I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. Episode 67.

In today's episode instead of me answering questions I will be asking questions of our

special guest Tim Harford. Tim is one of my favorite thinkers and writers.

He's a UK-based writer, trained in economics at Oxford, who turned his attention to applying

those tools he learned to better understanding

understanding our world.

He's written nine books.

His first book, his breakthrough book,

was The Undercover Economist,

which has sold something like 1.5 million copies and counting.

His newest book, which just came out, the day you're hearing this, it coming out is called how to make the world

add up that's the title if you live not in the US if you live in the US the same book has

the title the data detective.

This is the same book, and it is fantastic.

He tells you how to make sense of data

when trying to understand your world,

how to use data to gain a better understanding,

and how to use data to gain a better understanding and how to avoid being tripped up or tricked by

data being interpreted in ways that are a little bit less rigorous. He's a great writer, very numerically savvy, but also very good at telling stories.

So in this episode, we cover a lot of ground.

As I like to do, I got deep into Tim's story how did he transition from an academic

trajectory into a writing trajectory what is his current setup right now as a writer, what has been going on during the

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