Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is December 18th, 2017, and my guests are Kelly and Zach Wiener-Smith.

Kelly is an ecologist, specializing in parasites, and is a Huxley Fellow at Rice University in the Bio Sciences Department.

Zach is the artist and creator of the daily award-winning cartoon, Saturday Morning Breakfast Serial.

Together, they are the authors of Sunish.

Ten emerging technologies that will improve and or ruin everything.

Kelly and Zach, welcome to econtalk.

Thanks so much for having us.

Now I want to start off, I asked this before we start recording, I asked how to pronounce your last name.

Kelly, can you explain that?

Sure, so Zach's last name before we got married was Wiener, and mine was Smith.

When I was publishing papers in grad school, it was very hard to find my own scientific papers,

because Kelly Smith is a very common name, and so I decided that I was going to change my name when we got married,

...