Hello and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and I'm here today with a Halloween special for you,

which includes rats, boiling hands and cauldrons, witches, superstitions, pirates, and much more.

It's a conversation I had with Peter Leeson,

author and economist at George Mason University, who calls himself not just an economist, but a

collector of Curiosa. In his latest book, Just Out, WTF, an economic tour of the weird,

Leeson looks at just that, at all historical weirdness, the strangest practices and rituals that mankind

has been engaged in. We discuss how people's beliefs themselves can be used as a kind of

technology in the broadest possible terms for producing better social outcomes. Your argument is

that what seems like irrational, totally senseless behavior, some of the stuff that strikes

us as the absolute weirdest things that we can imagine happening historically are not at all

irrational and weird, that there's all sorts of reasons why they make sense, right? Yeah, exactly.

People engage in all kinds of stuff that seems bat-shit crazy. But if you examine it through the lens of

economics, if you just think about it in terms of basic constraints, you know, the limitations

that people confront given their environments and the incentives that the things that they do and

the beliefs that they hold and so on have on their behavior, you can begin to see that, you know,

what looks really weird actually, you know, what looks really weird

actually, you know, I think makes a lot of sense and is in many ways not so different from

some of the practices and rituals that we take for granted as completely normal today.

So, for example, what? What was the weirdest one that you were the most baffled by when you

first encountered it? I think the one that caused

the most head scratching was the criminal prosecution of insects and rodents in Renaissance,

Italy, France, and Switzerland. Wow, that's definitely, that's really weird. Why were they being

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