foreign this is Trend following radio where great thinking comes alive Nobel Prize winners legendary Traders best-selling authors and the pros that know what drive us irrational human beings I am your host Michael Covell not filtered raw honest that's my passion [Music] let me tell you how this podcast works there's no great staff that picks the latest and greatest whoever to come on this show I pick people that I like I pick people that have something interesting to say that resonates with me someone who has deep dived over the course of their life into a topic and when I hear their insights I just go damn that's cool that's awesome those are the kinds of people that I want and often the way that I find them entirely random my guest today is teamwork Horan he's a professor of economics and political science at Duke University what caught my eye about his work a little piece of jargon that he pulled together called preference falsification outlined in his book private truths public lies essentially we just don't tell the truth we tell people one thing when we really believe something else there's a lot of reasons for this if there's too much preference falsification it can dampen a community a population's capacity to want change because it brings about this intellectual narrowness people essentially forget they become stupid they spent so much time not saying what they really believe that eventually they come to believe the nonsense they say and they actually forget what they knew now that's a shorthand view from my perspective a little bit of paraphrasing there but to bring you into the idea of where I want to go today with my guest on preference falsification and for anyone who has followed American politics in the last couple years can you recall the most recent presidential election we can't believe the polls are wrong timor's book was written in 1995. the idea of preference falsification is not new US human beings have been doing it for a long time again I'm terribly lucky on this podcast to bring on a diversity of guests to make us all go into thinking to actually think to think about what's going on not just to listen to some talking head that's reciting some word salad I don't really care if a word salad if I ever ever ever stop giving it real on this show please come and kneecap the hell out of me and take me out without further delay let's jump right into my guest the good professor from Duke University [Music] [Applause] so listen I caught this poll today a Gallup poll and it was Pomona College 90 of the students said they don't feel like they can speak freely right and the makeup of the students was 50 liberal 25 very liberal This Is self-described 50 liberal 25 very liberal and three percent conservative but the key number the takeaway is this Gallup poll ninety percent of the students don't feel like they can speak freely I think I'm talking to the right guy tonight about that very issue aren't I I think so I've thought a lot about context where people don't feel free to speak their minds and you've defined this in a certain way and I'm gonna let you put your best professorial hat on it's kind of an interesting term that's not necessarily intuitive it is once you understand what it is it's intuitive but when people hear the term preference falsification right out of the gate I kind of feel like oh my gosh what I'm the physics class or something but it's a really well thought out premise why don't you explain that preference falsification is a form of a line but not all lying is preference falsification preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one's wants because of perceived social pressures and it aims specifically to manipulate the perception of others about one's motivations or dispositions in the context of the Pomona case in that case several forms of preference falsification is undoubtedly taking place and the Pomona students are reporting that they are in fact routinely engaged in some forms of preference falsification intellectual preference falsification for example they may feel uncomfortable challenging particular arguments put before them by professors or presented in classrooms because of a fear that they might be accused of racism or some kind of bias or sexism of some sort so they will stay quiet they will pretend to understand and approve and accept the theories that are presented to them when in fact they have many doubts there's also on many campuses I imagine that Pomona is no different their social preference falsification people feel that there are certain issues that they cannot touch and that if they do touch them they have to take a particular point of view completely uncritically without even acknowledging that perhaps there is another side there is another perspective there are other considerations one should take into account all such suppression whether it's in the social sphere or in the classroom constitutes examples of preference falsification let's keep it in the academic Circle for a moment if we are pondering colleges and universities across the world if we're really at this point where students feel this inability for as you just outlined many different reasons to say how they feel to say how they think to counteract or to give an alternate take than perhaps either the professor or their other peers isn't that just like a terribly big failure for all of us when it comes to the university system it is in fact a huge failure it's particularly alarming because this is happening in a society that considers itself one of the freest on Earth and it's happening in a society where our constitution guarantees freedom of thought and freedom of expression but despite that and universities and to add to that I should say universities claim that they are places where all ideas can be debated they in ostensibly are training students to become critical uh thinkers if in a premier College in the United States within the American academic system 90 percent of students feel they can't speak freely that they cannot engage with other students with professors freely they can't say what's on their mind honestly and openly we've got a huge problem I went and looked before we talked today a little bit more that Gallup poll and there was some other data in there and one of the other pieces of information that came out of it is that same student body at Pomona that was pulled 50 percent of them were very comfortable and wanted their first amendment rights the other 50 percent thought there should be limits on speech which is an interesting conundrum there so you have 90 percent almost all of them saying I don't feel comfortable to say certain things and then half of them were saying but hold on we want to be regulated well what they're saying is if you go I haven't seen this the scallop poll but I've seen similar studies and of course I teach at a University at Duke University and talk to students all the time sometimes they get quite close to some students because I've had them in a number of classes and at the end of it they open up to me a little bit more than they would perhaps to normally because they know I take such an interest in free speech they share with me their own experiences these students are not asking for their own views to be regulated they get upset when they cannot save what's on their mind the 50 percent that you referred to would like other students views to be regulated so they think that there are students on campus who have views that are Beyond The Pale that are views that normal human beings should not hold and that those views have no place in polite civil discourse they don't even need to be considered these this 50 is willing to censor those students they would get very upset and they would invoke the First Amendment if an attempt were made to shut them down of course the the irony there jumps out at you but apparently not for students between the ages of 18 and 22 and I don't think it's limited to students between 18 and 22 but an alarming trend is that the percentage of people who don't see the irony there who have these double standards is alarmingly high among the millennials let me move into a slightly controversial area but before I do I want to kind of lay this predicate down as far as I can tell when I'm looking at preference falsification there doesn't seem to be some ideology that does it more than another it doesn't seem like to me if I say okay somebody on the left or someone on the right or you know a communist country or a socialist country doesn't seem like there's uh something that says this one particular group should do this more than another everyone's doing it is that a fair assessment I would agree with that but let me add to it an anecdote that goes back three decades to when I started working on preference falsification my very first paper on preference falsification where I developed the idea was one that defined various terms developed the theory talked about the preference falsification leads to inefficiencies and then as an example gave Eastern Europe which at the time was under Soviet occupation was living in in the communism so I presented this paper that and this was at a at a seminar at UCLA and at the end of the talk which was quite well received someone a very very distinguished Economist put up his his hand and he said you know I I find this all very fascinating but why didn't you call your paper a theory of Communist dictatorship as far as I can tell he said this has nothing to do with the United States because here's the most interesting thing because he said in the United States we have a constitution that protects free speech my answer to him was I said it does apply to the United States because the fact that we have legal protections for speech doesn't mean that as individuals living in in a society with free speech guarantees we will exercise that freedom and that's the critical point right there is just because you have the freedom doesn't mean you're going to use it doesn't mean you're going to use it every one of these students at Pomona all hundred percent of them have the freedom under the law to say what they want and if you look at Pomona's student handbook and faculty handbook I'm sure I'm sure it looks like the ones we have at other universities it says you are free to express your views the limits are that you cannot deliberately insult somebody you cannot use fighting words but if you believe that a certain policy is inefficient if you believe that a certain postmodernist theory that your literature Professor is putting forward is absurd that it's nothing but rubbish and you think that it's illogical you are free in the classroom according to the Pomona student handbook you are free to express your view and in fact Pomona formally encourages you to do that on the ground that it's good for others it's it's good for you to think critically but it also makes other students in the classroom think it's good for the educational process but the fact that we have these principles and these rights doesn't make students exercise those rights and live by those principles and that is what this Gallup poll that you cited is showing we have a huge huge disconnect between the rights that we enjoy and the principles by which we're supposed to live and the way we're actually living so let me dive into an example as I laid that political Foundation at the beginning that this is something that I think we can find an example of preference falsification across the Spectrum but I think we do have a very topical example in the United States of America with the president of the United States and I'm going to pick particular area to go and I would love for your comment on this but one of the most interesting things about the 2016 election was the constant talking about polls right so you have everyone talking about polls in particular I can think of two people that were not happy understandably with Trump's winning and that would be Hillary Clinton and Jim Comey so Hillary Clinton who lost to Trump Jim Comey who was fired by Trump from the FBI and both Hillary Clinton and and Comey and look I I get it people want to throw slings and arrows at me for this that's fine but this is a very concrete example that if we can all just say let's just put our partisan polls aside for a second both Comey and both Clinton kept talking about the polls even today they keep talking about the polls now people listening to our conversation Timor they might be saying hey Mike and Timor they're having this academic conversation it's not really important hold on we have you know the the director of the FBI talking about polls but here you're kind of saying hey hold on what does a poll tell us like I mean when someone wraps their arms around the idea of preference falsification how is it that you ever really believe a poll again once you understand the concept of preference falsification and once you understand that it can be very prevalent even in places where people are free under the law to say whatever they want people do not necessarily tell the truth to posters understanding the concept of preference falsification and its implications sensitizes you to how polls are conducted a poll conducted or the phone is not the same as a poll conducted online a poll that gives you anonymity strict anonymity is quite different from one that exposes your identity at the very least to the poster and possibly to many many others there's a huge difference in this this is why we can find in elections to polls conducted in the same area that give us very different different results one of the reasons has to do with the way the poll was conducted the degree of anonymity it gave to the respondents another is that pollsters are aware of the fact that the people they're polling will not necessarily tell them the truth so they make adjustments to their sample but those adjustments are all based on assumptions about what they think the sensitive issues are and what types of views are being hidden but it's all if they're not conducting polls properly there's a lot of guesswork involved there and they make huge mistakes in setting up their samples excluding certain groups or oversampling certain groups on the grounds that those particular groups are not as vocal as as others and that is why our polls can differ so much in the latest presidential election it turned out that Donald Trump's pollsters had a more realistic sense of what the American people were thinking than Hillary Clinton's pollsters did and they will tell you this now in the Days running up to the election the Hillary Clinton was confident that she had a blue forget what it was called this blue wall that was going to Winter the election she didn't have to campaign in Wisconsin Pennsylvania Minnesota places like that because those were all wrapped up well Donald Trump's posters were actually seeing something something different what do you know about that difference that's interesting seemingly the same populations of people and pollsters want to try to get an accurate handle on what's going on how did they have such differing results specifically they had quite different views of how working class Democrats in these states were going to vote the Democrats felt that for economic reasons these voters were going to by and large vote Democratic that they would not vote for uh Republican candidates who was likely to pursue policies that would continue to shrink the economic base in their communities the Republican pollsters were noticing that these voters were concerned also about social issues and but identity issues and that these were just as important or perhaps more important than the economic concerns that the Democratic pollsters were focusing on what the Trump voters sensed was that there were social grievances there that many of these voters in these blue States these blue-collar voters and these blue States felt that their own grievances were not taken seriously by the Democratic party on the grounds that they were white they felt that they could not express this they could not openly say what they thought which is that there are various identity groups in the Democratic party which leave us out and we are unable to say this there are all sorts of programs for other groups the Democratic party is formally committed to improving the economic prospects of African-Americans of immigrants of Hispanics of women but we're left out and in fact we are considered the victimizers of all these groups implicitly in most conversations occasionally explicitly and we are unable in the Democratic party to articulate this Donald Trump articulated those Grievances and with the Republican pollsters recognized is that these grievances ran deep enough that they just might Trump so to speak the economic grievances that these voters did believe and probably still believe the Democratic party is likely to address better than Republicans let me read something from you really quick this is a quote of yours it says once a minimum threshold of people holding certain private preferences is met even a minor event can lead to a dramatic change in economic social and political institutions now what's interesting about that is once a minimum threshold of people holding in certain private preferences is met even a minor event I might argue that the minor event which was really a major event was Trump himself Trump himself was the event that gave the people that you just described the opportunity to kind of see these private preferences they have manifested in a candidate absolutely and I should just add to that quote you cited that achieving a minimum threshold of a particular kind of private preference a threshold a number of dissenters let us say may lead to an explosion may lead to uh dramatic change in public opinion it will not necessarily do that because the very the fact that you know that there are a lot of people who think like you that there are a lot of other dissenters does not guarantee that you will make a move that Tipping Point you can't necessarily predict it right the Tipping Point's interesting you can't predict it and you can't predict it because as an individual even if I know that I am in the majority that the majority of all the voters majority of the people in my community are the centers they think like me I will not necessarily make a move until I know that others are going to do the same if I stick my neck out the 30 percent who don't agree with us will jump on me and many of the people who think like me May jump on me also May participate in ostracizing me precisely to prove that they are part of the status quo that they are not the centers come back to Trump now now what did Trump do Trump sensed that there is a quite large group of people who are disaffected and he had to prove to them that he was willing to take on many sacred cows that he was willing to take on the establishment that he wasn't afraid of anything and it is precisely for that reason that he went on very systematically insulting groups of people either individuals or groups of people that are very widely admired in the United States I'll give you one example here which will make which I think is a powerful one early on he insulted John McCain you might remember that John McCain's supposed ostensible mistake was to have been caught by the Vietnamese Trump said something like I'm not I'm sure I'm not getting the words exactly right but he said that he at greater admiration for soldiers who didn't get caught than than for once that did get caught in bad taste in in bad taste and he picked somebody John McCain who was admired by Republicans and Democrats alike and yes people will disagree with particular positions that John McCain has taken but vast majority agree that he is an American Hero through that statement Trump not only insulted an American hero but he also insulted millions of veterans who play a very important role in Republican politics interestingly the day after he made that comment his popularity within the Republican Party Rose and his chances of winning the nomination also went up just in polls but also in betting markets now what is the how can we explain how a candidate can improve his prospects of winning an election by insulting a hero to practice all Americans and insulting a group that a republican candidate typically has to win big to win the nomination what he was signaling there is that he was willing to take on practically anybody who was part of the establishment and John McCain is a member of The Establishment Donald Trump was signaling that he could take on these people he wasn't afraid of doing it so he wasn't afraid of saying something even in bad taste that would insult somebody like John McCain what many people in the United States many people who felt they could not speak honestly heard is that there is finally a candidate who is willing to take a lot of arrows from all sides to make a point he's not afraid of taking on the establishment and that is something and then if you then look at the the rest of the campaign he challenged various groups that in fact many Americans dislike or a distrust including the mass media when he attacked them his popularity again Rose because they felt that he had the courage to challenge the media that in the minds of these disaffected voters focused on the Grievances of other segments of society and ignored deliberately and persistently ignored their own Grievances and to add insult to injury made them look like the victimizers of other groups they felt that Trump would finally take on these these groups and put them in their place let me add another line from you which I think will give the audience context here public discourse can be categorized between the thinkable and the unthinkable and the thought and the unthought now whether somebody likes Trump or despises Trump to look at him he clearly got this whether or not he ever read any of your work and dove in Trump clearly instinctively gets the notion of the thinkable and the unthinkable the thought and the unthought he gets that on a base level doesn't he yes absolutely he gets it on a very base level and he realizes that there are unthinkable thoughts and that by articulating those he was going to be reaching millions of people because the politicians whether whether Republican politicians or Democratic politicians there were certain thoughts that politicians would not articulate he would do that and he gave hope to millions of individuals that he would continue to do this if he became president it's a fascinating example we can go down the rabbit hole with Trump all day I would like though to expand this out because your work is far beyond Trump some people are so triggered by Trump that if we don't expand it out they'll miss the larger Point perhaps and we should point out here that the book was written and it was published in 1995 so it was long before Trump yes and I should give the name right now since you mentioned it private truths public lies the social consequences of preference falsification let me jump into another example I know it's one that you have written about you've talked about which is Tahir square and Cairo Circa 2011 the Arab Spring everything unfolding why don't you lace some of that out from the preference falsification standpoint and remind people how much was bottled up inside Egypt ready to explode Egypt has long been a very poorly governed Society it's very poor it is in governed for decades most of the 20th century by a series of corrupt dictators who will also were quite repressive and became increasingly repressive in the 1990s and as we entered the 21st century because the society was so repressive people could not openly oppose the regime their dictator who's supposedly Mubarak ran essentially unopposed an election after election he had been in power for 30 years and anyone who dared uh challenged his policies or campaign for democracy was harassed ostracized often jailed and tortured in in jail you had millions of people especially among the young I should point out that the rate of unemployment was extremely high in youth unemployment was around 40 percent unemployment was high even among people with college degrees so he had a great deal of discontent it seemed to the rest of the world that things would just go on in Egypt like that indefinitely because the centers had no way to get organized the moment three or four people got together to form an organization to do something about the situation the secret police would identify them and cart them off to at the jail well against this background some people started getting organized on social media some of them were living outside of Egypt some of them were in Egypt but they were using Code words and as it turns out the Egyptian Secret Service was not quite up to task in tracking the in the keeping track of social media and connecting the organizers who had code names online with real people well these people got got organized and one of the biggest challenges when you have a large number of dissenters but they're all afraid to act individually one of the biggest challenges is to get them to coordinate and act at once and this is what they accomplished by agreeing to show up in Tahir Square cairo's largest Square all at the same time once they accomplish this once once they got there they suddenly felt that they had power in their their hands because they felt that there were so many of them hundreds of thousands of them in the Square they felt that the regime would be reluctant to start shooting on on these demonstrators leading possibly to thousands tens of thousands of deaths they sent us time went on they felt that the regime in fact found itself in a bind these demonstrators refused to leave the square they noticed as time went on that the regime was divided that some of the soldiers were befriending the the demonstrators they felt that the regime was really the regime felt trapped that the regime had to make a major compromise which in fact it did by sacrificing course the the leader so the leader the the major demand of the demonstrators was that the leader go the leader the military regime in fact let Jose babara go he became the scapegoat he was put behind bars at least temporarily the the situation was diffused the regime called for elections what the regime tried to do then was to get people to leave the square and in fact once they left the square the demonstrators lost the initiative the demonstrators were did not form an organized political party these remember during the years of repression the centers were allowed to organize so these millions of demonstrators who had come to Target Square because of shared grievances all went back to their homes and they were disorganized the only organized power in society was the Muslim Brotherhood not a good choice not a good choice not the choice of the people who demonstrated and in fact the Muslim Brotherhood did not itself participate in the demonstrations it just waited on the sidelines until the very end hoping to pick up the pieces and the reason it felt it could do that is because it was the only organized alternative to the regime and it was the only organized alternative because the one place that the regime was afraid to touch and the regime was unable to control completely was the mosque and the Muslim Brotherhood of course organized through the the mosque so the Muslim Brotherhood I'll be very brief here the Muslim Brotherhood came to came to power then there was a power struggle between the regime and the and the Muslim Brotherhood which the regime won within a year and a half and now we were back to the previous situation Mubarak is gone we have another dictator sisi the only difference being that CeCe is even more repressive he's he has learned from Mubarak and like China like many other like Russia like many other oppressive countries he is very tightly controlling social media because the regime learned through hard experience that social media can be used to coordinate a demonstration that is the background for the Egyptian Uprising let me give a a shift from Egypt to you name the country I've actually got one in mind and I'll throw it out in a second but here's where I want to shift what's interesting about the Egyptian situation that you just outlined is that there was a certain amount of private knowledge still in the body politics or the people still had this private knowledge that hey we know the right way you know if we get the opportunity we know the right way still however when you're dealing with the thinkable right and if it moves into the unthinkable and it stays there long enough and I might be paraphrasing a little from you here but if it stays there long enough if it leaves public discourse the private knowledge can disappear my question to you is a country like North Korea we don't really know for sure if the people still have that private knowledge or are they just so far away from preference falsification because they're just kind of I don't want to say drink the Kool-Aid that's a little unfair but you see where I'm going with this yes no absolutely North Korea is truly an extreme case because they don't even have access to the internet to be precise or about between 100 and 200 people in Korea trusted people who have access to the internet but the vast majority of the population 99.99 of the population do not have access to the global internet they are fed information and that's all they get and they're able to read books and newspapers and watch TV shows only that the regime allows it is going to be when Korea finally opens up we will see and and I hope that we can Rush In And before North Koreans learn about what they've as so many things that they've unlearned over the past 50 60 years we will be able to measure and document exactly what they think exactly what they know but what happens in such societies is the people actually do forget what advantages can flow from a free Society they can stop they can lose their ability to imagine what it would be like to have freedom they can lose their their ability to imagine a society in which many decisions are made by individuals in a decentralized manner the Egyptian case we were talking about is not that extreme because Egyptians did have access to the internet or at least half of half the society that was wealthy enough to have an internet connection at least they had access to ideas coming from outside the world so in Egypt there was a very large constituency of people who knew what they were missing they could compare Egypt with other societies other Arab wealthy or Arab societies non-arab societies the European countries across the the Mediterranean and see how life could be quite different and how people were happier living in societies the that didn't impose as many restrictions as Egypt did but North Korea is a particular case we do have other societies where the what I call the unthinkable has become the unthought I'll give you a quick example from India where for centuries people lived under the caste system it's not the caste system is illegal now but it's not it's not completely dead but until the 20th century the caste system which divides Indian Society into hereditary groups hereditary hierarchical groups this divided Indian Society into various groups that had quite different privileges the key concept that distinguish between various Indian casts was this notion of pollution you had at the very bottom you had Untouchables who were considered to were born into an Untouchable uh their family they were considered polluted and nobody could even get near them nobody could have a meal with them because they would get polluted themselves and it was considered quite sinful to get oneself uh polluted the interesting thing is even The Untouchables who were at the foot of this heart Cave of the Indian hierarchy and who lacked all the Privileges of higher castes and who were who could only serve as toilet cleaners and do and then garbage collectors and do the various dirty jobs in society even they believed in this concept of pollution and they recreated among themselves within the Untouchable community this hierarchy based on pollution so there were Untouchables of various degrees of pollution they could not get themselves The Untouchables could not imagine a world without this concept of of pollution because they lived in a society where you could not challenge this concept that divided India into these hereditary hierarchical groups they could not Escape they could not escape this concept so the very concept the very ideology that was the source of their horrible oppression for Generation after generation they accepted that ideology and recreated it in their own lives I wonder whether to come back to your example of North Korea I wonder whether we are going to see similar things when North Korea finally opens up it is such a repressive society that today we cannot even send in Scholars to test whether this is in fact happening and this is common in very repressive societies they won't let you explore they won't let Outsiders explore the sources of repression and their consequences if you could take me back in time that aha moment perhaps it was when you came up with the phrase preference falsification but can you paint the aha moment the trigger moment when this happened I mean Beyond look I obviously you were writing papers and then the book but there was just a moment where it was probably perhaps you or in conversation with someone else before you even got to the writing you had that light bulb went off up in the air and you said oh my gosh this is a direction I'm going down this path like can you paint that for me yes it actually happened when I was a PhD student at Stanford studying economics one of the fundamental theories that any economic students learns is the theory of revealed preference and the theory of revealed preference says that we can't tell what people's preferences are because they're in their minds but we can see the actions that they take we can see that when they're given a choice between an apple and an orange and a banana if they pick the banana we can infer that they have revealed that they prefer a banana to the apple and the and the orange well I sat there in course after course being exposed to this and I felt very uncomfortable I thought there was something quite odd about this because in the classrooms that I sat in they were I knew that there were some students who disagreed with theories of that their professors not necessarily this Theory but theories that their professors put forth but they didn't challenge them because they were interested in a recommendation letter from them they felt that in some cases that other students might ridicule them it wasn't exactly the motivations behind selecting one thing one option or another or preferring one Theory or another accepting a theory or not accepting it was somewhat more complicated that was I I recognized that but I felt as a graduate student in economics at that time I felt that there was nothing that I could do and I did not see how I could challenge one of the basic one of the fundamental building blocks of economic theory so this stayed in the back of my mind but as I was working on other subjects I decided that after I graduated after I got my PhD that I would start working on an alternative conception of preferences and one that would distinguish between honestly revealed preferences and feign preferences feign the process of expressing or feigning preferences is what I ultimately called a preference falsification the very fact that I did not in those classrooms put up my hand and challenge the theory of revealed preference was itself an active preference falsification I felt uncomfortable in doing that but I also in my own mind was in my own mind was beginning I was beginning to lay the foundations for an alternative to the theory that I was hearing presented again and again so it wasn't an aha moment that immediately sent me to the drawing board then a month later led to a new article took longer than than that but that this was the process that brought me to the concept of preference falsification you know you mentioned Stanford the econ Department I mean I don't know the professors at the time I'm sure there were probably some some rock star econ professors so to speak and I would think that that also plays a role you know if you're if you're a student in a classroom and you know your professor is my gosh I'll just pick your professor is Eugene farmer or Richard thaler or some some huge name that's you know won a Nobel Prize you know you Mr student out there in the audience 19 years of age who wants to raise their hand well my advisor Kenneth Arrow who already had when I was as advised he already had a Nobel Prize after I graduated and I started working on preference falsification he encouraged me to work on this he saw that I was getting somewhere and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the concept of a real preference now he at the same time he argued there are contexts in which it and I would agree with them contexts in which the theory of revealed preference is useful to use where the sorts of fears and trepidations that drive preference falsification are not present and there are some of those in many of those contexts that it's useful but to give credit for credit is due he did support it now whether when I was a second year graduate student in the classroom whether he would have supported my writing a dissertation on this subject I don't know but I do have to give him credit for being one of my early supporters when I started writing on preference falsification and many economy myths were quite skeptical I got to give you all the props for this interesting path that you've gone down because as political as America has become this constant debate on the cable channels everybody seemingly in a state of psychosis all sides it's nice to just kind of sit down with someone like yourself have a nice conversation where you kind of get under the hood and instead of being emotional about what's under the hood we just kind of look at it for what it is describe it talk about it learn from it and not allow it to become something where our blood pressure goes up so high that we need to go see the doctor yes yes and that's unfortunately that is what much of television has has become and there are parts of Academia where that's the case where debate exists we say that the start of our talk there are many areas in Academia there are many areas that are not touched at all and Men any debates that don't take place at all precisely because there's a fear that if you allowed people to express themselves freely they would end up in the sorts of situations dire situations that you just described that's very unfortunate the book private truths public lies the social consequences of preference falsification let's see if we can get some bump on the Amazon rank there you're one of my authors that I've had on where this particular book is a little bit older book but again I reached out to you because I thought it was so timely today which is so timely we're just living and breathing it I appreciate you coming on and giving some wide perspective about how it fits into all of our Lives thank you very much Michael I greatly enjoyed the conversation there [Music] I see a time when those awake will understand how to make money up down in Surprise markets whether new Trader or experienced college student or financial advisor protecting against a crash or 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