Transcript of Alvin E. Roth (on moral economics) New

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

Hi.

Um, today we have Alvin E. Roth. Uh, he is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a Stanford professor. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

My goodness.

His previous book is Who Gets What and Why, and his new book is called This Is Tasty.

Yeah.

Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal about how markets work.

Really interesting.

Super, super interesting. We learn about the difference between repugnancy and disgust. He himself pioneered this kidney market that has saved tens of thousands of lives. Yeah, uh, really, really great topic. Uh, please enjoy Alvin E. Roth. He's no chance But I think You're visiting, I presume, from the Stamford area, yeah?

I am.

You're originally from Queens. Both parents were schoolteachers?

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 were gonna become secretaries, and they taught them typing and stenography. Typography. So, one of the skills that a secretary needed to have in those days was to be able to take by hand dictation.

Yeah.

Right. And then your words per minute was your currency, I imagine?

And accuracy. Yeah.

Both parents specialized in that?

They did.

Did they meet in pursuit of that knowledge?

They probably did. You know, they were both New York City schoolteachers, and part of the implicit contract was you were supposed to go back and get a master's degree. And I think they met then.

Okay, they met in graduate school.

Yeah.

How much older is your older brother than you?

4 years.

4 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 9th 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 a high school degree, I don't have a high school degree.

Yeah, you don't have a high school degree, which I like a lot. And you started full-time at 16 at Columbia?

Yes.

So you were a wunderkind. 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 into 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 3 years. And it was in operations research. What was operations research?

Well, operations research was and is a collection of applied mathematical tools. Mostly they're tools that had their origin in World War II, so various kinds of optimization and some kinds of statistics, things like that.

And then you went to graduate school quickly thereafter, which you went to Stanford, and you get your master's and PhD there in 3 years. Again, this is accelerated now.

I did, yeah.

What was the hurry? Was it just happening?

It was mostly just happening. I wasn't in a hurry, but again, I wasn't a talented student. I liked being a student, but I was ready to also think about things on my own.

Okay. How do we transition from operations to economics?

It's a good question. I'm often asked 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, okay. Did you love, uh, Janusz von 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 him. I read a great biography about him last year. He is the one who basically comes up with the concept of Mutually assured nuclear annihilation, right? This is what he models out.

So he didn't ever talk about things like that. He may have thought about it or talked about it, but not written in his game theory book. But you might be thinking of Thomas Schelling, who was a game theorist who also shared a Nobel Prize in Economics with Bob Aumann. And he worked in the Rand Corporation and thought a lot about nuclear disarmament and armament and mutually assured destruction.

But that is based on the shoulders of game theory, no?

Yeah.

You have a lot of long stints. You do University of Illinois for 7 years?

8 years.

8 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? 'Cause you then also went to Harvard for 14 years. Like, these are really long tenures at any one place.

Well, you know, I'm old.

Uh-huh.

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 and then I 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 absorbed the culture and the points of view.

I think I can absorb the culture of the different places, Partly, there's a lot in common about fancy economics departments wherever they are. People sometimes ask me, "What's the difference between Harvard and Stanford?" And in many ways, they're pretty similar. If you're in 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 and 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, not completely. I have Harvard students who are working in the Valley, and I have Stanford students who go to Wall Street and 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 your last year at Harvard?

Yeah.

You win the Nobel Peace Prize with Lloyd Shapley?

Not a peace prize. That's a prize for peace.

Oh, oh, so sorry.

We won an economics prize. Prize.

Still by 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—

okay—

one in Physiology and Medicine and one 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 layperson?

That's a good question. So I have a very expansive view of markets because a lot of the markets I study aren't primarily monetary exchanges. So that surprises even some economists that I speak of markets that way. But I think of markets as tools that human beings build so that we can cooperate and compete and coordinate with each other. And so there are lots of markets. There are commodity markets where you don't care who you're dealing with. You can get 5,000 bushels of hard red winter wheat 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. It's 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 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.

Yep, that's a 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 helped design or redesigned, yes.

Yes. So let's talk about matching markets, because there's a bunch of different ones that maybe people wouldn't realize are 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 doctors, new American doctors. And that's a market that if you know someone who's graduating from medical school this year, right around now, they'll already have interviewed at residency programs, and they'll have submitted a rank order list of how much they like places, first choice, second choice, third choice, and the residency programs, the employers will do the same thing. And then an algorithm that— the algorithm used now is one that I helped design— an algorithm will match them to each other.

Why was it inefficient before you got involved? What were the baked-in challenges?

There were longstanding kind of inefficiencies that had to some extent been resolved before I got on the scene by creating a centralized clearinghouse. 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 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.

Yeah, the congestion, right, is everyone's gonna pick the top 3-tier hospitals in a very populated area. That place is gonna 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 gonna make lots of applications and therefore employers are gonna 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 pings.

Yeah, if you're the hospital and you get all these applications and you go, "Great, I want these 20 graduates," you have no clue if you're their 9th choice or their 7th. So you've wasted all this time on an applicant who really doesn't intend to go there but might have sent it as a backup plan.

So a centralized clearinghouse helps coordinate that. But one of the particular things that hadn't kept up to date with the way medical education and the labor market of doctors worked 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. Medical school who need 2 jobs, not 1 job. And if they need 2 jobs, you can't do a good job of getting them 2 jobs unless you ask them, "Which 2 jobs do you want? What's your first choice of 2 jobs?" 'Cause that's what they want. "What's your second choice of—" Yeah, that sounds very complicated. It's a little complicated to build an algorithm that can handle that. Yeah. But it makes it simpler for couples who are looking for 2 jobs to look for them in a sensible way instead of getting 1 job in Alaska and 1 job in Florida.

Yeah, I was gonna say there probably is some ranked priority of they'd like to be at the same hospital, then second to that, they'd like to be at 2 hospitals 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, so if me and 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 is very little consensus about what markets should and shouldn't be allowed, right? We have much different laws in the US as we do in Europe, as we have in Asia, and 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 rich will coerce the poor or underprivileged. 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, just 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. 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 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 disgust. You use the example like, we don't serve saliva in glasses at restaurants because universally everyone thinks that's gross. That's disgust. 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 know, 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. Whoa. 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, sheep.

I think the same referendum that made it illegal to sell horse meat for human consumption made it illegal to sell dogs for human consumption. So I think it's pets is the idea.

But it's such a fine line.

Yeah, pigs are pets. Yeah.

Well, no, not in California. People have—

No, no, of course they can. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they can't legally do it. 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 ban 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 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 have been attempts to ban that.

In 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 have small children, you have to say they can't do things that they really want to do. But that will harm them in some way, and you have to stop them because you, their parents, know better than they do. So there's a whole field now of experimental and behavioral economics which says that all of us former children, just 'cause we had enough birthdays, doesn't necessarily mean that we know what's good for us. And we might also like some laws that limit things you can do. So one that comes to mind that, 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 to prioritize tomorrow at school, or the child wants to eat a bunch of sugar before it goes to bed.

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 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 that alcohol itself isn't bad for you. You know, there weren't quality controls. It's just bad. You know, methyl instead of ethyl alcohol. And the country got tired of feeling like they were accomplices in a crime that many Americans didn't really think should be a crime. And it's a great example of the difficulty of banning things that people want to do, but also of the fact that regulations don't magically make the problems of alcohol go away. We don't let children buy alcohol, although there are 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 outcompeted by the fancy liquor stores that'll sell you aged-in-the-barrel scotch and things like that.

Yeah. Okay, so the other thing I think we need to understand, again, because your book is trying to evaluate the economic morals, not the moral imperatives. We're not trying to levy a verdict whether something is right or wrong.

Well, I think about that, and I end the book by saying that one of the things about morals is you can't be morally obliged to do something that you're not able to do. Right? 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, 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 aged 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. [Speaker:JAD] Right.

But the concept of trade-offs is really, really important, 'cause that's how we're gonna attempt to evaluate these different situations as we go through a list of very exciting and provocative, repugnant transactions.

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

Now, this becomes one of my primary axes 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— What is it? That's my one. Oh, okay. Okay. No, you're fine.

I just wanted to make sure it wasn't mine.

No, I'm wrong. Last year I was scheduled to go to Israel and didn't go because there was a war in Iran on 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. And that's what we're hearing.

Oh my goodness.

Okay. Whoa. We're getting intel.

Okay.

I feel like our modern era, and I don't know what's driving it, whether it's the internet or social media, but there seems to be a willing naive rejection of trade-offs, 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 lives 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 and 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 astray. And one of the examples I talk about at 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 the problem. We still have heroin addicts even though our jails are full of drug dealers and drug addicts. So if we don't like heroin addiction, I think we're morally obligated to think about how to abolish it, having tried one way. And so 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 that this country fundamentally in the Constitution is trying to service two goals, liberty and equality, that cannot exist at 100%, both. So just implicit in our whole system is the notion of trade-offs. We're gonna constantly be measuring, have we lost too much liberty for this equality, or have we lost too much equality for this liberty? And so admitting we're setting out on a journey that's going to involve compromise and trade-offs, and we're going to try to figure out what balance is suitable for us, I think needs to be applied everywhere. You can't really compute the world without acknowledging we're not gonna get perfection in any one of these without some cost.

I agree. And also, I think we have to learn from experience. It makes a lot of sense to say, "Let's make heroin illegal." But what makes less sense is to say, "Let's make that our only tool for fighting drug addiction." Yeah. Given that it yields a lot of drug addiction.

And then the last thing I think, and then we'll jump into some of the topics, is just we have to somehow evaluate what we can and can't get. We have to be able to determine whether or not these goals are achievable. And how do we do that?

You mentioned already that there are different laws in different places. Some years ago, before COVID I gave a talk in Berlin about controversial markets, and the three I chose to talk about in Berlin were prostitution, surrogacy, and kidney exchange. And the reason those made sense for an American to talk about in Germany is the German laws are just the opposite of the American laws. So, in Germany, the only one of those three that's legal is prostitution. Surrogacy and kidney exchange are not— 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 places that ban surrogacy. And the vulnerable who they identify are women who might be surrogates and bear 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?" [Speaker:ROBERT] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:25:28

And so the family courts started to have to create procedures where German surrogate parents could adopt their own child in order to— to have the child, 'cause 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 in 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 to?

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

And you said it's 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 law almost everywhere in the world to pay someone for a kidney. I should take a step back and say we get kidneys from deceased donors, from dead people, but also from living donors because healthy people have two kidneys and can remain healthy with one. So as you were saying, if you loved me and I needed a kidney, you might be able to save my life by giving me one.

What's the breakdown of that? How many are coming from cadavers versus —living folks?

20-something thousand are coming from cadavers, and about 7,000 are coming from living donors.

Okay, so still the majority is from cadavers.

The large majority is from cadavers. Only a small majority of the donors are deceased, because deceased donors give two kidneys, and living donors only give one. Right, right. So we need more donors of all sorts, but it's flatly against the law to pay a donor for a kidney. We've just recently, in very recent years, started to make progress on reimbursing the cost donors pay in becoming donors. That is, if you wanted 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 more Armchair Expert. If you dare.

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Well, my insurance would pay for the surgeries, yours and mine, needed for you to donate a kidney to me. Okay, okay. But they wouldn't pay for the childcare that you needed while you were in Palo Alto. Travel, all that. So there were lots of things that they wouldn't pay for. I was on the board for a number of years of a federally funded organization called NALDAC, 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 a kidney, and that's one of the reasons why there's a terrible shortage of kidneys.

What was the number before you came up with this algorithm that could match two different couples wanting to, or maybe it was even— 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 it's not, is in kidney exchange, each patient gets a compatible kidney from another patient's intended donor with no money changing hands. Right? It's the 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 all already agreed to donate, what did the number go from?

So it went from a handful a year when we started doing it to it's about 1,500, more than 1,000 a year now. There's a little carefulness you need to do in counting 'cause somewhat more than 1,000 people receive kidney transplants through kidney exchange, but some of the donors are non-directed donors. There are a couple of hundred donors each year in the US who want to give a kidney to someone and don't have a particular someone in mind.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard about these people. I've considered it. So, Admiral, you have?

Yeah, 'cause like— Who needs it? Yeah, if I already have one. Yeah.

I'm suspicious I'm gonna damage one of mine and need the second backup.

Well, I mean, yeah, that's fair.

You've gone further, at least I've heard you in— conversation with other people, open up the idea. The obvious threat of buying kidneys is, of course, rich people will go to poor countries and take advantage of people who are very, very desperate 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 there'd be this flow of blood from poor countries to rich countries. In most countries in the world, it's illegal to pay for for blood and also for blood plasma, which is a blood product that's actually very important. And in the United States, those things aren't illegal, but there's a regulation that says that whole blood has to be labeled with whether it's been donated voluntarily or for pay. And so the equilibrium we're in is that whole blood in the United States is donated without payment.

When I donate blood, they offer me an orange juice and a cookie afterward, but that's so I don't fall down. Yeah. But plasma as 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 it legal to pay plasma donors, and those are the only countries that are self-sufficient in plasma. Everyone else who can afford it buys plasma mostly from the U.S.

It's fascinating, isn't it? Mm-hmm. 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% of the world's plasma, and we're not a poor country. And we're the richest. So we should worry. It's a real thing to worry about that somehow rich countries would suck the blood out of poor countries. But that's not the present danger that we're in. The present danger that we're in is there are countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where there isn't enough blood and people are dying in large numbers because of shortages of blood and blood plasma. And in Western Europe, there aren't those deaths because they can buy it from the US. And in Australia, they can buy it from the US. So it's worth worrying about that we shouldn't have, you know, rich countries sucking the blood out of poor countries. But that's not what's happening. So it's important to think about the consequences. And one reason it's not happening is it turns out you need a sort of sophisticated medical industry to safely process and store and fractionate the plasma into useful pharmaceutical components.

Right. Okay, so then that brings us back to kidneys, because I was impressed with your solution to this.

So there've been lots of proposed solutions. Regularly, there's some legislation being proposed that would try to relieve the shortage of kidneys. And right now, there's an act that's being sponsored by quite a number of congressmen called the End Kidney Deaths Act, which is an ambitious title.

Yeah. It'll get a headline.

It's suggesting a very modest change in the National Organ Transplant Act, which is that it would allow non-directed donors, so just a very special class of donors, to get a tax credit over a period of, I think, 5 years for being a non-directed donor. One reason they're saying a tax credit and one reason they're spreading it over 5 years is to get away from this idea that somehow people would have some desperate need for sudden cash and that would cause them to quickly donate a kidney. Right? This is meant to be a considered decision. We owe a lot to the non-directed donors. A pretty high fraction, in the neighborhood of half of the kidney exchange transplants that happen are in chains initiated by non-directed donors.

But I heard you say you can imagine a scenario where we set a standard price for a kidney. Let's say it's $100,000. That was the example you gave. And an individual is not allowed to buy the kidney. The US government has to buy the kidney, and then the US 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 cadaver 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.

Which is our primary concern.

No one would be able to pay for a kidney except the federal government. And then, as you say, we would avoid all the moral problems 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 gradate that difference?

Yeah, that's a good question. It's not unreasonably risky to donate a kidney. You know, the deaths are 1 in 10,000, so that's a pretty modest risk. There are streets that you can cross in Los Angeles that give you a bigger risk than that, especially if you cross against the light. So I think that's something to seriously think about, and I, and I talk about that. And 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 is 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 wanted to donate a kidney to me, you would probably have some out-of-pocket costs that wouldn't be reimbursed just because it's time-consuming, it's time away from work.

00:37:26

And we have to keep the alternative in mind The alternative is some 80,000 people a year are dying because they didn't get a kidney.

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 of various sorts. Laws against sodomy, for example. But just incidentally, when Roe v. Wade was not so long ago although reversed by the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas, in his concurring opinion, suggested that we should also revisit the laws that make banning sodomy unconstitutional, and contraception, and of course, same-sex marriage. So these controversies are not over and done with.

So historically, marriage, how has it evolved? Where did it start?

So marriage is even older than I am. Heh heh heh. But of course, society has a lot of interests in marriages, and one of them, not the only one, but one of them is the care of children. 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 to have formed a household and so that the child will have a mother and a father and someone will take care of the child. I mean, that's been true for the very largest part of human history. But good contraception changed that a little bit. That starts to make it possible to have sex without having children.

The trade-offs have changed.

Yeah, the trade-offs have changed, and so maybe it's okay to have sex without being married. And therefore, maybe it's okay to have sex without the intention of having children. And therefore, maybe it's okay for people of the same sex to have sex with each other, even though children don't result. And therefore, maybe marriages don't have to just be about children. So I think social norms and technology— I mean, I mentioned contraception there, but there's also in vitro fertilization. Maybe a lesbian couple can still have children. Maybe a gay male couple can still have children.

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 there's 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.

You bring up Alan Turing, you talk about him a bit in this chapter.

Okay, so Alan 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's too broad a statement, But computer science, you mentioned von Neumann and game theory, there's a sense in which you could mention Turing in computer science. During World War II, 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 a homosexual. I forget the criminal phrase. He was sentenced to be chemically castrated, and he committed suicide. So, today, Today it's legal to be homosexual in Britain and in the United States, you know, and this is sort of an ancient horror, but it's not that ancient.

Wow, so he didn't get the chemical castration.

No, no, he got it.

Oh, he got it and then—

He got it and then killed himself.

Yeah, yeah, he wasn't happy. Oh my goodness. How does this rear up in marriage and adoption?

So the question is, do we allow people of the same sex to marry each other? That was a repugnant transaction. You know, remember, I use the word repugnant not to mean that I don't like something or that you shouldn't like it, but that some people don't like it. That was a big fight. The first legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States came in the early 2000s in Massachusetts through a court decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Court. And then what happened wasn't that lots of other states fell into line. 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 Obergefell, is the name of the Supreme Court decision, eventually the Supreme Court decided that equal protection of the law, especially once many states recognized same-sex marriage and others didn't, equal protection of the law required everyone to recognize it. And that's where we are now.

This is another Nobel Prize winner, the IVF doctor. So what's the repugnant nature—

Yeah, Edward. Jonathan Edward. So he invented— he and colleagues. Nobel Prizes always are, you know, leave out colleagues. He and colleagues invented in vitro fertilization in the 1970s. And by the time he got the Nobel Prize in the late 20th century, maybe later than that, I think his Nobel Prize was just a little earlier than mine, so in the 2000s, millions of people had been born through IVF over, you know, the last 40 years. So he won a 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 fetuses and become people. And if you think that the embryo is a person— It's personhood, yeah. —then the ones that are not used are perhaps murders, especially when they're discarded. Discarded. The nature of repugnant transactions is you can be vastly celebrated, you know, the Nobel Prize is a giant week-long party in Stockholm, and at the same time have people picketing and calling you a murderer. So these are fundamental disagreements we have when we talk about repugnant transactions and morally contested markets.

But of course, IVF, some people think it's murder, but millions of people are alive because of it. They think of it as life-giving, and of course millions more, you know, it allowed them to have children. But the children, the people born of IVF, they don't think of it as murder.

How can we come 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. Yep. But in Spain, there's not an obstacle. So if you are an unmarried woman who needs to become pregnant and doesn't have another way of doing it, you could go to Spain and become pregnant. Then you come back to Germany and you're a pregnant German woman. You're undifferentiable from other pregnant German women, and you go into the healthcare system, and you have a baby, and the baby is a German citizen. So it turns out making a law that says we don't recognize IVF can stop people who can't afford to travel to Spain, but they don't stop everyone. And so maybe it's an unequal law in that respect too, right? It allows the rich to do things that we don't think should be the preserve of the rich.

Yeah, it's almost reverse-engineered eugenics 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 in the book, Moral Economics, is often you ban something and you hand it over to criminals, which is very often not a satisfactory solution. But it's also hard to ban things that are legal in some nearby jurisdiction. Hence the abortion issue. Abortion and surrogacy and IVF. Surrogacy is more complicated because you have to bring a baby home with you, but IVF, you know, you're a pregnant German woman.

Yeah, could happen on vacation. Yeah, absolutely. Perfectly legal on vacation.

You're allowed to be a single single woman, you just have to have gotten pregnant naturally. True. That's so— yeah, that's an interesting distinction.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, in Section 2 of the book, we look at protection from harm, and these ones are great and probably the ones I'm personally most interested in. So step 1 is alcohol and drugs, and you do this fun thing where you list a lot of different drugs. You say caffeine, tobacco, heroin, marijuana, marijuana, opioids, alcohol. And if you were 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. So coffee is most acceptable in my community. You know, it's a great performance-enhancing drug. We regard it as food. I don't think we 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. D'accord. 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 gonna 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 what I guess is acceptable. You know, hard drugs are definitely not acceptable in my community. But some people have troubles with them, and some of them have gotten into trouble with them sort of inadvertently. That is, for medical reasons, they've been prescribed obtained 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, drugs I just gave you, most people are going to put opioids as the worst. Yeah. And they're significantly troubling. There's been years in the last decade where we've had 100,000 people die. Overdose deaths. 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. Mm-hmm.

In your book, of 3 million people that die, from the CDC, 500,000 are cigarette-related a year. And then for alcohol, it's 175,000 a year.

I think you're right. As I recall now, what I say is, just conjecturing, maybe the tobacco deaths are less repugnant because they're not sudden.

Yeah, the suddenness is really fascinating, isn't it? Why that elevates it so much in our mind. But of course, alcohol—

Alcohol includes some sudden deaths, right? Both behind the wheel and just alcohol poisoning.

Yeah, like 60,000 people a year do die of a sudden version of alcohol death. Yeah, yeah.

So I think some of this just has to do with what you're used to. We allowed tobacco— there were small attempts around the time of Prohibition to make alcohol illegal. When I started writing the book, one of the things I thought might be true was that tobacco had never been illegal. That turns out not to be true. There have been laws against tobacco in various times and places. Oh, really? But, you know, you say, "Oh, really?" right? We're now restricting— tobacco and marijuana are sort of sort of on opposite trajectories, right? Marijuana used to be illegal, Schedule I, 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 ingest 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. Like, you walk around New York City now and people are smoking joints everywhere. No one's like making a big thing of it.

Part of it's societal, what we just have decided is in vogue and not. I mean, smoking's coming back. Yeah, tobacco. A lot of younger people are smoking again. There's vaping and things and vaping too, but even cigarettes. It's weird. I don't 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 it's suffering from the same reality that the polio vaccine did, which is like no one alive today saw someone walking with a walker at 19 years old from polio, so they're not afraid to not vaccinate their kids.

I remember seeing people walk with polio.

Sure, sure. My grandfather's throat was permanently paralyzed from polio. But young parents who are deciding whether or not to get a polio vaccine, they didn't see it, so it's out of sight, out of mind. And there's a big upswell of younger influencers are smoking in public, and I think it's because they've stopped seeing the lung cancer patients that we grew up seeing plastered everywhere as cautionary tales, and people missing their mandible from dipping. Like, those went away. It was on the downward decline, and I think they took their foot off the gas, and now it's on the incline. But let's talk about Prohibition. So what happens in 1920s and '30s?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We prohibited most sales of alcohol— not sales for religious purposes, not sales for certain kinds of for medicinal purposes. But by and large, we prohibited the sale of alcohol.

In the Volstead Act, you could brew in your home?

So there was a big upsurge in the sale of wine grapes. Synagogue membership. Membership in synagogues. Oh, wow. Oh, that's really funny. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I taught 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 Judaica, Jewish things, and they could sell kosher wine even on Sundays. Really?

They went from no business.

And you had to scribble something that was supposed to be what shul you went to, what synagogue you belong to. But you could have gone in and scribbled something. They weren't interested in your scribbles.

Wow. Kind of like the medical marijuana card.

Yeah, remember how—

Yeah, there was a great comedian that said he went to get his medical marijuana card and they said, are you having trouble sleeping 12 hours a night? Yeah, exactly. They're just handing it out. He said, yes, I can only sleep for about 8 hours.

Well, here you go. "Hey, you need this." Exactly, exactly. So that's right. But that wasn't the main way that alcohol came into the US. Some was production, there was stills. Incidentally, NASCAR, you know, the stock car racing, in their national museum, they have a still. And one of the reasons is some of the heroes of NASCAR racing were people who they were modeled on. You were coming into town from the still, and you had to be able to outrace the police.

And particularly, you wanted a plain-looking car that was super modified to be really fast, so you wouldn't draw attention. To be really fast and have a lot of power.

A lot of product in the back, you know?

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 gonna have trouble when it starts generating folk heroes. You know, when the people who violate it are Robin Hood, not Al Capone. Now, there were also Al Capones.

And the Kennedys 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— You could legally buy whiskey, Seagrams, in Canada, and then illegally bring it into the United States. There's a big border, there's a big Atlantic seaboard. I think the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago was gangs fighting over importation, not just production. How is all the Canadian liquor gonna 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 it illegal in Germany if people can come to the United States, it was hard to stop drinking alcohol if it could be legally sold in Canada.

Yeah, it's funny, we've only had success in the war on drugs one time really, and that was during the Quaalude epidemic of the '70s and '80s, because it turned out there was only a single chemical factory in Switzerland that was capable of producing this. So if they could shut that one down, they could succeed, and they did succeed. But that's about the only victory. When they've tried to do meth, 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 it should be decriminalized. I thought it should be taxed and regulated and get rid of the black 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 got to 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 selling it. People shooting in the stairwells of these nice brownstones. It's 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. By the millions.

But we're not making drug policy work. 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 upped the— Or overdoses, right, absolutely.

And having people with Narcan 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 if incarceration is gonna continue to be part of the solution, it seems to me we have a responsibility to make treatment part of incarceration.

Yeah, and really quick, talk about the paradox between contracting a killer and selling drugs. Right, 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 hired killers.

It's not even in the FBI crime statistics.

And they carry a virtually similar penalty.

That's right. In both cases, if we catch you selling narcotics or killing for hire, 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 there are hardly any hitmen. Any hitmen. So, the way I thought about that in the book is the following. Supposing at the end of our chat, I say to you, "You know, you're a guy from Los Angeles. You probably know where I can buy heroin on my way home." Well, you'd be really surprised. Probably most of your podcasts don't end with that kind of request for information. Yeah. And you'd think, "Whoa, you know, this guy, Al, is crazy." That's really too bad. Or confident. Yeah, yeah. That's really too bad. You know, he seemed so coherent when we were talking to him, but he must be crazy. Just be getting senile, and that would sort of be the end of it. Maybe you decide not to publish the podcast because you wouldn't want to have guys like me on your show. But supposing I said to you, you know, I'm an academic, and every time I write a paper, there are referees.

You know, the joke in academia is referee number 2, 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 a hitman. What do you say? Well, probably you don't know where I could hire a hitman, 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, exactly. "Here's someone who wants to murder." Yeah, yeah, yeah. "You know, we should call the police." And if you called the police, first of all, if you'd called the police when I said, "Where can I buy heroin?" They'd say to you, "So you met a professor who asked you where he could buy heroin, and you're calling the police? You know, we're very busy. There's lots of real crime in Los Angeles." "Leave us alone." But if you called them and said, "I talked to this professor from the Bay Area, and he wants to hire a hitman to kill someone in Los Angeles," they'd say, "Is it too late?

Call him back and tell him, you know, before he gets on the plane, he should come to this bar in Burbank, ask for Joe, and Joe will take care of him." And Joe would take care of me. A lot of the convictions for attempted hiring of killers is when the person doing the hiring talks to an undercover police officer. Police. There are so many drug deals, it doesn't make sense to try to preempt them one by one. But there are 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 plain clothes to talk to me and have me explain who I wanted murdered and then arrest me.

What fresh perspective do we need to apply to this drug?

First of all, I think we're doing great on hitmen. We should keep it up.

Ah, yeah, yeah. Well done.

We have this really tough law against commercial killing, and it seems to be largely working. Most murders, people are killed by people who love them or who they know or who live in their neighborhood, and commercial killing is very little. Let's keep it that way. So I like the laws that say, "If we catch you, we throw you 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 experiment of decriminalizing. 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 turns out to be expensive. So we let people buy and sell on the street, and we didn't do anything to help them, or didn't do very much to help them kick the habit.

Yeah, we kept citing these different experiments that were run in Portugal and Spain, but we just applied one side of it, which is none of the resources, none of the help.

We're just like, like, "Okay, let's decriminalize." Well, I think in Portugal they're also having recognition that they weren't giving enough help and they were getting open-air markets and things like that. And that's a real cost, right? Cities have to be good to live in. I mean, most of us live in cities.

Yeah, and you're evaluating their rights against mine. Absolutely.

So you don't want to find hypodermic needles in the school playground.

No, no, no one wants to live in that city or play on that playground. Right.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare. There.

So what kind of experiments do you think need to be 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 an eye that you stay Now, that's pretty controversial because a place like that would need some police protection. Not everyone who comes is a nice person. Whereas the police think, you know, "Do you want us to protect these guys? Our job is to arrest them." Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'd have to think hard about how to organize the laws and the rules and what would happen. Again, what you'd really like is treatment, so we need to understand more about how to treat addiction. There have been some technological progress in that, you know, things like methadone.

Well, GLP-1s 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 they'd be available to you. 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 criminology and housing for the homeless. You know, a lot of addiction is to painkillers, and people who are homeless are, in a certain sense, in a lot of pain. Some of that process, if we made it easier to get decent housing— These things all probably touch each other in various ways that I don't claim to understand. 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's an issue. No one disagrees with that. We tried through Prohibition, and it only decreased alcohol consumption for the first 3 years, and then it rebounded beautifully. We're weirdly in a phase right now 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 I haven't done 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 Haidt 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 for alcoholics. Well, for alcoholics, but I mean, general. 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. Yeah. So I think he would say, yeah, that looks good, but actually it's not good because everyone's so isolated. And I think there's something to that potentially.

It's probably dynamic and multifaceted. Yeah. But, um, everything is. Yeah, I was pointing out to him, because his worldview is everything about the internet and social media is bad, and I said, 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 9%. But yes, that's his explanation. But regardless, I think we need to know what the explanation is, right?

There might be multiple explanations, but there's no question that, that a lot of things are affected by social norms. But social 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 you. Yeah.

Good for your heart. I'm still sticking with that a little.

Those were the days. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I miss those days.

Doing my heart a favor with this glass of wine today. Yeah, exactly.

So that cuts it down a little.

Yeah, there's probably different causality within each socioeconomic 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 it's terrible for you, right? But that's not why an 18-year-old— their longevity is not at the forefront. That's not why they're doing it.

But I think there are these cycles that are generational too. In other words, if 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 reason injection. 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 it up a minute ago.

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, garden, then your kid is gonna bring measles home, especially if your kid isn't vaccinated. So it's a dangerous disease. So we just went through COVID where miraculously, technologically, vaccines were developed with uncanny speed. I remember the long trek to polio when I was a small child and eventually getting first Salk and then Sabin in elementary school. They lined us up and walked us through the gym and we all took a sugar cube with a purple liquid in it. It was oral. Salk was a shot and Sabin was oral. Oh, okay. That was a big deal because I had contemporaries who were in leg braces, and parents wouldn't let you go to 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 hotspots because testing them in a place that COVID has already swept through isn't a good way to test them. So the way you test vaccines is you have to predict it a little bit. You find a hotspot, you enroll 40,000 people in your trial, 20,000 of them you give the vaccine to and 20,000 you don't. You have to wait a couple of months because even in a hotspot, people can go through their daily life without getting exposed. So you have to wait till enough people have gotten exposed in the two groups so that you can see the big difference, hopefully, between the vaccinated group and the unvaccinated group, and that tells you that the vaccine is working.

What are 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 getting the vaccine. Okay, okay. 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 sort 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 gonna 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 and 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 to do so.

Even if they're signing up. And thousands of people signed up because we were all locked down. People signed up and they were passionate about it. They'd say, "You know, this gives me a chance to make a difference instead of just passively hiding in my house from this dread disease." But we didn't do it. And there was a lot of discussion, I got involved in some of it, about maybe we should. I mean, we 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. 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. —to 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 government officials who are against measles vaccines. We already know that measles vaccines work.

Here's where I think the moral conundrum comes with vaccines. So I'm a very outspoken vaccine advocate. Get. There are people that protest my wife and I when we 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 to put anything in your body you don't want to. So I'm fine with that. And if you contract measles, that's on you.

Should I be able to send my child to a public kindergarten?

Where I'm going to go— where the moral conundrum for me lies is the children of someone making that decision. They're minors. Should they have to inherit your decision on it? And are you putting a minor at risk? That's where it's most juicy in a moral debate. So how do you feel about that zone?

I think it depends on what the morality argument is. What comes to mind is there are small groups of Christian believers who don't like blood transfusions. Jehovah's Witnesses are among among them, and they don't like blood transfusions because their 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-grooved pathway where the parents say, "No transfusions, we're 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. Yeah.

And God wanted him to live. God did this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, God could have stopped the injunction, so we're good. Right.

There's some workarounds. Yeah.

It's like the Amish can be driven to the hospital in a 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 refused a blood transfusion.

As you say, an adult 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. Yeah. You send your kid to this hospital because because they have a good record of treating the children of Witnesses, and God works in mysterious ways. I think that we have more difficulty seeing the merits of opposing views when we're talking about something that we think is a matter of morality than when we're talking about other things. Yeah.

Can economics help us through that?

Well, there are ways of arguing that might help us. In other words, there aren't enough kidneys for transplant, but we were able to get kidney exchange going even though there are people who are pretty opposed to most ways of increasing the number of transplants. But that was a way of increasing the transplants that didn't arouse so much opposition. That's not true everywhere. Kidney exchange still isn't legal in Brazil and in Germany. Even if you're a donor?

Yeah.

The rule in both places is you couldn't give me a kidney. My brother could give me a kidney, but you can't. It has to be a first-order member of the family. Okay. And the German prosecutors have no sense of humor about this. So if my brother wants to give me a kidney and you want to give a kidney to your brother, but we're incompatible, the fact that everything has been satisfied except the medical compatibility issue, they wouldn't allow you to give me a kidney and my brother to give your brother a kidney. But those laws are subject to change. The German Health Ministry has a draft that they're trying to put through the Bundestag.

And they'll have us as an example. 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, a small number of kidney exchanges going on in Brazil as a clinical trial to see if it works in Brazil. 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, we 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 controversies?

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 almost We always pretty much bet on horse racing in the United States, 'cause after all, how can you not bet on horse racing?

Don't eat 'em. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's part of the fun. That's why you don't eat them.

They're for betting, not for eating.

Exactly, 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. Yeah, not potentially. You know, you could bet throughout the game on specific things. Will the next free throw go in? So it's addictive. Another thing is you can try to influence the athletes Bets will come in more.

Those are coming out more and more and more. Yeah. Almost daily we get another scandal.

And it used to be that there was always this crime associated with gambling in sports about influencing the game. And it used to be that the prototypical kind of involvement of criminals in sports was in point shaving. So you're a basketball player, and I'm asking you to not win by so much. Cover the spread. Your team will still win. Could even be losing.

As long as you lose by 6, or else— I'll still win.

So there were some famous scandals of that sort in the 1950s. One of them that I get to follow occasionally on the internet because one of the protagonists was named Alvin Roth. Oh, wow. So in the book, I had to 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, "Fats," end quote, Roth, which is how he's talked about in Wikipedia. But he was banned for life from the NBA and would have gone to jail, but was allowed to join the Army instead.

Yes. And this is where we get back into paternalism a little bit, because we had, of course, Michael Lewis on, and he had a great 10-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 skyrocketing.

No, it's a real addiction. Not everyone is subject to it, of course.

But it's significant. And again, we have this little bit of a crossroads, which is like, you should be allowed to destroy your life in some sense. You know, we believe that in this country. You should be allowed to do that. You're 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 shouldn't 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 it a little bit. Bartenders have a certain responsibility. They can cut you off and 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, maybe it'll benefit from being re-regulated that way. It's a pretty recent thing that we've allowed this sports betting. Court decision again. So there's two things we've talked about. One is the addictive feature of betting on the game. The other is the effect on sports. If you're asking athletes, if you're pressuring athletes not to make the last free throw because you've got a bet. And of course, we're seeing this now with prediction markets. If you know someone who knows that the president of Venezuela is about to be abducted, you could make a lot of money on a prediction market by betting on that. You know, that's a little worrisome if you worry about corruption in high office. 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 incentivizes people for businesses to go bankrupt and heavily incentivize them to start rumors. Like Bear Stearns 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.

Unless you're in Congress, but yes.

Unless you're in Congress. Yeah, yeah. What can you do? Yeah, yeah, what can you do? 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. Yeah, yes. We should be thinking about managing them, especially when they're things that we can't ban, even if we would like to, like alcohol. So decriminalizing drugs, we probably need to treat addicts more like patients than like criminals compared to what we're doing now, but maybe not completely not like criminals because it's very compelling to be addicted to something. You know, I think there's a 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." [LAUGHTER] 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 and think about how to regulate vaping, which might have something to be said for it if you're a two-pack-a-day cigarette smoker.

Maybe switching to non-combustible is good for you. But if you're a middle schooler 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 bring some from Nevada, right? I'm like smuggling it in. Every time someone would come to visit, they'd have to bring me a sleeve. And then I finally quit like 2 years ago on New Year's. 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 worked, because the aging libertarian in me was like, I hate that it helps and it's true. No, that's right.

So the morally contested markets, behavioral problems with things like addiction are not going to be zero-one solutions. It's not that you pass a law, now we're done, we passed the law, everything's good.

We're going 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 tradeoffs and do experiments and learn what works. And that's really what I'm concluding in this book.

Yes. Well, Alvin 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 meet you. Thank you so much.

Nice to meet you. You guys too. Hi there, this is Hermium.

Hermium, if you like that, you're going to love the fact check. Miss Monica, I have my glasses on not to cover up my sty. Oh, my journal entry this morning started as such: my sty's the captain now.

Thank you.

Okay, so I just want to read you— I got a couple screen grabs I want to share with you.

Wait, we're not done talking about your stye. Well, that was good.

I just hate it. I wanted to say I have my glasses on to read this, not to cover my stye. Okay, go ahead and ask me about my stuff.

Um, how does it feel? The same. I've been hot on antibiotics, right? Drops. Drops. Not oral. Not oral.

And I've been hot compressing like a very good boy. I know, but I've been hot compressing. Okay, but what I'm gonna read is in reference to our foot fetish debate. Oh, okay. Or us trying to figure it out. Okay, so this was interesting. This is from, um, Miss Missa 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. Interesting. That's pretty fascinating. Yeah, I have no way to fact-check that. I'm not going to consult a neurologist. I thought I screen grabbed another one. Another one was just really walking us through why she loves feet. Her thing thing is like bare feet represent— it was a woman. It 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 as this like intimacy kind of, uh, offering of vulnerability. I could definitely see that.

It's like my sick thing.

Ding ding ding, I took the Dremel to my toenail last night. I didn't even— I wouldn't even know I was going to talk about so much. Nah, but mostly because I'm wearing lace-up shoes today and 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 said you even put your shoes on the bed.

Don't say that. I've seen it, I've seen it.

Those, because like, probably you just don't feel like taking your shoes off.

Yeah, I would kick off normal shoes, but if I gotta bend over and—

but you don't wear enough loafers for someone who likes to slip on.

Well, but I have slip-on Vans and I have my low-top Converse loose enough that I can slide in and out.

But you've never tried out a loafer?

I hate loafers. I've tried many times. They look great on you, and everyone should wear loafers. They great on everyone. On me, they look preposterous. If anything is like outside of my vibe, I really think a loafer is 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, no, you, you wear sweaters. I've got you multiple sweaters. That's true. I've got you sweaters. You wear them all the time. That's true.

You have a, you have a, a knack for choosing sweaters. I, I love— and you wear cardigans My gray Burberry one that's in massive rotation.

Yeah, that's a great one.

Just wore the green Row one recently.

Great one. You could wear— definitely wear that with a loaf.

Monica, I know you're picturing it seems organic, but I promise if you saw me in a loafer, you'd be like, hold on, what's going on? Because then I got to wear a dress pant. No, loafers and jeans is a very specific dude, and I'm not that dude. That's a Connecticut, went to Harvard.

No, you have— see, you you have an old school— like, you have an old school mentality, old school flair. 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.

You're not— blue-collar tradesmen aren't wearing Burberry sweaters either. Oh, that would have been a good counter.

You're just not him anymore.

Yeah, I But I, I, I, I intend to stay that way. Yeah.

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 a lot of systems, on our system, it just shows the last 3 digits of the credit card. Mm-hmm. And him and I have the exact same last 3 digits of our credit card. Serendipity. Isn't that crazy?

Kismet.

Which is like, I was like, oh my God. Like, I thought that was so cool. Yeah. And then it immediately scared Jess. Oh. Which the reason the guy was flagging it it is like, so when you guys like, if you split, there's a chance that it's gonna go to the wrong card. It's gonna be like attributed to the wrong card.

Why do either of you have credit cards on file at restaurants?

We don't. You say why don't we?

Well, how are they gonna, how are they gonna 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.

No, it's not that. And what is it? I don't know, but Jess of course went back there. He wanted to see on the computer, and he did. He said, yeah, it is like the last 3.

Yeah, I still don't understand what the issue is because you're gonna 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 swipe on 682.

That would be a problem. Okay, maybe they swipe type it and type in the amount? Because with tip, it's like, with tip and stuff, like if I'm tipping $50, maybe they type that in back of the credit, or like they're like, oh, this is the credit card that gets $50 tip, this credit card gets $100. It was obviously enough of a thing in their system for him to have brought it up.

Yeah, I just wish I understood how it could go.

He says it shows starts up F and then the last 3 digits, and ours are the same. Isn't that crazy? Of all the numbers in the world.

Yes, that part's very exciting that you guys have the last 3 numbers. And isn't it the last 4 everywhere my credit card is?

That's why the last 4 is not— they don't match.

Yeah, but that's where it breaks down. Do you want to tell us what they are to help people, um, hack your credit card and his?

Mine is too. No, it's not. Yeah, it is. So are all— mine is. No. Okay, hold on. No, American Express cards do not all end in— well, I know that. Well, I just—

because I've had different cards. I have multiple MX cards and only one of them ends in— we're not going to say the number, but the same now as it turns out as you and Jess. That's nuts.

But maybe like, maybe there's only a few endings. Okay, while Amex cards often end in similar digits like 100x or 200x due to how they are issued and replaced. Right. It says many users report last 4 digits ending in 1001, 1003, 1007, 1008, 1013, et cetera. Well, don't say et cetera. Huh. Anyway. Wow. Yeah. So if the 3 of us split at this restaurant, restaurant. Anyway, that was just very Sam. 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 sty. Yep. Um, we've got a pig sty. It's a, it's a pig sty. Uh, the toenail, just ground it. Gross. So, cuz why?

It was getting fluffy on top.

You know, it won't grow out at all, which is only go up. I don't want to talk about it.

So, well, you brought it up.

I know, but not in detail. I don't need you to be able to like picture exactly what's going on.

You love talking about gross stuff.

Well, I'm already hitting you with a third thing. So I have the stye, I have the toenail. So I'm trying to just limit those two things. Okay. So I can tell you that your stye is making me— I love a certain t-shirt, you know. I wear the same brand t-shirt mostly all the time. Velvet. Uh-huh.

Velvet by Graham and something.

Graham and Crackers. Yep. I've been noticing lately that there's a lot of, um, right out of the wash, directly from the washer and dryer, there's antiperspirant buildup in the armpit, in the fabric. Really? Yes, because I'm caking on my antiperspirant and 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 armpit. It makes the armpits of the shirt not fully clean and weird. Exciting. It's like got a film of antiperspirant over it post-wash. Okay. And so my response to that is like to order more shirts. Okay. Because it can't have this like gooey cakey armpit.

Okay.

And so I guess 2 weeks ago, week and a half ago, I'm like, stop wearing deodorant. Stop wearing antiperspirant. Okay. Stop wearing deodorant. Uh-huh. My expectation was like That's not going to be a thing.

I might have more sweat, but you're not going to smell. I don't smell. Uh-huh.

Oh no, Monica, I'm hoping this is a detox period where it's like my body's still expelling all of this. Clearly I'm putting a lot on because it's like ruining my shirts, right? But I'm, I'm like, okay, it's just got to get all out. It's probably— it's, it's trying to find homeostasis. It's—

I've been caking that up there for a decade, however long.

I I have been pretty regularly been like, oh my God, my armpits smell.

You smell it?

Oh, within a day. And I'm like, what is going on? I don't smell. I'm having a real crisis of conscience.

I understand. That would really stress me out.

Identity crisis.

But you said one time you smelled. One time.

No, every day. No, sorry.

I'm talking about years ago. You said you're like, he's like, my armpits smell weird today.

Do you have a memory of this? Yeah.

Oh, um, and you said it smelled like bacon.

Oh, I wish it smelled like bacon currently.

Is it classic BO? Classic BO.

Classic. And I'm like, no, I don't have—

I don't smell like that. I've never smelled BO.

My breath doesn't smell. I got this whole story about myself. My breath doesn't smell. So what I'm having to do— thank you. And then you would agree I don't smell.

I have never smelt you smelling bad.

Well, guess 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. Oh, I'm constantly, like, washing with a bar of soap in a sink. Using soap? Well, what else can you use to get rid of the water? I don't know 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'm not, I've not liked this at all.

I'm like, what's going on? Okay, well, I haven't smelt it.

I have another theory though. Okay. Because there have been periods where I didn't and I don't remember smelling. I didn't wear it in a purse or deodorant and it would be fine. For days. And my one fear is that I take this creatine, okay? It's a powder in a 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 said out loud, because Kristen takes it too, I go, hey, do you think the creatine— I didn't even get the full sentence out. She said, 'BO.' Oh no. And I'm like, 'Yes!' So I use this powder that has a light smell of BO in it, and then her father—

smells like it even when you open it.

We'll go inside after this and I'll let you huff it.

Okay.

Um, we haven't huffed it yet. You don't need to get rid of it.

I'm nervous I won't be able to smell. Maybe, maybe that's why I haven't smelled you, because my nose is all clogged.

That could be it. So, okay, Kristen'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 his profession. But like, if this guy's gonna buy a TV set, he's gonna read about every single TV set. Yes. And every review.

Andy likes to do this too. Andy Rosen.

Okay. Yeah, it's a personality. It is. So her father's been getting into weight training, which I love. It is adorable. We have more stuff to talk talk about. Yeah. And, um, so he wanted to start using creatine. He found out that 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? And we're like, we use this brand. And then like a couple days later he said, I'm thinking about buying your brand. Like, he hasn't pulled the trigger on it. He's like, but I'm reading a lot that it smells like B.O. Stop. I'm like, oh, it's definitely— how did you— how You, you didn't research this thing that far that you went on a message board where people were starting to talk about that it smells like B.O.? So he already knew. Oh, 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. I got to be on it. Yeah. And see if that's it. Okay. Because maybe that's what's going on, is I'm taking this thing that already smells like B.O.

when I take I can't believe— oh, that's how much I want premium health. No, you can take another brand. I think it's this thing.

It's— I know. Well, it's not just pure creatine. It's this other thing I need. MBM. It's got some acronym. Okay. And I think maybe that's the culprit because I've had a lot of different creatines and none of them ever smelled like anything. Exactly.

Literally. And it tastes like nothing too.

It's not even a thing.

I don't think it's placebo, but it works. Yeah. I'm on it and I They don't smell like deo. And I don't use deodorant. You do not? I have not used deodorant in like 10 years or like 15, maybe 12.

Now I know a lot of people quit antiperspirant out of the fear of the aluminum, which I do think was just recently debunked. Doesn't matter. But you're not even deodorant free?

I don't use anything.

You don't put anything in there? No perfume, eau de toilette? Nope. Oh wow. And I don't—

I do not. I've never smelled.

I don't smell. No, no, never smelled you either. Yeah. And Rob doesn't smell. We all got lucky.

But Rob, do you use deodorant? I do.

Yeah. I think you put 3 coworkers together in a small room, we've hit the lottery. Oh yeah, there's no one I smell.

For sure, for sure. I agree. Um, no one smells here.

We're so lucky, cuz it's impossible to address. We've gone over this. I know. Thank Hey Rob, I gotta talk to you. Um, you gotta, you gotta wash your armpits better or something. I like— how do you bring it up?

We had, we had a nanny. She— it was perfume though, was too strong.

That's easier. Yeah, Natalie talked to her. Oh great, Natalie's tough, right? Does she handle all that stuff for you, Rob? All the confrontation? Yeah, yeah, she likes it. I'm surprised I've never had to negotiate with, with Natalie for your wage. Oh, you're right. You're, you're, you're, you're dropping, you're dropping out. How was your event last night?

It was good. I was invited to an event, 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 one it is. I don't want to know. I know you're not gonna say it, but you signed NDA. I can't talk about it.

How was the event?

What was the thing? It was a fashion-y show. It was a winter preview.

Well, it wasn't a fashion— it was just like— Fall preview. I was— from winter. I was invited to see a winter preview. She just started out, we're just leaving winter. This is what I know. This is how fashion works. I was invited to see a winter preview of clothing that is not available yet, obviously, off the run one way, if you will. And it was, it was very exciting to get eyes and get to decide if I wanted any of the items.

Ah, did anything tickle your fancy?

Yeah, of course, of course, of course. There were some items that tickled. 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.

I thought that's like, so I, I can say like, I want that.

Okay, you're flagging it.

I want that. So like, put one, you know, they're gonna like put one aside, make sure they have my size, you know, make me one.

Um, it's a pre-order, kind of, kind of.

Yes, yes. Uh, but, uh, were there any celebrities there? No, not while I was there. Oh, not while I was there. It's like, you know, it makes me think there were different slots. No, they're not slots. There's— it was 2 days, yesterday and today, and it's a chunk of time.

Are you going back today?

No, I already saw what I already saw. I already did it. And then I did make a purchase purchase of just the clothes that are available while I was there. Okay, yeah, they're gonna get you on the front end or the back end to walk out with. Yeah, they got me. I almost bought something for way too much money. Teeny tiny clutch, clutch purse. It was teeny. It holds like— it's like a card case basically for one credit card. Yeah, gold, had diamonds on it. It was vintage. It was— and it was engraved, like, from way back when.

Meredith was the name.

Someone wore it, you know, on, on the runway. They wore it with their— with this dress. He pointed out the dress, and they wore it, and I was like, fuck, I want— I wanted it. What was the price tag on there? I didn't get it. Okay, how much do you think?

Golds and diamonds?

Yeah, and a one ruby. $13,000.

More. Uh, yo, I didn't get it.

I know, congratulations. I'm doing so good not getting it. 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 satiate. I know you're right. Not.

I know, you're right.

So in fact, if anything, you should just buy even cheaper stuff and more often and just—

yeah, cheaper in big quantities—

and just, um, fill yourself with items in your house until you're like the kid in the Shel Silverstein poem, the Garbage Man.

So far my house is like—

it's, it's still clean. Yeah. And clutter-free.

It's clutter-free.

But you're going to do your best to change that. I'm not. You're going to have 7 or 9 armoires 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 armoire is in— it doesn't hold clothes anymore. Okay.

Weed. Weed.

Yeah, sorry. You keep all your edibles and your vapes? No, it's in my—

it's in my water closet, actually.

Oh, your toilet?

Yeah. So I keep towels in there, I keep, um, toilet paper in there.

Feminine products? Your Spanxies, are they folded up?

No, they're in my closet. Okay. And they're not Spanxies. You're trying to say Nixies. You forgot it was Nixies. Oh, Nixies. But mine are, um, mine are— Good eye. Nixies.

Thinx. Thinx? Yeah, for the thinking lady.

They— yeah, but it's with an X, you know.

Oh, um, you got to have an X in women's underwear.

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. Oh, great.

Well, let's get it. You know, I always like to get it cold in here. Yeah.

I had a West Side day. I went to Venice. Okay. Ooh. I know. Yeah. Very far away from where we live. Yeah, I don't know. So it was like a real adventure I decided to do. Mm-hmm. And, you know, I went to Abbacchini, very famous popular street in Venice where there's a lot of of stores. Yeah. And foodies and things like that. And I did not enjoy myself.

What a punchline. In what way? I— Like, what am I doing out here?

The West Side is not for me is really just like what I took from it. I felt grateful that I lived on the East Side of Los Angeles. Mm-hmm.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

What things were irking you or not to your liking?

So many people walking, but I like that. 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 also so many people walking with their dogs. Dogs. Nobody having any, like, awareness of other people. The dog thing? No. Well, it was part of it. I saw a dog eat somebody's pizza.

Okay, well, out of their hand, or they had discarded it on the ground?

No, like, they were sitting outside eating their pizza at a 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 that— you're not eating the rest of the pizza. The guy, the dog owner, has to go get you a new piece. Exactly. That wasn't offered? If you stick around long enough.

No, I walked away. But I— yeah, but he was walking away like he was like, oh, sorry.

Oh, he was just 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, eats somebody's pizza, and he's just 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 is that, and I somehow saw that all the time. Like, I would never see a dog leap up and eat a piece of pizza. Oh, but you're gonna— of course, of course you saw that, is my point.

Manifested. It just—

but it can confirm 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. I'm having an issue.

You. What's your issue?

I don't know. I'm like so— I'm like all of a sudden sweating. Let's turn the air up. Let's make it colder here. But I don't know if it's internal. Set to so hot. Okay. Oh my God, are we catching my first hot flash?

No, it's hot in here. Okay, I'm wearing a sweater, man. I'm sick. You want to give it yourself a second to— let's let it cool down for a second.

Remember when you were addicted to Halls? Yeah, you didn't know me then. I know, but you just talk about it. Yeah. Um, I'm currently addicted addicted to Halls. They're addictive. I had 4 while we were sitting.

I want one now that you say. You know, at my height, I was getting the family pack every day. I know, every day, like going to get a pack of cigarettes.

I know, I'm eating too many Halls. I want one now.

I wonder if I have any in your satchel. I have one 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 agents. Menthol, don't they? Well, the menthol is the thing I'm addicted to. I know. But to keep all the ingredients together, they need a binding agent.

Is menthol bad for you? No. Okay, great.

No. Yeah. Okay. Smoking menthol cigarettes is bad for you.

That's the cigarette that's bad though, right? That's right. Yeah. Okay.

And inhaling menthol on fire is probably not great. But no, menthol is great for you. Okay. Yeah. Hall's Mentholiptus. Vicks VapoRub. Baby rub.

Okay. Well, I love them.

I got to recommend a show, and I know you're not going to try it because it's a reality TV show, but we like it so much.

I'm so sorry. I'm not done talking about the best side.

Okay, great.

I'm so sorry.

You took a long break and I thought you were going to talk.

I know, because something's going on with my body. It's like I feel really strange. Are you, um, maybe a fever is breaking or something. Maybe, maybe I've had a fever and it's breaking. Let's hope that's what it is.

Come on. Yeah, you're sweating. Yeah, I'm sweating.

Okay, I feel really weird now. I'm worried I smell.

I might have given it to you. Oh my God, just by power of, uh, suggestion.

I mean, I do feel like I kind of smell all of a sudden, but I think it's the sweat mixing with this cashmere.

Okay, so you think the cashmere smells, not you?

Sometimes Sometimes certain sweaters, if there's sweat on them— It activates something in the wool. It does. It does.

It wakes up some dormant thing in the sheep wool.

I know. I hate it. I hate it. Yeah. Okay. So I'm in Venice. Yeah. A dog ate someone's pizza and I'm like, "Ew, this place is wild." You know? Yeah. And then I go into the store. I won't say what it is 'cause I'm gonna be nice. Okay. I went in. I guess they're known for having like vintage Levis. 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— like, for a second I'm like kind of looking at the jeans, but then I meandered. 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 addressing these other people. Great. I'm still looking around. One lady goes up to her and is like, do you have like dark— a darker wash than the one she's wearing? So they go over to the vintage jeans, they're looking.

I then go over to the vintage jeans and I'm looking. And she goes, honey, if you— if you want to look at these, I'm gonna need to help you.

That's the worker there. Uh-huh. Okay. And I was like, that's crazy.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, you're not allowed to look at the jeans without supervision.

Exactly.

That would have been my exact sentence. I know. Hold on, you can't look at the jeans without supervision? Is the policy here— I know, that would have been great to start with a question.

Questions are the— meet a question with the question.

Yeah, they're, 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 like sizes. Oh, okay. Or something. When really she just didn't want me messing with the jeans when she was over there. It was this tight. So she was over there.

Maybe she was afraid you were gonna get 'em outta order. Maybe. Yeah.

Yeah. But like, sorry bitch, do you want your clothes? I don't mean to, I just didn't mean to say that. Okay.

You're gonna take that back.

Let's rewind it. Sorry. Sorry, lady. Like, you know, it was just Pretty Woman. It was like big mistake, huge. Like, I would have bought— don't mistake me for someone who's not gonna buy these items. But okay, here's where I go. Now you want to push back because you think— what am I 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. I do think you have that story. Like, I do think you're on 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 in darker, before anyone got in there, I don't think in any world she wouldn't have taken you over there and helped you. Oh yeah. The one woman said, I'd like to see this in darker. So you didn't initiate that, the other one did. And then I do think it's quite possible that if she was helping you and the other woman came up and started rifling through, that she might have said, honey, hey, you got to be with me. I think all that's quite 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 push back on.

I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that, but I am saying she missed out on a sale.

Great, but you also didn't initiate the jeans thing with her.

It doesn't matter. She didn't— when I was over there alone, yeah, she didn't say, hey, if you're gonna I don't look at the vintage jeans. I got to come help.

Great. And I understand that point of view. But what's really funny is what keeps me from shopping. I told you I had to kill an hour and a half at the Americana while my phone was being fixed. And what I fucking hate is I want to be able to walk around the store and not talk to someone every 30 seconds. So it's like I was wanting to cruise from the button-ups to the sweaters, but every 5 feet, excuse me, sir, can I help you find something. Oh no, I'm just browsing. And then you're like, well, why are you in here? You're not shopping. So I have the opposite thing as you. And that woman that works there has got to try to assess, are you the me type or Monica type? Because you want them to come over and go, how can I help you?

No, I think you're misunderstanding. Okay. I did not want her help. Okay. I did not think I needed her help. Mm-hmm. So for her to say, if you're going to look at this, I have to help you.

I was like, that's kind of a very bizarre policy of the store or her own personal laziness about having to restock or reorganize.

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—

because I don't think the Pretty Woman thing's ever going to happen to you. You are very you're very well put together and you have expensive clothes on all the time. You wear jewelry. So that part, I don't think that happens.

I don't know. But I left. Okay, sure. I just said, oh, okay. And then I left. Because also I'm like, well, how are you going to know?

Sunglasses in a disguise because you're like, fuck, I do need those pants. I know. I wanted to make a point. I wanted to punish her. But now I do need to get those pants. I know. And you came back in sunglasses and a scarf and you're like, pardon me, how do you say pantalones azules? Oh yeah, I could have done that.

Also though, I was like, wait a minute, if this is the system where if you have to like get help for the jeans, you want me to just stand here and wait until you're done doing this whole thing with this other lady?

Yeah, that's the problem with these boutique. That's why you got to go into Target. They got a dial. No.

No real good store is doing this. This is not normal. But mainly I was very— and I didn't expect this from myself. I did not like being called honey.

Okay. You're from the South. I mean, that's pretty standard. Maybe that's why.

Yeah. Because it often is very condescending. Condescending thing to say to someone. Yeah, in the South, a little bit. It could go either way. Obviously it can be used in a sweet way. Yeah, but it is often used in a condescending way.

Well, especially 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 hope this doesn't offend Indians— oh boy— or Moroccans. What? But I think if you were speaking French, you could really pass for Moroccan. Oh, all right. Yeah, or Algerian. French Algiers. Yeah, yeah. Just think about playing one in a movie.

Hire me, I guess. No, no, I don't do accents, so no.

What if they're French?

I can't do a French accent.

You could with some work. No, that would stress me out. You're incapable of learning French accent. Okay.

I'm very bad at accents. Okay.

Um, so don't— I'm good at them, but I can't do most of them.

You can do French. I know, but that's— you're not interested.

Maybe I will. Okay, nice.

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. Okay. Or my partner or something, or Welcome, honey.

I hear it all the time now when I'm in Tennessee, and often it's so sweet. I love it. You can tell when it's sweet.

Yeah.

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. Yeah.

That's not what it was. Yeah. And then I remember there's a Taylor Swift song called Honey on the new album, so I listened into it after.

Oh, I felt seen. Okay, great. She doesn't like it either? Uh-huh.

Okay, well, she says, uh, like, he can—

Travis, okay, let's call it what it is—

can call her honey and that's it. Well, like, normally honey in the song— like, she's saying this, what I'm saying, but hers is translating better. 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 Kristen. We use hun, honey. I think it's a nice pet name. Okay.

I would like to be called that. Okay, but be careful.

Oh yeah, not if you're trying to condescend me.

Yeah, just be Careful, it's a triggering word for you, so we got to make sure.

Well, if you love me, you can do it.

Yeah. What? Tell me. Nothing. I just think we all have these things that 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 affected by it. It's just like you validate this person by caring what they called you, and you give away a 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 in you. And I can just think like, Monica, how could you care if this person called you anything? You're you're so above that kind of insult.

Yeah, but like, this is like—

you're bigger than that.

Me and you argue about this a lot. Mm-hmm.

Making you feel a certain way versus I feel a certain way.

No, that's not what I was gonna say.

Oh, I thought that was gonna be the one.

Um, no, like, I feel very— I'm like, we do not live in— on islands. People affect one another, and I am not like trying to deny that reality. And you, and yes, you can be self-actualized. You can, you can understand.

Well, you, you have agency, so you can be affected if you allow yourself to be affected. That's what I'm saying.

I know, but I disagree. I, I, I think we live in a—

for you, it feels impossible currently.

Well, no, and not just for me. Well, 'cause you're saying it can't be done for everyone in life. Humans, mm-hmm. Humans affect other humans. Like, I don't think you can, I not, by the way, I don't think you you should walk through life without feeling things from other people, good and bad.

I, I do, because again, let's, let's assume the worst about this person. Let's go all the way with this. But let's just do it. Let's say that she is racist and she notices you have money and she's jealous and she thinks you're a piece of shit that's inferior because you're brown. Okay, she's a terrible person.

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 going to now try to infect you with, right? And you're going to let them? That's my pride. Like, you're going to let that person with their insecurities change your day? You're going to, you're going to get infected by it and let it be contagious? I think a strong actualized internalize version of you is like, what that gal's experiences that's making her behave that way has nothing to do with me. Her opinion of me means nothing, and it has no effect on me. Someone else can behave like a knucklehead, but you can't internalize those feelings of I'm less than 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's shit, it doesn't mean it doesn't have to have an impact on you. Doesn't mean it won't hurt your feelings to be around someone who has just insulted you. Like, that is a normal reaction as a person. You, you don't have to— it shouldn't ruin your life, ruin your whole day. It, 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 do— again, do I think it needs to affect you to the extreme where 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 a knucklehead. Yeah, it's like that, you know, again, guy with a parrot on his shoulder at 7-Eleven. He says something to you, you just immediately write it off. It means nothing. What's that? What does this guy know about anything? No, standing in front of 7-Eleven with the parrot?

That's so intellectual though, which I like. I I understand that's where you're coming from.

You're saying it's 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, yeah, I just live in reality where, like, look, if I'm walking down the street and someone yells something at me and they have a parrot on their shoulder, no, I'm not gonna think what they— like, they're a valid— I should be thinking about how to change my life. But it would still It would probably hurt all of, like, it would just be like, oh, ah, like, uh-huh. 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 even— does that statement, you're too tall—

I know, but they're— but that's objective. But can we walk through that just as an experiment?

What do you think your actual reaction would be if a guy yelled at you, you're too tall?

I'd just be like, he's not talking to me. I would be right.

Or, or who cares what that guy said? It's nonsense.

Yeah, I would just be like, oh, this guy's on drugs. It's nonsense.

What the guy said.

I know, but like, that is objective, but other things aren't. You being ugly, you being like— these aren't— these are subjective things. They are.

And what determines whether or not you're vulnerable to them is what your own self-esteem is. That's exactly what defines your susceptibility and vulnerability.

I don't think that's always right. I, I don't like, okay. 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 don't belong. I'm irrelevant or exactly. Or, or I don't belong. All right, great.

Well, not belong, but you're using the pretty woman analogy for a reason. Well, that was just like easy to say. Yeah, no, but it makes total sense, and we all know what that means. Yeah, big mistake. And that's what it was. It was a Pretty Woman experience.

Well, it wasn't a Pretty 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 at a store called me honey, and I didn't like it. Yeah, I hear you. And that doesn't mean I think I'm a little girl.

Like, I know I'm 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 always pleasant.

Yeah, I don't like feeling annoyed, and 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, Alvin, what are all the Nobel Prizes? Yeah.

Okay, well, I was so embarrassed when he pointed out I used the wrong word.

I think a lot of people think that. Okay, um, physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, Literature, Peace, Economic Sciences. So 5 of them are presented in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway. Interesting.

Yeah. Peace gets the most heat, right? That's the one we hear about the most.

So, 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, in science. 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.

And I love Obama. I know, but that's actually, I don't mean him specifically, but that's, that's an interesting debate. Like what progresses?

Like Obama was a great president and I don't know how we would quantify how many lives he saved, but I don't, he did not save as many as vaccines or antibiotics. Like, those things are like quantifiably hundreds of millions of lives have been saved, or this invention allows us to travel into space versus like, you are a really good guy that encouraged people to be good and better. But that's huge. It's powerful. It's powerful. It's something. I'd put Martin Luther in the camp of the founders.

Physicists. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, there are people who revolutionize the way the, 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 Louis Pasteur or no Obama. Well, I know we got to ask the hard questions on here or we're not doing our job.

I don't want to do that. I don't want to I do not want to do that. Um, I mean, look, I'm more— I'm most likely to get a Peace or a Literature Prize of this. Those are my actually only even remote options.

Yeah, that you could even be a contestant. Exactly. Yeah. So, so you're, you're weighting those higher? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's funny, I go the opposite way. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. 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'd be arrogant.

Like if I can't do it, it must be really impressive. Like you can see where that's kind of area. I see.

I see.

Well, both ways. Yeah. I can't do this abstract calculus to figure out how fast Alpha Centauri's moving towards us. So that's really, that person must be so smart.

I guess I'm glad we have all. Me too. Because they're all extremely important. Did you hear about Crater Carroll speaking of space? The moon? Yeah.

And what's going on with 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 the— Skid mark? No, you're going to be upset you said that after you hear about this. Okay. Because they go, you know, they go on that, what is it? Artemis. Artemis. Thank you. Okay. Yes. And then they see this and the astronaut asked if they could name it Carol. Carol after his deceased wife. Oh, yeah.

I'm really upset I said that. Yeah, that's great. What is it? Do we know what it is?

It's a crater, I think. Okay. I've been calling it Crater Carol, so I hope it's— They've named—

I see Einstein. Einstein, Dalton, and Carol. I wonder what Dalton that is.

And the video's going around of him, like, he's up there and he's saying, we want to name it Carol. It's really—

The one thing from this Artemis thing that I believe so certainly. One of the astronauts, they went around the dark side of the moon, which is crazy.

Do you think they listened?

They should have. That would have been cool. There's no radio communication or anything. So they're just kind of like, who knows what's happening on the other side, right? But I think when they came around it, or I don't know the timing of it, but the point is, one of the astronauts looked at Earth and he was hit by this reality that we should all feel. I wish we could all feel. It's like, you little monkeys are on this fucking rock in the middle of an abyss, and you guys are all you have. I know. And the fact that you're on this floating thing fighting each other is such a tragedy. I mean, I'm paraphrasing. I'm not even sure exactly how he said it, 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. I know. 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. Yeah. And they're spending that— I know— coming up with all these fake differences between each other.

You know what we all have in common? We're on a fucking rock floating through.

Exactly. I'm with you. Yeah. It's heartbreaking. But you also, you would say, well, evolution, we're animals, and animals, that and everyone hates them and fights. Well, I was thinking that.

I did. I actually, I forced myself to counter his point of view. And I was saying, what's interesting is you don't look, 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 brains that get—

Yeah, we should. We should be able to. Oh, did you figure?

We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other. That's sweet. They're hugging up there.

These astronauts are so sweet, naming the 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.

Oh, that's cool. Earth is so like— I don't—

It's a miracle.

I like don't believe in it.

I don't either. I don't either. Um, Alvin.

Okay. Oh, he, 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 carry feces in their hand on the street.

Yeah, no, he didn't say that, but, uh, worm— he said eating worms, but then I was like, I didn't want to say, but like people eat worms. Sure, I think he's probably talking about here, but yeah, I know, but like a lot of cultures eat worms. Okay, they do, they really do.

But he was talking about here, horse meat's illegal, right? Because here we think it's crazy, but a lot of places they eat horse meat. And then there are some things that are just— we don't need a law against it because here, no, no one's eating worms. And so the expectation is they won't be 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 eat worms.

Some people eat poop, probably. No. Yes. I mean, 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 cannibals. It is illegal here. Yeah. Yeah. But not there, right? But we don't have a law that says you— I don't think there's a law anywhere on any books that says you can't serve humans in a restaurant. I don't think that law exists. Huh.

Well, not in a restaurant, but cannibalism is a law. There's a law against cannibalism. Remember that guy had to go to jail in France?

I don't know if— I mean, why would there be a lot? Because it would imply already murders.

It's like you've already crossed. Well, not necessarily. Okay, what you're eating, you're at the morgue.

Yeah, that's what he was. He was working on a lab.

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— someone wants to get their part of their body eaten, someone on the internet wants to eat someone's body.

So in the U.S., there are no laws that explicitly prohibit cannibalism per se.

Wow. Because again, you don't—

because you just feel like it's happen. Yeah, but it is.

But in Papua New Guinea, where it had been a thing for certain tribes, they might need to put that— right, they would have to decide to legislate against it.

It says most states have enacted laws that make it effectively impossible to legally obtain and consume human body matter, though.

Okay, well, I'm so glad that's not my kink.

Eating humans? Yeah, you would never be satiated. It's like if your thing, your kink, is this 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 pot-bellied pigs are allowed, often subject to weight limits under 120 pounds in strict city-specific zoning ordinances.

Thank God Clooney's not a fugitive from law, because I think he had a potbelly pig very famously.

Yeah.

Oh wow. Well, we can't afford to have him as a criminal, but she has a farm.

Exactly.

So livestock, she could own anything probably.

He mentioned Alan Turing. That was sad.

That was very sad. So sad.

But that's a great movie, Imitation Game.

Yeah, I should rewatch it. Great movie.

Movie with Benedict Cumberbatch.

I think that was his breakout, right? Yeah, he was already like simmering, but then it was like, then it was like, sayonara, suck-ass.

I love him. Um, oh, when did Robert— oh, I think he— okay, I may have misheard this. I, I thought he said Jonathan Edwards, um, is the doctor who got his Nobel Prize in, um, in vitro. It's Robert Edwards, which he may have said Maybe I misheard. Okay, but he won it in 2010. Okay, physiology or medicine. Okay, so is IVF illegal in Germany? This is for single women. It's legal and available in Germany, but it's strictly regulated by the Embryo Protection Act. It is primarily accessible to married heterosexual couples with egg donation and surrogacy strictly prohibited. Strictly strictly prohibited. Could you always bet on horses in the United States?

No, it is 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, faced significant legal, 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. Thing. So I guess that's not specific to horse racing, right?

Okay, all right then.

Yes, Mark Twain is credited with saying, giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it a thousand times. He's credited. Okay, good. 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 know, you don't want to advise? You love to advise, um, Rick Glassman.

This This is where I'm like, I'm shamefully selfish.

Yeah, because what if I need it?

I want both, you know? I like a backup.

Yeah, I probably need a backup since I had kidney stones. Oh boy. They probably wouldn't even— maybe they wouldn't let me.

Damn. Yeah, well, that would be the best case scenario. You tried and you couldn't. Yeah, get screened. That was like, I tried to give— what'd I try to give? Plasma? I tried to give sperm in college.

Oh yeah, and you weren't allowed. But that's nice. You'd be fine doing that. Yeah. And you were getting paid, you would be paid.

Well, that was the goal. Yeah, I was in college and I needed some money, but they wouldn't accept it. They said it was terrible sperm.

What, 'cause it 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 count. It wasn't high enough.

You didn't have any problems getting pregnant. I've only tried twice, and I have two kids, so it worked out.

Yeah, yeah. All right, bye!

Love you, love you!