Latest / Paths of Curiosity in an AI World / Q3 - AI in Data, Behavior, and Human Systems with Syon Bhanot, PhD

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Q3 - AI in Data, Behavior, and Human Systems with Syon Bhanot, PhD · Paths of Curiosity in an AI World

1:36
SPEAKER_00: You ran an experiment in Canada and reservant that made people two thirds more likely to finish their tuberculosis treatment.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: How does something seemingly simple change something that serious?
1:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's a great question because it gets at the core of economics, right?
1:53
SPEAKER_01: So we think that people respond to incentives.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: And so if things are really important, like taking your medication or saving for retirement or getting your exercise when you're not at your healthiest, we would think that those things would be prioritized because they matter so much at that moment in that person's life.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: But I'm a behavioral economist, so behavioral economists take the view that people struggle to be rational optimizers all the time.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: We struggle with self-control and we're forgetful and we are affected by our peers and all those sorts of things, right?
2:24
SPEAKER_01: When you kind of think about people as a bit less rational, then you might have behaviors like taking your medication that, you know, should matter more than anything else, but that people just forget to do, right?
2:35
SPEAKER_01: How could you forget to do something so important?
2:37
SPEAKER_01: We forget to do important stuff all the time.
2:39
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so a lot of my work involves, like you said, the interventions that are geared towards helping not very rational people do better for themselves and get outcomes that they prefer.
2:50
SPEAKER_01: And in your example, that paper we found, just essentially reminding them at the right time and following up with them is really what people need to do this very important activity.
2:58
SPEAKER_01: And so we should think about people more as human beings, flawed human beings, rather than these perfect rational robots, which economics sometimes makes it sound like everyone is out there just doing a bunch of math at the grocery store to figure out what to buy.
3:12
SPEAKER_01: But really, people are people and our irrationalities shine through.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: How would you describe what you do today to your student self?
3:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a great question.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: When I was a student, I probably wouldn't have guessed that I would have ended up as an economist, let alone a behavioral economist, but I'd probably say that I'm curious about how people make decisions and about who we are as a species, what we're doing going through our lives in our time here.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: And so I try to think about it as I do research to try to understand the human experience through life, right?
3:46
SPEAKER_01: And that means how we make choices, um, how we allocate our time, how we allocate our money, how we allocate our energy, and thinking about exploring that and coming up with insights that are generalizable so we can learn something about the human experience through just understanding what it is that we do and why we do what we do and what we're motivated by, and hopefully get a little lesson through that work about who we are as a species, so to speak, by just kind of exploring those little individual moments of decision making.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: Can you walk us from where you were as a student to running field experiments for governments and international organizations?
4:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so probably my main lesson in terms of path is uh it's a lot more winding of a road than most everybody would want you to believe.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: So if you look at people's CVs and things, you see this wonderful order in which they must have planned to do things in that order, and it's really not how it works, especially after you get past college.
4:40
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's a lot more of I don't know what the right analogy might be.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: It's almost like surfing or something where you are in control of the board, but the waves and the forces of nature are pretty powerful too, and they will ultimately determine where you're gonna go on this on the surfboard, right?
4:56
SPEAKER_01: So I kind of view the world as a bit like that, like we have some control over our board, but really the forces underneath us are much more powerful.
5:03
SPEAKER_01: So, for example, I was really interested in foreign policy and diplomacy more in college, and then it just happened to be when I was in graduate school, it was um the early 2000s, 2007, 2008, in that window, and this was like after the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and everyone who's talking about national security, and I wasn't really interested in that, but I was interested in foreign affairs.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: So I found myself in grad school thinking, well, I thought I was going to be doing X, but everybody tells me, Oh, you're interested in X, why don't you do Y for now because we're in these wars?
5:33
SPEAKER_01: And I just wasn't interested in that.
5:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so took some other classes and kind of I wouldn't say quite stumbled into, but sort of stumbled into a an enjoyment of microeconomics and uh study of decision making, thinking about people in a more sophisticated way than economists do, as more than just rational automatons, but truly complex emotional kind of um beings and people that don't always maximize our utility, spoke to me at that time, right?
6:02
SPEAKER_01: Um and so, you know, that sort of led me down my PhD towards more study and behavioral econ.
6:08
SPEAKER_01: And then just meeting the right people in grad school.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: So John Lest in particular at U Chicago was a notable influence on me early in grad school, um, uh storied economist at Chicago, and helped me see that somebody with my interests and skill sets, right?
6:22
SPEAKER_01: I I like working with people, I like making projects happen, more so than sitting at a desk for many hours.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: So it kind of felt like it was my skill set to like work with governments and work with practitioners and policymakers who want to use research to explore behavior in the real world.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: It just felt like my comparative advantage, economists talk about.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: What are you what is your what are you relatively better at than other people?
6:44
SPEAKER_01: And it felt like for me talking to others, talking them through the value of doing these kind of projects was just something was a skill set I had.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: And so I enjoy doing it.
6:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, combined with the fact that I could do it pretty well, um, ultimately led me to the kind of work that I do.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: What was the moment that you realized that this was the path you wanted to pursue?
7:05
SPEAKER_01: Um I wouldn't say there was a particular moment.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: I think there were just a series of moments, really.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: Uh it was partly like I mentioned, these moments in grad school, being redirected away from something that I thought I was interested in.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: I guess one moment was uh after college, I worked for a year in Kenya, including at a refugee camp in the northern part of the country.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: And it was a good experience to see that that side of the world and to really understand how different people, the different ways people live all over the world.
7:32
SPEAKER_01: It was very helpful for context, somebody growing up in America, uh, to really see that.
7:37
SPEAKER_01: But it was also useful to learn what you, like I said, your comparative advantages.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: So for me, that was a key moment where I thought, I'm doing good work here, but I don't think it's the work that I'm the best at necessarily.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: And it'd be nice to do something where I felt like I really could be the best at it, right?
7:52
SPEAKER_01: And so that was an important um moment for me.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: And then various things in grad school, so courses I took, professors I met, um, more so grad school than undergrad for me.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: Undergrad was nice, but I felt like I was just learning how to become an adult more as a college student, not really ready to absorb as much information in a weird way.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: I learned a lot, but it was almost like as I was going through it, I learned.
8:15
SPEAKER_01: I didn't feel like I was actively learning as much by choice, if that makes sense.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: It was more like I have to take these classes now and I have to finish my college degree.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: Whereas in my 20s, maybe from 23 to 30, that was a window where I felt like, okay, now I'm selecting what I want to learn based on my interests a little bit more and based on my understanding of the world.
8:35
SPEAKER_01: And so for me, I think that would be a kind of a big lesson, I would say, is that a lot of these moments, I know a lot of uh young people might be thinking, oh, it's gonna happen for me in high school and college and like later is when I'll be a professional.
8:47
SPEAKER_01: But actually those moments of getting you on a path and developing and figuring out what you want to do can happen well after college, in some cases into your 30s and sometimes even forties.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: That's totally normal too.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: So that's certainly what happened to me.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: A lot of those key moments more came in grad school through the people I met.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: So, what is a nudge?
9:03
SPEAKER_00: And what's maybe one real example where a tiny difference changed what thousands of people did?
9:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so a nudge is um uh concept in in behavioral economics, behavioral science, often described using an analogy to human behavior and how it's uh shaped by the sort of choice environment around a given decision.
9:26
SPEAKER_01: Long story short, the basic definition of a nudge is manipulating the choice environment.
9:30
SPEAKER_01: So imagine you're at the grocery store and you're trying to pick what you want to have for lunch, right?
9:34
SPEAKER_01: You're faced with a choice environment, right?
9:36
SPEAKER_01: There's different options array in front of you.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: There's a menu, there's stuff at eye level, there's stuff under the counter down below uh at checkout, and this choice environment shapes your choice, right?
9:46
SPEAKER_01: So behavioral economics says that it's not just about what's on the menu, but how the menu might be laid out, what has a box around it, and what's in bold and what's not.
9:54
SPEAKER_01: Those things might actually impact your choice, even though they don't actually impact the food itself, right?
9:58
SPEAKER_01: It kind of manipulates you in the moment of choice.
10:01
SPEAKER_01: And nudging is the notion that we can manipulate that choice environment to help you make a decision that you yourself would acknowledge is best for you.
10:09
SPEAKER_01: So think about again, going to lunch, you go to the same cafe every time.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: Research suggests that people pick what's at eye level with higher probability.
10:17
SPEAKER_01: So if you are at the grocery store, whatever food is like at eye height is more likely to be selected.
10:24
SPEAKER_01: Why?
10:24
SPEAKER_01: Well, because people don't like bending down, basically.
10:26
SPEAKER_01: Even if their favorite food in the world is on the lower shelf, like they're much more likely to just say, ugh, I'm just gonna grab what's right in front of my eyes, right?
10:32
SPEAKER_01: So now that I know that fact, what do I, the shop owner or maybe the government or something, what would I want to be at eye level?
10:40
SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe the stuff that people wish they ate more of, right?
10:43
SPEAKER_01: So if you survey people, most people aren't thinking, I wish I had more fries and burgers.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: Most people think when they answer these surveys, they say, I wish I ate a little more healthy lunch, right?
10:53
SPEAKER_01: So if you, let's say, run a school cafeteria and you know that children pick what's at eye level, maybe you should put the fruit at eye level, right?
11:01
SPEAKER_01: Because it's healthier and probably what is better for the students.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, they can still bend down and get the chocolate from the lower shelf, but you're making it a little bit harder for them to do the thing that's less good for them, right?
11:11
SPEAKER_01: So nudging is all about manipulating that choice environment, but crucially doing it in a way that we think is actually better for the person themselves, and they themselves would acknowledge that.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: They say, Thank goodness, you know, the fruit was always at eye level because I could grab it so easily, and man, I ate so much fruit, and I'm so happy about that, right?
11:26
SPEAKER_01: Whereas if we had the chocolate at eye level, people would be at home saying, I eat chocolate again, and honestly, it was great, but I'm eating too much chocolate, I'm not as as fit as I would like to be.
11:36
SPEAKER_01: So if we, the school, could manipulate that choice environment, we could potentially make you better off.
11:41
SPEAKER_01: So that's maybe one example of a nudge.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: A lot of our listeners are on TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn every day.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: What do the behavioral scientists building those platforms know about human psychology that most users don't?
11:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so um maybe it's kind of inherent to your question a little bit.
11:59
SPEAKER_01: A cynical view would be they call you users for a reason, um, because you're hooked, basically, right, to this product where we say there are drug users and there are social media users, and that's pretty much the main two industries that refer to the people who use their products as users.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: So not a great company to be in.
12:15
SPEAKER_01: So my view is that there's well documented that um a lot of the folks in these tech spaces were well trained in behavioral science, and so they develop these platforms in a way that hooks you.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: In the case of TikTok, it's literally built into the algorithm, right?
12:29
SPEAKER_01: It's it shows you what historically you've liked before, and it just keeps feeding you what you seem to like to look at with the aim of keeping you on the platform as long as possible, right?
12:38
SPEAKER_01: That's their main goal on all these platforms.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: When you log off, it's a failure for them.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: They want to keep your eyeballs there.
12:43
SPEAKER_01: And so what do they do?
12:45
SPEAKER_01: They use tricks and tools on the platform to manipulate you to keep you there, right?
12:49
SPEAKER_01: They want to show you an infinite stream of entertaining content.
12:52
SPEAKER_01: Why?
12:52
SPEAKER_01: Because they want to sell your attention to an advertiser, and they can't sell attention if you're not on the platform anymore, right?
12:59
SPEAKER_01: I think once you view a lot of these social media um platforms through that channel, like they're a business and they get money from keeping you on, maybe you can be a more informed user to think, well, okay, you know, I am on here, I'm seeing stuff that's entertaining, but I'm sort of being manipulated to be on here, right?
13:16
SPEAKER_01: Like the platforms are developed to keep me on here because then they can sell more ads, and that's how they make money.
13:21
SPEAKER_01: They're making money somewhere, right?
13:22
SPEAKER_01: And that's really where the money's coming in.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: So I think if people were just a little bit more aware of that, which kind of underlies the business model, they might be a little bit more resistant to using it quite as much as they do.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: For a student being steered by those platforms, certain careers or colleges, how do you know when a nudge has crossed into something more manipulative?
13:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that's a crucial question, right?
13:46
SPEAKER_01: Because if you are sort of nudging someone's behavior, right, let's say you're a school principal and you're putting certain food at eye level or whatever, right?
13:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, you can do that with various motivations.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: One motivation could be, hey, I want to make as much money as I can.
14:01
SPEAKER_01: You know, we're here at the school, I'm the principal, I want the cafeteria to make a lot of money today.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: So let's put all the stuff that makes us the most money at eye level, right?
14:10
SPEAKER_01: We would worry about that because we would say, hey, wait a minute, that's kind of manipulating me to get at my wallet, but you're trying to like get my money.
14:17
SPEAKER_01: But stores do that all the time, right?
14:19
SPEAKER_01: So uh grocery stores are laid out in a very manipulative way.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: Restaurants put a box around an item they want you to buy, they make it prominent and you know, they make the font of it bigger.
14:29
SPEAKER_01: Why?
14:29
SPEAKER_01: Not because it's special, because they want you to buy that thing, right?
14:32
SPEAKER_01: So we're often being manipulated uh in that way.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: But really, for nudging, the idea of my nudging was I'm not gonna manipulate you to do what I want.
14:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna try to affect your choice environment to help you choose what you probably want, right?
14:44
SPEAKER_01: So it's a bit more, maybe you could say paternalistic, but the idea being that I want to manipulate your behavior, but I'd like to move you in a direction that you yourself will acknowledge is better, right?
14:54
SPEAKER_01: But it is still manipulation to some extent, right?
14:56
SPEAKER_01: Because you're using these tools.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: So I always ask the question once you know that what's at eye level is more likely to be purchased by five-year-olds in in at the dining hall in their school, um, or six-year-olds or whatever, what are you supposed to do about that information?
15:13
SPEAKER_01: Like, once you know it, you can't neutrally display food.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: Like you have to put stuff on the shelf, right?
15:18
SPEAKER_01: So the fact that you know about nudging, you can either just ignore that and just put stuff out at random, or choose to put something where, right?
15:27
SPEAKER_01: So I view it as, yeah, it's manipulation, but it's unavoidable manipulation.
15:31
SPEAKER_01: I mean, like, whatever you choose to do, once once you're aware of that fact about where placement mattering is a choice.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: And so we might as well try to choose the thing that's best for people.
15:41
SPEAKER_01: So my kind of counter-argument is, well, there's no such thing as not nudging, not manipulating choice.
15:47
SPEAKER_01: Once you know you know that it can be so easily manipulated, you have to just commit to something, right?
15:53
SPEAKER_01: And I I think it's better to commit to, hey, let's try to help people make the right decisions for themselves over let's try to make the most money possible, which to me seems like truly manipulative, potentially.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: A listener is about to pick a major or choose between two job offers.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: What should they know about how that decision is probably being framed for them?
16:14
SPEAKER_01: We have to make a lot of these important decisions, where to go to college, which minor or major to choose, what to do after graduation, etc.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: My main advice is maybe boring economics advice, but it's really maximize your own utility, right?
16:26
SPEAKER_01: Economists talk about utility, it's like a kind of a not quite, but kind of a placeholder for happiness, right?
16:31
SPEAKER_01: So you're trying to maximize your well-being in your life, how good how good your objective to you subjective life is.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: Um I think what a lot of people miss is actually that point, is like you should be choosing whatever's gonna make you the happiest in the long run, right?
16:46
SPEAKER_01: But I think especially when you're younger, you don't have a lot of experience of the world, you don't really know which choices are minors or majors or even colleges or jobs are gonna be right for you.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: You're still in development, right?
17:00
SPEAKER_01: Um, so what do most people do?
17:02
SPEAKER_01: They use cues from other people.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: So what will my parents say?
17:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, what will my roommates say?
17:08
SPEAKER_01: Will my classmates think it's impressive that I have that internship or that job, right?
17:13
SPEAKER_01: And will my high school classmates think it's impressive that I got into that college or that college, right?
17:18
SPEAKER_01: So you're making decisions not based on your own subjective experience, but based on what others will think of your choices and outcomes.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I understand the reason for that.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: It's a very human thing to do, but it can lead to really bad decisions, basically, is my kind of view, right?
17:36
SPEAKER_01: So if you're thinking about a minor, a major, these big life decisions, where to live, what job to take.
17:42
SPEAKER_01: My advice is try as hard as you can to ignore the opinions and views and preferences of everybody else.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: And I would include parents in that, right?
17:51
SPEAKER_01: Your parents have a bias too when they're thinking about you and uh they want you to live nearby and have a nice paying job that's near them, right?
18:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh in many cases.
18:01
SPEAKER_01: But that might not be the right choice for you, right?
18:03
SPEAKER_01: So I think the advice is try not to be swayed by other people.
18:07
SPEAKER_01: They don't have to live with your choices, right?
18:09
SPEAKER_01: If you choose the wrong job for the wrong reasons to impress other people and you go there and you hate it, it was the wrong job.
18:14
SPEAKER_01: The right job is the one that you really enjoy, that makes you feel good every day and makes you feel happy to be alive and enjoying your life, right?
18:21
SPEAKER_01: So that might not be the most prestigious one.
18:23
SPEAKER_01: Similarly, the best school to go to might not be the one that's the most prestigious, it might be the one that's best for you, for your life.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I kind of tell people, really think about like what is it that I want?
18:33
SPEAKER_01: What is it that I like?
18:34
SPEAKER_01: And am I choosing something because others told me to?
18:38
SPEAKER_01: If that's the case, then interrogate that choice a little bit more and really ask, like, is this truly my choice, or am I doing this for other people?
18:46
SPEAKER_01: Because the sad reality is most of the people you know as a young person won't be majorly important in your life.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of depressing.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: But if you're in high school or college, uh, all your friends, some of them might stick around and you know, they'll be at your 50th birthday party, um, but most almost all of them won't.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, they won't even be anywhere near you when you're 50.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: So why would you make choices for those people?
19:10
SPEAKER_01: You should make choices for you and the and the people closest to you.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, my general advice, maximize your utility.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: It sounds easy, but it's actually pretty hard to do given that we're social creatures and we look around us for cues.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: You ran a water conservation experiment where telling people how they ranked against neighbors made some people use more water, not less.
19:31
SPEAKER_00: What happened?
19:32
SPEAKER_00: And what does that tell us about when competition backfires?
19:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so this is a very nuanced set of results on sharing social information, right?
19:41
SPEAKER_01: So we were just talking about how peers affect your choices, right?
19:44
SPEAKER_01: One way that that manifests is also wanting to do less bad things when it's revealed to me that other people are doing something good, right?
19:53
SPEAKER_01: You can almost think about it as the sort of a double-edged sword of social information.
19:58
SPEAKER_01: When I tell you what other people are doing, people tend to want to get in line with what other people are doing, right?
20:03
SPEAKER_01: They want to say, like, oh, other people are doing X, maybe I should do X too.
20:06
SPEAKER_01: So we follow the crowd.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's great if the crowd is doing something noble or good, right?
20:11
SPEAKER_01: So um if it's like the crowd is not cheating on a test, and you say nobody cheats on this test, um, historically, then you might say, Well, I shouldn't cheat either because I want to be just like everyone else, right?
20:22
SPEAKER_01: But when the behavior is not so good, like everybody's cheating on a test, using AI to do their homework or whatever, then you probably need to know that too, right?
20:31
SPEAKER_01: So if I were to communicate that to you, right?
20:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, hey, AI is being used by students to do all their homework, you say, Well, what's the harm?
20:39
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I'll do it too.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: People tend to want to follow a crowd.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's what you found in some of these different water use experiments, right?
20:45
SPEAKER_01: That um it's it can be effective to tell people what others are doing, but you have to frame the messaging in an appropriate way because what you don't want is the people who use very little to sort of hear, hey, you're using very little water in your house, and they think, oh, I can just use more because I, you know, I'm the outlier, basically, in the in a good direction.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, but that might actually cause a negative kind of behavioral response.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: So you also want to be really careful with these kind of messages.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, and in the study you're referencing, we also were thinking about how people compare to more the more direct peers.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, and one concern there is if you tell people they're in a competition, which is how we sort of framed it there, and you're in last place, it was demoralizing, right?
21:27
SPEAKER_01: Because you don't see any hope of catching up.
21:29
SPEAKER_01: So what we found was in that case, it was really a demoralizing effect of being told, you're in a contest to use the least water, and man, you are so far behind, you're awful at this.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: People just said, this is not a competition I'm gonna win.
21:40
SPEAKER_01: So I'm just gonna ignore this message and I'm gonna just keep using the water I'm using and I'll I'll look somewhere else for my ego boost.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: Um, but maybe there is a message that's more effective for folks who use a lot of water, and it shouldn't be you're terrible at this.
21:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, but maybe we need to find better ways to help them improve, right?
21:56
SPEAKER_01: Rather than try to motivate them through a competition that they're not gonna win is our
22:01
SPEAKER_00: Your research finds that money is often a weaker motivator than social visibility.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: What drives people to help others and what shuts that down?
22:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a great uh question as well.
22:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'll give you a really concrete analogy.
22:15
SPEAKER_01: So suppose your friend is moving into a new apartment or a new dorm or something, and they say, Hey, um, could you help me move?
22:23
SPEAKER_01: Right?
22:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh and you say, Oh yeah, when are you moving?
22:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, maybe at 10 a.m.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: on Saturday.
22:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure, I'll be there, you know.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: You'll be very excited to go help your friend, right?
22:31
SPEAKER_01: You're a good friend, and and that's what friends do, right?
22:34
SPEAKER_01: They help each other when they're in need.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, but then suppose you're says, Oh, by the way, I'll give you eleven dollars.
22:40
SPEAKER_01: And you say, wait, what did you just say?
22:42
SPEAKER_01: Like, I'm gonna I'm gonna pay you eleven dollars for helping me.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: Now suddenly people would say, Oh, something has my motivation has changed.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: It's like you're incentivizing me more to help you, but now it feels weird, right?
22:56
SPEAKER_01: Because now it's like my friend is paying me this friendly thing I was doing has now turned into a financial transaction.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: And you might actually say, eleven dollars, that's not enough.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: If you're gonna hire me, you need to give me a higher pay than that.
23:09
SPEAKER_01: And now suddenly this is like a market transaction.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: When before it was a social, personal, friend-to-friend transaction, right?
23:16
SPEAKER_01: The reason I'm kind of using this example here is we've reintroduced the idea of money as an incentive, but adding it into this picture has weirdly reduced your incentive to actually help because it's turned what was already a pretty big social incentive into a monetary one.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: And as soon as it's monetary, it becomes higher, I'm being hired, what's my hourly wage?
23:37
SPEAKER_01: And now you're thinking about it in very different ways.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: Before you were willing to do it for$0 an hour, right?
23:41
SPEAKER_01: But now suddenly uh you're thinking about whether it's worth your time.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, my big picture takeaway there is that oftentimes we're motivated by taking a certain action that's really driven by our so social norms or um being good to a friend or some motivation that's nothing to do with money, and sometimes introducing money into those environments can degrade our underlying motivation, right?
24:04
SPEAKER_01: So we call that intrinsic motivation, that we sometimes have this intrinsic motivation, it's not outside incentives that are motivating me to help my friend.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: It's just an innate desire to help people I'm close with, right?
24:15
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so the worry is that when you bring financial markets into too many spaces, you might actually be degrading some of those other things that motivate us as people, um, which include those social incentives, like you mentioned.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: So then how would this knowledge, for instance, play out in the real world?
24:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so uh it's a great question.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: If you think about, for example, like charitable giving, right?
24:37
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people give lots of money to charity.
24:38
SPEAKER_01: They're clearly not motivated necessarily by financial incentives.
24:42
SPEAKER_01: If they were, they wouldn't be giving their money away, right?
24:45
SPEAKER_01: And they're in fact choosing to give a large amount of their money away in some cases, um, specifically to get less money, right?
24:52
SPEAKER_01: And they're intentionally giving away their resources.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: So what are they doing that for?
24:56
SPEAKER_01: Well, you look at the research, or just anecdotally, people often have a building named after them, or they have some ceremony where they they kind of have a dinner to celebrate this donor to this hospital wing, right?
25:08
SPEAKER_01: And they have the person stands up and they have a nice speech read about them to all these people in the room, right?
25:13
SPEAKER_01: They have this like uh the ceremony, which is basically you can think of it as partly what they paid for with their donation.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: They said, here's a million dollars for this hospital, and you're gonna have this dinner, and it's gonna be celebrating me socially in front of all these people, and I get all these kudos and all these likes on this LinkedIn post or whatever.
25:30
SPEAKER_01: Like, that's what they're paying for is that social recognition of them doing a good thing.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: Now you might say that feels icky, right?
25:36
SPEAKER_01: They gave money because they wanted the social recognition, and the answer is like, yeah, kind of.
25:41
SPEAKER_01: And that feels wrong, but to me, it's that's great.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: Like, if Bill Gates gives lots of money and wants social recognition for being a good person, um I'd say, great.
25:51
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Bill Gates, for all this money you've given, right?
25:53
SPEAKER_01: You're saving lots of lives by giving this money to charity through the Gates Foundation.
25:56
SPEAKER_01: In a way, we want to harness those non-monetary incentives um most effectively to make sure we get the most good going to the most people.
26:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that requires us to really think about what motivates people to give.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: So that's just one example where you can't say, well, I want people to give more to charity.
26:14
SPEAKER_01: We need to pay them to do it.
26:15
SPEAKER_01: It's not even an option, or even pay their taxes, right?
26:18
SPEAKER_01: Paying your taxes involves you paying your money uh to the government.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: I can't really financially incentivize you to do that.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, we need to use other motivators.
26:27
SPEAKER_01: So actually, a lot of the behaviors we actually want people to do more are things we can't really use financial incentives for, so we better understand sort of the other incentives that that exist there.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: You published a study on whether administrative burden, paperwork, extra steps, confusing forms deters young people from programs they qualify for.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: What did you find?
26:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so broadly administrative burden is this idea of just like paperwork, right?
26:51
SPEAKER_01: You probably even young people uh have probably done way more paperwork in their life than they intended to do, filling out forms for this and that.
26:58
SPEAKER_01: It starts early, and then you just keep doing it more and more and more.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: And researchers have started to point out that these administrative burdens, these paperwork uh burdens, can actually prevent people from doing things that they really should be doing, that they otherwise would choose to do.
27:13
SPEAKER_01: So we found in the study with young people a very similar pattern where um people were quite forgetful in filling out their applications for a summer jobs program in Philly.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: So regularly reminding people to fill out their forms got more people through the process, um, as did sort of one-on-one personalized support.
27:31
SPEAKER_01: This is in the city of Philadelphia, right?
27:33
SPEAKER_01: What we're finding is very consistent with what the literature shows, which is if you just think about it as here's this really great program, people will, of course, they'll apply because there's a wonderful program available for them.
27:43
SPEAKER_01: It'll make them better off.
27:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, that sort of ignores the fact that these small burdens of paperwork and hassle can be enough to prevent people from doing things that they really actually want to do quite badly, right?
27:54
SPEAKER_01: So you can view this as um, I'm offering you this great reward, but you just have to fill out half a page of a form and it takes you five minutes.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: But that five-minute burden feels heavier than that, right?
28:07
SPEAKER_01: For busy people who are running around and forgetful and sometimes don't make the best choices uh and aren't rational all the time, they might forget that paperwork or it might accidentally get recycled and then they forgot about it, and then that now they're not signed up for the program.
28:20
SPEAKER_01: They weren't being rational, like they should have filled it out immediately.
28:23
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't take that long and it could see this great benefit.
28:25
SPEAKER_01: But people are people, and so they fail to do things that are optimal for them.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so what we need to do is really make sure that when you're signing up for a social program or for a summer jobs program or whatever, the form is just as short as it needs to be, right?
28:39
SPEAKER_01: It if you have information about people already, pre-fill it in, right?
28:42
SPEAKER_01: So you can click the link and we already the information we have about you is already in the application.
28:47
SPEAKER_01: You just have to enter one or two things rather than filling out the same tedious form a million times.
28:52
SPEAKER_01: We should maybe make these processes a bit smoother for people because then they're more likely to make the choices and do the things that are better for them.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: What's the one thing you wish every student understood about how their decisions are being framed before they even realize it?
29:06
SPEAKER_01: So um I think the way you put it is in and of itself a crucial lesson, right?
29:12
SPEAKER_01: The notion that you aren't making decisions entirely based on your own preferences is a really valuable lesson to have, right?
29:20
SPEAKER_01: So realizing the forces that shape your behavior.
29:23
SPEAKER_01: We talked about some, right?
29:25
SPEAKER_01: Social pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, right?
29:29
SPEAKER_01: Those are important areas where you aren't making a choice entirely of your own, right?
29:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh you're making a choice affected by other people in your environment.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: And I think that alone as a lesson is really powerful, right?
29:42
SPEAKER_01: And then also it's difficult to optimize, right?
29:45
SPEAKER_01: So I think a lot of young people these days really have this sort of optimizer mentality.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: They're trying to get the maximum out of all the resources that they have available to them.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: And that's nice, right?
29:54
SPEAKER_01: It can seem like a good way to live your life.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: Like, let's be as efficient and and maximally enjoy life as much as we can, but it can also be paralyzing in a sense, right?
30:03
SPEAKER_01: So there's this interesting research that that shows that some of the happiest people aren't people that are optimizers, they're called satisficers.
30:09
SPEAKER_01: They're people who choose things that are satisfactory, right?
30:11
SPEAKER_01: They're like, what college should I go to?
30:13
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
30:13
SPEAKER_01: How can you possibly optimize?
30:15
SPEAKER_01: Think of that decision of picking between what hundreds of colleges around the world, uh, and you have to apply to 10, and then you have to hopefully get into at least one and go.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: What are the odds that you're gonna go to the optimal school for you?
30:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's impossible to even know what that's gonna be.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: Your interests are just forming now.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: A lot of times you apply to schools that you haven't even visited yet, right?
30:35
SPEAKER_01: Let alone seen, even maybe even online, right?
30:38
SPEAKER_01: You just apply to them because they're famous, and then you hope that you'll get into one that you'd be happy to go to.
30:43
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's not a decision that can really be optimized, right?
30:46
SPEAKER_01: Um, but if you just take the view of, I'm gonna apply to a bunch of schools, and all of which that I think are satisfactory choices, and wherever I get in is where I get in.
30:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, no big deal.
30:55
SPEAKER_01: You tend to be much happier if you just have that view of I'm not trying to pick the best, I'm just trying to pick something that's fine.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: And so I think uh taking that view for anybody making decisions, I think, can be really valuable because it frees you up.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: The stress is off.
31:09
SPEAKER_01: You don't have to pick the best choice, you just have to make a reasonable choice and kind of move on from there.
31:14
SPEAKER_01: And those would be a couple of examples, right, of ways in which your choices aren't your own, and just knowing that can help you be a little more satisfied with the choices that you ultimately make.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: How do you predict AI will change what these careers look like over the next 10 to 20 years?
31:30
SPEAKER_00: And what happens when AI starts nudging people, but other than humans can.
31:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's hard to know where AI is going.
31:39
SPEAKER_01: I spend a lot of my time thinking or worrying about thinking about or worrying about that.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: The more I see how the tools play out in practice, the more I get concerned, especially about younger people who can almost be bypassed, right?
31:54
SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of the skills that can replace first are the kind of skills you would hire an entry-level young person to do, and increasingly it's creeping up the skills ladder as well.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: So I think nobody's really potentially immune, except maybe the plumbers and things like that.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: But um, so I like I do think it will reshape, even if it doesn't.
32:12
SPEAKER_01: What I would say is is most people are familiar with an AI set of tools that is like the chat making pictures and videos and things like that, right?
32:21
SPEAKER_01: That that's especially what the data shows, mostly what's happening in Western countries in particular.
32:25
SPEAKER_01: They're more disproportionately using it for almost things like that, or planning a meal and making a recipe at home or something like that.
32:32
SPEAKER_01: But myself, having used it more for work purposes and the kind of tools that economists use for data science, etc., I'm seeing the sort of the ways at which it can replace like pretty high-level coding, essentially, for data analysis.
32:47
SPEAKER_01: And that is more where I think, oh, this actually will impact, even if it doesn't develop any more than it already has.
32:54
SPEAKER_01: I can already see this is going to impact society and jobs and what people do and don't do beyond the entry level.
33:00
SPEAKER_01: Not maybe in every industry, it's not gonna like necessarily replace all of our jobs, but it will reshuffle where firms will allocate their money, right?
33:08
SPEAKER_01: So you think about firms as optimizers, they pick between the inputs that are providing the most bang for their buck, uh, so to speak.
33:15
SPEAKER_01: And AI is not expensive and it can do the same job as a handful of workers on some basic data analysis tools.
33:23
SPEAKER_01: Of course, they're gonna use an AI tool for$5,000 instead of hiring five people for half a million.
33:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, so that I think is inevitable.
33:32
SPEAKER_01: Those jobs are gonna reshape, and I think young people really want to think about being as adaptable as they can to the circumstance, right?
33:38
SPEAKER_01: Rather than think about it in a dread kind of way, think about it as like you want to build various skills and just adapt like back to my surfing analogy.
33:46
SPEAKER_01: Like you want to just get through and adapt to the what nature's gonna throw at you.
33:50
SPEAKER_01: And I almost view now AI development as something that's happening to us all, whether we like it or not.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: And we have to be able to adapt to that.
33:58
SPEAKER_01: So that's like my general perspective on uh maybe on AI at a high level.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: What do most students get wrong about behavioral economics as a career?
34:07
SPEAKER_00: What surprises people once they're doing this work?
34:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think um probably the the main thing I would say is maybe it's true with any career, any econ-related career, is people have this view of what it's gonna be like, which is not necessarily the same.
34:25
SPEAKER_01: I mean, what you learn in class and what you actually do in practice are very different, right?
34:28
SPEAKER_01: So if you're thinking about it from like a research perspective, a lot of the times what researchers do, or even applied behavioral scientists do, it's not always exciting, right?
34:39
SPEAKER_01: You see the TED talk or whatever, same thing with if you think about a different career, like architecture or something, you see the great unveiling of this piece of architecture, and it's oh, it's amazing, and it's must have been so cool to work on.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: But probably a lot of those meetings were about like which nails to use and what material should be drilled in here, right?
34:57
SPEAKER_01: So that's actually boring at times, right?
34:59
SPEAKER_01: It's just like the nitty-gritty parts are kind of boring.
35:03
SPEAKER_01: So same thing with research.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: You think, oh, we're gonna produce this cool study where we, you know, it's in Kenya and we're doing this great like data collection and whatever, but the vast majority of time you're working on the project, it's you've got a data set open, you're running some analysis, you're trying to make the table look right.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: It's a lot more, it's it's a lot more of that kind of work, right?
35:23
SPEAKER_01: Rather than um the sort of exciting, constant, like tons of energy, positive, super fun all the time, right?
35:30
SPEAKER_01: So I would say most people I think underappreciate the sort of monotony of a lot of research work, right?
35:37
SPEAKER_01: And that's probably, again, I think it's true of any industry.
35:39
SPEAKER_01: The vast majority of what you're doing is not that exciting, but then the exciting moments can be really great.
35:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I think people do that for behavioral econ because it's so kind of cool.
35:48
SPEAKER_01: All the studies are kind of cool and interesting and funny sometimes.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: Um, but the work itself is a bit more you learn a technical set of skills and you apply those over and over, and you spend a lot of your time doing these kind of tedious but important tasks and just to get that payoff.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, but the payoff is relatively short-lived.
36:07
SPEAKER_01: The fun is finding joy in in some of that tedious work that you need to build and you have to go through to get to the final output.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: For a student who thinks this work sounds like exactly what they want to do, what's one concrete thing they can do in the next year to start moving towards it?
36:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the great thing that you do have around you is not just AI, but the internet in general, right?
36:29
SPEAKER_01: So you can learn a lot online about a lot of stuff without really needing a teacher, right?
36:34
SPEAKER_01: One thing that, you know, I I think intimidates a lot of uh folks who are just starting out is there's all these papers, and I don't have any of the technical skills to like actually read a lot of these papers.
36:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, but the truth is certainly in behavioral econ and behavioral science, a lot of the papers are pretty easy to understand, and you probably can mostly just read the abstract of the paper and get a decent understanding of what's in the paper itself, right?
36:58
SPEAKER_01: Now there's of course AI tools that will help you like process lots of different papers that interest you and kind of understand them much more intuitively.
37:05
SPEAKER_01: So I would say the first thing I would do if I was a young person who was interested in this or wanted to do this is start looking at papers, like looking at the abstracts of papers that seem cool in the top journals.
37:16
SPEAKER_01: It it might sound boring, but any abstract that you read the first sentence or two and you think, eh, I don't know where this is about, like just move to the next one, you know.
37:24
SPEAKER_01: Um it's pretty easy to read a bunch of abstracts and find what grabs you right within five minutes.
37:28
SPEAKER_01: So I I think anybody listening here could go to the American Economic Review for the last two years of issues, read every abstract, it'll probably take you 20 minutes, and I'm I'm sure that several of them will jump out to you as like, ooh, that's kind of cool.
37:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, I want to read that more.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: So I would encourage anyone in the audience to do that, and you'll probably find quite a few papers that grab you as exciting.
37:52
SPEAKER_01: I would also recommend to people the there's a journal called the Journal of Economic Perspectives, um, which has a lot of different articles about different economics topics, and it's not, I wouldn't say it's at the level of a 12-year-old or anything like that, um, but it's it's a more it's kind of more written for a general audience, right?
38:09
SPEAKER_01: So it's not just written for people with an econ PhD.
38:12
SPEAKER_01: Um so a lot of their articles in there are um accessible, I think, for a younger person.
38:16
SPEAKER_01: I think like a first-year college student or something would be very comfortable, I think, reading a lot of those articles.
38:21
SPEAKER_01: It might get a little more complex than you're used to, but that's okay.
38:25
SPEAKER_01: So I point people to the Journal of Economic Perspectives a lot.
38:27
SPEAKER_01: And it can be any issue in the last 20 years because I'll have issues on different policy topics and things that interest you.
38:33
SPEAKER_01: So if you're interested in AI, for example, like there'll be a recent issue on that.
38:36
SPEAKER_01: If you're interested in housing, there'll be an issue on that.
38:38
SPEAKER_01: If you're interested in conflict, there might be an issue on that.
38:40
SPEAKER_01: And it'll have these kind of more easily digestible articles that kind of summarize the research in economics to date on that topic, um, which I think is a nice place to start without feeling like overwhelmed by all math or you know the data analysis stuff, but you can kind of just focus on the core ideas.
38:59
SPEAKER_00: What's a skill your career has needed that would genuinely surprise most people?
39:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I um honestly I'm not saying I'm charming, but uh definitely charm is like something that you have to cultivate, right?
39:13
SPEAKER_01: You're on the phone with someone, they're nervous about doing some project because they're worried about the data or whatever, and you have to have some degree of ability to see where they're coming from, talk them through it, make them feel comfortable with a given decision.
39:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, and a lot of that does come down to, I mean, partly it's confidence and competence, but it's also just being a human being.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: I'm charm, I'm saying in a very general, I'm using it in a very general sense.
39:37
SPEAKER_01: It's really just being able to see, like, oh, I hear where you're coming from.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: I relate to that instead of kind of this top-down, I'm the expert.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: You, what do you know?
39:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, I found it really important, especially with a lot of these field studies, it's people who are responsible for some pro government program or something, um, and really feel responsible to make sure that it's safe for the people who use the program, right?
39:58
SPEAKER_01: So um I try to be really um maybe I don't know if humble is the right word, but I'm I don't know better than somebody whose career it is to administer some program, right?
40:10
SPEAKER_01: I can come along and say your application process is too onerous and you have too many forms, and we have to simplify and streamline and use all the behavioral science tools to nudge people to make the right decision.
40:19
SPEAKER_01: That's fine.
40:20
SPEAKER_01: But it still doesn't make me more I'm I don't know more about this program than this person who's like the director of the program or whatever.
40:27
SPEAKER_01: They know more about it than me.
40:29
SPEAKER_01: I know more about behavior change, and so like we're it's a partnership, right?
40:32
SPEAKER_01: We're trying to work together to solve this problem for this, this, this partner.
40:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, but that requires you to be pretty understanding of where they're coming from, right?
40:43
SPEAKER_01: And so I like I think that would be what I would broadly classify as the sort of charm, but humanity of just like not thinking that you know better, even in an environment where you are really the expert, so to speak, on the topic.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, you have to be willing to learn from other people and sometimes do things that maybe don't make total sense to you, but defer to them as the expert.
41:04
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a skill that um I don't know so many people have, and certainly the more education you get, it tends to like actually reduce people's strength of that skill because they're just like, well, I'm really smart, so and I have a PhD, so like of course I know better than other people.
41:20
SPEAKER_01: I think you actually have to kind of go the other way at some point and say, maybe I actually don't know what I'm talking about.
41:25
SPEAKER_01: Let me learn from this other person in a practical setting, and you often learn more than you realize you might.
41:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I guess that kind of intellectual humil humility is another way to put it.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: Are there any books or podcasts you would suggest to a student who wants to learn more?
41:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a really great question.
41:43
SPEAKER_01: There's no perfect answer.
41:45
SPEAKER_01: In terms of podcasts, like there's no one specific one that I think is always great.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: And frankly, most of the podcasts I listen to are not really about behavioral econ per se, right?
41:54
SPEAKER_01: I spend a lot more time listening to podcasts about politics and about um social issues and even sports and other things, right?
42:01
SPEAKER_01: So I think that diverse array of podcasts can be pretty, pretty useful.
42:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, in terms of books, though, uh again, I could tell you lots of books that would feel like eating your vegetables, which maybe nobody wants to do.
42:11
SPEAKER_01: Um I would try to have some fun with it, right?
42:14
SPEAKER_01: You should be really, especially when you're younger, reading books that you enjoy reading.
42:17
SPEAKER_01: It's more important to enjoy the actual thing you're going through and not feel like it's work.
42:22
SPEAKER_01: If it feels like it's too much work, you won't really cultivate that love of reading, uh, so to speak.
42:26
SPEAKER_01: That said, there are several books that I think are actually pretty fun to read that are in this space.
42:31
SPEAKER_01: I'll name up several of them.
42:32
SPEAKER_01: So one is a book called Scarcity that I think is is really great on sort of uh the impact of scarcity on our decisions.
42:39
SPEAKER_01: Um this is not really an econ book, but this book, Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, is an amazingly uh interesting book about the the history of our species and sort of how a lot of our institutions and attitudes and views have been shaped over time.
42:53
SPEAKER_01: So it's a real, real high-level and very popular book.
42:58
SPEAKER_01: Um in more behavioral econ space, I think uh Misbehaving by Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler is a really entertaining read about his career.
43:06
SPEAKER_01: Um it's a bit more personal than some of the other books, which I sort of like.
43:09
SPEAKER_01: And then one of my favorite books is called The Big Short.
43:12
SPEAKER_01: They also made it into a movie a few years ago that won some Oscars and things, and I think Brad Pitt and some other people were in it.
43:18
SPEAKER_01: Um so uh highly recommend uh that movie, but also the book, um which is really about the financial crisis 2008 and trying to understand what happened there.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: Um but Michael Lewis is one of my favorite writers, he's an amazingly uh entertaining person to read.
43:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh his stuff also always reads like a thriller, even though it's kind of nonfiction.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, anything by Michael Lewis I recommend.
43:42
SPEAKER_01: But the big short is the most directly like behavioral econ adjacent, I would say, of the options.
43:46
SPEAKER_01: But really diversify, read all kinds of fun stuff, listen to all kinds of podcasts, there's no wrong choice, especially when you're younger, um, to cultivate all the different parts of your personality so you really understand the human experience rather than feeling like I'm always viewing it through an econ lens or a psych lens.
44:01
SPEAKER_01: It's nice to just read some fiction too and really think about it in a literary way and read some philosophy and see what's going on in the world.
44:07
SPEAKER_01: So current events and things like that too, I think all feed the mind in a way that's that's it's really helpful.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: Dr.
44:14
SPEAKER_00: Bayon, thank you so much for joining us today on positive curiosity.
44:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you for having me.
44:20
SPEAKER_01: It's great to talk to you and really excited to see what comes next for all your work.