 Thanks everyone for coming. I'm Christy Freeland and I was really delighted to be asked to moderate this session and particularly so after spending about an hour drinking smoothies at the Google Cafe with Sendil Muley Natham Okay ish pronunciation who is a truly brilliant behavioral economist at Harvard and my job today is to ask him about his brilliant ideas and Also to give all of us a sense of who the guy is So I'm gonna start by asking you about the paper you're writing right now about angel technologies What are they and why should we care? Yeah, let me start with my favorite example partly because it affects me personally every day You know every night when I go to bed, I always set my alarm clock at 6 30 6 20 something like that. I Have a lot of goals when I go to bed at 11 or 12. I'm gonna get up at 6 20. I'm gonna go for a run I'm gonna write poetry. I don't know something. They're always good goals at 6 20 one of the great evils of society is realized which is the snooze bar because at 6 20 I Don't want to jog or write poetry or rather. No, I do want to jog. I do want to write poetry I just want to do it starting at 6 30 Hit this news bar, of course, it's 6 30 you can see what happens This is an interesting problem. I like this problem for a few reasons one I've been through this many many many times and I still haven't mastered it To there's a technology here. That's not helping me that much After all the alarm clock isn't doing in a way what I would want it to do just to get me up at the time that I wanted it to get me up and So there's a nice product on the market called clocky, which is this alarm clock with wheels and what it does is it rolls off the edge of the bed Goes off in a random direction And then starts beeping So you can imagine at 6 20 you have to get up and find clocky. So now you do get up at 6 20 This is a nice metaphor that I think after something that technology can do for us so in this case what clocky is doing for me is that you ever seen these cartoons where like There's like an angel on the shoulder and a devil on the shoulder and the devil is trying to get you to do something And the angels trying to do something better and I often think of many things in life as having an angel on the devil And there's a little fight what clocky does is it arms the angel up? Give the angel a little more ammunition to accomplish what the angel wants to accomplish And so I think that clocky for me is a metaphor for a type of technology that we will start to see consumers Increasingly demanding and firms increasingly figuring out how to provide which are not things like Technologies that just you know coke tastes good. I'm going to get it They're technologies that help us be the people we want to be This is not someone else telling me you ought to do X It's me saying I really struggle with this and I would love if something could help me do this better And so once I noticed this with clocky I started looking around and it is sort of an emerging trend It's very nascent, but it's nice to find these trends before you know They start to get full-blown and we can name it and there's a few products I think that are starting to fill the space up and it's an interesting space also because of what I do Which is behavioral science because I think behavioral science can move from the lab to Actually almost a form of engineering if we know these are the things that make people tick Can we use these insights to engineer things? What are other tools? What are other things? So I'm going to volunteer an alternative to clocky which doesn't have a snooze button and in my own personal life's case That's three children But it is a lot more expensive and time-consuming so I will grant you that What wouldn't know about the dog, but the kids definitely do it So the book you're working on now send bill is called the eternal bank What is the eternal bank and whose idea is it? So yeah, so the the that's the book. I'm working on next So I should say It's always the case that you're planning to do things as you can imagine That's a that's a book about my dad and it comes from the It comes from this thing. He once called me and he said you're an economist, right? This was 12 years after my PhD. So you would think he would know that I was an economist Okay, just a little footnote here You were a tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the time at the time. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah Okay, so you had a few credentials a little bit. Yeah, so I said yes, and then he said well I Need your help on something What so I want to start a bank and my dad has nothing to do with banking He has nothing to do with any of this And so I was about to explain to him that it's a little harder to start a bank than you might think But then I figured what why bother just tell me why do you want to start a bank? And he had this idea he said a lot of people out there who believe in reincarnation and Why should they go into the next life without money? They've accumulated a lot of money in this life Let them take that money into the next life. So they'll come to this bank and they'll give us Their money and some passcodes and when they're reincarnated if they're reincarnated They can come back recover their passcodes Because they'll remember Yeah, I'm not as well-versed in reincarnation as you might expect to give him my heritage So they they come back and they would give us the passcodes and my dad's idea was that we went either way either we have concrete proof of reincarnation or we get the float on their money and So he said and the best part of it. He said and we'll call this the eternal bank So the book is really about my dad is a very interesting guy And it's about his stories and what they tell us about and try to understand them through social science So this is this story is emblematic for me about what is creativity because obviously this is a very creative idea At the same time, I don't think any of us are gonna go out and set up the eternal bank So there's something slightly. It's very creative. It's almost too creative And so it's about understanding what the science of creativity is and how can you be too creative? So I think that one thing that we're finding in The research on science uncreativity It's almost like this is a gross simplification. It's almost like there's a spectrum between creativity and judgment if you almost think of creativity as Being able to see the world as it might be and Judgment as being able to see the world as it is you can see how those are remarkable opposition When you're very creative, you're looking past what is to what might be When you have great judgment part of what you do is you can really see things almost clearly for what they are And you can see how these are in like remarkable opposition And so that's why oftentimes creative people will say one brilliant thing and one thing where you're like that is Absolutely insane and they'll be convinced that both of them are great ideas And so that's the that's the tension And so that story for me and the research that I've been doing afterwards is around trying to understand that tension of what makes creativity So send all told me this story yesterday, and it really resonated with me because as it happened I had just re-read a paper by Robert Merton the sociologist Written in the 1960s where he had surveyed he and a colleague had surveyed a whole bunch of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and One of the findings as the scientists sort of reported their own theories of their success and their thinking One thing that all of them said was what was crucial was not so much Being brilliant because they said there are lots of people who are really really smart It was that they all felt they had a kind of intuition about where the hot and important issues were and They knew to work on those and not to work on the others And this sounded to me a lot like the judgment that send all was talking about that's so essential to creativity exactly That's right, and I think that that varies a lot There isn't great research on this, but I think that that mix that you need varies a lot by field So in Merton's case, he was talking a lot of scientists and Nobel Prizes and science are often given for things that are much more like Experimental advances and when you're doing a lot of experimental advances you need creativity But because there's a lot of heavy lift involved you need a lot of judgment But if you look at art I would speculate and you go out in this direction You need less judgment and a lot more just raw creativity and it sort of varies by field a very creative management consultant Probably not that helpful a somewhat creative management consultant with good judgment very helpful So I think it matters a lot is that a very creative auditor probably not helpful at all well In some places a little too helpful exactly exactly right so maybe when we're advising our kids once they finish their alarm clock We'll in our lives on Career choices we should try to figure out where they are on the creativity judgment spectrum Now send all you've talked to us a little bit about your dad And I was really fascinated to hear about your family story So I'm gonna ask you a little bit about that. Where were you born? So I was born in India I was born in a village Sort of about four hours. I used to say five hours south of Chennai, but what does hours mean? It's like an interesting thing where it's like the roads keep getting better So in effect the village is getting closer to Chennai. So how close is it now three hours pretty good. That's progress No, it's getting better much better. Yeah. Yeah, my teeth don't rattle anymore And then how old were you when you emigrated seven and that was to those the Los Angeles So yeah, we moved to LA my dad was there and then I was there There until I went to college and how did your dad manage to bring you guys from this small village five or three hours outside of Chennai? He came to do a PhD at Caltech and then He was here for about four years before Before he could bring us that's an example of an interesting almost angel technology because we didn't have a phone in our house and Maybe one in our village, but we didn't have a phone So my dad would make these audio tapes where he'd talk into them and tell us what he wanted to say And then I still remember The sort of the tapes would come and then you put it on the tape machine and like you'd hear your dad And it's like very interesting was one way, but it was still somehow intimate despite it's one way this did you make tapes for him? I Never even heard to me so And what was the experience of immigration like was it was it all on easy streets suddenly you got to America the roads paved with gold I Mean as a kid it was just another thing. It was like different. I mean to me It was like perfectly the only the only odd part of it was when I was 10 My dad lost his job Because of defense contracting rules and he couldn't work in the sector anymore and that was the rule was also the rule Was that he was an aerospace engineer? But if you worked in any building that had a defense contract you had to get the complete clearance Even if you weren't working on that so he would work on commercial airlines But still because he wasn't a citizen he couldn't no longer even work on commercial online projects So now you can be an aerospace engineer and the interesting part of it to me was I still in this moment where? It's kind of interesting where I said to him so now you don't have a job We're not getting money. So what happens if you don't get a job? I just curious. It was interesting and he said We what happens? We don't have money. We don't need Accurred to me as a child that the world would be such a place where just through chance you could end up with such a random Bad outcome because you know even when we're in India. It's not like I ever worried about not having something to eat per se You might not get candy But somehow the idea that the world would be this place where there's almost no net and you can fall very far That had a very long impact on me Okay, I'm gonna cheat and say you're working now on scarcity, right? Do you think that's connected? I think it is yes I've done a lot of work on poverty and I think it's I think it is very much related to it It's related to this notion. I think it's a I think that's the sort of the psychology and I think all of us probably feel it in one way or another so Some people may feel it money some people may feel it in time But that feeling of having very little and that feeling that you get when you just feel you have too little time That's something that I'm working on now. I have that's the book I'm working on which is around It turns out that there's a common psychology that arises every time people have too little So there's more in common between the poor and the busy And dieters and the lonely that there's a common psychology that all of those people draw upon that That seems to operate. It's something people haven't really noticed before Is that good for us? I mean certainly if we're on a diet, we feel pretty virtuous If we're very busy, we feel virtuous. We're working hard. Does it does scarcity make us better? Yeah, so that's one of the interesting things. It's like Scarcity has these amazing benefits because it focuses our mind So we find and others have found for example when you're working busy People are far more effective when they're on deadlines than they ever could be and you know, you've all this is well known to journalists By the way, I think it's well known to most of us. I think any any student who's like wow with five hours left I wrote a term paper that I couldn't write in five weeks Kind of understands that you know the power the motivating aspect of deadlines and it's not just bit time though So for example the poor This is an interesting fact. I think most people in our research that came out I think it's the opposite of what most people anticipated The poor are much better managers of their money than the rich significantly better managers in the sense that They I mean in every sense just like you're just like when you're very short on time you become a very good manager of Time the poorer better managers of money. So in many ways Scarcity does what you'd expect it to do the mind reacts by saying we have very little of this resource Let's marshal all our mental resources to focus it But there is a very bad side to scarcity, which is probably In the long run outweighs the benefit, which is because the mind is so focused on it You know it focuses involuntarily. So for example So think of the following You have a project that is due like you're working on a An article the deadline is the next evening the next afternoon You go home. You're going to spend time with your kids because you haven't seen them in a while There's nothing you can do on that project right now. Anyway But while you're with your kids your mind keeps going back to the project You haven't done work on the project and you haven't enjoyed your time with your kids And they probably haven't enjoyed you and they haven't enjoyed you either. You're a worse parent in that moment. You are a worse parent and What that's doing is it's because scarcity is loading your mind It's creating it's as if there's it says if you had a mental processor And part of that processor is constantly being taxed. It's like your computer when you have like too many windows open Part of it is being taxed by this other process that's continually running And so as a result what it means is people who are under conditions of scarcity when they're trying to do anything There they are significantly worse. And so we find some striking evidence for example that When somebody becomes poor the same person when they're in times of poverty their IQ drops significantly a lot And other measures psychologists have these measures called executive control, which is what you use to exercise self control Which is what you use to focus Those drop quite a bit in fact the orders of magnitude are such that it's almost like when you become poorer It's almost like being moderately inebriated. So they're very big effects on cognitive load, but it's not about being poor It's not about the people the same person When they get more money The mind recovers because now the cognitive load is gone And it turns out the same is true for people who are on diets So we found we went and looked and there have been a lot of Trials around diets and when people are put onto diets not from the nutrition aspect They're getting plenty to eat from the from that point of view. That's true of the poor by the way that we study It's not nutrition But when they're put onto the diet even effective diets People lose quite a few IQ points while being on the diet because part of their mind is constantly Well thinking about food and that makes them less effective than whatever it is they're doing and so that to me was interesting because it kind of as as economists we tend to think of scarcity as I remember when I was telling one of my economists colleagues that oh, yeah I'm working on this sort of new research on scarcity. They looked at me like I was an idiot because they said well There's already a science of scarcity. It's called economics Which is true, but I think it's an older type person. No is the younger type person They probably just didn't like me But what they were What they were alluding to which is right economists Are brilliant at recognizing that everything in the world is scarce if you spend money on x you don't have money spend on y So let's call that physical scarcity What I think economists don't have an understood and they don't really maybe they don't care to understand Is that physical scarcity doesn't mean psychological scarcity? So I'll give you an example like most people in this room are lucky enough not to have money scarcity But you do have money scarcity you have a budget constraint however much money you have you have a physical amount of money Right, so we know from an economist point of view you're experiencing scarcity But let me show you from a psychology point of view that you're not experiencing scarcity if you were to lose $20 or 20 francs or whatever the currency might be From your Pocket you went out for a jog and it fell out. You might be annoyed at yourself You might say to yourself. Ah, that's stupid. I shouldn't have lost that But you never ask yourself a question that people who are actually Experiencing money scarcity ask themselves Which is the question I'm now $20 poorer. What am I not going to buy? It doesn't feel like you've lost anything in some sense except a piece of paper Of course, we know from the physical point of view you have lost more than a piece of paper You must be buying $20 less of stuff because that's what the budget constraint is But it never feels that way in fact people who are experiencing money scarcity most definitely That's when you ask them free form questions such as this one of the first things they report is Well, I have to figure out what I'm not going to buy Now take time scarcity if an hour of your life is lost because your plane is delayed and you're very busy person You very much ask yourself. What am I not going to do if an hour is lost on a sunday afternoon That was a relaxing day. You don't ask yourself So that's the sense in which there's a big divide between the physical scarcity Which economists were right to point out exists everywhere And this psychological scarcity, which is a remarkable feature of the mind to allow us to feel Like we have millions of $20 bills endless amount of $20 bills So when you told me about this work yesterday, I was very delighted sendo as I told you For one reason which is I have been thinking that I really should go on a diet But I'm also finishing a book which the second draft is doing two weeks And I had told myself that I would just not start the diet until after the manuscript is done on the ground So it was too hard to do both things at once So I now I felt immediately vindicated and celebrated by having a huge meal last night So that was great. Thank you But are there other practical Lessons you can offer us so your story about the parent who has work And isn't has has made a choice to be with her or his children has the work to do later I think probably everyone in this room who has kids is familiar with that And we hate it. So how can we do better? So I think that Let's let's go back to where we started a little bit. I think that's where the angel technologies can be very very powerful. I think what We can start doing is we can start getting a tune to consumer needs that are of this type So that is there are quite a few consumer demands that are of the type of I'd like to do better at acts I want to be this person. I want to do these behaviors, but I'm not able to We can diagnose what's causing the wedge between I call this intention and action But you might want to say between wanting and doing But whatever is causing the wedge between wanting and doing we now have tools and behavioral science to understand that So for example, one of the reasons there's that wedge and we all know this from eating Is pure self-control. You don't want to eat that doughnut But then when you see the doughnut, you're like, oh this doughnut looks really good. Maybe I'll eat this doughnut But there are other things which are as important in fact arguably more important, but people underappreciate Which one of them I think it was probably even more important than raw self-control Which is mind wandering So you want to I'll give the most prosaic example of this, but that's also very important in the world You're a diabetic you've been diagnosed with this What used to be deadly ambitious disease, but now is controllable through Taking um pills, let's say let's say your early stages. So when the doctor tells you this you say wow It's really unfortunate, but I'm I'll take my pills. So that's what you want to do The reality is we know from the data that the average rate of pill taking is maybe about 65 percent roughly 65 to 75 That's not good because that means you're getting efficacy well below what you should be and that leads to a lot of consequences So that's a wedge between wanting and doing Now what's causing it? I think sort of mind wandering Forgetting inattention is one of the biggest sources of this because after all You live a busy life It's four in the afternoon. You're supposed to take your pill at lunchtime. You just forgot, but now it's back at home And like moves on so you miss it today And that's because diabetes is asymptomatic Nothing the devil in this case is not a strong devil. It's the neutral devil of kind of indifference You're like, well nothing is that long right now The angel can't be as loud as that indifference basically There's nothing for the angel to say no, no, but you have to take it. It's very consequential So there's this company that's created a way of making the angel very loud And it's called glow caps and what they do is I call it the passive aggressive pill bottle So it's got a little light and if you don't take it it starts by blinking It's like, oh, I really want attention. I haven't you haven't talked to me So if you don't open the pill bottle, but then if you don't open it after the blinking it starts beeping And if you don't open it after the beeping, this really is like a Like a friend who really needs attention. It starts sending you text messages And so That's an example where you can see you can diagnose the wanting doing and in clinical trials They're finding that to be very effective at increasing adherence But there are many more places than just taking taking pills. So let's go back to parenting So a very specific example I often think about is If you ask parents, how Good do you think it is to raise your voice in anger at your kids? Most parents will say that's not a good idea. I mean you need to be stern. You need to be firm Maybe you need to raise your voice because that's the right thing to do at that moment But you shouldn't do it just because you're angry I mean a lot of parents would say that I hope But of course when you ask them, well, how often have you done it in the last week? They'll say, well, okay, I've done it quite a few times. That's not good Now that's a great example between wanting and doing Now and I think technology can understand how we can solve that problem too Like introspect for yourself a little bit about what happens in that moment Again, it's a little bit of mind wandering. You get so caught up That you're just like if there was a technology at that moment that sensed Oh, look, there's a rise in your volume Let's just have a bracelet that detects it and then buzzes Silently to you it brings you back Well, I can tell you Sandil if there were such a bracelet my children would be giving it to me Exactly for every holiday We only have a few minutes left. So I want to ask you one final question, which is What makes you do what you do? What what what? excites you about your job what what? What wakes what gets you up in the morning not what keeps you up at night But what gets you up in the morning apart from the little clock I think it's two things one is Um Because of my experiences in life, I feel like I would love to I value doing things that have social value and do something I've been incredibly lucky and so when you look back and say wow, I'm really lucky It's a little unnerving because having been so lucky you feel it's Flip of a coin and other people who have not been lucky and who are surely more talented and so Trying to kind of get rid of put some put something back But the other thing that drives me at some visceral level is I was telling a student my this the other day It's like I love desserts and uh, there's a chocolate chip cookie that I really love in New York. It's this levan bakery It's possibly the best chocolate chip cookie in the world And when you eat that cookie, it's amazing. It's like your mouth fills like incredible pleasure But for me when you have like a good idea I would say it's the same visceral pleasure It's like It's not like any random idea But when the idea finally comes together and you say oh that makes sense. It's the same kind of just raw Just pleasure of like having seen it and unlike the chocolate chip cookie You have this other sort of egotistical advantage of like I might be the first person to have this idea Probably not true But you know egotistically you can fool yourself into saying that and that's a real pleasure Okay, I can't resist this slightly naughty question So having a great idea as good as this fabulous chocolate chip cookie Do you compare it to sex also when you talk to your students? Wow, that's no I do not compare it to sex when talking to my students. So I uh, we have certain rules at Harvard which uh Some of our faculty break, but No when talking to us we are safe you're among friends Is this being videotaped we'll edit this out later. Uh, no, it's different than sex. Let's leave it at that There's only one person involved Um, I cheated and I'm gonna ask you one last last question What's The big idea or the big subject apart from the ones you've told us that you would really like to have that breakthrough idea about Different question. So I I think that the the thing I'm nibbling around the edges that With angel technologies is part of sort of a Ideas 42 which is a a social venture we've set up and has a lot of good people And the thing that we're nibbling around the edges and really perfecting Is the thing we'd love a breakthrough on I think we're close but we're not there which is If you look at behavioral science Whether it's economics or psychology Their fields that are not they're almost like science like physics is they're not engineering And the biggest advantage is that some of the biggest breakthroughs in physics came from engineering By which I mean where you take a real problem and you're actually trying to solve it And I would love to see and that's what we've been doing at ideas 42 I would love to see a way that we can actually become engineers Engineering is a discipline that has it's a science in a way It has it uses scientific tools it uses analysis And I think right now where social science is is it's almost like The applied stuff is considered like a somebody will do it It's just guys at harvard eating chocolate chip cookies as it were Exactly connected to the real world right and I think that in a way when we have a more robust field of engineering Just like in physics it'll transform even pure science because when you go out and try stuff you realize Okay, this isn't going well. There's something we have wrong And we've already finding that in some of our projects behavioral ideas that look great in the lab You go try them on some projects and you're like this isn't working at all Which then makes you question. Well, what do we do in the wrong in the lab experiment? That wasn't so representative of the world and so that That would be the idea that I'd love to see in the next 15 years is to say well We created a field of sort of almost engineering in this area and I think that could be transformative for the world Okay. Well, thank you so much. I have been really fascinated by everything you've had to say today and by our conversation tomorrow I'm sure everyone else here has been too and we will all want to buy your book So when is it going to be published and what will the title be? Oh, the title is a source subject. I don't have a title, but it's published in january. So and and this is this This is the scarcity the scarcity book and who's the publisher? Uh hold a time books Publishing is weird. It's got this huge hierarchy every publisher is owned by some other publisher, but this is times books Okay times books something about scarcity. Sendil Malinatham I don't think there'll be lots of people with that name publishing a book in this area in january And and we will all buy it. Uh, thank you so much. Thank you very much