Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of Odd Thoughts. I'm Tracy Alloy,
Speaker 1: Executive editor of Bloomberg Markets, and I'm Joe Wisenthal, Managing
Speaker 1: editor of Bloomberg Markets. I want to let our listeners
Speaker 1: in on a little secret. This isn't widely known outside
Speaker 1: the Bloomberg office, but Joe abhores fun in all its forms.
Speaker 1: He hates whimsy, he hates photos of cute animals and
Speaker 1: anything related to general merriment. That's not true, No, no, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: that's pretty much true, pretty much. I like having fun,
Speaker 1: just I just don't like most people's definition of it.
Speaker 1: I guess you have your own definition. Al right. Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, I thought today, in an effort to
Speaker 1: change Joe's mind about fun and humor in general, we
Speaker 1: might embark on something a little different, something fun, but
Speaker 1: obviously it still needs to be markets related. So Joe,
Speaker 1: I'm really excited to say that we're going to have
Speaker 1: today someone who bills himself as the world's first and
Speaker 1: only stand up comedian economist. Wait, stand up economists, Yeah
Speaker 1: it is. I'm skeptical, all right, So we're having your
Speaker 1: embowman on. He has a PhD in economics from the
Speaker 1: University of Washington. He also travels the country doing comedy
Speaker 1: gigs at universities and economic conferences, making jokes about yield
Speaker 1: curves and supply and demand and all that fun stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm even more skeptical there's actually a circuit of going
Speaker 1: around making jokes and comedy conferences and universities. I swear
Speaker 1: there is. If you look at his website, he has
Speaker 1: a list of every show that he's done, and he's,
Speaker 1: as economists would say, very much in demand. Okay, convinced, Yeah, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm starting to get intrigued. Just to give you an idea,
Speaker 1: We're going to have your um come on and at
Speaker 1: the beginning he's going to do a short set for us,
Speaker 1: and I've also brought in some of our Bloomberg colleagues
Speaker 1: to be our guinea pigs and his audience. All right, well,
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to being convinced. Ladies and gentlemen, your
Speaker 1: am Bowman. Thank you very much. It's it's a pleasure
Speaker 1: me with all of you today. My name is Roon Bowman.
Speaker 1: I appear before you as the world first and only
Speaker 1: stand up economist. Yes, it's a it's a niche market.
Speaker 1: I really only have one thing going for me as
Speaker 1: a stand up economist, and that's low expectations. When I
Speaker 1: told my father that I was going to be a
Speaker 1: stand up economist, he said, Ronny said, you can't be
Speaker 1: a stand up economist. And I said, why not? And
Speaker 1: he said, because there's no demand a boom And I
Speaker 1: was the first joke I ever told on stage. I said,
Speaker 1: don't worry that I'm a supply side economist. I just
Speaker 1: stand up and let the jokes trickle down. I believe
Speaker 1: in laugher cur those are actually just my jokes that
Speaker 1: how much economics everybody knows? And then I kind of
Speaker 1: arranged the rest of your team accordingly. Uh you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm happy to say that it's been a good
Speaker 1: couple of years for economics comedy. A few years ago
Speaker 1: I got to be on the PBS News Hour. And now,
Speaker 1: I don't know how much you all know about the
Speaker 1: world of stand up comedy, but let me just play
Speaker 1: you this. In the world of stand up comedy, it
Speaker 1: does not get any bigger than the PBS News Hour
Speaker 1: with Jim Lair. It was pretty amazing. They interviewed three
Speaker 1: economists on the show. They interviewed Robert Schiller who won
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize. They interviewed Joseph Stiglets, who won the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize, and they interviewed me. I felt like kind
Speaker 1: of a self aware version of Sarah Palin And what
Speaker 1: did they ask for my moment of TV fame when
Speaker 1: the TVs News Hour they asked me if I'd ever
Speaker 1: bombed on stage? A couple of things about this, right.
Speaker 1: First of all, I am not a eight of failure,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm an economist. Secondly, on professional comedian, right,
Speaker 1: so it choke doesn't work. You just started keep throwing
Speaker 1: stuff out there until you find something that six just
Speaker 1: basically the same thing that the fat of the Treasury
Speaker 1: didn't the last six or seven years. And finally had
Speaker 1: to admit on the PBS News Hour and in fact
Speaker 1: I had bombed on stage. The works show I ever
Speaker 1: did was in October of two thousand and eight. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you remember what was happening to the global economy
Speaker 1: in the stock market in October of two thousand eight.
Speaker 1: October two thousand and eight, I did a show in
Speaker 1: Colorado Springs for a group of bankers. And commonly it
Speaker 1: is kind of a violent business, right like if you're
Speaker 1: doing well, then you're killing. If you're doing badly, then
Speaker 1: you're bombing. And I totally bombed that show. And I
Speaker 1: actually did so poorly that I spent a star any
Speaker 1: time afterwards, sort of soul searchingly trying to figure out
Speaker 1: where had I lost the connection with this audience of
Speaker 1: bankers in Colorado Springs in October of two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: And I finally realized that I lost them on my
Speaker 1: opening line, that my opening line was, Hey, how was
Speaker 1: it going? Maybe I'll close this set with some You
Speaker 1: might be an economist if jokes so. You might be
Speaker 1: an economists if you think that In America's next top
Speaker 1: model should be a Dodginess growth model. Uh, it might
Speaker 1: be an economist. If you don't read human interest stories
Speaker 1: because they don't interest you. You might be an economists
Speaker 1: if you've ever gone to a bank or other financial
Speaker 1: institution in the hopes of getting a date. If you
Speaker 1: plan to have your children born in December instead of
Speaker 1: January so you can maximize the discount of present value
Speaker 1: of the child tax credit. And finally, you might be
Speaker 1: an economist if be adamantly refused to sell your children
Speaker 1: because you think they'll be worth more later. Thank you,
Speaker 1: right your I thought that was really funny. I'm a
Speaker 1: big fan of puns. The first time I've ever done
Speaker 1: a podcast show by telephone to a group of five people,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to convince Joe that there can be humor
Speaker 1: in economics. Um, on that note, can you tell us
Speaker 1: how you actually had this idea and how you got
Speaker 1: into this gig? Yeah, it was. It was basically a
Speaker 1: random coincidence. So while I was in graduate school at
Speaker 1: the University of Washington getting my PhD in economics, I
Speaker 1: wrote a parody of the Ten Principles of Economics in
Speaker 1: a popular textbook by Harvard professor Greg Mankiw And uh,
Speaker 1: just kind of did that to blow up team, because
Speaker 1: that's what you do when you're in graduate school. And
Speaker 1: then one thing led to another. It got published in
Speaker 1: this chinest humor journal called the Animals of Improbable Research,
Speaker 1: and then they run a humor session every year at
Speaker 1: this thing science convention that happened to be in Seattle.
Speaker 1: So they invited me to present my paper and I
Speaker 1: had so much fun. I kind of got into stand
Speaker 1: up comedy as a hobby. And then, um, I guess
Speaker 1: two things happened after that. One was my academic career,
Speaker 1: to be perfectly honest, and didn't go quite as well
Speaker 1: as I hoped. Uh. And then the other thing was
Speaker 1: it turned out that people were interested in paying me
Speaker 1: to do stand up comedy about economics. So ten years later,
Speaker 1: this is now my my profession. So this is your
Speaker 1: full time thing. This is so what's the circuit? Like,
Speaker 1: how often do you perform uh in a year? One?
Speaker 1: Are the common venues and so far? Yeah, so this
Speaker 1: is sort of my this is my paid job. Nobody
Speaker 1: believes me, but this is how I make a living.
Speaker 1: I do stand up comedy about economics. I have kind
Speaker 1: of a full time, unpaid job working on on carbon
Speaker 1: taxes and a carbon tax ballot measure here in Washington State,
Speaker 1: and climate change issues and tax reform and stuff like that. Um,
Speaker 1: but it's all financed by the miracle of economics comedy.
Speaker 1: Mostly I do colleges and corporate events, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: the colleges are sort of all over and then the
Speaker 1: corporate events some of them are financial firms, but also
Speaker 1: just trucking executives on the banks of the Arkansas River. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the floor to bankers associate. How many gigs
Speaker 1: do you do a year, Probably maybe fifty or sixty. So,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of people think of economics as
Speaker 1: a really dry subject. Do you think something like that
Speaker 1: lends itself to humor. Well, like those jokes that I
Speaker 1: told you know that you might be an economist if jokes.
Speaker 1: The reason those jokes work is because you have a
Speaker 1: stereotype that you can play against. And so anytimes you
Speaker 1: have stereotypes, you can kind of do comedy. And you know,
Speaker 1: there are these obvious stereotypes about economists being sort of
Speaker 1: hyper rational and focus on money and uh. And so
Speaker 1: when you have that, then then then there's an opportunity
Speaker 1: to do comedy. And the fact that the fact that
Speaker 1: everybody has such low expectations makes it all the easier.
Speaker 1: Like I've often found that low expect having low expectations
Speaker 1: is one of the one of the great assets in life.
Speaker 1: That's one reason why I like being an economist, because
Speaker 1: I think there are a lot of people in the
Speaker 1: world who tend to think that that other people should
Speaker 1: be good people at heart, and then they're you know,
Speaker 1: often disappointed when when people let them down. Own where
Speaker 1: you study economics, and then you go into the world
Speaker 1: thinking that everybody is going to be kind of a
Speaker 1: self interested jerk, and it turns out that people are
Speaker 1: oftentimes much better than that, Right, so you're pleasantly surprised. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you get the benefits of low expectations. Yeah, I've never
Speaker 1: really thought about that. That The sort of first building
Speaker 1: block of economics is the assumption that everyone is going
Speaker 1: to be selfish and cool and uh self, you know,
Speaker 1: self maximizing all the time. But then as you learn more,
Speaker 1: of course, and most economists don't really believe that, but
Speaker 1: that as you learn more, the what happens is humans
Speaker 1: surprise you to the to the upside. So that is
Speaker 1: a kind of a nice thing about the economic worldview.
Speaker 1: I've never really thought of it that way before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, well, the way that I have a couple
Speaker 1: of cartoon economics books that I co authored with illustrated
Speaker 1: Grade de Klin, and the way we say it is
Speaker 1: that is an economists assume that people are optimizing individuals,
Speaker 1: and so that doesn't necessarily mean that they're optimizing just
Speaker 1: for themselves, right No, Um, No, economists would say that
Speaker 1: people just care about themselves and don't care about friends
Speaker 1: or family or even people in other parts of the
Speaker 1: world or animals or whatever. But you know, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of cases where doing the economic models and
Speaker 1: start of thinking through how the analysis works makes a
Speaker 1: lot more offense when you when when you kind of
Speaker 1: simplify things and say, okay, people are are kind of
Speaker 1: basically self interested. Do you have counterparts and other academic fields?
Speaker 1: Like is there a physics comedian, a chemistry comedian, Like
Speaker 1: have you found those other other types? Yeah? You know,
Speaker 1: for a while, we thought about putting together like a university,
Speaker 1: like a comedy university, which I still think would be
Speaker 1: an awesome idea, but it's never gone anywhere. Let's see,
Speaker 1: who do I know. There's just the fellow whose website
Speaker 1: is science comedian Brian Mallow, who's a former astronomer. He
Speaker 1: talks about how he started in the comedy instead of
Speaker 1: astronomy because they put him on the dayshift. Uh. There's
Speaker 1: a fellow who actually gotta peach the neurobiologies means tim
Speaker 1: Lee very funny. His website I his comedy of tim
Speaker 1: Lee dot com. Uh. There's a guy, Bill Santiago who
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Pardon My Spanglish, and he does
Speaker 1: he actually does a stand up comedy in both English
Speaker 1: and Spanish. He's of I think he's from New York,
Speaker 1: but as of Puerto Rican descent, and he's he's super
Speaker 1: funny and does a lot of comedy about language. So
Speaker 1: I think it would be totally possible to do that,
Speaker 1: to put together like a whole academic curriculum, uh, just
Speaker 1: based on comedy. So, um, when you go off to
Speaker 1: economic conferences and you do your stand up, do you
Speaker 1: ever get economists who are just having none of it,
Speaker 1: who are just completely humorless. I do occasionally get people
Speaker 1: who think that, um, you know, I'm making fun of
Speaker 1: a serious subject and maybe their socks were pulled on
Speaker 1: too tight or something like that. But for the most part,
Speaker 1: people appreciate that that you know, it's public education, and
Speaker 1: it's it's Uh. I've taught high school as well as college,
Speaker 1: and when you teach high school, one of the things
Speaker 1: you learned is that motivate engine is incredibly important. Right
Speaker 1: that that it's not that the students don't have the
Speaker 1: book or don't have access to the materials, it's that
Speaker 1: you know, they're lacking the uh. Sometimes they're they're they're
Speaker 1: lacking the impetus to actually read the book, and um,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's why I worked on these cartoon books.
Speaker 1: And that's why, um, that's why I do some of
Speaker 1: the comedy is is to motivate people to pick up
Speaker 1: the book and maybe economics, it's kind of interesting who
Speaker 1: are some of the funniest economists out there? Doesn't Austin
Speaker 1: Goldsber do stand up? Other Austin all of us is
Speaker 1: out there that who back meets of Chicago does stand up?
Speaker 1: They're actually one of some the humor sessions that I
Speaker 1: put on the American Economic Association meetings. It's usually me,
Speaker 1: and then there's like four or five others, uh, folks
Speaker 1: who just give they write papers on various things. Um.
Speaker 1: The most recent one there's a Felling who presented the
Speaker 1: paper on you know. The economists will sometimes do like
Speaker 1: what's called non market valuation to try to figure out,
Speaker 1: like how much do we value having you know, stam
Speaker 1: in in the the Sacramento San Jachim river system. And
Speaker 1: this paper was about using those same economic techniques to
Speaker 1: figure out the value that salmon put on having salmon
Speaker 1: in the river system, uh, and the values of the
Speaker 1: sam having humans in the river system. Presumably salmon's value
Speaker 1: being in the river greatly right. Well, it terms out
Speaker 1: that they value their own lives quite highly. Yet, but
Speaker 1: their value for for Smoltz for juvenile salmon is actually
Speaker 1: relatively low and roughly comparable. I learned to their valuation
Speaker 1: for juvenile human, which was it was determined by showing
Speaker 1: salmon a picture of the Brady Bunch. Those were the
Speaker 1: juvenile humans that they picked. U. It was a funny
Speaker 1: papers on that topic. You're One of the reasons we
Speaker 1: stumbled upon you was because we read this uh listical
Speaker 1: I guess that you did, called the top eleven funniest
Speaker 1: papers in the history of economics, and some of them
Speaker 1: I had heard before, but some of them I had haven't.
Speaker 1: And um I got to read out of the names
Speaker 1: of these papers, the theory of Interstellar Trade by Paul Kirkman, uh,
Speaker 1: the Effective Prayer on God's Attitude toward mankind, and what
Speaker 1: is possibly my favorite is Japan's Phillips curve looks like
Speaker 1: Japan by Gregor Smith. I love that one tell us
Speaker 1: about these papers and why you think economists decide to
Speaker 1: do them. So I've edited for a number of years
Speaker 1: now the humor section of an economics journal, a real
Speaker 1: economics journal called Economic Inquiry. Uh. So they published series
Speaker 1: papers and then every quarter or every issue they try
Speaker 1: to publish of what they call a miscellany piece, which
Speaker 1: just serve a funny piece. So many of those papers,
Speaker 1: including the Paul Cregman paper he's a Nobel prizewinner, the
Speaker 1: Jim Heckman paper also in Prizewinner. We're published in Economic Inquiry. UM.
Speaker 1: Japan's Phillips curve looks like Japan was actually published in
Speaker 1: the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and it's almost
Speaker 1: certainly the funniest paper ever published in the Journal of Money,
Speaker 1: Credit and Banking. UM. I think people do it kind
Speaker 1: of on a on a on a lark um. Either
Speaker 1: something you know, naws at them, which is kind of
Speaker 1: where I ended up with this parody of the Ten
Speaker 1: Principles of economics, or a lot of times they just
Speaker 1: come across hath hazardly something something that that that triggers
Speaker 1: this idea. So Japan's Philip curve looks like Japan. Right
Speaker 1: at the background is the Philips curve. Was this idea
Speaker 1: from the fifties and sixties, and there's a trade off
Speaker 1: between inflation and unemployment, you have high inflation and low
Speaker 1: unemployment or the opposite. But the idea was that you
Speaker 1: were always on that Phillips curve line. And so what
Speaker 1: this economist was doing he was actually looking at Philips
Speaker 1: curve data for Japan and and graph to Philips curve
Speaker 1: data for Japan between h I think it was like
Speaker 1: thousand and five, and when he looked at the graph,
Speaker 1: it just happened to look like a map of Japan.
Speaker 1: Uh So he wrote this paper. There's actually a link
Speaker 1: on his website of the paper and the link so
Speaker 1: that the title of this paper is also the abstract
Speaker 1: and frankly most of the text which is which is
Speaker 1: pretty great. So that was what led him to write
Speaker 1: that paper. There was another paper called the Efficiency of
Speaker 1: a C d C and looked at the rock group
Speaker 1: a C D C. And uh, I don't know how
Speaker 1: they give a fan you are of a c DC,
Speaker 1: but they had two front men, two main singers, Von
Speaker 1: Scott and Brian Johnson. And apparently there's been a debate
Speaker 1: among mel heads ever since about which of them was
Speaker 1: the better front man for a C d C. And
Speaker 1: so there was this economist, Rob Oxby in Canada who
Speaker 1: was doing his research who was doing serious research. His
Speaker 1: research was about how background music affects people's decision making,
Speaker 1: and so some of the songs that he had his
Speaker 1: graduate students or whatever playing the background were some of
Speaker 1: these A C d C songs and they were trying
Speaker 1: to figure out whether the background music affected like when
Speaker 1: people were negotiating, how does it affect that outcome of negotiations?
Speaker 1: And it turned out that the graduate student kind of
Speaker 1: accidentally played two different A c DC songs during some
Speaker 1: of these experiments, and that ruined the data for the
Speaker 1: actual paper, but it gave him this idea for this
Speaker 1: joke paper where you can use the results because the
Speaker 1: two A c DC songs one was a Brian Johnson
Speaker 1: fil one was a Bond scott You can use those
Speaker 1: results to figure out that Brian Johnson. In fact, if
Speaker 1: you're negotiating, you want to listen to the Brian Johnson
Speaker 1: A CDC songs and not the Bond Scotland. Yeah. Can
Speaker 1: I just read from the abstract of that A C
Speaker 1: d C paper It says we use tools from experimental
Speaker 1: economics to address the age old debate regarding who was
Speaker 1: a better singer in the band A c d C.
Speaker 1: These results may have important implications for settling drunken music
Speaker 1: debates and environmental design issues and organizations. I love that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's There was a follow up humor piece which was
Speaker 1: that after this, uh, after he released this on his
Speaker 1: website or posted the paper on his website, it was
Speaker 1: picked up. It was, it was. It wasn't the newspapers
Speaker 1: like in Australia, right, which is where a c DC
Speaker 1: comes from. So it actually got a ton of press,
Speaker 1: and then Steve Levitt picked it. I blew it as
Speaker 1: the universe of Chicago. He's one of the authors of Freakonomics,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a blog post about it. But he
Speaker 1: didn't realize that the paper was a joke, so he
Speaker 1: wrote a blog post about it that was called this
Speaker 1: is what happens to economists and they listen to too
Speaker 1: much a c d uh. You know. He wrote, like,
Speaker 1: I hope for this guy's sake that he has tenure
Speaker 1: in rawbos to be excited to post a comment on
Speaker 1: his blog on Steve Lennart's blog saying, first of all,
Speaker 1: I already have tenures, thank you very much. And the
Speaker 1: second of all, the papers a joke, So what are
Speaker 1: you up to now. You mentioned the carbon text thing.
Speaker 1: But outside of your stand up, what what occupies your time?
Speaker 1: I am, um working on another cartoon book. So my
Speaker 1: co author and I have two cartoon books about economics.
Speaker 1: We have a cartoon instruction to climate change and we
Speaker 1: are working on a cartoon introduction to calculums. So the
Speaker 1: cartoon books are really fun. And you know, in America especially,
Speaker 1: I think cartoon books have kind of a little bit
Speaker 1: of a bad People think that they're quote unquote just
Speaker 1: for kids. But I've actually come to really appreciate them
Speaker 1: as a way to convey information to audiences of all ages.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're very accessible, they provide a way to
Speaker 1: do humor, and when you do a cartoon book, you
Speaker 1: don't have to, um, I feel like you need to
Speaker 1: put footnotes on everything and say two hundred pages what
Speaker 1: you can say in uh, you know, in twenty pages. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then I'm spending a lot of time working on
Speaker 1: this carbon tax reform campaign here in Washington State. It's
Speaker 1: actually a ballot measure, Initiative seven thirty two, which just
Speaker 1: qualified for the ballot. We Are campaign gathered three hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty three thousand signatures last year and it's a
Speaker 1: pretty neat campaign. The idea is that, you know, we
Speaker 1: have a moral responsibility to take action on climate change,
Speaker 1: and the way to do it is to have a
Speaker 1: carbon tax, use market instruments, so you have a carbon tax,
Speaker 1: and then use the revenue from the carbon tax to
Speaker 1: reduce existing taxes. So we cut the state sales tax
Speaker 1: by a point um uh and reduce some other taxes
Speaker 1: for businesses and for low income households. Then that was
Speaker 1: actually the idea that that brought me into economics in
Speaker 1: the first place. So it's kind of this idea of
Speaker 1: environmental text re form, that we can use the tools
Speaker 1: of economics and the power of capitalism to protect the environment.
Speaker 1: It's a big thing that that that's in my life
Speaker 1: right now, in addition to my wife and my eighteen
Speaker 1: months old baby. Well, our producers are signaling that we
Speaker 1: need to cut the fun short. So one last thing
Speaker 1: before you go, can can you tell us one final
Speaker 1: economics joke, like a one liner that we can use
Speaker 1: in our daily lives. Let's see, do I have a
Speaker 1: good joke? I mean, I can tell you the oldest
Speaker 1: economics joke in the world if you want. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: oldest economist joke in the world is about a physicist,
Speaker 1: the chemist, an economist who are stranded on a desert
Speaker 1: island and they don't have any food, and then a
Speaker 1: can of beans washes up on the shore, but they
Speaker 1: don't have a way to open the can of beans,
Speaker 1: and the physicists as well, we'll just crack it against
Speaker 1: the rock here and do some calculations and we use
Speaker 1: this velocity and then the canna beans will open. And
Speaker 1: the chemist says, no, no, no, that's too complicated. We'll
Speaker 1: put the Canadians in the salt water and it will
Speaker 1: corrode and that it as much time. You know, we
Speaker 1: can eat two Cannabians. And the economist is not, it's
Speaker 1: just too hard. Let's just assume we have a can opener.
Speaker 1: I love that joke. I've heard that before, but I
Speaker 1: think it's a great joke. Yes, this is this is
Speaker 1: the this is the only joker, the only economics joke
Speaker 1: that in the in the world that uh that most
Speaker 1: people think of. So that's the assuming can open or joke.
Speaker 1: And it's ironic that I told it on your podcast
Speaker 1: because a great deal of the work that I do
Speaker 1: with stand up economics is trying to convince people. O,
Speaker 1: there's more economics comedy out there than the than the
Speaker 1: assuming canto. All right, thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 1: Thanks today, my pleasure. Thanks so much, Joe. Did I
Speaker 1: convince you that it's fun to have fun? I thought
Speaker 1: he was awesome, But you know what the big picture
Speaker 1: is to me. The fact that there's someone who makes
Speaker 1: a living being a stand up comedian first stand up economists,
Speaker 1: like what a country like this is just so awesome.
Speaker 1: I'm just so glad to know that. I just assume
Speaker 1: that he was a professor somewhere and this is a
Speaker 1: little side thing. For some reason, it makes me really
Speaker 1: happy to know that someone can make a living being
Speaker 1: a stand up economist. I wouldn't say what a country,
Speaker 1: I would say what a labor market exactly. I thought
Speaker 1: it was a great discussion, and I'm a big fan
Speaker 1: of all these semi ridiculous economics papers, so it was
Speaker 1: fun to bring up some of those favorites. And I
Speaker 1: am also just a sort of a from a philosophy
Speaker 1: of comedy angle. I love this idea about how they're
Speaker 1: equivalence to him in all these different areas, and how
Speaker 1: there are certain superstructures of jokes like you might be
Speaker 1: an economist if are these sort of structures of jokes
Speaker 1: that we all know that they could be applied to
Speaker 1: really niche field. And I'm sure you could probably go
Speaker 1: really deep into economics. You know, you might be a
Speaker 1: financial economist if and get even further in the weeds.
Speaker 1: So I love the way that works out. I really
Speaker 1: want that comedy university to happen. Fingers crossed. All right,
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at the Star Warm. Thanks for listening to
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