Daniel Fridman, “Freedom From Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina” (Stanford UP, 2017)

[MUSIC] Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Sociology. I'm Patrick Shean, a host of the channel. Today, we're going to be talking to Daniel Friedman about his new book, Freedom from Work, Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States in Argentina, which is out in 2017 from Stanford University Press. In brief, Freedom from Work explores how people in the United States and Argentina are being taught to think about themselves as economic actors today in what some people call the new economy, the post-industrial economy, or some label as just neoliberalism. Friedman follows groups of people who practice the advice of what he calls financial self-help, which involves the world of best-selling books, seminars, and board games even, that he discovers fundamentally reorient users' perceptions of what their economic ethics and goals ought to be and how they ought to try to achieve them. Far from these self-helpers being some isolated underground cult, listeners and readers, I think, will no doubt have recognized some of the ideas discussed in the book and by these financial self-helpers, which shows really the reach of these ideas. Friedman uses ethnographic methods, extensive interviewing, and spending many times in these seminars, and get together to try to unpack the core ideas and practices of financial self-help. In particular, I find this book so fascinating because it looks at what we call "new economy" isn't just the result of big structural changes like globalization, technological change. It also depends on everyday people thinking and acting in the world in certain ways. And this book looks fundamentally at how people are transforming themselves and being transformed. It's sort of the flip side, the human side, to the big stories we hear of financialization and the new economy. Daniel Friedman is an assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Daniel, welcome to the show. Thank you, and thanks for having me. We're very glad to have you. I thought maybe you could start off with telling us a bit about who you are, your background, and particularly what led you to the ideas that animate the book. Okay, well, first let me say that summary of the book. I think I'm going to transcribe that because that was a really a very neat way of putting it. So it's a good question how it became interested in these people who read financial self-help books and participating activities in financial self-help. I had not much contact at all with that word. It actually came from earlier research I did that had nothing to do case-wise with this. My earlier work was on the dictatorship in Argentina that happened from 1976 to 1983. I am originally from Argentina. Then I moved to the US for graduate school and I am still living in the United States. So what I studied in that work was how the government was sort of creating a new economic actor that you can call homoeconomicus, which is the economic actor that tries to calculate and benefits and costs and is sort of atomized from society. Basically, in that study since it was historical, I only studied sort of how the government does it. How the government creates consumers, creates investors, gives them the tools, gives them the rationale for being a good consumer and a good investor. Part of this work was done by economic authorities which were economists. But what I couldn't do in that research is understanding the process of bottom-up, if you wish, how people try to change themselves into a certain economic actor. Then I found the contemporary case. I watched something on TV or some serendipitous way in which I discovered that there's this word of financial self-help. I discovered that some people play a board game and I decided to jump on it to start attending these meetings and from that came the book. So then maybe we can start at the beginning of the book. You open it up with the story of Guillermo, who is a bookseller in Buenos Aires, comes across a book that is the beginning of his journey into the world of financial self-help. Would you tell us about Guillermo and a little bit about his story? Yes, Guillermo, by the way, was such a nice guy that I interviewed several times in Buenos Aires and he owned this little booth in a park in Buenos Aires that is very famous for bookselling, like use bookselling and CDs and records. I don't know now what people trade there, but sort of culture books and so on. Guillermo was telling me how in the few years before I interviewed him, this was in 2007 when I interviewed him. He started to change about himself and his financial planning, his behavior in a different way because actually because of his job, he saw some of these books of financial self-help. One that is very famous and that is the center of my book is Rich Dad Poor Dad. What people teach their children, wait, what Rich people teach to children that they've wore in the middle class don't. That's the name of the book. So Rich Dad Poor Dad is a very famous series and he was seeing the book but he never, Guillermo never paid attention to it. He was something that he didn't think he was relevant to him. He said he came from a sort of lefty culture, family, Buenos Aires and he thought that was some sort of business he think that wasn't for him. He was telling it so well that he started reading it and when he started reading it he started changing his perception of himself, his perception of why he was rejecting certain values or certain aspects of trying to be more successful financially and so on. And so that sent him into sort of a journey that he wasn't only about learning how to do business better or how to improve his personal finance. He was also about himself, about changing things inside, if you wish, to be able to do that. And in a way that story reflects a little bit of what the book is about in terms of disconnection that people perceive between straightforward economic action and more sort of deeper things about how people should be shaping themselves in a certain way in this day and age. So then Guillermo started to apply some of these some innovations in his business and he had a partner that was his brother, his brother rejected some of them, they parted ways, he started doing it by himself and eventually he started playing cash flow which is a board game that funds financial self-help plays and eventually he really became involved in changing himself. And so yeah that's sort of the story that opens the book and allows me to go into the more the argument of the story after that. Great, yeah. So the book you mentioned there, Rich Dad Poor Dad is sort of is the linchpin of this financial self-help world. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about what the book says and this book comes with as we learn a whole lot of other practices that readers and users of the book and one similar to it are supposed to do. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about what the book tries to tell its readers and maybe what the other activities that go along with it try to teach. Well, Rich Dad Poor Dad is one of the most successful brands of financial self-help in the last 15 years maybe a little more. So the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad is Robert Kiyosaki and he's not just the author of one book, he has a series of books that include books for children, books for women for example this rich woman that's authored by his wife, specific books on real estate investing and and so on. So it's a brand. It's like a system of books and products. But what caught my attention when I started this research in 2007 were a few distinctive things. First, actually a little earlier, the first time I ran into Robert Kiyosaki and reached that was an article I read in an Argentine newspaper about people getting together to play board game. And that made me very, very curious of what was going on there. I mean, as a sociologist, anytime you see people doing weird things, you start wondering what's going on. So that's one thing, and I can talk more about the board game later. But the other thing was watching one of those long PBS channels fundraisers, where people ask you to call and make a donation and so on and buy a DVD or instead of DVDs or whatever product they are trying to use for fundraising. And they were showing parts of a DVD of Robert Kiyosaki, in which he was explaining people that they had to be financially free, that they had to plan well for retirement, but also essentially that the world has changed from what he called the industrial age into the information age, and that now jobs were not as secure as they used to be, and that you needed to prepare yourself for your financial life in a different way. And he caught my attention because, of course, I knew there were self-help gurus around. But some of what he was saying was more similar to what sociologists say about how the world changed in the last 30 or 40 years than I thought-- I would have thought before listening to this. Some of it made sense in terms of the conditions under which we were today, the conditions under which capitalism works today, and so on, and so forth. Yet most of the weight of the responsibility for dealing with that was on the individual. These are obviously self-help books, and they're telling you that you probably have a problem that you need to solve inside yourself. You were probably raised at a time-- or many people were raised at a time-- which jobs were more secure than they are today. And therefore, people think that their goal should be to find a secure job, and so on, and so forth. And this was trying to-- this story of Rich Dad was aimed at changing people's perceptions. So that got me very, very interested, and that's how I decided to start going to these groups and so on and so forth. In the book, you distilled down some of the core ideas that come from Rich Dad, poor dad, but that animate all the other similar books and the world of financial self-help. You boil them down to three categories of ideas. Would you tell us what those three core ideas are? Yes, so I divide financial self-help in three fixtures that are components of financial self-help. First, something I kind of mentioned before is sociological component. What I call a sociological component, and that means theories about how the world works. So I was talking about earlier about the information age and industrial age, the idea that the way we work today is different, particularly in terms of the kind of stability that you can expect from jobs, at least since the 1970s or 80s. And so what these books provide is a diagnosis of our current situation that, of course, some of these diagnoses are available in other forms and social scientists are all the time producing these diagnosis. But what caught my attention was that self-help books give you an interpretation or reading of how the world works and therefore how you should behave in that world. And the other thing that is part of this sociological component is an idea of how the class structure works. So Roryuki Asaki has another book among the many, he has that's called the cash flow quadrant. And so that's an idea of class structure in which people are divided in a certain way according to whether they are self-employed employees, investors or business owners. And from that on, the books push people to think how they can move from a situation in which they have to work as employees to a situation in which they become investors. And how do they have to change to do that? So that's a sociological component. Then there's a technical component, or what I call a technical component, which means there's technical tools about how you should think about your finances in a more technical way. For example, how you categorize different types of income and investments. How you should think about that. How you should calculate. So that would be the more sort of rational or the more technical part that comes in these resources, books, and so on. And finally, there's what I call in the absence of a better word, the motivational component. Essentially, what these books and these activities will tell people who attend is, well, you need to understand the way the word works. You need to acquire technical tools for figuring out how to make money and how to get what they call passive income, which is income that doesn't come from your own work, but comes from the work time or money from others. And finally, all that is not enough if you don't work on yourself, if you don't change inside, if you don't undergo a pretty demanding work on yourself to change into the kind of person that would be able to achieve financial freedom, which is essentially being able to have income without having to work. So these are the three parts of it. Great. And one can see-- and they find when they read the book, how powerful those three components went brought together are to be a sort of totalizing worldview and ideology that the readers of the books and the followers of Kiyosaki and these other financial self-help gurus move. You can see just how powerful all three of those are and how they come together. I wonder if you could tell us more about sort of the last thing you said, which is the goal of all this. When we understand the-- when we read this and we see how the world works, and we have the tools of how to interact with it, and we have the motivation of how we should think about what we want to do. The goal of all this in the end is to be financially free. What does that mean exactly? And how are users supposed to get there? And what are the things they need to do to transform themselves to become financially free? Yes. That's a very important question. And financial freedom is at the center of all these practices. Basically, some people might show up to the kinds of activities that I attended, maybe having a vague sense of trying to-- they want to be financially in a better position, not work that so much or whatever. And in a way, there's a chapter I call. It's not about money. It's about freedom. So essentially, if people come to these activities with the idea of making money, my problem is making more money, you're in for a bit of a surprise, because there's a bit of a more elaborate framework as I was suggesting before, in which it's not money what you should be trying to achieve. But rather, you should try to change yourself in a way that money is going to come to you automatically if you happen to change yourself inside. So financial freedom can be defined for me in two ways. One is a very straightforward equation, which basically. you are financially free according to these resources. If you, all the income you receive comes from investment and doesn't come from your own work. So basically, you don't need to work and you can live off your investments. Now I think it's a little bit more complicated than that because for example, someone like Zuzi Orman who's also famous financial guru says something along the lines of your financially free when you manage to dominate your fears when you have power over your fears and your weaknesses. So financially, financial freedom is not just an equation between income and expenses but also a condition of the self. So in a way, you might not reach that financial state of financial freedom but you can start doing things that will liberate you in a way and disconnects these practices with several practices of self-help in general of liberating yourself, controlling yourself more and so on and so forth. So financial freedom is a pretty tricky concept. It's like a horizon in the future but it's also a practice to change yourself. There's a very interesting author that I said in the book, Mariana Valverde and she says, in many practices of self-help, freedom is the state that people want to reach but it's also the tool by which you reach that state. That's very interesting and I particularly find interesting, you mentioned in there the goal of liberating yourself and I think maybe this is a time that we could tie this to one of the core concepts throughout the book that sometimes gets ill-defined which is the term that a lot of academics use which is neoliberalism. This is used in a bunch of different ways throughout the academic world and I know that you actually wanted to put the term in your title, the title of the book but maybe we're encouraged not to do so. But it's an animating concept throughout that ties to this ideology that comes with financial freedom, financial self-help. So could you tell us what neoliberalism means, how different people use the term and what kind of meaning you deploy in the book? Well, neoliberalism is one of those terms that are problematic because first of all, many people use it to mean very different things. The other problem is that they don't define it, they assume that everyone will understand what they're talking about. And finally, no one, very, very, very few people call themselves neoliberals. So it's a concept that is loaded with some sort of attack against particular forms of thinking or policies and so on. So in this book, I use it in a fairly particular way, the term neoliberalism. You could think of neoliberalism as an ideology and some people have done that. You could think, for example, of neoliberalism as a set of policies and there are certainly other options. But my use of neoliberalism is within the tradition started by Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, sociologist, whatever you want to call him. And continued by many people after Foucault, I think 1984, that's called governmentality. And essentially sees neoliberalism more than anything as a way of governing, as a way of conducting the conduct of individuals. And there are certainly several different forms of governing throughout history. And neoliberalism is characterized by the notion that people should not use their own freedom as a way of self-government. Essentially, neoliberalism tries to produce situations in which individuals do not need to be governed so much from the outside. So when I saw financial self-help as a case, it tied very well with the concern of neoliberalism that people become entrepreneurs of themselves. Essentially people who take responsibility or are not dependent on responsibility for themselves and for their financial conduct, who treat themselves as if they were the owners of a business of themselves, if that makes sense, that they increase what economies call their human capital, that they become the targets of their own transformation so as to adjust to economic structures in a way that doesn't demand so much intervention from the outside. So that's sort of the line of neoliberalism that which I became interested even before the book. And then when I saw the case, I saw there was a very interesting sort of version of that work on the self that neoliberalism demanded a lot of. And the other thing that got my attention there in relation to neoliberalism is that this was not some kind of government intervention or government plan in order to change people in a certain way, but it was actually fairly independent and actually voluntary. You go, you buy the book, you go, you play the board game, you participate in the things voluntarily. So I thought that was also a very sort of intriguing thing in terms of how individuals themselves kind of buy into without so much external intervention, but of course conditioned by the current situation in terms of work and so on, when someone like Yisaki says that work is not as secure as it used to be, that of course resonates with people in a way that probably wouldn't have resonated so much 45 years or six years ago. In addition to this, Yisaki's usage of neoliberalism as sort of ideology and governmentality and drawing on the Foucault, you also have another sort of guiding theory in the book that is often called economic performativity. Would you tell us what that means and how it applies? Yes, so economic performativity is an idea that was started by a French sociologist called Michel Calon. And essentially what it says is that sociologists for the most part have tried to deny that there is such a thing as what we call the homoeconomics. The subject that economics assumes, well, most economics assumes behavior economics is less and less sort of committed to that idea, but essentially economics assumes a certain form of action that is rational, that is cost-benefit oriented and sociologists have resisted that saying that humans are much more complex than that, they are determined by many more things and not just a calculation of benefit and cost. But what Calon said was, yes, that's true, but also you can't ignore that there are ways in which that kind of behavior can be produced, maybe not the exact sort of behavior that is modeled in economic models, but through certain mechanisms one can bring action closer to that model of action. And what Calon says is that economics has a lot to do with producing that kind of behavior. Economics for Calon is not something that studies the world, is something that produces the world. So if you look at many markets, you would see that part of how they were configured was with the intervention, with the help of economic theories. If you want to put in more blunt terms, theories become true as they are sort of enacted in real worlds, in real markets. So to bring this closer to the issue of the book, most people don't breathe economics unless they have a course in high school or college or so on. So the connection between economic knowledge and large amounts of people actually comes many times through resources like financial self-help. There are forms of economic knowledge involved, ways of acting, ways of behavior. and they are sort of channeled through these popular resources. So in a way what I say in the book is you have financial freedom, you have this idea that you have to work on yourself and so on and so forth. But you also have the idea of financial intelligence, of a technical transformation of people. And that's where performativity comes in. Essentially people are sort of changed not just through self-reflection, but also through technical tools that they are offered to think and calculate in particular ways. So in the case of financial self-help, you have certain financial statements that people use that transform the way they see finance. And it's very simple. They change one thing from one column to the other, but that's very significant. And what I argue in the book is that the realm of technical transformation that the theory of economic performativity sort of brought to light quite significantly is not divorced from a notion of how I should behave, who should I be, how should I transform myself from a project of the self. Essentially people try to fit these technical tools, what Kalan calls processes that help them calculate in certain ways, like a financial statement, with certain ways of acting and certain ways of transforming oneself. I think that's such a fascinating concept in theory, because so often I find that within academics and people of different political persuasions, people end up arguing, one side says, "No, we're all just homo-economicists, we're rational, selfish actors, period that is natural state of humans." And the other side says, "No, we're loving and social and everything else." And often we get stuck in those warring camps. And what I see in what you've just said is that actually we're somewhere in the middle, and it depends on, it's not about where we actually sit naturally, but let's look at the things that actually shape how we act in the world. Let's not talk about natural states. I find that to be such a dynamic concept. Yeah, I think that's one of the motivations there in the book. I mean, not just saying it is shaped by something, but what is it shaped about? Sometimes these books that a lot of people don't pay attention to, can have quite a lot of influence in how many people think about themselves. Exactly. And the book is full of examples of that. One of the ones I found most interesting is one of the additions to the book, as we mentioned earlier, is a certain board game called Cash Flow, that readers of Kiyosaki's work get together to play. And it has, it teaches a lot of lessons. It's a financial, you'll tell us about it, but it's a board game where you're making money like any other, but it's sort of, orients peoples thinking about what their next step should be, how they should think about their money. And it's very much an example of this, of teaching people to act in a certain way in the world. Would you tell us about the board game and maybe also elaborate on how you participated or where you observed all this? Yes, well, I'm kind of lucky that Cash Flow existed because when you try to study things like that, as an ethnographer, as a sociologist, if you don't have people who get together in certain situations in which you can see all the things and actually go and participate, I think it's just much harder to study some sort of ongoing transformation. Of course, I interviewed people, and I asked them about their biography. I made about 50 interviews in the US and Argentina. But I also could observe something that was ongoing where people talk to each other in this game, where they actually play and sometimes reflect on what they're doing. So that was first of all, a very practical opportunity for being able to write a book like this. And so Cash Flow was created by Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Reach That Poor Dad. And it brings people together, but it also is one of those tools of self-transformation. If financial self-help, everything you do in terms of taking more risks and investing a little bit, people take first small steps and so on, is a tool for self-transformation, is what Foucault, what I've called "practices of the self." And Cash Flow is a very special one because it's a game in which you, people can try to see themselves in action. Essentially, it's a fictitious market. It has a board with two tracks. One is the Rad Race and the Fast Track. The Rad Race is inspired in the everyday idea we have of the Rad Race. That you work and you make some money, but then you spend it all in what you need and then you work and work and you're always in the same place. And the goal of the game is to leave the Rad Race. And you only leave the Rad Race when you your passive income, the income that doesn't come from your own work helps you cover all your expenses. So essentially that's when you're financially free. So the game is fun. And it's an opportunity for people to get together with others and sort of reinforce the ideas in the materials they read and so on and so forth. But also it helps people understand the concept of financial freedom in somewhat vivid way because you may accumulate and accumulate money, but you're not free until all that money is transformed into incoming Cash Flow and not just the stack of money there. And all the technical tools as I was saying before, with the inspiration of performativity, all these technical tools are meant to reinforce this idea. And then people can also, as I was saying, see themselves in action and saying, "Oh, why did I take more risk here or less risk here? Should I be, should I try taking more risk? What kind of person I am? Am I right for this?" And essentially with playing several times people can try to modify the risk, first study themselves, know themselves, and then sort of modify their risk tolerance. So that allowed me to see this inaction. And the context of how people play is different in different places, but in the US this was in New York where I did the fieldwork was fairly small groups. Someone organized his online, creates a Cash Flow Club. And actually these clubs are independent from the company that produced the game. People just go out and want to play with others. First because the game is a little expensive, so sometimes you don't want to jump into spending 200 bucks in a game. But also because some people say, people I interviewed said, "I have no one to play with. It was a bit embarrassing playing this board game with friends. Everyone thinks I'm crazy." So you get a, so you, by playing Cash Flow, you get into a social world that is more supportive of the ideas people might start to be developed while reading these books or engaging in forms of financial self-help. In some cases it's the first thing they do. Some friend invites them to a game and they go. So and in Argentina it was the games were more part of larger, like one day workshop that people spent a little bit more money on that. The games in New York were free for the most part. This was some more expensive thing which you get on the morning, a seminar on the ideas of Robert Kiyosaki. Again, many of these things were completely independent from the company. Then in the afternoon people would play the game for four, five hours. Many would become friends or exchange business cards and reflect many times these activities have a moment of pause and reflection. What did you do in the game? How did you get out of the rat race? What mistakes you made? What did you learn about yourself and so on and so forth? So I think it was a point of entrance that was at the same time a very, very significant practice of self-transformation. What I say in the book is that it's a serious business but it can also be fun. It's a game. People might play sometimes in coffee shops and sometimes in this larger organized seminars. I'd like to just jump off of you're telling us here about how this is a social process to people aren't just reading these books on their own. They're also getting together and playing the game with one another and as you spend one chapter talking about supporting each other in a lot of ways. So, you know, there is this idea that we are out on our own, homo-economicous out for ourselves, but there is some kind of maybe you call it a contradiction or not that a lot of the people that organize these are very helpful towards others, selfless in some ways and trying to in this community of people trying to help themselves get into this world of financial freedom. Would you tell us about sort of how you observe that and what the tension is you see there? Yes, I observed something that to me was somewhat paradoxical when I was participating in these groups. Essentially, we tend to think our self-interest and our desinterest sociologist call it and as sociologist Pierre-Poultier calls it, "or generosity or care for the others" as things that are contradictory in nature, which makes a lot of sense. You're either trying to get something for yourself or you're trying to help others, right? Now, when there was something that was happening in this group, that frame didn't quite help explain it. So, let's say I organize a seminar to help people think about their financial freedom and so on and I organize a cash flow game. I'm one of those sort of entrepreneurs of the financial self-help industry. I'm telling you that I'm helping you, but then at the end of the seminar, I offer you some participation in some business or some opportunity that's quite clearly beneficial for me. My reaction to that was like, "Oh my God, this is all a big scam." I'm sure anyone listening so far would have said, "Wait, isn't this all a big scam? What do people think about that?" My reaction was that, but then of course, as a netographer, as a sociologist, I need to try to make sense of how people think of these, not how I react to these. And I saw that people have a particular way of combining or reconciling these two things that didn't seem contradictory for them. Essentially, you can help me and you can make money off of it and that's fine. So, interest and desinterest are not seen as contradictory. And the logic that sort of ties all these together is the idea of a world of abundance. So, basically, these are people trying to change themselves in order to become rich, financially free and so on. So, one organizer of these activities in New York always said, and I borrowed that for this concept, always said, "Leaving a world of abundance and not in a world of scarcity." So, he was saying, "You know, help people be generous and it's going to come back." So, but the notion was that if you want to become that kind of person that is financially successful, you have to start acting like this imaginary version of successful people that have no limits in terms of what they can do. They are completely free and therefore they can help people and benefit from that without that being contradictory. It's part of that transformation. So, that notion, I think, helps everyone in this world understand each other without being, how can I put it, over-lissous species. So, even Robert Kiyosaki himself says, "In some places he says, "You know what? I'm not an author. I'm not really an author. I'm a business person. I'm selling books here." And in other places he says, "I want to help you." And so, all these things are not contradictory. People don't perceive it as contradictory. So, it makes possible to say, "You know what? This guy might be making money off of this, but that doesn't mean to me that it's morally repulsive or anything like that. It's basically, you can help people and make money off of it. And that's the way this world works. That's the collective logic by which people interact with each other, knowing that it's neither pure disinterest. No one is there only to help others. It would make no sense in this world. But also, people are not only and entirely self-interested. And it sort of configures how people interact with each other. I'd like to draw out something you mentioned in there, which was the thought of, "Is this a scam?" I think when I read the book and I think when many others read the book, one of their first questions might be, "Well, does it work?" You know, "Does the product work? Does it make people successful? Does it make them financially free?" And you say somewhere in the book that you're not really interested in that. You're not really interested in an expose showing a scam, but that you're interested in what it can tell us about our world today. Sort of in some, would you tell us what from understanding all this world, what are the key things that you've learned from this that will help us understand? Well, I think that asking whether people become rich or not is a different question that asking whether this works. Because I think it works in terms of people working on themselves and trying to change themselves. And it's sort of an ongoing, continuous project, as I was saying earlier, related to neoliberalism of perfecting oneself in order to be completely self-responsible, autonomous, independent, and so on. So some people might do better, some people might not do better. Part of the problem is that the kind of study I did is not the kind of study that can verify years down the road where whether people achieve that specific goal or not. So that's why I say I'm not entirely interested because I think the effects of these are much larger in terms of people entering in a particular way of thinking about themselves and transforming themselves. Instead of evaluating financial self-help books for the idea that people are going to become rich down the road. So I mean, if you ask me if I would like to know maybe I would, but not in this kind of study, I think what the vantage point of my study was more into how people mobilized this in a way that transforms the way they think about themselves and the way they conduct themselves. Regardless of results, which sociologists know that eventually someone becoming rich or not or whatever is not going to depend only on their willpower as these books promise you. But we kind of already know that. So I think the vantage point of the book is seeing that process of self-transformation. Great. Well, we've taken up a lot of your time. There's many things in the book that we have not covered here, particularly a comparison between the United States and Argentina, comparing how this world operates in the two. But I'd like to ask just one final question about what you're working on now since the book. What are your latest projects? Well, I'm working on a couple of different projects and the main ones are two right now. One, they're fairly different from the book. One is a project on, that is more, it's closer to the sociology of money. So it's somewhat related, but not so much. And it's about how psychologists, in particular, are the psychoanalysts in Argentina, which is a very, a place where there's a very, very large amount of psychoanalysts and psychoanalysts is very strong. How do they think about money? And more specifically, how they charge patients and how they think about payments in a relationship that is very intimate and very complex. And it's also care work, so care work usually complicates the way people relate around money. So that's one project. And the other project I'm working on is I'm analyzing a museum of economics that is in my Mexico City that tries to show economics as a museum piece, presenting economics to the population. And there's many other things going in the museum in terms of outreach and financial education that are closer to the themes of the book. But essentially, I'm trying to understand following the-- partly the idea of performativity of how economics makes it into the world, how it becomes true, if you wish. And a very unusual-- or to me, unexpected place-- was a cultural institution like a museum. So that got my attention. And I'm doing research with that, too. Well, Daniel Friedman, thank you so much for writing the book. And thank you for being on the show. Oh, thanks for the invitation. I enjoyed this a lot. Thank you so much. [MUSIC PLAYING]