0:00:04 Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner.
0:00:09 This is the second and final part of a series we are revisiting from last year.
0:00:19 Stick around for an update at the end of the episode.
0:00:23 Last week’s episode was called Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia.
0:00:29 We heard about the alleged fraudsters, we heard about the whistleblowers, and then a lawsuit
0:00:31 against the whistleblowers.
0:00:38 My very first thoughts were like, oh my god, how’s anyone going to be able to do this again?
0:00:43 We heard about feelings of betrayal from a co-author who was also a long-time friend
0:00:45 of the accused.
0:00:52 We once even got to the point of our two families making an offer to a developer on a project
0:00:55 to have houses connected to each other.
0:01:01 We also heard an admission from inside the house that the house is on fire.
0:01:05 If you were just a rational agent acting in the most self-interested way possible as
0:01:09 a researcher in academia, I think you would cheat.
0:01:14 That episode was a little gossipy for us at least.
0:01:20 Today we are back to wonky, but don’t worry, it is still really interesting.
0:01:26 Today we look into the academic research industry, and believe me, it is an industry.
0:01:30 And there is misconduct everywhere from the universities.
0:01:36 The most likely career path for anyone who has committed misconduct is a long and fruitful
0:01:41 career because most people, if they’re caught at all, they skate.
0:01:46 There’s misconduct at academic journals, some of which are essentially fake.
0:01:50 There may be something that sounds a lot less nefarious than what I just described, but
0:01:53 that is actually what’s happening.
0:01:59 And we’ll hear how the rest of us contribute, because after all, we love these research
0:02:00 findings.
0:02:04 You know, you wear red, you must be angry, or if it says that this is definitely a cure
0:02:05 for cancer.
0:02:09 We’ll also hear from the reformers who are trying to push back.
0:02:13 It was a tense few months, but in the end, I was allowed to continue doing what I was
0:02:14 doing.
0:02:16 Can academic fraud be stopped?
0:02:27 Let’s find out.
0:02:32 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:02:44 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:02:50 This week, we heard about two alleged cases of data fraud from two separate researchers
0:02:51 in one paper.
0:02:57 The paper claimed that if you ask people to sign a form at the top before they fill out
0:03:03 the information, you will get more truthful answers than if they sign at the bottom.
0:03:09 After many unsuccessful attempts to replicate this finding and allegations that the data
0:03:14 supporting it had been faked, the original paper was finally retracted.
0:03:20 The two alleged fraudsters are Dan Ariely of Duke and Francesca Gino, who has been suspended
0:03:22 by Harvard Business School.
0:03:27 Gino subsequently sued Harvard, as well as the three other academic researchers who blew
0:03:28 the whistle.
0:03:32 The lawsuit against the researchers was dismissed.
0:03:35 The whistleblowers maintain a blog called Data Colada.
0:03:40 They have written that they believe there is fake data in many of the papers that Francesca
0:03:43 Gino coauthored, perhaps dozens.
0:03:48 Gino and Ariely, meanwhile, both maintain their innocence.
0:03:52 They also both declined our request for an interview.
0:03:56 On that one paper that caused all the trouble about signing at the top, there were three
0:04:01 other coauthors, Lisa Shoe, Nina Mazar, and Max Bazerman.
0:04:05 None of them have been accused of any wrongdoing.
0:04:10 So let’s pick up where we left off with Max Bazerman, the most senior researcher on that
0:04:11 paper.
0:04:13 He also teaches at Harvard Business School.
0:04:19 When there’s somebody who engages in bad behavior, there’s always people around who
0:04:23 could have noticed more and acted more.
0:04:26 Bazerman was close with Francesca Gino.
0:04:29 He had been her advisor and he trusted her.
0:04:34 So he has been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the mess.
0:04:40 He recently published a book called Complicit, How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop,
0:04:45 and he’s working on another book about social science fraud.
0:04:48 This has led him to consider what makes people cheat.
0:04:54 Let’s take the case of Dieteric Stapel, a Dutch professor of social psychology, who
0:05:02 after years of success admitted to fabricating and manipulating data in dozens of studies.
0:05:09 Part of the path toward data fabrication occurred in part because he liked complex ideas, and
0:05:16 academia didn’t like complex ideas as much as they liked the snappy sort of quick bait,
0:05:22 and that moved him in that direction and also put him on the path toward fraudulent behavior.
0:05:28 So here’s something that Stapel wrote later when he wrote a book of confession essentially
0:05:29 about his fraud.
0:05:35 He wrote, “I was doing fine, but then I became impatient, overambitious, reckless.
0:05:39 I wanted to go faster and better and higher and smarter all the time.
0:05:43 I thought it would help if I just took this one tiny little shortcut, but then I found
0:05:46 myself more and more often in completely the wrong lane in the end.
0:05:49 I wasn’t even on the road at all.”
0:05:54 What struck me about that, and I think about that with Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino as
0:05:59 well, which is that the people who have been accused of having committed academic fraud
0:06:05 are really successful already, and I’m curious what that tells you about either the stakes
0:06:11 or the incentives or maybe the psychology of how this happens, because honestly, it surprises
0:06:12 me.
0:06:18 I would say we don’t know that much about why the fraudsters do what they do.
0:06:22 And the most interesting source you just mentioned, so Stapel wrote a book in Dutch
0:06:29 called “Outsporing,” which means something like D-Rail, where he provides his information
0:06:33 and he goes on from the material you talked about to describing that he became like an
0:06:36 alcoholic or a heroin addict.
0:06:41 And he got used to the easy successes, and he began to believe that he wasn’t doing
0:06:42 any harm.
0:06:48 After all, he was just making it easier to publish information that was undoubtedly true.
0:06:55 So this aspect of sort of being lured onto the path of unethical behavior followed by
0:07:00 addictive-like behavior becomes part of the story, and Stapel goes on to talk about lots
0:07:06 of other aspects like the need to score, ambition, laziness, wanting power, status.
0:07:12 So he provides this good insight, but most of the admitted fraudsters or the people who
0:07:18 have lost their university positions based on allegations of fraud have simply disappeared
0:07:20 and have never talked about it.
0:07:25 One of the interesting parts is that Mark Houser, who resigned from Harvard, and Ariely
0:07:32 and Gino, who are alleged to have committed fraud by some parties, all three of them wrote
0:07:39 on the topic of moral behavior and specifically why people might engage in bad behavior.
0:07:40 That’s right.
0:07:46 A lot of the fraud and suspected fraud comes from researchers who explore fraud.
0:07:54 In 2012, Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely collaborated on another paper called The Dark Side of Creativity.
0:07:57 Original thinkers can be more dishonest.
0:08:01 They wrote, “We propose that a creative personality and a creative mindset promote
0:08:09 individuals’ ability to justify their behavior, which in turn leads to unethical behavior.”
0:08:15 So just how much unethical behavior is there in the world of academic research?
0:08:21 That’s a hard question to answer precisely, but let’s start with this man.
0:08:26 I essentially spend all of my nights and weekends thinking about scientific fraud, scientific
0:08:28 misconduct, scientific integrity for that matter.
0:08:35 Ivan Oranski is a medical doctor and editor of a neuroscience publication called The Transmitter.
0:08:41 He’s also a distinguished journalist in residence at NYU, and on the side, he runs a website
0:08:43 called Retraction Watch.
0:08:49 We hear from whistleblowers all the time people we call sleuths who are actually out there
0:08:53 finding these problems, and often that’s pre-retraction or they’ll explain to us why
0:08:54 retraction happened.
0:08:57 We also do things like file public records requests.
0:09:02 He began Retraction Watch in 2010 with Adam Marcus, another science journalist.
0:09:08 Marcus had broken a story about a Massachusetts anesthesiologist named Scott Rubin.
0:09:13 Rubin had received funding from several drug companies to conduct clinical trials, but
0:09:18 instead he faked the data and published results without running the trials.
0:09:22 I went to Adam and I said, “What if we create a blog about this?”
0:09:26 It seems like there are all these stories that are hiding in plain sight that essentially
0:09:30 we and other journalists are leaving on the table.
0:09:37 When we looked at the actual retraction notices, the information was somewhere between misleading
0:09:38 and opaque.
0:09:40 What do you mean by that?
0:09:46 When a paper is retracted and it’s probably worth defining that, a retraction is a signal
0:09:51 to the scientific community or really to any readers of a particular peer-reviewed journal
0:09:58 article that you should not rely on that anymore, that there’s something about it that means
0:10:03 you should … You can not pretend it doesn’t exist, but you shouldn’t base any other work
0:10:04 on it.
0:10:09 But when you call it misleading or opaque, you’re saying the explanation for the retraction
0:10:12 is often not transparent.
0:10:16 When you retract a paper, you’re supposed to put a retraction notice on it the same way
0:10:19 when you correct an article in the newspaper, you’re supposed to put a correction notice
0:10:21 on it.
0:10:25 When you actually read these retraction notices, and to be fair, this has changed a fair amount
0:10:30 in the 13 years that we’ve been doing this, sometimes they include no information at all.
0:10:34 Sometimes they include information that is woefully incomplete.
0:10:39 Sometimes it’s some version of getting al Capone on tax evasion.
0:10:45 They fake the data, but we’re going to say they forgot to fill out this form, which is
0:10:50 still a reason to retract, but isn’t the whole story.
0:10:56 Let’s say we back up and I ask you, how significant or widespread is the problem of, we’ll call
0:10:58 it academic fraud?
0:11:07 We think that probably 2% of papers should be retracted for something that would be considered
0:11:10 either out and out fraud or maybe just severe bad mistake.
0:11:18 According to our data, which we have the most retraction data of any database, about 0.1%
0:11:23 of the world’s literature is retracted, so one in a thousand papers.
0:11:26 We think it should be about 20 times that, about 2%.
0:11:29 There’s a bunch of reasons, but they come down to one.
0:11:34 There was a survey back in 2009 which has been repeated and done differently and come
0:11:40 up with roughly the same number, actually even higher numbers recently that says 2% of researchers,
0:11:44 if you ask them anonymously, they will say, yes, I’ve committed something that would be
0:11:45 considered misconduct.
0:11:48 Of course, when you ask them how many people they know who have committed misconduct, it
0:11:52 goes much, much higher than that.
0:11:54 That’s one line of evidence, which is admittedly indirect.
0:11:59 The other is that when you talk to the sleuths, the people doing the real work of figuring
0:12:04 out what’s wrong with literature and letting people know about it, they keep lists of papers
0:12:09 they’ve flagged for publishers and for authors and journals, and routinely, most of them are
0:12:10 not retracted.
0:12:12 Again, we came to 2%.
0:12:15 Is it exactly 2% and is that even the right number?
0:12:18 No, we’re pretty sure that’s the lower bound.
0:12:23 Others say it should be even higher.
0:12:28 Modern watch has a searchable database that includes more than 45,000 retractions from
0:12:32 journals in just about any academic field you can imagine.
0:12:38 They also post a leaderboard, a ranking of the researchers with the most papers retracted.
0:12:44 At the top of that list is another anesthesiologist, this one a German researcher named Joachim
0:12:45 Bolt.
0:12:49 He came up briefly in last week’s episode too.
0:12:52 Bolt has had more than 200 papers retracted.
0:12:57 Bolt, an anesthesiology researcher, was studying something called hetistarch, which was essentially
0:12:58 a blood substitute.
0:13:05 Not exactly blood, but something that when you were on a heart-lung pump, a machine during
0:13:08 certain surgeries or you’re in the ICU or something like that, it would basically cut
0:13:14 down on the amount of blood transfusions people would need, and that’s got obvious benefits.
0:13:20 Now he did a lot of the important work in that area, and his work was cited in all the guidelines.
0:13:23 It turned out that he was faking data.
0:13:29 Bolt was caught in 2010 after an investigation by a German state medical association.
0:13:34 The method he had been promoting was later found to be associated with a significant
0:13:37 increased risk of mortality.
0:13:43 So in this case, the fraud led to real danger, and what happened to Bolt?
0:13:47 He at one point was under criminal indictment, or at least criminal investigation.
0:13:48 That didn’t go anywhere.
0:13:54 The hospital, the clinic also, which to be fair, had actually identified a lot of problems.
0:14:00 They came under pretty severe scrutiny, but in terms of actual sanctions, pretty minimal.
0:14:03 You’ve written that universities protect fraudsters.
0:14:06 Can you give an example other than Bolt, let’s say?
0:14:09 So universities, they protect fraudsters in a couple of different ways.
0:14:13 One is that they are very slow to act, they’re very slow to investigate, and they keep all
0:14:16 of those investigations hidden.
0:14:22 The other is that because lawyers run universities, like they, frankly, run everything else, they
0:14:25 tell people who are involved in investigations.
0:14:31 If someone calls for a reference letter, let’s say someone leaves, and they haven’t been
0:14:36 quite found guilty, but as a plea bargain sort of thing, they will leave, and then they’ll
0:14:38 stop the investigation.
0:14:42 Then when someone calls for a reference, and we actually have their receipts on this because
0:14:49 we filed public records requests for emails between different parties, we learned that
0:14:53 they would be routinely told not to say anything about the misconduct.
0:14:58 Let’s just take three of the most recent high profile cases of academic fraud or accusations
0:14:59 of academic fraud.
0:15:04 We’ve got Francesca Geno, who was a psychology researcher at Harvard Business School, Dan
0:15:08 Ariely, who’s a psychologist at Duke, and then Mark Tessier-Levin, who was president
0:15:12 of Stanford Medical Researcher, three pretty different outcomes, right?
0:15:18 Tessier-Levin was defenestrated from his presidency, Geno was suspended by HBS, and Dan Ariely,
0:15:23 who’s had accusations lobbed at him for years now, is just kind of going on.
0:15:26 Can you just comment on that heterogeneity?
0:15:31 So then I would just not so much as a correction, but just to say that, yes, Mark Tessier-Levin
0:15:33 was defenestrated as president.
0:15:38 He remains, at least at the time of this discussion, a tenured professor at Stanford, which is
0:15:42 a pretty nice position to be in.
0:15:47 A Stanford report found that Tessier-Levin didn’t commit fraud or falsify any of his
0:15:54 data, although work in his labs, quote, “fell below customary standards of scientific rigor,”
0:16:00 and multiple members of his labs appear to have manipulated research data.
0:16:05 Dan Ariely also remains a professor at Duke, and Duke has declined to comment publicly
0:16:10 on whether an investigation into the allegations of data fraud even occurred.
0:16:15 As Ivan Oransky told us, universities are run by lawyers.
0:16:21 I’ve been quoted saying that the most likely career path or the most likely outcome for
0:16:26 anyone who has committed misconduct is a long and fruitful career.
0:16:30 And I mean that because it’s true, because most people, if they’re caught at all, they
0:16:31 skate.
0:16:36 The number of cases we write about, which grows every year, but is still a tiny fraction
0:16:43 of what’s really going on, Dan Ariely, we interviewed Dan years ago about some questions
0:16:45 in his research.
0:16:49 Duke is actually, I would argue, a little bit of a singular case.
0:16:58 Duke in 2019 settled with the US government for $112.5 million because they had repeatedly
0:17:06 alleged to have covered up really bad significant misconduct.
0:17:08 Duke has had particular trouble with medical research.
0:17:14 There was one physician researcher who faked the data in his cancer research.
0:17:20 There were allegations of federal grant money being mishandled, also failing to protect patients
0:17:22 in some studies.
0:17:28 At one point, the National Institutes of Health placed special sanctions on all Duke researchers.
0:17:34 So I’ve got to be honest, and people in Durham may not like me saying this, but I think Duke
0:17:39 has a lot of work to do to demonstrate that their investigations are complete and that
0:17:43 they are doing the right thing by research dollars and for patients.
0:17:48 Most of the researchers we have been talking about are already well-established in their
0:17:49 fields.
0:17:54 If they feel pressure to get a certain result, it’s probably the kind of pressure that comes
0:17:59 with further burnishing your high status, but junior researchers face a different kind
0:18:01 of pressure.
0:18:04 They need published papers to survive.
0:18:06 Publish or perish is the old saying.
0:18:10 If they can’t consistently get their papers in a good journal, they probably won’t get
0:18:17 tenure and they may not even have a career, and those journals are flooded with submissions.
0:18:22 So the competition is fierce and it is global.
0:18:27 This is easy to miss if you’re in the US since so many of the top universities and journals
0:18:34 are here, but academic research is very much a global industry and it’s also huge.
0:18:44 Even if you are a complete nerd and you could name 50 journals in your field, you know nothing.
0:18:50 Every year, more than 4 million articles are published in somewhere between 25 and 50,000
0:18:55 journals, depending on how you count, and that number is always growing.
0:19:02 You have got journals called Aggressive Behavior and Frontiers in Ceramics, Neglected Tropical
0:19:10 Diseases, and Rangefer, which covers the biology and management of reindeer and caribou.
0:19:16 There used to be a journal of mundane behavior, but that one, sadly, is defunct.
0:19:21 But no matter how many journals there are, there is never enough space for all the papers.
0:19:27 And this has led to some, well, let’s call it scholarly innovation.
0:19:30 Here again is Ivan Oransky.
0:19:34 People are now really fixated on what are known as paper mills.
0:19:41 So if you think about the economics of this, right, it is worthwhile if you are a researcher
0:19:47 to actually pay, in other words, it’s an investment in your own future, to pay to publish a certain
0:19:48 paper.
0:19:53 What I’m talking about is literally buying a paper or buying authorship on a paper.
0:19:58 So to give you a little bit of a sense of how this might work, you’re a researcher who
0:20:00 is about to publish a paper.
0:20:06 So Donner et al. have got some interesting finding that you’ve actually written up and
0:20:08 a journal has accepted.
0:20:10 It’s gone through peer review.
0:20:13 And you’re like, great, and that’s good for you.
0:20:17 But you actually also want to make a little extra money on the side.
0:20:22 So you take that paper, that essentially it’s not a paper, it’s really still a manuscript.
0:20:26 You put it up on a brokerage site, or you put the title up on a brokerage site.
0:20:31 You say, I’ve got a paper where, you know, there are four authors right now.
0:20:35 It’s going into this journal, which is a top tier or mid tier, whatever it is, et cetera.
0:20:37 It’s in this field.
0:20:42 If you would like to be an author, the bidding starts now, or it’s just, it’s $500 or 500
0:20:43 euros or whatever it is.
0:20:47 And then Ivan Moransky comes along and says, I need a paper.
0:20:49 I need to get tenure.
0:20:50 I need to get promoted.
0:20:51 Oh, great.
0:20:53 Let me click on this, you know, brokerage site.
0:20:55 Let me give you $500.
0:21:01 And now all of a sudden, you write to the journal, by the way, I have a new author.
0:21:02 His name is Ivan Moransky.
0:21:03 He’s at New York University.
0:21:07 He just joined late, but he’s been so invaluable to the process.
0:21:10 Now what do the other co-authors have to say about this?
0:21:13 Often they don’t know about it, or at least they claim they don’t know about it.
0:21:18 What about fraudulent journals, do those exist, or fraudulent publication sites that look
0:21:22 legit enough to pass muster for somebody’s department?
0:21:23 They do.
0:21:28 There are all different versions of fraudulent with a lower case F publications.
0:21:32 There are publications that are legit in the sense that they can point to doing all the
0:21:34 things that you’re supposed to do as a journal.
0:21:36 You have papers submitted.
0:21:38 You do something that looks sort of like peer review.
0:21:42 You assign it what’s known as a digital object identifier.
0:21:44 You do all that publishing stuff.
0:21:48 And they’re not out and out fraudulent in the sense of they don’t exist and people are
0:21:52 just making it up, or they’re trying to, you know, use a name that isn’t really theirs.
0:21:55 But they’re fraudulent with a lower case F in the sense that they’re not doing most
0:21:57 of those things.
0:22:01 Then there are actual, what we refer to, we in Anna Abelkina, who works with us on this,
0:22:03 as hijacked journals.
0:22:06 We have more than 200 on this list now.
0:22:08 They were at one point legitimate journals.
0:22:14 So it’s a real title that some university or funding agency or et cetera will actually
0:22:15 recognize.
0:22:22 But what happened was some version of the publisher sort of forgot to renew their domain.
0:22:25 I mean, literally something like that.
0:22:29 Now, they’re more nefarious versions of it, but it’s that sort of thing where, you know,
0:22:35 these really bad players are inserting themselves and taking advantage of the vulnerabilities
0:22:40 in the system, of which there are many, to really print money because then they can get
0:22:44 people to pay them to publish in those journals and they even are getting indexed in the places
0:22:45 that matter.
0:22:53 It sounds like there are thousands of people who are willing to pay journals that are quasi
0:22:56 real to publish their papers.
0:22:58 At least thousands, yes.
0:23:01 Who are the kind of authors who would publish in those journals?
0:23:06 Are they American, not American, or their particular fields or disciplines that happen
0:23:08 to be most common?
0:23:12 Well, I think what it tends to correlate with is how direct or intense the publisher
0:23:16 of Paris culture is in that particular area.
0:23:21 And generally that varies more by country or region than anything else.
0:23:25 If you look at, for example, the growth in China of a number of papers published, what’s
0:23:30 calculated is the impact of those papers, which relies on things like how often they’re
0:23:31 cited.
0:23:37 You can trace that growth very directly from government mandates.
0:23:43 For example, if you publish in certain journals known as a high impact factor, you actually
0:23:48 got a cash bonus that was a sort of multiple of the number of the impact factor.
0:23:53 And that can make a big difference in your life.
0:23:59 Recent research by John Yenedes, Thomas Collins, and Yerun Boss has examined what they call
0:24:02 extremely productive authors.
0:24:07 They left out physicists since some physics projects are so massive that one paper can
0:24:10 have more than 5,000 authors.
0:24:14 So leaving aside the physicists, they found that over the course of one year, more than
0:24:21 1,200 researchers around the world publish the equivalent of one paper every five days.
0:24:28 The top countries for these extremely productive authors were China, the US, Saudi Arabia,
0:24:30 Italy, and Germany.
0:24:35 When there is so much research being published, you’d also expect that the vast majority of
0:24:38 it is never read by more than a handful of people.
0:24:43 There’s also the problem, as the economics blogger Noah Smith recently pointed out, that
0:24:50 too much academic research is just useless, at least to anyone beyond the author.
0:24:53 But you shouldn’t expect any of this to change.
0:24:58 Global scholarly publishing is a $28 billion market.
0:25:04 Everyone complains about the very high price of journal subscriptions, but universities
0:25:07 and libraries are essentially forced to pay.
0:25:12 There is, however, another business model in the research paper industry, and it is
0:25:13 growing fast.
0:25:16 It’s called Open Access Publishing.
0:25:22 And here it’s most often the authors who pay to get into the journal.
0:25:27 If you think that sounds problematic, well, yes.
0:25:31 Consider Hindawi, an Egyptian publisher with more than 200 journals, including the Journal
0:25:37 of Combustion, the International Journal of Ecology, the Journal of Advanced Transportation.
0:25:41 Most of their journals were not at all prestigious, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t lucrative.
0:25:47 A couple years ago, Hindawi was bought by John Wiley and Sons, the huge American academic
0:25:50 publisher for nearly $300 million.
0:25:55 So Hindawi’s business model was they’re an open access publisher, which usually means
0:26:00 you charge authors to publish in your journal, and you charge them, you know, it could be
0:26:05 anywhere from hundreds of dollars to even thousands of dollars per paper, and they’re
0:26:09 publishing, you know, tens of thousands and sometimes even more papers per year.
0:26:11 So you can start to do that math.
0:26:17 What happened at Hindawi was that somehow, paper mills realized that they were vulnerable.
0:26:19 So they started targeting them.
0:26:24 They’ve actually started paying some of these editors to accept papers from their paper mill.
0:26:31 And long story short, they now have had to retract something like, we’re still figuring
0:26:34 out the exact numbers when the dust settles, but in the thousands.
0:26:40 In 2023, Hindawi retracted more than 8,000 papers.
0:26:45 That was more retractions than there had ever been in a year from all academic publishers
0:26:46 combined.
0:26:52 Wiley recently announced that they will stop using the Hindawi brand name, and they folded
0:26:55 the remaining Hindawi journals into their portfolio.
0:26:59 But they are not getting out of the pay to publish business.
0:27:02 Publishers earn more from publishing more.
0:27:03 It’s a volume play.
0:27:07 And when you’re owned by, you know, shareholders who want growth all the time, that is the
0:27:09 best way to grow.
0:27:14 And these are businesses with, you know, very impressive and enviable profit margins of,
0:27:17 you know, sometimes up to 40%.
0:27:18 And these are not on small numbers.
0:27:23 The profit itself is in the billions often.
0:27:28 It’s hard to blame publishers for wanting to earn billions from an industry with such
0:27:30 bizarre incentives.
0:27:36 But if publishers aren’t looking out for the integrity of the research, who is?
0:27:37 That’s coming up after the break.
0:27:40 I’m Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio.
0:27:56 We feel like when we’re in cultures that there is no way for any of us to change the culture.
0:27:57 It’s a culture.
0:28:00 My God, how could we change it?
0:28:06 But we also recognize that cultures are created by the people that comprise them.
0:28:12 And the notion that we collectively can actually do something to shift the research culture
0:28:19 I think has spread, and that spreading has actually accelerated the change of the research
0:28:21 culture for the better.
0:28:23 That is Brian Nosek.
0:28:27 He’s a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, and he runs the Center for Open
0:28:29 Science.
0:28:34 For more than a decade, his center has been trying to get more transparency in academic
0:28:35 research.
0:28:41 You might think there would already be transparency in academic research, at least I did.
0:28:45 But here’s what Nosek said in part one of the series, when we were talking about how
0:28:49 researchers tend to hoard their data rather than share it.
0:28:54 Yeah, it’s based on the academic reward system.
0:28:56 Publication is the currency of advancement.
0:29:02 I need publications to have a career, to advance my career, to get promoted.
0:29:08 And so the work that I do that leads to publication, I have a very strong sense of, “Oh my gosh,
0:29:15 if others now have control over this, my ideas, my data, my designs, my solutions, then I
0:29:18 will disadvantage my career.”
0:29:22 I asked Nosek how he thinks this culture can be changed.
0:29:27 So for example, we have to make it easy for researchers to be more transparent with their
0:29:28 work.
0:29:32 If it’s really hard to share your data, then adding on that extra work is going to slow
0:29:34 down my progress.
0:29:37 We have to make it normative.
0:29:41 People have to be able to see that others in their community are doing this.
0:29:42 They’re being more transparent.
0:29:46 They’re being more rigorous so that we, instead of saying, “Oh, that’s great ideas and nobody
0:29:49 does it,” you say, “Oh, there’s somebody over there that’s doing it.
0:29:51 Oh, maybe I could do it too.”
0:29:53 We have to deal with the incentives.
0:29:58 Is it actually relevant for my advancement in my career to be transparent, to be rigorous,
0:30:00 to be reproducible?
0:30:03 And then we have to address the policy framework.
0:30:09 If it’s not embedded in how it is that funders decide who to fund, institutions decide who
0:30:15 to hire, and journals to decide what to publish, then it’s not going to be internally and completely
0:30:17 embedded in the system.
0:30:18 Okay.
0:30:20 So that is a lot of change.
0:30:24 Here’s one problem NOSC and his team are trying to address.
0:30:30 Some researchers will cherry-pick or otherwise manipulate their data or find ways to goose
0:30:34 their results to make sure they come up with a finding that will capture the attention
0:30:36 of journal editors.
0:30:42 So NOSC’s team created a software platform called the Open Science Framework where researchers
0:30:49 can pre-register their project and their hypothesis before they start collecting data.
0:30:50 Yeah.
0:30:56 So the idea is you register your designs and you’ve made that commitment in advance.
0:30:59 And then as you’re carrying out the research, if things change along the way, which happens
0:31:02 all the time, you can update that registration.
0:31:04 You could say, “Here’s what’s changing.”
0:31:08 We didn’t anticipate that going into this community was going to be so hard and here’s
0:31:10 how we had to adapt.
0:31:11 That’s fine.
0:31:12 You should be able to change.
0:31:17 You just have to be transparent about those changes so that the reader can evaluate.
0:31:20 And then those data are time-stamped together.
0:31:21 Exactly.
0:31:22 Yeah.
0:31:23 You put your data and your materials.
0:31:25 If you did a survey, you add the surveys.
0:31:28 If you did behavioral tasks, you can add those.
0:31:33 So all of that stuff can be attached then to the registration so that you have a more
0:31:36 comprehensive record of what it is you did.
0:31:41 It sounds like you’re basically raising the cost of sloppiness or fraud, yes?
0:31:44 It makes fraud more inconvenient.
0:31:46 And that’s actually a reasonable intervention.
0:31:52 I don’t think any intervention that we could design could prevent fraud in a way that doesn’t
0:31:55 stifle actual legitimate research.
0:32:00 We just want to make visible all the things that legitimate researchers are doing so that
0:32:04 someone that doesn’t want to do that extra work has a harder time.
0:32:08 And eventually, if everything is exposed, then the person who would be motivated to
0:32:12 do fraud might say, “Well, it’s just as easy to do the research the real way.
0:32:16 So I guess I’ll do that.”
0:32:19 The idea of pre-registration isn’t new.
0:32:22 It goes back to at least the late 19th century.
0:32:25 But there is a big appetite for it now.
0:32:28 The Data Collada team came up with their own version.
0:32:33 Here is Yuri Simonson from the Asade Business School in Barcelona.
0:32:35 It’s a platform that we launched.
0:32:37 It’s called Aspredicted.
0:32:39 And it’s basically eight questions that people write.
0:32:43 People call author, sign on it, it’s time stamped, people, you can show the PDF.
0:32:47 And when we launched it, we thought, “Okay, when do we call this a failure?”
0:32:49 You know, thinking ahead, “When do you shut down the website?”
0:32:54 But all right, if we don’t get 100 a year, we’re going to call that failure.
0:32:56 And we’re getting about 140 a day now.
0:33:02 Brian Nosik says, “The registered report model can be especially helpful to the journals.”
0:33:07 So in the standard publishing model, I do all of my research, I get my findings, I write
0:33:09 it up in a paper and I send it to the journal.
0:33:12 In that model, the reward system is about the findings.
0:33:17 I need to get those findings to be as positive, novel, and tidy as I can so that you, the
0:33:20 reviewer, say, “Okay, okay, you can publish it.”
0:33:25 That’s dysfunctional and it leads to all of those practices that might lead the claims
0:33:28 to be more exaggerated than the evidence.
0:33:35 The registered report model says, “To the journal, you are going to submit, Brian, the
0:33:39 methodology that you’re thinking about doing and why you’re asking that question and
0:33:43 the background research supporting that question being important and that methodology being
0:33:45 effective methodology.
0:33:46 We’ll review that.
0:33:49 We don’t know what the results are, you don’t know what the results are, but we’re going
0:33:52 to review based on, do you have an important question?”
0:33:56 So this is almost like before you build a house, you’re going to show us your plan and
0:34:00 we’re the building department and we’re going to come and say, “Yeah, that looks legit.
0:34:03 It’s not going to collapse, it’s not going to infringe on your neighbor,” and so on.
0:34:04 Is that the idea?
0:34:05 Exactly.
0:34:12 The key part is that the reward, me getting that publication, is based on you agreeing
0:34:15 that I’m asking an important question and I’ve designed an effective method to test
0:34:16 it.
0:34:17 It’s no longer about the results.
0:34:19 None of us know what the results are.
0:34:26 And so even if the results are uninteresting, not new, et cetera, we’ll know they’re legitimate,
0:34:30 but there would seem to be a conflict of incentive there, which is that, “Oh, now do I need to
0:34:33 publish this uninteresting, not new result?
0:34:34 What do you do about that?”
0:34:39 Yeah, so the commitment that the journal makes is we’re going to publish it regardless
0:34:43 of outcome and the authors are making that commitment too.
0:34:47 We’re going to carry this out as we said we would and we’ll report what happens.
0:34:52 Now an interesting thing happens in the change of the culture here in evaluating research
0:34:57 because you said, “Well, if it’s an uninteresting finding, do we still have to publish it?”
0:35:01 It turns out that when you have to make a decision of whether to publish or not before
0:35:06 knowing that the results are, the orientation that the reviewers bring, that the authors
0:35:10 bring is, “Do we need to know the answer to this?”
0:35:13 Regardless of what happens, do we need to know the answer?
0:35:16 Is the question important in other words?
0:35:17 Exactly.
0:35:22 Is the question important enough that we need evidence regardless of what the evidence is?
0:35:25 And it dramatically shifts what ends up being published.
0:35:30 So in the early evidence with register reports, more than half of the hypotheses that are
0:35:35 proposed end up not being supported in the final paper.
0:35:43 In the standard literature, comparable type of domains, more than 95% of the hypotheses
0:35:45 are supported in the paper.
0:35:48 You wonder in the standard literature, “If we’re always right, why do we bother doing
0:35:49 the research?”
0:35:50 Right?
0:35:52 Our hypotheses are always right.
0:35:57 And of course, it’s laughable because we know that’s not what’s actually happening.
0:36:01 We know that all that failed stuff is getting left out and we’re not seeing it.
0:36:08 And the actual literature is an exaggeration of what the real literature is.
0:36:12 I think we should say a couple of things here about academia.
0:36:17 The best academics are driven by a real scientific impulse.
0:36:22 They may know a lot, but they’re not afraid to admit how much we still don’t know.
0:36:28 But they’re driven by an urge to investigate, and not necessarily at least, an urge to produce
0:36:33 a result that will increase their own status.
0:36:39 But academia is also an extraordinarily status conscious place.
0:36:41 I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that.
0:36:47 If status is the reward that encourages a certain type of smart disciplined person to
0:36:51 do research for the sake of research, rather than taking their talents to an industry that
0:36:56 might pay them much more, that is fantastic.
0:37:02 But if the pursuit of status for status is sake leads an academic researcher to cheat,
0:37:04 well, yeah, that’s bad.
0:37:07 I mean, the incentives are part of the problem, but I don’t think it’s a part of the problem
0:37:09 that we have to fix.
0:37:12 That again is Yuri Simonson from Data Colada.
0:37:17 I think the incentives, it’s like going to be little rub banks because their incentives
0:37:20 are there, but it doesn’t mean that we should stop, you know, rewarding cash.
0:37:26 It just, we should, you know, make our saves safer because it’s good for cash to buy things,
0:37:30 and it’s good for people who publish interesting findings to get recognition.
0:37:36 Brian Nosek says that more than 300 journals are now using the registered reports model.
0:37:43 I think there is broad buy-in on the need to change, and it has already hit the mainstream
0:37:50 of many of the changes that we promote, sharing data materials code, pre-registering research,
0:37:52 reporting all outcomes.
0:37:59 So we’re in the scaling phase for those activities, and what I am optimistic about is that there
0:38:05 is this meta science community that is interrogating whether these solutions are actually having
0:38:07 the desired impact.
0:38:12 And so this is the most exciting part of the movement as I’m looking to the future is this
0:38:16 dialogue between activism and reform.
0:38:17 We can do these things.
0:38:21 Let’s make these changes, and meta science and evaluation.
0:38:22 Is this working?
0:38:24 Did you do what you said it was going to do and et cetera?
0:38:29 And I hope that the tightness of that loop will stay tight because that I think will
0:38:34 make for a very healthy discipline that is constantly skeptical of itself and constantly
0:38:39 looking to do better.
0:38:43 Is Brian Nosek too optimistic?
0:38:44 Maybe.
0:38:51 100 journals is a great start, but that represents maybe 1% of all journals.
0:38:58 For journals and authors, the existing publishing incentives are very strong.
0:39:01 So I think journals have really complicated incentives.
0:39:06 That is Samin Vizier, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne.
0:39:09 Of course, they want to publish good work to begin with, so there’s some incentive to
0:39:12 do some quality check and cover their ass there.
0:39:16 But once they publish something, there’s a strong incentive for them to defend it or
0:39:19 at least to not publicize any errors.
0:39:27 And here’s a reason to think that Brian Nosek is right to be optimistic about research reform.
0:39:32 Some of his fellow reformers, including Samin Vizier, have been promoted into prestigious
0:39:34 positions in their field.
0:39:40 Vizier spent some time as editor-in-chief of the journal Social Psychological and Personality
0:39:41 Science.
0:39:44 So one of the things the editor-in-chief does is when a manuscript is submitted, I would
0:39:48 read it and decide whether it should continue through the peer review process or I could
0:39:51 reject it there, and that’s called desk rejection.
0:39:54 One thing I started doing at the journal that wasn’t official policy, it was just a practice
0:39:58 I decided to adopt, was that when a manuscript was submitted, I would hide the author’s
0:39:59 names for myself.
0:40:03 So I was rejecting things without looking at who the authors were.
0:40:06 So the publication committee started a conversation with me, which is totally reasonable, about
0:40:10 the overall desk rejection rate, am I rejecting too many things, et cetera.
0:40:14 There was some conversation about whether I was desrejecting the wrong people.
0:40:18 So if I was stepping on important people’s toes, and an email was forwarded to me from
0:40:24 a quote-unquote award-winning social psychologist, Samin desrejected my paper, I found this extremely
0:40:27 distasteful and I won’t be submitting there again.
0:40:31 And when I would try to engage about the substance of my decisions, the scientific basis for
0:40:34 them, that wasn’t what the conversation was about.
0:40:37 So it was basically like, do you know who I am?
0:40:38 Yeah.
0:40:39 Yeah.
0:40:41 I’ll send a question to you and that journal then.
0:40:46 It was a tense few months, but in the end, I was allowed to continue doing what I was
0:40:47 doing.
0:40:52 Vizier recently took on the editor-in-chief job at a different journal, Psychological
0:40:53 Science.
0:40:57 It is one of the premier journals in the field.
0:41:03 It’s also the journal where Francesca Gino published two of her allegedly fraudulent papers.
0:41:08 So I asked Vizier what changes she is hoping to make.
0:41:10 We’re expanding a team that used to have a different name.
0:41:15 We’re going to call them the statistics, transparency and rigor editors, the star editors.
0:41:20 And so that team will be supplementing the handling editors, the editors who actually
0:41:24 organize the peer review and make the decisions on submissions.
0:41:28 Like if a handling editor has a question about the data integrity or about details of the
0:41:32 methods or things like that, the star editor team will provide their expertise and help
0:41:33 fill in those gaps.
0:41:37 We’re also, I’m not sure exactly what form this will take, but try to incentivize more
0:41:41 accurate and calibrated claims and less hype and exaggeration.
0:41:45 This is something that I think is particularly challenging with short articles like Psychological
0:41:49 Science publishes and especially a journal that has really high rejection rate where
0:41:51 the vast majority of submissions are rejected.
0:41:55 Authors are competing for those few spots and so it feels like they have to make a really
0:41:57 bold claim.
0:42:00 And so it’s going to be very difficult to play this like back and forth where authors are
0:42:02 responding to the perception of what the incentives are.
0:42:06 So we need to convey to them that actually if you go too far, make two bold of claims
0:42:10 that aren’t warranted, you will be more likely to get rejected.
0:42:12 But I’m not sure if authors will believe that just because we say that.
0:42:16 They’re still competing for a very selective number of spots.
0:42:21 So as a journal editor, how do you think about the upside risk of publishing something
0:42:25 new and exciting against the downside risk of being wrong?
0:42:27 Oh, I don’t mind being wrong.
0:42:29 I think journalists should publish things that turn out to be wrong.
0:42:32 It would be a bad thing to approach journal editing by saying we’re only going to publish
0:42:35 true things or things that we’re 100% sure are true.
0:42:39 The important thing is that the things that are more likely to be wrong are presented
0:42:42 in a more uncertain way and sometimes we’ll make mistakes even there.
0:42:45 Sometimes we’ll present things with certainty that we shouldn’t have.
0:42:49 What I would like to be involved in and what I plan to do is to encourage more post publication
0:42:55 critique and correction, reward the whistleblowers who identify errors that are valid and that
0:43:01 need to be acted upon and create more incentives for people to do that and do that well.
0:43:04 How would you reward whistleblowers?
0:43:05 I don’t know.
0:43:10 Do you have any ideas?
0:43:15 Right now, the rewards for whistleblowers in academia may seem backwards.
0:43:20 Remember, the data collado whistleblowers were sued by Francesca Gino, one of the people
0:43:21 they blew the whistle on.
0:43:25 They needed a go fund me campaign for their legal defense.
0:43:31 So no, the whistleblowers aren’t collecting any bounties, nor do they cover themselves
0:43:33 in any kind of glory.
0:43:38 Stephen, I’m the person that walks into these academic conferences and everyone is like,
0:43:40 here comes Debbie Downer.
0:43:43 That’s Leif Nelson, another member of Data Collada.
0:43:47 He’s a professor of business administration at UC Berkeley.
0:43:53 In a recent New Yorker piece by Gideon Lewis Krause about these fraud scandals, Nelson
0:43:58 and his Data Collada partners were described as having a, quote, “basic willingness to
0:44:03 call bullshit.”
0:44:09 So now that you’ve become part of this group that are collectively, I would think of as
0:44:15 the primary whistleblower or police or steward, whatever word we want to use, against fraudulent
0:44:20 research in the social sciences, what does that feel like?
0:44:24 I’m guessing on one level, it feels like an accomplishment.
0:44:28 On the other hand, it makes me think of a police force where there’s the Internal Affairs
0:44:36 Bureau where detectives are put to find the bad apples and even though everybody’s in
0:44:41 favor of rooting out the bad apples, everybody kind of hates the IAB guys.
0:44:48 And I’m curious what the emotional toll or cost has been to you.
0:44:50 Wow.
0:44:51 Bad question?
0:44:52 No.
0:44:55 Like, it reminds me of how stressful it all is.
0:44:59 We struggle a little bit with thinking about analogies for what we do.
0:45:01 We’re definitely not police.
0:45:03 Police, amongst other things, have institutional power.
0:45:06 They have badges, whatever.
0:45:07 We don’t have any of that.
0:45:09 We’re not enforcers in any way.
0:45:15 The Internal Affairs thing hurts a little bit, but I get it because that’s saying, “Hey,
0:45:18 within the behavioral science community, we’re the people that are watching the behavioral
0:45:20 scientists.”
0:45:22 And you’re right, no one likes internal affairs.
0:45:27 Most of our thinking is that we want to be journalists, that it’s fun to investigate.
0:45:28 That’s true for everybody in the field, right?
0:45:31 They’re all curious about whatever it is they’re studying.
0:45:33 And so we’re curious about this.
0:45:37 And then when we find things that we think are interesting, we also want to talk about
0:45:40 it, not just with each other, but with the outside world.
0:45:45 But I don’t identify as much with being a police officer or even a detective, though
0:45:49 every now and then people will compare us to something like Sherlock Holmes and that
0:45:51 feels more fun.
0:45:55 But in truth, the reason I sort of wins at the question is that the vast majority of
0:46:00 the time, it comes with far more burden than it does pleasure.
0:46:02 Even before the lawsuit?
0:46:10 Yeah, the lawsuit makes all of the psychological burden into a concrete observable thing.
0:46:16 But the prior to that is that every time we report on anything that’s going to be like,
0:46:23 “Look, we think something bad happened here, someone is going to be mad at us and probably
0:46:27 more people are going to be, and I don’t want people to be mad at me.”
0:46:32 And I think about some of the people involved and it’s hard because I know a lot of these
0:46:36 people and I know they’re friends and I know the friends of the friends and that carries
0:46:40 real, real stress for I think all three of us.
0:46:45 In the New Yorker piece, there are still people who call you pretty harsh names.
0:46:47 You’ve been compared to the Stasi, for instance.
0:46:49 Yeah, that’s real bad.
0:46:53 I’m not happy with being compared to the Stasi.
0:46:56 The optimistic take is that there’s less of that than there used to be.
0:47:02 When any of the three of us go and visit universities, for example, and we talk to doctoral students
0:47:06 and we talk to assistant professors and we talk to associate professors, we talk to senior
0:47:11 professors, the students basically all behave as though they don’t understand why anyone
0:47:13 would ever be against what we’re saying.
0:47:18 They wouldn’t understand the Stasi thing, but they also wouldn’t even understand why
0:47:21 they almost are at the level, “I don’t understand why we’re having you come for a talk.
0:47:23 Doesn’t everyone already believe this?”
0:47:26 But when I talk to people that are closer to retirement than they are to being a grad
0:47:32 student, they’re more like, “You’re making waves where you don’t need to, you’re pushing
0:47:34 back against something that’s not there.
0:47:36 We’ve been doing this for decades.
0:47:38 Why fix what isn’t broken?”
0:47:39 That sort of thing.
0:47:42 If they were to say that to you directly, “Why fix what isn’t broken?”
0:47:43 What would you say?
0:47:46 I would say, “But it is broken.”
0:47:48 And your evidence for that would be?
0:47:53 The evidence for that is a multi-fold.
0:47:57 After the break, multi-fold we shall.
0:47:58 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:47:59 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:48:08 We’ll be right back.
0:48:11 Can academic fraud be eliminated?
0:48:12 Certainly not.
0:48:15 The incentives are too strong.
0:48:21 Also, to be reductive, cheaters are going to cheat, and I doubt there is one field of
0:48:27 human endeavor, no matter how noble or righteous or honest it claims to be, where some cheating
0:48:29 doesn’t happen.
0:48:34 But can academic fraud at least be greatly reduced?
0:48:35 Perhaps.
0:48:42 But that would likely require some big changes, including a new type of gatekeeper.
0:48:48 Samin Vizier, the journal editor we heard from earlier, is one kind of gatekeeper.
0:48:50 Sometimes, for example, we’ll get a submission where the research is really solid, but the
0:48:54 conclusion is too strong, and I’ll sometimes tell authors, “Hey, look, I’ll publish your
0:48:57 paper if you tone down the conclusion,” or even sometimes change the conclusion from
0:49:01 saying there is evidence for my hypothesis to there’s no evidence when we are the other,
0:49:05 but it’s still interesting data, and authors are not always willing to do that, even if
0:49:07 it means getting a publication in this journal.
0:49:11 So I do think that’s a sign that maybe it’s a sign that they genuinely believe what they’re
0:49:15 saying, which is maybe to their credit, I don’t know if that’s good news or bad news.
0:49:20 I think often when we’re kind of overselling something, we probably believe what we’re
0:49:21 saying.
0:49:24 And there’s another important gatekeeper in academic journals, one that we’ve barely
0:49:29 talked about, the referees who assess journal submissions.
0:49:35 Peer review is a bedrock component of what makes academic publishing so credible, at
0:49:40 least in theory, but as we’ve been hearing about every part of this industry, the incentives
0:49:44 for peer reviewers are also off.
0:49:48 Here again is Ivan Oransky from Retraction Watch.
0:49:53 If you add up the number of papers published every year, and then you multiply that times
0:49:59 the two or three peer reviewers who are typically supposed to review those papers, and sometimes
0:50:04 they go through multiple rounds, it’s easily in the tens of millions of peer reviews as
0:50:05 a unit.
0:50:10 And if each of those takes anywhere from four hours to eight hours of your life as an expert,
0:50:14 which you don’t really have ’cause you gotta be teaching, you gotta be doing your own research,
0:50:18 you come up with a number that cannot possibly be met by qualified people.
0:50:19 Really, it can’t.
0:50:21 I mean, the match just doesn’t work.
0:50:23 And none of them are paid.
0:50:27 You are sort of expected to do this because somebody will peer review your paper at some
0:50:30 other point, which sort of makes sense until you really pick it apart.
0:50:35 Now peer reviewers, so even the best of them, and by best I mean people who really sit and
0:50:40 take the time and probe what’s going on in the paper and look at all the data.
0:50:41 But you can’t always look at the data.
0:50:45 In fact, most of the time you can’t look at the raw data, even if you had time because
0:50:47 the authors don’t make it available.
0:50:53 So peer review, it’s become really peer review light and maybe not even that at the vast
0:50:54 majority of journals.
0:50:59 So it’s no longer surprising that so much gets through the system that shouldn’t.
0:51:02 This is a very hot topic.
0:51:07 And that again is Leif Nelson from UC Berkeley and Data Colada.
0:51:13 Editors largely in my field are uncompensated for their job, and reviewers are almost purely
0:51:15 uncompensated for their job.
0:51:19 And so they’re all doing it for the love of the field.
0:51:21 And those jobs are hard.
0:51:24 I’m an occasional reviewer and an occasional editor.
0:51:27 And every time I do it, it’s basically a taxing.
0:51:34 The first part of the job was reading a whole paper and deciding whether the topic was interesting.
0:51:38 Whether it was contextualized well enough that people would understand what it was about.
0:51:44 Whether the study as designed was good at testing the hypothesis as articulated.
0:51:48 And only after you get past all of those levels would you say, okay, and now do they have
0:51:50 evidence in favor of the hypothesis.
0:51:58 By the way, we have mostly been talking about the production side of academic research this
0:52:00 whole time.
0:52:02 What about the consumer side?
0:52:07 All of us are also looking for the most interesting and useful studies.
0:52:13 All of us in industry, in government, in the media, especially the media.
0:52:15 Here’s Ivan Oransky again.
0:52:17 We have been conditioned.
0:52:20 And in fact, because of our own attention economy.
0:52:25 We end up covering studies overall else when it comes to science and medicine.
0:52:26 I like to think that’s changing a little bit.
0:52:28 I hope it is.
0:52:33 But we cover individual studies and we cover the studies that sound the most interesting
0:52:36 or that have the biggest effect size and things like that.
0:52:42 You wear red, you must be angry or if it says that this is definitely a cure for cancer.
0:52:43 And journalists love that stuff.
0:52:44 They lap it up.
0:52:48 Like signing a document at the top will make you more likely to be honest on the forum.
0:53:00 And on that note, I went back to Max Baserman, one of the co-authors of that paper, which
0:53:03 inspired this series.
0:53:09 For Baserman, the experience of getting caught up in fraud accusations was particularly bewildering
0:53:14 because the accusations were against a collaborator and friend that he fully trusted, Francesca
0:53:15 Gina.
0:53:22 So, you know, when we think about Ponzi schemes, it’s named after a guy named Ponzi who was
0:53:26 an Italian-American who preyed on the Italian-American community.
0:53:32 And if we think about Bernie Madoff, he preyed on lots of people, but particularly many very
0:53:36 wealthy Jewish individuals and organizations.
0:53:40 One of the interesting things about trust is that it creates so many wonderful opportunities.
0:53:45 So in the academic world, the fact that I can trust my colleagues means that we can diffuse
0:53:48 the work to the person who can handle it best.
0:53:51 So there’s lots of enormous benefits from trust.
0:53:56 But it’s also true that if there’s somebody out there who’s going to commit a fraud of
0:54:04 any type, those of us who are trusting that individual are perhaps in the worst position
0:54:07 to notice that something’s wrong.
0:54:12 And quite honestly, Steven, you know, I’ve been working with junior colleagues who are
0:54:18 smarter than me and know how to do a variety of tasks better than me for such a long time.
0:54:22 I’ve always trusted them, certainly for junior colleagues.
0:54:27 For the most new doctoral students, I may not have trusted their competence because they
0:54:28 were still learning.
0:54:34 But in terms of using the word trust in an ethical sense, I’ve never questioned the ethics
0:54:35 of my colleagues.
0:54:39 So this current episode has really hit me pretty, pretty heavily.
0:54:44 Can I tell you, Max, that is what upsets me about this scandal, even though I’m not an
0:54:48 academic, but I’ve been writing about and interacting with academics for quite a while
0:54:49 now.
0:54:53 And the problem is that I maybe gave them overall too much credit.
0:54:59 I considered academia one of the last bastions of, I mean, I do sound like a fool now when
0:55:06 I say it, but one of the last bastions of honest, transparent, empirical behavior where
0:55:11 you’re bound by a sort of code that only very rarely would someone think about intentionally
0:55:12 violating.
0:55:19 I’m curious if you felt that way as well, that you were sort of played or were naive
0:55:20 in retrospect.
0:55:22 Undoubtedly, I was naive.
0:55:27 You know, not only did I trust my colleagues on the signing first paper, but I think I’ve
0:55:30 trusted my colleagues for decades.
0:55:36 And hopefully with a good basis for trusting them, I do want to highlight that there’s
0:55:38 so many benefits of trust.
0:55:44 So the world has done a lot better because we trust science.
0:55:49 And the fact that there’s an occasional scientist who we shouldn’t trust should not keep us
0:55:52 from gaining the benefit that science creates.
0:56:00 And so one of the harms created by the fraudsters is that they give credibility to the science
0:56:09 deniers who are so often keeping us from making progress in society.
0:56:14 It’s worth pointing out that scientific research findings have been refuted and overturned
0:56:17 since the beginning of scientific research.
0:56:20 That’s part of the process.
0:56:26 But what’s happening at this moment, especially in some fields like social psychology, it can
0:56:28 be disheartening.
0:56:33 It’s not just a replication crisis or a data crisis.
0:56:36 It’s a believability crisis.
0:56:39 Samine Vizier acknowledges this.
0:56:42 There were a lot of societal phenomena that we really wanted explanations for.
0:56:47 And then social psych offered these kind of easy explanations or maybe not so easy, but
0:56:50 these relatively simple explanations that people wanted to believe just to have an answer
0:56:51 and an explanation.
0:56:56 So just how bad is the believability crisis?
0:57:01 Danny Kahneman, who died last year, was perhaps the biggest name in academic psychology in
0:57:05 a couple generations, so big that he once won a Nobel Prize in economics.
0:57:10 His work has been enormously influential in many fields and industries.
0:57:15 But in a New York Times article about the Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely scandals, he
0:57:21 said, “When I see a surprising finding, my default is not to believe it.
0:57:26 12 years ago, my default was to believe anything that was surprising.”
0:57:30 Here again is Max Baserman, who was a colleague and friend of Kahneman’s.
0:57:36 I think that my generation fought against the open science movement for far too long,
0:57:40 and it’s time that we get on the bandwagon and realize that we need some pretty massive
0:57:46 reform of how social science is done, not only to improve the quality of social science,
0:57:49 but also to make us more credible with the world.
0:57:54 So many of us are attracted to social science because we think we can make the world better,
0:57:58 and we can’t make the world better if the world doesn’t believe our results anymore.
0:58:03 So I think that we have a fundamental challenge to figure out how do we go about doing that.
0:58:08 In terms of training, I think that for a long time, if we think about training and research
0:58:13 methods and statistics, that was more like the medicine that you have to take as part
0:58:15 of becoming a social scientist.
0:58:21 And I think we need to realize that it’s a much more central and important topic.
0:58:27 If we’re going to be creating reproducible, credible social science, we need to deal with
0:58:31 lots of the issues that the open science movement is telling us about.
0:58:34 And we’ve taken too long to listen to their advice.
0:58:41 So if we go from data collada, talking about p-hacking in 2011, you know, there were lots
0:58:44 of hints that it was time to start moving.
0:58:49 And the field obviously has moved in the direction that data collada and brianosic have moved
0:58:50 us.
0:58:56 And finally, we have samine vasir as a new incoming editor of psych science, which is
0:58:58 sort of a fascinating development as well.
0:59:00 So we’re moving in the right direction.
0:59:06 It’s taken us too long to pay attention to the wise advice that the open science movement
0:59:10 has outlined for us.
0:59:23 I do think there needs to be a reckoning.
0:59:29 I think that people need to wake up and realize that the foundation of at least a sizable
0:59:34 chunk of our field is built on something that’s not true.
0:59:39 And if a foundation of your field is not true, what does a good scientist do to break into
0:59:41 that field?
0:59:45 Like imagine you have a whole literature that is largely false.
0:59:49 And imagine that when you publish a paper, you need to acknowledge that literature.
0:59:53 And that if you contradict that literature, your probability of publishing really goes
0:59:54 down.
0:59:56 What do you do?
0:59:59 So what it does is it winds up weeding out the careful people who are doing true stuff.
1:00:04 And it winds up rewarding the people who are cutting corners or even worse.
1:00:12 So it basically becomes a field that reinforces rewards, bad science and punishes good science
1:00:14 and good scientist.
1:00:21 Like this is about an incentive system and the incentive system is completely broken.
1:00:23 And we need to get a new one.
1:00:27 And the people in power who are reinforcing this incentive system, they need to not be
1:00:28 in power anymore.
1:00:32 You know, this is illustrating that there’s sort of a rot at the core of some of the stuff
1:00:34 that we’re doing.
1:00:41 And we need to put the right people who have the right values, who care about the details,
1:00:45 who understand that the materials and the data, they are the evidence.
1:00:48 We need those people to be in charge.
1:00:53 Like there can’t be this idea that these are one-off cases, they’re not.
1:00:55 They are not one-off cases.
1:00:56 So it’s broken.
1:01:00 You have to fix it.
1:01:02 That again was Joe Simmons.
1:01:06 Once we published this series last year, there have been reports of fraud in many fields.
1:01:11 Not just the behavioral sciences, but in botany, physics, neuroscience and more.
1:01:16 So we went back to Brian Nosik, who runs the Center for Open Science.
1:01:23 There really is accelerating movement in the sense that some of the base principles of
1:01:28 we need to be more transparent, we need to improve data sharing, we need to facilitate
1:01:33 the processes of self-correction are not just head nods.
1:01:39 Yeah, that’s an important thing, but have really moved into, yeah, how are we going
1:01:40 to do that?
1:01:45 And so I guess that’s been the theme of 2024 is how can we help people do it well?
1:01:48 At his center, Nosik is trying out a new plan.
1:01:53 One of the more exciting things that we’ve been working on is a new initiative that we’re
1:01:56 calling Lifecycle Journal.
1:02:03 And the basic idea is to reimagine scholarly publishing without the original constraints
1:02:04 of paper.
1:02:11 A lot of how the peer review process and publishing occurs today was done because of their limits
1:02:13 of paper.
1:02:17 But in a world where we can actually communicate digitally, there’s no reason that we need
1:02:22 to wait till the research is done to provide some evaluation.
1:02:27 There’s no reason to consider it final when it could be easily revised and updated.
1:02:33 There’s no reason to think of review as a singular one set of activities by three people
1:02:35 who judge the entire thing.
1:02:40 And so we will have a full marketplace of evaluation services that are each evaluating
1:02:42 the research in different ways.
1:02:46 It’ll happen across the research lifecycle from planning through completion.
1:02:51 And researchers will always be able to update and revise when errors or corrections are
1:02:52 needed.
1:02:57 But the need for corrections can move in mysterious ways.
1:03:04 Brian Nosik himself and collaborators including Leif Nelson of Data Colada had to retract
1:03:09 a recent article about the benefits of pre-registration after other researchers pointed out that their
1:03:15 article hadn’t properly pre-registered all their hypotheses.
1:03:16 Nosik was embarrassed.
1:03:22 My whole life is about trying to promote transparent research practices, greater openness, trying
1:03:24 to improve rigor and reproducibility.
1:03:28 I am just as vulnerable to error as anybody else.
1:03:36 And so one of the real lessons, I think, is that without transparency, these errors will
1:03:39 go unexposed.
1:03:44 It would have been very hard for the critics to identify that we had screwed this up without
1:03:50 being able to access the portions of the materials that we were able to make public.
1:03:57 And as people are engaged with critique and pursuing transparency, and transparency is
1:04:04 becoming more normal, we might for a while see an ironic effect, which is transparency
1:04:11 seems to be associated with poorer research because more errors are identified.
1:04:15 And that ought to happen because errors are occurring.
1:04:18 Without transparency, you can’t possibly catch them.
1:04:26 But what might emerge over time as our verification processes improve as we have a sense of accountability
1:04:33 to our transparency, then the fact that transparency is there may decrease error over time, but
1:04:34 not the need to check.
1:04:36 And that’s the key.
1:04:40 Still, trust in science in the US has been declining.
1:04:45 So we asked Nosik if he is worried that this new transparency, which will likely uncover
1:04:49 more errors, might hurt his cause.
1:04:54 This is a real challenge that we wrestle with and have wrestled with since the origins of
1:05:03 the center is how do we promote this culture of critique and self-criticism about our field
1:05:10 and simultaneously have that be understood as the strength of research rather than its
1:05:12 weakness.
1:05:16 One of the phrases that I’ve liked to use in this is that the reason to trust science
1:05:19 is because it doesn’t trust itself.
1:05:25 That part of what makes science great as a social system is its constant self-scrutiny
1:05:31 and willingness to try to find and expose its errors so that the evidence that comes
1:05:37 out at the end is the most robust, reliable, valid evidences could be.
1:05:43 And that continuous process is the best process in the world that we’ve ever invented for
1:05:46 knowledge production.
1:05:47 We can do better.
1:05:55 I think our mistake in some prior efforts of promoting science is to appeal to authority,
1:05:57 saying you should trust science because scientists know what they’re doing.
1:06:04 I don’t think that’s the way to gain trust in science because anyone can make that claim.
1:06:06 Appeals to authority are very weak arguments.
1:06:13 I think our opportunity as a field to address the skepticism of institutions generally and
1:06:21 science specifically is to show our work, is by being transparent, by allowing the criticism
1:06:28 to occur, by in fact encouraging and promoting critical engagement with our evidence.
1:06:33 That is the playing field I’d much rather be on with people who are the so-called enemies
1:06:39 of science than in competing appeals to authority.
1:06:43 Because if they need to wrestle with the evidence and an observer says, “Wow, one group is totally
1:06:49 avoiding the evidence and the other group is actually showing their work,” I think people
1:06:51 will know who to trust.
1:06:53 It’s easy to say it’s very hard to do.
1:06:58 These are hard problems.
1:06:59 I agree.
1:07:00 These are hard problems.
1:07:05 To be fair, easy problems get solved or they simply evaporate.
1:07:11 It’s the hard problems that keep us all digging and we at Freakonomics Radio will keep digging
1:07:13 in this new year.
1:07:15 Thanks to Brian Nosick for the update.
1:07:18 Thanks especially to you for listening.
1:07:20 Coming up next time on the show.
1:07:22 The sun right here is 12 foot tall.
1:07:30 The economics of highway signs and after that, some 30 million Americans think that they
1:07:36 are allergic to the penicillin family of drugs and the vast majority of them are not.
1:07:37 Why does this matter?
1:07:43 Nothing kills bacteria better than these drugs.
1:07:46 We go inside the bizarro world of allergies.
1:07:47 Thanks.
1:07:48 Coming up soon.
1:07:54 Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too.
1:07:56 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
1:08:02 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at Freakonomics.com where we publish
1:08:04 transcripts and show notes.
1:08:07 This episode was produced by Alina Kullman.
1:08:12 Our staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Elinor Osborn, Ellen Frankman, Elsa
1:08:17 Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jason Gambrell, Jeremy Johnston,
1:08:21 John Schnarrs, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Coruth, Sarah Lilly, Theo Jacobs and
1:08:23 Zac Lipinski.
1:08:26 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers.
1:08:28 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
1:08:33 As always, thanks for listening.
1:08:36 We are a carrot based organization because we don’t have sticks.
1:08:38 I mean, would you like me to loan you a stick just once in a while?
1:08:39 Yeah, that would be fun.
1:08:53 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
1:08:56 [MUSIC PLAYING]

0:00:02 (dramatic music)
0:00:05 – Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner.
0:00:08 Today, a holiday treat, a bonus episode
0:00:10 from people I mostly admire.
0:00:12 One of the other shows we make here
0:00:13 at the Freakonomics Radio Network.
0:00:16 It is an interview show hosted by Steve Levitt,
0:00:18 my Freakonomics friend and co-author,
0:00:21 who is an economics professor emeritus now
0:00:23 at the University of Chicago.
0:00:26 On this episode, Levitt interviews David Eagleman,
0:00:28 a neuroscientist, entrepreneur,
0:00:31 and author of several books, including LiveWired,
0:00:34 the inside story of the ever-changing brain.
0:00:36 It is a fascinating conversation.
0:00:37 You are going to love it.
0:00:40 To hear more conversations like this,
0:00:44 follow people I mostly admire in your podcast app.
0:00:45 Okay, that’s it for me.
0:00:47 Here is Steve Levitt.
0:00:49 (dramatic music)
0:01:01 – I love podcast guests who change the way
0:01:04 I think about some important aspect of the world.
0:01:07 A great example is my guest today, David Eagleman.
0:01:09 He’s a Stanford neuroscientist whose work
0:01:13 on brain plasticity has completely transformed
0:01:18 my understanding of the human brain and its possibilities.
0:01:20 The human brain is about three pounds.
0:01:22 It’s locked in silence and darkness.
0:01:25 It has no idea where the information is coming from
0:01:28 because everything is just electrical spikes
0:01:30 and also chemical releases as a result of those spikes.
0:01:34 And so what you have in there is this giant symphony
0:01:36 of electrical activity going on
0:01:40 and its job is to create a model of the outside world.
0:01:47 – Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.
0:01:50 – According to Eagleman,
0:01:52 the brain is constantly trying
0:01:54 to predict the world around it.
0:01:56 But of course, the world is unpredictable and surprising.
0:02:00 So the brain is constantly updating its model.
0:02:02 The capacity of our brains to be ever-changing
0:02:05 is usually referred to as plasticity,
0:02:08 but Eagleman offers another term, live wired.
0:02:10 That’s where conversation begins.
0:02:18 Plasticity is the term used in the field
0:02:21 because the great neuroscientist
0:02:24 or psychologist actually, William James,
0:02:25 coined the term because he was impressed
0:02:28 with the way that plastic gets manufactured,
0:02:31 where you mold it into a shape and it holds onto that shape.
0:02:34 And he thought that’s kind of like what the brain does.
0:02:37 The great trick that mother nature figured out
0:02:39 was to drop us into the world half-baked.
0:02:42 If you look at the way an alligator drops into the world,
0:02:44 it essentially is pre-programmed.
0:02:47 It eats, mates, sleeps, does whatever it’s doing.
0:02:49 But we spent our first several years
0:02:52 absorbing the world around us based on our neighborhood
0:02:54 and our moment in time and our culture
0:02:56 and our friends and our universities.
0:03:00 We absorb all of that such that we can then springboard
0:03:03 off of that and create our own things.
0:03:05 There are many things that are essentially
0:03:09 pre-programmed in us, but we are incredibly flexible
0:03:11 and that is the key about live wiring.
0:03:13 When I ask you to think of the name
0:03:14 of your fifth grade teacher,
0:03:16 you might be able to pull it up,
0:03:18 even though it’s been years since you saw
0:03:19 that fifth grade teacher,
0:03:23 but somehow there was a change made in your brain
0:03:25 and that stayed in place.
0:03:27 You’ve got 86 billion neurons.
0:03:30 Each neuron is as complicated as a city.
0:03:33 This entire forest of neurons,
0:03:35 every moment of your life is changing.
0:03:38 It’s reconfiguring, it’s strengthening connections
0:03:41 here and there, it’s actually unplugging over here
0:03:42 and replugging over there.
0:03:45 And so that’s why I’ve started to feel
0:03:48 that the term plasticity is maybe underreporting
0:03:49 what’s going on.
0:03:51 And so that’s why I made up the term live wiring.
0:03:53 When I went to school, I feel like they taught me
0:03:56 the brain was organized around things like senses
0:03:58 and emotions, that there were these different parts
0:04:01 of the brain that were good for those things.
0:04:04 But you make the case that there’s a very different
0:04:06 organization of the brain.
0:04:08 – It is organized around the senses,
0:04:10 but the interesting thing is that the cortex,
0:04:13 this wrinkly outer bit, is actually a one-trick pony.
0:04:14 It doesn’t matter what you plug in.
0:04:17 It’ll say, okay, got it, I’ll just wrap myself
0:04:21 around that data and figure out what to do with that data.
0:04:25 It turns out that in almost everybody you have functioning
0:04:27 eyeballs that plug into the back of the head.
0:04:29 And so we end up calling the back part of the brain
0:04:30 the visual cortex.
0:04:32 We call this part the auditory cortex.
0:04:35 And this is the somatosensory cortex that takes
0:04:37 in information from the body and so on.
0:04:40 So what you learned back in high school or college
0:04:42 is correct most of the time.
0:04:45 But what it overlooks is the fact that the brain
0:04:46 is so flexible.
0:04:49 If a person goes blind or is born blind,
0:04:51 that part of the brain that we’re calling
0:04:53 the visual cortex, that gets taken over by hearing,
0:04:54 by touch, by other things.
0:04:56 And so it’s no longer visual cortex.
0:04:59 The same neurons that are there are now doing
0:05:01 a totally different job.
0:05:04 – So let me pose a question to listeners.
0:05:08 Imagine you have a newborn baby and he or she looks
0:05:10 absolutely flawless on the outside.
0:05:14 But then upon examination, the doctors discover
0:05:17 that half of his or her brain is just missing.
0:05:20 A complete hemisphere of the brain, it’s never developed.
0:05:22 It’s just empty space.
0:05:24 I would expect that would be a fatal defect
0:05:28 or best the child would be growing up profoundly
0:05:30 mentally disabled.
0:05:32 – Turns out the kid will be just fine.
0:05:34 You can be born without half the brain
0:05:36 or you can do what’s called a hemispherectomy,
0:05:39 which happens to children who have something called
0:05:42 rasmusans encephalitis, which is a form of epilepsy
0:05:45 that spreads from one hemisphere to the other.
0:05:47 The surgical intervention for that is to remove
0:05:49 half the brain.
0:05:51 You can just imagine as a parent, the horror you would feel
0:05:53 if your child had to go in for something like that.
0:05:55 But you know what, kid’s just fine.
0:05:59 I can’t take my laptop and rip out half the motherboard
0:06:01 and expect it to still function.
0:06:04 But with the brain, with a live wired system, it’ll work.
0:06:07 – So I first came to work because I was so blown away
0:06:10 by the idea of human echolocation.
0:06:13 Only to discover that echolocation is only
0:06:14 the tip of the iceberg.
0:06:17 But could you talk just a bit about echolocation,
0:06:19 how quickly with training it can start
0:06:21 to substitute for sight?
0:06:23 – So it turns out that blind people can make
0:06:27 all kinds of sounds either with their mouth like clicking
0:06:29 or the tip of their cane or snapping their fingers,
0:06:30 anything like this.
0:06:33 And they can get really good at determining
0:06:36 what is coming back as echoes and figure out,
0:06:38 oh, okay, this is an open space in front of me.
0:06:39 Here, there’s something in front of me.
0:06:41 It’s probably a parked car.
0:06:43 And oh, there’s a little gap between two parked cars here.
0:06:44 So I can go in here.
0:06:48 The key is the visual part of the brain is no longer
0:06:50 being used because for whatever reason,
0:06:52 there’s no information coming down those pipelines anymore.
0:06:55 So that part of the brain is taken over by audition,
0:06:58 by hearing and by touch and other things.
0:07:01 What happens is that the blind person becomes really good
0:07:04 at these other things because they’ve just devoted
0:07:06 more real estate to it.
0:07:09 And as a result, they can pick up on all kinds of cues
0:07:11 that would be very difficult for me and you
0:07:14 because our hearing just isn’t that good.
0:07:16 – And then in these studies,
0:07:20 you put a blindfold on a person for two or three days
0:07:22 and you try to teach them echolocation.
0:07:25 If I understand correctly, even over that timescale,
0:07:28 the echolocation starts taking over
0:07:29 the visual part of the brain.
0:07:31 Is that a fair assessment?
0:07:32 – That is exactly right.
0:07:34 This was my colleagues at Harvard.
0:07:36 They did this over the course of five days.
0:07:39 They demonstrated that people could get really good at,
0:07:41 they’re actually a number of studies like this.
0:07:42 They can get really good at reading Braille.
0:07:44 They can do things like echolocation.
0:07:48 And the speed of it was sort of the surprise.
0:07:50 But the real surprise for me came along
0:07:52 when they blindfolded people tightly
0:07:54 and put them in the brain scanner
0:07:59 and they were making sounds or touching the hand.
0:08:01 And they were starting to see activity
0:08:06 in the visual cortex after 60 minutes of being blind.
0:08:09 – So in your book, you talk about REM sleep.
0:08:11 And honestly, if I had sat down
0:08:14 and tried to come up with an explanation of REM sleep,
0:08:17 I could have listened to a thousand ideas.
0:08:20 Your pet theory would not be one of them.
0:08:22 So explain what REM sleep is
0:08:24 and then tell me why you think we do it.
0:08:26 – REM sleep is rapid eye movement sleep.
0:08:28 We have this every night, about every 90 minutes.
0:08:30 And that’s when you dream.
0:08:31 So if you wake someone up
0:08:33 when their eyes are moving rapidly
0:08:34 and you say, “Hey, what are you thinking about?”
0:08:37 they’ll say, “Whoa, I was just riding a camel across a meadow.”
0:08:39 But if you wake them up at other parts of their sleep,
0:08:42 they typically won’t have anything going on.
0:08:44 So that’s how we know we dream during REM sleep.
0:08:45 But here’s the key.
0:08:48 My student and I realized that at nighttime,
0:08:50 when the planet rotates,
0:08:52 we spend half our time in darkness.
0:08:55 And obviously we’re very used to this electricity blessed world.
0:08:57 But think about this in historical time
0:08:59 over the course of hundreds of millions of years.
0:09:00 It’s really dark.
0:09:03 I mean, half the time you are in blackness.
0:09:05 Now you can still hear and touch and taste
0:09:07 and smell in the dark.
0:09:10 But the visual system is at a disadvantage
0:09:12 whenever the planet rotates into darkness.
0:09:16 And so given the rapidity with which other systems
0:09:18 can encroach on that,
0:09:21 what we realized is it needs a way of defending itself
0:09:23 against takeover every single night.
0:09:25 And that’s what dreams are about.
0:09:28 So what happens is you have these midbrain mechanisms
0:09:31 that simply blast random activity
0:09:34 into the visual cortex every 90 minutes during the night.
0:09:37 And when you get activity in the visual cortex,
0:09:39 you say, “Oh, I’m seeing things.”
0:09:41 And because the brain is a storyteller,
0:09:43 you can’t activate all the stuff
0:09:47 without feeling like there’s a whole story going on there.
0:09:48 But the fascinating thing is when you look
0:09:51 at the circuitry carefully, it’s super specific,
0:09:53 much more specific than almost anything else in the brain.
0:09:57 It’s only hitting the primary visual cortex and nothing else.
0:10:02 And so that led us to a completely new theory about dreams.
0:10:05 We studied 25 different species of primates
0:10:07 and we looked at the amount of REM sleep
0:10:08 they have every night.
0:10:12 And we also looked at how plastic they are as a species.
0:10:14 It turns out that the amount of dream sleep
0:10:18 that a creature has exactly correlates
0:10:20 with how plastic they are, which is to say,
0:10:23 if your visual system is in danger of getting taken over
0:10:25 because your brain is very flexible,
0:10:27 then you have to have more dream sleep.
0:10:29 And by the way, when you look at human infants,
0:10:32 they have tons of dream sleep at the beginning
0:10:34 when their brains are very plastic.
0:10:37 And as they age, the amount of dream sleep goes down.
0:10:40 – Have you convinced the sleep scientists this is true
0:10:43 or is this just you believing it right now?
0:10:44 – At the moment, there are 19 papers
0:10:46 that have cited this and discussed this.
0:10:48 And I think it’s right.
0:10:49 I mean, look, everything can be wrong.
0:10:50 Everything is provisional,
0:10:54 but it’s the single theory that is quantitative.
0:10:56 It’s the single theory about dreams
0:11:00 that says not only here is a idea for why we dream,
0:11:01 but we can compare across species
0:11:04 and the predictions match exactly.
0:11:07 No one would have suspected that you’d see a relationship
0:11:11 between how long it takes you to walk or reach adolescence
0:11:12 and how much dream sleep you have.
0:11:14 But it turns out that is spun on.
0:11:23 – So we talked about echolocation,
0:11:26 which uses sound to accomplish tests
0:11:29 that are usually done by vision.
0:11:31 And you’ve started a company called NeoSensory,
0:11:35 which uses touch to accomplish tasks
0:11:37 that are usually done with hearing.
0:11:38 Can you explain the science behind that?
0:11:41 Given that all the data running around in the brain
0:11:44 is just data and the brain doesn’t know where it came from.
0:11:47 All it knows is, oh, here are electrical spikes
0:11:48 and it tries to figure out what to do with it.
0:11:51 I got really interested in this idea of sensory substitution,
0:11:53 which is can you push information into the brain
0:11:56 via an unusual channel?
0:11:58 Originally we built a vest
0:12:00 that was covered with vibratory motors
0:12:03 and we captured sound for people who are deaf.
0:12:05 So the vest captures sound,
0:12:07 breaks it up from high to low frequency
0:12:10 and you’re feeling the sound on your torso.
0:12:12 By the way, this is exactly what the inner ear does.
0:12:14 It breaks up sound from high to low frequency
0:12:16 and ships that off to the brain.
0:12:18 So we’re just transferring the inner ear
0:12:20 to the skin of the torso.
0:12:22 And it worked, people who are deaf
0:12:25 could come to hear the world that way.
0:12:28 So I spun this out of my lab as a company, Neosensory,
0:12:32 and we shrunk the vest down to a wristband
0:12:34 and we’re on wrist of deaf people all over the world.
0:12:37 The other alternative for somebody who’s deaf
0:12:39 is a cochlear implant, an invasive surgery.
0:12:44 This is much cheaper and does as good a job.
0:12:45 Just to make sure I understand it.
0:12:50 Sounds happen and this wristband hears the sounds
0:12:54 and then shoots electrical impulses into your wrist
0:12:56 that correspond to the high and low frequency.
0:12:58 It’s actually just vibratory motors.
0:13:00 So it’s just like the buzzer on your cell phone
0:13:03 but we have a string of these buzzers all along your wrist
0:13:06 and we’re actually taking advantage of an illusion
0:13:09 which is if I have two motors next to each other
0:13:11 and I stimulate them both,
0:13:14 you will feel one virtual point right in between.
0:13:16 And as I change the strength of those two motors
0:13:20 relative to each other, I can move that point around.
0:13:23 So we’re actually stimulating 128 virtual points
0:13:24 along the wrist.
0:13:27 – Do people train you give them very direct feedback
0:13:29 or is it more organic?
0:13:30 – Great question.
0:13:32 It started off where we were doing a lot of training
0:13:35 on people and what we realized is it’s all the same
0:13:36 if we just let it be organic.
0:13:39 The key is we just encourage people be in the world
0:13:40 and that’s it.
0:13:42 You see the dog’s mouth moving
0:13:45 and you feel the barking on your wrist
0:13:47 or you close the door and you feel that on your wrist
0:13:49 or you say something, you know,
0:13:50 most deaf people can speak
0:13:53 and they know what their motor output is
0:13:55 and they’re feeling the input.
0:13:58 – Okay, so hearing their own voice for the first time
0:13:59 through this. – Exactly.
0:14:01 – Oh God, yeah, that’s interesting.
0:14:01 – And by the way,
0:14:03 that’s how you learned how to use your ears too.
0:14:05 You know, when you’re a baby,
0:14:06 you’re watching your mother’s mouth move
0:14:08 and you’re hearing data coming in your ears
0:14:10 and you clapped your hands together
0:14:12 and you hear something in your ears.
0:14:13 It’s the same idea.
0:14:15 You’re just training up correlations in the brain
0:14:18 about, oh, this visual thing seems to always go
0:14:20 with that auditory stimulus.
0:14:23 – So then it seems like if I’m deaf
0:14:25 and I see the dog’s mouth moving
0:14:27 and I now associate that with the sound,
0:14:31 do the people say that they hear the sound where the dog is
0:14:33 or is the sound coming from the wrist?
0:14:34 – For the first few months,
0:14:36 you’re hearing it on your wrist,
0:14:38 you can get pretty good at these correlations
0:14:40 but then after about six months,
0:14:43 if I ask somebody when the dog barks,
0:14:44 do you feel something on your wrist?
0:14:45 And you think, okay, what was that on?
0:14:46 That must have been a dog bark
0:14:47 and then you look for the dog.
0:14:51 And they say, no, I just hear the dog out there.
0:14:52 – Hmm.
0:14:53 – And that sounds so crazy.
0:14:55 But remember, that’s what your ears are doing.
0:14:58 Your ears are capturing vibrations at the eardrum
0:15:00 that moves through the middle ear to the inner ear,
0:15:01 breaks up to different frequencies,
0:15:04 goes off to your brain, goes to your auditory cord.
0:15:06 It’s this giant pathway of things.
0:15:09 And yet, even though you’re hearing my voice right now
0:15:13 inside your head, you think I’m somewhere else.
0:15:14 And that’s exactly what happens,
0:15:18 irrespective of how you feed the data in.
0:15:22 So you also have a product that helps with tinnitus.
0:15:23 Could you explain both what that is
0:15:25 and how your product helps?
0:15:27 So tinnitus is a ringing in the ears.
0:15:31 It’s like beep and about 15% of the population has this.
0:15:33 And for some people, it’s really, really bad.
0:15:38 It turns out there is a mechanism for helping with tinnitus
0:15:41 which has to do with playing tones
0:15:45 and then matching that with stimulation on the skin.
0:15:47 People wear the wristband, it’s exactly the same wristband,
0:15:51 but we have the phone play tones, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
0:15:53 And you’re feeling that all over your wrist.
0:15:54 And you just do that for 10 minutes a day.
0:15:56 And it drives down the tinnitus.
0:15:58 Now, why does that work?
0:16:00 There are various theories on this,
0:16:02 but I think the simplest version
0:16:05 is that your brain is figuring out,
0:16:09 okay, real sounds always cause this
0:16:11 correlating vibration on my wrist,
0:16:15 but a fake sound, beep, you know, this thing in my head,
0:16:17 that doesn’t have any verification on the wrist.
0:16:20 And so that must not be a real sound.
0:16:23 So because of issues of brain plasticity,
0:16:26 the brain just reduces the strength of the tinnitus
0:16:28 because it learns that it’s not getting any confirmation
0:16:30 that that’s a real world sound.
0:16:32 Now, how did you figure out
0:16:34 that this bracelet could be used for this?
0:16:36 This was discovered by a woman named Susan Shore,
0:16:39 who’s a researcher who discovered this about a decade ago.
0:16:42 She was using electrical shocks on the tongue.
0:16:43 And there’s actually another company
0:16:44 that’s spun out called Lanier
0:16:46 that does this with sounds in the ear
0:16:47 and shocks on the tongue.
0:16:49 They had an argument that they think
0:16:52 it had to be touched from the head and the neck.
0:16:53 And I didn’t buy that at all.
0:16:54 And that’s why I tried that with the wristband.
0:16:57 So this was not an original idea for us
0:17:01 except to try this on the wrist and it works equally as well.
0:17:06 So what we’re talking about is substituting between senses.
0:17:08 Are there other forms of this products
0:17:10 that are currently available to consumers
0:17:13 or likely to become available soon in the space?
0:17:16 For people who are blind, for example,
0:17:19 there are a few different approaches to this.
0:17:21 One is called the brain port and that’s where,
0:17:24 for a blind person, they have a little camera on their glasses
0:17:29 and that gets turned into little electrical stimulation
0:17:30 on the tongue.
0:17:33 So you’re wearing this little electro-tactile grid
0:17:36 on your tongue and it tastes like pop rocks
0:17:37 sort of in your mouth.
0:17:39 Blind people can get pretty good at this.
0:17:42 They can navigate complex obstacle courses
0:17:45 or throw a ball into a basket at a distance
0:17:48 because they can come to see the world through their tongue,
0:17:50 which if that sounds crazy,
0:17:52 it’s the same thing as seeing it through these two spheres
0:17:54 that are embedded in your skull.
0:17:57 It’s just capturing photons and information about them,
0:17:58 figuring out where the edges are
0:17:59 and then shipping that back to the brain.
0:18:01 And the brain can figure that out.
0:18:03 There’s also a colleague of mine
0:18:05 that makes an app called Voice.
0:18:07 It uses the phone’s camera
0:18:10 and it turns that into soundscape.
0:18:13 So if you’re moving the camera around,
0:18:15 you’re hearing (mimics sounds)
0:18:18 you know, it sounds like a strange cacophony,
0:18:19 but it doesn’t take long,
0:18:21 even for you as a sighted person,
0:18:23 to get used to this and say,
0:18:27 oh, okay, I’m turning the visual world into sound
0:18:28 and it’s starting to make sense.
0:18:30 When I pass over an edge
0:18:32 or when I zoom into something,
0:18:34 the pitch changes, the volume changes,
0:18:37 there’s all kinds of changes in the sound quality
0:18:39 that tells you, oh, yeah, now I’m getting close to something,
0:18:40 now I’m getting far,
0:18:43 and here’s what the world looks like in sound.
0:18:48 – Coming up after the break,
0:18:51 there’s really no shortage of theoretical ideas
0:18:52 in neuroscience,
0:18:56 but fundamentally, we don’t have enough data.
0:18:59 More of Steve Leavitt’s conversation with David Eagleman
0:19:02 in this special episode of “People I Mostly Admire.”
0:19:18 Okay, back now to this special episode of “People I Mostly Admire.”
0:19:20 This is my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Leavitt
0:19:24 in conversation with the neuroscientist David Eagleman.
0:19:27 (eerie music)
0:19:30 – Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink,
0:19:32 has gotten a ton of attention lately.
0:19:33 Could you explain what they’re trying to do
0:19:37 and whether you think that’s a promising avenue to explore?
0:19:38 – What they’re doing is they’re putting electrodes
0:19:43 into the brain to read from and talk to the neurons there.
0:19:45 So what we’ve been talking about so far
0:19:47 has been sending signals to the brain,
0:19:48 but what Neuralink is trying to do
0:19:51 is take signals out of the brain, is that right?
0:19:51 – That is correct.
0:19:53 Everything we’ve been talking about so far
0:19:54 with sensory substitution,
0:19:57 that’s a way of pushing information in and non-invasive.
0:20:00 And what Neuralink is, you have to drill a hole in the head
0:20:02 to get to the brain itself,
0:20:04 but then you can do reading and writing invasively.
0:20:09 That actually has been going on for 60 years.
0:20:11 The language of the brain is electrical stimulation.
0:20:14 And so with a little tiny wire, essentially,
0:20:17 you can zap a neuron and make it pop off
0:20:21 or you can listen to when it’s chattering along,
0:20:23 going pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa.
0:20:25 There’s nothing actually new about what Neuralink is doing,
0:20:28 except that they’re making a one ton robot
0:20:32 that sews the electrodes into the brain
0:20:34 so it can do it smaller and tighter and faster
0:20:36 than a neurosurgeon can.
0:20:38 And by the way, there are a lot of great companies
0:20:41 doing this sort of thing with electrodes.
0:20:44 As people get access to the brain,
0:20:46 we’re finally getting to a point, we’re not there yet,
0:20:48 but we’re getting to a point
0:20:52 where we’ll finally be able to push theory forward.
0:20:55 There’s really no shortage of theoretical ideas
0:20:58 in neuroscience, but fundamentally,
0:21:01 we don’t have enough data because, as I mentioned,
0:21:04 you’ve got these 86 billion neurons all doing their thing,
0:21:09 and we have never measured what all these things
0:21:10 are doing at the same time.
0:21:11 So we have technologies
0:21:15 like functional magnetic resonance imaging, FMRI,
0:21:19 which measures big blobby volumes of,
0:21:21 oh, there was some activity there and some activity there,
0:21:22 but that doesn’t tell us what’s happening
0:21:24 at the level of individual neurons.
0:21:26 We can currently measure some individual neurons,
0:21:28 but not many of them.
0:21:32 Be like if an alien asked one person in New York City,
0:21:33 hey, what’s going on here?
0:21:36 And then tried to extrapolate to understand
0:21:37 the entire economy of New York City
0:21:38 and how that’s all working.
0:21:43 So I think we’re finally getting closer to the point
0:21:45 where we’ll have real data about,
0:21:47 wow, this is what thousands or eventually hundreds
0:21:49 of thousands or millions of neurons
0:21:52 are actually doing in real time at the same moment,
0:21:55 and then we’ll be able to really get progress.
0:21:57 I actually think the future is not in things like Neuralink,
0:22:02 but the next level past that, which is nanorobotics.
0:22:04 This is all theoretical right now,
0:22:07 but I don’t think this is more than 20, 30 years off,
0:22:10 where you do three-dimensional printing,
0:22:14 atomically precise, you make molecular robots,
0:22:15 hundreds of millions of these,
0:22:17 and then you put them in a capsule
0:22:18 and you swallow the capsule,
0:22:19 and these little robots swim around
0:22:23 and they go into your neurons, these cells in your brain.
0:22:27 And from there, they can send out little signals saying,
0:22:29 hey, this neuron just fired.
0:22:30 And once we have that sort of thing,
0:22:32 then we can say non-invasively,
0:22:35 here’s what all these neurons are doing at the same time,
0:22:38 and then we’ll really understand the brain.
0:22:41 – I’ve worn a continuous glucose monitor a few times,
0:22:43 so you stick this thing in your arm
0:22:44 and you leave it there for 10 days,
0:22:46 and every five minutes,
0:22:49 it gives you a reading of your blood glucose level.
0:22:51 It gives you direct feedback
0:22:53 on how your body responds to the foods you eat,
0:22:55 also to stress or lack of sleep,
0:22:57 that you simply don’t get otherwise.
0:23:01 I learned more about my metabolism in 10 days
0:23:04 than I had over the entire rest of my life combined.
0:23:06 What you’re talking about with these nanorobots
0:23:07 is obviously in the future,
0:23:12 but is there anything now that I can buy
0:23:13 and I can strap on my head?
0:23:15 And I know it’s not gonna be individual neurons,
0:23:17 but that would allow me to get feedback
0:23:21 about my brainwaves and be able to learn
0:23:23 in that same way I do with the glucose monitor?
0:23:27 – What we have now is EEG, Electroencephalography,
0:23:30 and there are several really good companies
0:23:34 like MUSE and Emotive that have come out with at-home methods.
0:23:36 You just strap this thing on your head
0:23:39 and you can measure what’s going on with your brainwaves.
0:23:43 The problem is that brainwaves are still pretty distant
0:23:46 from the activity of 86 billion chattering neurons.
0:23:49 An analogy would be if you went
0:23:50 to your favorite baseball stadium
0:23:53 and you attached a few microphones
0:23:55 to the outside of the stadium
0:23:58 and you listened to a baseball game,
0:24:00 but all you could hear with these microphones
0:24:02 is occasionally the crack of the bat
0:24:03 and the roar of the crowd.
0:24:07 And then your job is to reconstruct what baseball is
0:24:10 just some of these few little signals you’re getting.
0:24:14 So I’m afraid it’s still a pretty crude technology.
0:24:17 – I could imagine that I would put one of these EEGs on
0:24:20 and I would just find some feeling I liked,
0:24:23 bliss or peace or maybe it’s a feeling
0:24:26 induced by drugs and alcohol.
0:24:30 And I would be able to see what my brain patterns
0:24:32 looked like in those states.
0:24:35 Then I could sit around and try to work towards
0:24:37 reproducing those same patterns.
0:24:39 – No, it might not actually lead to anything good.
0:24:41 But in your professional opinion,
0:24:44 total waste of time, you trying to do that?
0:24:47 – The fact is if you felt good at some moment in your life
0:24:49 and you sat around and tried to reproduce that,
0:24:52 I think you’d do just as well thinking about that moment,
0:24:55 trying to put yourself in that state,
0:24:57 rather than try to match a squiggly line.
0:24:59 – You know, I’m a big believer in data though
0:25:03 and it seems like somebody should be building AI systems
0:25:06 that are able to look at those squiggles
0:25:07 and give me feedback.
0:25:10 The thing that I’d so hard about the brain
0:25:14 is that we don’t get direct feedback about what’s going on,
0:25:17 which is how the brain is so good at what it does.
0:25:18 If the brain didn’t get feedback from the world
0:25:20 about what it was doing,
0:25:21 it wouldn’t be any good at predicting things.
0:25:24 So I’m trying to find a way that I can get feedback,
0:25:25 but it sounds like you’re saying I gotta live
0:25:28 for 20 more years if I wanna hope to do that.
0:25:29 – I think that’s right.
0:25:31 I mean, there’s also this very deep question about
0:25:34 what kind of feedback is useful for you.
0:25:37 Most of the action in your brain is happening unconsciously.
0:25:39 It’s happening well below the surface of your awareness
0:25:41 or your ability to access it.
0:25:45 And the fact is that your brain works much better that way.
0:25:47 Do you play tennis, for example?
0:25:47 – Not well.
0:25:48 – Or golf?
0:25:49 – Golf I play.
0:25:50 – Okay, good.
0:25:51 So if I ask you, hey Stephen,
0:25:54 tell me exactly how you swing that golf club.
0:25:55 The more you start thinking about it,
0:25:56 the worse you’re gonna be at it.
0:25:59 Because consciousness, when it starts poking around
0:26:00 in areas that it doesn’t belong,
0:26:02 it’s only gonna make things worse.
0:26:04 And so it is an interesting question
0:26:06 about the kind of things
0:26:07 that we want to be more conscious of.
0:26:09 I’m trying some of these experiments now,
0:26:11 actually using my wristband,
0:26:16 wearing EEG and getting a summarized feedback on the wrist.
0:26:17 So I don’t have to stare at a screen,
0:26:19 but as I’m walking around during the day,
0:26:22 I have a sense of what’s going on with this.
0:26:23 Or with the smart watch,
0:26:26 having a sense of what’s going on with my physiology.
0:26:28 I’m not sure yet whether it’s useful
0:26:30 or whether those things are unconscious
0:26:33 because mother nature figured out a long time ago
0:26:36 that it’s just as well if it remains unconscious.
0:26:37 One thing I’m doing,
0:26:40 which is just a wacky experiment is to try it.
0:26:42 The smart watch is measuring all these things.
0:26:43 We have that data going out,
0:26:47 but the key is you have someone else wear the wristband.
0:26:48 Like your spouse wear the smart watch
0:26:51 and you’re feeling her physiology.
0:26:52 And I’m trying to figure out,
0:26:55 is this useful to be tapped into someone else’s physiology?
0:26:57 I don’t know if this is good or bad for marriages,
0:26:58 but what a nightmare.
0:27:01 But I’m just trying to really get at this question
0:27:03 of these unconscious signals that we experience.
0:27:05 Is it better if they’re exposed
0:27:07 or better to not expose them?
0:27:09 – What have you found empirically?
0:27:10 – Empirically what I found is that married couples
0:27:11 don’t want to wear it.
0:27:13 (laughs)
0:27:21 – So in my lived experience,
0:27:26 I walk around and there’s almost nonstop chatter in my head.
0:27:29 It’s like there’s a narrator who’s commenting
0:27:31 on what I’m observing in the world.
0:27:34 My particular voice does a lot of rehearsing
0:27:36 of what I’m gonna say out loud in the future
0:27:39 and a lot of rehashing of past social interactions.
0:27:40 Other people have voices in their head
0:27:44 that are constantly criticizing and belittling them.
0:27:47 But either way, there’s both a voice that’s talking
0:27:50 and there’s also some other entity in my head
0:27:52 that’s listening to that voice and reacting.
0:27:56 Does neuroscience have an explanation for this sort of thing?
0:27:59 On my book Incognito, the way I cast the whole thing
0:28:01 is that the right way to think about the brain
0:28:04 is like a team of rivals.
0:28:06 Lincoln, when he set up his presidential cabinet,
0:28:08 he set up several rivals in it
0:28:10 and they were all functioning as a team.
0:28:13 That’s really what’s going on under the hood in your head
0:28:15 is you’ve got all these drives
0:28:16 that want different things all the time.
0:28:19 So if I put a slice of chocolate cake in front of you,
0:28:21 Steven, part of your brain says,
0:28:23 “Ooh, that’s a good energy source, let’s eat it.”
0:28:25 Part of your brain says, “No, don’t eat it.
0:28:26 It’ll make me overweight.”
0:28:27 Part of your brain says, “Okay, I’ll eat it,
0:28:29 but I’ll go to the gym tonight.”
0:28:31 And the question is, who is talking with whom here?
0:28:35 It’s all you, but it’s different parts of you.
0:28:38 All these drives are constantly arguing it out.
0:28:40 It’s by the way, generating activity
0:28:43 in the same parts of the brain as listening and speaking
0:28:44 that you would normally do.
0:28:48 It’s just internal before anything comes out.
0:28:53 – Language is such an effective form of communicating
0:28:55 and of summarizing information
0:28:57 that at least my impression inside my head
0:29:02 is that a lot of this is being mediated through language.
0:29:03 But I also have this impression
0:29:06 that there are parts of my brain
0:29:07 that are not very good with language.
0:29:11 Maybe I’m crazy, but I have this working theory
0:29:13 that the language parts of my brain
0:29:16 have really co-opted power.
0:29:18 The non-speaking parts of my brain,
0:29:20 they actually feel to me like the good parts of me,
0:29:22 the interesting parts of me,
0:29:24 but I feel like they’re essentially held hostage
0:29:26 by the language parts.
0:29:27 Does that make any sense?
0:29:28 – Well, this might be a good reason
0:29:31 for you to keep pursuing possible ways
0:29:33 to tap into your brain data.
0:29:37 And by the way, it turns out that the internal voice
0:29:39 is on a big spectrum across the population,
0:29:41 which is to say some people like you
0:29:43 have a very loud internal radio.
0:29:45 I happen to be at the other end of the spectrum
0:29:48 where I have no internal radio at all.
0:29:49 I never hear anything in my head.
0:29:51 That’s called an endophagia.
0:29:55 But everyone is somewhere along this spectrum.
0:29:58 One of the points that I’ve always really concentrated
0:30:00 on neuroscience is what are the actual differences
0:30:03 between people traditionally that’s been looked at
0:30:05 in terms of disease states.
0:30:07 But the question is from person to person
0:30:09 who are in the normal part of the distribution,
0:30:10 what are the differences between us?
0:30:12 In terms of those are manifold.
0:30:15 So take something like how clearly you visualize
0:30:16 when you imagine something.
0:30:20 So if I ask you to imagine a dog running across
0:30:24 the flowery meadow towards a cat,
0:30:26 you might have something like a movie in your head.
0:30:28 Other people have no image at all.
0:30:29 They understand it conceptually,
0:30:31 but they don’t have any image in their head.
0:30:34 And it turns out when you carefully study this,
0:30:37 the whole population is smeared across the spectrum.
0:30:39 So our internal lives from person to person
0:30:40 can be quite different.
0:30:42 – So when you talk about the spectrum,
0:30:46 it makes me think of synesthesia.
0:30:49 Could you explain what that is and how that works?
0:30:52 – So I’ve spent about 25 years now studying synesthesia
0:30:55 and that has to do with some percentage of the population
0:30:57 has a mixture of the senses.
0:30:59 They might look at letters on a page
0:31:01 and that triggers a color experience for them
0:31:05 where they hear music and that causes them to see some visual
0:31:07 or they put some taste in their mouth
0:31:10 and it causes them to have a feeling on their fingertips.
0:31:13 There are dozens and dozens of forms of synesthesia,
0:31:16 but what they all have to do with is a cross blending
0:31:18 of things that are normally separate
0:31:20 in the rest of the population.
0:31:23 – And what share of the population has these patterns?
0:31:27 – So it’s about 3% of the population that has colored letters
0:31:29 or colored weekdays or months or numbers.
0:31:31 – It was big, it’s interesting.
0:31:32 I wouldn’t have thought it was so big.
0:31:35 – The crazy part is that if you have synesthesia,
0:31:37 it probably has never struck you
0:31:40 that 97% of the population does not see the world
0:31:41 the way that you see it.
0:31:44 Everyone’s got their own story going on inside
0:31:48 and it’s rare that we stop to consider the possibility
0:31:52 that other people do not have the same reality that we do.
0:31:54 – And what’s going on in the brain?
0:31:55 – In the case of synesthesia,
0:31:58 it’s just a little bit of crosstalk between two areas
0:32:01 that in the rest of the population tend to be separate
0:32:02 but neighboring.
0:32:04 So it’s like porous borders between two countries.
0:32:06 They just get a little bit of data leakage
0:32:10 and that causes them to have a joint sensation of something.
0:32:11 – People make a big deal out of it
0:32:15 when they talk about musicians having this
0:32:17 and they imply that it’s helpful,
0:32:19 that it makes them better musicians.
0:32:20 Do you think there’s truth to that
0:32:23 or is it just that if 3% of the population has this,
0:32:25 then they’re gonna be some great musicians among them?
0:32:26 – I suspect it’s the latter,
0:32:28 which is to say everyone loves
0:32:30 pointing out synesthetic musicians
0:32:34 but no one has done a study on how many deep sea divers
0:32:37 have synesthesia or how many accountants have synesthesia.
0:32:38 And so we don’t really know
0:32:41 if it’s disproportionate among musicians.
0:32:43 So you’ve created this database of people
0:32:47 who have the condition and you find a pattern
0:32:50 that is completely and totally bizarre.
0:32:53 And that’s that there’s a big bunch of people
0:32:57 who associate the letter A with red, B with orange,
0:32:59 C with yellow, it goes on and on
0:33:01 and then they start repeating it G.
0:33:03 In general though, you don’t see any patterns at all.
0:33:07 Like people can connect these colors and letters in any way.
0:33:09 Do you remember when you first found this pattern
0:33:10 and what your thought was?
0:33:13 So typically, as he said, it’s totally idiosyncratic.
0:33:17 Each synesthete has his or her own colors for letters.
0:33:20 So my A might be yellow, your A is purple and so on.
0:33:22 And then what happened is
0:33:24 with two colleagues of mine at Stanford,
0:33:27 we found in this database of tens of thousands of synesthetes
0:33:28 that I’ve collected over the years,
0:33:31 we found that starting in the late 60s,
0:33:33 there was some percentage of synesthetes
0:33:36 who happened to share exactly the same colors.
0:33:38 These synesthetes were in different locations
0:33:39 but they all had the same thing.
0:33:44 And then that percentage rose to about 15% in the mid 70s.
0:33:45 – So when you saw this,
0:33:47 you must’ve been thinking, my God, this is important, right?
0:33:48 – Exactly right.
0:33:49 The question is,
0:33:51 how could these people be sharing the same pattern?
0:33:53 What we had always suspected is that
0:33:56 maybe there was some imprinting that happens,
0:33:58 which is to say there’s a quilt in your grandmother’s house
0:34:03 that has a red A and a yellow B and a purple C and so on.
0:34:05 But everyone has different things
0:34:07 that they grew up with as little kids.
0:34:11 And so it was strange that this was going on.
0:34:13 The punchline is that we realized
0:34:16 that this is the colors of the Fisher Price Magnet set
0:34:19 on the refrigerators that were popular
0:34:22 during the 70s and 80s and then essentially died out.
0:34:23 And so it turns out that when I look across
0:34:25 all these tens of thousands of synesthetes,
0:34:28 it’s just those people who were kids
0:34:30 in the late 60s and 70s and 80s
0:34:32 that imprinted on the Fisher Price Magnet set.
0:34:34 And that’s their synesthesia.
0:34:36 And then as its popularity died out,
0:34:39 there aren’t anymore who have that particular pattern.
0:34:49 – Now I have to imagine that the way we teach
0:34:52 in traditional classrooms with a teacher or professor
0:34:54 at a Blackboard lecturing to a huge group
0:34:57 of passive students, as a neuroscientist,
0:34:59 that must make a cringe, right?
0:35:01 – It does, increasingly, yes.
0:35:02 – How should we teach?
0:35:04 I think the next generation is going to be smarter
0:35:07 than we are simply because of the broadness
0:35:09 of the diet that they can consume.
0:35:10 Whenever they’re curious about something,
0:35:13 they jump on the internet, they get the answer straight away
0:35:16 or from Alexa or from ChatGPT, they just get the answers
0:35:20 and that is massively useful for a few reasons.
0:35:23 One is that when you are curious about something,
0:35:26 you have the right cocktail of neurotransmitters present
0:35:28 to make that information stick.
0:35:31 So if you get the answer to something
0:35:32 in the context of your curiosity,
0:35:34 then it’s going to stay with you.
0:35:36 Whereas you and I grew up in an era
0:35:39 where we had lots of just-in-case information.
0:35:40 – What do you mean by that?
0:35:42 – Oh, you know, like just in case you ever need to know
0:35:45 that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066, here you go.
0:35:46 – And you want to contrast that
0:35:47 with just-in-time information.
0:35:48 – Exactly.
0:35:51 – I need to know how to fix my car
0:35:52 and so the internet tells me
0:35:55 and then I can really remember it ’cause I need it.
0:35:56 – That’s exactly it.
0:35:58 And so, look, you know, for all of us with kids,
0:36:00 I know you’ve got kids, I’ve got kids and we feel like,
0:36:03 oh, my kid’s on YouTube and wasting time.
0:36:06 There’s a lot of amazing resources
0:36:08 and things that they learn on YouTube
0:36:10 or even on TikTok, anywhere.
0:36:12 There’s lots of garbage, of course,
0:36:14 but it’s better than what we grew up with.
0:36:16 When you and I wanted to know something,
0:36:20 we would ask our mothers to drive us down to the library
0:36:22 and we would thumb through the card catalog
0:36:23 and hope there was something on it there
0:36:25 that wasn’t too outdated.
0:36:27 – You were more ambitious than me.
0:36:28 I would just ask my mother
0:36:30 and I have since learned that every single thing
0:36:33 my mother taught me was completely wrong,
0:36:34 but I still believe them.
0:36:36 Because of this part of the brain
0:36:38 that locks in things that you learn long ago,
0:36:40 I still have to fight every day
0:36:42 against the false sorts my mother taught me.
0:36:45 I wish I had told her to take me to the library.
0:36:47 – My mother was a biology teacher
0:36:48 and my father was a psychiatrist
0:36:51 and so they had all kinds of good information.
0:36:55 I’m just super optimistic about the next generation of kids.
0:36:57 Now, as far as how we teach,
0:37:00 things got complicated with the advent of Google
0:37:03 and now it’s twice as complicated with chat GPT.
0:37:06 Happily, we already learned these lessons 20 years ago.
0:37:08 What we need to do is just change the way
0:37:10 that we ask questions of students.
0:37:13 We can no longer just assume that fill in the blank
0:37:15 or even just writing a paper on something
0:37:18 is the optimal way to have them learn something,
0:37:20 but instead they need to do interactive projects
0:37:22 like run little experiments with each other
0:37:26 and the kind of thing that you and I both love to do
0:37:29 in our careers which is, okay, go out and find this data
0:37:32 and run this experiment and see what happens here.
0:37:35 That’s the kind of opportunities that kids will have now.
0:37:40 – You were listening to a special bonus episode
0:37:43 of People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt
0:37:45 and the neuroscientist David Eagleman.
0:37:49 After the break, what are large language models missing?
0:37:51 – It has no theory of mind.
0:37:55 It has no physical model of the world the way that we do.
0:37:56 That’s coming up after the break.
0:38:08 (gentle music)
0:38:13 – David Eagleman is a professor, a CEO,
0:38:16 leader of a nonprofit called the Center for Science and Law,
0:38:19 host of TV shows on PBS and Netflix
0:38:21 and the founder of Possibillionism.
0:38:27 Like every curious person trying to figure out
0:38:29 what we’re doing here, what’s going on,
0:38:32 it just feels like there are two stories.
0:38:35 Either there’s some religion story
0:38:38 or there’s the story of strict atheism,
0:38:39 which I tend to agree with,
0:38:41 but it tends to come with this thing of,
0:38:42 look, we’ve got it all figured out,
0:38:44 there’s nothing more to ask here.
0:38:45 There is a middle position
0:38:46 which people call agnosticism,
0:38:48 but usually that means, I don’t know,
0:38:50 I’m not committing to one thing or the other.
0:38:52 I got interested in defining this new thing
0:38:54 that I call Possibillionism,
0:38:56 which is to try to go out there
0:38:58 and do what a scientist does,
0:39:01 which is an active exploration of the possibility space.
0:39:03 What the heck is going on here?
0:39:06 We live in such a big and mysterious cosmos.
0:39:09 Everything about our existence is sort of weird.
0:39:11 Obviously the whole Judeo-Christian tradition,
0:39:14 that’s one little point in that possibility space
0:39:17 or the possibility that there’s absolutely nothing
0:39:18 or we’re just atoms when we die,
0:39:20 but there’s lots of other possibilities.
0:39:24 And so I’m not willing to commit to one team or the other
0:39:26 without having sufficient evidence.
0:39:28 So that’s why I call myself a Possibillion.
0:39:32 – And so in support of Possibillionism,
0:39:34 maybe a better name could be in order,
0:39:37 you wrote a book called SUM, that’s S-U-M.
0:39:41 So it’s SUM, 40 Tales from the Afterlives.
0:39:44 How do you describe the book to people?
0:39:45 – I call it literary fiction.
0:39:48 It’s 40 short stories that are all mutually exclusive.
0:39:51 They’re all pretty funny, I would like to think,
0:39:53 but they’re also kind of gut-wrenching.
0:39:55 And what I’m doing is shining the flashlight
0:39:57 around the possibility space.
0:39:59 None of them are meant to be taken seriously.
0:40:02 But what the exercise of having 40
0:40:07 completely different stories gives us is a sense of,
0:40:10 wow, actually there’s a lot that we don’t know here.
0:40:12 In some of the stories, God is a female.
0:40:14 In some stories, God is a married couple.
0:40:19 In some stories, God is a species of dim-witted creatures.
0:40:22 In one story, God is actually the size of a bacterium
0:40:24 and doesn’t know that we exist.
0:40:27 And in lots of stories, there’s no God at all.
0:40:29 That book is something I wrote over the course of seven years
0:40:32 and became an international bestseller.
0:40:34 It’s really had a life to it
0:40:36 that I wouldn’t have ever guessed.
0:40:38 – When I heard about the book,
0:40:40 I saw the subtitle and I thought,
0:40:44 I have zero interest in reading a book about the afterlife.
0:40:47 I totally misunderstood what the book was about.
0:40:51 And then I certainly didn’t understand that some was Latin.
0:40:54 – Some actually I chose because among other things,
0:40:56 that’s the title story.
0:40:58 In the afterlife, you relive your life,
0:41:02 but all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
0:41:05 So you spend three months waiting in line
0:41:08 and you spend 900 hours sitting on the toilet
0:41:10 and you spend 30 years sleeping.
0:41:11 – All in a row.
0:41:13 – Exactly, and this amount of time looking for lost items
0:41:14 in this amount of time,
0:41:16 realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name
0:41:19 and this amount of time falling and so on.
0:41:20 Part of why I used the title sum
0:41:24 is because of the sum of events in your life like that.
0:41:26 Part of it was because Kojito or Gosume.
0:41:29 So it ended up just being the perfect title for me,
0:41:31 even if it did lose a couple of readers there.
0:41:41 – People are super excited right now
0:41:44 about these generative AI models,
0:41:45 the large language models.
0:41:47 What’s your take on it?
0:41:49 – Essentially these artificial neural networks
0:41:53 took off from a very simplified version of the brain,
0:41:55 which is, hey, look, you’ve got units and they’re connected
0:41:56 and what if we can change the strength
0:41:58 between these connections?
0:42:00 And in a very short time,
0:42:02 that has now become this thing
0:42:05 that has read everything ever written on the planet
0:42:07 and can give extraordinary answers.
0:42:10 But it’s not yet the brain or anything like it.
0:42:12 It’s just taking the very first idea
0:42:14 about the brain and running with it.
0:42:16 What a large language model does not have
0:42:19 is an internal model of the world.
0:42:21 It’s just acting as a statistical parrot.
0:42:23 It’s saying, okay, given these words,
0:42:25 what is the next word most likely to be
0:42:27 given everything that I’ve ever read on the planet?
0:42:29 And so it’s really good at that,
0:42:33 but it has no model of the world, no physical model.
0:42:38 And so things that a six-year-old can answer, it is stuck on.
0:42:39 Now, this is not a criticism of it
0:42:42 in the sense that it can do all kinds of amazing stuff
0:42:43 and it’s gonna change the world,
0:42:45 but it’s not the brain yet
0:42:46 and there’s still plenty of work to be done
0:42:49 to get something that actually acts like the brain.
0:42:52 – Do you think that it is a solvable problem
0:42:55 to give these models a theory of mind, a model of the world?
0:42:58 – I suspect so because there are 8.2 billion of us
0:43:00 who have this functioning in our brains
0:43:04 and as far as we can tell, we’re just made of physical stuff.
0:43:06 We’re just very sophisticated algorithms
0:43:09 and it’s just a matter of cracking what that algorithm is.
0:43:12 – If we were to come back in 100 years,
0:43:13 what do you think would be most different?
0:43:14 I know that’s a hard prediction to make,
0:43:17 but what do you see is transforming most
0:43:19 in the areas you work in?
0:43:21 – The big textbook that we have in our field
0:43:22 is called Principles of Neuroscience
0:43:27 and it’s about 900 pages and it’s not actually principles,
0:43:30 it’s just a data dump of all this crazy stuff we know.
0:43:34 And in 100 years, I expect it’ll be like 90 pages.
0:43:37 We’ll have things where we put big theoretical frameworks
0:43:39 together and we say, ah, okay, look, all this other stuff,
0:43:42 these are just expressions of this basic principle
0:43:43 that we have now figured out.
0:43:46 – Do you pay much attention to behavioral economics?
0:43:46 – Yes, I do.
0:43:48 – And what do you think of it?
0:43:49 – Oh, it’s great and that’s probably the direction
0:43:52 that a lot of fields will go is,
0:43:54 how do humans actually behave?
0:43:56 One of the big things that I find most interesting
0:43:59 about behavioral economics comes back to this issue
0:44:01 about the team of rivals.
0:44:04 When people measure in the brain
0:44:06 how we actually make decisions about whatever,
0:44:09 there are totally separable networks going on.
0:44:12 Some networks care about the valuation of something,
0:44:13 the price point.
0:44:14 You have totally other networks
0:44:17 that care about the anticipated emotional experience
0:44:18 about something.
0:44:22 You have other networks that care about the social context.
0:44:25 Like, what do my friends think about this?
0:44:28 You have mechanisms that care about short-term gratification.
0:44:29 You have other mechanisms that are thinking about
0:44:32 the long-term, what kind of person do I want to be?
0:44:34 All these things are battling it out under the hood.
0:44:37 It’s like the three stooches sticking each other in the eye
0:44:39 and wrestling each other’s arms and stuff.
0:44:41 But what’s fascinating is when you’re standing
0:44:44 in the grocery store aisle trying to decide
0:44:47 which flavor of ice cream you’re gonna buy,
0:44:48 you don’t know about these raging battles
0:44:50 happening under the hood.
0:44:52 You just stand there for a while and then you say,
0:44:54 “Okay, I’ll grab this one over here.”
0:44:56 – There was a point in time among economists
0:44:57 that there was a lot of optimism
0:45:00 that we could really nail macroeconomics,
0:45:04 inflation and interest rates and whatnot.
0:45:06 And we could really understand how the system worked.
0:45:10 And I think there’s been a real step back from that.
0:45:12 The view now is, look, it’s enormous complex system.
0:45:16 And we’ve really, I guess, given up in the short run.
0:45:18 Are you at all worried that’s where we’re going
0:45:19 with the brain?
0:45:20 – Oh gosh, no.
0:45:23 And the reason is because we’ve got
0:45:24 all these billions of brains running around.
0:45:27 What that tells us is it has to be pretty simple
0:45:28 and principal.
0:45:30 You got 19,000 genes, that’s all you’ve got.
0:45:32 Something about it has to be as simple
0:45:37 as falling off a log for it to work out very well
0:45:39 so often, billions of times.
0:45:44 – They say as you get older,
0:45:46 it’s important to keep challenging your brain
0:45:49 by learning new things like a foreign language.
0:45:51 I can’t say I found learning German
0:45:52 to be all that much fun.
0:45:55 And I definitely have not turned out to be very good at it.
0:45:57 So I’ve been looking for a new brain challenge
0:46:02 and I have to say, I find echolocation very intriguing.
0:46:06 How cool would it be to be able to see via sound?
0:46:09 I suspect though that my aptitude for echolocation
0:46:12 will be on power with my aptitude for German.
0:46:15 So if you see me covered in bruises, you’ll know why.
0:46:18 If you wanna learn more about David Egelman’s ideas,
0:46:20 I really enjoyed a couple of his mini books
0:46:23 like LiveWired, which talks about his brain research,
0:46:26 and some four details from the afterlife,
0:46:28 his book of speculative fiction.
0:46:32 – Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner.
0:46:34 Again, I hope you enjoyed this special episode
0:46:36 of People I Mostly Admire.
0:46:37 I loved it.
0:46:41 And I would suggest you go right now to your podcast app
0:46:43 and follow the show, People I Mostly Admire.
0:46:46 We will be back very soon with more Freakonomics Radio.
0:46:49 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:46:51 And if you can, someone else too.
0:46:55 Freakonomics Radio and People I Mostly Admire
0:46:58 are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:47:00 This episode was produced by Morgan Levy
0:47:02 with help from Lyric Boutich and Daniel Moritz-Rabson.
0:47:04 It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger.
0:47:07 Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman,
0:47:09 Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne,
0:47:12 Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen,
0:47:15 Jason Gambrell, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars,
0:47:17 Neil Coruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas,
0:47:20 Sarah Lilly, Theo Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski.
0:47:22 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:47:24 As always, thank you for listening.
0:47:33 – David, you got your quick time going?
0:47:35 – I do now.
0:47:42 – The Freakonomics Radio Network,
0:47:44 the hidden side of everything.
0:47:49 – Stitcher.
0:47:51 (upbeat music)
0:47:53 you

0:00:08 Hey there, it’s Steven Dubner, and I would like to remind you about two live shows that
0:00:09 we are putting on soon.
0:00:12 The first one is on January 3rd in San Francisco.
0:00:15 The second is in Los Angeles on February 13th.
0:00:20 We have got some excellent guests for both shows, so please come hang out with us.
0:00:27 Tickets are at Freakonomics.com/LiveShows, one word, again January 3rd and February 14th,
0:00:28 San Francisco and LA.
0:00:34 Meanwhile, today on the show, a conversation with someone I know quite well, or at least
0:00:41 used to, someone who is smart, shrewd, very good at his work, and someone who taught me
0:00:47 a lot, even if not always on purpose.
0:00:49 Why don’t you just say your name and what you do?
0:00:50 My name is Adam Moss.
0:00:51 That’s easy enough.
0:01:00 I am an editor by lifelong profession and recently an author and sometimes a painter.
0:01:05 For a long time, Adam Moss was widely considered the best magazine editor around.
0:01:11 He was the founding editor of Seven Days Magazine, a clever and slightly transgressive
0:01:12 arts and culture weekly.
0:01:17 From there, he went to the New York Times Magazine, and after many years there, he took
0:01:21 over New York Magazine, which he radically remade for the digital era.
0:01:25 He won all the awards an editor can win.
0:01:29 He directly shaped the careers of hundreds of writers and editors.
0:01:32 Indirectly, he did the same for millions of readers.
0:01:38 He left New York Magazine in 2019, still on top but feeling a bit too old for the game,
0:01:42 a bit burned out and ready for something new.
0:01:49 The something new eventually took the form of a book called The Work of Art, How Something
0:01:51 Comes from Nothing.
0:01:58 The book is 43 cases of building something from first notion to finished product with
0:02:00 all that kind of toward firm between.
0:02:04 Many people who know Adam Moss were surprised that he wrote a book.
0:02:08 He was one of the few magazine editors who didn’t either start out as a writer or want
0:02:12 to be a writer or think of themselves as a writer.
0:02:14 He was a full-fledged editor.
0:02:17 An editor is mostly backstage.
0:02:20 There’s a lot of power and a bit of risk.
0:02:25 A writer, meanwhile, is out front, directly in the line of fire.
0:02:29 You work on a thing for months or years, and then it goes out into the world with your
0:02:33 name on it, so if people hate it, they know where to find you.
0:02:37 That’s why it was so intriguing that Adam Moss would write a book.
0:02:40 So we will talk about that today, but some other things too.
0:02:46 Mostly his tenure at the New York Times Magazine, where he happened to be my boss.
0:02:47 This was in the late 1990s.
0:02:52 I was what’s called a story editor, which meant I came up with ideas, assigned them
0:02:58 to writers, and then shepherded those pieces through the editorial and publishing processes.
0:03:03 The Times Magazine was considered a great magazine during this era, and it was a thrill
0:03:04 to be inside of that.
0:03:11 So terrifying sometimes, but mostly a thrill, and mostly because our boss was really good
0:03:15 at his job, and we all got to watch and learn.
0:03:18 That said, I quit The Times after about five years.
0:03:23 It used to be that when someone left that place voluntarily and was relatively young,
0:03:27 I was in my thirties, that people would think you’re crazy.
0:03:30 I was doing well as an editor and an occasional writer.
0:03:34 The boss has told me I might be a boss before long.
0:03:35 That was the last straw.
0:03:38 I didn’t want to be an editor or a boss.
0:03:44 I just wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to work on my own, not within a hierarchy.
0:03:50 So I quit and I went off to write books, which is how I ended up here, talking to you.
0:03:55 When Adam Moss’s book came out in early 2024, I read it right away.
0:04:00 For me and many others who worked for him, it was a bit like discovering his journal.
0:04:05 Something that made him tick as an editor, as a boss, was right there on the page.
0:04:09 At the time, I was trying to make a podcast series about mentorship.
0:04:15 The idea was that mentorship is this standard and successful practice in many realms, in
0:04:21 education and sports, the military, in the medical and legal professions, and yet in
0:04:24 other realms, there’s no standard mentorship at all.
0:04:29 I wanted to know why not and whether something should be done about that.
0:04:31 But the mentorship series just never came together.
0:04:35 We couldn’t find a center of gravity, and eventually we gave up, which is fine.
0:04:38 That happens all the time in this kind of work.
0:04:44 But there was one interview we did for the series that I was not willing to ditch.
0:04:47 This one, the one with Adam Moss.
0:04:53 Was he in fact a mentor to me, or maybe more like the master who teaches an apprentice,
0:04:58 or was he just an old-fashioned boss trying to extract labor?
0:05:00 That’s what today’s conversation is about.
0:05:05 It’s the latest in our series of one-on-one conversations to end the year, even if you
0:05:08 are not a big fan of magazines.
0:05:13 Even if you have never held a paper magazine in your hands, I suspect that you will benefit
0:05:20 from hearing Adam Moss’s perspective, because all of us at some point try to make something
0:05:21 from nothing.
0:05:36 So you might as well learn from a good teacher, like I did.
0:05:42 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:05:52 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:05:57 The title of Adam Moss’s book, The Work of Art, is of course a double entendre.
0:06:02 He is the kind of person for whom entendres rarely come singly.
0:06:07 There is a layer, and then another layer, and usually a few more.
0:06:12 This book is ostensibly a set of interviews with a variety of makers.
0:06:19 Stephen Sondheim, Twyla Tharp, David Simon, Samin Nasrat, Will Shortz, and their stories
0:06:25 unfold on pages that are packed with sketches and graphics, sidebars, footnotes.
0:06:31 It is very much a magazine in book form, which makes sense considering that Adam spent nearly
0:06:35 40 years making magazines, and this is his first book.
0:06:39 Some people end up in magazines by accident, like me.
0:06:42 I just wanted to write, and that’s where the writing jobs were.
0:06:43 Adam was different.
0:06:46 He was in love with the magazine form.
0:06:50 So I asked what first drew him in?
0:06:51 So many things.
0:06:55 First of all, when I came to love magazines, it was the late 60s, early 70s.
0:07:01 It was a heyday of the magazine form, but also it was a really interesting time.
0:07:07 The world was blowing up in some ways that to a young kid, which is very attractive.
0:07:12 The magazines that I loved, like The New Yorks and S-Wars, etc., they’re a little smart
0:07:13 ass.
0:07:14 They were funny.
0:07:16 I mean, my first magazine I read was Mad Magazine.
0:07:21 So it had this kind of fabulous, fractured idea of what the world was that really appealed
0:07:22 to my adolescent brain.
0:07:28 And there was the feeling that the whole thing was created by someone or something that felt
0:07:30 very distinct.
0:07:32 It had a personality.
0:07:37 And that personality, if it appealed to you, it was very powerful.
0:07:38 It felt very personal.
0:07:42 So this was the medium that you loved, and then you sought it out?
0:07:43 Yes.
0:07:44 And then who?
0:07:45 Okay.
0:07:47 So I had all of this stuff in my head, but it was unformed.
0:07:49 And I went to work at Esquire, and I was very young.
0:07:52 I was a very unformed person at that point.
0:07:54 What were you good at?
0:07:57 I was probably fairly intuitive.
0:08:02 I certainly was eager, and I’d read a lot of magazines.
0:08:07 I had a lot of data in my head based on my own fan taste.
0:08:12 And this guy named Lee Eisenberg, he just, for whatever reason, took an interest in me.
0:08:15 It could have been that he just wanted me to do his work for him, because he recognized
0:08:21 that my enthusiasm was potentially valuable to him.
0:08:25 But he also saw that my brain worked a certain way, and he wanted to encourage it.
0:08:27 It was an act of kindness.
0:08:30 Name some things that you would do there on a given day?
0:08:33 We started a section on the entertainment industry.
0:08:39 And one of Lee’s ideas was that he would put a movie star with a big literary person.
0:08:43 I remember William Styron and Candace Bergen.
0:08:49 My job was to go to the thing and set up the tape recorder, and then make sure everybody
0:08:51 was happy.
0:08:54 But then he would give me the transcript, and he would say, “What do you find interesting
0:08:55 in this?”
0:09:00 Slowly, but surely, I would see what he thought was interesting in it, and then I would watch
0:09:05 him as he constructed this thing into an exciting little bit of conversation that worked in
0:09:07 a printed form.
0:09:09 He was extremely good.
0:09:15 So just being able to watch him took all of that data in my head and started to organize
0:09:16 it.
0:09:17 That was invaluable.
0:09:22 One of the things that I hear a lot from younger editors is that they really resent doing the
0:09:28 older editor’s job for them because they feel it’s exploitive, and it is.
0:09:31 However, it’s an incredible way to learn.
0:09:32 I mean, it’s apprenticeship.
0:09:33 Yes.
0:09:41 And you talk it through, and in there is sharing of ideas, but also a kind of teaching.
0:09:42 And sometimes the teaching goes both ways.
0:09:45 This is really, I think, actually crucial.
0:09:50 In almost every case where there is a mentor, mentee kind of thing, it goes both ways.
0:09:55 Give an example of you as a young editor, as a mentee, let’s call it.
0:09:58 What do you think Lee Eisenberg got from you?
0:10:02 There was a generational difference, not a huge one, but I brought a bunch of generational
0:10:05 assumptions to the table that he didn’t have.
0:10:08 I think there is that element of- New eyes, fresh eyes.
0:10:09 Yes, fresh eyes.
0:10:14 And as you get older, you begin to dismiss certain things that aren’t fully dismissible.
0:10:18 So you were the editor of a few different magazines for a long time.
0:10:22 Can you explain the role, just briefly, of what it means to be the editor and chief of
0:10:23 the magazine?
0:10:27 I think a lot of people who aren’t writers or editors don’t really understand that.
0:10:31 It’s chiefly the person who decides where the magazine is going to go, what the magazine
0:10:37 covers and doesn’t, shaping the magazine’s identity and its relationship to its readers.
0:10:39 It’s a manager job.
0:10:41 The magazine is very, very much a group enterprise.
0:10:44 That’s one of the most wonderful things about it.
0:10:51 And it involves getting a whole bunch of people, story editors like you were, visual people,
0:10:56 copy editors, production people, all sorts of different kinds of people to work together
0:10:57 as one.
0:10:59 So in that sense, it’s like a conductor of an orchestra.
0:11:05 It’s very rarely what people think of as editors, which is the person who fixes sentences.
0:11:06 Although you did your share of that.
0:11:09 I did my share of that, but that’s not the chief job description.
0:11:14 The chief job description is the overall direction of the thing.
0:11:17 So you as a magazine editor are renowned.
0:11:21 In the field of magazine making, Adam Moss is considered a great editor.
0:11:23 And I certainly agree.
0:11:27 And one of the many things that I and a lot of people think you did well was that you
0:11:32 were very, the word that people like to use is exacting.
0:11:37 There’s a standard that is extremely high, but also a little bit elusive and ethereal.
0:11:38 You don’t quite know what it is.
0:11:40 But you know, you want to get there.
0:11:42 Let’s say you agree that you’re exacting.
0:11:43 I agree that I’m exacting.
0:11:48 I would like to think that I was a little bit more clear about what it was that I was
0:11:49 looking for.
0:11:52 But I recognize that that’s probably completely not true.
0:11:55 And what I was doing was a kind of maddening mind control.
0:11:58 It’s a spectrum, but let’s agree that you’re exacting.
0:12:02 My question would be when you are an exacting person.
0:12:07 And I’m sure many people listening to this conversation either are or want to be that.
0:12:10 But you also can’t control every single thing.
0:12:14 In fact, the process is set up so that you’re not controlled.
0:12:15 You’re not writing the articles.
0:12:17 You’re not editing the articles heavily.
0:12:20 So how do you live with that paradox?
0:12:25 Being an editor, it’s both an act of grandiosity and humility at the same time.
0:12:30 So it’s like, you have to think big, but you have to understand that it really is a group
0:12:32 project.
0:12:38 And for any group project to work, everybody has to feel like there’s some of them in it
0:12:41 and they have to feel invested in it and they have to feel proud of it.
0:12:45 They have to want to make it just as badly as you want to make it.
0:12:52 And so part of the exacting hood was not just getting people to a certain standard that
0:13:00 I thought was appropriate, but also getting people to care as much as I did.
0:13:02 How much of that was in the hiring though?
0:13:06 A lot of it’s in the hiring, but a lot of it’s also in the sort of day to day way that
0:13:09 you all get together as a group.
0:13:16 A lot of it is just familial as opposed to directed towards a particular task.
0:13:21 A lot of it is helping people find their own independence as thinkers, but also obviously
0:13:26 think the way you want them to for the purposes of this project.
0:13:33 Like a parent, I suppose, I would always relish the first moment that a story editor was willing
0:13:37 to fight with me because I just felt okay, they’ve got it now.
0:13:43 They have their strong point of view, getting people to feel independent within an environment
0:13:45 that they weren’t entirely independent.
0:13:49 It’s a kind of weird little equilibrium, but that was what I was after.
0:13:55 I was very happy that you landed on the parenting analogy because as you were speaking, that’s
0:13:58 what it sounded like for sure.
0:14:01 So parentish, I think, applies.
0:14:03 What about mentor?
0:14:06 Do you think of yourself as a mentor or is that not a word that fits?
0:14:09 I recognize that there’s mentorship going on.
0:14:14 It sounds pretentious to call yourself a mentor unless it’s like an actual title.
0:14:19 One’s a little bit squeamish about using language like that, but the act of teaching someone
0:14:26 I do recognize is crucial to being, definitely to leading, but also just you’re learning
0:14:27 all the time.
0:14:31 There’s a kind of mentor and mentorship that happens in every dimension of life.
0:14:33 How do you choose, though, as a teacher?
0:14:36 How do you choose who to spend time with?
0:14:41 Because you were supervising a lot of people at a place like The Times Magazine.
0:14:45 I don’t know how many story editors there were, maybe 8, 10, 12.
0:14:47 You had very different relationships with each one.
0:14:49 How does that work for you?
0:14:50 Is it a choice?
0:14:52 I don’t think it’s a choice exactly.
0:14:56 You hope that everybody feels that they are the favorite child.
0:14:57 That’s what you’re trying to do.
0:15:04 But everybody responds to different kinds of help, prodding, embracing, all the various
0:15:06 things that make for mentorships.
0:15:11 Just back to the family thing, you have a different relationship with each of your children.
0:15:16 That’s not to say that somewhere in there, you don’t have people that you think have
0:15:17 more potential.
0:15:21 Generally, they’re people who show that they’re eager to learn.
0:15:27 They kind of put their hand up and say, “Teach me,” and there’s no teacher who isn’t moved
0:15:28 by that.
0:15:34 Do you have advice for people who are not naturally … I do believe there’s an astonishing
0:15:41 amount of human capital in the world that is untapped because the possessor of it doesn’t
0:15:45 know how to export it, and others don’t know how to import it.
0:15:46 Import it.
0:15:47 Yeah, that’s nice.
0:15:52 I don’t have advice except to recognize that it’s an essential part of learning, to be
0:15:56 open to learning and to teach, then maybe you have to make a slightly more active effort
0:15:57 at it.
0:15:58 You certainly have to be open to it.
0:16:06 You certainly have to know what you don’t know and find ways to ask, maybe not out loud,
0:16:10 but to signal your openness to being taught.
0:16:15 I mean, it’s an interesting period because what I witness in younger people these days
0:16:18 is that they love their parents, and they have their very …
0:16:21 And very different relationships with their parents.
0:16:25 Yes, very, very different, and also they’re very comfortable with adults in a way that
0:16:27 was different from when I was young.
0:16:32 But there are certain things they resent, and there’s a kind of parenting as it exists
0:16:37 in a workplace that they would bristle at, which I found very valuable growing up.
0:16:41 It’s a sort of famous thing at Esquire when I was there, there would be these story meetings,
0:16:46 and people would cry at the end of the meeting.
0:16:54 They would leave and cry because the editors in charge were kind of unstinting in their
0:16:55 withering comments.
0:17:00 Now, you say this as if people didn’t leave and cry at the end of a New York Times magazine
0:17:01 meeting when you were …
0:17:02 Well, I …
0:17:03 You just didn’t see it.
0:17:08 The point is that I learned from my own mentors that this was the way you conducted a meeting.
0:17:12 It was much more efficient to be brutally honest.
0:17:15 That’s an idea that doesn’t work because blah, blah, blah, blah.
0:17:17 One thought of that as teaching.
0:17:21 I tried to bring some of that stricter method, and people were gassed.
0:17:26 And I would say, “Look, when I was growing up, you used to cry at the end of these meetings.”
0:17:30 And they said, “I don’t want to cry at the end of the meetings, and it’s not going to
0:17:31 work.”
0:17:32 And they were right.
0:17:36 It was necessarily the better way to do it, but because it was the way that I learned
0:17:42 how to sharpen my mind as an editor, I had an expectation that I should do the same with
0:17:46 those people I was trying to get to do the work a certain way.
0:17:47 In that case, yeah.
0:17:48 They taught me.
0:17:50 Meaning, the younger people taught you, like, “This doesn’t feel good.”
0:17:51 This doesn’t feel good.
0:17:52 But did you stop?
0:17:53 And this doesn’t …
0:17:54 Well, I found workarounds.
0:17:57 I found other ways to try to accomplish the same thing.
0:18:00 For instance, just different language.
0:18:04 Basically I learned to praise and then to withhold.
0:18:05 So that was a strategy?
0:18:06 Come over.
0:18:09 It wasn’t a conscious strategy, but I realized that’s what I was doing.
0:18:13 I was certainly told at enough times that I came to realize that, “Oh, yeah, this is
0:18:14 what I do.”
0:18:21 I did speak with five, six, seven former employees of yours, some of whom I overlapped with at
0:18:24 The Times Magazine, some of whom I didn’t.
0:18:29 If we were making a word cloud, I think withholding was probably the big word.
0:18:36 But let me just say that on balance, the overall experience was overwhelmingly positive because
0:18:43 what I got from working with you and what they all got was just a deep, deep satisfaction
0:18:50 of accomplishment and a recognition that you don’t get that satisfaction without having
0:18:54 a lot of failure and bumps along the way.
0:18:58 Not humiliation, and you didn’t humiliate people ever, as far as I know, I don’t know.
0:19:01 I don’t think so, I hope not.
0:19:05 So when I left The Times Magazine working for you, I left because I just wanted to be
0:19:06 a writer.
0:19:08 I loved being an editor.
0:19:13 Editing was the best training for me to be a writer, in part because I saw how many big-time
0:19:19 writers when they would turn in their manuscripts, they were terrible, and I thought, “Holy cow.”
0:19:22 If they can turn in stuff like that, I can do this.
0:19:23 Yes, Pulitzer Prize winners.
0:19:27 I was shocked, but it was also just amazing experience and fun.
0:19:33 It’s really fun to do the work, but then you gave me a six-month leave to go start working
0:19:37 on my first book, and I remember coming back and saying, “This is the life I want.
0:19:39 I like alone.”
0:19:44 And then I remember, at least my recollection is that I said, “I’m really appreciative of
0:19:48 the leave you gave me, and I love this place, I love this work,” but that’s what I want
0:19:54 to do long-term, and so I’d like to stay here for another year, that’s the deal that I remember
0:19:55 crafting.
0:19:59 And then I remember our relationship changed because I was a lame duck.
0:20:00 So what?
0:20:06 Did I just not care about you anymore because you were not going to be a long-term asset
0:20:07 for me?
0:20:08 Was I that calculated?
0:20:09 I wouldn’t say it was that.
0:20:12 I think it was more like plow horse idea.
0:20:14 Get as much out of you as I could.
0:20:15 It wasn’t bad.
0:20:20 The work was still really exciting, but another reason I left was that I recognized when you
0:20:27 succeed in a place like that, this happens in many occupations, when you succeed in some
0:20:32 kind of maker role, you end up getting promoted into a manager role, a boss, and I did not
0:20:37 want to be a boss, so leaving the times to write meant I would never have to be a boss
0:20:43 of anyone other than myself, but then I wrote books, and then the books turned into this
0:20:46 thing that we’re doing now at your company.
0:20:52 We have 20 people, and I think the boss that I became is very much like the boss that you
0:20:53 were.
0:20:54 Oh, really?
0:20:55 Oh, my God.
0:21:00 Now, is that just natural, or do you think that you learned certain attributes of a boss
0:21:02 person from me?
0:21:03 Not natural.
0:21:04 I’ll learn.
0:21:05 That’s what I’m saying.
0:21:08 That’s why I would call you a mentor, even if an unintentional or accidental mentor.
0:21:09 Oh, how interesting.
0:21:11 God, that’s scary.
0:21:12 I’m a writer.
0:21:14 You know, writers are writers.
0:21:18 You have a way of seeing the world, you have a way of, and a lot of this is what I learned
0:21:19 from you.
0:21:22 You have a way of assessing, is this idea worth doing?
0:21:23 Definitely.
0:21:25 That’s a big part of it.
0:21:28 Execution is important, but I always think of it a little bit like pro athletes.
0:21:32 You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have the talent, and then you realize that what you’re
0:21:40 really after is developing your taste or your sense of what’s interesting, what’s important,
0:21:43 what’s fun, what’s new.
0:21:45 Those are all things I learned from you.
0:21:49 You may have learned some methods from me, but your taste and sensibility was not something
0:21:53 I had much influence over at all, because it’s just who you are.
0:21:59 Maybe to some degree, but I think anybody who’s learning, who takes their thing seriously,
0:22:04 it’s thrilling when you encounter someone who sets a standard high.
0:22:10 But the problem is, when you go from being a writer to then being a boss, my first producing
0:22:16 partners, the word that got attached to me was like, “Dubbner’s too exacting.”
0:22:19 And I was pissed because I thought, “What’s wrong with that?
0:22:22 I learned from Adam Moss.”
0:22:24 Even hearing it back to me, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
0:22:28 I think that’s something that you should wear proudly.
0:22:34 I’m very glad to hear that what you felt as a person working with me, for me, whatever.
0:22:35 You can say “for you.”
0:22:36 It’s okay.
0:22:40 Because that you found delight in making something great.
0:22:43 That’s the main thing that I was trying to teach.
0:22:49 Even though it’s painful in the moment, you’re going to feel so good at having made something
0:22:53 that you put everything into and that you can be proud of at the end.
0:22:58 I hope that I conveyed that and that I worked with the kind of people who would feel that
0:23:02 and who would be willing to work pretty hard because they wanted to make something they
0:23:03 felt really, really good about.
0:23:08 It’s not everybody, but that is a certain kind of person and you’re that kind of person
0:23:12 and I’m that kind of person and there’s a reason we ended up in the same place.
0:23:18 I think the thing that’s most important or attractive about what you just said, but also
0:23:23 very much animates your book, is that it’s not just a thrill of accomplishing because
0:23:25 something is good.
0:23:26 It’s doing something different.
0:23:27 Yeah.
0:23:32 One other aspect of this whole business is that artists or any of when we’re talking
0:23:35 creative people, they need to not be bored.
0:23:39 It is incredibly difficult to make something and you have to have reasons to go on and
0:23:42 one of those reasons is simple interest.
0:23:47 You have to feel stimulated and if you do the same thing over and over and over and over
0:23:51 again, you’re just going to bore yourself to tears.
0:23:55 The artistic person, creative person, I don’t know what you want to call them, person who
0:24:01 wants to make something will constantly find new ways to do it because they’re trying to
0:24:04 keep themselves engaged.
0:24:09 In my book, I mean everybody remembers their childhood as lonely of course, but it is definitely
0:24:18 true that one after another, they describe childhoods of isolation and of need and then
0:24:21 something came along to fill that need.
0:24:24 Among other things, they learn to talk to themselves.
0:24:25 This is a big theme of my book.
0:24:31 I think of all of this as ways of talking to yourself, as ways of translating what your
0:24:33 imagination produces.
0:24:38 And what happened when Adam Moss’s imagination started producing something new?
0:24:44 Whatever lessons I might have gotten from my own magazine life that might apply to my
0:24:46 painting life, I didn’t.
0:24:47 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:24:49 This is Freakonomics Radio, we’ll be right back.
0:25:06 In 2019, Adam Moss stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of New York Magazine.
0:25:11 Here’s what he said at the time, “I’ve been going full throttle for 40 years.
0:25:14 I want to see what my life is like with less ambition.
0:25:16 I’m older than the staff.
0:25:17 I’m older than the readers.
0:25:20 I just want to do something new.”
0:25:23 That new thing, at least for a while, was painting.
0:25:28 When I thought I wanted to paint, I was up in Cape Cod where I have a place and without
0:25:34 any schooling whatsoever, I didn’t know how to do a thing.
0:25:40 My schooling was really when I went to buy paints, I’d talk to the salesperson and ask
0:25:45 them to have this work, like I didn’t understand what a medium was, I didn’t understand anything.
0:25:50 Nevertheless, I had this idea that I would do a painting a day, and that’s what I did.
0:25:54 One day I’d do a flower and then the other day I’d do some crazy stupid abstract and
0:25:58 then I would just make an effort at doing a person or something.
0:26:02 The whole idea was that at the end of the day, painting would be finished and thrown
0:26:05 away and start it over, it was fun.
0:26:09 Came back and I thought that was the end of it, I thought it was just a sort of fun little
0:26:14 summer thing, and a friend of mine said, “Well, you really seem to have liked it.
0:26:16 You really should get some training.”
0:26:24 She then connected me up with the head of painting, I think, at the Yale School of Art.
0:26:28 I can hear many listeners’ heads exploding, first teacher, head of painting at Yale School
0:26:29 of Art.
0:26:30 Well, no, she wasn’t my teacher.
0:26:35 She had a student who had just graduated who she thought was really good.
0:26:38 Her name was Maria De La Sandalus and she’s in the book.
0:26:42 She is a beautiful artist, but also a really lovely person.
0:26:44 She would just come over my house.
0:26:49 She taught me how to draw and she taught me how to paint at the beginning.
0:26:54 It wasn’t a particularly structured learning process, but she was my friend, my painting
0:26:55 friend.
0:26:59 Was it built around ideas or mostly execution technique, et cetera?
0:27:01 There was a certain amount of technique.
0:27:08 There was a lot of just helping me find my confidence as a painter and there was just
0:27:14 a certain kindness that I found empowering and a sense that she had that I had something
0:27:16 to make.
0:27:21 Was kindness in a mentor/teacher important to you?
0:27:22 It’s important to me.
0:27:23 It may not be important to other people.
0:27:28 If you look through history at creators of all types and people of all types, people
0:27:35 who have mentors, if you had to guess, would you say that on average, kindness is a benefit
0:27:41 or an attribute at least because when I think of a lot of what people claim at least to
0:27:45 be successful mentorships, there’s often, I don’t know about an absence of kindness,
0:27:49 but a presence of something else.
0:27:54 Certainly there is an expectation that this person can do better and I guess that can
0:27:59 be experienced in a lot of ways as being stern and forbidding and all of that kind of thing
0:28:03 and I’ve had mentor types like that, but I personally respond to kindness.
0:28:06 I need to feel a little loved.
0:28:12 If you were to generalize what a successful mentor is, would you use that as a template
0:28:13 or do you think that’s just for you?
0:28:20 I think there has to be a bedrock of they have a belief in you and you have to feel
0:28:21 it.
0:28:23 Otherwise the mentorship doesn’t work.
0:28:27 You have to believe that they are rooting for you.
0:28:30 I have never seen one of Adam Moss’s paintings.
0:28:32 That’s quite on purpose, yes.
0:28:35 He insists that he is just not a very good painter.
0:28:37 I’m more mediocre than Ben.
0:28:39 I’m okay, but that’s not good enough for me.
0:28:44 When someone is exacting, which we have already established Adam Moss is, then mediocrity
0:28:46 can feel worse than death.
0:28:50 So he needed to find something else to make, something that he would be good at and that’s
0:28:56 how he came to write The Work of Art, a book about how other creative people make something
0:28:58 from nothing.
0:29:01 It’s a book about the process of making.
0:29:07 I’ve always loved process because essentially I love narrative and the act of how something
0:29:12 comes to be is just a perfect story.
0:29:14 Starts with nothing and then ends up something.
0:29:18 But there’s a whole other part of this book that’s trying to understand the personality
0:29:22 attributes that make someone successful as an artist.
0:29:27 It’s about half visual and it works almost like a giant diagram where the text itself
0:29:29 winds around the images.
0:29:31 Some mucic, but also magazines.
0:29:35 And then it has all this footnote material, which is the me in the book for the most part.
0:29:36 Although you’re in the…
0:29:37 I’m in the introductions too.
0:29:42 Yeah, but also chapters differ because in some chapters they’re through written by you
0:29:43 with quotes.
0:29:44 Right.
0:29:45 In other chapters it’s more oral history.
0:29:46 Yes.
0:29:47 Right.
0:29:49 And in that way it’s very much like a big, big, big magazine.
0:29:50 Absolutely.
0:29:51 But it was a new pursuit.
0:29:56 It was new and yet I hope it had the benefit of a lifetime’s experience as a magazine maker.
0:30:00 I had never written a book before and I was really scared of writing.
0:30:01 It’s harder than it looks.
0:30:03 It’s so hard.
0:30:04 Unlike you, I never wanted to be a writer.
0:30:08 I would never have left magazines for writing, but I did leave magazines at a certain point
0:30:13 because I just felt that I didn’t want to be a boss anymore.
0:30:18 I started to write this book and I was just a terrible, terrible, terrible writer, really.
0:30:19 And I had to teach myself.
0:30:24 I had to use my editor head and at first my editor had recognized that it was terrible,
0:30:28 but didn’t have any solutions in mind.
0:30:35 And then over time I just began to strip it of its ridiculous ornamentation.
0:30:37 Was that all by yourself though or did you go to people for it?
0:30:39 No, I did that most of myself.
0:30:45 And then eventually, okay, I got to a place where I was happier as a writer and also the
0:30:46 work itself was better.
0:30:51 Let me just point out the difference between being an editor and being a writer might seem
0:30:52 not that large.
0:30:54 It’s huge.
0:30:56 It’s like marathon versus sprint.
0:31:01 They’re both running, but I wouldn’t think it could have felt so similar to what you’d
0:31:02 spent your life doing.
0:31:03 Well, okay, let me…
0:31:09 I created the book in the way that I created the book in order to assemble a community.
0:31:15 I wanted the group thing, which I always loved in magazines, and I wanted a sense of a lot
0:31:17 of people doing something together.
0:31:24 And so I kind of invented one, and that invention was a whole part one, which was to engage
0:31:26 all these artists in my project.
0:31:32 Okay, Amy Silman, show me how you made a painting, and we’ll go from beginning to end.
0:31:37 Okay, George Saunders, let’s talk about how you wrote “Lincoln and the Bardo,” and
0:31:41 David Mandel, how you wrote “A Joke,” or Kara Walker, how you built this magnificent
0:31:45 sculpture, or Stephen Sondheim, how you wrote a song.
0:31:53 And that process was essentially me recreating a context of group creation, because I thought
0:31:55 of them as my collaborators, not as my subjects.
0:31:57 So that was part one.
0:32:00 Part two was writing, I described already what a hell that was.
0:32:03 And was it hell because the collaborator was no longer there?
0:32:05 I’m just alone in the room again.
0:32:09 It’s the aloneness, it’s the dialogue in your head that was driving me completely crazy,
0:32:11 and it’s why I never was a writer in the first place.
0:32:16 I just found it unbearably lonely, and also I didn’t know how to act all the parts in
0:32:21 my head, where I could talk to myself and make myself better, which I didn’t know how
0:32:25 to do when it’s different people, but I didn’t know how to do in my own head.
0:32:30 So for some of the creators in your book, the people who influenced them were often people
0:32:32 that they never interacted with.
0:32:37 Yeah, possibly never met, you know, Gregory Crudson, who talked about his work as almost
0:32:44 a mathematical formula from like William Eggleston to Ray Carver short stories to David Lynch
0:32:50 and Blue Velvet, some combination of people with sensibility that in his own mind came
0:32:51 together.
0:32:53 Describe what a Crudson photo looks like.
0:33:02 A Crudson photo is a gigantic photograph that resembles a movie still, lit like a movie,
0:33:08 with enough narrative portent, but with no before or after.
0:33:15 So the viewer is meant to supply the narrative by looking at this picture and putting it
0:33:18 into a context of his or her own imagination.
0:33:22 So Eggleston and David Lynch and all those make a lot of sense.
0:33:26 Yeah, I in general don’t much care about the strict definitions of anything.
0:33:31 This book is a book about artists, but really I’ve bent the term “artist” pretty much
0:33:32 as far as it can go.
0:33:36 But I also believe that about mentorship, which in the end it doesn’t matter.
0:33:41 I guess the big distinguishing factor for me would be an influence can be distant and
0:33:47 unaware of you, whereas a mentor, there’s necessarily some kind of estuarial exchange.
0:33:48 Yeah.
0:33:53 Well, one interesting thing about the book was I kept looking for who is the person who
0:33:55 encouraged you when you were young.
0:34:01 There weren’t necessarily the person who was by your side when you were an adult, but
0:34:06 there had to be somebody, could be a parent, could be an art teacher, could be anybody
0:34:09 who basically saw something in them.
0:34:16 And that seeing was crucial to the development of their confidence that they could make the
0:34:20 thing, which of course confidence and what I in the book call faith, the faith that they
0:34:25 are actually able to make the thing that’s in their head, which they can’t, but you have
0:34:28 to believe you can in order to go forward.
0:34:33 I think the book is a bit of a, not a smoke and mirror, but a bit of sleight of hand in
0:34:36 that it’s called the work of art.
0:34:41 And it’s plainly about the process of making creative things.
0:34:46 And it’s plainly about what it took for those creators to even get to the point where they
0:34:47 were able to create something.
0:34:49 I know you love process.
0:34:52 That was a word that you said probably 30 times a day.
0:34:54 And it’s a word that I just have come to despise.
0:34:55 Oh, seriously?
0:34:57 Well, just the words sound so ugly.
0:35:02 It’s so beautiful, the thing that it’s describing and the word itself is so crude really.
0:35:08 I feel like as a magazine editor, some of your favorite stories or at least my conception
0:35:12 of some of your favorite stories were when there was a process of something being described
0:35:13 over time.
0:35:14 Absolutely.
0:35:18 And written texts, not that documentary film can’t do a lot of things can do it, but text
0:35:24 is great at that because it can move in and out of time and it can magnify and shrink.
0:35:29 So as much as you say that this book is about process and artifacts and so on, it was a
0:35:32 thrill to read because I love your work and I loved working with you.
0:35:35 But you never talked that much.
0:35:38 You dropped hints about what made something great or not.
0:35:41 We all learned the language of Adam Moss.
0:35:45 But it was often fragments, rarely sentences, never paragraphs.
0:35:48 I sound maddening from your description.
0:35:52 I sound like I must have been just a horrible person to work for, but okay.
0:35:53 Maddening maybe a little bit.
0:35:54 Well, definitely not.
0:35:55 Definitely not.
0:35:57 But maddening among nine other things.
0:36:01 But what struck me the book was really about was something separate than the process of
0:36:08 creation, really more about what it takes to become the kind of person who can create
0:36:10 things from whole cloth.
0:36:13 That’s really hard to do and I don’t think people understand the bravery it takes to
0:36:14 do that.
0:36:15 Yeah.
0:36:16 The book is not self-help.
0:36:20 So I’m not sure a lot of these things can be learned.
0:36:24 I mean, you can get better at everything, but you’re either a person who can focus or you
0:36:25 can’t.
0:36:28 You’re either obsessional or you’re not.
0:36:31 You have a high tolerance for tedium, which you need to to be an artist.
0:36:32 Or you don’t.
0:36:35 You have drive or you don’t.
0:36:36 What about taste?
0:36:38 You have taste or you don’t.
0:36:41 Or you have a certain sensibility or you have a certain sense of humor.
0:36:46 These are all things that you acquire for all sorts of mysterious reasons that you and
0:36:47 I don’t understand.
0:36:50 No one has ever understood how personality is formed.
0:36:56 And that all said, the book is, I hope, very encouraging to artists because I think most
0:37:02 people who are trying to make things don’t need to be James Joyce or Pablo Picasso or
0:37:04 Louise Glock even.
0:37:10 They can be themselves and they can find immense joy and satisfaction in making art.
0:37:13 They improve their ability to focus.
0:37:18 They improve their ability to persevere, to not give up when things get hard.
0:37:24 A lot of art making comes down to something as rudimentary as being able to learn to
0:37:25 fail.
0:37:33 Again, like parenting, it’s a little bit like a child learns to walk because they understand
0:37:34 how they can get up from falling.
0:37:36 They have to fall.
0:37:39 Your book nods at failure.
0:37:41 I think it’s a lot about failure.
0:37:42 Okay.
0:37:43 But ultimately.
0:37:44 Everybody succeeds.
0:37:45 Everybody succeeds.
0:37:46 Yeah.
0:37:53 And I’m thinking, yeah, this failure is instructive and real and useful to hear about, but it’s
0:37:56 an exercise in what some people call survivorship bias, right?
0:37:58 We read about the winners.
0:37:59 Sure, of course.
0:38:03 And I was very well aware of that, that this is a retrospective history of success.
0:38:06 And so everything has to be viewed through that lens.
0:38:10 I’ve always had this theory that I think is wrong, but as a writer or if you’re a creative
0:38:16 person of any type, an editor or an entrepreneur or whatever, I think it’s natural to try
0:38:17 to mimic success.
0:38:18 Yeah.
0:38:21 But I think that most successes are pretty singular.
0:38:23 I completely agree with you.
0:38:27 And so I felt that learning from failure was really the way to go.
0:38:33 I wanted very much to give people permission to fail because failure is, if you go through
0:38:36 the narratives in the book, there’s just failure right and left.
0:38:40 When you’re trying to create something, your brain is trying to subvert you in so many ways.
0:38:45 There are so many obstacles, and there is this kind of animus you need to have in order
0:38:47 to barrel ahead.
0:38:49 An animus toward what?
0:38:50 Animus is the wrong word.
0:38:54 You have to have a fighting spirit, I guess I would say, where you’re just not going
0:38:59 to be daunted, which as I was going through this, I found very reassuring because of course
0:39:05 the reason I did the book was because I had recently taken a painting and felt enormous
0:39:13 frustration and a sense of failure in that and truly what I didn’t understand is in
0:39:18 a group, there is a conversation that happens that’s external.
0:39:22 You and I, if we’re working together making a magazine, we talk about something, there’s
0:39:26 a phrase that came up in the David Simon chapter called The Bounce.
0:39:29 Our method of making something better is by bouncing.
0:39:34 I say something to you, you say something to me, bang, bang, bang, in the end something
0:39:37 happens which is better than it was when we started.
0:39:43 In most artists’ lives, that conversation has to happen in their own head.
0:39:47 I became very confused, how does someone have this kind of inner dialogue, and that’s what
0:39:50 I was trying to understand.
0:39:54 David Simon was a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun before he started writing books
0:39:56 and making TV shows.
0:40:00 One of those shows was The Wire, which many people consider one of the best TV shows ever
0:40:01 made.
0:40:05 If you would like to hear an interview with him, check out the People I Mostly Admire
0:40:09 podcast, another show in the Freakonomics Radio network.
0:40:13 It’s episode 109 called David Simon is on strike.
0:40:14 Here’s why.
0:40:17 We’ll hear more from Adam Moss in a minute.
0:40:37 I am Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio.
0:40:41 So would this book exist had you been a better painter?
0:40:42 Probably not.
0:40:46 I would not have had The Drive, which was born of my own frustration.
0:40:51 So I would have been satisfied painting all day because I would, I hope, have taken a
0:40:55 certain kind of satisfaction from the painting itself that, you know, why do you want to
0:40:56 do anything else?
0:41:01 I just want to do this all day long, which now I feel actually not because I’ve gotten
0:41:05 to be a better painter, but because I understand something about my relationship to painting
0:41:06 that I learned from the book.
0:41:08 Which is what?
0:41:12 When you say this in this context, it sounds so banal, but here I’ll say it’s a hobby.
0:41:15 Now, well, there’s a way in which that’s a description.
0:41:19 But what I would really say is that I was trying to create narratives and so for the
0:41:21 narrative to work, I wanted happy ending.
0:41:23 I wanted an exaltation.
0:41:28 I wanted that moment in the rom-com with the big kiss at the end where everyone lives happily
0:41:30 ever after.
0:41:36 And the artists themselves, when they would get to that point in their own storytelling
0:41:39 of their own work, refused to give me that.
0:41:45 They would express a certain amount of relief that the thing was over.
0:41:47 Maybe they would say, “Yeah, it was nice.
0:41:51 I was glad other people got to see it and I heard some nice things about it.”
0:41:54 But you’d never got the big firework.
0:42:00 And I found that as a writer of the book, somewhat frustrating, I kind of needed it for closure.
0:42:05 I needed it for my own purposes, but I also needed to feel that they made something great.
0:42:06 I was rooting for them.
0:42:12 There was a great deal of transference involved in this book, and I fell in love with all
0:42:19 of my subjects, so I wanted something spectacular for them in the end, and it never came.
0:42:22 When I would talk to them about that, I said, “Well, you don’t sound like that.
0:42:24 That was very important.”
0:42:27 And they said, “It’s not about the thing I’m making, it is really about the work.
0:42:33 I just get up every day because I like or I need more than I like to work in this way.”
0:42:37 And the endpoint is not that relevant to me.
0:42:42 And I just thought this was bullshit, and I thought it was bullshit over a long period
0:42:43 of time.
0:42:48 And then I was just worn down, and I came to kind of grok the truth of it.
0:42:52 I absorbed that, and suddenly my relationship to my own work changed.
0:42:53 How so?
0:42:58 I got enormous pleasure from what I like to think of as the verb of it rather than the
0:43:04 noun of it making one mark as a painter, just like one little chew that pleased me for whatever
0:43:11 reason released me from this incredibly punishing attitude I had toward the work itself.
0:43:15 I do care about the work itself, I really still want to be a good painter, but I can
0:43:17 get pleasure out of the making.
0:43:22 It’s interesting as you’re describing you coming to accept what these people were telling
0:43:27 you about their perpetual dissatisfaction because you make it sound so foreign.
0:43:33 But that’s exactly the way that I and everybody else who ever worked with you described you.
0:43:39 When you were happy with the work that I or anyone else did, everyone described it as
0:43:42 this like great thrill, it was like a high.
0:43:46 Getting your approval or praise was incredibly powerful.
0:43:51 Then there’s the corollary, getting your dissatisfaction could be demoralizing for many people.
0:43:52 You had to kind of fight through that.
0:43:59 But the steady state was more like, yeah, it was a really good issue this week.
0:44:00 That was it.
0:44:01 That implies many other things.
0:44:07 It wasn’t a great issue and more important, there’s next week also.
0:44:09 That’s one of the things that’s fantastic about magazines.
0:44:14 You always have next week or in a digital world, you always have five minutes from now.
0:44:19 That’s why I was particularly suited to magazines, but none of us know ourselves very well.
0:44:25 Over lessons I might have gotten from my own magazine life that might apply to my painting
0:44:27 life, I didn’t.
0:44:33 To the degree that it’s hard to know oneself, let’s call it the internal versus the external
0:44:37 on a scale of zero to five, how bad or good do you think you are?
0:44:39 Well certainly not zero and certainly not five.
0:44:42 So somewhere in that two to four range.
0:44:45 Did you become more self-aware over time and experience as an editor?
0:44:47 Yeah, I think so.
0:44:48 Maybe to a fault.
0:44:49 What do you mean by that?
0:44:52 Sometimes experience can be a hindrance.
0:44:55 You stop yourself from making something.
0:45:00 The Simeon chapter, the Simeon Nosrat chapter, the title of the chapter is With Beginner’s
0:45:08 Eyes because she makes this observation about Sulfat acid heat that when she, very excitedly
0:45:12 at the beginning of her cooking life, tells a fellow chef, the fellow chef says well everybody
0:45:13 knows that.
0:45:15 She says no they don’t.
0:45:16 They don’t know that.
0:45:22 In any way I’ve never seen that anywhere and I think people need to hear this, that this
0:45:24 is really how you should think about cooking.
0:45:29 And she goes on and builds this fabulous book and then a little empire off of it.
0:45:33 Sometimes experience stops you from doing something because you know it has failed too
0:45:38 often and you don’t want to go through that failure again.
0:45:41 You have to believe you can in order to go forward.
0:45:52 That was Adam Moss, the most influential boss I ever had by a mile, who did me the great
0:45:57 favor of showing me that I didn’t want to be boss, that I just wanted to make things,
0:46:01 but who also taught me how to be better at making things.
0:46:02 So thanks, Adam.
0:46:07 His book is called The Work of Art, although it might just as easily have been called The
0:46:09 Art of Work.
0:46:14 And the other book he just mentioned, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is also well worth reading
0:46:19 and you can hear its author, Samin Nasrat on a couple of Freakonomics Radio episodes
0:46:20 from 2023.
0:46:25 One is called What’s Wrong with Being a One Hit Wonder and the other is Samin Nasrat
0:46:27 Always Wanted to Be Famous.
0:46:34 Coming up next time on the show, we ask why is there so much fraud in academia?
0:46:38 If you were just a rational agent acting in the most self-interested way possible as
0:46:40 a researcher in academia, I think you would cheat.
0:46:46 The most likely career path for anyone who has committed misconduct is a long and fruitful
0:46:51 career because most people, if they’re caught at all, they skate.
0:46:58 She was at the center of everything, being a prestigious faculty member at Harvard and
0:47:01 all of her public speaking and her books.
0:47:02 That’s next time.
0:47:06 Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too.
0:47:09 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:47:15 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at Freakonomics.com where we publish
0:47:17 transcripts and show notes.
0:47:21 This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and Zach Lipinski.
0:47:25 The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Alina Kullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin
0:47:31 Abouaji, Eleanor Osborn, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine
0:47:35 Klinger, Jason Gambrell, Jeremy Johnson, John Schnars, Lyric Bowditch, Neil Coruth,
0:47:38 Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Theo Jacobs.
0:47:41 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers.
0:47:44 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:47:50 As always, thank you for listening.
0:47:51 I’m going to shut up.
0:47:52 Can you just say that again?
0:47:53 Gigantic.
0:47:54 No, say it the way you did.
0:47:55 Gigantic.
0:48:07 The Freakonomics Radio network, the hidden side of everything.
0:48:08 Stitcher.
0:48:11 [MUSIC PLAYING]