2352 FBF: Sara Silverstein – How To Lie With Statistics and Ridiculous Correlations, Business Insider

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Welcome to the Creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman. This is episode number 475 and today our guest is Sarah Silverstein from Business Insider who did a really interesting story on ridiculous correlations. Ridiculous correlations. I'm going to talk a little bit before Sarah comes on about how to lie with statistics. So first of all, thank you all for joining us from 164 countries worldwide. And thank thank you so much for reviewing us on itunes and subscribing to us. And welcome to everybody from Stitcher Radio. Thank you for your reviews there as well. We really appreciate those reviews. So thank you very much for taking the time out to do them. It only takes a moment and we very much notice and appreciate them always. So thank you for doing that. So statistics, aren't they a funny thing though? I mean, isn't it amazing how misleading statistics can be? Someone posted this interesting thing and not that, you know, it has anything to do with today's guest or anything, but it does have to do with real estate. Because as I am sitting here in beautiful Whistler, Canada in British Columbia, I'm looking at some of the material that, you know, I've saved up and I've got a whole bunch of articles on how to lie with statistics and just really interesting things that are just so misleading in our culture and people just take them as the gospel and it really just drives me crazy that they do this. Here's just one of so many examples. And by the way, when it comes to real estate, and the Case Shiller Index, right? That is the renowned index that so many people live and die by when it comes to real estate. And it only surveys 20 markets. Just 20. And the last time I looked at the Case Shiller Index, I would only be interested in investing in six or five or six of those 20 markets. Because the old saying in real estate is all real estate is local. It is a very much a local asset class. And how can we have it that the most renowned index for real estate investors is something that only surveys 20 of almost 400 markets. Yet people take that as the gospel for how the real estate market is doing. And most of those markets are cyclical markets that have big upswings and downswings. And those aren't the markets we like as prudent cash flow oriented investors. Anyway. So this article, not that it has anything to do with real estate really, but it does have a lot to do with how to lie and mislead people with statistics. And it was an article that one of my friends on Facebook posted and she says, I know we got problems, but come on, what's the obsession with killing? And it's a graph that shows the number of serial killers by country. And the U.S. of course, is the leader in serial killers, I guess, right? It says it's a Radford University survey of the serial killer database. So I didn't even know there was a database of this kind of thing, but it doesn't surprise me. So here's what's interesting about it. It shows the US being number one, England being number two, Italy, South Africa, Japan, Germany, Canada, blah blah, blah, it goes down. And the lower ones on the graph are Russia, China, Mexico, Brazil and Scotland and Poland. Okay, but this is totally misleading. The first reason it's totally misleading is because with the exception of China and India, the US has more population than any of these countries. So it's not a per capita chart. So that's the first giant problem. And that's why I'm so into rent to value ratios, right? Because everything is about a ratio. Everything really should always be reduced to ratios and percentages. And per capita, you can't know what the meaning of anything is unless you know the relationship between the overall number and the specific number in any given case. Okay, so this is totally deceptive. Okay? There's many other flaws here, right? Since the US has better human rights than most of the countries listed, it's far more difficult to catch and convict them here, right? For example, many countries listed don't have laws to Protect their citizens and their effects, like the fourth Amendment of the Constitution, from search. So it's easier to catch people who don't have rights to protect them from their government. Another point is the graph addresses serial killers, but not murder rates or other violent crimes, which is massively higher in many of these countries than it is in the US Right? So, so that's deceiving too. Like, why would you just profile serial killers specifically? Okay. I mean, just this doesn't say anything really about the overall violence or fear in which any of us should live. Right? Like Brazil, Mexico, very, very violent. Okay? South Africa, lots of murder there and lots of problems like that. Okay. As scary as these people are, these psychopaths, they're usually pretty smart. So they tend to be very intelligent. Like, didn't Ted Bundy have a PhD or something like that? I mean, he had a very high iq. I remember watching some story about him years ago. And so it's pretty hard to catch them. Maybe in some of these other countries with lower educational resources, maybe they're just not as smart. Okay? You know, that's another thing. Now, granted, the media glorifies violence, and that's awful and it's terrible. But the US is also, also affected with more of that media because more people in the cultures of wealthier, more advanced countries have more access to media. And since most of that media is made in good old Hollywood, the content creation capital of the world, which is Hollywood, it's just very misleading when you look at this stuff. Let's look at another one. I always love the one about college, right? So they say college graduates, okay, here's a Fed report. Fed reports that a college diploma is worth $831,000. And you've all heard these kind of surveys, right? That if you go to college and you graduate from college, you're going to make almost a million million dollars more over your career. But what they don't tell you, which I've talked about before, is that people who enter college are largely self selected.

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They're from not always, but a lot of them are from middle and upper middle class families and certainly from wealthy families. I mean, wealthy kids almost always go to college, okay? So they already have connections, capital, better education before they even got to college most of the time. So of course they're going to Earn more. They were already programmed to earn more. Now granted there are stories of the rich spoiled kid who's a total screw up, we understand that, but they don't tell you that these things are self selected, okay? The people who enter college already, even if they didn't go to college, they already had a big head start in life. How about this one? Listen, ladies, do not get upset with me about this, okay? There's a lot of fallacies to this statistic, but it's that old one you've heard that women only make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. What do they not tell you? They don't tell you necessarily that people self select for a job. Now look at, I have employed hundreds of people and I can positively tell you that when I place an ad in the old days, of course, you know like 10 years ago for a receptionist or even seven or eight years ago for a receptionist when you know, we had a big physical office and so forth, the applicants would be all female. When I place an ad for outside sales or telemarketer, guess what? The applicants would be almost all male. Now why is that? Well, I don't know, you know, look at commercial real estate firms, it's like a good old boys club. It's all men practically. There's hardly any females in commercial real estate. And I think that's awful, by the way. I hate that. But in commercial property management, I had an ex girlfriend that was a commercial property manager. It's almost all female. Guess who makes more money? The brokers do because they're uncommissioned. They're willing to sacrifice security for opportunity. So there's a lot of self selection that goes on there. They don't tell you that women leave the workforce for many years a lot of times to have a closer bond to their children. So listen, anybody knows that the much more important holiday is Mother's Day. Mother's Day is way more important than Father's Day. Okay? Mothers always, almost always have a closer bond with their children than fathers do. Did anybody adjust for that? No, didn't adjust for it. Right. So you know, there's a lot of stuff here in these statistics. How about shadow stats? Remember when we had John Williams on and we talk about the way the government manipulates and lies about inflation rates through the major ways that they do this are called waiting, substitution and hedonics. Okay, Hedonics or hedonism. So they index all these things. They say if people, you know, if the price of beef goes up too much, people will just, they'll just have chicken instead. So substitution, which is not fair. It's not a real way to, to count and quantify the true inflation rate. They also have what they call the core rate, the core cpi. You've heard this, right? Core inflation. It's also referred to as. And this talks about how energy and food prices are too volatile to have in the index. Okay. And now they're on the downside. So they probably include them again because it makes it look like the government and the Fed are doing a better job. Right. But they're too volatile. They go up and down too much. Right. So we're gonna throw them out. But yet no human being on earth can really live without food and energy. Look at the national association of Realtors, we had Lawrence Yoon on the show before and talk about statistical things that they do that are, I can't even get into that. The national association of Realtors and the kind of stuff that you see published on home prices, it just burns me up. But you know, that goes back to Case Shiller too as well. Realty mogul, one of the crowdfunding platform. I talked about this one a little while back about how they're bragging about how good their returns are, yet the returns are really not that good at all when I pointed them out. And that was somewhere in I believe early January. There's a lot more detail on that on the show. Back to college graduates. Here's another article about college graduates. Statistics like this are total BS okay? It says college grads make 98% more than everyone else. Okay? Now get this, okay? If you made a chart of the earnings of BMW owners incomes versus average Americans, it would show that BMWs are worth it too. Okay? And that's because BMW owners generally, and we're just using BMW as a proxy for any expensive car, they make more money. Well, people that can afford to go to college, that enter college, that have that middle and upper middle class upbringing, they're generally going to make more money too. There's a self selection bias that is just not imputed in these statistics. This kind of stuff drives me nuts. And Sarah Silverstein just did such an interesting article on that in Business Insider and I wanted to have her here today to talk about this. Hey, almost out of those meet the Masters home study courses. So order them when I get back from Whistler and San Diego. If I live through heliskiing, I'll let you know. Hope that you hear from me on the next episode. I really do. Then I will ship those off to you. And I ship them myself. So they are shipped. They are shipped to you with love and affection. Okay, so we're almost done with those Meet the Masters home study course physical products. You can get the last remaining versions of those while supplies last@jason hartman.com and also we have some great properties on the website. So check those out and stay tuned because yes, you've been asking for it. And we are going to announce an upcoming property tour very shortly here, maybe maybe as soon as the end of March. So pencil that in on your calendars. Hopefully we'll be announcing that soon. Anyway, thank you so much for listening to my little rant about statistics here. I've got to go play in the snow. Let's listen to our guest today as Sarah talks about some ridiculous correlations. It's my pleasure to welcome Sarah Silverstein to the show. She is senior producer at Business Insider, one of my go to resources that I read pretty much every day. And she produces some awesome videos, one on just funny, zany, compelling correlations that make absolutely no sense. One about the wizard of Oz and its possible implications on the gold standard. And just want to talk to her about a bunch of that stuff today. So, Sarah, welcome. How are you?

Great. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, it's good to have you. And you're coming to us from the Big Apple, right?

Yeah. I'm in New York at the Business Insider office.

Is that where Business Insider is based, the main office?

Yeah. But we have offices all over San Fran. We just opened one in London, so we're everywhere.

You know, I just want to ask you, before we dive into some of these actual topics, a little bit about Business Insider, since I don't think many people really know much about it. It's a website with interesting articles. I like reading it a lot. How old is the company? How big is it? I'm just kind of curious.

The company has been around I don't know exactly how long. I just joined a year ago. It is incredibly fast growing. I think we just started beating the Wall Street Journal on the web for growth and we have I don't know how many people.

And you've got several offices. Do you have offices outside of the US Too?

Yeah, we do in London.

Do your reporters leave the office or is it entirely like at a desk kind of base? Because, you know, I'm just interested in the changing media landscape. The old style is, you know, CNN has a bureau in many countries and the people go out and they're reporting on video. But you're kind of the newer model and I'm just kind of wondering what the distinctions are, if you want to speak to that for just a moment.

Yeah, I mean, we do have people in the field. They're not necessarily, you know, when like right now CES is going on this week. So we have somebody there covering it because, you know, we would be missing out on that. But we can do a lot of stuff without, you know, you don't have to go out to cover the tornado and stand in front of it necessarily.

Right. Like the CNN reporters. That sort of hype. Ish kind of style.

Yeah, there's certainly value to that. People want to see it. But you know, our readers want us to just be on top of the pulse of what's going on and wherever that story is, we can follow it. But we don't necessarily always have to go there, but we do travel.

Yeah. Good. Good stuff. Well, hey, let's talk about some of these crazy compelling correlations. I've always been fascinated with the title of the book. How to Lie with Statistics is always fascinated me. And you know, as I'm reading and doing research and talking to my real estate investor clients for that business I have, you know, I'm always pointing out these funny little lies and misleading things and statistics that just don't make any sense, but they are compelling. Tell us about some of the ones that you found.

Well, I'm the same way. I love when I see them and I always read them and I've come across so many, some of the ones that I've picked out recently, the lead exposure leads to crime, sunny skies causes suicides, you know, the super bowl indicator, which is always funny, buy or sell stocks based on who wins the Super Bowl. And these are all based on correlations that seem are seemingly strong but don't necessarily imply causation. And even though people will say that, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's the way that they're interpreted. So I went ahead and looked at some state data and just downloaded a ton of data the most like the census data, all this data about the states and the type of people that live there. And then also silly data about how many people own cats in every state and what drugs people use and that sort of thing just to figure out where some correlations were.

Fascinating stuff. Before you dive into yours, can I just comment on what you said? So a couple funny indicators are the length of women's skirts I've heard is an indicator of a coming bear or a bull market. So as the skirts are getting shorter. That means a bull market is in the offing, they say on Wall Street. And as they're getting longer, you know, more conservative, that's a bear market. That's a bad sign. And sunny skies, I would think. You know, I've definitely heard and it, it seems legit that, you know, gray, dreary places like Seattle, Alaska, dark, you know, especially in winter, the darker places have increased suicide rates. Wouldn't that be true? I mean, sunny skies, you know, I live in Arizona and it's gorgeous all the time here practically, so I would think the suicide rate would be lower in a sunny place. No.

Yeah. I mean, and I don't know, and I don't remember what the article had said about that one, but. And some of them certainly are causal, some of them certainly have, you know, other reasons that would lead the two to be linked. So I mean, I think that there are some, some of them have some sense to them and some of them don't, but it's easy to make the leap.

Right, Right. Okay, well tell us about some of the ones that you found. And, and let's also talk about the wizard of Oz and the gold standard.

Okay. Some of the ones I found, much like the women's skirts in bull and bear markets, the average commute time in any state is very correlated to the percentage of women owned firms. So the, some, the states with the shortest commutes also had the fewest women owned businesses like North Dakota and South Dakota, and the highest were like California and New York and Maryland. And I doubt that these two are tied to each other because women bosses somehow cause, you know, traffic congestion. It's much more likely that it has something to do with rural versus urban areas or something like that. Some third thing that causes both of them. Them, or is that an indication of both of these things?

I would say that's true. And I would say, and this is not a chauvinistic statement or anything like that, but I would say generally women owned businesses might be smaller because they're, you know, maybe felt that there's a glass ceiling and wanted to get away from that. And so they open a smaller business where they maybe, maybe have home based employees or people that are, you know, working closer to them for some odd reason. Whereas maybe, you know, you mentioned North Dakota and South Dakota, I think of the oil business and you know, totally male dominated, of course, and the fact that, you know, those are larger businesses, more industrial type businesses. I would think that women would be attracted to more information type businesses. And also, you know, women are totally overtaking colleges, so they're more educated. You know, there's just a bunch of interesting. Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, and I mean, I think that's absolutely true, but I also think that some of the places where both of these things are happening might be more urban, might have faster growing businesses. And there are more women owned businesses, you know, now as a percentage than there were before. So places where businesses are growing, there might be more traffic. The whole point is that I don't think that one is causing the other. I don't think having more is causing, you know, a slower commute. And so that's kind of the, you.

Know, the idea behind one other factor in that is that the more urban areas with the shorter commutes probably tend to be more progressive areas. So you're going to have more female owned businesses there too. So. Yeah, I don't know, that's, that's just fascinating. Okay, tell us about some more.

Okay. Well, we found a high correlation between households that have cats and breweries per capita by state. A lot of my friends are trying to convince me that this is causal, that they like beer because they love cats or vice versa. I don't buy it. I saw in Jersey, I think we had some of the lowest cats in breweries per capita. Also Louisiana and Alabama, we saw the highest in Vermont. Over 50% of the households I think have cats or have had and six breweries per 100,000 people. Also Oregon and Maine were up there with cats and breweries.

Well, shouldn't we count though, Sarah, Beer. Shouldn't we be looking at beer consumption versus brewery locations?

Oh, well, I mean there's so many, there are so many different statistics that we could look at. This is just one correlation that popped up. And again, the reason that I'm doing this was to show, like you said, the way that we can use statistics to lie. So the fact that it's not the best metric maybe for people that like, you know, for, to compare against and the fact that the correlation exists kind of points to that as well. Right?

Yeah, great point. No question. Absolutely. And that's where this whole thing I should tell the listeners is, is kind of tongue in cheek for sure.

This is a spoof, if you will, or a parody of a real news story. Just the fact that we can find this data and try to make these arguments in knowing that we don't think that these relationships really mean anything necessarily.

It's amazing. You really gotta read between the lines with everything in life. And many Politicians and world leaders, both good and evil throughout history have used this kind of technique to mislead people.

Right, absolutely. And one of the things that we looked at was Walmart's, the Walmart's per capita, again, this is the number of like Walmart locations, so may or may not be very telling. And the negative correlation with wine consumption. And if you were to take this data and try to spin it some way, you could say that Walmart could say, oh, if you open up a Walmart, wine consumption in the area will go down. And that would be using the data incorrectly because of course, you know, I don't think that opening a Walmart or closing or, you know, not having any Walmarts is actually causing people to drink or to drink more or less wine. They just both happen to be true in the same areas.

Yeah, fascinating stuff. Okay, give us maybe one more, if you would.

Well, one that wasn't as strong of a correlation, but I thought was worth doing because every year I see a story about, oh, about your sex life and your paycheck, like if you have more sex, you're gonna make more money. And these are the numbers. And so I did one because I found a correlation with Internet porn page views per person in each state and the average annual wage and the lowest was Arkansas, Idaho, Montana, and the highest was California, Colorado, New York, where there was a lot of porn and higher wages. And again, I don't think that the two are tied, but there is a statistical relationship between the two.

Okay, so like, let's just dissect that one for a moment. And this is, you know, again, a spoof.

If we were going to try to make sense of it. Yes. How would you do it?

But here's, here's what you'd have to do to make sense of that. Right. Okay. So maybe pornography websites charge subscription fees and you have to have a higher income to be able to have the discretionary money to pay for that. Right. And really, I don't know why you made the leap to sex versus income, because it's not sex versus income, it's pornography consumption versus income. Right. So maybe there's actually more single people, less actual sexual activity. Now again, you could argue whether you have more if you're married or single, you know, for sure. And married people always have that complaint. You know, that's like a cliche. But yeah, I mean, that's. Gosh, I don't know what to make of that one, you know. Any other thoughts on it?

No, I mean, well, I think that the, like Your point is a really good one, and I didn't think of that. But yeah, if porn sites are not cheap, it's something that people can charge a lot for because you're going to do it secretly and you're not going to share it probably with your friends. So you're right. That's a really. But just because you're able to come up with a, you know, a storyline, that's exactly how these relationships are explained constantly in the media. Right. That you can take any two things and figure out a way to make the relationship make sense. Or we could probably come up with a reverse. We could come up with a story that would make it make sense the other way. Right.

This reminds me of the book Freakonomics, and there are some other books on sort of interesting economic issues. And I'm looking at economic stuff all the time, and I really am quite fascinated by it. You know, I poke holes in the Freakonomics thing all the time in their different theories about. Like the one that was sort of famous years ago when the book first came out, was about real estate agents and. And their commissions. And there were all sorts of variables they didn't consider in there. And what they didn't realize because, you know, I have a background in real estate and they don't, is that actually, oddly, a lot of times a real estate agent wants the property to sell more slowly because they get more of a marketing opportunity out of holding open houses and advertising that property. As soon as the sold sign goes up, they lose all the buyer leads. So there's kind of a conflict of interest that's inherent sometimes in these things, which is interesting. I'll give you another example in the legal system that's sort of interesting. I've noticed that. And lawyers will tell you probably that judges don't generally like parties that represent themselves very much in court. Okay. Because maybe they feel they have to hold their hand a little bit more and they don't understand the system. And, you know, the system is intentionally ununderstandable. But then you see that when you hire a lawyer to go to bat for you and represent you, the lawyer has an inherent conflict of interest. Of course, the obvious one is that they might want to stretch things out to bill you more. But that's not even the one that I'm talking about, is that the lawyer has to maintain a relationship in the system and sort of be nice to the judge because they know they'll be in front of that judge again, whereas the defendant or the plaintiff who's representing Themselves, you know, they shouldn't care about that because they'll probably never see the judge again. It's sort of interesting, like the lawyer may not really go to bat for you as hard because of that. And the same is true actually with real estate agents because they have to maintain a relationship with those other agents in their community. And maybe that creates a conflict of interest with the client. It's just interesting how much more complex things are than people realize initially. Right.

Yeah. And I think that conflict of interest is such a huge one and can explain a lot of things, a lot of issues and problems that we see.

No question, no question. And you're from the hedge fund background. And so of course there's lots of conflicts of interest when it comes to investors and the funds in which they invest. Right. Because the fund manager wants to put a lot of expenses through the fund and those are maybe questionable expenses, but they want to get a lot of perks. Right. And that's not in the investor's interest, is it?

No, I mean, and that's, that's a good point is including marketing expenses sometimes for funds can be fed through the expenses, through the fees of the fund.

You mean the $3,000 dinners where they've got a wine and dine prospects, which doesn't necessarily.

It's hard to make the argument that that increases the benefit to you as an existing client.

I totally agree. It's really fascinating. And then the other issue you look, I mean, there's so many, the issues with funds, but with funds, a lot of times they want to bring earnings forward and sacrifice the future. And CEOs do this too with companies all the time, of course, and politicians do it too. And they want to bring a benefit forward so that they can brag about a high return, but that may sacrifice the long term returns that the fund might get. Right.

Well, and I mean if they do that, and that's completely wrong, of course, we're only talking about people that that's a violation. In more illiquid funds, it's easier to do that because the pricing is more objective or less objective. And also because the way that the fees are structured. The idea of incentive fees for hedge funds is that, oh well, if we get a percentage of the performance, then we're incentivized along with you for the fund to make money. The one problem is that usually those incentive fees end at the end of the year. So it's based on that year performance. So to have the performance, you know, finish in a certain year, especially if there's a hurdle that they have to beat in performance, then that can absolutely happen because it would. It would, you know, benefit the managers of the fund. But again, that only happen when that does happen. That is, you know, very bad behavior, and that is not the norm.

But bad behavior is what Wall Street's all about, isn't it?

Well, I don't entirely. I think there's a lot of good players on Wall Street. But like you said, conflict of interest is one of the main causes of bad behavior in many industries, not just on Wall Street.

Well, we took a little. We digressed a bit there, but thank you for entertaining my thoughts on that. I just believe in commandment number three in my ten Commandments for investing. Thou shalt maintain control. Just be a direct investor and own your own stuff and. And get the middleman out of the thing whenever you can, you know. But tell us about the wizard of Oz. I loved that piece that you did on the wizard of Oz. And were they promoting the gold standard?

Well, the wizard of Oz, it's not. First of all, this is just something I got. The first time I read it was in Gregory Mankiw's textbook in, like, my first economics class. And I've been thinking about it ever since. And I had an opportunity to do a story on it. I did. And it's basically the. It's the theory that when the Wonderful wizard of Oz was written that it may have been an allegory for the gold standard and what was happening at the time, and that the characters represent different players in that story. And basically in the early 1900s, the farmers in the west were borrowing a bunch of money from the bankers in the east to build farms or buy farms. And there was massive deflation. So the value of the dollar was increasing. And the money that the farmers owed to the bankers in the east, the value of that money, their debt just ballooned. And this was because the value of the dollar was tied to actual gold. And so basically, the way that the allegory works is that the bankers in the east are represented by the munchkins. And they're saying, follow the yellow brick road. You know, keep on the gold standard. That's what they want. And in the west, you have. The scarecrow represents the farmers that, you know, are not being benefited by this. And the Tin Man, I think, represents all of the workers that can no longer work. Unemployment rate, I think, reached God, I haven't looked at it in a while, but 18% at the time. And it was.

And.

I can't say I can't remember all the players names, but that's okay.

Neither can I.

But if you, you can go through step by step and look at the different political figures at the time, and at the end of the book, she's wearing silver slippers, not gold slippers. And the idea saying that the answer was right under our nose the whole time, that adding silver to the gold standard would, would basically bring the value of the dollar back down and relieve this pain that the country was feeling.

Interesting, fascinating stuff. What about the birthday paradox?

Well, the birthday paradox, and it's called the birthday paradox, but it's more of an unintuitive, surprising fact that if you're in a room with 23 people, the chances are better than not that two of those people will have the same birthday. And people are often surprised by this because 23 people is not that many. And there's 365 days in the year and the probability that you and I have the Same birthday is 0.27%. So when people think about this problem, they say, well, if there's 22 other people in the room, the chance of them having the same birthday as me, anyone, is only 6%. But the truth is that there's 253 pairs of people among 23 people, and the chance that at least two of them have a matching birthday is 51%. And if you have 75 people, the chances are 99.9%.

Hmm, that's interesting. Okay, so it's not because of some sort of commonality that people with common birthdays are drawn together somehow or anything like that?

No, no.

And you've probably heard the studies about people's names. I've always wondered about the impact of someone's name has on their life. You know, a disproportionate share of people named Dennis are Dennis. I mean, that's just mind blowing. And it's an amazingly disproportionate share.

Yeah, that's right. And there are, there are a lot of trends certainly in names like I think Hillary and Chelsea are both were both most popular right after Bill Clinton came into office. So I think maybe there are some, there are some trends in names that have to do with time periods. And there's certainly Freakonomics writes about the different types of demographics that use certain names. So there's certainly something to that. But no, the birthday paradox is totally separate. It's just a statistical anomaly, if you will. I don't know if that's the right word, but just a surprising information. But it certainly, I think it relates to investing as well because I think that there's a lot of surprising things that sometimes people assign too much weight to. You know, it's there. Sometimes people do well just by chance, and we discount that and sort of hold them up on a pedestal when if you put a thousand traders in a room and they flip a coin so many times, one of them is going to end up getting I don't know how many heads in a row, but an impressive number of heads in a row, you know. So I think that sometimes you have to say that, you know, it is just a statistical coincidence and not magic.

Sarah. I always like to say I'd rather be lucky than good any day of the week. Luck isn't very reliable, unfortunately, so we gotta just be good. Any other articles that you've done that you wanna share just real quickly before we wrap up, you know, any really interesting stuff or stuff that you're working on now, you know?

Well, right now I'm doing something on vaccines on that. I'm trying to relate to economics and the free rider problem with people not choosing not to vaccinate right now.

Tell us about that.

So. Well, I think that the free rider problem in economics is basically that if people in a community are using a community benefit, but some people are not paying their fair share, and the free rider problem exists because it's in everyone's best interest to maybe do that, but it also creates this effect where more and more people free ride and then the benefit disappears. And I think that that's getting close to happening with vaccines as it used to be that everybody vaccinated their children and so you were. Everybody was protected against that. Everyone is protected against these diseases. And so now if I'm making the choice whether or not to vaccinate my child, I don't have much risk of getting this disease of my child getting this disease because everybody else is vaccinated. So I can free ride on this herd immunity without paying the cost of whatever risks I think exist, you know, by taking that vaccine.

Interesting. Yeah. People are getting so suspicious of vaccines. I've done several shows on that. And that's, you know, that's part of the problem with this. But yeah, yeah, that's a complicated issue. The other complicated issue is the antibiotics. I mean, the bacteria and the germs are getting. They're just overcoming it constantly, you know, and now it becomes a real decision doctors have to make of if we're over prescribing these antibiotics, they're just not going to work anymore. So you let the person get sick or, you know, not recover or give them the antibiotic and make the germ stronger. So that's a real issue they're facing around the world. So very interesting, Sarah, Give out your information. Where should people just find you? BusinessInsider.com, of course you can search your name on the website and see all your great content.

Yeah, Business Insider videos, I'm all over there. But yeah, definitely businessinsider.com Excellent.

Sarah Silverstein, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me.

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