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♪ (music) ♪
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(narrator) Welcome to Nobel conversations.
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In this episode,
Josh Angrist and Guido Imbens,
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sit down with Isaiah Andrews
to discuss the key ingredients
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in their nobel-winning collaboration.
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Josh and Guido, first congratulations
on the Nobel Prize!
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Thank you.
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(Isaiah) The work you did together,
particularly the work
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on the local average treatment effect,
or late framework
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was cited as one of the big reasons
you won the prize.
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At the same time, you only
overlapped at Harvard for a year--
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if I'm remembering correctly--
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it would be great to hear a bit more
about how you started this collaboration
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and sort of what made your working
relationship productive.
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Are there ways in which you felt like
you complimented each other,
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sort of what got things started
on such a productive, trajectory.
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Your job talk, as I recall Guido,
it wasn't very interesting
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but I think it was
a choice-based sampling--
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It was. It was.
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(laughter)
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I was a very marginal hire there
because they didn't actually interview me
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on the regular job market,
but I think they were very desperate to get
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someone else to actually teach that
course.
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It was after they had
a couple of seminars already
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and it was still looking in econometrics,
so Gary called me and kind of--
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Gary Chamberlain?
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Gary Chamberlain called me and
interviewed me over the telephone.
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He said, "Okay, well, my don't you come
out and give a talk?"
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I remember this talk a little bit.
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I remember the dinner that
you and Gary and I had.
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I remember not being very excited
about your job market paper,
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but I saw that Gary was and luckily,
Gary's view prevailed...
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Yes.
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...and Harvard made you an offer
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and I think we started talking
to each other pretty pretty soon after
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you arrived in the fall of 1990, right?
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Now as I said, I came and
I didn't have a very clear agenda.
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I was a little intimidated getting there.
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But Gary kind of said, "No, you should talk to Josh."
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You should go to the labor seminar,
kind of see what these people do.
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They're doing very interesting things there."
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I listened to Gary.
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As we did.
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As we did in the those days and ever since.
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I think it helped it, we were neighbors.
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So we both lived in Harvard's
junior faculty housing,
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partly because housing costs
were very high in Cambridge
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relative to our salary,
which was very low.
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I think it also kind of made a
difference, neither of us came from Cambridge,
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so there were a lot of MIT people
who kind of already had their whole networks,
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kind of our collaborators.
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♪ (music) ♪
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(Josh) Well, I think we had figured out
a mode of working together also.
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We had kind of a regular date,
so we were neighbors
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and we often did our laundry together.
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We didn't have laundry
machines at our apartments.
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But we used to do our laundry
and we were talking
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and you had a way of very systematically,
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addressing questions that
would come up in our discussions
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and the one thing that I
was very impressed by,
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our early interaction,
is you would follow up.
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Yeah,
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You would write some things down.
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Looking back at those days,
sort of clearly,
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just had a lot more time to actually think
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-- I mean, I look at my junior college now--
-- You don't have time to think now.
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(Guido) No, but for me that is kind of one thing,
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but I feel now a lot of my junior colleagues
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don't actually have a lot of time to think.
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People are just doing so many projects,
and it's actually so hard
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and there's so much pressure on people
to publish that.
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I remember spending a lot of time sitting
in my office and thinking,
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"Wow, what shall I do now?"
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(laughter)
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But it would give me a lot of time
to actually think about these problems
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and trying to figure it them out
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and I could actually go to seminars
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and then the next day have coffee
or lunch with Josh or Gary
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and actually talk about those things.
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(Isaiah) You guys weren't actually at
Harvard together all that long,
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so you started working
together pretty quickly.
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Were you both in the mindset that
you were looking for co-authors,
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or looking for a particular type
of types of co-authors at the time
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or was it more sort of fortuitous than that?
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(Josh) I think we were lucky.
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I don't remember I was that I was looking
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Now that I think, it was more fortuitous.
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I said I came in,
I'd done my job market paper,
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and another paper for my thesis
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and I was just very happy to come to Harvard
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and suddenly there were all these
seminars to go to,
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and lots of interesting people to talk to,
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but it wasn't a very
conscious thing on my part.
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Looking back, I think there
was a moment for me,
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where I was discussing
instrumental variables,
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potential outcomes,
treatment effects with Guido
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and we had a pretty good discussion,
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but then he also sent me some notes
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and the notes were very methodical
write-up of our discussion
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and what you thought,
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we had been concluding in a fairly formal way
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and I thought, "Well, that's great."
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Talk is cheap, right, but with somebody..
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- (Guido) Yeah, but--
- ...really writes out their story.
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(Guido) For me, it really helps
writing things down
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and I do remember working with Josh
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and sitting in my office and writing things out
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and you guys have all
had the discussions with Gary
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where afterwards we need to then sit down
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and actually write things up
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to figure out exactly what was going on.
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I think the other thing we had, Guido,
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is we had some very concrete questions
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that came from applications.
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(Guido) Yeah.
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A lot of econometrics, in my view,
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that we were schooled in
was about models,
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Here's a model and what can you say about this model?
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I think we were thinking
about, here's a particular scenario,
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draft eligibility is an instrument
for whether you serve in the Army.
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What do we learn from that?
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(Guido) That's right.
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That's right, and that's sort of where your influence
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on the way I do research now is still very clear--
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♪ (music) ♪
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(Isaiah) I guess zooming out a little bit,
just thinking about
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when you guys started working on this,
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when you started working together,
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any thoughts for folks
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who are just interested in
finding productive
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co-authors being productive?
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I mean, Guido already mentioned
the importance of having time,
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right, which it is.
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It is very easily not to have a lot of time to think--
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You definitely have to make time.
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That's a great question, though, Isaiah,
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and I tell my students that
you should pick your co-authors
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as carefully maybe more carefully than you pick your
spouse.
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You want to find co-authors who,
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you have some complementarity
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and that's what makes a strong relationship.
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You don't want to work with somebody
who sees the world exactly like you
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and as much as Guido and I agree about things,
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we often disagree about things to this day
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and it's fruitful to have those discussions
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and we had complimentary skills.
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I was very empirical.
I'm not really an abstract thinker.
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Guido was great at figuring out what the principles were.
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Yeah, that's right and I totally
agree, kind of [a different spot.]
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These are incredibly
important relationships
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and you see a lot of
people working together
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and not necessarily working very well
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and then it's very hard often to get out of this relationship.
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A good partnering is a
beautiful thing, like a marriage.
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It produces wonderful children,
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the fruits of the scholarship are
potentially wonderful
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and they exceed the capacity of the
partners to do it on their own
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but a bad co-authorship can be very
destructive and time consuming and painful,
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just like a bad marriage.
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Arguments may start about who did what when
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and intellectual property type issues,
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especially when it when it goes a little sour
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and somebody thinks the other party
is not pulling their weight.
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There's more co-authorship
now in economics,
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I think that's been documented, much more.
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(Guido) Yes.
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There's more teams
and there's larger teams
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and I think that's great,
I love working on teams.
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We do work on schools with big teams.
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I work often with PI teammates
like Parag Pathak and David Autor
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and then a team of graduate students,
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but I see that the students are not always,
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in some ways they're a little too promiscuous,
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in my view, in their partnering.
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They don't think it through.
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It's difficult to think it's through.
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I think, for me, working
with people always has involved
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spending a lot of one-on-one
time with people,
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you need to figure out how they think
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and what kind of problems are interested
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and how they think about these problems,
how they like to write, to make that--
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And it takes some maturity on
everybody's part.
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Yes. Yes.
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In what sense?
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Just in the sense of knowing what's going to work for them,
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knowing when things are
versus aren't working?
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(Josh) Maturity in the
sense of having some judgment
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to be able to face it honestly,
if it's not going well,
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sometimes you have to have some difficult
discussions.
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Is it worth continuing?
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"I was hoping you would do this, and you didn't,"
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maybe it turns out there's some
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feeling in the other direction, the same way.
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And Josh is very good
(chuckles)
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in the being honest,
part from the beginning,
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(Josh) For better or worse.
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(Guido) I would write this stuff and then I remember the
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first version of the paper with Reuben,
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Josh was in Israel at the time,
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Don and I were in Cambridge
and so I would talk with Don regularly,
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but Don wasn't really doing
much writing in those days,
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I would write things and then I would fax them to Josh
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and they would come back,
first page just one big cross, No,
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second page, one big line, No
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and that would go for awhile
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but he still does that.
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I sent him the first draft of my Nobel lecture,
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and Josh goes, No, no!
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I've gotten some PDF comments like that from Josh, very helpful.
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Omit needless words.
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I have few co-authors
who are willing to do that.
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Especially as you get older,
it's harder to put up with that.
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I would find it harder now to start working with people who did that
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early on in a co-author relationship.
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It's also very hard because you need to have enough trust.
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Josh, for being willing to be very critical,
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he was also willing to admit being wrong.
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♪ (music) ♪
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(Josh) But you have to be on
the lookout for good partners,
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somebody who can help you answer
questions that you can't answer yourself.
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I think there's a natural
tendency for people to gravitate
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to people who are similar in outlook and skills
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and that's not as useful
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Josh is right, nowadays it's very tempting
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to find people who think about the same problems
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you're already thinking about,
who think along the same lines
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and that may not lead to very novel stuff.
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But at the same time finding people
who actually have very different ideas,
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it's going to take a lot of time.
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Guido, you mentioned in passing how working with Josh has influenced
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how you do research,
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could you say a little more about that?
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I'd also be interested to hear from Josh,
did working with Guido
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influence the way that
you do research?
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(Guido) Nowadays, I'm much more conscious
of the fact that, for me,
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good economic research comes out of
talking to people doing empirical work,
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and it's really not reading econometrica
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or the reading the stats journals,
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but it's actually talking to people
doing empirical work,
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going to the empirical seminars.
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When I was at Berkeley,
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David Carr and [inaudible] as colleagues there
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and I would talk to them and listen to them,
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trying to figure out
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how are they solving their problems
and other things there
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where I'm not really quite happy with the way they're doing
things
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and trying to look for methodological problems,
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where there's some more general solutions possible.
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I tried to tell it to my students
that I encourage them to work
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as research assistants also,
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for the people doing empirical work at Stanford.
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There was no [subbing] but that I
learned while I was in graduate school,
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but it really came out of working with Josh.
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as well as talking to Gary,
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Gary us was always encouraging of doing that
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and because he done that himself,
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he'd worked with on empirical problems with
Zvi Griliches
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early in his career.
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Yeah.
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Well, I became more more interested
in the econometric theory
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through our interaction,
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and I think empiricists are often impatient
with econometric theory,
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partly because empirical work is
very time-consuming,
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and you may have a sense that something is
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convincing and sensible
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and you haven't really fully made the case for that,
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but you're convinced
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and that motivates you to pursue it,
like the draft lottery story.
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I was pretty sure that was
worth doing
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and I came away from working with Guido
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seeing that there was the potential to say something
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more than just about that particular problem,
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and I think over the those early
years in the 90s,
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our thinking evolved together
that there's actually a framework,
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a way to solve a lot of problems
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and I think that that is the power of
the late framework,
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is it answers a lot of questions in some sense.
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♪ (music) ♪
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In some sense, did you find that,
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email versus facts versus in -person,
the medium mattered
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to how collaboration went
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or they're ways that you felt like it
was the most useful to collaborate?
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To me, I think what matters most is,
initially you have a period--
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We needed that initial period,
that was very intense with almost
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daily interaction and we also became friends.
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You don't develop the kind of friendship,
electronically usually
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but once you have that foundation you can be pen pals
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and we did use e-mail,
though it wasn't as useful then
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but it worked,
but we definitely had a lot of faxes.
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I still have these faxes, long faxes
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and then in the summer, I would come to Cambridge,
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usually to the NBR meetings
and hang around for a few weeks
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and you visited me in Israel.
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I visited in Israel.
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But yeah, there was good foundation from that that year
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and in some sense that was enough.
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and nowadays,
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I have the co-authors
in lots of different places,
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but it's always been important
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to spend some time with
people in the same place each year.
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You understand how they work, how they think,
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even to the point that,
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you know when they actually respond,
whether they respond quickly or whether that means,
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they're not actually doing anything
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or that mean they're thinking hard about a problem
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and they just take take longer.
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but you do need to
develop some understanding there.
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♪ (music) ♪
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We've talked about
how your collaboration started,
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maybe just to step back slightly
were they're sort of features about
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the environment at Harvard or in Cambridge,
at the time, which you felt like contributed to it?
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Coming from Brown,
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I felt it was very intimidating place
because it clearly was a very, very
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impressive set of people.
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Zvi Griliches was there, Dale Jorgensen--
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Gary, Jerry Hausman, Whitney Newey, sometimes Jamie Robins.
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I mean, my view of that in retrospect,
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I can't say I loved every
minute of every talk
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I ever gave in that Workshop,
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but that was the highest powered,
that was the group you wanted to reach...
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(Guido) Yeah.
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and you would get
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extraordinarily insightful feedback,
even if it wasn't always easy to swallow.
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Yeah, and I have for a while,
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I would basically give a talk every semester
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because we didn't have any money
to be inviting people.
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Gary would say, "Well, why don't you give a talk?"
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(laughter)
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That was the arena for young people
with our interest.
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(Guido) Yeah, it was really very impressive,
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but it was quite tough--
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It was intimidating.
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People there had very strong
views on what they thought was
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the way you should do econometrics,
the way the direction things should go,
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now, I would think things were
getting a little stale that in fact,
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we were bringing in a lot
of the new ideas...
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(Josh) Yeah.
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...and that wasn't necessary
immediately appreciated.
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(Josh) But that's okay.
- And that's fine.
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We were pushed and a lot of great discussions
in that workshop about
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what should we make of late?
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But there were other questions
that were just as interesting,
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like the role of the propensity score -
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that was a big deal in the 90s
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and econometrics was moving towards that
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and there were a lot of great questions.
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Yeah,
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I learned a huge amount
there from the time I spent--
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(Josh) I think the other thing that Guido and I
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both benefited from
is we both,
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not at the same time, but in
early in our careers, taught
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econometrics with Gary Chamberlain,
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and that was like an
apprenticeship for us, I think.
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I taught a mixed graduate undergrad 1126,
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I don't know if they still have that number,...
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(Isaiah) Ahuh, they do.
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...very interesting course that it had both
graduate and undergraduate enrollment
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and it was relatively applied for an
econometrics class,
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and I learned a lot by teaching that with Gary.
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But in that sense, Harvard was a great place, very flexible there.
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The other thing I remember about Harvard is,
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well I had very good students,
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I taught a lot of wonderful students
who went on to have wonderful careers.
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Also, Harvard as an institution,
you're probably are aware of this, Isaiah,
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as a junior faculty member, they didn't then ask much of us,
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other than teaching our classes.
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We didn't have administrative concerns, to speak of.
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I think I went to two faculty
meetings in my two years at Harvard
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and so we're left--
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You were given a lot of freedom and flexibility.
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Yeah. Yeah. So I went to the chair said,
you know, can I teach this course Reuben?
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And I think it was Friedman
at the time. It was like fine.
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Yeah,
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it wasn't really any concern about what
what it was about and again that was
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very intimidating, experience,
but it was a great experience.
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