Insights from Economist Alex Tabarrok

"Basically, we have, and I'm going to qualify this because it's going to sound crazy, but we have sort of a totalitarian government now. It's not totalitarian in its means, but it's totalitarian in its ends in the sense that whatever the problem is in society today, the first thing people turn to is the government. It doesn't matter how small or how big the problem, what kind of problem it is. It's the first thing that people think about."

"I think we've put way too much emphasis on going to college, okay? We have too many people going to college. And if you're the sort of person who just doesn't sit down learning, you didn't like reading, you didn't like books so much and didn't like sit down learning. But you feel you have to go to college because everyone's doing it and your parents say it's the only way to become wealthy and rich... the problem is, is that a lot of these people who are not that well suited in preferences to college, they go to college, they spend a lot of money on a kind of stupid degree, okay, and then they drop out."

Auren Hoffman (00:02.04)

All right. Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Alex Tabarrok. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and the co -author of Marginal Revolution with one of my good friends, Tyler Cowen, and one of the most popular and long running blogs on the internet. Alex, welcome to World of Dats. I'm very, very excited. Now there's a sense that the U .S. is less dynamic than in the past. What is an

Alex (00:20.1)

It's great to be

Auren Hoffman (00:31.318)

explanation for

Alex (00:32.982)

Yeah. Well, economists have done a great job at documenting this fact. So we know that the number of startups as a percentage of the economy is down. We know that firms are, there's less turnover. Firms are getting older. Firms are getting bigger. We don't exactly know why, right? But I think it is worth emphasizing this point just on the facts because it runs completely counter

to the conventional wisdom, right? Conventional wisdom is that, oh, in the 50s, you got a job at IBM and you stayed there all your life and you got a pension and now you have to get multiple jobs. No, it's not true. It's the exact opposite. Today, most people are going to be working for a very large firm, a firm with 500 or more employees, and those firms tend to last. They tend to be much older than they were before. There's fewer people, there's fewer startups.

and fewer people are working in those startups.

Auren Hoffman (01:32.846)

And is it because there's just there's fewer startups because there's more opportunities like back in the day, it might be hard to get a job, especially maybe if you didn't know the right people or you didn't look a certain way. And now it's just like much easier for people to get a job at these. It's obviously much easier if you can get a job on these big companies. It's much easier for your life than to like go through the rigmarole of all the startup

Alex (01:56.356)

Yeah, so I'd say even, you know, we talk about the decline of dynamism, but we're not entirely sure whether this is even a good thing or a bad thing. You can also call dynamism churn. So you can say, well, there's a decline in churn, you know, and that makes it sound good. And like, why are the big firms not going out of business? Well, you could say, it used to be the case

Auren Hoffman (02:12.813)

Yep.

Alex (02:23.668)

A big firm would get old and ossified and along would come a new firm and would just steal all their business. And now the big firm is maybe more nimble. Maybe information technology has made that big firm more nimble like Zara and Fashion and they can change more quickly. Walmart changes its stock more quickly, information technology. So that's a possibility. Now that is

Auren Hoffman (02:40.653)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (02:47.916)

And if the big firm is not doing well, there are plenty of private equity people that come jump in and try to make it do better, right?

Alex (02:56.058)

Right, right, exactly. Now that is not, now that story, it might be true, but it runs against this counterfeeling that the economy has become less productive, right? And productivity has not been going up and wages have not been increasing as fast as in the past. So, you know, if you want to tell a story to make both of these things go together, then sort of decline in dynamism maybe is a bad thing.

But I don't think we know that for

Auren Hoffman (03:27.928)

There's like your colleague Tyler Cowan and people like Peter Thiel have a theory that we're just inventing less things, we're doing less science, we're doing less breakthroughs, we're not increasing at the pace that we had in the past. How do you feel about

Alex (03:46.34)

Yeah, so there's a couple of theories of the decline of dynism. One is the Tyler Cowan, kind of Robert Gordon, Peter Thiel theory, which is that… excuse me. I'm sorry.

That's right, again. Yeah, so there are a couple of theories for the decline of dynamism. One is the Tyler Cowan, Peter Thiel, Robert Gordon theory that why do you start a new firm? Well, one reason to start a new firm is if there's a new idea, some new technology, right? And if there's been a decline in this kind of fundamental ideas and technology, then maybe that's what's causing the decline in

And maybe we're coming out of that. know, Tyler seems to think that, you know, mRNA technology, know, things like this, artificial intelligence, maybe we're coming out of that. It's still, we're not seeing that in the productivity statistics. Okay, so it hasn't gotten down to where we can measure that, but it seems, it looks that way, but we're not seeing it in the stats. The other theory is that

It's actually a decline in the growth of the labor force. So here's another reason to create a new firm is if, firms can't get bigger and bigger forever. There are diseconomies of scale. So if you have a lot of people coming into the workforce, then you need to create new firms. Think about it slightly differently on the consumer side. Suppose you have a new city. Well, in that new city,

You're going to need some restaurants. You're going to need some new restaurants. And so that automatically, just because you're growing, you get more firms, you get more startups. And maybe as a side kind of benefit of that, of the new city, the new restaurants, you get a few McDonald's. That is you get some really innovative ones, right? So it's just this growth in labor force or in consumption, consumers.

Alex (05:57.626)

And that just requires new firms and maybe there's spinoffs which get you productivity.

Auren Hoffman (06:02.848)

So if the US population was going from 300 million to 600 million in the next 50 years or something, then that also could potentially spark a lot more innovation or something.

Alex (06:18.012)

Absolutely. And of course, the lay on top of this that the most innovative people are the immigrants, right? And you know, there's an interest. I mean, I traveled to India quite a bit and in India, most people, they work for themselves precisely because as you were saying earlier, they can't get a job at a nice, cushy, big corporation with lots of benefits and so forth. You are literally on your

You have to start your own business. And when those people come to the United States, it's much more familiar to them to start a business.

Auren Hoffman (06:55.558)

how do you square that with a lot of the people who kind of track the decline and dynamism track it to like the 70s and that is like when the immigration boom in the US started was like right around then and kind of the 40s, 50s, 60s the immigration was at all time low in the US and then it started rocketing up. So how does that

Alex (07:18.234)

Yeah. mean, lots of things can happen at the same time. And the 1970s is weird. For multiple reasons, it's a very weird decade. know, crime started going up. That was definitely not caused by immigration.

Auren Hoffman (07:20.566)

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Alex (07:35.964)

But you had like all kinds of massive numbers of assassinations, right? You've got bombings. So like in 1970, there was something like 275 bombings in the United States. There might be five or six today. Serial killers were huge. inflation went crazy. You can't blame that on the immigrants.

Auren Hoffman (07:49.159)

my gosh.

Alex (08:02.076)

So I think a lot of things went wrong in the 1970s. The puzzle really is more, you know, why didn't we recover? Because we never really recovered. You know, there was a brief increase in productivity in the 1990s, mostly in the retail sector. Walmart did fantastic. But even into the 2000s, you know, and today, like productivity growth in manufacturing has been flat for like 10 years. It's shocking.

Auren Hoffman (08:11.788)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (08:29.612)

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. What you you you're part of your research. One of your papers, you kind of concluded that federal regulation was not the cause of decline in American Dynasm. And I would think most people listening to this podcast would be shocked by that. You know, we're we're like walk us through that and then a few other kind of questions around that.

Alex (08:46.938)

Right. Yeah.

Alex (08:55.324)

Yeah, I mean, I was shocked by that. And it's a bit depressing. Right. So, we have a big database of…there's a code of federal regulations, okay? And there's a reg -data database, which is a product of Mercatus, which goes through that code and looks at all of the sort of restrictive words, words like shall not,

Auren Hoffman (08:59.522)

How do you even know that? Like, how did you figure it out?

Alex (09:24.006)

prohibited, those kinds of binding words. And it counts those up in each section of the Code of Federal Regulations. And then there's a machine learning technique which says, well, what's the probability that this part of the Code of Federal Regulations has to do with this industry?

So if there's some words in there, you know, like deep pit mine, well, then it's probably to do with the mining industry of this textiles. So we can associate each part of the code of federal regulations with an industry. And we know how many restrictive words are in that part. So you sum it all up and you get a measure of the amount of regulation by industry. And what we found was

Essentially, dynamism has declined in all kinds of industries, in the highly regulated ones, in the less regulated ones. It's declined in manufacturing, it's declined in services, it's declined in industries which have a lot of import competition, it's declined in industries which don't have a lot of import competition. So this kind of finding...

It's depressing in the one sense because if it was regulation, well, we know how to fix it. know, is that less regulation, right? Instead it suggested must be something economy -wide, right? Like labor force. Okay, so that makes sense. It would be in a lot of industries if it's the decline in the labor force or if it's the decline in this fundamental ideas science part of it. That also makes sense. Since we wrote that paper,

you know, there's more support of information has come to light, and that is this decline in dynism appears to be international. So, it's happening in Europe, it's happening in most of the developed economies. So, whatever it is, it's something pretty big and fundamental.

Auren Hoffman (11:22.008)

There's this kind of trope that starting maybe in the 80s, all the best, you know, many of the best physicists, engineers, et cetera, that maybe normally would be starting interesting things, inventing different things, all went into finance because the pay was just too good and it kind of attracted all these people. And that kind of really hindered certain type of innovation. What do you think about

Alex (11:50.844)

I mean, I don't think a lot of them, it is true, were pushed into finance, but it wasn't pulled. Like if they're just being pulled into finance, just makes it more profitable to be a physicist and you just get more physicists, more people going into getting their PhDs and so forth. It was the case that, you know, the decline of NASA and decline of some of the big projects, you know, we didn't do in the United States, we didn't do a collider.

So that meant that there was less, there was some push, you know, there was less demand for them in physics. And so they ended up going into finance. But I don't think it was the case that finance pulled these guys away in a way which harmed the economy. After all, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of them. not, you know, yeah, we can get more physicists, you know, if we really want it, if we really had the demand for

Auren Hoffman (12:40.846)

small numbers.

Auren Hoffman (12:46.678)

Well, but you could make a case that innovations happen from a very small number of people and in just diverting some of those small number of people to an area where they might make a lot of money but may not introduce a lot of innovations could really affect things or do you not agree with

Alex (13:08.678)

mean, it's possible, but there's also spillovers. look, a lot of these guys in finance, like what are they doing? Well, they're doing machine learning and they're doing signal processing, right? So that just encourages the research in that area. mean, some of it is, know, like in Magellan, you know, Rentech, it's hidden away. Yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (13:31.586)

Yeah, exactly. Like you're at Renaissance, you can't tell anybody about it. You're just making money, right?

Alex (13:36.412)

Some of it is hidden away. That's true. I suspect that, know, Renetech, Renaissance, you know, the invented AI like 10 years before anybody else. However, I think there are spillovers. There's a general, if you can make more money in physics, more people go into physics, not all of them go into finance. And this knowledge of signal processing, it does spill over. So I'm not, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (13:44.782)

Totally, right.

Alex (14:03.344)

don't think a simple reallocation of talent is the story. The world has got a lot of talent.

Auren Hoffman (14:08.772)

Since the pandemic, we have seen a lot more businesses being started. Is this kind of a real reversal or do think this is just kind of a one -time blip or how do think about it?

Alex (14:20.912)

Yeah, I mean, that also is weird, right? Because it doesn't fit any of the stories which I gave you, right? It's not like a science suddenly, you know, improved or regulation declined or the labor force suddenly grew. None of these stories fit the increase in business startups in the pandemic and for following the pandemic. I think it's a blip. So the story that I would tell is, you know, something like this. After the

the London bombings, okay, there's a nice paper on this. The metro in London was shut down and people looked at how do people get to work, okay? And because the metro was shut down, they had to find a new route to get to work. Then the metro's opened up again and what they discovered is that a significant fraction of these people continue to use the new route, not the old, they didn't go back to the old route, even though the metro was open.

So that suggests that this kind of push, right? Got people to think a little bit differently, got people to try out something which they had didn't before. And then they realized, this is actually better. So I think in the same kind of way, the pandemic, a lot of people were out of work. They were looking around for something different. They decided, okay, I've been shoved, you know, I've been pushed. Now's the time to take some chances, take some risks. Let's start something. And that gives us a temporary.

boost. My thinking is that, I mean, I hope it lasts, but my thing is that it is a blip and it will go back down. In the same way, know, crime, you know, went way up in the pandemic and then is trending back down again, you know, things like that. So I think it's too early to draw very many conclusions.

Auren Hoffman (16:09.91)

It is certainly much easier today to create a side hustle than it was in the past. So you can be employed or you could be a student, whatever, but then you do something else and you make a little bit of income on it. And there's so many different platforms to help you do this today. And potentially some of those high side hustles could become real significant businesses. One day. How do you think about this? Like adding to dynamism?

Alex (16:36.604)

Yeah, I mean, that's very plausible. I hope it's true. But, you know, we have yet to see it in the data. that, again, that's something which at least dates to, you know, the iPhone, right? So the rise of gig work, that's not something in like the last two or three years, it's more something in the last 15 years. And we didn't see it earlier. So yeah, I mean, I hope that's true. But it's not in the data

Auren Hoffman (17:06.082)

What, you know, back in the day in the kind of, say in the thirties, there were all these like massive projects like Hoover Dam. And then, you know, in the fifties, there was the interstate system. In the sixties, you have NASA and the moon landing. And, you I know you're a libertarian, but these are amazing government programs that also did a lot of good. How do you analyze these projects?

Alex (17:33.71)

Right. Well, look, as a libertarian, I'm much more concerned when the government says you can't do something than when the government does something. So I'm not that bothered by the Hoover Dam or the space program. Even Ayn Rand liked the space program. Yeah. A lot of that is complementary to the private sector.

Auren Hoffman (17:51.276)

Yeah, Golden Gate, Golden Gate Bridge or something like that, right?

Alex (18:02.548)

We need energy. The transportation system makes it cheaper to move goods and services around and so forth. So I'm not terribly concerned about that. do think that we've, you know, the space program was the last gasp of the 19th century Victorian, dare I say, manly approach to conquering nature and

breaking out into new frontiers, know, space, the new frontier. And, you know, we've just, we've lost some of that. Even back

Auren Hoffman (18:40.056)

Why is it, are we just not ambitious enough? we too timid? Are we just too worried about people dying or these things that obviously a of people die in the space program. A of people died creating Hoover dam and stuff. What's the reason why government doesn't seem to be able to do anything big

Alex (19:01.916)

I mean, it's all of those things. I think also, look, to steal madness, you can say, well, look, you had World War I, you had World War II. These are like massive technology, right? You got tanks, you got nuclear weapons, you had the Great Depression, you know, you've got environmental problems, which were real, overstated, but still are real. And I think people

You know got this idea that technology was something to be feared and was something was a negative right and some of that was understandable, you know you had Chernobyl not Chernobyl but a three -mile island right later Chernobyl but three -mile island and people you know known we can't have energy. can't have nuclear Jimmy Carter. You got to put on a sweater, you

Auren Hoffman (19:54.753)

Yeah,

Alex (19:55.324)

That is so, to me, that is so anti -American. This idea that the way to deal with a problem is to say, reduce your consumption. No, the way to deal with the American way is to grow. And we definitely have lost some of that. So I think part of it is courage and ambition and those kinds of things and fear, safety, all that stuff. And then the second part of it, I think, is the government just got too big.

the scope got too big. mean, basically, we have, and I'm going to qualify this because it's going to sound crazy, but we have sort of a totalitarian government now. It's not totalitarian in its means, but it's totalitarian in its ends in the sense that whatever the problem is in society today, the first thing people turn to is the government. It doesn't matter how small or how big the problem

what kind of problem it is. It's the first thing that people think about. So education, health, environment, business, dynamism, what's the government's solution to this? So the government really does have its finger in every single potential pie. I I was looking the other day at the Code of Federal Regulations and the regulation of sausages, right? And it tells you.

Well, for asachos, the meat has to be ground by so much and you have to have so much salt and it has to be cured for 60 days but not 90 days. And like it goes on and on, paragraphs and paragraphs. So the government is just everywhere. It is totalitarian in its ends.

Auren Hoffman (21:33.154)

Right, instead of just saying like it needs to be safe, like that would be much better, right? And then people can kind of figure out.

Alex (21:38.822)

Correct, correct, which is kind of the common law. It shouldn't be fraudulent, know, it needs to be safe, you know, things like that. Sort of a rules kind of a approach. So by trying to do too much.

Auren Hoffman (21:43.501)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (21:48.64)

If the government is like, if the government was like really totalitarian, I mean, you think things would work a little better. Like they'd actually get stuff done. Like if you're building a high speed rail in China, I feel like they get it done. You know, they make it happen. They push people out of the way. And you're building a high speed rail in California and like a mile gets done per year. Maybe. I mean, it's horrible. Like, like

Alex (22:15.196)

Yeah

Auren Hoffman (22:17.562)

It's almost the worst of all worlds. either you get stuff done and, to tell us here and, like, or maybe get out of the way, but like we have, we have both.

Alex (22:26.662)

Yes, exactly. So that's why I say it's totalitarian in its ends. It tries to control everything, but not in its means. So we still have a rule of law so people can still sue, right? And we're still trying to protect the two -eared wild buffalo rat bird or something like that, I think that literally, almost literally, There's a whole article on the front

Auren Hoffman (22:33.634)

Yes, yes.

Auren Hoffman (22:47.66)

Yeah, yep, Yeah,

Alex (22:56.164)

of the New York Times about Elon Musk and SpaceX and eight birds. It was unbelievable, Victorians would never put up with that nonsense.

Auren Hoffman (23:06.518)

Right, right.

Now, you're also, you've talked, you've thought a lot about things like reshoring, building manufacturing capacity. How do you think we could be thinking about that differently?

Alex (23:24.058)

Yeah, so I have some concerns. Yeah, I think we're in a bad situation in that, you you think about anti -immigration, reducing, closing our borders and anti -free trade, protectionism. And now both parties are in total agreement. So Biden, you know, kept all of the Trump tariffs. He has kept, he built the wall, Biden built the wall, right? You know, yeah. And look.

Auren Hoffman (23:48.514)

Yep, totally.

Alex (23:53.548)

I understand that there's some concerns about China, and there is an argument, which I understand, and I think it's a legitimate argument, that there are some things, you know, chips that we want to make sure, it's not good to have them located in Taiwan, right? We want to make sure that we are on shore those. However, I have three concerns. One is, fundamentally, I don't think China and the United States

have such a clash of interest. Of course, it's not perfect harmony, but there's a lot of harmony of interest between China and the United States. We do lot of trade with China, which benefits both China and the United

Auren Hoffman (24:35.752)

It's, it's, in their economic destinies are somewhat intertwined is what you're saying.

Alex (24:42.084)

yeah i'm so absolutely and what china's not going away it's one point four billion people it's not going away moreover the way i think about

Auren Hoffman (24:48.27)

And you think it's more more true than Germany and the UK in 1914 type of thing?

Alex (24:55.5)

Yeah, I just more truth with even with respect to Russia, right? I mean the Soviet Union did go away, right? Putin can go away, but China it's not just you know, it's not just a premier But here's here's the thing like as China's getting richer Okay, people are worried because they're getting more military whatever but also what this means is that people in China are getting cancer, okay

Auren Hoffman (24:59.788)

Yeah, yeah, well certainly more true than Russia. Yeah, yep.

Alex (25:25.212)

Not a thing, but now there's 1 .4 billion people who want to cure for cancer, and they're willing to put some money into it, right? And then that's going to increase the amount of research and development for all kinds of high -tech goods, which is amazing for us. Like, I would be thrilled if an American wins the Nobel Prize for curing cancer. I would be 99 .5 % as happy if a Chinese scientist wins a Nobel Prize for curing cancer.

So we have a lot to gain from a richer China. That's point one. Point two is that, yeah, I get the idea that we want to onshore chip manufacturing, but I think we want to friend shore, right? So we don't want to just have protection against all countries. Like I get it, okay, a hundred percent tariff on your Chinese EVs. It's kind of crazy, but all right. However, let's reduce tariffs on Germany.

Let's reduce tariffs on Europe. In fact, let's create a free trade, even a free immigration block among the Western democracies, you know, including Japan, Australia, New Zealand. So, let's, this idea that let's not turn a small problem in foreign policy, which is to make sure that we have a

Ready military supply. Let's not turn that into trying to create a fortress America Which is going to make us poorer and actually less safe instead, you know, let's build up the free world Okay, let's create an immigration and free trade with Europe and Canada and Mexico and so forth. Let's build up the free world That's point two point three is that look

It's very, very easy to take a foreign policy argument and turn it into rent seeking for the benefit of special interests and protectionism for the benefit of special interests. Right? So at one point in the United States, probably even still today, you know, we were prohibiting mohair imports. Okay. Why? Because we use mohair to make military uniforms.

Alex (27:44.828)

The whole thing is ridiculous. But that is the, it's very easy, almost inevitable, that this kind of argument is turned into a special interest trough.

Auren Hoffman (28:04.45)

Now, a couple of things on pandemic. know you were really involved with things like Operation Warp Speed. Why was that particularly so successful?

Alex (28:14.532)

Right. So I'm not a big Trump fan, but I think on Operation Warp Speed, Trump had the right instincts, which was to get it out of the government procurement system and instead create a private -public partnership, which avoided a lot of the contracting rules, okay, and which was guided, frankly, by the military.

Okay, so you had two people leading Operation Warp Speed, Manseh Slawi, who has brought in vaccine, researcher vaccine, fantastic, a guide CEO of vaccines on the civilian side, and you have General Gustav Perna, who was the logistics expert. And the military is one of the few institutions in American society which still has

ability to act quickly, right? And we put them to the test, you for better or worse, you know, we do keep them on their toes, right? And so I think these two things, getting it out of the basic government system, setting something outside of that system, making it going to the private sector. So the way I put Operation Warp Speed was to use the American model. And by that, I mean the American model is not command and control.

It's not government procurement. It is let's use the tremendous spending power and to combine that with the ingenuity and the speed of the private sector, right? So as a combination of the visible hand and the invisible hand. And that can work in an emergency. It can become overrun by rent seeking in normal times, but in an emergency, that's really the way to do it. The American model, spend a lot so the government knows how to do that, but get the private sector to produce.

Auren Hoffman (30:11.202)

Now, how do you think about other pandemic potential things that we're facing like bird flu?

Alex (30:18.042)

Yeah. mean, you know, the COVID was completely predicted and predictable and predicted, right? I mean, the scientists were saying this is going to happen, multiple papers on it, but you know, the Bill Gates had a Ted talk on it, you know, seen by like millions of people, Time Magazine, CNN, they're all talking about the inevitable pandemic before it actually happens.

Auren Hoffman (30:45.71)

Pandemics have been predicted, you know, 10 out of the last two times type of thing, right? Like they're always being talked about. So it's hard to know when you should go into core mode, right?

Alex (30:58.328)

Yes and no. I we had the earlier avian flu and although it's, I mean, it infected millions and millions of people, got lots of people sick, fortunately it didn't create so many deaths. It created a few thousand deaths, but still the point that this was predicted and we weren't ready, right? Now we have, you would think now that we've had the experience of COVID.

Auren Hoffman (31:20.813)

Yep.

Alex (31:26.928)

that we would be better prepared. And maybe we are a little bit, but the response to the bird flu, think it's not been great. I give it a C minus, maybe a C. We need to ramp up testing much more quickly. We should be testing the milk supply. It's ridiculous. It is frankly ridiculous. And I'm a libertarian. It's ridiculous that the farmers can refuse to have their

their stock tested, like that's insane. Even as a libertarian, it's much, much better to violate some liberty and test some cows and birds and things like that now than to lock down the economy later. And those are kind of our two choices. So I'd much rather we act decisively early

then be forced into changing our entire economy and locking people in their houses and forbidding people from going to church later, right? So the thing we should have learned about a pandemic, you gotta act quickly and you gotta act decisively early. There's a lot of things we could be doing, like in addition to testing, like we could vaccinate the cows.

I mean, it's in the word, right? Vax, right? What more clue do we need that we should vaccinate the cows?

Auren Hoffman (32:57.781)

Now you've also written a lot about crime and you've studied a lot of crime and as you mentioned earlier there was a lot of violent crime in the 70s and it kind of started to fall off pretty sharply in the 90s. What are some of those factors and there's been so many theories about it but what are some of those factors that that changed the crime

Alex (33:19.76)

Yeah, so we had a huge increase in crime in the 60s, 70s, basically peaked in the 1990s, early 1990s. And then we've had this big, big decline in crime. there's basically sort of three theories. think all them, there are three things which I think mattered. Some controversy, one of them is abortion, okay, as the Steve Levitt,

Auren Hoffman (33:45.676)

Yeah, that's the Steve Lemmon Freakonomics. Yeah.

Alex (33:47.772)

Freakonomics story, right? So he says, you know, abortion is legalized in some states as early as 1970, nationally in 1973, and then 18 years later, okay, you begin to see this drop in crime. And the evidence for that is that crime dropped first in the states which legalized first. It's also the case that crime dropped first among

the crimes which were most age -related. So for example, like homicide, that's a crime of young people, while like check fraud, that's a crime of older people. And so what you see is that as the crimes which began to decline first were the ones which were dominated by young people, and then as more and more cohorts,

Auren Hoffman (34:29.706)

Yep, yep.

Alex (34:45.02)

came under the abortion regime, as it were, the crimes which were committed by older people also started to fall. So, that's some of the evidence for the theory. yeah.

Auren Hoffman (34:55.968)

By the way, that theory just never made sense to me because like there was this rise of people, you know, over that time, the rise of people living in one parent households started to go up dramatically, decline in the family, you know, all these other things, which you would think would also contribute, even more so contribute. So it just, never, that whole abortion theory just never really made a lot of sense to me.

Alex (35:23.324)

Yeah, so I think that's a legitimate criticism because, yeah, the causal arrows do go something like the children who were aborted, okay, would have been the ones who would have grown up in the most criminogenic, single parent, low income, often African American, right? They would have grown up in the worst circumstances, okay? And you're right

the macro level, we didn't see a big decline in single -parent households. Now, yeah, somewhat of a rise, but certainly not a decline with abortion. So what you have to argue is that it was very targeted or that it was focused. So it's not just single -parents, but it's a specific type of single -parent, very poor and so forth. And given the

Auren Hoffman (35:58.104)

Yeah, in fact, we saw a rise of

Alex (36:23.642)

And this is not, all this stuff is not always easy to talk about in today's political climate, but a huge amount of crime is created by a relatively small number of people. And if we're talking about violent crime, we're essentially talking about a small number of African -American young men. That is a huge source of crime, right? The African -Americans are also the victims of crime, right?

So it's not totally inconsistent, not totally impossible that the numbers add up. But I agree with you that that is one critique of this theory. But if you focus on the fact that you don't need that many super criminals to be aborted for this to be true, like it's still, the numbers can still add up. That's what I'd say on that. The other theory is the lead, getting the lead out.

Auren Hoffman (37:23.168)

Yep. Okay. I've heard that theory. Yeah.

Alex (37:24.674)

Right. So we do know the nice thing about this theory is we do know that people who have a lot of lead in their blood, from gasoline, from lead paint, things like that, it lowers IQ and it makes people less able to regulate their emotions. So the micro evidence kind of fits. The macro evidence is that we started phasing

leaded gasoline in the 1970s. So again, sort of 18 years later, you you begin to see this decline in crime.

Auren Hoffman (38:04.398)

And you also see at the same time, you know, kind of a somewhat decline in testosterone, rise in estrogen in men, you know, lowering sperm counts, all these other things, which could also, and who knows what environmental factors there are causing some of these things.

Alex (38:24.858)

Right. Yeah, I'm not sure that… I think there's some dispute about the sperm counts, whether that's actually true or not, I don't know. But I think you're right, you do see, like you see not only lowering in crime, but lowering in like teenage pregnancy, right? Kind of, which sort of fits on the female side, Kind of a less ability to regulate your emotions, things of that nature, like maybe that's connected with, you know, getting pregnant when you're a teenager.

So anyway, so you saw a lot of things getting better in the 1990s. So I think that's a possibility. It also fits the international evidence reasonably well. So that's a possibility. So you got abortion, you got lead, maybe that's something. The third one is just kind of melange of things like crime became less profitable. Like people aren't carrying around cash anymore, okay? Cell phones.

Auren Hoffman (39:18.805)

Yeah.

Alex (39:22.1)

are making it easier to, you know, capture people, things like that. Cameras everywhere, exactly. And then we did massively increase the penalties for crime, which had been falling in the 60s and 70s. We way ramped up the number of prisoners, you know, and I think that also had an effect.

Auren Hoffman (39:25.378)

Yeah, cameras everywhere, all those types of things. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (39:45.954)

Yeah, a lot more people, a lot of the criminals, I guess, if you're if you're in prison, you can't really commit crimes against police against non prisoners. Right. Yeah.

Alex (39:54.172)

Exactly. There's deterrents and there's incapacitation. So I think these things matter. However, like my last point would be, think crime declined because crime declined. Crime went up because crime went up. Like there's a big peer effect. Okay.

Auren Hoffman (40:14.092)

Yep. Okay. You see, or if you're a victim of crime, you're more likely to commit crime yourself or, know, so there's, there's some sort of like spiral down or spiral up.

Alex (40:23.928)

Exactly. So this is why I worry, you know, people think, okay, crime has gone down and why do we have, we have mass incarceration. Okay. Right. And well, first of all, you have to understand there was mass incarceration for a reason. It was because, you know, the number of murders went up by a factor of four in the 1970s. Right. So people were afraid to walk in the streets. You know, I like the talking about the bombings, the serial killers.

I mean, it really was. This where we get all the movies from, The Joker and all that. So people were frightened. So it's totally understandable. let me add this. Among the people who were demanding mass incarceration, more incarceration, were leaders of the black community, because they were the victims of crime. So in the 1970s, people said the criminal justice system is racist. Why?

Auren Hoffman (41:11.116)

Of course. Yeah.

Alex (41:20.668)

because it lets out too many black criminals on the street. It doesn't punish them enough. That's what black leaders were saying, right? So anyway, so you had this rise that there was a good reason for mass incarceration. I think we went too far, okay, but you gotta be a little bit careful to let the pendulum swing back too far because I think that underneath the surface, there is still plenty of...

Auren Hoffman (41:24.854)

Yep. Yeah.

Alex (41:48.72)

bubbling criminality which could leap out like a volcano and you see that in San Francisco and Oakland and you see that in like, Kia and Hyundai, know, car thefts and things like that. So I think we do have to be careful not to let the social contagion free once again the way we mistakenly did in the 1960s and

Auren Hoffman (42:09.77)

There was a paper last year that compared the crime rates of Swedish lottery winners to the crime rates of non lottery winners. Unpack that paper for us a

Alex (42:21.124)

Right. So there's a very clear correlation in the data, which is that poorer people commit more crime, particularly more violent crime. Maybe they're not laundering money, but they're committing more violent crime. And so you guys, well, why is that the case? Is it the case that poverty creates crime or is it that crime creates poverty? Okay.

Or is it some third thing that just happens to be correlated with both of these two things? And that is going to affect your strategy towards defeating crime, combating crime. Now, what is nice about the lottery paper is, the problem with studying this, of course, is that the people who are rich are different than the people who are poor. so, is it that they're rich or is it something else?

Now, the nice thing about the lottery paper is it breaks this endogeneity circle. So you have a random event, which makes people richer. And then the question that they can then ask is just like in a randomized controlled trial, you have a random event, makes people richer, do they commit less crime? And the answer is no. The answer is they commit about as much crime as they did before. So it's not the

at least from this study, it's not that the income causes crime, it's something, they're correlated, but it doesn't appear to be causal. At least that's the lesson.

Auren Hoffman (43:52.238)

Now, you know, you know, in like 10 years, there's like going to be a follow up Raj Chetty paper on this, which will say, but the kids of these people commit less crime or something like that, right?

Alex (44:02.62)

I mean, research never stops, Still, I think this is a...it points very clearly towards that we must be humble when we're looking at these correlations, okay? You can't just jump to the conclusion that,

Auren Hoffman (44:06.413)

Right, right.

Alex (44:26.63)

Poverty creates crime, therefore if we get rid of poverty, we'll get rid of crime. That doesn't seem to be the case. And there's other evidence on that as well, right? mean, like there are plenty of Chinatowns where there was not a lot of crime, but a lot of poor Chinese people, things like that,

Auren Hoffman (44:44.397)

Now there's been so many people kind of going after cash bail and talking about eliminating cash bail, how cash bail is unfair. How do you think about

Alex (44:55.472)

Yeah. So the people who want to get rid of cash bail, they tell a very compelling story, which is that, there's this guy, he committed a misdemeanor and he couldn't make bail. Okay. And so he's left in jail for weeks or months and it was just a

And you think, well, you know, I could commit a misdemeanor. You know, I could end up in jail. And no, the answer is no. Okay. That is not actually what's going on. What's going on is that these people are committing misdemeanors, but the average person, I'll give you some data, approximate data from New York City. The average person who doesn't make bail has already skipped bail multiple times previously. They have multiple misdemeanor charges.

Okay, maybe some felony charges as well. Okay. The people who end up not being able to make bail have got already lots of charges against them. So what's going on is that the judge sees this guy. Yeah, it's just a misdemeanor. Maybe it's even a parking fine or something like that. But then he looks at the record. He said, well, this just happened 10 times before and you never showed up for trial. Okay. So what are they going to do? So the judge finally says, you know, I've had it. I've had it with these guys.

You know, I'm imposing bail. It's 5 ,000 bucks and they don't make the bail. But that, you know, that was on purpose. It's not a, these guys are not a random

Auren Hoffman (46:27.438)

But does the cash bail actually increase the likelihood that they'll show up for trial? Because you could just keep them in jail too, especially if you thought they were a danger to the community, keep them in jail until the trial starts. What is the reasoning? Obviously the state doesn't need the bail. It's not like a revenue thing or something. What is the reasoning for

Alex (46:54.746)

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things. One is that actually this gives judges a more flexible approach to letting them out on their own recognizance or keeping them in jail. Okay. So he's very, I'm going to sign bail. So I'm kind of a more flexible approach. And it basically says, look, are people in the community going to support? Okay. So, you know, to get bail, the accused, they might have to,

their mother sign on the bail bond, right? And I wrote a paper on bounty hunters, which talk about more in a minute. But I was talking with one of these bounty hunters, bail enforcement agents, and he says, look, I deal with a lot of tough guys, and they're not afraid of me. They're not afraid of the police. But if the mother signs the bail bonds, they're still afraid of their mother, and they'll show up for trial. So yeah, I think it

Auren Hoffman (47:50.083)

huh. Yeah.

Alex (47:54.012)

And especially if you borrow the money from a bounty hunter, from a bail bondsman, because those guys will come out and find you. They're much more effective than the police and they'll get you to show up. But the number of people, just the basic facts, like it's like 25 % of people don't show up for trial. Like it's a huge number. So it's not surprising that judges want some way to partially at least incentivize people to show

because that's a huge waste of the prosecuting time, the judge time when the guy doesn't show up for trial and he keeps doing this over and over

Auren Hoffman (48:30.318)

But someone doesn't show up for a trial. You're clearly guilty of not showing up for trial. You can be then thrown in jail, right? I mean, you've just committed that crime if you don't show up for trial.

Alex (48:42.448)

Absolutely, but you know, like I say that the guys who end up not being able to make bail They've got you know, five six charges against them including Not showing up on previous on previous. I mean look What's really going on

Auren Hoffman (48:57.794)

mean, I like, I thought the, I thought the idea of bail was like, making sure that somebody doesn't like, abscond to Mexico or something. and, you know, because like, but if, if like, you're in San Francisco or, whatever St. Louis and the person just stays in San Luis, like you can go find them and then if they don't show up, well, okay, well now you have a, you're, literally get thrown in jail. Like it's, a terrible situation to not show up for, for, so why is that not punishment enough

Like, why do we need the dollars?

Alex (49:28.124)

The police rarely go after these people. I mean, the only time that the police will typically capture somebody who is out on bail is if they're committing a further crime, know, this speeding ticket or something like that. But what the bail does is two things. One, you often get the money from a bail bondsman, which means that you have this private, highly incentivized people. Because what happens is the bail bondsman puts up the money, okay? And so...

Auren Hoffman (49:39.117)

Yeah,

Auren Hoffman (49:53.1)

Yeah, of course, yeah, so they have incentive to get the person back. Yep.

Alex (49:55.004)

If you don't show up, the bail bondsman loses the money. So they have an incentive to make sure you show up. So that's part of it. And also look, it's just a good reminder. Okay. Like you and I know, I mean, uh, if there's some reasonable amount of money on the line, we're just like less likely to forget, it could be 500 bucks or, whatever. Like if we've made a look, look, uh, sometimes you make a dinner reservation, right?

And the reservation says, if you don't cancel within 24 hours, then you lose your, uh, a hundred bucks or something, right? Well, does that make you more likely to show up or more likely to cancel earlier? Yes, I think it does.

Auren Hoffman (50:39.854)

You've thought a lot about AI. Who do you think is going to be advantaged and disadvantaged the most over the next 10 years?

Alex (50:49.628)

I mean, I wish I knew. The thing about AI is I've never seen, you know, we have made inanimate matter think, which is unbelievable. And I've never seen a technology where

the projections of where that technology is going to go are so widely different that the entire destiny of the human race is at stake, right? So it's like, you you invented the gasoline engine, but it could be that the gasoline engine increases in efficiency 10 ,000, 100 ,000 times, you know, if one trajectory happens.

Auren Hoffman (51:34.764)

Yes, right.

Alex (51:37.302)

and it doesn't if another. And they're really smart people. That's what they're telling me, right? There's at least a possibility that we create a super intelligence, okay? And beyond von Neumann, know, beyond anything which we have previously imagined. That is a possibility. I'm not sure it's going to happen. I don't think it's also possible that it peaks out. You know, we're trained on human data. Maybe AI peaks out.

and I just don't know, right? and to sort of predict, think like you might say, for example, that, AI is going so rapidly, you should become a software engineer. Right. And yet one of the first jobs, which AI will replace probably is a software engineer. You know, the guys that open AI, they're working very hard to eliminate their jobs. So, you know, and like.

Auren Hoffman (52:31.81)

Yep, yep, totally.

Alex (52:35.846)

Who would have predicted that the earliest jobs to be threatened by AI would be like photographers and musicians? So, I can't, it's very difficult to predict. Strange.

Auren Hoffman (52:45.536)

Auren Hoffman (52:52.27)

Now, your colleague, Tyler Cowen, he recently made an argument that we reached peak economist, that you don't even need to be an economist anymore to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board. What do you think about that?

Alex (53:09.104)

So it wasn't the idea of the PhD economist. think like Arthur Burns, I think was the first one with a PhD. There's been quite a few since then, but before that, you there were plenty of economists on the, plenty of people on the Federal Reserve without PhDs in economics. I don't know. I don't see it. You might see economists are getting

more attention in the media than ever before. It's not uncommon now to have a front page article in the New York Times talking about some of the latest economics research, usually by Raj Chetty. I think we are getting a greater inequality among economics influence and among economics and so forth.

Auren Hoffman (53:49.996)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's incredible.

Auren Hoffman (54:00.195)

Yeah.

Alex (54:05.21)

But I don't particularly see economics as in decline, certainly not compared to other professions, Like political science, sociology, are they like rising? I don't think so.

Auren Hoffman (54:16.748)

Yeah, it's a good point. If you think of even John Levin, like the new president of Stanford, like he's an economist, you know, that's a, so it's still very prestigious to be an economist. You're right. It's probably less prestigious to be a political scientist today than it was in the past.

Alex (54:32.08)

Right, and the high -tech firms have been hiring lots of economists. Maybe that has peaked a little bit, it's still we're at a much higher level than we were before.

Auren Hoffman (54:46.252)

Now, you have been blogging at Marginal Revolution forever, for centuries, it seems like. What has changed the most over that

Alex (54:52.27)

Yeah

Alex (54:59.718)

So, you know, at the very beginning, the blogging was definitely seen as sort of a low status. You know, you're not publishing in the AER or Econometrica or something like that. So what are you doing talking to people and, you know, writing this blog? What is this thing? Right. And that has definitely changed over time. So now like the high status guys are like emailing me, hey, here's my new paper. You know, maybe you might want to put a link

Auren Hoffman (55:26.71)

Yeah,

Right about it, of course. Yeah, yeah.

Alex (55:29.696)

Marginal revolution, right? And so much more of what economists do isn't this high theory, but is the data work, which has a bigger interest to people in the street, can be explained, people in the street. So I think blogging became more high status over time. And in general, the economist as public intellectual increased.

Auren Hoffman (55:58.458)

You and Tyler have been collaborating on Martian Revolution for a couple decades. That is longer than most marriages. Why has that collaboration been successful?

Alex (56:15.356)

Yeah, Tyler and I have written books together and papers and blogging and Marginal Revolution University. I'd say this, Tyler and I have very different styles of thought, okay? So, if you ask Tyler a question, right, like, what is the answer, Tyler? You say, well, here's 10 things you need to think about, and he'll list them out, right? You know this already, you talk to Tyler, right? And it's like dazzling.

Auren Hoffman (56:38.668)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the reasons I love him.

Alex (56:41.596)

Yeah, it's brilliant, right? I mean, you just hear the 10 things you need to think about and it's incredible, like how he knows all of this stuff. But then like maybe like an hour later, you'll be thinking, hey, wait a second. He didn't actually answer the question. So then if you ask me a question, my style of thinking is, okay, let's simplify this. Okay. You know, let's cut this out, cut this out. Let's focus on what's the really heart of it. And I'll give you an answer.

Like maybe my answer won't actually be, it'll be to the simplified version of the problem, not actually to the one that you asked me. Now, so we have very different styles of thought. Tyler likes to complexify things and I like to simplify things. But if you push Tyler, okay, well, let's focus on like right now in this particular situation, this particular moment in time, and let's cut down this, it's probably not this, and force Tyler to kind of,

Auren Hoffman (57:18.284)

Yeah,

Alex (57:38.286)

simplify. And if you come to me and you force me to complexify and say, well, yeah, you're right, that's true for a presidential system, but maybe not quite exactly right for a parliamentary system. We have to adjust the theory a little bit in this way and so forth and so forth. Tyler and I will come to an agreement. So we have a total diversity of thought. And yet, because of values or something else, we often come to agreement. And I think that enables us to trust one another.

if we're writing a paper or something like that, that we will be able to cooperate in a way which takes advantage of both of our skills and not reach some impasse where we can't agree because we have some fundamental difference. No, we're usually coming to the same conclusion from totally different places. And I think the diversity of our thought helps both of us, but also because we end up agreeing, we're able to collaborate.

Auren Hoffman (58:35.758)

There's been a lot of people talking about the lack of diversity of thought at universities right now. How big of a problem do you think that is?

Alex (58:47.714)

Yeah. I mean, I think it is a big problem for multiple reasons. I mean, just politically, like, the universities are under incredible attack, right? Like, JD Vance just says, professors are the problem, right? They're the enemy. The professors are the enemy, okay? And why is that? Well, it's because on campus, you know, the liberals dominate

conservatives or libertarians or however you want to define them, like in some departments, a hundred to one, you know, in the average department, it's like 10 to one, you know, even among economists are considered, you know, radical free market, right wing people. among economists, the liberals dominate like four to one. Right? So this is a problem for the United States politically because the universities actually do some good things. Okay.

Auren Hoffman (59:34.434)

Yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (59:44.364)

Yeah, and even by the way, even get to hire as a math professor or engineering professor or something like that. There are certain other questions and certain some universities will require you to answer to kind of weed out certain types of ideologies.

Alex (59:59.356)

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. It's again, it's totalitarian. It's yeah, it's McCarthyite. Yeah,

Auren Hoffman (01:00:08.024)

So what you're making an argument, it's in the university's best interest to, even if you are a very liberal person, to diversify because otherwise you are going to be under attack. It's almost like telling a rich person it's in your best interest to pay some taxes so the people don't have a revolution against you or something.

Alex (01:00:15.781)

Yes.

Alex (01:00:28.38)

Yeah, the English department should be thanking the economics department because when you go to funding in Virginia with a conservative governor, we're the only people he likes. So for the general health of the university, it's important to have diversity. And yeah, it's important, especially like not every... How do I put

Auren Hoffman (01:00:42.945)

Yeah.

Alex (01:00:57.852)

I think we need to have diversity between universities, not just also within universities. So, you you might look at George Mason and say, you economics people, you're all libertarian conservatives and whatever, and your department has no diversity, right? But like, we're the only department like that in the United States. Okay? So, we need these, you know, I'm totally happy with having a Marxist economics department.

Auren Hoffman (01:01:18.391)

Yeah, yep.

Alex (01:01:26.722)

I would like to see this flowering of diversity among different places. It's not that every single place has to be diverse, but we need to have an openness and then we have competition of ideas in the bigger marketplace.

Auren Hoffman (01:01:35.437)

Yes.

Auren Hoffman (01:01:44.322)

Okay, two more personal questions we ask everybody. First one is, what is a conspiracy theory you believe?

Alex (01:01:55.608)

Okay, I'll give you, I'll give you, let me see. I give you a fun one, which I won't say I believe at a hundred percent, but I think like 10, 15%. And that is that Justin Trudeau is the son of Fidel Castro. Do you know this one? You've never heard of this one? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:16.322)

Wait, what? No, I've never heard this one. This is is awesome. OK. OK.

Alex (01:02:23.184)

I mean, this is big in Canada. And if you look at pictures, Justin Trudeau looks very much like Castro. He does not look at all like his father, Pierre Trudeau, like his father, Pierre Trudeau, his father on the birth record. And the sort of timeline fits, and it was kind of known that Pierre and his wife, they were kind of swingers a little bit.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:40.972)

Okay.

Alex (01:02:49.461)

And they were in the region and you know, it's not impossible.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:53.362)

But why why Castro out of all people? it's just like, was there something going on between Justin Trudeau's mother and Castro? Like, so they knew each other and they were friendly with one another. OK.

Alex (01:03:00.412)

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, very much so, yeah, very much so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the vacation sort of together and they were compatriots, yeah,

Auren Hoffman (01:03:12.758)

my gosh, this is a good conspiracy theory. never heard this one. I mean, it sounds like one that is well known, but I never heard it before. I'm going to go, I'm going to go down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. I love this stuff. So, all right. Last question. We ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Alex (01:03:20.764)

You gotta Google it now.

Alex (01:03:36.356)

I I guess now, if I said, you know, don't follow your passion, but that's almost, it's almost reversed now, right? Yeah. So, okay, let me try something. Yeah, all right. I think we've put way too much emphasis on going to college, okay? We have too many people going to college. And if you're the sort of person who just doesn't

Auren Hoffman (01:03:42.284)

Yep, everyone says that now. Yeah.

Alex (01:04:02.062)

sit down learning, you didn't like reading, you didn't like books so much and didn't like sit down learning. But you feel you have to go to college because everyone's doing it and your parents say it's the only way to become wealthy and rich and you know, the problem is, is that a lot of these people who are not that well suited in preferences to college, they go to college, they spend a lot of money on a kind of stupid degree, okay, and then they drop

you know, 40 % of students don't graduate, right? So that is like the worst of all worlds because exactly, exactly. You have the debt and you don't have the piece of paper. And yeah, it's the worst scenario. And a lot of students end up in that scenario. And even though, again, if you graduate, you know, like there's this idea that,

Auren Hoffman (01:04:39.896)

Yeah. Not graduating college is the worst, right? It's the worst scenario.

Alex (01:05:00.38)

There's obviously things which, degrees which don't pay very well, know, cosmetology and you know, stuff, but English is not great. Yeah, exactly. But a lot of people think, I'll do a business degree. But actually the business degrees are a joke. The business, you know, how to make a PowerPoint, communication. I'm sorry. I still don't know what communication is. I don't know what that is. Are they teaching Claude Shannon? I don't think so.

Auren Hoffman (01:05:03.414)

Yeah. English even, right? Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:05:15.18)

Yeah, yeah, that would be a joke.

Auren Hoffman (01:05:28.28)

Well, also the, I mean, if you are the type of person who, is a bit of a little bit of a go -getter, and you can learn, other things, like, I mean, if you could learn how to be an electrician or something like that, like, first of all, you're adding a lot of value to people's lives. You're making people's lives significantly better and kind of a guaranteed like incredible living for the rest of your life.

Right. It's a very hard thing to learn. It's very, so even for people who are good at learning stuff, it doesn't, there there's also just a, you can make an argument and maybe it just doesn't make sense for so many of them to do this kind of traditional, you know, whatever, get the history degree or something. Even if you're passionate about history, you can like probably teach yourself history on the side. Like the degree doesn't matter.

Alex (01:06:24.006)

so many great podcasts on history.

Auren Hoffman (01:06:25.548)

Yeah, exactly. So many great podcasts. There's so many great books. I love history. I never took a history class in college. And, you know, the but if you could actually learn to do something really great and really valuable, like some of those jobs pay incredibly well. People make hundreds of thousand dollars a year

Alex (01:06:44.08)

Yeah, we were talking about AI. Well, the AI is coming for the plumbers last, right?

Auren Hoffman (01:06:50.456)

That's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Being a plumber would be really valuable. All right. This has been amazing. Thank you, Alex Saburock for joining us on World of Dazs. I follow you at a cabarrock on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to gauge with you there. This has been a ton of fun. Thank

Alex (01:07:07.388)

Thank you, Arne, it's been a pleasure. All right, great.

Auren Hoffman (01:07:11.286)

Alright, thank