Hey there, listeners. It's Mikala. Behind the money is on a break for the holidays, but I didn't want to leave you hanging, so I want to introduce you to one of our sister podcasts, the economics show. Every week, one of the FTs's top calmness or correspondence, usually our economics columnist, Sumaya Keynes, sits down to untangle a thorny economic issue with a guest.

The episode you're about to hear features Chris Giles, our economics commentator and writer of the F.T.'s

Central Bank's newsletter.

He's speaking with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler to figure out why investors, politicians, and ordinary people so often act against their best interests.

So here it goes. Over to Chris.

There are mythical creatures that stride the land of economics. Their species name is Homo

Economicus. The myth says they're perfectly rational, self-interested, calculating individuals.

Whole economic models have been built on this creature's ability to rationally maximize their

happiness. Economists use these models to predict decisions and behavior. Of course, everyone

always knew Homo Economicus was never a fully accurate description of the way people behave.

It was a useful simplification, but that was easy to forget when it came to describing the results of complex economic models.

If there's been a backlash against the assumption of rationality, that happened in large part because of the work of our guest on today's show. He's the winner of the

2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for showing time and again that human decisions are anything but

rational. I'm Chris Giles, the FD's economics commentator. Welcome to The Economic Show from the Financial Times.

You may well have guessed that in this episode I'm speaking to Richard Thaler,

the economist widely seen as the founding father of modern behavioral economics,

a branch of economics that integrates psychological insights into economic analysis.

Famously, he co-authored the 2008 bestseller Nudge, which reshaped how policymakers think about human decision-making.

And in the past month, he's released an updated version of his book, The Winners Curse, a collection of real-world examples that challenge the traditional economic

assumption of human rationality. Richard, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Chris. It's nice to be here.

Now, we like to do this thing on this show where we kick off with our guest rating something

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