My guest today, Barry Nelbuff, is a professor of economics at the Yale School of Management

and co-founder of the beverage company Honest T. He's an expert in the areas of game theory

and negotiation and he has a very big personality.

You know, the old statement turned lemons into lemonade. I knew how to make alcoholic

kombucha. And so we created calm brucha. The motto was get tickled, not pickled.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

There are two topics that I especially want to talk with Barry about today. The first is Honest T.

How in the world does a company started by a professor and a student in the garage

end up being a multi, multi-million dollar business?

And the second is his new book entitled Split the Pie. When I first heard he had a new book

on negotiation, I wondered what new ideas could there possibly be on that topic. But then

I read the book and honestly, I was shocked at how original and insightful his approach really was.

So I first heard about your company Honest T from the economist Austin Gulsby and it must have been

in the early 2000s. And at first I thought he was joking or maybe confused. I said, wait,

there must be two Barry nail buffs because there's no way the one who's a game there's to Yale

that he started a tea company and eventually Austin convinced me that indeed it was true.

And our conversation quickly turned to the topic of what an incredibly bad idea it was to try to

sell tea because really even now doesn't it seem like a terrible idea to try to start a bottle tea

company in a garage trying to compete for shelf space and grocery stores with Coke and Pepsi and

trying to figure out logistics, production, how in the world could you think that made any sense?

Yeah, it should have been a recipe for disasters the quick way of saying it. What I thought was the

case was all the tea companies out there had failed basic economics. And so I had to choose between

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