Make Me Smart July 7, 2023

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Reema Khrais 

Alright, I think this is the first time we’ve hosted something together Meghan.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

It is ! I’m excited. Hey, everybody. I’m Megan McCarty Carino. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make today make sense. It is Friday, July 7.

Reema Khrais

And I’m Reema Khrais, host of the Marketplace podcast, This is Uncomfortable. Kimberly is out today. And Kai is on assignment traveling in China with Treasury Secretary Yellen. So you’ve got two fill-in hosts. It’ll be a good time. If you’re listening to the pod, thank you for joining us. And if you’re on the YouTube live stream for Economics on Tap, hello.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Well, we’ve got you know, we’ve got the usual we’ve got our drinks, we’ve got our news.It’ll be fun. But first up, let’s let’s talk about drinks, right?

Reema Khrais

Because I have got what we call a date shake. Are you familiar with that?

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Whoo. Lovely.

Reema Khrais

Yes. So it is a palm spring date shake. Yeah, this is my first time making this. It’s been on my mental to do list for a while. I used to live next to this smoothie shop in Los Angeles. And I once bought a date shake that was very overpriced, probably like 13, $14. And I’ve been committed to try to recreate it. And so today was the day I found a recipe on Bon Appetit. made some adjustments to it, but basically you toast walnuts. And then you soak some dates, and you combine it and then you add some ice cream and cinnamon and and that’s pretty much it. And it’s I would read it like six out of 10 it’s very, very sweet.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Oh! I mean there’s soaking involved. There’s I imagined so yeah. I know there’s like there’s a famous place in the desert, right that does like these date shakes right?

Reema Khrais 

Yeah I didn’t realize that when I was looking for recipes, I kept seeing these date shake recipes that connect back to Palm Springs. And so I looked into it, it’s really fascinating. Apparently, Palm Springs is responsible for 95% of the country’s dates. And it goes back to like the early 1900s. The Department of Agriculture was like yes, the Coachella Valley, which includes Palm Springs, is the perfect place to cultivate dates. Because it gets really really hot there. You know, there’s not a lot of humidity makes it the ideal site to grow them. And they imported them from North Africa and the Middle East, which you know, I’m Middle Eastern, which maybe explains my affinity for dates. But I didn’t realize that connection to Palm Springs

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Who doesn’t love dates?

Reema Khrais

Yeah, so it’s it’s good. I think I need to make some adjustments though. I used Halo top ice cream, instead of like the good…

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Ohhh, that’s your problem!

Reema Khrais 

I know I think it muted some of the flavors. It’s not. It’s not, but I have some water.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

I’m not a fan of a halo.

Reema Khrais 

And I’ll try it out again. What are you drinking?

Meghan McCarty Carino 

So I am drinking a it’s like a non-alcoholic spritzer. It’s this brand. I’ve been trying out some like non-alcoholic, different drinks. It’s this brand Weekday Vibes, bitter orange spritz. And it is it’s kind of a base of like de-alcoholized wine with kind of like bitter orange flavor. And of course got a little got a garnish it up you know zuzz it a bit. Yeah.

Reema Khrais 

It looks pretty. Wait what are you using for the garnishes. Is that a grapefruit?

Meghan McCarty Carino 

It’s an orange. Just to go with the bitter orange theme that makes that makes I wish I had had like a blood orange or something that would be more you know, a little bit a little bit more special than a regular old orange but it does the job and man I do have like a large ice cube.

Reema Khrais 

How do you To make those large ice cubes you just have the…

Meghan McCarty Carino 

I have a mold. It’s a, mine is not a silicone mold, but it’s I think it’s like a some sort of rubber mold that makes the large, the large ice.

Reema Khrais 

It just feels fancy. I love it

Meghan McCarty Carino 

It does. Yeah, just feels more special.

Reema Khrais 

All right. Well, why don’t we start talking about the news? Just get right to it.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Yeah just jump into it.

Reema Khrais

Do you want to the news? Would you like to go first?

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Yeah, sure, sure. So I’m sort of continuing a theme that we have been on this week on on Make Me Smart kind of looking at this new Twitter killer, Threads, from Meta aka, formerly known as Facebook. So according to some reporting from Semafor, Twitter has threatened to sue meta over its new app Threads. In a letter to Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, which was seen by Semafor, a Twitter lawyer accused Meta of stealing trade secrets and intellectual property in its creation of Threads in part by hiring dozens of former Twitter staff, which I think is an interesting point, given that there were a lot of unemployed Twitter staff around after they did some mass layoffs. Meta has, you know, called the accusations baseless said no one from Twitter worked on the app. You know, who knows. But I think it is just sort of indicative of how this is kind of cutting a little close to the bone for Twitter, this is the first really big competitor in a line of different, you know, competitors that have popped up, including Bluesky, who’s, you know being led by

Reema Khrais

Are you on Bluesky?

Meghan McCarty Carino 

I am on Bluesky, I have done like almost nothing with it, I have to say I’m not, I’m not a real like an early adopter type. And I think it gets to why Threads appears to be so successful early on, you know, it got like 30 million downloads in the first day, which exceeded even previous to that, like ChatGPT had been the most quickly downloaded app in history. But this was even faster. And I think that, you know, the fact that it’s from an already existing and very large social media platform sort of overcomes some of the lag in network effects that happen with all of these. Like, Bluesky, I’m like, “Okay, I’m not sure you know, I don’t know if I want to invest the time in like going and re-following everyone that I follow on Twitter.” Like, I kind of dabbled in Mastodon for a little bit and was like the same thing. I kind of like, I want to, I want to wait till the dust settles a little bit, before I figure out like, what is really going to be the one that everyone goes to. And that’s the trick with with social media, you know, is it’s like a platform can be bad in many, many ways can have all kinds of technical issues, you know, like privacy policies that we don’t like, but if that’s where everyone that you know, is, then it’s really hard to leave and it creates a kind of anti-competitive landscape, you know, where it’s just it’s really hard to go to the Mastodons to the BlueSky’s when you don’t know. you know, if that’s where all your friends and all the people you follow and all the you know, conversations that you want to be listening to are going to end up.

Reema Khrais 

So I begrudgingly signed up last night, I was feeling some signup fatigue. I was like, Am I really going to do this? Should I hold off and then just went ahead and did it and I spent a few minutes scrolling through it, and it felt like I’d been transported into 2010. And like seeing these posts and comments from people I went to high school with and from celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, and I’m like, “What am I doing here? What’s going on?” Yeah, and I get what you’re saying that it feels like there are a lot of people in one place, but I don’t really love that. I’m replicating my following list from Instagram. Like, I’m fine seeing those people’s pictures and videos, but I don’t need to hear their inner thoughts or hot takes, like I would rather have a more curated Yeah,

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Totally. Yeah, I follow a lot of like, food and silly animal accounts that I don’t necessarily need to know their microblogging thoughts. Yeah,

Reema Khrais 

So it feels like we’ve entered a party where like, the guest list was just like, yeah, come on through, bring whoever you’d like and that can be fun. Yeah, sometimes but also can be incredibly hectic and overwhelming. And I just makes me want to go into the corner and not talk to anyone. Yeah, that’s my initial feeling. But who knows what’ll happen to the, to the platform?

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Yeah I actually didn’t finish signing up for threads because I started to I started down the path, like I downloaded the app. I’m one of those 30 million that downloaded the app in the first day. And then I started reading all of these concerns about the privacy policy. So when I sort of got to that point of like, okay, sign our privacy policy, I was like, “Oh, this is not great.” And so I looked into it a little bit, and it is kind of not super great. So it’s like, one of the reasons, probably the reason that Threads is not become available in the EU yet, is because of these privacy issues. And privacy data privacy being more heavily regulated in the EU under GDPR. Meta has had some judgments recently against it that sort of like put in questions, some of its, you know, regular data policies. So I read that, you know, some of the hang ups, some of the red flags for threads in the EU are that it collects sensitive information about people’s identity, their health, fitness, location, employment, like all of these very kind of sensitive things, it collects and shares with third parties for advertising. And you can’t delete your account without deleting your Instagram account, which is tricky.

Reema Khrais 

That’s true. I saw that. And yeah it was making me hesitate last night, whether or not I should download it.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Yeah it is true, it is true. Yeah, so

Reema Khrais 

I should plug, I read this great article from the Atlantic last night. And the central point was that Threads proves that social media is fated to repeat a cycle of life and death. That was the thesis of the article. It’s really, I thought it was a good read, if you want to check that out. But anyway, let’s move on. Yeah. So speaking of the Atlantic also saw another article this morning that I would love to talk about. This is a story that has been in the news cycle for a couple of weeks now, but I find it really fascinating. It’s a story that is just dripping with irony. So last month, Francesca Gino, she is a Harvard Business School professor who studies dishonesty, she was accused of falsifying data and at least four papers. And now there are some allegations that she made fake data and dozens of other published papers. She’s now on administrative leave. And it’s so wild story. And you know, these accusations are significant because she is a leading scholar in the field. And you know, behavioral science is not only interesting, at least to me, but it’s important. It combines, yeah,  mean, we’ve done stories on workplaces that relate to behavioral science and economics.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Yeah constantly.

Reem Khrais

Yeah. Right, because it can combine elements of economics and psychology to understand why we behave the way we do. And that can ultimately have implications for governments public policy. So she’s published a lot of things with a central question of why do normal people lie and cheat. And, again, just so much irony here. And so her research, for example, has tried to show how I mean, it’s tried to show a lot of things, but in particular, how rates of cheating go up in response to different social factors. So like, she has this one paper that shows that when people are just in the presence of abundant wealth, like if we’re sitting at a table, and there’s $7, I’ll just do $7,000 worth of bills, are scattered all around, you’re more likely to cheat when given a task. And so the author of this Atlantic article poses this question of like, what would Francesca’s contested science say about Francesca? Like, was she in some way searching for a theory of herself, perhaps subconsciously, who knows? But the author makes the point that she was she was in the presence of abundant wealth. She taught classes at Harvard for business executives and had colleagues who made upwards of $2 million a year. Anyway, all of this is just very meta and layered. But it makes me think of just how it might shift perceptions of behavioral science, like I said, like I said, a lot of the findings that are applied to real world settings. This is something taught within business schools and applied within companies. And so yeah, it just makes me more skeptical of the incentives and norms within this industry. And, you know, just the fact that Gina was just the celebrated almost like celebrity like researcher. And you know, there are a lot of people like that within like pop-psychology and they get high salaries, high speaker fees, lots of money from book deals, and not that this is an excuse, but I can just imagine there’s a lot of pressure to perform to, to release these really unique and creative results. And I was reading about this, I just like sort of fell in a rabbit hole this morning and was reading about it in the Financial Times. And they made this point that testing other people’s result within the research world is like a very normal scientific practice. But in behavioral science, that initial results are not replicated before they’re quickly recycled, is how the article put it, into like sensational headlines or pop-psychology articles and self-help books.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Yeah, I was thinking about that with, you know, the social sciences that I mean, I find behavioral science and like social sciences to be fascinating. In part, I think, because it is so difficult to pin down. Why do people behave the way they do and, you know, to provide some insight into that, I think is really complex. And, and sometimes unquantifiable. These things sort of trying to reduce are very complex world and complex human behavior. And, you know, societal behavior to these things is, I think, very tempting and like very attractive for humans. And I think we sometimes overlook it, especially in those kinds of, you know, kind of non exact sciences.

Reema Khrais 

Totally. But I could keep talking about this but I think, why don’t we take a break and when we get back, we’re going to do, we’re gonna do a new segment actually from This is Uncomfortable, the show that I host that we like to call “defend your splurge.” So yeah, we’ll do that one.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Very excited about that.

Reema Khrais

Okay, I think we are back. So we’re going to try something different on the show, we’re going to do what we call defend your splurge. It is a fun little segment in the weekly newsletter we do for This is Uncomfortable, where we ask readers to tell us, you know, how they’re treating themselves these days and why. And so we’re going to take turns talking about what we’ve splurged on lately. The only rule is that you cannot judge. And Drew is going to join us too. Are you there, Drew

Drew Jostad

I’m here. Hi, Reema.

Reema Khrais

Hey, Drew.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Hey, we couldn’t do the game without Drew. Yeah,

Reema Khrais 

I know. We were talking about it offline. And we’re like, “No, we have to have Drew.” So before we start, you know, we want to hear about your splurges. So you can drop them in the chat and we’ll check in on them at the end. All right, Meghan, do you want to start off what is something that you’ve bought recently?

Meghan McCarty Carino 

All right. This is something that everyone who knows me already knows about it because I kind of talk about it nonstop now, but I have become the proud owner of an Ooni pizza oven, about a month and a half ago. I had been, this is something that I had been wanting, pining after for quite some time and I was just like, mentally I had been waiting. Okay, if they ever go on sale, I’m going to I’m going to do it. I’m going to buy the pizza oven. On sale, I think it was like $350 I got the smaller sized one the 12 inch any pizza oven. But I am kind of known for buying a lot of kitchen gadgets and technology that I don’t quite use all the time. I have like a Sousvide immersion circulator. And I know I haven’t used forever, but we have been using the pizza oven and yeah, it is really fun. It’s super fun. But now I have just gone absolutely down the rabbit hole of like dough making, you know, when we bought it, I was like I’m just gonna buy dough from like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s or a pizza place or something. I’m not going to, like totally destroy my life by trying to you know, figure out the intricacies of pizza dough but of course, you know, you buy the pizza oven, you have to figure out you have to do it. So now my entire life it just like circulates around dough recipes, proofing times, cold ferments, different pre-ferments like it’s a whole thing. I mean that the the pizza oven has brought us a lot of I would say it has brought us a lot of like joy and family time and friend time. It’s a good centerpiece for like, we brought it on vacations. We bought it to my parents’ house. Yeah. So Oh, talk to one of the small ones so that we could I think whenever I feel like it’s totally splurge worthy.

Reema Khrais 

Oh it’s 100% splurge worthy. I also think whenever a purchase promotes like a communal, has like a communal effect that’s a good purchase, you know if it if it brings more connection, and that’s what it sounds like. Exactly. Okay, go for it. Drew. I think you’re next.

Drew Jostad

All right, I’m up. So the reason this thing is a splurge is that like normally, I don’t like spend a lot of money on clothes. And this, my splurge is actually $100 sweatshirt that I bought when I was in Mexico. Normally, if I was going to spend $100 on a sweatshirt, this would be like a high-quality piece of clothing that I could be like, “Alright, I’m gonna have this for many years. I really need a sweatshirt right now.” But this one was, I was walking past an art gallery in Mexico City, and I saw a painting and I was like, that’s a cool painting. And the last night we were there, my girlfriend dragged me into that art gallery and was like, “let’s buy that sweatshirt painting on it.” And so it’s a it’s a red, but it’s just like a basic red sweatshirt with like a print of this weird painting on it. It’s got these like four sort of ghostly, ethereal figures on it. And three of them are wearing very pointy hats. And they’re kind of like cradling the fourth one. I don’t know. I think it’s just kind of like really unique and it’s my little Mexico souvenir.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Yeah. I feel like that’s a really fun way to sort of like buy into art, that it’s not just something that’s going to be, you know, inanimate on your wall that you’re gonna wear it and every time you wear it, you’re gonna remember your trip to Mexico City.

Reema Khrais 

I love that. That’s great. Okay, so I’m looking at the comments too. There are some good splurge. Isn’t there? A fancy face lotion? Canadian ketchup chips

Meghan McCarty Carino 

always on board

Drew Jostad

That sounds like something you gotta order. Special Order.

Reema Khrais 

Yeah, yeah. So something I bought recently, is something that, had you told me a year or two ago that I bought this, I would have been very confused and perhaps alarmed. I bought an expensive sleeping pad for camping about… I’m embarrassed. No, we’re not judging, about $300.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

I think I have the same one, probably.

Reema Khrais 

They’re expensive. Some context here. Yeah, well, I think the company is called Hest or something. Anyway, but it kind of has to do with a big impulsive decision I made last year. I don’t know if you know this. Meghan, I’m not in Los Angeles anymore. Maybe you know that?

Meghan McCarty Carino 

I did. Yeah, I did know that.

Reema Khrais

I am in Portland, Oregon. And, we, my husband and I, made the decision to move here last November. Again, very impulsively, we were working in a one-bedroom apartment where we had to constantly negotiate who was working where because we both work remotely, and paying way too much money on, you know, on the apartment. And so we were kind of stumped in terms of where to move. Initially, we thought we were going to move to New York City to be closer to our families, but then that would put us in the same problem. Anyway, so we separately had a trip plan to Portland and leading up to it, we planted the seed in our heads of “what if we moved to Portland,” and when we visited we loved it and realized that it would help us cultivate our aspirational affinity for nature, the natural world. And so we are here for like a year or two. And one of the things on the bucket list is like yeah, to get out and do things we wouldn’t ordinarily do, which is one of those, again, is just going out in nature and camping. So it was my first time camping last month, and I really wanted to make I wanted to make sure that it was a good experience. I had a positive experience my first time, so it didn’t deter me and it was important that we bought good equipment. And so one of those things was the sleeping pad. That was my very long-winded way of justifying the purchase.

Drew Jostad

There’s no price on a good night’s sleep.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

100%

Reema Khrais 

And we’ve already camped several times, I think, yeah, I think it was worthwhile. Um, And we slept like babies. Both of you all sound like you’ve camped before.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

I am sort of the the, you know unwitting companion to a very diehard camper so yeah I’m into all of the camping luxuries I support any camping luxury yeah.

Drew Jostad

I will, I will definitely camp I’m not like quite serious enough about it to have like all my own gear but if I have a friend who’s like got the stove already and got like got something in mind I’m like 100% down.

Reema Khrais 

let’s do it. Yeah, I’m looking at some of the comments someone said “I bought a custom quilting table so my sewing machine needle space is level with the table so nice no more pulling of the fabric because it hangs over the machine base and much better seams.” Love it yeah, I love these purchases that help you know that are related to our hobbies and interests and again, like connect this with others so that is that was lovely. Alright, that’s it. That was defend your splurge. We feature new splurges every week on the This is Uncomfortable newsletter. You can submit yours and you can also sign up for the newsletter. There are other stuff there recommendations from the team. I also write about what’s on my mind each week you can sign up for that at marketplace.org/comfort.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

And Kai and Kimberly will be back next week. If you have a question or a comment or a suggestion, a topic you want to get smart on, please email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org. Or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.

Reema Khrais 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s episode was engineered by Jayk Cherry, Dre Jostad wrote the theme music for our Friday game and was a good sport for defend your splurge. And our intern is Niloufar Shahbandi.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

The team behind our Friday livestream is Emily Macune and Antoinette Brock. Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts and Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital and On-Demand.

Reema Khrais 

Nice. Speaking of bad purchases, I’m about to go to the Amazon store and return some things I need to return. Next. All right. Have a good time with your pizza dough this weekend.

Meghan McCarty Carino 

Yes, I’m gonna do it. I’m making a whole wheat dough this time, trying it out.