let's rewind it. Sorry, lady. Like, you know, it was just pretty woman. It was like, "Big mistake, huge." Like, I would have a bite. Don't mistake me for someone who's not going to buy these items.

But, okay, here's what I mean. I know now you want to push back because you think I'm going to say.

You think is I'm like projecting onto her that I'm not worth the money here. I know what you're saying. I'm sweating so much. Like, I know. I do think you have that story. Like, I do think you're on high alert for that. But, but if you had asked her, can I go look at a pair of jeans like this and darker before anyone got in there? I don't think in any world she wouldn't have taken you over there and helped you. The one woman said I'd like to see you send darker. So you didn't initiate

that. The other woman did. And then I do think it's quite possible that if she was helping you and the other woman came up and started rifling through that she might have said, "Honey, hey,

“you got to be with me." I think all that's quite probable. Well, I'm not arguing she doesn't”

have a shitty bedside manner, but your conclusion that it was unique to you because of who you are,

I'm that's the part I was talking about. No, no, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. But I am saying she missed out on a sale. Great, but you also didn't initiate the jeans thing with her. It doesn't matter. She didn't when I was over there alone. Yeah. She didn't say, "Hey, if you're going to look at the vintage jeans, I got to come help." Great, and I understand that point of view. But what's really funny is what keeps me from shopping. I just I told you,

I had to kill an hour and a half at their Americana with fun with being fixed. Yeah. And when I fucking hate it, I want to be able to walk around the store and not talk to someone every 30 seconds. So it's like every, I was one of the crews from the buttonups to the sweaters, but every five feet. She used me, sir, can I help you find something or no, I'm just browsing. And then you're like, "Well, why aren't you in here, you're not shopping?" So I have the opposite

thing as you. And that woman that works, there's got to try to assess, are you the meat type or Monika, because you want them to come over and go, "How can I help you?" No, I think you're misunderstanding. Okay. I did not want her help. Okay. I did not think I needed her help. So for her to say, if you're going to look at this, I have to help you. I was like, that is kind of a very bizarre policy of the store or her own personal laziness about having

a restock or reorganized. And it was just a mix of weird things. It was like, if that's really the policy, why didn't you tell me that earlier when I was kind of looking at them? Oh, I don't remember. So are you making this policy up right now because you, because you're feeling pretty woman things ever going to happen. You are very well put together and you have expensive clothes on all the time. You wear jewelry. So that part, I think, I don't think that happens.

I don't know, but I, I laughed, you know. I laughed. I just said, "Oh, okay." And then I laughed. Because also, I'm like, "Well, if you're back in like some sunglasses in our disguise, you're like, fuck, I do need those pants." I want to make a plan. I want to punish her, but now I need to do need to get those pants. And you came back in some glasses in a scar. Anywhere, like, a part of me, how do you say, um, pantalones, uh, as well as, um, uh, yeah, I cut it on that.

“Also, though, I was like, wait a minute. If this is the system where if you have to, like,”

get help for the jeans, you want me to just stand here and wait until you're done doing this whole

going to target and get a dial. No. No real good store is doing this. Like, this is not, uh,

this is not normal. So, uh, but mainly, I was very, and I don't, I didn't expect this from myself.

“Okay. I did not, like, being called honey. Okay. And I, you're from the south. I mean, you should,”

that's, that's, that's pretty stand. Maybe that's why. Yeah. Because it often, it is a very condescending thing to say to someone in the south a little bit. It could go either way. Obviously it can be used in a sweet way. Yeah. But it is often used in a condescending way. Well, especially, it's like honey, bad honey is pretty clear. Honey, also, I'm like, I'm 38. Honey, I'm not, you're honey.

This is a huge off topic, but it just occurred to me if you're trying to speak French. I was thinking,

if I saw you, I met you and you were speaking French, and I'd hope this doesn't offend in the ends. Oh, boy. Or Moroccans. What? But I think if you were speaking French, you could really pass from Moroccan. Oh, all right. Yeah. Or Algerian French Algiers. Yeah. Yeah. I could just think about

“playing one in a movie. How are me? I guess. No. No. I don't do accents. So no. What if they're French?”

I can't do a French accent. You could with some work. No. That was stressed out. You can hear incapable of learning a French accent. I'm very bad at accents. Okay. So I'm good at them, but I can't do

most of them. You can do French? Yeah, but that's-- You're not interested. Maybe I'll hear you.

So anyway, I didn't realize that I find that now that I'm 38, if you call me honey, and not you're not my like lover. Okay. Or my partner or something, or um. Welcome, honey. I hear it all the time. Now when I'm in Tennessee, and often it's so sweet. I love it. You can tell when it's sweet. Hey, so I'm saying it's not the word. So I do think you'd be fine being called honey even at 38. If it was the 55-year-old woman that greets me at the

gas station by my house. Yeah. That's not what it was. Yeah. And then I remember there's a Taylor Swift song called Honey on the new album, so I listened to it after. Oh, that's seen. Okay, great. She doesn't like it either. Uh-huh. Okay. Well, she says, uh, like he can contrast. Okay. Let's call what it can call her honey. And that's it. Well, like normally honey in the song, like she's saying this, what I'm saying, but hers is translating better. Normally when people call her honey or

baby or some other things, like it's condescending, and it's when this is happening, and it's when someone's like be littleling her, but he can call her honey if he wants. Okay, but I bet he does frequently. I think he does. Honey's cute. You use honey a lot with Kristen. We'll use honey. I think it's a nice pet name. Okay. I would like to be called that. Okay, but be careful. Oh, yeah. You're not if you're trying to condescend me. Yeah, it's just be careful.

It's a trickling work for you. Oh, if you love me, you can do it. Yeah. What? What? Tell me. Oh, nothing. I just think we all have these things that like we don't want to be called. I have my list. You have your list. And I'm just struck when it's not me who's experiencing the emotions of it. How much agency you're giving away by being affected by it? It's just like you validate this person by carrying what they call you. And you give the way up power. You give them a power over you

that they don't deserve. I guess. You know, like the most self-actualized version of oneself is just like, yeah, I can hear it new and I can just think like Monica, how could you care if this person called you anything? You're so above that kind of insult. Yeah, but like this is a bigger than me and you argue about this a lot. Making you feel a certain way versus I feel a certain way. No, that's not what I was going to say. Oh, I thought that was going to be the one. No, like I feel

very like we do not live in on islands. People affect one another and I am not like trying to deny that reality. And yes, you can be self-actualized, you can you can understand. You have agency.

“So you can be affected if you allow yourself to be affected. That's what I'm saying. I know, but I disagree.”

I think we live and feel it feels impossible currently. Well, not just for me. What could you say in it can't be done? For everyone in life, humans, humans affect other humans. Like I don't think

from other people good and bad. I do because again, let's let's assume the worst about this person.

Let's go all the way with this work. But let's just do it. Let's say that she is racist and she knows she's you have money and she's jealous and she thinks you're a piece of shit that's inferior because you're brown. She's a terrible person. Okay. We get it. And she was trying to hurt you. Think about where that's coming from. That's such a obvious bag of insecurity that that person has. That they're going to now try to infect you with. Right. And you're going to let them. That's my

pride. You're going to let that person with their insecurities change your day. You're going to

“you're going to get infected by it and let it be contagious. I think a strong actualization of”

you is like what that gals experiences that's making her behave. That way has nothing to do with me.

Her opinion of me means nothing and it has no effect on me. Someone else can behave like a knucklehead. But you can't internalize those feelings of I'm less than a night. I'm not worthy of being here. That's like that's your department. Sure. That's fine. But that doesn't mean even if you're able to say like well that's that person shit. It doesn't mean it doesn't have to have an impact on. It doesn't mean it won't hurt your feelings to be around someone who is just insulted you.

Like that is a normal reaction. But we agree. You don't have to. It shouldn't ruin your life. Ruin your whole day. You know, it doesn't. You don't need to go that far. But I definitely think it's okay to be affected by the way people treat you. Again, do I think it needs to affect you to the extreme or it's starting to change your behavior or the way you look at the world? No, that's bad. But to be like, oh, that's okay. I just think you're giving that person way more

power than they deserve because they already they already demonstrated that they're a knucklehead. Yeah. It's like that, you know, again, the parrot on his shoulder at 7 and 11 says something. You just immediately write it off. It means nothing. What's that? What does this guy know about anything? No, I'm not gonna say that. No, I'm not gonna say that. It's that's so intellectual,

“which I like I understand. That's what we're coming from. You see it's unrealistic, not impossible.”

Exactly. I'm only debating you if you're saying it's impossible. I agree with you that it's hard. I don't think it's impossible. And I think it's circumstantial. But it is, I mean, yeah, I just live in reality where I like, look, if I'm talking to the street and someone yells something at me and they have a parrot on their shoulder. No, I'm not gonna think what they, like, they're a valid. I should be thinking about how to change my life. What they said about

his welfare. But it would still probably hurt all of, like, it would just be like, oh, ah, like, uh-huh, being yelled at or told something bad doesn't feel good, even if it's, like, crazy. Again, that doesn't mean I keep walking and I'm like, oh, man, what if he's right? Like, what if I am a stupid bitch? Like, it's just like, ah, like, that doesn't feel good to really bad energy from people. As a thought experiment, just imagine he yells, you're too tall.

Right. Truly does it, does that statement? You're too tall. I know, but there, but that's objective. But can we walk through that? This is an experiment. What do you think your actual reaction to be of a guy, y'all, that you're too tall? I, I just be like, he's not arguing to me. I would be like, or who cares what that guy said. No, it's nonsense. Yeah, I would just, like, oh, this guy's on drugs. It's nonsense. What the guy said. I know, but like, that is objective.

But other things aren't. You being ugly. You being, like, these aren't, these are subjective things. They are. And what determines whether or not you're vulnerable to them is what your own self-esteem

is. That's exactly what defines your susceptibility and vulnerability. I don't think that always

is right. I, I know. Like, I, I know I have enough money to buy stuff in that store. But you have some fear that people don't think you have money. No, I don't care about that. Okay. People don't need to think I have money. That's like, not important to me at all. People need to not think, like, I'm not relevant or exactly, or, or I don't belong. All right. Well, not belong. But you're using the pretty woman analogy for a reason. Well, that was just like easy to say. Yeah, but it, it makes

“total sense. And we all know what that means. Yeah, big mistake here. And that's what it was.”

It was a pretty woman experience. It wasn't a pretty woman experience so much as I was, look,

working at a store called me honey, and I didn't like it. Yeah. I hear you. And that doesn't mean I think I'm a little girl. Like, I know I'm not. I'm aspiring in life to not let anyone have that control over my emotions because I don't enjoy the emotion of being triggered. Right. I don't have that aspiration. I don't have that aspiration to like not feel things from other people. I definitely have an aspiration to like not let something like take me down or like, you know, have a major

impact on my mood. But yeah, like I'm fine having interactions in the world that are not always

pleasant. Yeah, I don't like feeling annoyed. And I feel annoyed all of them with people. Yeah. And I'm happy or when I'm not feeling annoyed. Yeah. Okay. Let's do some facts. Okay. Alvin. What are all the Nobel Prizes? Yeah. Okay. Was so embarrassed when you pointed out I've used. I think a lot of people think that. Okay. Physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, economic sciences. So five of them are presented in Stockholm, Sweden,

and then peace prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway. Interest. Yeah. Peace gets the most heat, right?

That's the only hair about the most. Okay. I was going to ask you like which one would you

“physics? That's what you think is the best or what you would want. Well, I just think it's like”

the most may be substantive in medicine. Yeah. That's pretty good. I don't know. I just think like had someone not cracked the DNA code versus Obama. I think one is more perpetuates mankind more. And I love Obama. I know, but that's actually, I don't mean him specifically, but that's that's an interesting debate. Like what progresses? Like Obama was a great president and I don't know how we would quantify how many lives he saved, but I don't mean he did not save as many

lives as vaccines or antibiotics. Like those things are like quantifiably, hundreds and millions of lives have been saved or this invention allows us to travel into space versus like you are a really good guy that encourage people to be good and better. But that's

it's powerful. It's powerful. It's it. I put Martin Luther. I put Martin Luther in the camp of

“the physicists. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like there are people who revolutionize the way the”

rest of the world is going to think about things for the rest of time. Mm-hmm. And that is that very powerful. Um, I guess if I was just picking between I have to live with, like on planet Earth either there was new, no Louis Pasteur or no Obama, I know we got to ask the hard questions. No, we're not doing our job. I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. I do not want to do that. Um, I mean look, I'm more, I'm most likely to get a piece or a

literature prize of this. Those are my actually only even remote options. Yeah, that you could even be a contestant. Exactly. Yeah. So you're waiting those higher. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's funny. I go the opposite. I am Jenna. Okay. I get early respect things a lot more that I can't do. Yeah. Which maybe is some kind of arrogance. I don't know. But no, it'd be air. Or if I can't do it, it must be really impressive. Like you can see where that's kind of arrogant. Like yeah, I can't do this

abstract calculus figure out how fast Elfus and Cherry's moving towards us. So that's really that person must be so much. I guess I'm glad we have all. Me too. Because they're all extremely important. Did you hear about crater carols speaking of space? The moon? Yeah. And what's going on crater carol? I just thought there was a rock moving through the moon that was fascinating the footage of that. Well, there was like a mark on the moon. Okay. You know, they got the earth.

Don't. You're going to be upset you said that after you hear about this. Okay. Because they go, you know, they go on that. What is it? Astronomers. Artemis, thank you. Okay. Yes. And then they see this and the astronaut asked if they could name it Carol after his deceased wife. Oh, yeah. I'm really

“upset. I said, yeah. That's great. What is it? Do we know what it is? It's a crater I think.”

Okay. I've been calling it crater Carol. So I hope they've named I see Einstein. I'm Einstein Dalton and Carol. Oh, where would Dalton that is? And the video's like going around of him like he's out there and he said we want to name it Carol. The one thing from this Artemis

the moon which is crazy. So there is no, do you think they listened? They should have, yeah. That would have been cool. They couldn't come in. There's no radio communication or anything.

“So they're just kind of like who knows what's happening on the other side right? But I think when”

they came around it or I don't know, I don't know the timing of it. But the point is one of the astronauts looked at earth and he was hit by this reality that we should all feel I wish we could all feel. It's like you little, you little monkeys are on this fucking rock in the middle of an abyss. And it's you guys are all you have. I know. In the fact that you're on this floating thing fighting each other is such a tragedy. I mean, I'm not very sure what exactly how he said it. But I know

that was the thrust of what he was saying, which I think about often is just like if you're an alien hovering above earth, like what's going on? There's a bunch of people down there. They're

lucky enough to be this perfect distance. 93 million miles from the Sun where they can have

water and oxygen and they live and they're spending that coming up all these fake differences between each other. You know, we all haven't common. We're on a fucking rock floating through. Exactly. I'm with. Yeah, it's so it's heartbreaking. But you also, you would say, well, evolution where animals and animals status and I want hates in the fights. Why was thinking that? I did, I actually, I made, I forced myself to counter his point of view. And I'm

saying what's interesting is you don't look, you know, he's not looking at the earth seeing that a lion is fighting another lion in order to get access to the female and going like, what a tragedy. The lion is spending his time on this floating, you know. So then I did, I was like, well, that's relevant too. Sure. But also, it's not. It's like we afraid that we should be able

to do you figure we will always choose earth. We will always choose each other. That's sweet.

They're hugging up there. These astronauts are so sweet, naming the creator Carol and doing this. Oh my God. Oh, well, can you see, is that the northern lights over the upper right tip of the? Oh, wow. That's cool. Earth is so like, I don't think it's a miracle. I like, don't believe it. I don't think. I don't either. Um, Alvin. Okay. Oh, he was making a point about rules and laws and how sometimes you don't have to make laws because like people just

automatically don't do a thing because it's so repugnant. Oh, uh-huh. Like true feces in their hand on the street. No, he didn't say that. But, uh, one, he said eating worms,

“but then I was like, I didn't want to say, but like, people he wants. Sure. I think he's right”

I talk about here, but yeah. I know, but like, a lot of cultures he worms. Okay. They do. They really do. But he was like, am I here horse me to illegal? Hey, right. Because here we think it's crazy. But a lot of places they eat horse me. And then there are some things that are just we don't need a law against it because here no no one's eating worms. And so the expectation is they won't be in your food. Right. I guess. And you don't have to,

you don't have to legislate against that. That's true. But, uh, people you want to know about. People you pull probably. No. Yes. I'm this cannibals, Monica. We have that's different than eating worms. Like, okay, great. Let's use cannibalism. Okay. There are we have evidence of certain groups being cannibals. It is illegal. Here. Yeah. Yeah. But not there. Right. But we don't have a law that says you I don't think there's a law anywhere on any books that says you can't serve humans in a restaurant.

I don't think that law exists. Huh. Well, not in a restaurant, but cannibalism is a law.

“There's a law against cannibalism. Remember that guy had to go to jail in France. I don't know”

if I mean, why would there be a law? Because it would imply already murder. So it's like you've already crossed. Well, not necessarily. Okay. What is your eating yet? Yeah. That's what he wants to work in the market or what if you just cut off a bunch, like, cut off some of your arm and I ate. There's been these cases. There's been consensual where people eat each other. Like, they was someone wants to get their part of their body eaten. Someone on the internet wants to eat

someone's body. So in the US, there are no laws that explicitly prohibit cannibalism per se. Wow. Because again, you don't. Because you just feel like it's not happening. Yeah. But it is. But in Papua New Guinea where it had been anything for certain tribes, they might need to put that. Right. They would have to decide to legislate again. It says most states have enacted laws that make it effectively impossible to legally obtain and consume human body matter,

though. Okay. Well, I'm so glad that's not my king. Eating humans. Yeah. Being a doctor.

You never be satiated. Because like, if you're thinking your king is this thing you can't do,

you would never be satiated in life. Yeah. But also just. Yeah.

But it's highly regulated at the local level rather than state level. It is often considered

livestock not pets. Generally, only miniature breeds like pop belly pigs are allowed, often subject to weight limits under hundreds and 20 pounds in strict city specific zoning ordinances. Thank God. Clooney's not a fugitive from law. Because I think he had a pop belly pig famously. Yeah. Oh, wow. We can't afford to have him as a criminal. But she is a farm. Exactly. So lives. She could own anything, Broly. He mentioned Alan Turing. That was sad.

That was very sad. So sad. But that's a great movie, imitation game. Yeah.

“I should read why. Great movie with Benedict Comberbot. I think that was his breakout, right?”

He was already like simmering, but I was like, Ben was like cyan or suck ass. 11. Oh, I think he, okay. I may have missed her this. I thought he said Jonathan Edwards is the doctor who got his Nobel Prize in, in vitro. It's Robert Edwards. Which he may have said, and maybe I missed her. Okay. But he won it in 2010. Okay. Physiology or medicine. Okay. So is IVF illegal in Germany? This is for single women. It's legal and available in

Germany, but it's strictly regulated by the embryo protection act. It is primarily accessible to married heterosexual couples with egg donation and serigacy strictly prohibited.

Strictly prohibited. Could you always bet on horses in the United States? No. It only

if you ate them afterwards. Exactly. No, it has not always been possible or illegal to bet on horses throughout the entire United States. Has a long history face significant legal social and regional restrictions over time. There's all kinds of restrictions. In the early 20th century anti-gambling sentiment led almost all states to ban bookmaking, which nearly eliminated horse racing. So I guess that's not specific to horse racing. Right. Okay. All right, then. Yes, Mark Twain is credited with saying

giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it a thousand times. He's credited. Okay. That's it. That's everything. Well, I do applaud albums work with these

“kidney donations. I know. That was wild actually. Should I give my kidney to someone?”

That's up to you. You don't want to advise? You love to advise. I'm request. This is just where I'm like, I'm shamefully selfish. Yeah, because what if I need it? I want both. You know, I like a backup. Yeah. I probably need a backup since I had kidney stones. Oh, boy. They probably wouldn't even, maybe they wouldn't let me camp. Yeah. Well, that would be the best case scenario. You tried and you couldn't. Yeah, it gets green. That's like I tried to give.

What did I try to give? Plasma. Try to give sperm in college. Oh, yeah, and you were allowed. But that's not you'd be fine doing that. Yeah. And you were getting pet you would be good. Well, that was the goal. Yeah. I was in college and I needed some money, but they wouldn't accept it.

“This is terrible sperm. What? 'Cause I had low mobility. No, you need to have or at least they”

told me you need to have an inordinately high sperm count. Oh. And I did not have a high sperm count. Interesting. I like to think I had an average sperm count. It is specifically, you have a low sperm count. It is. It wasn't high enough. You didn't have any problems getting pregnant. I've only tried twice. Exactly. Yeah. So it works. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Bye. Love you.