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🗓️ 12 March 2012
⏱️ 60 minutes
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0:00.0 | Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts |
0:13.9 | of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org |
0:21.2 | where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to |
0:26.5 | another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd |
0:33.6 | love to hear from you. Today is February 23, 2012, and my guest is a manual |
0:42.8 | German of Columbia University. His latest book is Models Behaving Badly. A manual welcome |
0:50.0 | to Econ Talk. Thanks very much, I'm glad to be on. I want to start with your personal story. |
0:56.1 | You began your career as a physicist and then went to Wall Street. Tell us about that journey. |
1:00.6 | Yeah, I originally grew up in South Africa and I liked literature and the arts, but really |
1:07.7 | you had to specialize very young when you were in South Africa. It was like a British system. |
1:11.5 | So when you were 16 or 17, you went to college that was it. You did arts or science or medicine |
1:17.0 | or law or business. And so I liked physics and I went into physics and I got very attracted |
1:24.9 | to it and I was inspired by all the famous physicists, just like everybody else in spite |
1:29.4 | of all the famous physicists. You read about Einstein and Schrodinger and studied four |
1:35.3 | years of physics in South Africa and then I came to Columbia University where I actually |
1:39.4 | teach now, but I teach financial engineering, but I came to do a PhD in physics over there. |
1:45.4 | I did that. It took me a long time, seven years. I had the wrong kind of background. I had a very |
1:49.6 | classical physics background in Columbia. I was doing very obviously modern physics and quantum |
1:54.2 | mechanics. And then I worked as a, I did a thesis on weak interactions on theoretical physics |
2:00.6 | and I worked as a postdoc in an assistant professor for seven years during research and kind |
2:06.9 | of liking it, but I'm also getting a bit discouraged at times. |
2:10.8 | And why did you leave physics? And where did you go? |
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