13. Yul Kwon: “Don't Try to Change Yourself All at Once.”

People I (Mostly) Admire

Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2021

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

He has been a lawyer, an instructor at the F.B.I. Academy, the owner of a frozen-yogurt chain, and a winner of the TV show Survivor. Today, Kwon works at Google, where he helped build tools to track the spread of COVID-19. But things haven’t always come easily for him. Steve Levitt talks to Kwon about his debilitating childhood anxieties, his compulsion to choose the hardest path in life, and how Kwon used his obsession with game theory to stage a come-from-behind victory on Survivor.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My guest today Yule Kwan has done a little bit of everything. He's got a law degree from
0:08.4	Yale, taught courses at the FBI, hosted television shows on PBS and CNN, started a frozen
0:14.7	yogurt chain and held high-level jobs at Facebook and Google. He even won
0:19.2	season 13 of the TV show Survivor. There's so much to talk about with Ewell. It's going to take two
0:25.2	episodes to cover everything.
0:27.0	Welcome to people I mostly admire, with Steve Levitt. I first met Yule a few years back. A mutual friend
0:37.0	introduced us saying Yule was the smartest person she had ever met. We said hello.
0:41.6	Yule asked me what I was working on and I told him about a new project using
0:46.2	GPS technology in the criminal justice system.
0:49.8	Just so happened that you'll had worked for two years on GPS and he gave me great advice that
0:54.4	really shaped that project. Then he asked me what else was I working on and I
0:58.6	mentioned another project. You will just happen to know exactly the right person to help me get that project implemented.
1:04.8	A third project?
1:06.0	You will have thought about that issue as well, and he had three great reasons why the project was going to fail.
1:12.0	He convinced me to drop the project.
1:14.0	So since then, I make it a point to run all my new projects past Eule.
1:20.0	It's so great to have you here with us today. You were a high-achieving
1:27.1	teen, valedictorian in high school, varsity water polo and track and field athlete,
1:31.9	before going on to Stanford where you graduated 5 Beta Kappa, a highly selective honor society.
1:37.0	It sounds like things came pretty easy to you early in life.
1:40.0	Yeah, I guess if you look on paper, it looks like I did lots of good stuff, but the reality
1:46.3	is that I felt like certainly my childhood was a struggle.
	...

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