Alvin E. Roth (on moral economics)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepherd and I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi.

Today we have Elvin E. Roth. He has a Nobel Prize winning economist and a Stanford professor. Ding, ding, ding, ding.

My goodness. His previous book is Who Gets What and Why. And his new book is called This Is Tasty, Moral Economics From Prostitution to Oregon 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.

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They're the most loved homes on the platform consistently highly rated by guests. Some trips really do feel better when you have the right space. You're visiting I presume from the Stanford area. 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, specializing in that? They did. Did they meet in pursuit of that knowledge?

They probably did. They were both New York City school teachers and part of the implicit contract was you were supposed to go back and get a master's degree. And I think they met them. Okay.

They met in graduate school. Yeah. How much older 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 till 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 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 a wonder 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 in 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, yeah, in three years. And it was in operations research.

What was operations research? Well, operations research was any is a collection of applied mathematical tools. Mostly they're tools that had the 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 and PhD there in three years. Again, this is accelerated. I did.

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. OK. How do we transition from operations to economics?

It's a good question. I'm often asked that my story, which I'm sticking to, is that I didn't change what I did. But the disciplinary boundaries 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, OK.

Did you love Yarnishwand Neumann? He's a father of game theory. It would be delightful to have met him. He was a polymath and an unusual man.

Most of the game theory we do today isn't very directly related to what he did. I'm fascinated with my rhetoric, great biography about him last year. He is the one who basically comes up with the concept of mutually assured nuclear annihilation. Right?

That's 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 in his game theory book. But you might be thinking of Thomas Schelling, who was a game theorist who also shared a Nobel Prize in economics with Bob O'Mond.

And he worked in the Rand Corporation and thought a lot about nuclear disarmament and ornament 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. Eight years. 74 to 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? Because 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. 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 inoculate you from this? Or do you feel like you were able to pick up the worldview of all these places you spent all this time in?

I always think of myself as being from Detroit, and then I've been here for 30 years. And I definitely downloaded a different worldview through being here. And I want more of those worldviews. And I just wonder if you could feel that you absorb the culture and the points of you.

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 the economics department, you're reading the same journals, you're seeing many of the same people. So 70, 80% 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 change 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 meet. Right. Okay.

So in 2012, I guess you're last year at Harvard, you win the Nobel Peace Prize with Lloyd Shabley. Not a Peace Prize. That's a prize for peace. Oh, sorry.

We won an economics prize. We're still buying the Nobel Committee. Is it not the same? It's different.

There's a Nobel Prize in economics. There's one in physics and one in chemistry and one in physiology and medicine and in literature. So you win that for the theory of stable allocations and 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 lay person?

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-read 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 a matching 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 and the demand and how is that going to affect the price of things? And that's certainly one specific kind of market. Now 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 going to be done through paying 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 because there's a bunch of different ones that maybe people wouldn't realize their markets. That's a good question because in fact I wrote a book in 2015 called Who Gets What And Why. And that has some things in common, one market in particular in common with my new book, Moral 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 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 used now is one that I helped design. And algorithm will match them to each other. Why was it inefficient before you got involved?

What were the baked in challenges? 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 a 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, and 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.

On dating sites, people with nice pictures get lots of things. You have 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 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, and 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? Which is your first choice of two jobs because that's what they want. Which is second choice.

That sounds very complicated. It's a little complicated to build an algorithm that can handle that. But 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 they're probably in some ranked priority of they'd like to be at the same hospital.

Then 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 clearinghouses didn't take care of that, the married couples didn't go where they were matched.

Because I like to say that the iron law of marriage is that you can't be happier than your spouse. So if my spouse get matched to a pair of jobs that doesn't suit us, we can keep looking for jobs. And that disrupts the match for everyone. So that's something that's been fixed.

Okay, so now what's interesting about markets is that globally, there's very little consensus about what markets 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, surrogacy, sex work.

And the concern generally does ultimately find its way to fear that the ritual coerce the poor or under privilege. In 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 repugnance. And so I would love for you to explain repugnance 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 who 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. These other markets where moral considerations come into play. Yeah, gay marriage is 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 repugnant 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 repugnant transactions have to have fans and foes. That's exactly right. 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 to 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. Yeah.

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'd all agree that I don't think you could establish a hierarchy of horse cow. I think the same referendum that made illegal to sell horse meat for human consumption made it illegal to sell dogs for human consumption. So I think it's a pet is the idea.

But it's such a fine line. Yup eggs are pets. Well no not in California. People have a lot of course the idea of a chicken.

Right. 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 into 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. Some sense you know better than the person knows for themselves.

Right. And paternalism is a very interesting word because of course often we apply it to children. And you know 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 they will harm them in some way. And you have to stop them because you their parents know better than they do. So there's a whole field now with experimental and behavioral economics which says that all of us former children just because we had enough birthdays doesn't necessarily mean that we know it'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 prioritize tomorrow at school or the child wants to eat a bunch of sugar before it goes away.

Play on the freeway. Play on the freeway. I think that would have appealed to me. 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 the American history is 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 methylens that have 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 the fact that regulations don't magically make the problems of alcohol go away. We don't let children buy alcohol although they're 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 the 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 will 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 levy a verdict whether something is right or wrong. Well I think about that and I end up by saying that 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 and that makes it it seems to me less of a moral obligation 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.

Right 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 are 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 consequentialists 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. No 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.

Okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay no your mind is I'm sure it wasn't my. No I'm not. Last year I was scheduled to go to Israel and didn't go because there was a war in Iran and all the days I was supposed to be there but I downloaded an app that gives me an air raid alert whenever there's one in Israel. Oh wow.

That's what we're hearing. Oh wow. 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 as if 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 saved from that polio vaccine or name the vaccine it's preposterous they're not comparable one is a 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 in accelerating? Well I think it's a very bad way to talk about trade-offs you know if you don't think about consequences then you can be led far straight and one of the examples I talk about some length is addictive drugs right we all would like there to be no heroin addicts but simply throwing them in jail turns out not to solve a 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 I'm 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 serve us 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 gonna constantly be measuring have 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 gonna 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 everyone illegal but what makes less sense is to say let's make that our only tool for fighting drug addiction even 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 are 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 to answer your question about how can we tell when things aren't working the places that don't like surrogacy see themselves as protecting the vulnerable the place with advanced surrogacy and the vulnerable who they identify are women who might be surrogates and be our children for someone else but of course if you're a German couple in need of surrogacy to start your family 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 a 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 theory and then 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 and that couple wants to donate the kidney to their loved one and they're not a match but lo and 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 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 transplants a year so the weight on dialysis is long and dangerous and people die while waiting and he says a top 10 killer in the US 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 US but around the world and part of that is related to the fact that it's against the world 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 all sorts but it's flatly against the law to pay a donor for kidney we've just recently in very recent years started to make progress on reimbursing the cost that donors pay in becoming donors that is if you want to give me a kidney if I had kidney failure I'd probably be in a hospital up in the Bay Area and you would have to come and get a hotel room and you'd have costs and it would have been illegal 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 stay tuned for armchair expert if you dare we are supported by all state checking all state first could save you hundreds on car insurance that's smart not checking which platform you watch that new show on so frustrating 15 minutes later you've logged in 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 very subject to terms conditions and availability all state North American insurance co-infiliates North Brigillinois yeah yeah your insurance is not going to pay for you to donate a kidney well my insurance would pay for the surgeries for yours and mine needed for you to donate a kidney to me okay okay but they wouldn't pay for the child care that you needed while you were in Palo Alto 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 Naldak the National Living Donor 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 flatly against the law to pay for 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's a no money changing hands that makes it legal it wasn't completely clear that this would be legal because 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 dissent an 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 1500 more than a thousand a year now there's a little carefulness you need to do accounting because somewhat more than a thousand 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 US who want to give a kidney to someone and don't have a particular someone in mind yeah I haven't heard about these people I considered it so Admiral you have yeah because I don't need to yeah I already have one yeah I'm suspicious I'm gonna damage one of mine I need to say well I need to get 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 and 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 enunciated that the rich countries of the world the global north would suck the blood out of the poor countries and it'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 a 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 products 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 illegal 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 these 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 percent 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 in 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 it's worth worrying about that we shouldn't have for you which country's sucking 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 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 death act which is an ambitious title get headline it's suggesting a very modest change in the national trans-mon act which is that it would allow non-directed donors or just a very special class of donors to get a tax credit over a period of i think five years for being an undirected donor one reason they're saying a tax credit and one reason they're spreading over five years is to get away from this idea that somehow people would have some desperate need for some cash and that would cause them to really donate a kidney but this is meant to be a considered decision we owe a lot to the non-directed donors a pretty high fraction and they put half of the kidney exchange transplants that happen are in chains initiated by non-directed i heard you say you can imagine a scenario where we set a standard price for 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 kidney from a could ever becomes available it doesn't go to the richest person there's some criteria so that's right 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 just 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 gradiate that difference that's a good question it's not a reasonably risky to donate a kidney you know the deaths are one in ten thousand so that's a pretty modest risk there are streets that you can cross an essentialist that give you a bigger risk than that especially if you're crossing 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 rich are 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 want to donate a kidney to me you would probably have some out of pocket costly it 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 it kidding absolutely that's exactly the alternative 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 unconstitutional in supreme court decisions are very sorts laws against autonomy for example but just incidentally when ro v 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 sodomy unconstitutional and contraception and of course the same sex marriage so these controversies are not over and done with so historically marriage how does it evolve where did it start so marriages even older than i am but of course society has a lot of interesting 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 led to pregnancy which with high likelihood led to children we as a society developed all these rules that said man and 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 a household and so 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 of the change 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 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 and 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 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 allen turing you talk about him a bit in this jam okay so allen turing is a great man i mean people should know his name every computer scientist does he sort of invented computer science i mean that that's a too broad a statement but computer science you mentioned von Neumann in game theory there's a sense in which you could mention touring in computer science germ world war two he was also a codebreaker and helped shorten the war by breaking the German enigma code by helping break the German enigma code he was british but he was homosexual and after the war he was convicted of being homosexual i forget the criminal phrase he was sentenced to be chemically castrated and he committed suicide so today it's legal to be almost sexually britain in the united states you know this is sort of an ancient horror but it's not that ancient wow so he didn't get the chemical castration no i got it he wasn't happy oh my goodness how does this ripen marriage an adoption so the question is do we allow people the same sex to marry each other that was a repugnant transaction to remember i use the word 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 2000 in massachusetts through a court decision the massachusetts Supreme court and then what happened wasn't that lots of other states fell into 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 over the fell is the name of the supreme court decision eventually the supreme court decided that equal protection of the law especially once many states recognize same sex marriage and others didn't equal protection of the 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 Jonathan Edward so he invented he and colleagues nobel prize is always our you know leave out colleagues he and colleagues invented in vitro fertilization in 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 early than mine so in the 2000s millions of people 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 criticism become people and if you think that the embryo is a person and person the ones that are not used are perhaps murders especially when they discarded the nature of repugnant transactions is you can be vastly celebrated you know the nobel prize is a giant weak long party in Stockholm and at the same time have people picking and following your murder so these are fundamental disagreements we have when we talk about repugnant transactions in 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 as life-giving and of course millions more you know it'll have 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 conclusion 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 yeah but in Spain there's not an obstacle so if you are an unmarried woman who needs to become pregnant then doesn't have a another way of doing it you 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 a 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 someone's reverse engineered eugenics in some bizarre way it's like okay we're gonna select for who can do this one of the things i talk about in the book more 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 that's the abortion issue abortion and surrogacy yeah IVF surrogacy is more complicated because you have to bring a baby home with you but IVF you know you're a pregnant could have an vacation yeah perfectly legal on vacation you're allowed to be a single woman you just have to have gotten pregnant naturally that's so interesting yeah exactly yeah exactly in section two of the book we look at protection from harm and these ones are great and i'm 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 that 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 yes coffee is most acceptable in my community it's a great performance enhancing drug we regard it as food i don't think we limit children no 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 condominium 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 when i guess it's 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 opioids 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 rugs i just gave you most people are going to put opioids as the worst and they're significantly troubling there's been years in the last decade where we've had a hundred thousand people die overdose death yes it's a very real threat but let's talk about the numbers for tobacco yeah so tobacco kills more people than opioids and alcohol kills more people than tobacco in your book of three 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's not 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 death 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 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 interest marijuana just anecdotally i've seen people confront people for smoking cigarettes in public outside multiple times my children will do it when i see people smoking marijuana no one says anything i think that's really interesting and telling that 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 its societal what we just have decided is in vogue and not i mean smoking is coming back yeah that's crazy a lot of younger people are smoking again and vaping and vaping too but even cigarettes it's weird i don't know what i mean i think maybe because people stopped talking about how bad it was for you that people are kind of back on it which is not good yeah i think in 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 with people 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 guess and now it's on the incline but let's talk about prohibition so what happens in 19 20 or some 30s yeah yeah we prohibited most sales of alcohol not sales for religious purposes not sales for certain kinds of medicinal purposes but by and large we prohibited the sale of alcohol in the voles that act you could brew in your home so there was a big upsurge in the sale of wine grapes synagogue membership in synagogue wow that's really funny yeah yeah yeah yeah i talked for many years at the university of Pittsburgh and the state of Pennsylvania had and i think still has a liquor monopoly it's only sold in state stores and state stores are closed on sunday but the store that sold judeica jewish things and they could sell kosher wine even on top of the only in from no business and you had to scribble something that was supposed to be what surely went to what synagogue you belong to but you could have gone in scribble something they were interested in your scribbles yeah kind of like the medical marijuana card yeah number hope yeah there's a great comedian that said he went to get this medical marijuana card and they said are you having trouble sleeping 12 hours a night he said yes i can only super buddy down here you go you need this so that's right but that wasn't the main way that alcohol came into the u.s some was production there were stills it's not 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 out race the police and particularly you wanted a plain looking car that was super modified to be really fast so you went brought tension to be really fast to have a lot of product in the back yeah and so stock cars these big gangly cars are what they decided to race not coupes not corvettes or anything sedans you can tell right away that a ban is going to have trouble when it starts generating folk heroes you know when the people who violated or robin hood not al Capone now they were also al Capone and the canadys 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 sale of alcohol and so you could legally buy whiskey sequins in canada and then illegally bring it 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 as it's hard to stop surrogacy by making 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 quailute 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 they could shut that one down they could succeed and they did succeed but that's about the only factory when 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 run in front of my eyes in san francisco and in portland and a few other places on the west coast and I gotta say I have completely reversed my position on it and there's a lot of these trade-offs that aren't maybe not obvious when you're first evaluating it like okay let's even say that addiction went down and the deaths 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 browns sounds like well the whole city's 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 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 or overdoses they are over those trying absolutely and having people not kind of available 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 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 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 do with the social norms about drugs and commercial killing there's almost zero convictions a year of higher it's not even in the fbi crime statistics and they carry out virtually is similar penalty that's right in both cases if we catch you selling narcotics or killing fire 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 hitman 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 that's really too bad yeah that's really too bad you know he seemed so coherent when you're talking to anybody must be getting seen out and that would sort of be the end of it maybe 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 i'm an 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 at UCLA and you look to me like the kind of guy who would know where i could hire it man what do you say well probably you don't know where i could hire it man but even if you did you wouldn't tell me because that wouldn't be a good thing to do but afterward you wouldn't just say oh that sure took a strange turn that conversation you'd say maybe we should call the police yes is that here's someone who wants a murder yeah yeah you know we should 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 you 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 called him 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 two-way call him back and tell him you know before he gets on a 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 it 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 were 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 in plainclothes to talk to me and have me explain who i wanted murder to 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 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 they know 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're in 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 plans 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 turned 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 citing these different experiments that were running Portugal and Spain but we just applied one side of it which is none of the resources none of the help which is like oh god decriminalized 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 happy to make needles in the school playground no no no one's to live in that city or play on that playground right stay tuned for our marmer expert if you dare so what kind of experiments do you think we need to run well 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 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 whereas the police think you know 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've 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 could be drugs and maybe you could have them prescribed so you could be available to maybe you could 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 these things all probably touch each other in various ways but 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 laps right now that we don't fully understand yet which is we all recognize alcoholism as 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 nosedive and i don't know that we have a great explanation of what's driving that nosedive 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 drinkers 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 potential probably dynamic and multifaceted but um yeah i was pointing out to him because his worldview is everything about the internet and social media's madness and what about this uptick in healthy eating and reduction in drinking and better savings you can't ignore all these other things that are upticking hugely as the suicide rate goes up nine percent 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 there used to be some thought that maybe alcohol had some protective properties that drinking red wine was good for your heart sticking with that a little bit yeah yeah yeah yeah i miss those days doing my heart of favor with this class of wine exactly yeah so that cuts it down a little yeah there's probably different causality within each socio-economic rung 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 that's terrible for you right but that's not why i'm 18 year old they're long jevries not at the forefront that's not why they're doing it but i think there are these cycles that are generational to in other words if your grandparents drank cocktails then your parents drank wine and 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 okay so vaccines turn out to be controversial who would have thought and they're controversial at the highest levels of government right now so we're seeing measles again we'd 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 gonna have measles up especially for kids in vaccinated so it's an dangerous 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 first sought and then saben in elementary school they lined us up and walked us through the gym and we all took a sugar cube with purple liquid in it it was a oral sought was a shot and saben 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 a 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 you have to test them in places where there's lots of covid you have to find hot spots because testing them in a place that covid has already swept through is a big good way to test them so the way you test vaccines is you have to predict it a little bit you find hot spot 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 hot spot people can go through their daily life without getting exposed so you have to wait till enough people have gotten exposed to 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 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 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 you know people in their 20s who have no comorbidities 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-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 even if they're signing up and thousands of people signed up because we're all locked down people signed up and they were passionate about it they'd say you know this gives me a chance to make a difference instead of just passively hiding in my house from this 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 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 yeah the world to have all those lockdowns just as the disease itself was costly but of course that's now a minor story now that we have covered 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 a very outspoken vaccine advocate there are people that protest my wife and I only go places the anti-vaxxers right 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 vaxx I believe that's your right I don't think you should have 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 a public where I'm gonna go where the moral conundrum for meat 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 to hovers witnesses are among them and they don't like blood transfusions because they are reading of scriptures says that God is omnipotent and if God wants to save you he saves you and if he doesn't want to save you he doesn't save you and you shouldn't mess 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 children and there's sort of a well-gove 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 that 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 is we said no God works in mysterious ways our hands are kind of clean and God wanted to live yeah yeah God could have stopped the injunction so yeah those workarounds yeah this is like homage can be driven to the hospital car but they can't operate the car themselves my mother's boyfriend Dan his mother died she's a Jehovah's Witness because they refuse the blood transfusion as you're saying it else can refuse but the question for children and the fact that I know about these hospitals means that Jehovah's Witnesses know about these hospitals you send your kid to the hospital because they have a good record of treating 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 do that there are ways of arguing that might help us in other words there aren't enough kidneys for transplants 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 dorouse someone's opposition that's not true everywhere kidney exchange still isn't legal in brazilian in Germany even if you're a donor yeah the will in both places is you couldn't give me kidney my brother could give me kidney but you can't yes it has to be a first one remember the family and the German prosecutors have no sense of humor about this so if my brother wants to give me 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 kidney but those laws are subject to change the german health ministry has a a draft that they're trying to put through the boondestock and they'll have us as an example we're 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 so a number of kidney exchanges going on in brazil is a clinical trial to see if it works in brazil and we're confident 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 limited it i think you could always pretty much ban on horse racing in the united states because after all talking about ban on horse race don't eat them exactly that's part of the fun that's why you don't eat for a buddy not for eating exactly but still you would go to a racetrack to do it so one problem with sports betting on your phone is it's potentially addictive you're not potentially you know you could ban 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 athletes so that your bets will come in more those are coming out more and more and more 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 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 even be losing as long as you lose by six yes still win so there were some famous scandals of that sort in the 1950s one of them i get to follow occasionally on the internet because one of the protagonists was named Alvin Roth oh wow so i didn't the book i had to proofread 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 Roth which is how he's talked about it with a comedian 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 lewison 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 sky rocket not everyone is subject to it of course but it's significant and again we have this little bit of crossroads which is like you should be allowed to destroy your life in some sense you know we believe that in this country you should be allowed to drink alcohol 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 yes so gambling may be a benefit from being reregulated that way it's a pretty recent thing that we've allowed this sports betting a supreme court decision again so there's two things we 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 enisraelis about to be abducted you can make a lot of money on a prediction market by betting on that it'll that's a little worrisome if you worry about corruption 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 to start rumors like barys serns was a rumor we've learned a lot we have to keep up with it 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 measuring congress but yes unless you're in congress yeah yeah yeah 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 there are 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 yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah we can regulate the amount of nicotine in cigarettes you know 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 them think about how to regulate vaping which might have something to be saturated if you're a two-pack a day cigarette smoker maybe switching to non-combustable is good for you but if you're a middle school student it's a terrible idea to get addicted to nicotine which is apparently you know a very powerful addicter i'm the product of this law it happened i was furious they outlawed in california flavored tobacco and i liked wintergreen so i was having like my father-in-law brings them from novata right i'm like smuggling it and every time someone come to visit they'd have to bring me to sleep and then i finally quit like two years ago on new years but i'll say it was largely helped by when i walk into 7-eleven it's not even there there was a hurdle 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 because the aging libertarian me was like i hate it helps and it's true that's right so the morally contested markets behavioral problems with things like addiction are not going to be zero one solution so it's not that you pass a law yeah we're done we pass the law everything's good yeah we're going to inch towards a better and better percentage is all we're going to do 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 elven 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 hermium hermium you like that you're going to love the fact that this is maldon i am a glasses on not to cover up my sty oh my journal entry this morning started as such my sty is 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 sty i wanted to say i wanted to say i'm like i was not to read this not to cover my style okay go ahead and ask me what my style um how does it feel the same i've been on antibiotics right drops drop not all not all and i've been hot compressing like a very good boy i know but i've been hot compressing okay but what i'm going to read is in reference to our foot fetish debate oh okay or i was trying to figure it out okay so this was interesting this is from um miss miss a 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 e.g. 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 that's pretty fascinating yeah i have no way to fact check that i'm not going to consult a neurologist i thought he's going to grab 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 that was a woman okay and she's like bare feet to 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 kind of uh offering a vulnerability to definitely see that's like my sick thing ding ding i took the dremel to my toenail last night i didn't even i don't even know i was gonna talk about feet so much nah but mostly because i'm wearing lace-up shoes today it's just too much i'm 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 gonna 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 you even put your shoes on the bed don't say that i've seen it i've seen it it's always when you're wearing those because like probably you just don't feel like taking the shoes off yeah i kick off normal shoes but i gotta bend over and but you don't wear enough loafers for someone who likes to slip on oh but i have slip on vans and i have my low top converse loose enough that i can slide in and i've never tried out a loaf i hate loafers i've tried many times why they're look great on you and everyone should wear loafers they look great on everyone on me they look preposterous if anything is like outside of my vibe i really think i love 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 multiple sweaters yeah that's true i've got you sweaters you wear them all the time that's true you have a you have a knack for choosing sweaters i love them you wear a card against my gray burberry one that's a massive rotation yeah that's a great one just for the green rote one yeah great when you go wear definitely wear that with a loaf monica i know you like it your pitch ring it seems organic but i promise if you saw me in a loaf or you'd be like hold on what's because then i gotta wear a dress pant no loafers in jeans is a very specific dude and i'm not that's a kineticate went to harvard no no you have you have an old school like you have an old school mentality for school flare you know you have an old school mentality about what you can wear loafers with and who's wearing loafers and that kind of thing yeah you have an old school not a lot of blue collar tradesmen wearing loafers i'll just say that and that's that's kind of where i anchor my i know but like go ahead blue collar tradesmen aren't wearing burberries sweaters either oh i was just gonna say you're just not him anymore yeah i know but i i i i i i intend to stay that way okay 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 him and i and the server said you know i just want to flag for you guys that on our system and i think well a lot of systems on our system it just shows the last three digits of the credit card and him and i have the exact same last three digits of our credit card serendipity isn't that crazy chisment which is like i was like oh my god like i thought that was so cool yeah and then it's 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 car it's going to be like attributed to the wrong car why do either of you have credit cards on file at restaurants we don't 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 that it's in the computer system and that they might click the wrong thing no it's not that ten what is it i don't know but just of course went back there he wanted to see on the computer and he did he said yeah it is like the last three yes i was not interested in 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 at these places no we don't but maybe they swiped six a two 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 fifty dollars maybe they type that in back of the credit or like oh this is the credit card that gets fifty dollars tip this credit card gets a hundred dollars i was obviously enough of a thing in their system for him to have brought it up yeah i just we said understood how it could go he says it shows up f and then the last three digits and hours 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 everywhere micro credit cards that's why the last four is not they don't match yeah but that's what breaks down do you want to tell us what they are to help people pack your credit card in his minus two no it's not yes it is so are all minus no okay hold on no american spread cards do not all end in s well i know that well i just got different cards i have multiple mx cards and only one of them ends and we're not gonna say the number but the same now as it turns out as you and just that's not but maybe like maybe there's only a few endings okay well 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 zero zero three one zero zero seven one zero zero eight one zero one three etc well don't say etc anyway wow three of us split at this restaurant hooey 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 yeah we've got a pig's tie it's a big stick the toenail just ground it gross so because why it was getting fluffy i don't know i won't go out just only go up i don't want to talk about it so well you brought it out i know but i had a detail i don't need you to be able to picture exactly what's going on well i'm already hitting you with a third thing so i have this tie i have the toenails i'm trying to limit those two things okay so i can tell you that your style you're starting to be very very very very very very very very very very very very you know i wear the same brand t-shirt mostly all the time velvet uh-huh uh-huh velvet by gram and something gram and crackers yep but noticing lately that there's a lot of right out of the wash directly from the washer dryer there's anti-perspirant build up in the armpit in the fabric really yes because i'm kicking on my antiperspirant then i'm wearing the shirt and then somehow so much is transferring that it's not coming out in the wash yeah and it affects the armpits it makes the armpits of the shirt not fully clean and weird exciting it's like got a film of antiperspirant over post wash okay and so my response to that is like to order more shirts okay because they can't have this like gooey cakey armpit okay and so i guess two weeks ago we can have gone like we'll stop wearing deodorant stop wearing antiperspirant okay stop wearing deodorant my expectation was like that's not gonna be a thing i might have more sweat but i don't smell uh-huh oh no do you smell i'm hoping this is a detox period where somebody's still expelling all of this clearly i'm putting on my shirt right but i'm i'm like okay it's just got to get all out it's probably it's trying to find homeostasis but i've been kicking over that could be true yeah over long i have been pre-regularly but like oh my god my armpits smell it within a day and i'm like what is going on i don't smell i'm having a real crisis of conscience i understand that would really start identity crisis but what you said one time you smelled one time no every day no no no sorry i'm talking about like years ago you were like you said you're like he's like armpits smell oh you have a memory of this oh um and you said it smelled like bacon oh i wish it smelled like bacon currently is a classic b.o classic b.o classic and i'm like no i don't have i don't smell like that i never i never smell b.o i can't smell the whole story about myself i've read this as well so what i'm having to do thank you and then you would agree i don't smell i have never smelled you smelling that well guys 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 so now i've been showering every day yeah but i'm also washing my armpits out like after i work out in the sink upstairs i'm constantly like washing with a bar soaping a sink using soap what else can you use to get rid of that i don't know if that's gonna 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 and my body's back to like a natural state but i've not not liked this at all okay i haven't smelled it i'll have another theory though okay because there haven't been periods right then and i don't remember smelling didn't wear it in a person and audio right and and it would be fine for days and um my one fear is that i take this kreatin okay it's a powder and scooper 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 open up a thing i finally set out loud because christian takes it too i go hey do you think the kreatin i didn't even get the full sentence on she said be oh oh no and i'm like yes so i use this powder that has a light smell of beow in it and then her father smells like even when you open it we'll go inside after this and i like you cough it okay we don't have to yeah you don't need to get rid of it i'm nervous i'll be able to smell maybe that's why i haven't smelled you because my nose is all clogged that could be yeah so christian's father and shout out to tom bell i've never met a man who researches things more than my father-in-law because he's in the news yeah i think that's why but like this guy's gonna buy a tv set he's gonna read about every single tv set and every review and he likes to do this too and he rose in okay yeah it's a personality it is so her father's been getting into weight training which i love it's adorable we have more stuff to talk about yeah and um so we wanted to start using kreatin he found out that's good if you're lifting weights it's good for you guys i'm on it so he he before he buys it yeah he's like what kind do you use or 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 like but i'm raining a lot that smells like be oh stop oh it's definitely that how did you how did you you wouldn't research this thing that far that you went on a message where people were starting to talk about it smells like be oh so he already knew and we were like at the time we were like yeah it 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 replace it with a different one for a while gotta be on it 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 be oh when i take it oh that's how much i want premium health no you can take another brand i think it's just a thing it's not well it's not just pure kreatin it's this other thing i need mbm it's got some acronym but i think maybe that's the culprit because i've had a lot of different kreatins and none of them ever smell like anything exactly literally and it tastes like nothing too it's not even a thing i don't think it's placebo it works i'm on it and i don't smell like yeah and i don't use deodorant i have not used deodorant in like ten years or like fifteen maybe twelve now i know a lot of people quit any persimmon out of the fear of the aluminum which i do think was just recently debunked doesn't matter but you're not not even deodorant you know anything anything in there no perfume oh do you twall that no oh wow and i don't i do not i don't i don't smell you either yeah and rob doesn't smell we all got lucky but rob do you think i do i think you put three co-workers together in a small room we've hit the lottery oh yeah the smell i like for sure 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 um you got you got to watch armpits better or something i like how do you bring it out we had an antie she it was perfume though oh that's easier yeah Natalie talked about great at least top right she handled all that stuff for you rob all the confrontation yeah yeah she likes it i'm surprised i've never had to negotiate with what Natalie for your wage oh yeah oh yeah oh you're you're dropping you're dropping you're dropping out how was your event last night it was good i was invited to an event um that was dream event for you it was exciting i got i got to go to a preview of some clothing that was very they all know what it is i don't know how you're not gonna say it please sign an nda i can't talk how was the event what was the thing it was a fashiony show is up well it wasn't a fashion it was just like fall pre- of course of course there were some items that tickled what did you make any purchases um no because so they're not available yet oh i thought you said you were gonna maybe have access to that so i can say like i want that okay you're flying 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 um so pre-order kind of yes yes uh but uh was there any slurry sir no no i was there oh not what was there it's like you know it makes me think there were different slots no they're not slots there's there's two days yesterday and today and it's a chunk of time are you going back today oh i already saw it i already saw you did it and then i did make a purchase of just the clothes that are available while i was there okay yeah they're gonna get you on the front end of the back i need to start the walkout with you know they got me i almost bought something for way too much money ooh teeny tiny clutch clutch purse it was tea it holds 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 narrative was the name some of war you know on on the runway they wore it with their with the stress you pointed out the dress and they wore it and i was like fuck i wanted i wanted it what was the price tag on i didn't get it how much do you think golds and diamonds yeah in a one ruby 13 000 dollars more more uh oh 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 have the illusion that that's gonna say she knows i know i know you're right so in fact of anything you should just buy even cheaper stuff and more often and just yeah cheaper and just um fill yourself with items in your house until you're like the kid in the shell silver steve poem the garble house is like it's it's still clean yeah and clutter free it's kind of free but you're gonna do your best to change i'm not you're gonna have seven or nine armwars still even in that big house you're gonna find out how to i'm not okay the whole point of my house is i only have one armoire well you have a huge closet now exactly the armwars and it doesn't hold clothes anymore okay we weed so you keep all your edibles and no it's in my it's in my water closet actually oh your toilet 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 and they're not spanksies you're trying to say nixies nixies i forgot it was nixies but mine are um mine are good i nixies nix for the thinking lady yeah that's with an x you know um you got to have an x in women's nowhere i know it's weird it is interesting it is really weird okay speaking of shopping so i had a west side day last week okay i feel hot all of a sudden no great let's get it you know i always like to get a cold in here yeah i had a west side day i went to venice okay i know yeah very far away from where we live so it's like a real adventure i decided to do and you know i went to abbakini very famous popular street in venice where there's a lot of um stores yeah and and foodies and things like that and um i did not enjoy myself but a bunch like in what way i i like what am i doing west side 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 stay tuned for more armature expert if you're there what things were irking you or not to your liking so many people walking but i like like i like in 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 i was so many people walking with their dogs nobody having any like awareness of other people no well it was part of it i saw 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 restaurant yes oh my goodness and ate a stranger's 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 uh it's okay like you could tell he hated it the guy with the pizza obviously then he's like he's stuck with okay now do i eat the rest of this pizza it has dog slobber on it yeah this is hard no there's you're not eating the rest of the pizza the dog owners go get your new pizza exactly but that wasn't offered you if you stick around long no i walked away but he was walking away like he was like oh sorry and he was like oh he was on a walk he wasn't a fellow diner no oh that's insane unless the guy was penniless was he penniless no he's walking his dog on the street his dog jumps up eat somebody's pizza and he's like sorry this is one of these examples of how i constantly was seeing men yell at women in public and i'd have to defend them yeah because my worldview was that and i somehow saw that all the time like i would never see a dog leap up you would you're a but you're gonna of course of course you saw that i didn't manifest it it just happened but it confirmed what you think about dogs is there unruly not what i think about dogs well first of all yeah dogs love pizza of course you know well everyone yeah i want pizza right now they share about those what's your issue no i'm like so i'm like all of a sudden sweating let's turn the area 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 no it's okay and i'm sick don't 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 talk about it yeah um i'm currently addicted to halls they're addictive i had four while we were so i want one now you said 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 wonder if i have any of your sachel i've won now 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 i don't even know what that means i believe all those mint type things have binding agent well they have the menthols i think i'm addicted i know but to keep all the ingredients together they need a binding agent which is menthol bad for you no okay great no okay smoking menthol cigarettes is bad for you it's that's a cigarette that's bad though right okay and an alien menthol and fire is probably not great but no menthol is great for you okay now halls mental lipses um vix baker bake paper rub baby rub okay well i love them i gotta recommend a show and i know you're not gonna try it because it's a reality tv show but we like it so much oh i'm so sorry i'm not done talking about you oh okay so sorry can you do a long break i know because i tell you something going on my body it's like i feel really strange um are you um how do you feel every people is breaking or something maybe i had a fever and it's breaking let's hope that's what it is fun yeah you're sweating yeah i'm sweating i feel really weird now i'm where i smell i might have given it to you oh my god i power of uh suggestion i mean i do feel like i kind of smell all this i think it's the sweat mixing with this cashmere okay so you think the cashmere smells not you sometimes certain um sweaters if they're sweat on it it does it does it wakes up some dormant thing i know i hate it i hate it okay so i'm in Venice yeah a dog gets someone's pizza and i'm like ee this place is wild you know and um then i go into the store i don't say what it is because i'm gonna be nice okay i went in um 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 vent like for a second i'm like kind of looking at the jeans but then i meander and um 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 people start coming in she starts adjusting these other people great i'm still looking around one lady goes up to her and is like do you have like darker darker wash than 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 if you want to look at these i'm gonna need to help you that's the worker there uh-huh and i was like that's crazy uh-huh yeah you're not allowed to look at the jeans without supervision exactly out of my exact sentence i know you can't look at the jeans without supervision is the policy here i know that would have been great to start with the question questions are the me to question with the question yeah they're they're they're a judo move uh-huh make them explain what they just said what did you just say she said because and then she made like she said 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 that was just tight so she was afraid you're gonna get them out of order maybe but like sorry bitch do you want your clothes i don't mean i just didn't mean to say that okay you're gonna take that back let's rewind sorry lady like you know it's just pretty woman it was like big mistake huge like i would have bought you don't mistake me for someone who's not gonna buy these items but okay here's what i'm now you don't want to push back because you think i'm gonna say you think it's i'm like projecting onto her that i'm not worth the money or i know what you're saying i'm sweating so much i know if you think you have that story like i do think you're on high alert for that i wasn't 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 wanted to take you over there and helped you oh yeah one woman said i'd like to see this and darker so you didn't initiate that the other woman 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 i but your conclusion that it was unique to you because of who you are i'm that's the part i want to start 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 it doesn't matter she didn't when i was over there alone yeah she didn't say hey if you're gonna look at the vintage jeans i gotta 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 american on my phone with being fished and when i fucking hate it's like 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 my crews from the button-ups to the sweaters but every five feet excuse me sir can i help you find something oh no i'm just browsing and then you're like why aren't you in here you're not shopping you know so i have the opposite thing is you and that woman that works there's got to try to assess are you the me type or Monica because you want them to come over and go how can i help you know this is you 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 gonna look at this i have to help you i was like that's kind of a very bizarre policy of the store her own personal laziness about having a restock or reorganize it 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 know so are you making this policy up right now because you but i don't think the pretty woman things ever gonna happen to you you are very well put together and you have expensive clothes on all the time you wear jewelry so but i know but so at that part i think i don't think that happens i don't know but i um i left you know i'm not sure i just said oh okay and then i left uh because also i'm like well how are you like i'm like oh sunglasses in a disguise i do need those pants i know i want to make a place i want to punish her but now i need to get those pants i know and you came back and sunglasses in a scarf and you're like a part of me uh how do you say um um ponthalonis uh azulis uh uh yeah i could have done um 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 thing with this other lady yeah that's the problem with these boutiques that's why you got to go into target they got to dial no no no real good store is doing this like this is not uh that's not normal so uh but mainly i was buried and i don't i didn't expect this for myself okay i did not like being called honey oh okay yeah and i you're from the south i mean you should that's that's pretty standard 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 but it is often used in a condescending way especially if it's like honey that honey is pretty clear honey also i'm like i'm 38 honey i'm not your honey this is a huge off topic but it just occurred to me if you were 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 indians or morocans what but i think if you were speaking french you could really pass from a rockin oh all right yeah or algierian french algiers yeah i could just think about playing one in a movie hire me i guess no no i don't do accent so no what are the french i can't do a french accent you could with some work no that was driving i'm so i'm very bad at accents okay um so don't go to add them but i can't do most of them you can do french yeah but that's you're not interested maybe i'll be okay okay so uh 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 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'm a little bit 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 wants to do and then i remember there's a tailor swift song called honey on the new album so i listened to it after oh god singing okay great she doesn't like it either uh-huh well she says like he can call Travis okay let's 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 um 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 belittling her but he can call her honey if he wants okay good i bet he does frequently i think he does honey's cute you use honey a lot with christian we use honey 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 yeah just be careful it's a trick or for you so if you love me you can do it yeah what um what tell me oh nothing i just think i 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 called 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 mama how could you care if this person called you anything you're so above that kind of insult yeah but like this is bigger than me and you argue about this a lot making you feel a certain way versus i feel a certain way no i thought that was gonna be the one i thought that was gonna be the one um 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 effective that's what i'm saying i know but i disagree i i i think we live for you it feels impossible currently well not just for me well because you're saying it can't be done for everyone in life humans humans affect other humans like i don't think you can i not by the way i don't think you should walk their life without feeling things from other people good and bad i i do because again let's let's just do no worse 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 an obvious bag of insecurity that that person has that they're gonna now try to infect you with right and you're gonna let them that's my pride like you're gonna let that person with their insecurities change your day you're gonna you're gonna get infected by it and let it be contagious i think a strong actualized version of you was like what that gales experiences that's making her behave that way has nothing to do with me her opinion on 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 and 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 has just insulted you like that is a normal reaction you don't have to it shouldn't ruin your life ruin your whole day if you know it doesn't you don't need to go that far but i i definitely think it's okay to be affected by the way people treat you it does 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 ow that's okay i just think you're giving that person way more power than they deserve because they already act they already demonstrated that they're an uncle ad you know it's like that you know again go with a paradigm shoulder at 7-11 he says something you just immediately write it off it means nothing what's that whether this guy know about anything stand in front of someone with a pair of it's not so intellectual though which i like i understand that's where you're coming from but i'm unrealistic not impossible exactly because 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 i i just live in reality where like look if i'm working on this tree and someone yells something at me and they have a pair 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 but it would still probably hurt all like i would just be like oh uh-huh like being being yelled at or told something bad doesn't feel good even if it's like crazy it does 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 receive bad energy from people as a thought experiment just imagine he yells you're too tall right truly does it eat 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 would be if a guy yelled at you you're too tall i just like he's not arguing me right or who cares what that guy said it's not it's not yeah i would just like oh this guy's on drugs like you know 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's always right i don't 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 you know what i live in or exactly or i don't belong right right well not belong but you're using the pretty woman analogy for a reason well i was just like easy to say yeah no but it makes total sense and we all know what that means and that's what it was it was a pretty woman experience it wasn't a perfect woman experience so much as i was look i really i was like i mean we went off on such a tangent all i was i wrote down a lady working in 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 um yeah like i'm fine having interactions in the world that are not always pleasant yeah i don't like feeling annoyed then i feel annoyed often with people yeah and i'm happier when i'm not feeling annoyed yeah okay let's do some facts okay elven what are all the Nobel prizes yeah okay well it's so embarrassed when you pointed out i'd use i think a lot of people think that okay um physics chemistry physiology or medicine literature peace economic sciences so five of them are presented in Stockholm, Sweden and the peace prize is awarded in Oslo Norway interest yeah peace gets the most heat right that's the only here about the most okay i was gonna 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 maybe 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 is more perpetuates mankind more i know that i love obama 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 quantifying hundreds of millions of lives have been saved or this invention allows us to travel into space versus like you are really good guy that encouraged people to be good and better but that's powerful it's powerful i put mark luther in the camp of of the physicists yeah that's what i'm saying yeah yeah yeah there are people who revolutionize the way the rest of the world is going to think about things for the rest of time and that is very powerful um i guess if i was just picking between i have to live with like on planet earth either there was no luie pestor or no obama i know we got to ask the hard questions 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 i've those are my actually only even remote options yeah that you could even be a contestant exactly so so you're you're waiting those higher yeah okay yeah it's funny i go the opposite way in general okay i generally respect things a lot more that i can't do yeah which is maybe is some kind of arrogance i don't know but no it would be area like if i can't do it it must be really impressive like you can see where that's going to air yeah like yeah i can't do this abstract calculus to figure out how fast alpha centuries moving towards us so that's really that person must be so special i guess i'm glad we have all me too because they're all extremely important did you hear about crater carol speaking of space the moon yeah and and what's going on crater carol i just saw 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 there skimmer don't you're gonna be upset you said that after you hear okay because they go you know they go on that what is it astrumus thank you okay yes and then they see this and the astronaut asked if they could name it carol after his um deceased why 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 i've been calling it crater carol so i hope they've named i see uh einstein uh einstein dalton and carol and the video is like going around of him like he's up there and he said we want to name it carol it's one thing from this Artemis thing that i believe so certainly one of the astronauts you know they went around the dark side of the moon which is crazy so there's no do you think they listened they should have yeah that'd been cool um they couldn't come in there's no radio communication right 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 at the time you know 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 new little monkeys are in 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 pretty i'm sure what exactly i said but i know that was the thrust of what he was saying which i think about often it's just like if you're an alien hovering above earth yeah 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 you know coming up all these fake differences between each other you know we all have in 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 we're animals and animals that is and i want to hit them the fights i was thinking that i did i actually i i mean i force 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 have rain yeah we should we should be able to figure we will always choose earth we will always choose each other that's sweet they're hugging up there uh these astronauts are so sweet naming the crater carol and doing this oh my god oh wow 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 it's a miracle i don't believe in it i don't i don't either um alvin okay oh he was making a point about um 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 three feces in their hand on the street no he didn't say that but uh warm he said eating worms but then i was like i didn't want to say but like people he warms sure i think he's right about here but yeah i know but like a lot of cultures he warms okay they do they really do but he was talking about here horse meets illegal right because here we think it's crazy but a lot of places they eat horse meet and then there's some things that are just we don't need a law against it because here no no one's eating warms 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 probably poo probably no yes and there's cannibals Monica we have that's different than eating worms like well okay great let's use cannibalism okay there are we have evidence of certain groups being candles it is illegal here yeah um 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 to go to jail in france i don't know i mean why would they're killed because it would imply already murder so say you've already crossed well not necessarily okay why did you get the org yeah that's what he wants you to work on the law or what if you just cut off a bunch like cut off some of your arm and i ate it 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 eating somebody in there wants to eat someone's body so in the us there are no laws that explicitly prohibit cannibalism per se because again you don't because you just like it's not happening but it is but in pop of a guinea where it had been a thing for certain tribes they might need to put that right they would have to decide to legislate it it says most states have enacted laws that make effectively impossible to legally obtain and consume human body matter though okay well i'm so glad that's not my kink eating humans yeah you never be satiated because like if you're thinking your kink is the thing you can't do you would never be satiated in life yeah but also just yeah um can you own pigs in california as pets yes you can own pet pigs in california 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 120 pounds in strict city specific zoning ordinances thank god clunie's not a fugitive from law because i think he had a pop belly pig who famously yeah oh wow well kalie we can't afford to have him as a criminal but she has a farm exactly so much so she couldn't want anything really you mentioned allen touring that was sad that was very sad so sad that's a great movie imitation game yeah make sure we watch great movie with benedic cummerback i think that was his breakout right he was already like simmering but i was like that was like sign our suck ass elodim um wended robert at oh i think okay i may have misheard this i thought he said jonathan edwards is the doctor who got his number of prize in um in vitro it's robert edwards which he may have said maybe i misheard okay but he went 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 syrux surrogacy 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 legal to bet on horses throughout the entire united states um has a long history they significantly go social and regional restrictions over time there's all kinds of restrictions okay 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 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 alvin's work with these uh 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 um rick last this is just where i'm like i'm shamefully selfish selfish because what if i know both you know i like a backup yeah i probably need a backup since i had kidney stones oh boy oh boy they probably wouldn't even maybe they wouldn't let me camp yeah well that'd be the best case scenario you tried and you caught it yeah it gets me those like i tried to give what i tried to give plasma try to give sperm and college oh yeah you were allowed but that's not you'd be fine doing that yeah and you were getting pet you would be well that was the goal yeah i was in college and i needed some money but they wouldn't accept it that says terrible sperm what because 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 they didn't specifically say you have a low sperm they didn't have any problem you didn't have any problem but i've only tried twice and i've met two kids so it works out yeah yeah yeah bye bye love you