transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard, and I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Speaker 2:
[00:05] Hi.

Speaker 1:
[00:06] Today we have Alvin E. Roth. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a Stanford professor. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Speaker 2:
[00:15] My goodness.

Speaker 1:
[00:16] His previous book is Who Gets What and Why, and his new book is called This Is Tasty, Moral Economics, From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.

Speaker 2:
[00:33] Really interesting.

Speaker 1:
[00:34] Super, super interesting. We learn about the difference between repugnancy and disgust. He himself pioneered this kidney market that has saved tens of thousands of lives. Yeah. Really, really great topic. Please enjoy Alvin E. Roth. You're visiting, I presume, from the Stanford area, yeah? Okay. You're originally from Queens. Both parents were school teachers?

Speaker 3:
[01:19] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[01:20] And what was their specialty? Were they just generalists?

Speaker 3:
[01:22] 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. So one of the skills that a secretary needed to have in those days was to be able to take by hand dictation.

Speaker 1:
[01:43] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[01:44] Right.

Speaker 1:
[01:44] And then your words per minute was your currency, I imagine?

Speaker 3:
[01:47] Then accuracy. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[01:49] Both parents specialized in that?

Speaker 3:
[01:51] They did.

Speaker 1:
[01:52] Did they meet in pursuit of that knowledge?

Speaker 3:
[01:54] They probably did. They were both New York City school teachers, and part of the implicit contract was you're supposed to go back and get a master's degree, and I think they met then.

Speaker 1:
[02:03] Okay, they met in graduate school.

Speaker 3:
[02:04] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[02:05] How old is your older brother than you?

Speaker 3:
[02:07] Four years.

Speaker 1:
[02:08] Four years. And did you look up to him?

Speaker 3:
[02:09] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[02:10] So he started this. He started taking classes at Columbia on the weekend, and that encouraged you to do the same?

Speaker 3:
[02:16] He did.

Speaker 1:
[02:17] Yeah. What grade?

Speaker 3:
[02:18] The entrance exam was in ninth grade. I don't think I started classes till tenth grade, but I'm not positive about that.

Speaker 1:
[02:26] All to say, you end up beginning college full time at Columbia before you've gotten a degree, yeah?

Speaker 3:
[02:33] So if we're talking about a high school degree, I don't have a high school degree.

Speaker 1:
[02:35] Yeah, you don't have a high school degree, which I like a lot. And you started full time at 16 at Columbia?

Speaker 3:
[02:41] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[02:42] So you were of under Ken. Do you reject that term or do you embrace it?

Speaker 3:
[02:45] I don't think I embrace it. I was not a great high school student.

Speaker 2:
[02:49] But they let you in the college without it?

Speaker 3:
[02:51] They did. It's a private college. And the thing about having some acquaintance with Columbia professors was they let me in.

Speaker 2:
[02:57] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[02:58] And you got your first degree quickly in three years. And it was in operations research. What was operations research?

Speaker 3:
[03:05] 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.

Speaker 1:
[03:18] And then you went to graduate school quickly thereafter, which you went to Stanford. And you get your master's and PhD there in three years. Again, this is accelerated now.

Speaker 3:
[03:28] I did, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[03:29] What was the hurry? Was it just happening?

Speaker 3:
[03:31] 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.

Speaker 1:
[03:39] Okay. How do we transition from operations to economics?

Speaker 3:
[03:44] 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 may do an economist, and there I was.

Speaker 1:
[04:09] Oh, okay. Did you love Janusz Von Neumann?

Speaker 3:
[04:12] 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.

Speaker 1:
[04:24] 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.

Speaker 3:
[04:33] 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 Allman. And he worked in the Rand Corporation and thought a lot about nuclear disarmament and armament. And mutually assured destruction.

Speaker 1:
[04:53] But that is based on the shoulders of game theory, no?

Speaker 3:
[04:56] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[04:56] You have a lot of long stints. You do University of Illinois for seven years?

Speaker 3:
[05:01] Eight years.

Speaker 1:
[05:02] Eight years.

Speaker 3:
[05:02] 74 to 82.

Speaker 1:
[05:03] And then you do University of Pittsburgh for a long time as well.

Speaker 3:
[05:09] 82 to 98.

Speaker 1:
[05:11] Are you astounded when you look back that you've had kind of full careers at all these different places, because you then also went to Harvard for 14 years? Like these are really long tenures at any one place.

Speaker 3:
[05:22] Well, you know, I'm old. We did different things at each place. I met my wife at Illinois. We had our children in Pittsburgh. We saw them off to college in Boston, and then we moved to Stanford in 2012.

Speaker 1:
[05:35] 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.

Speaker 3:
[05:58] 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 percent 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. I think they change a little bit what students study. Not completely. I have Harvard students who are working in the valley, and I have Stanford students who go to Wall Street 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.

Speaker 1:
[06:48] Right. In 2012, I guess your last year at Harvard, you win the Nobel Peace Prize with Lloyd Shapley.

Speaker 3:
[06:56] Not a peace prize. That's a prize for peace. We won an economics prize.

Speaker 1:
[07:01] Still by the Nobel committee? Is it not the same?

Speaker 3:
[07:04] It's different. There's a Nobel Prize in economics, there's one in physics and one in chemistry, and one in physiology and medicine, and one in literature.

Speaker 1:
[07:12] 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?

Speaker 3:
[07:40] That's a good question. I have a very expansive view of markets because a lot of the markets I study aren't primarily monetary exchanges. So that surprises even some economists that I speak of markets that way. But I think of markets as tools that human beings build so that we can cooperate and compete and coordinate with each other. And so there are lots of markets. There are commodity markets where you don't care who you're dealing with. You can get 5,000 bushels of hard red winter weed from any farm, they're all the same. Or they can be marriage markets where you care precisely about who you're dealing with. That's the whole point. It's a matching market that gets you married. And there's lots of things in between, like employment labor markets.

Speaker 1:
[08:19] Yeah, I think we're all most familiar with thinking of markets in terms of the commodities markets, or what is the supply and the demand, and how is that going to affect the price of things. And that's certainly one specific kind of market.

Speaker 3:
[08:33] Yeah, that's a giant kind of market.

Speaker 1:
[08:34] 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.

Speaker 3:
[09:01] Or help design or redesign, yes.

Speaker 1:
[09:04] Yes. So let's talk about matching markets, because there's a bunch of different ones that maybe people wouldn't realize are markets.

Speaker 3:
[09:10] 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 is graduating from medical school this year, right around now, they'll already have interviewed at residency programs, and then 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.

Speaker 1:
[10:02] Why was it inefficient before you got involved? What were the baked-in challenges?

Speaker 3:
[10:06] There were long-standing 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 way and not be pressed to answer more quickly than you'd like because you'd like to see what else is coming along.

Speaker 1:
[10:32] The congestion is everyone's going to pick the top three tier hospitals in a very populated area. That place is going to be inundated with requests. Then as we try to move on to someone's second choice, and now another new moment of congestion.

Speaker 3:
[10:46] It also is that people are going to make lots of applications and therefore employers are going to get lots of applications. 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. Colleges get lots of applications, residency programs get lots of applications. On dating sites, people with nice pictures get lots of pings.

Speaker 1:
[11:09] If you're the hospital and you get all these applications and you go, great, I want these 20 graduates, you have no clue if you're their ninth choice or their seventh. 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.

Speaker 3:
[11:24] A centralized clearing house 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 clearing house dates back to the 1950s. But in the 1950s, almost all graduates of American medical schools were men. And by 1970, about 10% were women, and today it's 50%. And so more and more, there are couples graduating from medical school who need two jobs, not one job. And if they need two jobs, you can't do a good job of getting them two jobs unless you ask them, which two jobs do you want? What's your first choice of two jobs? Because that's what they want. What's your second choice?

Speaker 1:
[12:03] Yeah, that sounds very complicated.

Speaker 3:
[12:05] It's a little complicated to build an algorithm that can handle that. But it makes it simpler for couples who are looking for two jobs to look for them in a sensible way instead of getting one job in Alaska and one job in Florida.

Speaker 1:
[12:17] Yeah, I was going to say there probably is some ranked priority if they'd like to be at the same hospital. Then second to that, they'd like to be at two hospitals in the same city.

Speaker 3:
[12:24] And they have opinions about which hospitals, they may be in different medical specialties. So they have a lot of things to think about. But one of the reasons it's important is when the clearing houses didn't take care of that, the married couples didn't go where they were matched. Because I like to say that the iron law of marriage is that you can't be happier than your spouse. So if me and my spouse get matched to a pair of jobs that doesn't suit us, we can keep looking for jobs. And that disrupts the match for everyone. So that's something that's been fixed.

Speaker 1:
[12:51] 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, 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'm in love for you to explain repugnance in a repugnant market.

Speaker 3:
[13:47] 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.

Speaker 1:
[14:20] 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.

Speaker 3:
[14:31] That's right. So same-sex marriage is sort of a prototypical repugnant transaction. There are two people who want to marry each other. There are other people who think they shouldn't be allowed to. But it's not clear what the harm is that's done to the people who object. But this has been a giant political issue in the United States and in many other places. So it's clear that some people have strong objections to same-sex marriage.

Speaker 1:
[14:50] 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.

Speaker 3:
[15:06] That's exactly right. So there aren't any laws, I don't think, about you can't serve beverages made of spit. But there are laws in California, you can't sell horse meat for human consumption. You can go up and down Los Angeles to restaurants, 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.

Speaker 1:
[15:28] It was that recent?

Speaker 3:
[15:30] 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.

Speaker 1:
[15:46] And we'd all agree that I don't think we could establish a hierarchy of horse, cow, sheep.

Speaker 3:
[15:51] 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.

Speaker 2:
[16:00] But it's such a fine line.

Speaker 1:
[16:01] Yeah, pigs are pets.

Speaker 3:
[16:03] Well, no, not in California.

Speaker 1:
[16:05] People have pop...

Speaker 3:
[16:07] Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they've not been included. Of course they can and chickens, right. We have a law in California that you can't sell horse meat for human consumption, it's a felony.

Speaker 1:
[16:14] There's another concept that's relevant to bring in 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?

Speaker 3:
[16:26] 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 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.

Speaker 1:
[16:45] In some sense, you know better than the person knows for themselves.

Speaker 3:
[16:48] Right. And paternalism is a very interesting word because, of course, often we apply it to children. And if you don't properly supervise your children, you might be neglecting them. Sometimes your 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, because 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 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.

Speaker 1:
[17:31] 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 goes to bed.

Speaker 3:
[17:45] Play on the freeway.

Speaker 1:
[17:46] 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.

Speaker 3:
[17:59] 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 alcohol itself isn't bad for you. There weren't quality controls. 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 will sell you aged-in-the-barrel scotch and things like that.

Speaker 1:
[19:21] 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.

Speaker 3:
[19:36] 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. But the nature of moral obligation has to do with something that you can do and can choose to do. So we weren't able to ban alcohol, and that makes it less of a moral issue. Some of us might still like not to have alcohol sold, and even those of us who enjoy fine wine and 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 1:
[20:15] Right. But the concept of trade-offs is really, really important because that's how we're going to attempt to evaluate these different situations as we go through a list of very exciting and provocative repugnant transactions. So talk about trade-offs.

Speaker 3:
[20:30] 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.

Speaker 1:
[21:13] No, 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.

Speaker 2:
[21:25] What is it?

Speaker 3:
[21:26] That's my wife.

Speaker 1:
[21:27] Oh, okay, okay.

Speaker 2:
[21:29] No, you're fine. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't mine.

Speaker 3:
[21:32] Last year, I was scheduled to go to Israel and didn't go because there was a war in Iran and on the days I was supposed to be there. But I downloaded an app that gives me an air raid alert whenever there's one in Israel. And that's what we're hearing.

Speaker 1:
[21:45] Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:
[21:46] We're getting intel.

Speaker 1:
[21:47] 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. Anytime there's any downside, we must reject it wholesale. I can think of the war on vaccines, which is certainly you can produce for me, some people who have experienced side effects. If you graph that number of side effects versus life saved from that polio vaccine or name the vaccine, it's preposterous. They're not comparable. One is a magnitude bigger, but because there's a trade-off, the whole thing must be thrown out. And I wonder, do you think that's always been how people felt about trade-offs or do you think that's kind of new and accelerating?

Speaker 3:
[22:36] Well, I think it's a very bad way to talk about trade-offs. 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.

Speaker 1:
[23:08] An effort to figure that out. Yeah, I think people choose to not acknowledge that this country fundamentally in the Constitution is trying to service two goals, liberty and equality, that cannot exist at 100 percent, both. So just implicit in our whole system is the notion of trade-offs. We're going to 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 going to get perfection in any one of these without some cause.

Speaker 3:
[23:55] I agree, and also I think we have to learn from experience. It makes a lot of sense to say, let's make heroin illegal. But what makes less sense is to say, let's make that our only tool for fighting drug addiction, given that it yields a lot of drug addiction.

Speaker 1:
[24:10] 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?

Speaker 3:
[24:24] You mentioned already that there are different laws in different places. Some years ago, before COVID, I gave a talk in Berlin about controversial markets. And the three I chose to talk about in Berlin were prostitution, surrogacy, and kidney exchange. And the reason those made sense for an American to talk about in Germany is the German laws are just the opposite of the American laws. So in Germany, the only one of those three that's legal is prostitution, surrogacy, and kidney exchange are not yet legal. So let's take surrogacy to answer your question about how can we tell when things aren't working. The places that don't like surrogacy see themselves as protecting the vulnerable, the 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? And so the family courts started to have to create procedures where German surrogate parents could adopt their own child in order to have the child because no one's more vulnerable than a newborn baby. So one way you can tell the law isn't working is you're trying to protect the vulnerable and you're in danger of creating stateless babies who can't go home with their parents.

Speaker 1:
[25:48] Right, right. Now you were working in theory and then admirably started working and like, okay, I think I understand how this works. Can I actually fix something? And you were called to help with the kidney exchange. That's a matching market, right? And I may love you and want to donate my kidney to you, but you and I might not be a match, unfortunately. And now there's another couple and that couple wants to donate the kidney to their loved one and they're not a match, but lo and behold, I might be a match. So there is some way to make everyone happy. And this is the system that you helped design. So what was happening and where did we get to?

Speaker 3:
[26:29] 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.

Speaker 1:
[26:56] And you said it's a top 10 killer in the US.

Speaker 3:
[26:58] 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.

Speaker 1:
[27:29] What's the breakdown of that? How many are coming from cadavers versus living folks?

Speaker 3:
[27:33] 20 something thousand are coming from cadavers, and about 7,000 are coming from living donors.

Speaker 1:
[27:39] Okay, so still the majority is from cadavers?

Speaker 3:
[27:41] 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.

Speaker 1:
[27:50] Right, right.

Speaker 3:
[27:51] 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 that 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.

Speaker 1:
[28:15] And it would have been illegal for you to reimburse me for those?

Speaker 3:
[28:17] 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.

Speaker 1:
[28:39] Yeah, your insurance is not gonna pay for you to donate a kidney.

Speaker 3:
[28:41] Well, my insurance would pay for the surgeries for yours and mine needed for you to donate a kidney to me.

Speaker 1:
[28:47] Oh, okay, okay.

Speaker 3:
[28:48] But they wouldn't pay for the childcare that you needed while you were in Palo Alto.

Speaker 2:
[28:51] Travel, all that.

Speaker 3:
[28:53] 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.

Speaker 1:
[29:21] 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.

Speaker 3:
[29:28] So there was hardly any kidney exchange. We came in at the beginning of kidney exchange. The thing about kidney exchange that's so relevant to this discussion of what's allowed and what's not is in kidney exchange, each patient gets a compatible kidney from another patient's intended donor with no money changing hands. But it's 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.

Speaker 1:
[30:14] 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?

Speaker 3:
[30:21] So it went from a handful a year when we started doing it, to it's about 1,500, more than 1,000 a year now. There's a little carefulness you need to do in counting because somewhat more than 1,000 people receive kidney transplants through kidney exchange. But some of the donors are non-directed donors. There are a couple of hundred donors each year in the US who want to give a kidney to someone and don't have a particular someone in mind.

Speaker 1:
[30:46] Yeah, I've heard about these people.

Speaker 2:
[30:47] I've considered it.

Speaker 1:
[30:48] So Admiral, you have.

Speaker 2:
[30:50] Yeah, because I already have one.

Speaker 1:
[30:54] Yeah, I'm suspicious I'm going to damage one of mine and need the second back.

Speaker 2:
[30:58] Well, I mean, yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 1:
[31:00] 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.

Speaker 3:
[31:20] 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 had 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 would be this flow of blood from poor countries to rich countries. In most countries in the world, it's illegal to pay for blood and also for blood plasma, which is a blood product. That's actually very important. And in the United States, those things aren't illegal, but there's a regulation that says that whole blood has to be labeled with whether it's been donated voluntarily or for pay. And so, the equilibrium we're in is that whole blood in the United States is donated without payment. When I donate blood, they offer me an orange juice and a cookie afterward, but that's so I don't fall down. Yeah. But plasma is a product of blood, doesn't have to be labeled. In the United States, not only is it legal to pay for plasma, but we export tens of billions of dollars of plasma products every year.

Speaker 1:
[32:40] Yeah, you call this the Saudi Arabia of blood plasma.

Speaker 3:
[32:43] Right. So it turns out that only in a handful of countries is it legal to pay plasma donors, and those are the only countries that are self-sufficient in plasma. Everyone else who can afford it buys plasma mostly from the US.

Speaker 1:
[32:55] It's fascinating, isn't it, these little arbitrary lines we draw.

Speaker 3:
[32:58] 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.

Speaker 1:
[33:17] And we're the richest.

Speaker 3:
[33:18] 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 to worry about which country is 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.

Speaker 1:
[34:02] Right. Okay, so then that brings us back to kidneys because I was impressed with your solution to this.

Speaker 3:
[34:08] So there have been lots of proposed solutions. Regularly there's some legislation being proposed that would try to relieve the shortage of kidneys. And right now, there's an act that's being sponsored by quite a number of congressmen called the End Kidney Deaths Act, which is an ambitious title.

Speaker 1:
[34:23] I'll get a headline.

Speaker 3:
[34:24] 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, five years for being a non-directed donor. One reason they're saying a tax credit and one reason they're spreading it over five years is to get away from this idea that somehow people would have some desperate need for sudden cash and that would cause them to quickly donate a kidney. 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.

Speaker 1:
[35:05] 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.

Speaker 3:
[35:36] 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.

Speaker 1:
[35:48] Which is our primary concern.

Speaker 3:
[35:49] 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 associated with having rich people buying kidneys from poor people and potentially exploiting them.

Speaker 1:
[36:00] 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?

Speaker 3:
[36:10] Yeah, that's a good question. It's not unreasonably risky to donate a kidney. You know, the deaths are one in 10,000. So that's a pretty modest risk. There are streets that you can cross in Los Angeles that give you a bigger risk than that, especially if you cross against the light. So I think that's something to seriously think about. And I talk about that. And again, that's part of the market design issue is as we're talking about these things, we should think about what are the objections? What is it that we're trying to avoid when we ban paying for kidneys? And part of it is that the rich are exploiting the poor. But 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.

Speaker 1:
[36:57] And we have to keep the alternative in mind, which is some 80,000 people a year dying because they didn't get a kidney.

Speaker 3:
[37:02] Absolutely, that's exactly the alternatives.

Speaker 1:
[37:05] 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?

Speaker 3:
[37:13] 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 thotomy, for example. But just incidentally, when Roe v. Wade was, not so long ago, 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.

Speaker 1:
[37:42] So historically, marriage, how has it evolved? Where did it start?

Speaker 3:
[37:46] So marriage is even older than I am. But of course, society has a lot of interests in marriages. And one of them, not the only one, but one of them is the care of children. So for a long time, sex with high likelihood led to pregnancy, which with high likelihood led to children. We as a society developed all these rules that said man and a woman who have sex with each other had better be prepared for raising the child that might result. And a good way to be prepared is to be married and have formed a household 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.

Speaker 1:
[38:33] The trade-offs have changed.

Speaker 3:
[38:34] 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.

Speaker 2:
[39:03] A single person.

Speaker 3:
[39:04] Yeah, a single person, right. So maybe our idea of who can be a parent should be different. And then maybe our idea of who can adopt a child should be different. There was a lot of reason for society to think that people who can have sex with each other should be married to each other to be ready to catch the baby. But many of those things are no longer so urgent. And we have come to recognize that marriage has other advantages to the people who are married to each other than just their ability to help each other raise children. And so we came to feel in the United States, not everyone and not quickly and not easily, but we came to feel that maybe people should be able to marry each other even if they couldn't have children.

Speaker 1:
[39:40] You bring up Alan Turing, you talk about him a bit in this chat.

Speaker 3:
[39:43] 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 code breaker 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. 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, it's legal to be homosexual in Britain and in the United States. And this is sort of an ancient horror, but it's not that ancient.

Speaker 1:
[40:25] Wow, so he didn't get the chemical castration.

Speaker 3:
[40:27] No, he got it.

Speaker 2:
[40:28] He got it and then killed himself.

Speaker 3:
[40:30] Yeah, yeah, he wasn't happy.

Speaker 1:
[40:32] Oh my goodness. How does this rear up in marriage and adoption?

Speaker 3:
[40:36] So the question is, do we allow people of the same sex to marry each other? That was a repugnant transaction. Remember, I used 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 law, and what happened was lots of other states amended their constitutions to make same sex marriage the only kind of marriage allowed in their constitution. And the reason was the way the Massachusetts court ruled is it said the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a constitution that requires equality before the law, and we're not treating gay people equally.

Speaker 1:
[41:19] Yeah, there's a legal right marriage.

Speaker 3:
[41:21] 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.

Speaker 1:
[41:47] This is another Nobel Prize winner, the IVF doctor. So what's the repugnant nature?

Speaker 3:
[41:53] Jonathan Edward. So he invented, he and colleagues, Nobel Prize is always our, you know, leave out colleagues. He and colleagues invented in vitro fertilization in 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, and the ones that are not used are perhaps murderers, especially when they're discarded. The nature of repugnant transactions is you can be vastly celebrated. The Nobel Prize is a giant weeklong 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, it allowed them to have children. But the children, the people born of IVF, they don't think of it as murder.

Speaker 1:
[43:12] How can we come to some conclusion through an economic model on that issue?

Speaker 3:
[43:16] 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.

Speaker 1:
[43:30] That's a shocker.

Speaker 3:
[43:31] 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 can 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.

Speaker 1:
[44:07] Yeah, it's almost reverse engineered eugenics in some way. It's like, okay, we're going to select for who can do this.

Speaker 3:
[44:13] One of the things I talk about 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.

Speaker 1:
[44:27] Hence the abortion issue.

Speaker 3:
[44:29] The 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.

Speaker 1:
[44:37] Yeah, could happen on vacation. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3:
[44:40] Perfectly legal on vacation.

Speaker 2:
[44:41] You're allowed to be a single woman. You just have to have gotten pregnant naturally.

Speaker 3:
[44:45] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[44:46] That's so strange.

Speaker 1:
[44:48] Interesting distinction.

Speaker 2:
[44:49] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[44:49] Okay, in section two 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 one is alcohol and drugs. And you do this fun thing where you list a lot of different drugs. You say caffeine, tobacco, heroin, marijuana, opioids, alcohol. And if you were asked to put those in order of threat based on your community, where you live, the order would be what?

Speaker 3:
[45:17] The order of acceptability.

Speaker 1:
[45:19] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[45:19] 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.

Speaker 1:
[45:29] No?

Speaker 3:
[45:29] It's great. So everyone likes coffee. Then we start to get to tougher drugs.

Speaker 1:
[45:33] Wine.

Speaker 3:
[45:33] Wine in California is pretty popular.

Speaker 1:
[45:36] Not in Utah.

Speaker 3:
[45:37] But it's a big industry in California, which is in trouble now. As wine consumption goes down, our friends in Napa Valley, some of them are going to grow condominia instead of grapes, which might make California less nice in some ways. But marijuana is also popular in some circles. I think I had trouble ordering those in what I guess is acceptable. Hard drugs are definitely not acceptable in my community, but some people have troubles with them and some of them have gotten into trouble with them sort of inadvertently. That is for medical reasons, they've been prescribed opioids and then become addicted.

Speaker 1:
[46:11] 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.

Speaker 3:
[46:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[46:19] And they're significantly troubling. There's been years in the last decade where we've had 100,000 people die.

Speaker 3:
[46:26] Overdose death.

Speaker 1:
[46:27] Yes. It's a very real threat. But let's talk about the numbers for tobacco.

Speaker 3:
[46:32] Yeah. So, tobacco kills more people than opioids. And alcohol kills more people than tobacco.

Speaker 1:
[46:37] 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.

Speaker 3:
[46:47] 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.

Speaker 1:
[46:55] Yeah. The suddenness is really fascinating, isn't it? Why that elevates it so much in our mind.

Speaker 3:
[47:01] But of course, alcohol includes some sudden deaths, right? Both behind the wheel and just alcohol poisoning.

Speaker 1:
[47:08] Yeah, like 60,000 people a year do die of a sudden version of alcohol death.

Speaker 3:
[47:11] 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.

Speaker 1:
[47:29] Oh, really?

Speaker 3:
[47:29] But you say, oh, really? We're now restricting tobacco and marijuana are on opposite trajectories. Marijuana used to be illegal, schedule one, like heroin, and tobacco, we'd give agricultural subsidies to tobacco farmers. 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.

Speaker 1:
[47:55] 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. You walk around New York City now and people are smoking joints everywhere. No one's making a big thing of it.

Speaker 2:
[48:12] Part of it's societal, what we just have decided is in vogue and not. I mean, smoking is coming back.

Speaker 1:
[48:19] Yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 2:
[48:20] A lot of younger people are smoking again.

Speaker 3:
[48:23] There's vaping and things like that.

Speaker 2:
[48:25] There's vaping too, but even cigarettes, it's weird. I don't know what. I mean, I think maybe because people stopped talking about how bad it was for you, that people are kind of back on it, which is not good.

Speaker 1:
[48:36] Yeah, I think it's suffering from the same reality that the polio vaccine did, which is like no one alive today saw someone walking with a walker at 19 years old from polio, so they're not afraid to not vaccinate their kid.

Speaker 3:
[48:48] I remember seeing people Sure, sure.

Speaker 1:
[48:50] My grandfather's throat was permanently paralyzed from polio, but young parents who are deciding whether or not to get a polio vaccine, they didn't see it, so it's out of mind. 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, 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.

Speaker 3:
[49:23] We prohibited most sales of alcohol, not sales for religious purposes, not sales for certain kinds of medicinal purposes, but by and large we prohibited the sale of alcohol.

Speaker 1:
[49:33] In the Volstead Act, you could brew in your home.

Speaker 3:
[49:35] So there was a big upsurge in the sale of wine grapes.

Speaker 1:
[49:39] Synagogue membership.

Speaker 3:
[49:40] Membership in synagogues.

Speaker 2:
[49:41] Oh, wow. That's really funny.

Speaker 3:
[49:43] 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.

Speaker 1:
[50:01] Oh, really? They went from no business?

Speaker 3:
[50:03] And you had to scribble something that was supposed to be what shul you went to, what synagogue you belonged to. But you could have gone in and scribbled something. They were interested in your scribbles.

Speaker 1:
[50:11] Wow. Kind of like the medical marijuana card.

Speaker 2:
[50:14] Yeah, I remember how...

Speaker 1:
[50:15] 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?

Speaker 2:
[50:23] Yeah, exactly. Or just hand it in.

Speaker 1:
[50:25] He said, yeah, I can only sleep for about eight hours. Well, here you go, you need this.

Speaker 3:
[50:29] 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, 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.

Speaker 1:
[50:53] And particularly, you wanted a plain looking car that was super modified to be really fast. So you wouldn't draw attention to the shit in the fan.

Speaker 3:
[51:00] You have a lot of product in the back.

Speaker 1:
[51:01] Yeah. And so stock cars, these big gangly cars are what they decided to race, not coupes, not Corvettes or anything, Sedans.

Speaker 3:
[51:09] You can tell right away that a ban is going to have trouble when it starts generating folk heroes, when the people who violated are Robin Hood, not Al Capone. Now, they were also Al Capone.

Speaker 1:
[51:18] And the Kennedys famously got a lot of their wealth through this?

Speaker 3:
[51:22] There was a lot of importation from Canada. Canada went through various forms of prohibition and trying it without ever stopping the production and sale of alcohol. And so you could legally buy whiskey, 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 going to get into the United States and be sold?

Speaker 1:
[51:53] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[51:53] 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.

Speaker 1:
[52:04] 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 math, it's like you've got several hundred chemists in India that are making the precursor compound, so it can go elsewhere. It's like unless there's a single source to these things, they're nearly impossible to ever shut down. But we got to evaluate what the efficacy of trying to pinch it as much as we can. So let's talk about drugs because I grew up saying I had a very libertarian view on it. I thought it should be decriminalized, I thought it should be taxed and regulated and get rid of the black market. And then the experiment was run in front of my eyes in San Francisco and in Portland and a few other places on the West Coast. And I got to say I have completely reversed my position on it. And there's a lot of these trade-offs that are 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 dope in the stairwells of these nice brown stones. 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.

Speaker 3:
[53:36] 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. But we're not making drugs so scarce or even so expensive that poor people can't buy them. So we're losing the war on drugs. But as you say, when we just say, so we're making it non-criminal, that doesn't drive down the number of addicts.

Speaker 1:
[54:04] Or overdoses, they uptake it in Oregon.

Speaker 3:
[54:06] Absolutely. 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 incarceration is going to continue to be part of the solution. It seems to me we have a responsibility to make treatment part of incarceration.

Speaker 1:
[54:38] Yeah, and really quick, talk about the paradox between contracting a killer and selling drugs.

Speaker 3:
[54:42] 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.

Speaker 1:
[54:55] There's almost zero convictions a year of hired hitman.

Speaker 3:
[54:57] It's not even in the FBI crime statistics.

Speaker 1:
[54:59] And they carry a virtually similar penalty.

Speaker 3:
[55:03] 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. 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.

Speaker 1:
[55:36] That's really too bad.

Speaker 3:
[55:37] Yeah, that's really too bad. You know, he seemed so coherent when we were talking to him, but he must 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 two. You know, he's always the one who hates your paper. And I just can't take it anymore. I've identified one of my academic enemies at UCLA. And you look to me like the kind of guy who would know where I could hire a hitman. What do you say? Well, probably you don't know where I could hire a hitman. But even if you did, you wouldn't tell me because 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 a murder. Yeah, 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 him and said, I talked to this professor from the Bay Area and he wants to hire a hitman to kill someone in Los Angeles, they'd say, 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 policeman. 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.

Speaker 1:
[57:21] What fresh perspective do we need to apply to this drug?

Speaker 3:
[57:24] First of all, I think we're doing great on Hitman, we should keep it up.

Speaker 1:
[57:27] Uh-huh, yeah, yeah, well done.

Speaker 3:
[57:29] 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 experiments of decriminalizing.

Speaker 2:
[57:57] We had to try it.

Speaker 3:
[57:58] And I agree with you that they didn't work. Even the plans, the thing about decriminalizing is that it'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.

Speaker 1:
[58:19] 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, okay, let's decriminalize.

Speaker 3:
[58:30] 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.

Speaker 1:
[58:41] Yeah, and you're evaluating their rights against mine.

Speaker 3:
[58:43] Absolutely. So you don't want to find habitimic needles in the school playground.

Speaker 1:
[58:47] No, no, no one wants to live in that city or play on that playground.

Speaker 3:
[58:50] Right. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Speaker 1:
[59:05] So what kind of experiments do you think would need to be run?

Speaker 3:
[59:08] 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 conscious. 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. 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.

Speaker 1:
[59:50] Well, GLP-1s are now starting to show a lot of...

Speaker 3:
[59:52] 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, but I think we have to be thinking about them that way, not just as a criminal problem that we have to solve.

Speaker 1:
[60:29] 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 is an issue. No one disagrees with that. We tried through prohibition, and it only decreased alcohol consumption for the first three years, and then it rebounded beautifully. We're weirdly in a phase right now where alcohol consumption is in a nosedive. And I don't know that we have a great explanation of what's driving that nosedive, but I think we had better find out what it is, because I think it's very interesting that we're getting the thing we wanted, but we didn't do anything.

Speaker 3:
[61:09] Right. Now, there are surveys that suggest that the number of daily users of marijuana now exceed the number of daily drinkers.

Speaker 1:
[61:17] So my current theory, but again, I haven't seen any of the work on this. But yeah, my assumption is that where you're seeing weed consumption available, you're seeing alcohol go down. And for me, objectively, I'd rather see people consume marijuana than alcohol. I think it's far less dangerous.

Speaker 2:
[61:33] 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.

Speaker 3:
[61:48] Not for alcoholics.

Speaker 2:
[61:49] Well, for alcoholics, but I mean generally. Alcohol is a social drug and as younger people are being more isolated on their phones, social media, they're staying in. They're not going out and hanging out with friends and getting a drink. They're on their phone. So I think he would say, yeah, that looks good, but actually it's not good because everyone's so isolated. And I think there's something to that potentially.

Speaker 1:
[62:13] It's probably dynamic and multifaceted.

Speaker 2:
[62:15] Yeah, everything is.

Speaker 1:
[62:17] Yeah, I was pointing out to him because his worldview is everything about the internet and social media is bad. So what about this uptick in healthy eating and reduction in drinking and better savings? You can't ignore all these other things that are upticking hugely as the suicide rate goes up, nine percent. But yes, that's his explanation. But regardless, I think we need to know what the explanation is, right?

Speaker 3:
[62:39] There might be multiple explanations, but there's no question that a lot of things are affected by social norms. But social norms aren't things that we know very much about how to change. You can't legislate them. They seem to change slowly. You said that there's an up surge 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. Good for your heart.

Speaker 2:
[63:04] I'm still sticking with that a little bit.

Speaker 3:
[63:06] Those were the days. I miss those days.

Speaker 1:
[63:09] Doing my heart a favor with this glass of wine tonight.

Speaker 3:
[63:11] Exactly. So that cuts it down a little.

Speaker 1:
[63:14] 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.

Speaker 3:
[63:30] 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.

Speaker 1:
[63:39] Yeah, you don't want to do what your parents did in some way. There's some rejection. Okay, can we talk about vaccines for a bit? And then I just want to talk about what emerging controversies you see coming our way, and how we can apply this market view to them. So vaccines, we kind of brought up a minute ago.

Speaker 3:
[63:53] 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 sort of had measles beat, but it used to be a really dangerous disease. And of course, it has negative externalities. If your kid goes to kindergarten and there's somebody with measles in the kindergarten, then your kid is going to bring measles home, especially if your kid isn't vaccinated. So it's a dangerous disease. So we just went through COVID where miraculously, technologically, vaccines would develop with uncanny speed. I remember the long trek to polio is when I was a small child. And eventually getting first Saut 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.

Speaker 1:
[64:35] It was oral?

Speaker 3:
[64:36] Saut was a shot and Sabin was oral.

Speaker 1:
[64:38] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[64:39] 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.

Speaker 1:
[65:34] What are the ethics of giving half that group the placebo though?

Speaker 3:
[65:37] People don't seem to object to that because you don't yet have an authorized vaccine, so the whole population is not getting the vaccine. But there was a movement for what are called human challenge trials or human infection trials. So there were a lot of people who signed up with an organization called One Day Sooner. Their argument was we, mostly we young, healthy...

Speaker 1:
[66:00] Males.

Speaker 3:
[66:00] Males. Are willing to test vaccines. So we're willing to be exposed to the disease to be part of a vaccine trial, some of whom would get the vaccine and some wouldn't. But we also don't know if the vaccine is going to be effective. And their argument was young, healthy males, 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.

Speaker 2:
[66:39] Even if they're signing up?

Speaker 3:
[66:40] 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 who protect us. And so these people had that kind of feeling. They wanted to be firefighters. They wanted to help you beat the pandemic, but we didn't allow them to. And possibly that was a mistake in the sense that it really was costly to the world to have all those 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.

Speaker 1:
[67:30] Here's where I think the moral conundrum comes with vaccines. So I'm a very outspoken vaccine advocate. There are people that protest. My wife and I, 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 vax, I believe that you're 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 can track measles, that's on you.

Speaker 3:
[67:59] Should I be able to send my child to a public kindergarten?

Speaker 1:
[68:01] Where I'm gonna go, where the moral conundrum for me lies is the children of someone that are 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?

Speaker 3:
[68:20] I think it depends on what the morality argument is. What comes to mind is there are small groups of Christian believers who don't like blood transfusions. Jehovah's Witnesses are among them, and they don't like blood transfusions because 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. If you're a Jehovah's Witness and an adult, and you say, no transfusion, they won't give you a transfusion, then 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.

Speaker 1:
[69:35] Our hands are kind of clean.

Speaker 3:
[69:36] And God wanted them to live.

Speaker 1:
[69:37] God did this.

Speaker 3:
[69:38] You know, God could have stopped the injunction, so we're good.

Speaker 2:
[69:40] Right, there's some workarounds. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[69:42] It's like the Amish can be driven to the hospital's 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.

Speaker 3:
[69:53] 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. You send your kid to this hospital 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.

Speaker 1:
[70:16] Yeah. Can economics help us through that?

Speaker 3:
[70:19] 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.

Speaker 1:
[70:41] Even if you're a donor?

Speaker 3:
[70:43] Yeah. The rule in both places is you couldn't give me a kidney. My brother could give me a kidney, but you can't. Yes, it has to be a first order member of the family. And the German prosecutors have no sense of humor about this. So if my brother wants to give me a kidney and you want to give a kidney to your brother, but we're incompatible, the fact that everything has been satisfied except the medical compatibility issue, they wouldn't allow you to give me a kidney and my brother to give your brother a kidney. But those laws are subject to change. The German Health Ministry has a draft that they're trying to put through the Bundestag.

Speaker 1:
[71:12] And they'll have us as an example, we're running the trial.

Speaker 3:
[71:15] 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. And we're confident it will work in Brazil because it works everywhere else. The hope is once we have 20 or 30 people who got transplants that way, you can go to the Brazilian legislature and say, this works, let's make it legal.

Speaker 1:
[71:41] Yeah. Okay, so what about the road ahead? What are some emerging controversies?

Speaker 3:
[71:45] So one is betting on sports or on other things for that matter, sports betting on apps and prediction markets. And for a long time, we didn't allow betting on sports or we'd limited it. I think you could always pretty much bet on horse racing in the United States. Because after all, how can you not bet on horse racing?

Speaker 1:
[72:02] Don't eat them, but eat them.

Speaker 3:
[72:03] Exactly, that's part of the fun. That's why you don't eat them.

Speaker 1:
[72:06] They're for betting, not for eating.

Speaker 3:
[72:07] 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.

Speaker 1:
[72:16] Yeah, not potentially.

Speaker 3:
[72:17] 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 so that your bets will come in more.

Speaker 1:
[72:29] Those are coming out more and more and more. Almost daily we get another scandal.

Speaker 3:
[72:32] And it used to be that there was always this crime associated with gambling and sports about influencing the game. And it used to be that the typical kind of involvement of criminals in sports was in point shaving. So you're a basketball player and I'm asking you to not win by so much.

Speaker 1:
[72:50] Cover the sprat.

Speaker 3:
[72:50] Your team will still win.

Speaker 1:
[72:52] Could even be losing. As long as you lose by six, you'll still win.

Speaker 3:
[72:56] 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.

Speaker 2:
[73:04] Oh, wow.

Speaker 3:
[73:05] 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.

Speaker 1:
[73:23] 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.

Speaker 3:
[73:42] No, it's a real addiction. Not everyone is subject to it, of course.

Speaker 1:
[73:45] 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 drink alcohol if it's on you. But we know better, right? We know better for these young men. It's very paternalistic for us to say, you should have the right to become insolvent.

Speaker 3:
[74:02] You should be allowed to drink alcohol, but we don't serve it in elementary school cafeterias. We try to regulate a little bit. Bartenders have a certain responsibility. They can cut you off, and they may have to. They may be liable.

Speaker 2:
[74:13] There's a warning label on the bottle.

Speaker 1:
[74:16] Also, we stop serving alcohol in public at certain times.

Speaker 3:
[74:19] So gambling, maybe it'll benefit from being re-regulated that way. It's a pretty recent thing that we've allowed the sports betting, a Supreme Court decision again. So there's two things we've talked about. One is the addictive feature of betting on the game. The other is the effect on sports. If you're asking athletes, if you're pressuring athletes not to make the last free throw because you've got a bet. And of course, we're seeing this now with prediction markets. If you know someone who knows that the president of Venezuela is about to be abducted, you could make a lot of money on a prediction market by betting on that. You know, that's a little worrisome if you worry about corruption in high office and what's for sale and what isn't.

Speaker 1:
[74:56] 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.

Speaker 3:
[75:08] 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.

Speaker 1:
[75:18] Unless you're in Congress, but yes.

Speaker 3:
[75:19] Unless you're in Congress, yeah. What can you do? 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. We should be thinking about managing them, especially when there are things that we can't ban, even if we would like to, like alcohol. So decriminalizing drugs, we probably need to treat addicts more like patients than like criminals compared to what we're doing now. But maybe not completely not like criminals because it's very compelling to be addicted to something. I think there's a quote I found that's attributed to Mark Twain, which probably means he never really said it, which says, quitting smoking is easy. I've done it a thousand times. We can regulate the amount of nicotine in cigarettes. 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 school student, it's a terrible idea to get addicted to nicotine, which is apparently a very powerful addicter.

Speaker 1:
[76:30] I'm the product of this law. It happened. I was furious. I outlawed in California flavored tobacco, and I liked winter green. 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 two 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.

Speaker 3:
[76:59] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[77:00] And it's all but gone now because everyone liked all the flavors. And I'm like, God, I hate to admit that that kind of work because the aging libertarian in me was like, I hate that it helps and it's true.

Speaker 3:
[77:10] 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.

Speaker 1:
[77:22] We're going to inch towards a better and better percentage is all we're going to do.

Speaker 3:
[77:26] And we're going to have to think about trade-offs and do experiments and learn what works. And that's really what I'm concluding in this book.

Speaker 1:
[77:33] 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.

Speaker 3:
[77:50] Nice to meet you guys too.

Speaker 1:
[77:54] Hi there, this is Hermium Permium. If you like that, you're going to love the Fact Check with Ms. Monica. So I think I have a fun and ironic update.

Speaker 2:
[78:03] Okay, let's hear it.

Speaker 1:
[78:04] About our debate.

Speaker 2:
[78:06] Oh, about skin marks?

Speaker 1:
[78:09] No, my arms.

Speaker 2:
[78:10] Oh, okay.

Speaker 1:
[78:12] With waving the flag.

Speaker 2:
[78:13] Okay. If you recall. I think you need to tell people.

Speaker 1:
[78:15] Yeah, so I was saying I was in a bit of a pickle because I wanted to both work my arms out in the race, I waved the flag at the MotoGP race, and also my arms don't fit in my suit.

Speaker 2:
[78:27] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[78:27] So I was really, Sophie's Choice didn't know what to do. You were really urging me to skip arm day.

Speaker 2:
[78:33] Yes, I was.

Speaker 1:
[78:34] For the safety of the riding.

Speaker 2:
[78:36] Yes, I was.

Speaker 1:
[78:37] Big debate. Red carpets came into, high heels got invoked.

Speaker 2:
[78:42] What's that mean?

Speaker 1:
[78:43] I was pointing out that you're uncomfortable in high heels.

Speaker 2:
[78:46] Oh, during our debate.

Speaker 1:
[78:46] Yes, yes, yes, yes. Just bringing back all the details.

Speaker 2:
[78:48] Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1:
[78:50] I went to Austin with that on the table. The question was, what was I going to do? Heed your advice, be responsible, or be vain.

Speaker 2:
[79:02] But you made very clear to me that it wasn't a safety hazard.

Speaker 1:
[79:06] No, it wasn't.

Speaker 2:
[79:06] You could move, that I was overreacting.

Speaker 1:
[79:09] It's uncomfortable. I chose vanity.

Speaker 2:
[79:11] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[79:12] Definitely worked my arms out on Saturday, and they did not ask me to wave the flag.

Speaker 2:
[79:18] Right.

Speaker 1:
[79:20] So that's funny. So that right there is a win for you. That's like a win.

Speaker 2:
[79:24] No, it's not.

Speaker 1:
[79:25] Well, it is in a funny way, which is like I did this thing, which I shouldn't have done, and then I didn't even get to do the thing. Maybe I won't use the word win. I'll just say that's a funny mark in your category, and then we'll get to mine, which was, so I did. I got my arms all plumped up and vascularized.

Speaker 2:
[79:42] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[79:43] Didn't wave the flag. Didn't even ask me.

Speaker 2:
[79:45] Yeah. Who did?

Speaker 1:
[79:47] I don't know. I don't know. It's funny you don't pay as much attention when you're not the one waving the flag.

Speaker 2:
[79:52] Which then goes to show how many people aren't paying attention when it's you.

Speaker 1:
[79:55] I did have someone last year text me and go, oh my god, you were waving. I mean, another MotoGP fan noticed I was waving the flag. Anyways, I did not wave the flag. Wasn't asked to wave the flag. I was like, well, that was for nothing. But then, and here's the irony, the ironic twist, went to the track on Monday. I don't know if it's because it was so hot in Austin, whatever, arms weren't tight.

Speaker 2:
[80:17] You're fine.

Speaker 1:
[80:18] No issue.

Speaker 2:
[80:19] I know.

Speaker 1:
[80:20] So both things happened in reverse.

Speaker 2:
[80:22] That's right.

Speaker 1:
[80:23] That's how I feel like it's a win for both of us.

Speaker 2:
[80:26] It's a win for me if you're safe. That's all I care about. I'm not against you having big arms on a flag wave, only if it comes at the risk of your safety, which you assured me it didn't, but I didn't believe you, and also you were lying to me.

Speaker 1:
[80:42] It was just a hilarious outcome.

Speaker 2:
[80:44] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[80:45] Harrison Barnes waved the flag this year.

Speaker 2:
[80:48] He's an NBA player for the San Antonio Spurs.

Speaker 1:
[80:52] Okay, great. So he had a San Antonio Spurs. And good, because presumably he was very tall. He could get that. Six, seven. Six, seven, get that flag up in the air.

Speaker 2:
[81:00] Six, seven.

Speaker 1:
[81:01] In fact, I might have to go back on my DVR and watch him wave the flag.

Speaker 2:
[81:04] That's nice.

Speaker 1:
[81:05] And I wanna see how his arm, you know, these NBA players have really nice arms, I'd probably like to check out his arms.

Speaker 2:
[81:09] Okay. Yeah, but, okay.

Speaker 1:
[81:12] I was just talking side note. Oh yeah, great!

Speaker 2:
[81:15] Really nice arms, Rob just put a picture up.

Speaker 1:
[81:17] And great delts, and he's got some vascularity in his delts, in his left delt.

Speaker 2:
[81:21] He looks handsome.

Speaker 1:
[81:22] Yeah. He looks like he's screaming in that photo.

Speaker 2:
[81:25] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[81:25] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[81:26] Of happiness.

Speaker 1:
[81:28] Victory was his.

Speaker 3:
[81:29] I think it says that's when he found out he was gonna wave the flags.

Speaker 1:
[81:32] Oh, that probably makes sense. They probably just told him.

Speaker 2:
[81:35] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[81:35] Okay. So I was talking to Ricky Glassman yesterday.

Speaker 2:
[81:38] Oh, great.

Speaker 1:
[81:38] And it was ostensibly, he called for advice, which is always so flattering. I love this role I get to have in Ricky's life. It's very, yeah, I really cherish it. So we're talking about business stuff and everything. And then I don't know how we got on the topic of muscles, but we just went off and he's like, yeah, I don't know how to explain it. I guess cause I grew up watching Swartz and Nigger and Sylvester Stallone, I'm like, that must be it too. And he's like, yeah, I just love them so much. And then we were talking about like to what extent do we love them? And I'm like, you know, I want to squeeze them and stuff. Like where is this line? This is very weird.

Speaker 2:
[82:20] Homoerotic.

Speaker 1:
[82:21] Where's that line?

Speaker 2:
[82:22] You're attracted to it in a-

Speaker 1:
[82:25] I think there's layers, in an aspirational way. Like, oh, I'd like to look like that.

Speaker 2:
[82:28] Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[82:29] But I also want to feel them. Like I want to squeeze the biceps.

Speaker 2:
[82:33] You don't want to feel their dick, do you?

Speaker 1:
[82:36] No. We went through like, well, how far does it go? I would definitely want to squeeze Schwarzenegger's biceps, and I'd like to feel, I'd even like to run my hands across Brad Pitt's abs in Fight Club.

Speaker 2:
[82:49] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[82:49] Right? I'd like to feel that.

Speaker 2:
[82:51] What do you want to feel?

Speaker 1:
[82:53] All the definition and the ridges. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[82:56] Can you relate to that?

Speaker 1:
[82:58] Would you like to run your hand over his abdomen?

Speaker 2:
[83:00] No, but I'm straight.

Speaker 1:
[83:02] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[83:03] You know what I don't want to do is rub my hands over like Kristen's arm muscle.

Speaker 1:
[83:09] Right.

Speaker 2:
[83:09] I have zero.

Speaker 1:
[83:10] I know. This is why it was worth us discussing.

Speaker 2:
[83:13] That's why you're wondering if you're gay.

Speaker 1:
[83:14] It's like we're on some trajectory, we're on some spectrum on the Kinsey scale.

Speaker 2:
[83:20] I don't think it's that.

Speaker 1:
[83:21] Where we like want to touch and feel. That's like, that's interesting.

Speaker 2:
[83:23] Well, because I think it's still like, you want to touch and feel it so you can kind of see like.

Speaker 1:
[83:29] What it would feel like if I could rub my arms.

Speaker 2:
[83:31] It's still about you guys.

Speaker 1:
[83:33] You think so?

Speaker 2:
[83:34] Yeah, I mean, women have, I have this all the time, like with other women.

Speaker 1:
[83:39] Do you want to feel any of women's boobs or anything?

Speaker 2:
[83:41] No.

Speaker 1:
[83:42] But I do hear that from other women that are straight. Yeah, they're like, oh, I want to squeeze those boobs. And they're straight.

Speaker 2:
[83:47] Okay, well, I've never ever wanted to squeeze.

Speaker 1:
[83:49] You've never had a friend of yours ask if they could touch your boobs? Nope. Never. Even drunk.

Speaker 2:
[83:56] No.

Speaker 1:
[83:57] You could want to squeeze them without being sexually attracted.

Speaker 2:
[84:00] No, I guess. But like, whatever. I don't know. I can't speak on behalf of anyone other than me.

Speaker 1:
[84:05] We've got a sidetracked.

Speaker 2:
[84:06] Yeah. I have no desire to touch anyone's, squeeze anyone's boobs or touch their genital parts. How about a butt? Touch?

Speaker 1:
[84:17] Yeah. Like if you saw a big, buoyant butt, you don't want to squeeze it to see what it feels like in your hand?

Speaker 2:
[84:22] No.

Speaker 1:
[84:22] Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:
[84:24] I might want to say like a female.

Speaker 1:
[84:26] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[84:27] Yeah. I might be like, oh my God, that person has such a nice body. Like I wish my body looked like that. But I don't need to touch it. I don't need to touch it to know that. I just like, I'm like, oh, they have like great X, Y or Z. I wish I had that. And then, you know, then you hate yourself for a little bit. And then.

Speaker 1:
[84:47] What are you chomping on over there?

Speaker 2:
[84:48] Oh, I have some lozenges.

Speaker 1:
[84:50] Oh, okay.

Speaker 2:
[84:51] I'm still sick. Oh, and I have a sick spray. I almost brought it since the boats have sprays. No, it's like natural.

Speaker 1:
[85:00] Oh, okay. So it's pageantry for show.

Speaker 2:
[85:05] I mean, I'm not better.

Speaker 1:
[85:06] It's just an activity to do.

Speaker 2:
[85:07] Well, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[85:08] Okay, so no desire to touch.

Speaker 2:
[85:09] Okay, I have no desire to touch, but I definitely have admiration, a lot of admiration for a lot of female bodies, but it's still about me. That's, it's still like, I wish I looked like that. It's never outward really towards them. It's like, how can I look like that? And I think that's what's happening with you guys too, but maybe the feeling is like, it's still about that. It's like, hey, what does it feel like to have that?

Speaker 1:
[85:38] I wanna feel the heft of things too, you know? The weight of things and the heft.

Speaker 2:
[85:42] Right. Yeah. But let me ask you something. Yeah, ask me. So you wanna feel it.

Speaker 1:
[85:50] Squeeze and prod?

Speaker 2:
[85:51] Yeah, touch. You wanna get your physical hands on it. With their consent. And, but do you wanna do that for females? Like, when you see abs on a female, are you like, ooh, I wanna touch that? Not really.

Speaker 1:
[86:09] No. But I regularly see butts in spandex or something.

Speaker 2:
[86:15] Or boobs.

Speaker 1:
[86:15] Sure. And I do wanna squeeze it.

Speaker 2:
[86:18] That is sexual. Those are the sexual parts. Like, that's different than what you're feeling towards these men and their abs.

Speaker 1:
[86:27] That's true.

Speaker 2:
[86:27] And it goes to show, if you're not wanting to touch the female abs, it's not about muscles. Exact, no, it's about actual muscles on the men and how you can get them. Mm-hmm. Or like how you can relate to them or something. I think most people out in the world are aware of other people's faces and bodies and whatever, sexually or not.

Speaker 1:
[86:53] Yeah, they're probably seeing the ones, whatever one they want.

Speaker 2:
[86:56] Exactly, that's my whole point.

Speaker 1:
[86:57] That is your point.

Speaker 2:
[86:59] Or if whatever they feel sexually, their sexual orientation, they might see, you know, like if you're straight, you're gonna see the opposite sex, a little with more curiosity sexually, but the same.

Speaker 1:
[87:14] Of their erogenous zones.

Speaker 2:
[87:16] Exactly. Cause when you're attracted to someone, it could be really random things you're attracted to on their body. Not just their erogenous zones, you know?

Speaker 1:
[87:28] Mom's pubis, a shoulder blade.

Speaker 2:
[87:30] That's erogenous, that's the clear erogenous zone. But you know, I really like hands. And so I do tend to look at men's hands a lot.

Speaker 1:
[87:41] This is so fascinating. Again, very anecdotal. I have no idea what the granddad would say. But certainly I'm aware of so many men who have foot fetishes.

Speaker 2:
[87:51] Right.

Speaker 1:
[87:52] I don't really know any women that do. I've never heard a woman talk about it.

Speaker 2:
[87:55] This is so interesting. This just came up on Elizabeth and Andrews.

Speaker 1:
[87:58] Oh, really? But I know many women who are super into hands. And I don't know a ton of guys who are super into hands.

Speaker 2:
[88:05] Right.

Speaker 1:
[88:06] What is going on? Why would one...

Speaker 2:
[88:10] Well, I know why women do. Hands are a huge part of sexual interaction.

Speaker 1:
[88:17] Because they're going to be all over you.

Speaker 2:
[88:18] Yeah. They're all over you. They're in you potentially.

Speaker 1:
[88:22] Sometimes they're in you.

Speaker 2:
[88:23] They're on you.

Speaker 1:
[88:23] They're in you. They're in charge of all the action.

Speaker 2:
[88:26] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[88:27] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[88:27] So, that's why I think women can be attractive.

Speaker 1:
[88:30] So, do you think these guys with foot fetishes want to be manhandled by their feet?

Speaker 2:
[88:35] Well, that's what I don't- Probably.

Speaker 1:
[88:36] I've seen pornography where guys are getting jerked off with a woman's feet.

Speaker 2:
[88:41] What?

Speaker 1:
[88:42] Yes, I have seen that.

Speaker 2:
[88:43] That seems very hard to do.

Speaker 1:
[88:45] For her, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[88:46] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[88:47] Yeah, you gotta really be coordinated.

Speaker 2:
[88:48] And how can you do that gracefully? It feels like you'd look so weird, the woman.

Speaker 1:
[88:53] Yeah. Also, how do you gently bring up, like, hey, are you coordinated with your feet? Like, if that's a huge thing for you, that's like your ultimate, like the guy we interviewed for Armchair Anonymous.

Speaker 2:
[89:04] Yeah, Kinks.

Speaker 1:
[89:05] Who, like, his toes played with. So it's like, he wants, this is an important thing to have.

Speaker 2:
[89:12] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[89:13] Is this foot job, we'll call it, for sake of time. How do you suss out whether that partner's gonna be able to do that? Because I imagine there would be a lot of gals that were fully up for it.

Speaker 2:
[89:26] And they just can't do it.

Speaker 1:
[89:27] And can't do it.

Speaker 2:
[89:27] Yeah, I feel like most people can't do that.

Speaker 1:
[89:29] It's so corny. If I try to, man, yeah, forget that. I mean, also, the amount of leg strength you'd have to have.

Speaker 2:
[89:35] That's what I'm saying. It's actually a lot more than the foot. You also have to be flexible depending on...

Speaker 1:
[89:40] Those guys should be, they should be more generous and just be like, can you lay down on your back and I'll hump your feet?

Speaker 2:
[89:45] Okay, so are they putting the penis...

Speaker 1:
[89:48] Between their feet.

Speaker 2:
[89:49] This, like this?

Speaker 3:
[89:52] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[89:53] Oh, okay, I imagined it like...

Speaker 1:
[89:54] That requires a lot of quad and ab and core.

Speaker 2:
[89:59] I imagined it like that.

Speaker 1:
[90:01] That could be fine too.

Speaker 2:
[90:02] But that's hard.

Speaker 1:
[90:03] Yeah, that would work too. Actually, I'm not even sure of the way I said the first one. I think that feels more natural, what you just did. Where it's the inside of your feet.

Speaker 2:
[90:12] Yeah, but then that also is hard on the legs.

Speaker 1:
[90:14] On the IT band.

Speaker 2:
[90:15] Yeah, you have to be like, at one of these, you know? Okay, I hope nobody asks me to do that, because I'm just gonna look bad.

Speaker 1:
[90:23] What if you say, give me a couple days of practice on a banana or something to see if I can even do that.

Speaker 2:
[90:29] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[90:30] In concept, I'm fine with it, and there's nothing wrong with that. In theory, thank you.

Speaker 2:
[90:34] Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. But I think, well, in this...

Speaker 1:
[90:41] So we gotta circle back?

Speaker 2:
[90:42] No, this is more evidence to it. Why the hand and the foot fetish, and like I said, I think the hand makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[90:50] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[90:51] I think foot, I think people who have foot fetishes, I think women's feet like remind them of the vagina. I don't understand why.

Speaker 1:
[91:00] Really?

Speaker 2:
[91:00] Maybe because the bottom part's so soft.

Speaker 1:
[91:02] What are you basing that on? Have you heard someone say that?

Speaker 2:
[91:05] I just know it.

Speaker 1:
[91:05] It's just you're leaping to that.

Speaker 2:
[91:07] No, I just know it in my heart.

Speaker 1:
[91:08] Oh, you do?

Speaker 2:
[91:08] You know?

Speaker 1:
[91:09] Should we call Eric?

Speaker 2:
[91:10] Yeah, we can.

Speaker 1:
[91:11] I mean, just to find out if that's...

Speaker 2:
[91:12] Remember, we've talked to him about this though, and his is weirder. His is not like...

Speaker 1:
[91:16] It doesn't, it's not as conventional.

Speaker 2:
[91:18] I don't think so.

Speaker 1:
[91:19] Also, we should say, Eric's not the kind of person who's buying photos off the internet.

Speaker 2:
[91:22] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[91:23] Yeah, yeah. I think it's a low grade. He just appreciates it.

Speaker 2:
[91:27] He appreciates the aesthetic a lot, and especially because he worked in women's shoes.

Speaker 1:
[91:31] As a young boy.

Speaker 2:
[91:32] But he's never said he wants to suck any toes or anything. So his is...

Speaker 1:
[91:38] He didn't suck your toes at one point?

Speaker 2:
[91:39] No, he just cheese grated them.

Speaker 1:
[91:41] Oh, okay.

Speaker 2:
[91:42] He just manicured them. Again, like he wanted aesthetically...

Speaker 1:
[91:46] Yeah, I guess he wouldn't have sucked your toes.

Speaker 2:
[91:47] No! Oh my god, that would have crossed the line.

Speaker 1:
[91:50] But if we would let anyone, it'd be Eric.

Speaker 2:
[91:53] Yeah, but like I don't think... I don't know. That is intimate. Well, by the way, toe sucking is a sexual thing.

Speaker 1:
[92:02] Sure, standard biz.

Speaker 2:
[92:03] Yeah, and I think it's because your feet are very sensitive, just like your vagina. I think there's some similarities.

Speaker 1:
[92:12] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[92:13] I think that's what it's about.

Speaker 1:
[92:15] Having no draw to the feet, I can't begin to figure out what's going on.

Speaker 2:
[92:20] Well, I think I do.

Speaker 1:
[92:21] You think you cracked it?

Speaker 2:
[92:22] I really do think I cracked it.

Speaker 1:
[92:24] I just think it's interesting that you think the foot looks like the vagina. Of all the body parts, if that's the argument, then I think people would be way more into armpits.

Speaker 2:
[92:31] Not looks. There's just something about it that I think for these people. Yeah, like the softness, the sensitivity. Well, if you have good feet, they're soft. But if you have bad feet, they're great for you.

Speaker 1:
[92:46] The toenails.

Speaker 2:
[92:48] They're like, yeah, they're manicured in a way that a lot of vaginas are, like Kempt, as we talked about last time, Kempt or Unkempt.

Speaker 1:
[92:57] Sean Kempt?

Speaker 2:
[92:59] Yeah, so I just, I think that's what it is. And if you have a foot fetish, please weigh in.

Speaker 1:
[93:06] Let us know.

Speaker 2:
[93:06] On whether or not I'm right.

Speaker 1:
[93:08] You might not want to do it in public on the comments, but.

Speaker 2:
[93:11] People also, they don't know what it is. I just decided that about hands, and I think that's right. But that's not what's happening when I'm at the grocery store and I see someone have nice men with a strong hand. I'm not like, oh, I want that on me. It's just like, it's a visceral thing, where I'm just like, oh, that's hot.

Speaker 1:
[93:31] Yeah, you get a PQ, you get a little bolt of electricity.

Speaker 2:
[93:37] And some people, I think I actually don't get it from a lot of things that a lot of people get it from.

Speaker 1:
[93:43] Like? Like what do you hear friends talking about? And you're like, oh, I can't even relate. For me, that's like, I have a friend that talks about ankles and talks about feet. And I'm like, what are you talking about? What the ankles?

Speaker 2:
[93:55] Because it's skinny? What is that?

Speaker 1:
[93:57] I don't even want to go into it, but there are guys with things with ankles and I'm just like, how could, of all the things to look at, why is that even where you would be focused on? You've got eyes, lips, different body parts, erogenous zones.

Speaker 2:
[94:16] I'm on fire.

Speaker 1:
[94:18] Wow, you're really solving a lot of mysteries, age-old mysteries.

Speaker 2:
[94:21] I think I now understand the ankles.

Speaker 1:
[94:23] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[94:23] Because conventionally, you don't really, they're covered up. Mine are.

Speaker 1:
[94:31] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[94:31] People are wearing socks, people are wearing pants, shoes, whatever. So it's kind of like, oh, I'm seeing something I'm not really supposed to be seeing. And I have that, like, with certain things, if I see that normally are covered, like, okay, like, I really like necks.

Speaker 1:
[94:47] Okay, those are always on display.

Speaker 2:
[94:49] Not always, because people have jackets and shirts.

Speaker 1:
[94:52] Pete, you think everyone's wearing turtlenecks?

Speaker 2:
[94:54] Jackets and shirts and, like, hats. Okay, that one's a little more of a...

Speaker 1:
[94:59] I think necks are pretty...

Speaker 2:
[95:00] On display.

Speaker 1:
[95:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[95:02] Okay, that's probably right. But it still just feels like...

Speaker 1:
[95:05] You just like necks.

Speaker 2:
[95:06] No, it's just...

Speaker 1:
[95:06] It's not that they're not on display, you just like them.

Speaker 2:
[95:08] Well, it feels like, it's not, like, right in front of me. It's not eyes or lips or something.

Speaker 1:
[95:14] But do you mean specifically the back of the neck?

Speaker 2:
[95:15] Back, back of the neck.

Speaker 1:
[95:16] Oh, that's different.

Speaker 2:
[95:17] Yeah, back of the neck.

Speaker 1:
[95:18] Okay, I'm with you. Front of the neck, you're getting as much front of the neck as you are face. I don't care about front of the neck.

Speaker 2:
[95:24] No, back of the neck. Back of the neck.

Speaker 1:
[95:27] And what are you looking for in the back of the neck?

Speaker 2:
[95:29] I don't know, it's just like I just know. I know when I see it that I like it. And I do think it's like, oh, I'm not really supposed to be looking at that. Cause like they can't see me looking at it maybe, like there's some stuff in there.

Speaker 1:
[95:43] Okay, now back to the what your friends, do you find that you hear your friends talking about specific body parts in men that you're like, I don't get it?

Speaker 2:
[95:54] Well, I'm never like, I don't get it because no one is saying anything weird. But like, yeah, like if you're like at a grocery store, this is all the stuff's happening at the grocery store.

Speaker 1:
[96:05] Yeah, it's hilarious cause you order all your groceries, but yeah.

Speaker 2:
[96:12] Oh my God.

Speaker 1:
[96:14] It's like you're doing an improv about it. It's like, we need a location. Grocery, you're always going, grocery store.

Speaker 2:
[96:19] No, because when I-

Speaker 1:
[96:19] Can we get a location that these brother and sister would be in, grocery store?

Speaker 2:
[96:23] No, it's just where most like strangers are all together.

Speaker 1:
[96:26] You see a lot of strangers, yeah. And you're in lines and you're-

Speaker 2:
[96:28] Exactly, you're behind people. So if someone's at the grocery store, oh, Jess calls this something, okay? So whenever he sees anyone wearing a shirt that's like kind of cropped or like right at the pants, he calls that marinara.

Speaker 1:
[96:47] Oh, interesting.

Speaker 2:
[96:48] Because when you go to grab the top of the shelf, you grab the marinara.

Speaker 1:
[96:55] Which in his mind isn't always marinara.

Speaker 2:
[96:56] It's marinara.

Speaker 1:
[96:57] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[96:57] It exposes the stomach.

Speaker 1:
[96:59] Arrows, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[97:00] And the arrows and like abs.

Speaker 1:
[97:02] Arrows are really powerful.

Speaker 2:
[97:04] Arrows are powerful, they are powerful.

Speaker 1:
[97:07] Yeah, I feel like they're, of the many things a man could have, arrows are like really high up on the list.

Speaker 2:
[97:13] Now, do you like arrows on a woman?

Speaker 1:
[97:14] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[97:15] Yeah. Well, arrows are literally arrows, they're pointing to your genitals.

Speaker 1:
[97:19] They're telling, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's funny, and it's not that I'm like an ab person, so it's not like I need a six pack, but yeah, even arrows on a gal, you're like.

Speaker 2:
[97:29] Definition.

Speaker 1:
[97:31] I think there's something that we know that we don't know about the arrows. And this goes for a lot of different fitness things, which is like arrows are really hard to get. You're really athletic if you have arrows.

Speaker 2:
[97:42] Oh.

Speaker 1:
[97:43] And so somehow your body knows evolutionarily, like that person's very fit.

Speaker 2:
[97:49] Oh, interesting.

Speaker 1:
[97:50] And then there's other things where it's like every guy does bench press and has a big chest. You're just like, yeah, guys have big, it's like, doesn't really say anything.

Speaker 2:
[97:58] I think it's more that it's pointing to the chest.

Speaker 1:
[97:59] I think that's why butts too are really powerful.

Speaker 2:
[98:02] So I don't have a thing for butts.

Speaker 1:
[98:05] At all. When you watch like an NFL game, you're not like mesmerized by.

Speaker 2:
[98:09] I'm not a butt girl. But anyway, marinara. So if someone is marinara, sometimes it's intriguing to me, but I think most women, that's very intriguing. And I'm like, hit or miss. Hit or miss, not always, even if it's like really nice. I'm just like, I like more random things.

Speaker 1:
[98:40] Hands, necks, earlobes.

Speaker 2:
[98:42] Sometimes I just like, I'll see something random on someone's body, like their forearm or something. And I'm like, oh, I get PQs.

Speaker 1:
[98:50] Wow. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3:
[98:53] Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Speaker 1:
[99:06] Knee cap ever?

Speaker 2:
[99:07] No. No, I've never been attracted to anyone's knee cap.

Speaker 1:
[99:11] Me either.

Speaker 2:
[99:12] But you know, I remember we had Husson on, and he said, and I thought this was interesting, he said he's really attracted to, specifically Indian women.

Speaker 1:
[99:25] The little hairs, that one.

Speaker 2:
[99:27] He did talk about that, but he talked about in a woman's arm, an Indian woman specifically, like armpit, there's often like extra fat right here.

Speaker 1:
[99:38] More folds.

Speaker 2:
[99:38] I have it, and I like, I despise it.

Speaker 3:
[99:41] Oh, you hate it.

Speaker 2:
[99:42] Oh my God, I hate it.

Speaker 3:
[99:42] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[99:43] But I remember him specifically talking about that.

Speaker 1:
[99:46] But he loved it.

Speaker 2:
[99:47] And that he liked it, and I was like, oh, you know, there really is like, there is a lid for every pot.

Speaker 1:
[99:53] Can I ask for every seat, as my father would say, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[99:55] There really is, like, you never know what people are attracted to. I know.

Speaker 1:
[99:59] And you just decide, oh, no one likes this, and then you will confirm that.

Speaker 2:
[100:04] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[100:05] And you're missing out on, like, yeah, dude, you see it all the time. We see people that are paired up, and you're like, wow, that person clearly has all the options in the world, and that's who they picked. That's interesting. And it should be comforting.

Speaker 2:
[100:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[100:20] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[100:21] Yeah, it should be. It should be comforting. It's like, someone will like this.

Speaker 1:
[100:26] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[100:26] But also it's like, I don't know, I go back and forth, I guess, because, you know, I don't like that skin, flesh-y, fatty part of my arm.

Speaker 1:
[100:36] Arm pit?

Speaker 2:
[100:37] Arm pit. It's like, it's not really the pit. Well, I guess it is the pit, sort of, but it's more like on the side. Anyway, I hate it. And I guess it could be like, well, somebody will like this. Like, that's... But I don't like it. And I think it's okay. It's like, I should probably just care about what I like. I don't like it. So I don't need to find someone who likes me.

Speaker 1:
[100:57] It's a better rule of thumb to be making decisions for yourself and know what others will like about you. In general. But then you really gotta ask yourself, well why don't you like it? My hunch is you don't like it because you think other people don't like it.

Speaker 2:
[101:09] Probably. Because it's not on the bodies of the women that I look at and I'm like, oh I wanna look like that.

Speaker 1:
[101:15] Yeah, but don't wanna touch.

Speaker 2:
[101:17] I just don't wanna touch. I don't wanna touch their armpit.

Speaker 1:
[101:20] You don't ever wanna poke a big butt to see what the consistency is?

Speaker 2:
[101:23] Never.

Speaker 1:
[101:23] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[101:24] The thing is, when we talk about this with Nikki, whoever you're attracted to.

Speaker 1:
[101:27] Yeah, they like it, man.

Speaker 2:
[101:30] You like all the parts.

Speaker 1:
[101:31] Yes, totally, totally. You like it all. Yep.

Speaker 2:
[101:35] You just gotta have a little confidence. That's why personality is real. Like, having a good personality and being someone, somebody wants to be around and hang out with. Like, once you're that person, I mean, I say this as someone with no boyfriends. Once you're that person.

Speaker 1:
[101:52] And I'm pretty strict.

Speaker 2:
[101:53] God, does that mean I have a bad personality?

Speaker 1:
[101:55] Why?

Speaker 2:
[101:56] Because I'm saying, if you have a good personality, you can get people.

Speaker 1:
[101:59] I think this is the, what's funny is, I think you're giving yourself this advice.

Speaker 2:
[102:03] What do you mean?

Speaker 1:
[102:04] I think you might be a little too, what's the word? Picky's the word, I guess. You gotta go with who's got a good personality and then see if you get attracted to them after that. You don't know anyone with a good personality?

Speaker 2:
[102:17] The people I know who have good personalities are my friends.

Speaker 1:
[102:20] Right.

Speaker 2:
[102:21] And they're all married or they're Jess.

Speaker 1:
[102:24] Yeah, you're not at the grocery store.

Speaker 2:
[102:25] I don't go to the grocery store, no. I'm not gonna get their personality really from the grocery store.

Speaker 1:
[102:30] It's funny, you're out a lot.

Speaker 2:
[102:32] I am out a lot, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[102:33] I know you're out a lot, so I'm a little confused.

Speaker 2:
[102:37] Can I be, I'm not to be, good personalities are few and far between.

Speaker 1:
[102:41] Are they?

Speaker 2:
[102:42] Yeah, they really are. Across the board, women and men. Good personalities that you really want. Well, I'm misled, that's the problem. My friends, the people in my life have great personalities.

Speaker 1:
[102:56] I was gonna say, we interview insanely interesting people all week.

Speaker 2:
[102:59] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[103:00] And then generally if I hang out with somebody, it's someone in our friendship group. So I probably don't have a great read on the general options personality-wise. Other than when I'm in Nashville, I'm just hanging out with my neighbors and stuff and out at restaurants.

Speaker 2:
[103:16] Right. I do think that Jess being my best friend Is problematic. is a hindrance.

Speaker 1:
[103:24] Yeah, big time.

Speaker 2:
[103:27] He is the most special personality of anyone I've ever met in my entire life. And I spent all my time with him.

Speaker 1:
[103:33] Uh-huh. I know.

Speaker 2:
[103:35] Even Marinara. Like, who am I going to meet that is Marinara? Like, no one.

Speaker 1:
[103:42] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[103:43] And so this is where I really think sometimes. I'm like, look, I got so lucky.

Speaker 1:
[103:48] You should send him to conversion camp.

Speaker 2:
[103:50] No, we're not attracted to each other. And that's what's great about us. He has an incredible personality and I get free access to that personality and it's so lucky.

Speaker 1:
[104:02] That is a problem. If you're deciding, you meet a guy, you've been on a date with him and then you're deciding the next night, do I hang out with Jess or do I hang out with this guy? That's, yeah, this is interesting. This is a problem kind of.

Speaker 2:
[104:15] It is. That is what goes through my head. Of course it is. Like, okay, I have two hours to hang out tonight. Am I going to go on a date or am I going to hang out with this person that's going to make me laugh for two hours?

Speaker 1:
[104:27] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[104:28] I'm always going to pick that.

Speaker 1:
[104:30] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[104:30] So sometimes I think like, oh, maybe I should just, in fact, most days I think I think this. Like, I'm just so lucky. I have these incredible people in my life, multiple, multiple incredible people that I think if anyone would be so lucky to have one of these people in their life, and I have so many. And maybe I should just be lucky and grateful for that. And like, that's enough.

Speaker 1:
[104:54] How about this, if I said there's this new breakthrough, AI figured this out.

Speaker 2:
[104:59] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[104:59] You and Jess could take this pill. They took your DNA and they engineered it. And when you, after you wake up tomorrow morning, you're gonna be insanely attracted to Jess, and he's gonna be insanely attracted to you.

Speaker 2:
[105:08] Oh. Would I do it?

Speaker 1:
[105:10] Yeah, right?

Speaker 2:
[105:11] I know, but what if it ruined everything? This is a Black Mirror episode. This should be a Black Mirror. It could ruin everything. I think you just gotta be grateful for what you have.

Speaker 1:
[105:22] All right. Yeah, let's say you're both attracted to each other, but now all of a sudden he wants to have sex with you more than you want to have sex with him. Now you have this-

Speaker 2:
[105:29] Or what if he's selfish in bed or something? Then bad parts of personalities can come out when these things get involved. Jealousy, there can be a lot of things.

Speaker 1:
[105:40] Jealousy, when he's making other people laugh, all of a sudden it bothers you. Yeah, because right now you don't care. But if he was making some girl just laugh uncontrollably and he was your boyfriend.

Speaker 2:
[105:50] And he was straight. Yeah, you'd be...

Speaker 1:
[105:53] You'd tell him to shut up. Just shut up. Your comedy is only for me.

Speaker 2:
[105:58] I know, it is funny because now when we're out places and he's making people laugh and he's my buddy, I'm like so... Proud. Yeah, I'm like, oh my God, yeah, Jess is my best friend. I'm so lucky.

Speaker 1:
[106:11] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[106:12] But yeah, if he was into girls.

Speaker 1:
[106:16] He's making some hot chick laugh uncontrollably. You could see she was looking at him like, I wish this guy was my boyfriend.

Speaker 2:
[106:23] Yeah, and then she's pulling her shirt down. I'm like, fuck you.

Speaker 1:
[106:28] Get out of here. I break up with you, Jess.

Speaker 2:
[106:32] Yeah, see, it could go badly. I'm leaving it.

Speaker 1:
[106:35] We wouldn't take it.

Speaker 2:
[106:36] Yeah, I'm gonna leave it. All right. Should we do Dax?

Speaker 1:
[106:38] One is Dax, yeah. Okay, Alvin.

Speaker 2:
[106:41] What are all the Nobel Prizes?

Speaker 1:
[106:45] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[106:45] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[106:46] Well, I was so embarrassed when you pointed out I used that wrong.

Speaker 2:
[106:48] I think a lot of people think that.

Speaker 1:
[106:50] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[106:51] Physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, economic sciences. So five of them are presented in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway.

Speaker 1:
[107:07] Interesting.

Speaker 2:
[107:07] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[107:08] Peace gets the most heat, right? That's the one we hear about the most.

Speaker 2:
[107:11] Okay. I was going to ask you, which one would you-

Speaker 1:
[107:14] Physics.

Speaker 2:
[107:15] That's what you think is the best or what you would want?

Speaker 1:
[107:18] Well, I just think it's the most maybe substantive in-

Speaker 2:
[107:23] Medicine.

Speaker 1:
[107:25] Yeah, that's pretty good. I don't know. I just think had someone not cracked the DNA code versus Obama, I think one is more, perpetuates mankind more. And I love Obama.

Speaker 2:
[107:42] I know, but that's actually, I don't mean him specifically, but that's an interesting debate, like what progresses overall.

Speaker 1:
[107:49] Like Obama was a great president, and I don't know how he would quantify of how many lives he saved, but he did not save as many lives 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 encourage people to be good and better.

Speaker 2:
[108:14] But that's huge.

Speaker 1:
[108:15] It's powerful. I put Martin Luther in the camp of the physicists.

Speaker 2:
[108:23] Yeah, that's what I'm saying. There are people who revolutionize the way the rest of the world is going to think about things for the rest of time, and that is very powerful.

Speaker 1:
[108:38] 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. I know, we got to ask the hard questions out here, or we're not doing our job.

Speaker 2:
[108:51] I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that at all. I do not want to do that. I mean, look, I'm most likely to get a piece or a literature prize of this. Those are my actually only even remote options.

Speaker 1:
[109:11] Yeah, that you could even be a contestant.

Speaker 2:
[109:13] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[109:13] Yeah. So you're weighting those higher?

Speaker 2:
[109:16] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[109:17] Okay, yeah. It's funny, I go the opposite way in general. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I generally respect things a lot more than I can't do.

Speaker 2:
[109:24] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[109:24] Which maybe is some kind of arrogance, I don't know, but.

Speaker 2:
[109:28] No, it'd be arrogant the other way.

Speaker 1:
[109:29] If I can't do it, it must be really impressive. Like you can see where that's kind of arrogant.

Speaker 2:
[109:33] I see, I see, I see. Well, both ways, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[109:34] 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 special.

Speaker 2:
[109:43] I guess I'm glad we have all.

Speaker 1:
[109:44] Me too.

Speaker 2:
[109:45] Cause they're all extremely important. Did you hear about Crater Carroll speaking of space?

Speaker 1:
[109:50] The moon?

Speaker 2:
[109:52] Yeah, and.

Speaker 1:
[109:53] What's going on with Crater Carroll? I just saw, there was a rock moving through the moon that was fascinating the footage of that.

Speaker 2:
[109:58] Well, there was like a mark on the moon.

Speaker 1:
[110:01] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[110:01] You know, they got the earth.

Speaker 1:
[110:02] Skidmark?

Speaker 2:
[110:03] No. You're gonna be upset you said that after you hear about this, okay? Because they go, you know, they go on that, what is it, asterisk.

Speaker 1:
[110:11] Artemis.

Speaker 2:
[110:11] Artemis, thank you. Okay, yes, and then they see this and the astronaut asked if they could name it Carol after his deceased wife.

Speaker 1:
[110:21] Oh no, yeah, I'm really upset I said, yeah. That's great. What is it? Do we know what it is?

Speaker 2:
[110:27] It's a crater I think.

Speaker 1:
[110:28] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[110:29] I've been calling it Crater Carol, so I hope it's a crater.

Speaker 1:
[110:31] They've named, I see, Einstein?

Speaker 2:
[110:34] Mm-hmm, Einstein, Dalton and Carol.

Speaker 1:
[110:37] I wonder what Dalton that is.

Speaker 2:
[110:38] And the videos like going around of him, like he's up there and he's saying we want to name it Carol. It's really strange.

Speaker 1:
[110:44] The one thing from this Artemis thing that I believe so certainly, one of the astronauts, you know, they went around the dark side of the moon, which is crazy.

Speaker 2:
[110:53] Do you think they listened?

Speaker 1:
[110:55] They should have.

Speaker 2:
[110:55] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[110:56] That would have been cool. They couldn't, 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.

Speaker 2:
[111:26] I know.

Speaker 1:
[111:27] 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.

Speaker 2:
[111:41] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[111:41] Like what's going on? There's a bunch of people down there. They're lucky enough to be this perfect distance, 93 million miles from the sun where they can have water and oxygen and they live. And they're spending that coming up all these fake differences between each other. You know what we all have in common? We're on a fucking rock floating through.

Speaker 2:
[111:58] Exactly. I'm with you.

Speaker 1:
[112:00] Yeah, it's heartbreaking.

Speaker 2:
[112:02] But you also, you would say, well, evolution where animals and animals' status and everyone hates them and fights.

Speaker 1:
[112:08] 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.

Speaker 2:
[112:31] Sure, but also it's not. It's like we have brains that can't.

Speaker 1:
[112:34] We should be able to, oh, do you figure? We will always choose earth. We will always choose each other.

Speaker 2:
[112:39] That's sweet.

Speaker 1:
[112:40] They're hugging up there.

Speaker 2:
[112:42] These astronauts are so sweet, naming the crater Carol and doing this. Oh my God.

Speaker 1:
[112:48] Oh wow, can you see, is that the northern lights over the upper right tip of the?

Speaker 2:
[112:53] Oh wow.

Speaker 1:
[112:54] Oh, that's cool.

Speaker 2:
[112:56] Earth is so, like, I don't-

Speaker 1:
[112:57] It's a miracle.

Speaker 2:
[112:58] I like don't believe in it.

Speaker 3:
[112:59] I don't either, I don't either.

Speaker 1:
[113:03] Alvin.

Speaker 2:
[113:07] Oh, he was making a point about rules and laws and how sometimes you don't have to make laws because like people just automatically don't do a thing because it's so repugnant.

Speaker 1:
[113:17] Oh, uh-huh.

Speaker 2:
[113:18] Like-

Speaker 1:
[113:18] Curry feces in their hand on the street.

Speaker 2:
[113:20] No, he didn't say that. But worm, he said eating worms, and then I was like I didn't want to say, but like people eat worms.

Speaker 1:
[113:27] Sure. I think he's probably talking about here, but yeah.

Speaker 2:
[113:29] I know, but like a lot of cultures eat worms.

Speaker 1:
[113:33] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[113:34] They do. They really do.

Speaker 1:
[113:38] But he was talking about here horse meat is illegal.

Speaker 2:
[113:40] Right.

Speaker 1:
[113:40] Because here we think it's crazy, but a lot of places they eat horse meat. Then there are some things that are just, we don't need a law against it because here, no one's eating worms. And so the expectation is they won't be in your food.

Speaker 2:
[113:53] Right. I guess.

Speaker 1:
[113:54] And you don't have to legislate against that.

Speaker 2:
[113:57] That's true. But people you want to all of the-

Speaker 1:
[113:59] Some people eat poop probably.

Speaker 2:
[114:01] No!

Speaker 1:
[114:01] Yes. And there's cannibals, Monica. We have-

Speaker 2:
[114:04] That's different than eating worms.

Speaker 1:
[114:06] Okay, great. Let's use cannibalism.

Speaker 2:
[114:09] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[114:09] There are, we have evidence of certain groups being cannibals.

Speaker 2:
[114:15] It is illegal.

Speaker 1:
[114:17] Here.

Speaker 2:
[114:17] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[114:18] Yeah. But not there.

Speaker 2:
[114:20] Right.

Speaker 1:
[114:22] 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.

Speaker 2:
[114:31] 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?

Speaker 1:
[114:39] In France. I don't know if that, I mean, why would there be a law? Because it would imply already murder. So it's like you've already crossed.

Speaker 2:
[114:45] Well, not necessarily. Okay, what is, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[114:47] You're eating, you're at the morgue. That's what he was.

Speaker 2:
[114:50] Yeah, at the morgue, yeah. Or what if you just cut off a bunch, like cut off some of your arm and I ate it?

Speaker 1:
[114:57] There's been these cases, there's been consensual where people eat each other. Like someone wants to get their part of their body eaten, someone on the internet wants to eat someone's body. So in the US, there are no laws that explicitly prohibit cannibalism per se.

Speaker 2:
[115:10] Because again, you don't need it.

Speaker 1:
[115:13] But in Papua New Guinea, where it had been a thing for certain tribes, they might need to put that. They would have to decide to legislate against that.

Speaker 3:
[115:22] Most states have enacted laws that make it effectively impossible to legally obtain and consume human body matter though.

Speaker 2:
[115:29] Okay. I'm so glad that's not my kink.

Speaker 1:
[115:33] Eating humans?

Speaker 2:
[115:35] Yeah, being attracted to them.

Speaker 1:
[115:35] You would never be satiated. It's like if your kink is this thing you can't do, you would never be satiated in life.

Speaker 2:
[115:41] Yeah, but also just.

Speaker 1:
[115:43] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[115:45] 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.

Speaker 1:
[116:07] Thank God Clooney's not a fugitive from law, because I think he had a pot-bellied pig. Famously, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[116:14] Oh, wow. Well, Kaley Cuoco has.

Speaker 1:
[116:16] We can't afford to have him as a criminal, but she has a farm.

Speaker 2:
[116:20] Exactly, it's her lifestyle.

Speaker 1:
[116:21] She could own anything, probably.

Speaker 2:
[116:22] You mentioned Alan Turing. That was sad.

Speaker 1:
[116:25] That was very sad.

Speaker 2:
[116:27] So sad. But that's a great movie. Imitation Game.

Speaker 1:
[116:30] Yeah, I should re-watch it.

Speaker 2:
[116:31] Great movie with Benedict Cumberbough.

Speaker 1:
[116:34] I think that was his breakout, right? He was already simmering, but then it was like sayonara, suck ass.

Speaker 2:
[116:40] I love him. When did Robert. Oh, I think he. Okay, I may have misheard this. I thought he said Jonathan Edwards is the doctor who got his Nobel Prize in vitro. It's Robert Edwards, which he may have said it maybe I misheard.

Speaker 1:
[117:00] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[117:01] But he won it in 2010.

Speaker 1:
[117:03] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[117:04] 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 your surrogacy is strictly prohibited.

Speaker 1:
[117:25] Strictly prohibited.

Speaker 2:
[117:27] Could you always bet on horses in the United States? No.

Speaker 1:
[117:30] Only if you ate them afterwards.

Speaker 2:
[117:31] Exactly. No, it has not always been possible or legal to bet on horses throughout the entire United States, has a long history, faced significant legal, social and regional restrictions over time. There's all kinds of restrictions. In the early 20th century, anti-gambling sentiment led almost all states to ban bookmaking, which nearly eliminated horse racing. I guess that's not specific to horse racing.

Speaker 1:
[117:54] Right.

Speaker 2:
[117:55] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[117:56] All right then.

Speaker 2:
[117:57] 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.

Speaker 1:
[118:03] Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 2:
[118:04] That's it.

Speaker 1:
[118:05] That's everything. Well, I do applaud Alvin's work with these kidney donations.

Speaker 2:
[118:10] I know, that was wild actually. Should I give my kidney to someone?

Speaker 1:
[118:15] That's up to you.

Speaker 2:
[118:16] You don't want to advise? You love to advise Rick Glassman.

Speaker 1:
[118:19] This is just where I'm shamefully selfish.

Speaker 2:
[118:23] Yeah, because what if I need it?

Speaker 1:
[118:24] I want both. I like a backup.

Speaker 3:
[118:28] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[118:29] I probably need a backup since I had kidney stones.

Speaker 1:
[118:31] Oh boy.

Speaker 2:
[118:33] They probably wouldn't even, maybe they wouldn't let me. Damn.

Speaker 3:
[118:35] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[118:36] Well, that would be the best case scenario. You tried and you couldn't. Yeah, good screen. I was like, I tried to give, what did I try to give?

Speaker 2:
[118:42] Plasma.

Speaker 1:
[118:44] I'm trying to give sperm in college.

Speaker 2:
[118:46] Oh yeah, and you weren't allowed. But that's not, you'd be fine doing that.

Speaker 1:
[118:49] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[118:51] And you were getting, you would be paid.

Speaker 1:
[118:52] Well, that was the goal. Yeah, I was in college and I needed some money, but they wouldn't accept it. That's a terrible sperm.

Speaker 2:
[119:01] What, because it had low mobility?

Speaker 1:
[119:03] No, you need to have, or at least they told me, you need to have an inordinately high sperm count, and I did not have a high sperm count.

Speaker 2:
[119:10] Interesting.

Speaker 1:
[119:11] 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.

Speaker 2:
[119:16] You didn't have any problems getting pregnant.

Speaker 1:
[119:18] I've only tried twice.

Speaker 2:
[119:20] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[119:20] And I had two kids.

Speaker 2:
[119:21] So it works out.

Speaker 1:
[119:22] Yeah, yeah. All right.

Speaker 2:
[119:24] Bye.

Speaker 1:
[119:24] Love you.

Speaker 2:
[119:25] Love you.