Episode One Hundred

Introduction

0:00okay here we go is it my recording name good how do we do this i spent so long um welcome to smith and mark's walk into a bar that's quite all right i i do i forget how to do it welcome to smith and mark's walk into a bar history of economics podcast this is a voice that you haven't heard in quite some time i am scott shiel i am the producer of smith and mark's

0:35walk into a bar and a former co-host and this is welcome to our 100th anniversary this is our 100th

100th Episode Celebration

0:42episode and this is a very special episode we are bringing back everybody who has been on the show in the past and so let me introduce you to past co-host gerardo sarah from the university of manchester how is life in manchester gerardo hey scott good to see you good to see everyone it's been it's been a while in fact and yeah life is good pretty exciting to be back um looking forward to a nice conversation excellent also joining us is carlos eduardo superniac joining us from paris

1:14france where he is a professor at the american university of paris how is life carlos hello everyone very nice to be back to see all of you again uh well we had uh two weeks of gorgeous weather in paris uh that has been cut short today by rain so i don't know what that means right we're back to smith and mark's walking to a bar and the weather all all of a sudden this crap again uh but otherwise everything's fine very happy to be here that's great and of course joining us as always are

Current Hosts Introduction

1:44our current host jennifer john from duke university how's life in durham jen hi it is a beautiful sunny day in durham north carolina yes that's the standard thing yes it always is and chinla chinla akder joining us from akari akra how is how is life in akra hi hi everyone um ancara uh today vegas spring have arrived i can say but it's still a bit cold uh my work is so intense nowadays and i already need a

2:16break and i will be in paris soon actually to join people for the memorial day for daniel dyatkin that we lost last year so i'm really excited to leave uh do a little break and see everyone uh for this day and be together for that uh that's memorial actually that's important i think and i'm so

Francois's Absence

2:42happy to see you today that's great well we are down one person francois is supposed to join us but i suspect we had some miscommunication about the schedule so we're hoping that francois will join us at some point during the recording so uh just to catch us up i i thought we would maybe begin by um gerardo and carlos respectively telling us what they've been doing the last couple of years since they left the show what have they been uh what has been keeping them busy and and uh what are

3:13they up to these days what kind of research projects are they working on what's uh what's keeping them

Research Projects Discussion

3:18active carlos go ahead what do you what do you have to say all right so it's been four years actually right time flies uh four years uh actually five no five years yeah wow that's that's crazy yeah five years since uh i was last uh in the show for the 50th episode that was my last one uh so at that time if i remember correctly i had just started my new job at the american university of paris right so i was still new to friends uh so i'm still there i'm still at the job i like the

3:49job so i'm very happy at the job just applied for a promotion to for professors this year so fingers crossed let's hope for the best uh so everything is good on that front uh the the the year following my departure from the podcast i also became uh i also begin actually a four-year term as a secretary of the history of economic society which is i'm about to finish now so these are my last very last months as secretary so that's been sometimes fun sometimes it's not so fun so it's a mixed bag uh

4:25but it's i've learned a lot it's been a very very great experience uh i'm also now the president of the latin american society for the history of economic thought that i've just started right in this january so i have a two-year term ahead of me so i should be in charge of organizing the next conference uh in sao paulo next year 2027 so you're all invited i'm giving you almost two years of advanced notice right so november 2027 alapis sao paulo i expect to see all of you there uh so

Early Days of the Podcast

4:52that's fun too uh and you know otherwise just uh still publishing a few papers here and there on both on early modern political economy and also on the history of brazilian economics in the post-war my my two main research projects but i won't bore you with with the details of that well that's great i look forward to uh i'll i'll i'll make a an earnest effort to get down to sao paulo for uh for a lot by 2027 that'd be that'd be great uh gerardo what about you what has uh kept you busy these last you've

5:26been about five five and a half years i think six years yeah yeah almost six years i mean after carlos impressive resume i don't know what i got to say but uh uh yeah there's been a few things that that kept me busy one has been of course this just to preempt scott's next question my book is almost done i'm currently working on the revision it'll be it'll be a book on economic knowledge and political imagination in ghana and they will hopefully appear next year uh in parallel with the 70th anniversary of ghana's independence would have been more fitting to wait for the hundred one and wait 30 more years to

6:01be put the last week but actually i'm decided to go to 70s good try to find it you try to find an excuse to put it off for another yes of course absolutely um beyond that i've been doing a few things one is i don't want to say too much because i like this to be a surprise of course carlos is aware of it because of his institutional role as secretary of district economic society i've been working very hard on what has been a very long project that hopefully will provide our community with an excellent research and teaching resource i don't want to say too much but hopefully it's

6:32only a few months away we've been dealing with a few a few issues um lastly i've been trying to really uh i've been working on this project for the past uh three years on the history of economic the history of inequality and crisis in uh in west african thought and this has led me to all sort of interesting places doing some work on nigerian intellectual history but also been going to back to gana a lot i've been going every year the past three years uh doing the kind of field work that i that i really enjoy basically starting from the assumption that the economic ideas that matter and

7:07which are interesting and should be studied and taken seriously are not only those of economists and political philosophers or or so-called intellectuals but also ordinary people so starting from this assumption i've been going to lots of um interesting and perhaps unorthodox places for forestern of economic thought for example i've been interviewing um coffin makers in accra that is this family that for three generations have been producing they call them fantasy coffins they are coffins that are designed

7:39according to the values and the aspirations of those who commission them it could be an aircraft it could be a car it could be a bottle it could be all sorts of things and a banknote so many of them are actually economic signifiers that say very very important things about how this community think about poverty wealth inequality redistribution or a bit a spend actually spent an incredible amount of hours in traffic just that bus stops observing the stickers and the inscriptions at the back of minivans that are used

8:09to transport people in many african cities we could convey very important messages about what is poverty what is wealth and where do they come from and there's many many i could tell you about i just want to cite one that really stood with me which said in chi which is the main language spoken in southern ghana it said which means we sit on wealth and yet we are hungry i thought that was very very uh very very powerful so yeah this is what has been has been keeping me busy let's say

8:42you know i've consistently with the idea that historians of economic thought have lots to learn from anthropologists and vice versa basically you know to go beyond the archive and text and look what else is out there and and uh has anything been happening in your personal life in the last few years that you might want to mention yes i've also got a child which is proving to be very rewarding and very interesting and uh yes i like the way that was like i acquired a child i acquired a small human yes absolutely

9:20that's great one sounds like you when we inevitably invite you back on the show sometime later in this year to discuss your your book it sounds like we'll have a lot of interesting things to discuss so make it a couple of years okay we'll we'll look forward to that for my for my part i've been i guess it's been four years if it's been five years for carlos i think it's been four years going on four years for me since i left the show uh of course i was a guest at one point uh on the show and i spoke at that point about my research and what i was doing and and at this point i'm still pretty much doing the

9:53same research i uh i published a book in 2020 that has turned out to kind of give me a little bit of an ongoing research project uh something of uh analytical engine that i can apply to different questions and problems and so it's almost uh i just pump papers out one after another um which uh doesn't make it sound very good but that's uh that's kind of what i've been doing of course i moved to uh i moved from phoenix arizona to austin texas in july of 2024 and i'm now an associate professor at

10:31the university of austin and i too am going up for full professor this year so hopefully keep your fingers crossed um otherwise um i uh organized a new version of the winter institute for the history and philosophy of economics that we held here in austin in december and carlos and jen both joined us uh participated in that institute it was a great event i think uh went off very well i'm hoping to make that a permanent or semi-permanent ongoing thing it's a matter of finding the money to keep it going

11:07but uh i'm working on that so so we'll see um other than that you know that's been what's keeping me busy

Current Projects Discussion

11:13let's let's ask our current hosts what they're working on these days we uh they're on the show but they rarely ever get a chance to talk about their own project so jen what are you up to these days what uh what's keeping you active so many things so i have a well so okay so here are a couple of things that i'm working on right now so um i have this ongoing project on uh antitrust from a philosophy of science perspective and so not too long ago um mackie panhans who you might also know

11:43from the history of economics uh community and i put out a paper on market definition and we actually just talked a little while ago um still about market definition so there are these questions that you might think um well they are pretty fundamental questions when it comes to antitrust analysis and how things play out in the courtroom and questions like well what's the relevant market even is a really basic and really hard question to answer um so i've got a so i've got some work going on

12:17on in that strand the other and sometimes it overlaps with the antitrust stuff but the other project that i have going on is going on is more centered on issues of measurement um i've taken a recent interest in index numbers which just like give me the philosophical heebie-jeebies they're just weird they should yeah they're weird um and and i'm trying to think about them from the perspective of current accounts of measurement that we have in philosophy and the ways in which index

12:48numbers like do and sometimes really don't fit our assumptions about measurement so those are a couple of things i'm working on interesting very interesting what about you chenla what's uh what what are your projects these days what's keeping you active well actually tomorrow i will give um a lecture something between lecture and talk uh because i was invited there's a tradition in my university it's called learn and connect uh talks and i was invited and i decided to talk a little bit about adam

13:20summit because as you may know that uh this year um wealth of nations uh 250th anniversary and uh monday a student of mine told me uh congratulated me like in like in a celebration mode that monday it was the day that about of nations has been published nine march march march nine nine ninth of march and i didn't

13:50know that detail sometimes students um are very surprising actually and we are in a celebration mood like that so tomorrow i will tell uh to public because that will cover the great public of the university there are many different departments in my university uh i will actually uh sketch the 250 years of economics what happened uh and uh what was the connection with other

14:21disciplines because uh i created a a lecture i mean a class new course uh two years ago and its name is economics and interdisciplinarity where i mentioned the history of um interdisciplinarity between economics and many different fields and many different fields like psychology uh sociology geography biology physics literature anthropology also archaeology and anthropology because they are i mean separated and law

14:56like every other fields about history and um political science are not there because it's so so uh much uh together so it's so mixed and i will tell them a little bit of that so i was preparing that talk for a couple of uh days now um besides that uh i had an idea on uh adam smith i had an interpretation uh of adam smith and i proposed that paper i mean i uh put it uh put i may created a paper out of that interpretation proposed for nissen glass uh uh there will be a conference in june in glasgow uh in glasgow university that will be a conference in june in glasgow university that will be organized by international adam smith community

15:40sorry international adam smith community sorry international adam smith society i'm not a member but it was possible to to send uh an abstract and i was accepted and they told me that and they told me that there was a lot of people and uh you know the it was a harsh competition but and i let they liked my my paper and uh this paper my interpretation of adam smith i will present i will present it in this where you'll be also there so you can come and listen

16:14and also in glasgow uh in june i'm writing that that paper besides uh i write a turkish paper a paper in turkish because for my um associate professor file i have to write a couple of turkish papers that is missing actually and i am trying to write a paper on uh methodological individualism uh the the and the the question research question of that paper is what are the differences between heterogeneous agent and

16:47homogeneous agent so as a great aggregate agent and heterogeneous agent models if you want you know it's related to agent based modeling and all i'm not working on modeling but i worked a bit on i i worked on methodological individualism and i really want to try uh what makes one individual heterogeneous uh in a model new models let's say that was uh triggering me for a while and i tried to write uh a paper um on that not a very

17:19technical paper actually i cannot really put myself into the modeling it's just uh you know qualitative uh research well that's great that sounds just sounds like everybody everybody's keeping busy that's uh that's very good that's very good well uh unfortunately we still

Podcast History Discussion

17:37don't have francois and and i don't want to speak to what francois is working on so uh so we'll we'll leave that we'll leave that unexplored but um we thought that we would talk a little bit today about maybe just give you a bit of background on the history of the show and how it got started and uh yeah what uh what are some of our favorite moments from the show and things like that so just to uh kind of begin that discussion i'll i'll mention that the show really started uh i can't remember the year so i think it was 2017 when was the toronto hes that's when we got the money from

18:12i remember walking down the street with carlos uh somewhere in downtown toronto we were talking about how they just awarded us this money and what we were going to do with the show so 2017 yeah that was 2017. yeah so uh so in 2017 we approached carlos and gerardo and i approached the history of economic society with a proposal to start a podcast and uh we asked for a little bit of money i can't start with the dollar amount was it surprised that it doesn't really cost much money to run these sorts of things so uh we asked for some money for a couple of microphones and um and a mixing board

18:51and what we thought we were going to need uh technically to to create the podcast and we used some of that money also to support the the ongoing storage of the data that you need to need to run a podcast and um but yeah that that's a little bit about the background of the of the podcast what do you what do you guys call us and gerardo what do you remember about the early days of the podcast and sort of getting things started yeah you just you just told the story and it made me think about how

19:22we we did things at the beginning uh and so of course these were pre-covered days and so before the time when video conferencing became a regular part of our lives right i i i had sort of lost track of that but i remember that back then it felt like a much more daunting technical task right uh i remember that we didn't use video for instance right we recorded only with the audio because we were afraid that if we had video on that would crash the connection and the the sound quality would be bad you know so we're very concerned with the technical aspects around it which sounds pretty silly now

19:56uh but yeah yeah i mean we were experimenting right we didn't know how to do this so we were very amateurish um well my my memories of that of that time of the of the beginnings uh so you i mean it was your idea scott you came up with the idea you approached me about it we of course we had been working together uh for the journal right for redham for for many years then so we knew each other quite well and so you approached me to ask if i would be interested in in joining you uh and i said yes even

20:26though and i'll admit to this now i of course i had heard the word podcast thrown around but i actually had not a very clear idea of what a podcast actually was right so it was a very abstruse concept to me that i didn't really you know understand i had hadn't made much of an effort to understand uh uh to to be honest uh i said yes okay well why not let's try to do this uh and then of course i started i tried to find out and figure out what what a podcast actually was uh uh but i was not a podcast

21:02listener back then i'm still not a podcast listener now so that that hasn't changed i was a host for for for for a few years but that has not really turned me into a consumer of podcasts even though i guess i understand the format a bit better right but it was i mean it was it was great i mean of course i i don't i i never regretted saying yes because it was uh it was a really fun uh a really fun time a fun adventure while it lasted yeah but i mean for me it really just it fell from heaven right because i had not not at all uh planned to become a podcaster uh but i'm glad i said yes

21:37what about you gerardo any thoughts from those days it's actually pretty similar in a sense so to this day i'm not a podcast listener and uh it's it's been lots of fun and i was drawn to the playfulness of it i was drawn to the idea of doing it for you guys i thought we would have a a good time but um i also want to uh to bring covet into the picture in the sense that i left the show in the winter of 2020 and the reason why i guess i started enjoying it a bit less is precisely that it started

22:07feeling like an extension of the lives we already led by that point you put your headphones on you speak into your microphone uh and so uh by contrast the episodes i remember most fondly are those that i had a chance to record in the same location as the speaker i really remember how much lovelier it was just to be in the same room with someone to look into each other's eyes i know that there's a few that really come to mind the one with marianne johnson in manchester felwinsa in nantes the one in nigeria which would be was perhaps the most exciting talking to all these

22:40different people and that already raised methodological questions that i still grapple with these days but for um for obvious reasons the one that i found myself thinking about most often

Favorite Moments Discussion

22:54is of course the one we did with mauro boyanowski maura and i were in cambridge together we were working on our john robinson paper we were going to the archives every day we were eating together we were teasing each other a lot i used to always comment on how much the place had changed since he was a student so i have all these background memories to that single episode or just walking you know alongside the canal and just sitting together chatting about music and stuff so obviously after mauro's passing i came to you know to give much more weight to those days we spent together in

23:25cambridge of which podcast was was a part so i thought this would be a good chance to to remember mauro of course um yes yes uh every opportunity we can take to remember mario we all miss carlos what were you going to say yeah i also have an interesting memory from uh from an episode that was that i was recorded in the presence of the guests i think it was actually the first i'm pretty sure it was the first episode that we had a chance to do that because it was episode two right so first episode was christina marcuso so we all recorded it uh in separate locations uh but then for the second

24:01episode at that time i happened to be at duke and so we decided to have kevin hoover as the as the the guest and so i was in the room with kevin uh at at somewhere at the university i don't remember where so we sat down we set up the mic uh and what's what struck me about that interview was that so we were starting and so we were very concerned about the structure of the show right so we were really into scripting it and coming up with questions and having you know this the set of steps that we

24:33wanted to move through during the interview to make sure that we didn't step in each other's toes and that uh you know we got the message across so we're very concerned with that uh and so when we approached kevin uh when i talked to kevin uh at duke and said okay so we're going to prepare questions and we're going to send them to you so you can think about them and come up with your answers and no no don't do that i don't want to see the questions beforehand right so i want i want it to be spontaneous right so don't send me the questions just ask me the questions and that's that's how we did it right so he was there in the room and of course we had our questions we knew the question but

25:05he didn't and he was just uh riffing on the questions that we were that we were throwing his way and so that was that was a very interesting early experience for me at least yeah i i remember um well it's funny how um different people are different guests are in terms of their expectations for what it's what it's like to be a guest right um there are guests like kevin who uh who don't really i don't look at the questions we always send the questions in advance but um some some guests don't

25:37look at them um some of them but other guests uh in fact our friend uh james morrison comes to mind i remember james had all of his had all of his responses basically written out and i think what you listen what you hear on the episode which is a very good episode james is a really interesting guy um is is basically james what what james had written down in response to the uh to our questions and so he he was uh he i don't think he um improvised very much uh you know my memories of the of the

26:09the beginning of the show i i i think i've mentioned this on the show before that the original inspiration uh was i i had been a podcast listener at the time for a couple of years i was one of those people who had been drawn into listening to podcasts by i think it was serial the the original true crime podcast that at least in the states got everybody interested in podcasting and um one of the podcasts that i listened to a lot at the time was a show i believe it's still still going on uh called

26:44the partially examined life and we basically stole the model of the partially examined life for our podcast uh the partially examined life is three hosts um they're former graduate students in philosophy who have maintained an interest in philosophy they never finished their phds but they've made maintained an interest in philosophy then they just sit down and talk about a particular topic or they have a guest and so that was the model that we really uh adopted and i purposely approached gerardo and carlos

27:17as a prospective co-host precisely because i thought that we could uh engage in the kind of banter that i really liked from the partially examined life and so um i was looking for people who could be spontaneous who could be funny who could be um obviously intelligent uh on the fly and uh like carlos mentioned we had been working together for five or six years at that point as co-editors of re of uh research in the history of economic thought and methodology now review of the history of economic

27:52thought and methodology and i had known gerardo from our time together as postdocs at duke in 2013-2014 and um he and i uh bonded became brothers during that time and um there were there were no other people um that i wanted to do the show with so they were the they were the first two people that i approached um you know one thing that i will say i think that i've had i've heard this question from some people in the community is what is the nature of the relationship between our show and

28:25ceteris never paribus which is uh which is run by our friend and colleague maria bach uh and um both those shows sort of appeared i think we may have even produced our first episodes within the first month of each other um both those shows appeared around the same time and there was uh briefly a discussion uh when we found out uh through through the network that uh that they were working on a podcast it was ironic because at the time that ceteris never paribus got started uh the three people

28:59that were involved were maria bach erwin decker and reinhardt schumacher and reinhardt and i were co-authors at the time we've been working on uh several projects together and i was not aware that he was working on a podcast and he was not aware that i was working on a podcast so there was uh briefly a moment of considering whether we wanted to combine forces and just have one podcast and we talked about it and we talked with them about what they wanted to do and in the end i think we decided that our

29:30our respective models just didn't really match up very well we had this kind of three person three host model where we were going to talk about uh particular topics or talk to particular guests and they wanted to do something a little bit different they at least the beginning of their show they recorded seminars and they would they would they would post those um so it was just a different kind of model and in the end we found that it didn't really fit very well so we decided to not combine forces but um we've always been uh we've always been happy i mean i think that um i know carlos

30:03has appeared on on on maria's show i believe i think i don't know gerardo have you ever been on have you been on as well yes yes yes i know it was great i'm i i'm i'm due i'll give the audience a bit of a preview that uh i'm due to uh we're going to be recording a a for the first time ever we're going to be recording a a ceteris never never pair of us and smith and mark's episode together when i visit la sonde in may uh so that'll be the first time that we do kind of a combined episode so i'll be with

30:35francois and maria in la sonde and i believe the plan is that francois will ask us both questions about adventures and podcasting in the history of economic thought so you have that to look forward to but let's bring our our other co-hosts in so so jen and chilla if i recall correctly jen you were the we brought you in first and then chinla came in later what do you remember about your your early experiences on the show so my first experience on the show was as a guest and that was

31:07a while ago at this point and i feel like i feel like i was such a child back in the day it just feels so long ago i know like the thing that's really difficult about podcasting is that it's actually really hard to make something sound like a natural but interesting conversation it's actually an achievement when you can do something like that um and that's something that that's just been throughout like that i it's on my mind a lot when i think about this podcast um but you know i just

31:43i believed in what it was doing um and i wanted to be involved because i'm primarily a philosopher uh and a philosopher of science and and it just seemed important there there are these movements within philosophy of science the history of philosophy science and um integrated history and philosophy of science approaches that i think if you're going to think about science you have to think about their history too and be sensitive to that um and so that was something that really really appealed to me uh then and now about having my foot in the history community uh in this sort of way

32:19and i'm still here so i still enjoy it um and and yeah and part of part of the learning process is learning how to you know be this professional conversationalist um and so that's been something that i think about a lot when we're recording um yeah yeah that actually goes i mean that goes to uh one of my major reasons for eventually leaving the show was just the feeling that i couldn't

32:52i couldn't serve both as host and as engineer of the show at the time we were at the time we were using a mixing board uh ever since the uh the uh invention of zoom uh we haven't had to use a mixing board zoom is much more effective i think uh much it's a much better tool than skype was um we don't have the bandwidth issues that we always that carlos mentioned earlier that we were concerned about in the days of skype and um the recording that comes out of zoom is relatively easy to edit so i no

33:29longer use a mixing board so um it's actually it wouldn't it wouldn't be as burdensome now to be a co-host as it was at the time but i just got to a feeling over time that i was um i was monopolizing too much of the conversation as i am again today uh and um just not able to focus on what guests were saying and be able to respond with intelligent questions and so i thought it was a time for me to leave the show and bring on full-time hosts who could really concentrate on talking to the guests

34:05and that i could just sit in the background and worry about the post-production things and pre-production things and things like that so what about you chenla what do you remember about you were also a guest first and then eventually joined the show as a co-host what do you remember about your early days well first of all i would like to say that 2026 will be the year of collaborations you will create this podcast um in lausanne in collaboration with them and also hes and eshet will

34:35collaborate so yeah that's great come together that's so nice uh secondly i would like to say that i am not uh a podcast listener neither but uh i was the listener of your podcast and um um when i'm actually yes i was invited to the podcast in 2021 i checked out the the date and my first episode was the 48th one so i was the actually a guest it was 15 september 2021 with carlos

35:13uh and uh you uh scott and jen but actually i was in paris at the time that was a total coincidence and uh i was in paris and so so does carlos also and we actually were uh next to each other that was a very nice uh wonderful start for me because i was so excited excited and i was questioned and i was feeling uh like uh my english will be okay and i was actually worried very much um for my english in

35:51general but i felt like it was okay and um you were understanding my answers uh so that was a very sweet memory uh then actually i have another memory about uh the podcast um um i was a listener of your podcast as i told you and uh in 2018 i guess before that uh i was in new york for hes conference and uh i met you actually you wanted to create an episode after the gala dinner uh in the hall actually

36:26at the same the same place and i was seeing you i saw you preparing the microphones and preparing yourself for the episode and i was so excited i remember that i come next to you and i told you things but i cannot remember what did i tell you what you told me what happened after uh did i listen the episode i was next to you like you know just integrating myself to actually i don't remember this

36:57was just cut i think i was so much excited and i was just i had the moment i had that memory what happened actually after my i can tell you i do remember gerardo i remember i remember chila saying that she was using the podcast for teaching purposes which made me so so happy to hear that's the thing from that conversation because that's something that to be completely honest with you i hadn't even fully considered right so that made me incredibly happy i never thought of it specifically as a

37:29teaching resource so it would be more of an inside of community kind of thing but actually it's so thank you chila i still remember that with much gratitude um yeah i remember that as well and that was one of the that was one of the um the first kind of realizations that the that the podcast had an audience and that people were that liked it and that they were actually using it for for for you know educational purposes that was great yes exactly the same thing today too um and yes exactly

38:00actually uh i have recitations for my history of economics classes so uh i choose a podcast episodes as recitation material i asked students to listen the podcast and uh create um a debate a conversation on on the podcast how they uh what they learned what how they found it what was the debate questions responses in the podcast and i seriously did it for many years uh then actually when i met you of course

38:34i was very happy actually and also be a part of it at the moment uh where you actually realize you really realized yeah it was great i bet but do you remember okay so so the reason why chinla's uh portion of that episode was cut uh was not it had nothing to do with the with the content it had to do with the fact that when we sat down at the gala dinner in new york with uh with people mingling around i placed the microphone in the wrong direction i placed it i placed it so that the so that the microphone was

39:10facing the crowd rather than the people that were speaking at the table and so when i got back and listened to the recording uh you couldn't you could barely hear our voices all you heard was the mingling of the people in the crowd and you know chidla's voice was very quiet in the background and our voices were very quiet in the background but you couldn't hear what we were actually saying so it just sounded like crowd noise so unfortunately we were not able to use that part of the recording and so that's why go ahead carlos what were you going to say you should have kept it anyway it was it was it was an

39:44interesting idea that we had because we wanted to do that i mean we had been toying with this idea for for already for for a couple of years of doing something during the conference and so what what we imagined was that we're going to do this sort of red carpet thing right we're going to have a table during the banquet and we're going to invite people people are just passing by we're going to call them are going to sit down and talk to us uh and we're going to have this very informal uh type of conversation i think it was a good idea uh but the problem is that the background noise was just overwhelming right so yeah it was my mistake and i was i was trying to keep people away from the table

40:20telling them go speak somewhere else rather than here right to make it better but it was it was just impossible we couldn't use any of the any of the of the of the material afterwards and then we ended up inviting several of the people who had agreed to sit down and talk to us right as a sort of let's make up to them because they yeah that was exactly we can't really that was exactly it yeah that was exactly it we had we had we had uh invited all these people to sit down with us at the at the dinner and then when the when it didn't pan out we thought well we need to bring them back for their own

40:51uh standalone episodes and we ended up mostly prize winners if i'm not mistaken that was kind of the natural the easiest way to select people well i remember we did a i remember we did uh didn't we do a we did like a four person sit down with some younger scholars yes that's right matt panhans was one of them so we recorded that and i think that's what we ended up uh posting as the episode but we had also done this like like carlos said sort of red carpet thing um where we wanted to talk to people in a more natural setting i think we've always had a goal of doing smith and march walk into a bar in a bar

41:28so doing it at the at the dinner was the next best thing um maybe one of these days we'll all be at the same in the same place at the same time and we can actually over a few drinks try to record an episode that would be an interesting that would be an interesting experience john has actually got an interesting suggestion in the chat as to why we should have kept that recording

41:53i mean during covet time right the the whole thing that one of the things that got really big was asmr videos and audio so we should post it so that if anyone ever misses the feeling of being at a busy busy history of an economic society conference what does the asmr mean i'm i'm i'm out of the swing of things what does that mean so asmr is the acronym stands for autonomous sensory meridian response okay but

42:23basically what it's an umbrella term now used these days for um for a variety of media that is supposed to evoke certain kinds of nice pleasant physical sensations um like as if you know your brain is getting all tingly okay so you'll find lots of interesting kinds of content on the internet enough said

42:56all right fair enough well let's talk a little bit i don't think i don't think scott has understood i don't know it's i don't think so either look at his face i guess it's something supposed to relax you to make you feel better so crowd noise can be soothing i guess that's i think that's where i'm wrong uh rate like rain or you know plus cafe sounds and uh but there are some very elaborate ones like their entire videos of people getting their hair brushed oh man i'm glad i'm not i'm not

43:28active on the internet i just keep me away from this stuff jilla what were you gonna say uh maybe we can think about doing an episode in this i wish jen would be there also but most of us will be in this actually why not to think about it um invite someone uh who is there and to really do doing there uh in person there actually we could try it i'm open to i'm open to trying it um um yeah let's keep that let's keep that in mind in fact now that i think about it uh we're gonna

44:01need the way i'm calculating things we're gonna need an episode for we're gonna need episodes for june and july uh before we go on break for august so um we might do that that's a that's a good idea but i thought we would talk next maybe about um what are your impressions of how what impact if any the show has had on the ht community do you get uh do you do people talk to you about it when your conferences and things like that i know that i i hear from people

44:32occasionally what do you guys say yes so well we were always very concerned with this from the beginning right so how to make it appealing right how to make it more than just a boring conversation about papers and books right uh so it goes uh in a sense to what uh to what jennifer was saying earlier right how to make it sound a bit more natural a bit more uh more appealing right more entertaining and more spontaneous i guess uh i'm not sure if we've been very successful with that i think our

45:06success has been limited on that front so a lot of what we did was you know in a sense just uh inside baseball talk right it's just uh scholars talking to scholars about uh the scholarly things that they have been doing right so i think our success was limited uh but still all right i was uh of course when you start a podcast of course you were expecting that people are going to hear it right that's why you do it uh but i i remember very distinctly the the first times that i started receiving

45:37feedback right people writing to me about the show saying well i really like this episode or there was this thing that was said that i thought was great or that i thought was awful so when i when it really you know concretely dawned on me that uh that that there were people out there who were listening to us uh it was both of course uh rewarding but it was also strange because then all of a sudden it became more serious right it was not just you know uh us guys just you know uh saying whatever came to our mind so it made me a bit more self-conscious i think uh with time i guess i i just i stopped

46:13caring to an extent uh but early on it made me definitely a bit more self-conscious to realize that you know all these people that we work with the people from the community the people that we respect that we work with uh that they were actually you know you know taking time from their lives to you know sit down and listen to whatever we're saying so that was that was an interesting but a little bit strange experience yeah what do you guys uh gerardo what do you think yeah no absolutely my experience also resonates uh with with scott's but um thinking about the feedback i

46:45received over the years i'd still maintain that the conversation with chinla was was the most rewarding because there was so much enthusiasm and again students were brought explicitly into the picture for the first time so for me there was there was a bit of a game of a game changer in a sense but looking back i wonder you know if wanted to reach a broader audience then i guess the format would have required uh quite a few changes perhaps episode should have been shorter snappier in a sense but i don't know but that's not what we were aiming at either because we still wanted to maintain a certain

47:19degree of um scholarly discourse right it was about staying on top of things and perhaps from that point of view we succeeded it's still a way um i think to to raise interest into what people are doing so in a sense it is it is an it is an experiment in community building uh which at the end of the day i think is what justifies the existence of our podcast of shatter is non paribus and i think both have been incredibly successful at trying to do that bringing people a bit closer because maybe you know it requires a different investment right you might not have time or the energy to

47:55read someone's book especially if it's not strictly in your field but it might just easier to put a podcast on and get a sense of what people are doing and who knows maybe collaborations might blossom from that i don't know but so i kind of like their thought but yes yeah i i i get the sense that um i i mean what what carla said is true we really struggled at the beginning to sort of find uh what exactly even though we had this model in mind of three people talking about interesting subjects uh we we did

48:26want to make it interesting for people outside the history of economic thought uh while also making it um you know serious enough or rigorous enough that it would it would be interesting to people inside the community right and so finding that balance has been difficult i don't know that we've ah here's francois he's joining us awesome how great hello francois did you have the wrong time did we give you the wrong time did you started one hour ago yeah we started at one so we're about halfway through but

49:01we're but we're we'll be glad that you're here dude don't worry about it we've got everybody here it's awesome it's no problem it's not a problem we're just talking a little bit about um uh sort of the original conception of the show and maybe what the show has uh has accomplished and um uh some feedback that we received from people through the years so so i was just saying that um we really did sort of struggle to find that sweet spot and i think in the end yeah we probably did end up with a model

49:32that is a little bit more inside baseball than we originally uh were aiming at but you know finding uh finding that sweet spot where you know what's going to be interesting to a non-academic

49:54that that an academic can speak to right so i mean how many episodes we couldn't really do many episodes of things like so here's something that i imagine a non-academic might be interested in about the history of economic stuff right so uh what is the significance of adam smith something like that well what is the significance of the wealth of nations uh what is the what is the grand takeaway in the hyacinths debate or something like that those that those might be questions that would be interesting to a non-academic but i don't think we could do very many of those right i just don't think

50:29there are that many subjects that we could make kind of the core of a of a half hour long or plus episode um whereas when you just bring someone in to talk about their research they're almost always capable of filling up almost always because we're academics we can go on and on they're almost always capable of filling up that space so um i you know i will say that one of the things that i like about the show and and the impact that it's had is that um you know i get the feeling and i and i look at it

51:02when i look at our statistics on the downloads i get the feeling that once an episode comes out pretty much everybody in the community is listening to it at the same time and i kind of like that there's something there's something neat about the idea that everybody's you know listening to us or listening to our latest episode within the first 24 hours or so that it comes out um and so you see that in the downloads you know there's always a thousand downloads in the first 24 hours and so um my hope is that everybody is uh it's kind of like a modern a fireplace chat fireside chat that we're having with

51:34the rest of the the economics community jen you were going to say something and then carlos

51:40oh i was just going to make a silly comment about how you you you made this comment um oh what will be of interest to the public audience you know what is the meaning of adam smith or what do we what have we learned from um you know from these sorts of debates and there's one very short answer which is that nobody knows anything but that wouldn't be that wouldn't be very good how many episodes can we do along those lines carlos what were you going to say no i was just going to add

52:10that also one of the uh feed month feedback that we received in the early days still the podcast was from uh spencer banzeth who was and i think still is a regular listener of the show so you always talk to us about about about it and when so spencer wrote to me i think to all three of us at the time i don't remember exactly uh saying something along the lines that well the podcast was a fantastic archival source for the future of the history of economics community and that struck me because i don't think

52:41that was at all what we had in mind when we started it's not what we were trying to accomplish when we started the podcast but still it was very high compliment coming from from spencer right so i'll take that i'll take that uh and count it as a win yeah that's great it's um it is interesting to think about how the nature of historical research has been changed by um the advent of the internet the advent of email i remember uh gerardo and i probably had conversations about this when we were together at duke

53:12that you know uh the work that we were doing the archives was 50 years later going to look much different right rather than rather than searching through documents we're going to be searching through scans of emails and things like that and uh you can imagine uh a world in which uh quotations from this podcast are taken and placed in future uh research papers and that would be that would be awesome if that were to happen um if it hasn't happened already so hopefully not any of mine uh well yeah just keep our uh our extra comments off the uh off the uh the the the the exactly there

53:49are a few that come to mind which i shan't repeat here but absolutely mostly from you scott i think you're the one who would end up having more trouble if not well i mean someone a colleague of mine said to me last week that uh scott what i love about you is you just say things uh and that's for better and that's for better and for worse i mean it's it's it's my it's my gift and my curse i just say things um anyways now that francois is here let's bring him into the conversation francois tell us a little

54:21bit well first of all tell us what you're working on these days what's keeping you active what are your research projects and then maybe speak a little bit about your memories of first coming on the show being a guest and then coming on as a as a co-host what do you recall okay so hi everybody i'm happy to see you all um i remember being invited in in the sixth episode of the show and this was really a nice conversation because it came at the right time when i had to uh the opportunity to sit down

54:55and to um reflect on my past work on russian economics out and that was really um interesting for me um and i felt that the the conversation was more natural that than i hoped because i am one of this person who is more afraid to speak um in in public than others maybe i don't know uh or we all feel that uh and uh this was really a nice uh a very nice opportunity and then i became

55:27a listener of the show um and when i received this invitation uh to join the the the podcast i thought that that i should try to bring something in the show that um um yeah that i could bring and i think what i did uh uh i mean it's always difficult to join something that already has a story and to and to

55:59uh inflect it in in some other way because it's it's really well working it is already uh uh functioning in a in in a good way and it's impressive that every month uh 11 times a year there is an episode on the 15 and scott is really uh wonderful in this respect to to achieve that even sometimes in very uh uh difficult conditions um and um what what i'm happy that i could bring to the show is to bring the

56:34attention to um because i'm myself working on on non-western economic salt and i could uh for example bring to the show people uh either coming from for example uh xenia lopo from ukraine or thomas from india or kayo kumizaki from japan from non-western uh places or non-western uh topics and i think that with uh host changing over time it brings different topics subject and and diversity in in gender places

57:13and and i think this is important um and um i'm happy to to have been able to bring some of that but i think that it also means that at some point i will have to leave the show because to give out the opportunity to others uh to uh to take uh to take the place and um yeah i think that i mean we we really had great hosts uh great guests like even a noble prize in economics but it's not necessarily the

57:48status of the status of the people it's how people are able to convey what they are telling and in that sense i really feel that some people uh some guests were really good at conveying stuff that you would never find in their papers and um that are really uh an entry point to the laboratory of the research uh topics and i think that this is um yeah that this is really great um i think you also asked me

58:21i was just gonna just follow up with you that you know you mentioned the diversity of the of the interests of the of the host and that's always been um part of the that's always been part of what we've been trying to trying to accomplish um it was convenient that that when i first had the idea that carlos and gerardo were the first people who came to mind that the three of us together kind of made a good group because of our different interests right carlos is is interested in in pre-classical

58:51political economy and in the the the economic history the history of economic thought in brazil gerardo has this very unique interest in in uh ghanaian uh history of economic thought and african economic thought whereas i'm a boring hayekian and uh you know so between the three of us we were all doing kind of different things in the history of economic thought and that's that's carried forward when we brought on the the new hosts jen is more of a traditional philosopher of science with some interest in in in economics and in chinlay is a is a mill scholar with interest in in classical

59:27political economy and francois you you just everything that you touch is interesting so um it's really been a good a good model that we've been able to maintain moving forward and for the record we're not looking for you i'm not looking for you to leave anytime soon so please please stick around but yes i did ask you also what your current research projects are what are you working on these days

59:51yeah so these days i'm working on um i'm preparing a little paper on on economic pedagogy and uh and uh and uh especially uh i i came across this piece written by a mathematical uh economist of the 19th beginning of 20th century ladislaus von bolkevich who wrote a paper on the organization of economic seminars in

1:00:21germany at the beginning of the 20th century and um he he tries he published that paper in a russian journal of uh of um education of the ministry of education to convince the russians to implement these seminars which are i uh pedagogical tool uh which have a lot of advantage to bring people to research to help them become independent in the research etc but which has also um disadvantages like

1:00:54perpetuating school of salts um indoctrinating students into what the professors want them to do and i'm currently this week working on trying to contextualize this uh this piece about economic pedagogy uh because yeah pedagogy is something within the field of history of economics so that interests me uh beyond my traditional topics of planning uh on which i'm currently uh working on

1:01:27yeah that's an interesting subject uh economic pedagogy is is something that i think about a lot as we're uh creating a new curriculum at our university for economics and social sciences so anyways let's uh let's maybe try to bring this home with kind of try to wrap things up here i don't want to spend too much time or take too much of your time everybody uh we also don't want to be overindulgent in talking

Conclusion and Future Plans

1:01:50about ourselves in our little podcast here so so maybe i'll just ask um just to you know for your your thoughts on favorite moments in the past favorite guests and this can be moments when you were on the show as a as a host or not on the show as a host just uh what what remember what memories other than things we've already talked about what memories come to mind anybody want to jump in here yeah i mean there there have been many uh nice moments of course uh over the years uh that the the ones that i that i enjoyed the most i think the ones that i enjoy the most recording and the ones

1:02:22that i enjoyed the most listening afterwards were well perhaps not surprisingly to scott and gerardo were the literature review episodes right so those were really were really cool and i was just thinking about this while i heard uh again jennifer uh mentioning a a while ago the the question of naturalness and spontaneity i think maybe that was the the key now that i think back on it uh that made those episodes uh so so interesting to me is that whenever we were before a guest right so there's

1:02:54there's a decorum right there's an etiquette right we have to behave nicely right we don't want to you know be idiots in front of people that we that we respect and that we and that we work with whereas when it was just the three of us talking about things that we thought were interesting right we felt much more more free i think to just speak our minds and and and yeah much easier to be idiots much easier to be idiots exactly right we could we could just be idiots without without any consequences so so so i think that that's what made them to me at least uh more uh more rewarding as as as a host

1:03:30but also more interesting in terms of of their content so i really i have a they have a special place in my heart for sure that's very nice of you to bring it this up carlos but some form of censorship still applied i have a very vivid recollection of this literature review episode we recorded in which we actually selected two papers each but then we ended up releasing only half of them and that's also because one of the papers i selected was completely trashed by scott shield so we it was just a very spontaneous conversation but we thought it would not do anyone a favor do you remember this scott anyway

1:04:04and i have no i have no memory of it whatsoever okay i'll tell you i'll tell you this i just say right spontaneity again after i went and i presented this paper and said this is beautiful it's amazing and scott said things that were not worth uh reproducing so we decided to just kill that and keep the other bit of the literature review so there's still some dynamics there's the price you pay for the spontaneity sometimes i put lots of work into reviewing that paper scott just saying i apologize gerardo maybe maybe maybe there'll be a uh you know an unreleased moments from uh from

1:04:36the podcast episode at some point we'll just collect all the things you're gonna be the only one you're you're gonna be the only one who's in trouble if that happens i'm pretty i'm pretty safe gerardo tell me tell me what the paper is i'll review it on another i'll tell you well if not this i'll send you an email but it's okay that's that's usually how things go i i will say for my part i mean my this is going to be a little bit strange i'm being attacked by dogs right now i have two dogs that are are driving me crazy right now so i'm trying to trying to do multiple things at once but i will say for my

1:05:07part that uh and this is this will be a bit um maybe an idiosyncratic thing to say but uh one of my fondest memories of the early days of the podcast especially is the realization over time that i didn't have to overwork the episodes in the post-production in the editing uh if you go back and listen to the uh the first handful of episodes that we did i was uh cutting out cutting out everything i was cutting out all the ums i was cutting out uh you know everything that was not um uh a straightforward

1:05:40answer to to the question that had been posed and uh that that meant that it was taking me 10 to 12 hours to edit an episode way too much time way too much time so over time i stopped overworking the edit the uh editing of the episodes it became much easier it now only takes about an hour to edit the episodes because i leave most of the ums in unless they're really distracting and i uh i don't try to overwork the episode so that was a was a realization that um that actually if you didn't

1:06:13do that over editing it sounded much more natural even if the guest was umming and owing and umming it's it's a more it's a more natural conversation than to try to fix all of those issues so what about you what about jen and uh china francois any any special memories from the last few years on the show go ahead china of course uh the one where i was the guest was so exciting for me so this is uh unforgettable for me but i also was very excited um when actually we invited um a noble uh winner uh sorry

1:06:50uh no a noble prize actually no noble prize winner in in economics um actually we invited uh edmund professor edmund palps director of the center of capitalism and society at colombia university uh winner of the noble prize in 2006. it was the first time i saw someone who won the noble prize and i was um i had that opportunity to talk uh to him ask questions it was so exciting for me i remember

1:07:23but during that episode we had some connection problems i also remember that it was a little bit cut but um i mean that didn't actually um uh that that didn't um um actually uh erase the effect of that episode on me i can say this one more yeah that was a bit of a challenging episode to record and and edit just because of the connection issues but it was a it was a wonderful opportunity to uh to meet with professor phelps like you said that was uh very unique not every day that we get to

1:07:56talk to nobel prize winners jana francois what do you think did i add something yeah by all means and there is always a question in mind when you will be you were also the guest actually once right we we finally yeah i don't have to do it again i've done i've done my i've done my duty as a guest i don't have to do it again we really insisted actually you didn't want and we made a great pressure on you to actually accept to make you accept our invisibility yes i purposely i purposely i said

1:08:28that i would be a guest but only i i have wanted a year to go by from the time that i left the show until i would appear as a guest i didn't want to be i always felt and again i feel this way today i always felt like i uh i occupied too much of the conversation on the show and uh that was another reason that was another reason why i left jen francois what do you what are you guys what are your fondest memories um yeah there were many good memories but i i remember two in particular uh one

1:08:59is as a listener i remember very vividly having listened to my first um episode it was maria christina marcuzzo i think it was one of the very first episode and i listened to that and i say wow wow that's um that's cool that's really cool because uh you um i was listening to her speaking about the archives and and and and how you go and dig and and interpret and all this and and i

1:09:29thought oh it's it's a kind of um mirror you know you you you work in a field you that was not used to be shown um in in yeah in this oral way and i thought that uh i would be very interested to hear more episodes because um because yeah it um it it it was a great experience to to hear history of economic thought

1:10:00coming alive uh in this in this matter and the second um i was really um impressed by the conversation we had with peter but care uh who i found extremely generous in the way he um he discussed and unveiled

1:10:22his yeah his way of teaching his dogs his ideas and how he works and this was really a very good memory for me pete is uh pete is uh nothing if not generous he is generous to a fault he has been uh a very important person for my career and uh i say that even though i've spent a fair amount of my time criticizing pete in writing so no he's he's very he's very generous and he's very kind and uh and he was a wonderful guest um jen what do you have to say you're you're you're now basically the main you're the

1:10:55introduced you're the mc the master of ceremonies on the show how do you feel about that oh well it's pretty great i don't mind occupying the spot that scott once occupied but as far as favorite moments go they're all my favorite obviously well thank you so much guys um for our audience i will say that we have uh we have episodes in the

1:11:25can for the next few months and we have a planned episode we've already mentioned some of those so the show is not going anywhere i don't know that i can promise you another hundred episodes but we'll try we'll we'll do our best so uh everybody thank you so much for taking the time to to join us today and um i look forward to uh seeing you and and talking to you in the future most of us will be together in nice in at the end of may and maybe we'll record an episode there and um yeah thanks so much

1:11:57guys thank you so much thank you very much lovely seeing everyone see you soon guys bye-bye join us again next month for another episode of smith and mark's walk into a bar a history of economics economics podcast