You are viewing this post: Fact Check Is Wes Bentley Sick Weight Loss Explained -Meet Him On Instagram? Trust The Answer
Are you looking for an answer to the topic “Fact Check Is Wes Bentley Sick Weight Loss Explained -Meet Him On Instagram“? We answer all your questions at the website Bangkokbikethailandchallenge.com in category: Bangkokbikethailandchallenge.com/digital-marketing. You will find the answer right below.
Keep Reading
Wes Bentley is one of the most attractive stars in the American industry who is currently thought to be ill. Is Wes Bentley sick?
Wes Bentley is one of the most popular stars in American industry.
He is one of the most beautiful and is also consered an American beauty star.
He is best known for playing the soulful, artistic neighbor Ricky Fitts in the Oscar-winning film American Beauty (1999).
He also played game designer Seneca Crane in The Hunger Games (2012) and played photographer Thomas in Lovelace (2013).
Fact Check: Is Wes Bentley Sick?
News has flooded the internet that actor Wes Bentley is ill, which is not true.
As of now, there have been no news and reports suggesting that Wes may be ill or in poor health.
He’s still doing great in his shoots and is ready for the new season of Yellowstone, which will be released soon.
However, the source of Wes’ illness was not a trusted source, so there is no reason to worry about Wes Bentley’s health at this time.
Wes Bentley is not ill, which fact check confirms.
Wes Bentley Weight Loss And Health Condition
Wes Bentley is a superstar who needs to gain weight and lose weight according to the scenes.
And that could be the reason for his weight loss in the last few days.
But if people think it was because of his poor health, that’s not true.
advertisement
As mentioned above, there is no news to support the statement that Wes may be in poor health.
Although he was once addicted to drugs in 2016, he is a clean and sober person for now.
Added screenshots of Wes Bentley in “Pete’s Dragon” to the gallery. More photos: https://t.co/TUDfMQ5nZC #WesBentley pic.twitter.com/E3jo088XDM
— Wes Bentley Network (@wesbentleynet) October 19, 2018
Wes Bentley Wife-Who Is He Married To?
Wes Bentley is married to his wife and colleague Jacqui Swedberg.
The couple have been together for more than a decade, dating back to 2010 when they married.
Wes and Jacqui are the parents of their two children together, including a son born in 2010 and another their baby daughter born in 2014.
This was Bentley’s second marriage.
First, Wes was married to fellow actress Jennifer Quanz from 2001 to 2009.
Wes Bentley Family Detials
Wes Bentley was born into a family of six, including his parents Cherie Baker and Dav Bentley.
Bentley’s mother was a chaplain and his father a minister.
Wes graduated from Sylvan Hills High School in Sherwood, Arkansas in 1996.
Even during his school days he was a good student. He was a member of Group 29 in the Juilliard School’s Drama Division.
And right now, Wes has a family of 4 including his wife and two children, although he is also very close to his parents and other family members.
Why Shiny Object Syndrome Keeps You Poor (The Cure)
Images related to the topicWhy Shiny Object Syndrome Keeps You Poor (The Cure)
See some more details on the topic Fact Check Is Wes Bentley Sick Weight Loss Explained -Meet Him On Instagram here:
Who Is Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu Husband Richard Bean – Is …
Though she has never been married, Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu has a daughter linked with her rumored husband, Richard Bean. In Emily in Paris, Philippine.
Source: www.650.org
Date Published: 2/18/2021
View: 6160
Không có tiêu đề
… rumors-pitchers-wont-be-checked-for-foreign-substances-at-2021-all-star-game … -packers-davante-adams-responds-to-derek-carr-recruiting-him-to-raers …
Source: bleacherreport.com
Date Published: 9/20/2021
View: 4168
Lee Daniels Talks About Being Beaten Up, Discovering He …
The director of Precious and Lee Daniels’ The Butler was growing up in Philadelphia, the son of a cop, when his father saw him trying out his …
Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Date Published: 3/1/2022
View: 2465
Archive | Saturday 19th February 2022 | Express.co.uk
Princess Eugenie weight loss: Royal’s recent appearance shows ‘transformational’ change … Brexit news Jacob Rees Mogg fact checked evg …
Source: www.express.co.uk
Date Published: 10/5/2021
View: 7914
Lee Daniels Talks About Being Beaten Up, Discovering He Was Gay
When Lee Daniels was 8 years old, his father threw him in a trash can.
The director of Precious and Lee Daniels’ The Butler was growing up as the son of a Philadelphia cop when his father saw him try on his mother’s heels. “I was walking down the stairs in heels and he threw me in the trash can,” Daniels recalls. “I think that’s where Precious came from because I remember the smell. I remember the dark, the cold, my mother trying to fight, and then me thinking I was Aladdin on a carpet escaping. And I think that’s why I feel so connected to Precious. But that was just one of many times. And I have no hatred in my heart at all for my father. I don’t think he got it [Daniels is gay]. He absolutely didn’t understand it and he knew being a black man was hard enough and thought if he scared me, in hindsight I think he thought if he scared me I would do. not be gay because he just couldn’t imagine what my life would be like.”
In contrast, Daniel’s grandmother understood. “She saw greatness, and she said I would have a greatness far beyond hers, which was incomprehensible to me at the time. My father told me I wouldn’t become anything. [But] she says, “Listen, you’re not like all the other guys here. You’re a fag.” I said, “What’s that?” And she said, “Don’t worry about it, but you’ll get used to it — people will call you that. But you have to remember, as long as you’re strong, as long as you’re fearless, as long as you’re honest, you don’t have to worry.’”
Daniels spoke at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film & TV on March 22, where he participated in the ongoing The Hollywood Masters interview series. Later, after dropping out of college, he came to Los Angeles, “and then something called AIDS hit. All my friends died. … I was making tremendous money [with a nursing agency]. I came from extreme poverty. I didn’t know what to do with the money, so what do you do? Houses, clothes, I don’t know. Drugs, parties, at 22, 23 or whatever. And still theater directing. And AIDS struck. And again it wiped out all my friends. I had no friends. And we were all together because her parents didn’t take her in. And we buried each other because most parents, 90 percent of parents, didn’t take them in. And it’s hit the community hard. It was terrifying because we never knew if you could drink out of glasses or what it was. It was the scariest thing ever. And I didn’t understand why I wasn’t [dead], because there were far better souls than me that left. i thought i had to go And so I descended into drugs and into sexual bathhouses to die. Not having AIDS is a miracle from God. I do not get it. I really don’t get it. Because I should have had HIV. Everyone else did.”
A full transcript follows.
You grew up in Philadelphia. When did you first fall in love with the entertainment world?
Have you seen my Instagram live? I was live on Instagram. It was so exciting because now I’ve learned how to do it. And my publicist is so nervous about me doing it because sometimes you do it drunk. (laughter) But I’m so excited. It’s a new gadget that I’m learning to use. It’s so exciting. So I posted “Live at LMU” on Instagram. Excuse me, the question again?
When did you fall in love with the film?
I don’t know if it was cinema, but television. I was eight years old, I was seven. Every year around Christmas and Thanksgiving they had The Wizard of Oz and then Cinderella by Rodgers & Hammerstein. I remember being just fascinated with The Wizard of Oz and Cinderella and Lesley Ann Warren’s Cinderella projects as a kid. And from there, the first book I read outside of Dick and Jane that I can remember reading as a kid was, ironically, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Wow.
I went to the library and something just said, “Go to the theater.” I don’t know what brought me to the theater department. The book itself looked interesting. I thought it would – I don’t know – I thought it would be like Little Red Riding Hood the wolf. And I pulled it out and I’ll never forget it. I read it cover to cover and then took it out. It was my first book that I got from the library. And then I had my cousins and my neighbors on the front steps of my front door, and my sisters and brothers reading out all the characters from Martha to George.
How did you imagine your future life as a child?
I thought I would end up in prison like most of my friends. That’s how the world was for me. I didn’t think I was going to die, but I imagined I was in prison. And if you have to steal to eat, yeah, I thought I’d definitely do it — I mean, that was just the norm.
One of your brothers was in prison for a while.
He still is.
do you communicate with him
I do.
And when you look at his life, how does it make you feel about your own?
I have mixed feelings, you know, about all of this. We dive deep.
(Laugh.)
Hopefully yes.
Shit. (Laughs.)
You can go flat later.
no It’s just that I suddenly realize I’m in therapy or something.
have you been in therapy
I do. I finally started therapy. They say it works.
say “you” but you don’t?
I’ll find out, won’t I?
Yes. (laughs) Your parents, who had the greater influence on you, your father, your mother?
Neither my mother nor my father had the greater influence on me, it was my grandmother who had the greater influence on me. I come from a family of five, brothers and sisters. And my grandmother could pass for white. And she immigrated from North Carolina with her sister. And she was a very powerful woman. She married the blackest man there is. She was the first black woman to go to Duke University. She passed as white. But then she said, “I’m outta here.” And she found this black guy, and they kind of migrated to Philadelphia. She was a politician. I don’t know how she got into politics. I do not know. I can’t remember how she got into politics. But my early memories were that she would get people to come vote in the neighborhood she lived in that resembled ours. And she had nine children, and she was a corrupt politician.
A corrupt politician?
Yes. She also did the numbers. She had something like numbers. do you know what numbers are
Uh-huh.
Yes, illegal numbers, they were illegal numbers.
Don’t let that English accent fool you.
(Laugh.)
I will not. i love you already
You meet me in the bathroom in our offices, so you know I don’t usually talk like that.
I know. He talks like he’s from Brooklyn. (laughs) Yeah, so she was that gangster. She was a gangster. Despite this, she was very politically active. It was important to her to get African Americans to come out. It was a first beginning, a first understanding for me to understand that life, people aren’t good or people aren’t bad, we all try to wake up in the morning to be the best person we are. But we end up falling on our asses. Nobody is perfect. And so my work was really that gray area that we all live in – that murky area that we all live in.
Wow.
And she produced many women who were very like her. And she had all the judges in her hands, because she would put them in office. As a result, some of their sons often committed heinous crimes, and so did many of the people in the neighborhood. But they got paid and never went to jail. And it was survival. It was just the way she did it. She was very into it — she really wanted African Americans to vote at a time when it was still legal to vote. It was important. She came from a place where she wasn’t allowed to vote. It was really about getting people to come and vote. So my early memories were in a convertible, a white convertible, with a speakerphone that said you go out to dial whoever it was. So voting was embedded in me, and if you didn’t come out to vote, your kids with those guns would make you come to vote. She dragged people off the projects and onto the streets to vote for whoever… And she was diabetic and an amputee. She is a very tall woman and she was diabetic. And she was just awesome. She could easily have become president, I think. Fearless. And I was about eight or nine – well, even before that, she was the first person to know I was gay. And she was very clear. She says, “Listen, you’re not like all the other guys here. You’re a fag.” I said, “What’s that?” And she says, “Don’t worry about it, but you’ll get used to it — people will call you that. But you have to remember, as long as you’re strong, as long as you’re fearless, as long as you’re honest, you don’t have to worry.” I watched her be all those things, all those things. Even in crookedness there was a street code that was very honest, very deadly. And I remember being impressed because Hubert Humphrey came into the house, the Vice President of the United States. And it was like, what the hell?
He came to your house?
My grandmother’s house, yes, because she was so powerful at the time. And I remember a conversation when she was on the phone at the height of [Philadelphia Police Commissioner and Mayor Frank] Rizzo. Rizzo was an integral part of our family; All aunts and uncles worked for the city of Philadelphia. Because she had all the judges in her pocket – including the cops. Queen Latifah and I share a similar story about our parents: our fathers were police officers and what they had to do. You know what I mean?
What did they have to do?
Just stuff you know?
What stuff?
My dad had to do stuff, that was, you know — we’ll get to him in a bit. But my grandmother Rizzo owed Mayor Rizzo her money back then. And I’ll never forget her saying – because it was unheard of to speak to a white person like that – “Get me my Motherf King money before I put a bullet up your ass.” I’m going to put a bullet in your head. Bring me my maternal royal money.” It just wasn’t done, you know?
Yes.
But I loved her very much. And it was important. And then there was a big exposé where I think The Philadelphia Inquirer – wish I could read that article if I could find it – microfiche, nowadays – exposed her for what she was. And I couldn’t go to school. I remember being embarrassed going to school that day when they had this big case and this woman who was just plain corrupt in every way. But what I learned was – she worked from her bed because she was an amputee – she never accepted no. I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. She’s a hero to me. And in the basement, listening to music was very important.
Yes.
Listening to Motown songs that were very similar to her with my aunts. And they were colored, which means she married a very dark man, and she looked white. So they were literally your color to my color, maybe even darker, my aunts and uncles and 27 grandkids, 30 grandkids. It was the best time of my life. And they walk the streets and witness some of the atrocities that I [witnessed], I didn’t really know what it was because it was all about coming home to love and fun.
At what point did you decide, “I want to leave this world and do something else?”
In the summer my parents worked and we went to my grandmother’s. But in eighth grade, it became very clear that I was gay. And my father died, my father was killed. He was murdered on the job. He was a cop and he was killed. And he lived a very violent life and died a very violent death.
Was he violent towards you?
Yes.
There’s this great scene in Empire where Lucious reacts to his son and throws him in a trash can. And that’s based on your own life, right?
That’s right.
What happened?
I walked down the stairs in high heels and he threw me in the trash can. I think that’s where Precious came from because I remember the smell. I remember the dark, the cold, my mother trying to fight, and then me thinking I was Aladdin on a carpet escaping. And I think that’s why I feel so connected to Precious. But that was just one of many times. And I have no hatred in my heart at all for my father. I don’t think he got it [Daniels is gay]. He absolutely didn’t understand it and he knew being a black man was hard enough and thought if he scared me, in hindsight I think he thought if he scared me I would do. not be gay because he just couldn’t imagine what my life would be like. But my grandmother could. And she saw greatness, and she said that I would have a greatness far beyond hers, which was incomprehensible to me at the time. My father told me I wouldn’t become anything.
Oh really?
mm My mother, I think, was where The Butler came from. Two doors down from us was a butler who worked for Ed Snider, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles. Anyone from Philadelphia out here? It goes so deep Yo, let’s get to the light of this story. (Laughter.) Anyway, my neighbor, Mr. Crawford, was a butler. And he drove a Mercedes, and there was a phone in there. For me it was like Batman. And he worked in Radnor, which is a suburb of the university [Villanova].
Oddly enough, I was actually there.
Do you have? It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
I was there for an afternoon.
Do you remember that? It is wonderful. Well, for me it was. It was just the most breathtaking thing I had ever seen. After so many of my friends were shot, [my mother] knew I wouldn’t survive selling drugs. I knew I just didn’t have it in me to sell drugs. i was scared Maybe that was part of the gay thing. I was not sure.
did you sell any
I tried to sell nickel bags, but then it just didn’t work. I couldn’t go through the process. But my mother said, “I want you to go to this school,” because the principal — when my father was killed, the family really exploded. And all these bad things started to happen. My brother was in trouble. Everyone was in trouble. It was as if the law was no longer there to protect us. And the law had protected us. Because at that point we were just ordinary Negroes. My grandmother, her fame faded. And my father was no longer a police officer. That’s why I’m so fascinated with race relations today, because [at his funeral] there was nothing but white men weeping around his coffin, weeping. Although I was glad he was dead because I knew the beatings would stop, I was fascinated by the white men weeping for him.
You went to college and then dropped out.
I did.
And then came to L.A.
Well, let’s go back to my mother a little bit. So my mother put me in this white school in Radnor. And it was the first time I’ve actually seen white people. I was in eighth grade. And I was immersed in white in one place. And I was totally mesmerized by all of that. It was like Mars or something. And I was one of three African Americans in that school at about 1,800, not even that, but still a lot of people. And they just lived a different life. And it was just fascinating. Ed Snider gave us his home, his address, so I had the wrong address. And I would take the train there and back. And my mother knew something would happen to me if I didn’t go away. And it happened, it happened to my whole family. They had all gone to jail. This experience allowed me to seamlessly transition back and forth between the white world and the black world—seamlessly, allowing me to understand the truth of the world and the white truth of the world. And, oddly enough, I haven’t experienced racism at all. And it was a great experience for me.
So when you came to L.A. you wanted to be in the entertainment business?
Let’s go back to college. So the college thing, so they saved. When your dad dies in Philly, they pass around a plate and the cops give you, it’s a college fund they give. And my aunts and uncles gave. But by the end of that year, a year and a half, the money had run out and it was left to me to figure out how to do it. And I had a choice, the option. I definitely knew how to sell drugs. But I just didn’t want to. My father told me that if I slept with a man he would kill me. So in my mind he came back to kill me. And I had a girlfriend.
Oh.
Her name was Laurie Ingram and she was as beautiful as Halle Berry, or so I thought. But she said, “You’re gay, aren’t you?”
How old were you at that time?
Old enough to know I’m gay. (Laughter) But sleeping with Laurie just to appease my dead father. And so she gave me – I had a bus ticket and seven dollars. And I went to Los Angeles from Lindenwood College in St. Louis, Missouri.
It took you a long time to break into the entertainment business. You made a lot of money by opening a nursing agency.
Well, not that long, just two and a half years. [But] I was homeless.
Were you homeless?
Yes. I lived behind a church. At first I lived on the streets. And then I found a church in Baldwin Hills. I lived behind a church in Baldwin Hills in the Crenshaw area. And they found out I live there, so I had to clean up. I had no problem with that. I was constantly looking for jobs in the L.A. Times and didn’t really know what to do. So I circled around and found a [job as] a receptionist at a nursing agency. And there, by the way, I was drawn to the theatre. I was drawn to the theater. There was a theater in the church. And I gathered some of the community who wanted to do theater and we did some of our plays. I took the work I did when I was eight and applied it, homeless in my early 20’s. At the same time, I started working for a nursing agency in Hollywood. And I was a receptionist. Let’s say your mother was sick or your aunt was unwell and they wanted home nursing and they didn’t want to go to the hospital, or if your grandmother was dying or if your wife was expecting a baby, they wanted home nurses. And I was on the phone because I had my white voice, a really good sales voice.
Oh you got your white voice?
Yeah, I don’t know what that is now, but I had it then. I had a good voice, a good speaking voice. And it was a sales job: “Let’s explain to you what the problem is, da-da-da-da-da.” We brought in the nurses. They made X dollars and then we paid the nurses X dollars. And I excelled at that very quickly because most of the people I grew up with were salespeople. They were drug dealers – and I knew how to sell very well – or pimps. I knew many pimps. So, you know, it was in me, the salesman was always there. And I excelled at it, and the manager made me a manager. I managed nurses. I didn’t know anything about nursing, but I got my first apartment in Hollywood and Wilcox. Wilcox and Yucca was my first apartment, a one bedroom apartment. I was so excited about that. If you’re homeless, you really have an understanding of what it is. I had seen people die. I had seen humans being born, but when you are homeless you have a complete three dimensional understanding of the human condition which is life altering. I gave my mother the impression that I was fine and I didn’t want her to worry about me, so I didn’t ask for money or anything. But I was determined to make it happen. I knew I could do it on my own. My grandmother told me I could do it, and why couldn’t I? And then I got my apartment and still directed theaters in the church. And that’s how I sell nurses. Then I said, “Why am I doing this for this white man? I could do that for myself.” I made enough money to move to better housing in West Hollywood and opened my own nursing agency. Again ignorant of nursing, I opened an office in Wilshire and La Brea and at the age of 22 started with 5 nurses and ended up with 500 nurses. And I made a lot of money. You would make that sale by befriending the hospital social worker or the hospital discharge planner, who are usually African American women. And I would go in and talk to them and sell my agency. And they would refer those people to me. And I understood people. i can read people I’m very good, I’m almost psychic at reading people. The fact that we had no complaint is beyond my understanding. You know that was crazy. And then something called AIDS struck. And we were the first agency – no one wanted to touch AIDS patients. I was the first agency under AIDS Project LA. And there we made enormous amounts of money by taking care of many dying patients. At the same time all my friends died again. It’s so exciting, the yin and yang of everything. I made a lot of money. I came from extreme poverty. I didn’t know what to do with the money, so what do you do? Houses, clothes, I don’t know. Drugs, parties, at 22, 23 or whatever. And still theater directing. And AIDS struck. And again it wiped out all my friends. I had no friends. And we were all together because her parents didn’t take her in. And we buried each other because most parents, 90 percent of parents, didn’t take them in. And it’s hit the community hard. It was terrifying because we never knew if you could drink out of glasses or what it was. It was the scariest thing ever. And I didn’t understand why I wasn’t [dead], because there were far better souls than me that left. i thought i had to go And so I descended into drugs and into sexual bathhouses to die. Not having AIDS is a miracle from God. I do not get it. I really don’t get it. Because I should have had HIV. Everyone else did. Anyway, I had the foster agency, and then the producer of a Prince film walked in. It was Saturday and he slipped a check under the door and said, “I’m here for Lee Daniels.” And he said, “You take care of my mom?”
Yes I know.
This 21 year old kid. And his mother was dying. And I had a nurse to take care of [her]. I did really well at the screening and the interview. And so he said, “What do you really want to do?” And I didn’t know it was just before Spike Lee and after the black exploitation era. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was drawn directly to the arts. And I said, “Well, I run theaters.” He said, “Do you want to be in show business?” I said, “Yes.” (Laughter.) And then, literally within a week, I sold my nursing agency for a couple million, without know about taxes.
Oh. wow Yes.
And I drove through all the Warners [to the set of Purple Rain] with an Armani suit, a Porsche, and a Newport cigarette and I just thought I was the fucker. And I was PA.
(laughs) Don’t take that as advice, everyone.
no Neither do my children. That will be accepted, and my children, poor children.
I heard they kept trying to fire you and Prince kept hiring you.
Yes. Because he knew the truth. He knew the truth.
did you meet him
Intimate. He knew I knew. And suits wouldn’t tell me. And I’ve never – I was my own boss. I’d never worked for anyone before, so I didn’t really know how to say, ‘Who are you? OK that’s nice. But that’s how it is.” You know what I mean? And so I got fired, and then he said, “No, bring him back.” I would be fired again. “Bring him back.” And I said, “Okay, I’m sick of this job,” you know what I mean? I had some money. I had sold a nursing agency. i was good I could do drama at church. I am fine. And then he loved me, and then we did Under the Cherry Moon together.
Did you keep in touch with him? When he died were you still around?
No, no, no, no, but we had so many friends together. Lenny Kravitz is my best friend. And he was friends with Lenny. Maxwell, he knew Maxwell. Chaka Khan is a really good friend. Patti Labelle. They were all friends. For some reason I just don’t know. I don’t know what happened to his career as a filmmaker because I felt like he was really talented in both films. But I don’t know what happened. I went my own way. We were in touch, but we weren’t in touch.
You went to the casting…
Wait. Warners finally said, “Okay, this boy’s up to something. We’re going to make him Head of Minority Talent.” Now again, before Spike Lee, after black exploitation, nothing happens to minority talent, you know? I knew it, they knew it. But they wanted to feel good, which was nice of them at the time, really good. And I think I did something with Shelley Duvall called Faerie Tale Theater in Lorimar or something. Otherwise there was really no work for me. I just sat there. But what they did was I could fly across the country to see plays to see theaters, which was so exciting. And I saw Morgan Freeman in Gospel at Colonus. Oh, also, I forgot to tell you something. Dreamgirls came into my life early in my career.
When you were 15?
I stole my mom’s car, 17. I stole my mom’s car and I went to the El Dorado and I went to New York City. And I saw Dreamgirls and it really changed my life. I knew it was theater, that I should do this.
So you were at the casting. You have become a manager.
I was casting director. Then I became a manager. And to learn – I hadn’t gone to film school, but I figured I knew how to sell nurses. I had gone to watch all these black people who were amazing and just didn’t work. I said, “I can do that. I can get you work.” “What are you talking about?” “The work is easy.” And I made good money from it, really good money from it, especially in TV time, because you could take 15 percent, sometimes 20, if I was a crook, you know, and put it on TV shows.
Did you enjoy that?
It was frustrating because I wanted to be the one on the red carpet! (Laugh.)
Yes (laughs).
I’m holding someone’s bag.
So what’s interesting is that you didn’t get that chance until you did Monster’s Ball at 41? And as a producer…
I managed for a while. I found that the real money was in white people because every white man got hired.
They had Wes Bentley.
It really was Nastassja Kinski when I got the taste. Most of you are too young to –
Do you know Nastassja Kinski? No? Have you seen Tess of the D’Urbervilles? Thank God. Hooray.
And then Michael Shannon, I got him his SAG card.
You have a great eye for actors.
Well, because I know. I went through the human condition. I think that was my salvation. That was my school. And what I would do was I learned on set what everyone’s job was. And I learned how to direct through management because I lived on set. And then I got tired of telling the actors that there are no jobs for them. It was really embarrassing not to tell the actors, especially the African American ones, that there weren’t any jobs. One of the most profound actors in the world is a woman named Paula Kelly. She was in Women of Brewster Place. She was with Sweet Charity. Sie ist einer der Gründe, warum ich heute hier bin. Eine Tour de Force, eine Meryl Streep, und sich nicht bewusst, dass sie eine Meryl Streep war, und ihr wurden nichts als Dienstmädchenrollen angeboten, und sie war, als hätte sie sie überhaupt nicht. Und es ist meine Entschlossenheit, sie am Laufen zu halten. Und als ich mich im Stich gelassen fühlte, sah ich, was geschah, Ungerechtigkeit. Ich habe Ungerechtigkeiten gesehen. Rennen habe ich nie gesehen. Weil ich in dieser Schule beschützt worden war, wo ich niemals Rassismus erlebt hatte, also wusste ich nie, dass es ihn gibt. Und wenn es existierte, war ich mir dessen nicht bewusst. Ich meine, ich wusste, dass es sein musste. Aber diese Schule hat mich irgendwie beschützt, weil sie mich angeschaut haben, als ob es cool wäre, in meiner Nähe zu sein, die High School also. Und so wurde ich es leid, den Leuten nein zu sagen. Ich sagte: „Ich gehe raus. Ich werde mein eigenes Geld aufbringen. Ich mache meinen eigenen Film.“ Und Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando und Sean Penn waren an einem Film beteiligt, bei dem Sean Regie führte, glaube ich. Ich weiß nicht, wer Regie geführt hat. Und ich glaube, Queen Latifah [war] an einem Film namens „Monster’s Ball“ beteiligt. Die Autoren konnten es nicht machen lassen, weil alle Studios wollten, dass das Kind lebt, das kräftige Kind, Halle Berrys Kind. Also sagte ich: „OK, es ist Zeit für eine Veränderung.“ Und Veränderung ist so schwer. Ich erinnere mich, dass ich so nervös war, die Krankenpflegeagentur zu verkaufen und einfach so nervös vom Management in die Produktion zu springen. Es war so sicher für mich.
Veränderung fällt Ihnen schwer?
Ja, echt schwer.
Obwohl Sie so große Veränderungen in Ihrem Leben hatten?
Mm-hmm. Sein Schmerz war, als würde man das Pflaster abreißen. Es ist, als würde man ein Schmetterling werden und den Kokon verlassen. Es ist gruselig. Für mich ist es. Aber ich sagte: „Okay, lass mich diese Änderung vornehmen. Mal sehen, ob ich dieses Geld aufbringen und diesen Film machen kann.“ Und ich wusste, dass dieselben Theorien auf das zutrafen, was ich auf der Straße sah. Ich habe alle gesehen, jedes Studio, alle sind vorbeigegangen. Sie sahen mich an, als wäre ich verrückt. Ich hatte mich mit Menschen angefreundet, das Hollywood-Stadtspiel – es ist alles ein Spiel. Es ist alles ein Spiel. Es ist alles ein Spiel. Es ist Stier. Weißt du, es ist nicht echt. Und so ging ich auf die Straße, um das Geld zu holen. Und der Film wurde gemacht.
Was meinst du damit, du bist auf die Straße gegangen? Sie waren nicht in den Straßen von Hollywood unterwegs?
no no Ich habe getan, was ich tun musste, um den Film zu machen, und ich werde es dabei belassen. Gut?
Geben Sie uns einen Hinweis.
Nein, ich gebe dir keinen Hinweis. Ich bin auf Band. Aber der Film wurde gemacht.
Sehen wir uns einen Clip an.
[CLIP. BEIFALL]Warum haben Sie das nicht inszeniert?
(Weinend) Ich sehe meine Filme danach nicht. Ich trete einfach weg. Das habe ich zum ersten Mal gesehen. Lassen Sie mich also einen Moment Zeit nehmen, um das zu umarmen.
Machen Sie sich bereit für die Szene in Precious.
Komm schon Mann. Ich werde wieder in Therapie sein. Das war schwer zu beobachten, weil es für mich sehr real war. Ich war ihnen allen, Heath [Ledger], Puffy [Sean Combs], Billy Bob [Thornton] gegenüber sehr klar: „Es ist mir egal, was irgendjemand sagt, das wird es sein.” Aber ich habe die Technik und den Stoff der Regie nicht wirklich verstanden. Ich habe den Kameramann danach mehrmals benutzt. Und ich schäme mich, wie ich mich am Set verhalten habe, um ehrlich zu sein. Und ich habe das mit niemandem geteilt. Ich wusste nicht, was Regie ist. Ich wusste nicht, was Produzieren ist. Ich wusste nicht, was Filmemachen ist. Ich wusste, das war in mir und es musste raus.
What did you learn from it?
Dass ich Regie führen könnte.
Waren Sie sich vorher nicht sicher?
Nun nein. Ich wusste, dass ich mich ein bisschen in einem Medium auskannte, in einem Medium mit einer Kamera. Ich studierte noch intensiver, was alle taten, was der Oberbeleuchter tat. Ich war in meinem Kopf gut darin, zuversichtlich zu sein, Regie zu führen, aber ich war mir immer noch unsicher. Und auch übermütig, wissen Sie. Wirklich arrogant. Because when you’re from the streets, you have to put on this bravado that often so many of us do. And I had that in me that I’m ashamed of. Because it masked so much of the African-American man being treated like nothing. I brought that energy and I’m very embarrassed about it, about what I did. But I’m very happy about the performances that came from it and I’m very excited about the win that came out of it [Halle Berry’s Oscar]. It was historic. Oddly, you know, at the end of it, I was doing drugs, I was on the crack pipe, and Halle had won the Oscar and I was at the Chateau Marmont and she was like, “You coming?” She said, “Big Daddy, you coming to the Vanity Fair party?” I didn’t think that I was worthy of being there. I had two hookers on the side of me with a crack pipe. I said, “I’ll see you there, baby. I’ll be there.” And I had no intention of showing. I didn’t think I was worthy to show. My dad told me I wasn’t worthy to show. That’s that experience. So when I see that film, it brings back everything. But it brings back a high — I mean, not that kind of high. (Laughter.) It brings back a flood of memories, a learning experience. I don’t like the person that I was then.
Do you now?
I do. I do.
Good.
[APPLAUSE]Ally Sheedy’s mother showed you Push —
She did.
— which became Precious.
How do you know this? Good for you.
I read a lot before, you know.
Yes.
And you find things out that are amazing.
Isn’t it fascinating?
Yes.
I didn’t even know she was Ally Sheedy’s mom.
At the time?
Mm-mm.
You’d made your first film as a director, Shadowboxer.
I’d done something before that. I’d done Woodsman.
Right.
Because I still didn’t feel that I — has anybody seen Woodsman? It’s good. It’s really good. Kevin Bacon. But after that one, I could not believe the stuff that I was offered. Leprechauns From the Hood. Who’s My Baby’s Momma Part 4. (Laughter.) I was like, “What the —?” I’m not joking. And so what the, you know? And so I wanted to do something even more. At that point, I had children and I wanted to do something. I was fascinated with pedophilia. So I went off and did this movie because I always learn; it’s about learning. What can I learn? What can I learn through the process? And I can sort of tell, you know, what are the characters like. I went off and did The Woodsman. It’s a learning process. Each process. But we were reviewed very, very well and I think we won [an award at] Cannes even, which is exciting. The first-time thing at Cannes. And then I thought I was the shit and I did a movie called Shadowboxer with Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr., Macy Gray. Still on drugs. It was so out-there that it was like crazy out-there. And that I have seen. I have seen it because I knew it was bad. But it’s not really that bad.
no
No, it wasn’t. It’s really not that bad. I went for it, you know.
It’s actually pretty interesting.
Yes, but they came for me. I wasn’t used to — I had been reading reviews until then. Because it was all about the review. Now I know if I even see my name, I run. You don’t even want to read it because you run. It stabs you hard.
I think the last review that you read called you a hack and you were very upset. But you’re not.
My dad told me I was. So it’s a reiteration. We are what you are. I have two kids and I’m just, “You’re so wonderful. Do you know how wonderful you are?” That’s what I tell them. “You’re great.” You’ve got to tell them, you know. I know the power of the word and what that can do to you and what it’s done to me. So I’m conscious about it, very conscious about it. So I did Shadowboxer and then I said, “I guess I can’t direct.”
Oh wow.
Because I had read those reviews. I’d been reading reviews. I didn’t know not to read the reviews. I did not know not to read the reviews. Stupid ass. Because they can be wonderful, but it’s just one word. And it can be a glowing review. It just takes one word to knock you out. It’s like, I’m in a fetal position under the blanket with a bottle of tequila. It’s crazy. You know what I mean?
I do. So Ally Sheedy’s mom gives you a copy of the book.
Yes. I had that and a copy of a book called Iced by Ray Shell that I’m going to probably end up doing sooner or later. And they’re both tour de forces. They both made me feel the way I felt. Iced did because it was about the crack experience and a black man and it was told in vignettes. Brilliant, just brilliant. And Precious because it just reminded me of my family or it reminded me of my childhood. I wasn’t Precious, but I knew so many Preciouses; I was another form of Precious. I knew that this was something that I could do with my eyes closed.
There’s an amazing thing I read, which is when you were a child, a young girl arrived at your doorstep.
Yes. Angie.
She’d just been horribly abused.
It was quite normal though. Here’s the thing. There wasn’t nothing abnormal about it. The girl lived at the very top of our street, she came down, she was butt-naked, her mother had beaten her. She was eight, nine, she was just growing boobs and she covered herself, but she was heavy. So it was really hard to cover herself. I remembered feeling very awkward because she was sort of overweight. And she’s covering herself and all you saw were the thick, thick [welts] — she had been beaten with an extension cord so deeply and my mother could not, my mother who had seen many such atrocities, she just couldn’t — it was unfathomable. And we wrapped her in sheets and stuff. And we literally, literally had to figure out who was going to take her back to her mother. It was just like, yeah. Her mother ended up shot. She was making biscuits and a man shot her in the head. It was crazy. It was just so crazy.
Let’s take a look at a clip from Precious. It’s the confrontation with Mariah Carey.
[CLIP. APPLAUSE]I didn’t cry.
Why not?
Because it was a f—king party. It’s funny that that movie played at the Magic Johnson Theater. The first time we showed it was in Harlem for a test audience. And it played as, almost as a comedy, and it was all black people and I was like, this is not what it’s supposed to be. You all laugh.
Wow.
I know some of it’s funny, but come the f— on, you know? And then it played at Sundance where it was art. It goes to show you. (Laughter.) And you could hear a pin drop. A pin. It was like that. And it really goes to show you what is the gray area that we all live in and what we understand. And even the reviews, that one will never ever see — some person behind that reviewer that’s doing the review on this movie — because I did not read any of them. Whatever they said about the film, [they] will never see the lens the way I see the lens. Because they ain’t lived in my shoes. Because anything I do is going to be real, is going to be from the [heart], because I done smelled it, I done ate it, I done tasted it, I done walked it. It’s me. And so yeah.
[APPLAUSE]Many Thanks. I have great memories of that, because I just remember like, [Monster’s Ball] was a hard one. We sort of got emotional there, but for the most part, it was fun — even Precious — we all got that it was such a black experience that when Precious, in the first scene they threw her down on the floor and she flew, like she fell down — this is why I love her, I love everyone I work with — she flew down on the floor, they push her, the boys, bullies push her on the floor, she goes down under and she starts singing, ironically, “Give Me Body,” by Queen Latifah. The writer of [the book on which Precious was based], Sapphire, was with me. And she starts laughing. And I start laughing. And then Mo’Nique started laughing. And the white AD said, “Sir. What is so funny? This girl just got pushed on the floor.” And yet I couldn’t understand what was so funny. And then why are the writers laughing and why is Mo’Nique laughing? And so Gabby’s [actress Gabourey Sidibe] shoulders were hunching and he said, “I hope you’re happy, she’s crying.” I went down and said — you know, you feel guilty — “Now Gabby, you know we was just trying to, I’m trying to figure out …” And she starts laughing. And I go, “Why are you laughing?” She says, “I’m a fat bitch on the floor, what do you think?” (Laughter.) It was just a black thing. It was definitely a black thing. And when I think of Mariah Carey and having her — literally, her hands were shaking as I put her in the rayon — she was like, “What do you have me in? Where is my lighting? Where is my makeup? What wig is this?” I can’t stop laughing. And I think of Mo’Nique. I’m so comfortable because I’m able to do me and I’m able to have people that trust me to do me, that just give it and just give it.
But I think there are a lot —
It’s a sexual experience. I say that when I’m doing something and I’m doing it at my best, it is as erotic as it could be. Because we are one, we’re making love without the physical act of making love. We are so spiritually connected. It’s so powerful.
But there were crew members who were unhappy with you. You fired your DP, you fired your editor.
Yes.
At least half a dozen more people.
Yes. But that was just once. I fired an entire crew. Because they had no respect for me in the beginning of the show. They had absolutely no respect for me. I would say, “This is what I want,” but some kids from NYU were telling me, “This is what they want.” I got, “OK, OK, well.” What I didn’t understand was that it’s not done. They thought that once the train starts running, it starts running. But what they didn’t know is who they was f—ing with. Because that train stopped. And I replaced everybody. You know what I mean?
Yes.
(Laughs.) Because it was starting to look like an afterschool special. I said, “This don’t look right. Do it look right to you?” I go, “And these costumes or this production, what’s going on here?” Something was wrong. And each day would go by and I was getting nervous. I said, “No, stop the train.” And so I called the investors, I said, “Look, you want your money? We got to get [rid of them].” So I shut down for a week and a half. It cost us a couple million because of the cut-down, but it was worth it. We got our money back. They got their money back.
It was what, a $10 million film?
Mm-hmm. It should have been eight. But that’s right, they got their money back, OK? A lot of money back.
There are times when you have to make an incredibly bold decision that makes you unpopular. When you cast this, you scoured through schools, looked for hundreds of girls to play Precious. I think you chose 10 and put them in an actor’s boot camp.
I did.
And then you decided you wanted to start again. What happened? That’s an amazing decision to me.
Even with Precious, the only reason why I cast her was because I felt that she was smart and she was the one that was on the floor laughing, where the others I would have been taking advantage of [the moment]. At that point I was insightful enough to know that I don’t want to take advantage of it. I felt that karmically it would come back to haunt me. And Gabby was on another level. She understood the humor of it all. Because if you really look at it, if you really dissect it, especially as an African-American, you can laugh. If you’re not laughing and black, something’s wrong with you, because there’s some funny shit in there.
How do you direct someone like Mo’Nique?
Mo’Nique. That was the best experience of my life. It was just…
You’d already directed her in —
Shadowboxer. It was just so great, you know. I had her with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and they were love interests. It’s a fun, fun moment, if you see them together. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and she are lovers and it’s just beyond. I had them in bed having sex. Es war toll. (Laughs.) That skinny white boy and her, it was so hot. It was great.
Did you rehearse? Did you let her improvise?
No. Not at all. It’s very, very much what it is in the moment. I’ll say, “Now grab the lotion on the table, because you got to wash your hands, you got to dry your hands. Your hands are dry.” “Don’t shave your underarms.” “Put yellow on your teeth.” It’s written and then she’ll say something, I go, “OK.” I guess it is a bit of improv, too. I don’t know, it’s a little bit me adding lines in at the last minute, it’s her putting stuff in, it’s the script, it’s the set, it’s the other actors, I can’t articulate that.
Did she ever say no to anything?
Definitely. The baby. She did say no to the baby. [At one point in the film, she throws a toddler across the sofa.] Yeah. Oh my, God.
The baby is great.
Mongo. Mongo.
They call the kid Mongo.
It was hard. It was so wrong. It was just wrong on every level.
And the kid looked so surprised.
But the kids was having fun because Mongo was mentally challenged and didn’t [understand], and Mo’Nique said, “Now listen, I can’t keep doing this, Lee. There’s just a limit to what it is. I’m not throwing the baby. I’m blowing cigarette on the baby.” Social services is off the set. We’ve got them, we paid them off. I learned from my grandmother how to play the game, you know what I mean? Because there she is blowing cigarette smoke in this baby’s [face]. It’s just terrible. I’m so mean, I don’t even know it. So the baby’s there, the cigarette’s there, the ashes are falling. She’s trying not to hit the baby in the face, she’s trying to blow the cigarette smoke the other way. And then I said, “Throw the baby.” And she goes, “What?” I said, “The baby don’t know. The baby’s Mongo.” I said, “I got a big fat cushion this big, it’s never going to [get hurt].” And she says, “Lee!” I said, “Throw the baby.” And she won the Academy Award. (Laughter.)
Let’s take a look at one more clip. This one’s Lee Daniels’ The Butler.
[CLIP. APPLAUSE]You had 41 producers on this movie.
That’s how much money it took me to get [it made]. I had to promise them all, you know. I told you I had to raise all my money. And so I had 41 this time.
Why do you think it was so difficult to get the money?
I would have thought at this point Hollywood, especially Lionsgate — I had just done Precious and won seven Academy Award nominations for them — that they would put a freaking fence around me or something. Like lock me in. Deal or something, right? But the answer was still no. It was, “They’re all flukes.” So the fighter in me was determined to go out and do it. And I did it. And I’m proud of the movie. I’m proud of the movie. My mom was like, “Dude, Precious, Monster’s Ball, like, Miss Jenkins down at the church is saying something’s wrong with you. Can you just do a movie that my church folks can come see?” And so that was that. That shut Miss Jenkins’ ass up. (Laughter.)
Some real challenges in this. You’ve got a film that goes over a very long period of time with different episodes, so it’s hard to keep a narrative going. And it’s based on a real guy’s story. What was your direction to Danny Strong as the writer?
He wrote it and then I did a pass. He knew the structure of it. He had a great structure, because it’s his story. He’d done a couple things for HBO that were just brilliant. Game Change and something else. He’s really a historian. A brilliant writer, brilliant historian. But again, just understanding the nuance of the African-American experience and understanding the gray area in everybody. And Gloria [Oprah Winfrey’s role] had not really been developed at all. To me, there’s always the matriarch that’s there. This country is built on black women. Getting Oprah to not be her and sort of become this other chick was deep and it was great. And I enjoy it. I enjoy having — you think you know somebody, but you really don’t know that person. And that’s something that really inspires me.
But it wasn’t easy getting her at that point. I mean she said at the time she gave you a lot of resistance.
She said it?
Or you may have said it.
Oh I did? I think there was a moment [when] it was hard for her to [do]. That’s why I would not take any of her money for [the production]. I refused, because I had to be in charge, and I knew that there was no way that I was going to be in charge if she were a producer or anything. She had to be an actor. She had to be one of the people. And she did. She really did. I mean everybody — when I do a movie, because I come from theater, everybody’s chipping in. If you ain’t putting on your own makeup, if you ain’t helping somebody else with their makeup or if you’re not helping them with their costumes, if you ain’t craft services, I’m not messing with you. Because the only ego, I have learned at this point, is the material. That is the only ego that’s at stake at this point. And so with Oprah it was, oh it was wonderful. I just loved taunting her. I became like, not a bully, but — I can’t explain it. There was a scene that’s cut [where] she was washing Cecil’s laundry and she couldn’t do the laundry. It was like a Lucy episode. It was like, “Put the soap in, then you put the bleach in, then you put your fabric softener in. Don’t you know how to separate the whites from the darks?” And then she finally screamed at me. She says, “I haven’t done laundry in 30 years.” (Laughter.) I said, “What do you mean, you haven’t done laundry in 30 years?” And I realized it was Oprah. And then I started screaming, “She ain’t done laundry in 30 years, you all! She ain’t done laundry in 30 years.” And she became sort of a surrogate big sister and it became fun. It just became fun. If we’re not a family on the set it really isn’t fun, it’s not worth it. It really isn’t, you know. The reason why you saw me cry so hard with Monster’s Ball was because it was painful: I knew what I wanted and it was painful to get. But all the other experiences have been just breathtaking. And even that Monster’s Ball was so fun. It was just different.
We haven’t even got to Empire Is there going to be a spinoff? You talked about there being a big shift at the end of this season.
Mm-hmm. There will be.
Does it have a title?
It’s going to take place in Vegas.
How involved in that are you going to be in the Empire spinoff.
I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, how much of me is there to go around? I got to do a movie.
You’ve got two series’ going.
Yes. And I’m doing a film.
What’s the film?
I can’t say. But I’m doing a movie. I’m very excited about it. I’m very, very excited about it.
Give us a clue what it’s about or.
I really can’t. Because it’s too close to, it’s a news story. But there’s several movies that I’m developing.
Are you going to do the Richard Pryor film at some point?
I don’t know what’s happening with that.
And Terms of Endearment.
Terms of Endearment possibly. Again, with Oprah. But it takes place in the ’80s. I really want to explore — I’ve got to tell stories that are important to me, and during the ’80s, so many African-American women died, because so many black men — because the church says, because your father says, because your neighbors say, that you can’t be gay. And so you’re dealing with men on the DL that are infecting African-American women. This is no longer a gay disease, it’s about women that are dying. Black women are dying by the bushels here in the United States. So in the ’80s, so I want to make Flap gay, DL, infect the Debra Winger character, and then, you know. So we explore the ’80s in a different way through…
I would love to see you do that.
Ich glaube schon. Don’t you think?
OK. Questions?
QUESTION: I was looking on your Instagram — great username, by the way.
The Original Big Daddy.
QUESTION: And I saw that you gave a shoutout to Moonlight and Issa Rae’s Insecure, and that got me wondering: you are very evidentially influenced by your own personal experience, but are you ever influenced by other contemporary films coming out today?
I am. And one of the films that have inspired me, too — a couple of them just gagged me — was the French film Elle. And then Arrival was breathtaking. Breathtaking. And there’s a Korean Film called Handmaiden that I simply was, I was blown away, simply blown away by it.
QUESTION: When it comes to creativity and the work you produce, do you find it more challenging to work within the deal at Fox or within major film studios?
I’ve never worked for a film studio. So that’s that. I guess I have. Television studios. [But that] really was jarring, because I was so used to calling the shots and then there’s so many executives that are there that it’s another part of my brain. I did it so that I could learn how to work with people, because it made me a better collaborator. I think you get so caught up in — it’s important to understand that it’s not just you or the actors. Because I only cared about the actors, the writer, and my crew. It was interesting to have people that don’t have nothing to do with [the creative part], but they have [money], the money people finally have something to say about it. So it was fascinating and it was a learning experience for me. What can I learn? That’s what I learned from working on Star and Empire.
QUESTION: I love how you implement the music industry into these two shows. So it makes me wonder what type of musical background you have that may have influenced the making of these shows, and also how you feel about new aspiring artists, what they can do to bring something to the table?
My children give me all the information about who. I don’t know. I didn’t know Puffy when I cast him in Monster’s Ball or Mos Def. [My knowledge] stops at Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, I guess. But my kids keep me current, and my partner, who’s younger than I, keeps me current about what’s happening in the streets. I mean, I know a good song when I hear one. I know what makes me tap my foot and what I think people will want to respond to.
QUESTION: What advice could you give to up and coming artists, because I’m one myself?
To be original. What I don’t like about artists today, the singers and stuff today, is that everything has to be perfect. And I find that everything’s so overproduced, everything is so, wind-machine and this all, and the originality [is rare], the Amy Winehouses are so rare. Back in the day, Aretha Franklin wasn’t afraid to show she had a tooth missing — no shade to Aretha because she’s the queen. But she had no problem sweating onstage and spitting onstage. She was giving you her gut. And that’s what I think is missing today in both cinema and also in singing.
QUESTION: I want to just thank you for coming and talking to us today. I feel that your works and your journey are very inspiring to me, especially as a young black filmmaker. What has been your biggest obstacle in the entertainment industry thus far?
Myself. Learning to love myself, learning to believe in myself. You know, I only did it as a vendetta to my dad, to show him that I was going to be something. I mean, it was about survival, showing him, but knowing deep down that I wasn’t worthy of it. So yeah, I think that myself would be, I am my worst enemy. But, I’m learning, that’s why I’m in therapy now. And I want to do something about that, because, you know, black people don’t believe in therapy. I was like, all of a sudden I’m 57 and I’m going to therapy. That’s some heavy stuff, you know?
Saturday 19th February 2022
“Built with the spectator in mind” The best destinations in the world for great value F1 holidays
Why Our Economic Behavior Isn’t Always Rational NPR
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: From NPR, this is HIDDEN BRAIN. I am Shankar Vedantam. When the crisis hits, people go into survival mode. Some go even further and place self-interest and self-preservation above the well-being of others. We see this with the COVID-19 pandemic.
(SOUND BITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: At the end of the day, I don’t let that stop me from celebrating. You know, I’ve been waiting – we’ve been waiting for spring break in Miami for a while.
VEDANTAM: Some people have refused to wear masks in stores.
(SOUND BITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: It’s become an all too familiar scene across the country – people getting physical about wearing masks in stores. It is required, but unfortunately …
VEDANTAM: And there are even those who bought medical equipment to sell it for a profit.
(SOUND BITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Agents were investigating 43-year-old Baruch Feldman for allegedly stockpiling and selling medical supplies, including masks and gowns, to doctors and nurses…
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: But at the same time, we’re also seeing a different kind of reaction – people looking for ways to help each other. Erika Strauss Chavarria is a high school Spanish teacher in Columbia, Md.
ERIKA STRAUSS CHAVARRIA: My students call me Chav.
VEDANTAM: In March, she launched a grassroots network called Columbia Community Care to provide food and other essential items to people in need.
CHAVARRIA: We typically serve around 100 people per site per day. We also have our home delivery service for groceries. And we have ministered to over 1,500 families in this capacity to date.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: There are many others like Erika. Someone in Texas tipped more than $9,000 on a dinner bill to help restaurant staff.
(SOUND BITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Only one message was written on the receipt. It says wait to pay your boys in the next few weeks. The tipster is a regular…
VEDANTAM: A retired Kansas farmer sent an N95 to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
(SOUND BITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ANDREW CUOMO: He sent a mask — a mask to New York to help a nurse or a doctor. how nice is that I mean how selfless is that?
VEDANTAM: Think of this man who donated a mask and the one who stockpiled masks. In almost every area, our public and economic policies are designed on the assumption that most of us will behave like the selfish human. We develop laws and policies to curb misconduct and rule violations. The one thing we rarely ask ourselves – what effect does that have on the man who donated a mask, on people like Erika? This week on HIDDEN BRAIN, why economic models of selfish behavior routinely don’t describe how people actually behave. And later in the show, can policies designed with only selfishness in mind have perverse effects on the rest of us?
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: Back in 2015, I spoke to behavioral economist Richard Thaler in front of a live audience at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C. Richard is a professor at the University of Chicago and the author of the books “Nudge” and “Misbehaving.” He was also recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
VEDANTAM: I want to start by asking Richard a real softball question. Her friend, whose name is Daniel Kahneman – he won the Nobel Prize in Economics a few years ago – world-renowned psychologist, brilliant author. And Danny Kahneman was once asked to describe Richard Thaler to a journalist. And he said Richard’s dominant trait, what sets him apart is that Richard is lazy.
(LAUGH)
VEDANTAM: Richard, can you tell me why Danny said that and why he insists that was a compliment?
RICHARD THALER: What’s even worse is A, Danny is my best friend and B, he said that’s my best quality.
(LAUGH)
Thaler: To this day, Danny defends that. And he defends A that it’s true and B that it’s a compliment because he says it means I’m just willing to work on things that matter. The truth is I’m only willing to work on things that are fun. And that’s why I’m here today, because I think we’re going to have fun.
VEDANTAM: I think that’s spot on. So I started talking to Richard about 10 years ago. Let me ask you to briefly introduce us. What is behavioral economics and why has it garnered so much attention or has it been so controversial over the last 15 or 20 years? How is it different from garden variety economics?
Thaler: You know, you all probably took an economics course at some point in your distant past. And you know that standard economics assumes that humans are highly rational beings, capable of complex calculations, devoid of emotions, and never having any problems with self-control. And they are complete idiots. So I call these fictional creatures Econs (ph). This is the abbreviation for Homo oeconomicus (ph)…
(LAUGH)
Thaler: …the Latin term. And I think that over the last 50 or 60 years, economists have devoted themselves to studying fictional creatures. You might as well study unicorns because there are no econs. Well, there are a few economists that I know who are around. But basically they don’t exist. And so we have very fancy models of fictional creatures. And people I know have trouble figuring out how to split a check when there are more than three people…
(LAUGH)
Thaler: …Occasionally – just occasionally – overeating or drinking too much, having trouble saving for retirement. And contrary to economic theory, at least some are willing to donate to National Public Radio…
(LAUGH)
THALER: …What any economist will tell you is a totally irrational thing because you can listen to it for free.
(LAUGH)
VEDANTAM: So when I first started talking to Richard about 10 years ago, it was about a topic called mental accounting. And Richard explained to me that mental accounting is something we all do in daily life and one of the things that struck me as soon as Richard started speaking was I started thinking of examples from my own life where mental Accounting really played a role, really big role. Let me start by telling us what mental accounting is, Richard.
Thaler: So a basic concept of economics is that money is fungible, which means there are no labels on it. There is a video of Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman talking. And Gene Hackman tells this story when they were young actors. Hackman visits Dustin Hoffman at his small apartment in Pasadena. Dustin Hoffman asked him to borrow some money. And then Hackman goes into his kitchen and sees these mason jars with labels on them. And one is rent and one is utility and there was nothing in the jar labeled food.
(LAUGH)
Thaler: So Hackman says you don’t need money. You got a lot of money in all those jars. And Hoffman says yes, but there’s nothing in the dinner jar. And that’s mental accounting, right? And it certainly used to be the case in my grandparents’ generation that people literally did it that way. But we still do it mostly in our heads. And it can make us do all sorts of fun things.
VEDANTAM: One of the things that has happened over the years is that Richard has actually played a psychotherapist to a lot of people who come to him with their economic problems. And I’m actually going to do the same here. One of the things I’ve noticed about myself is that my wife and I share our finances. So we have a joint checking account. In a way, we draw from the same pool of money. But I’ve found that when I go to a restaurant, I really like it when my wife pulls out her credit card and pays the bill. Now I’m effectively still paying for it.
(LAUGH)
VEDANTAM: But it greatly increases my satisfaction with the food…
(LAUGH)
VEDANTAM: …not having to pull out my own credit card.
Thaler: Okay, that’s fine. So here’s something that would be even better.
VEDANTAM: Yes.
Thaler: Suppose you and your wife trust each other…
VEDANTAM: Yes.
Thaler: … I recommend that you open a separate current account for each.
VEDANTAM: What?
Thaler: You can still have — my wife and I have that agreement. So we each have a separate checking account and a joint checking account. And splurge – if I buy myself a new set of golf clubs that I urgently need, or she buys her fourth camera…
VEDANTAM: Right.
Thaler: …because she travels the world to take photos, I don’t see that.
VEDANTAM: So the splurges come from your individual checking accounts.
Thaler: Exactly. And presents. So when your wife picks up the bill, it comes from her account.
VEDANTAM: That’s even better.
Thaler: Even better.
VEDANTAM: That’s really a good idea.
Thaler: And I think that’s a recipe for marital harmony.
(LAUGH)
VEDANTAM: One of the results of mental accounting is that people keep in mind how much money they need to make annually or monthly or sometimes even daily. And one of the things you explained to me was that this might explain why it’s sometimes difficult to catch a taxi on a rainy evening. Can you tell us why mental accounting might make it harder for us to catch a cab on a rainy evening?
Thaler: So that’s a study that some friends of mine and I did in New York a long time ago. And we took many taxis and talked to the taxi drivers. And we would ask how do you decide how long you work? They hire the cab for 12 hours, which is a long drive in Manhattan. And then they have to take it back within the 12 hours. And a lot of them would say, well, what we’re doing – I’m setting a goal. So renting the cab costs me $100 and then I have to fill up the gas. Let’s say that’s another $25. So I want to earn a certain amount from it – let’s say $100. And when I hit that, I go home.
Well, a consequence of this is that on days like rainy days when there is a lot of demand, they reach their destination early and go home. Now what would an econ do? An Econ would drive more on the busy days. And on the sunny day when no one needs a cab because they are walking, he would go for a walk himself. Again, going back to your spouse, imagine the guy comes home at 2 p.m. and his wife says, how come you come home so early? And he says because I didn’t make any money. Right? I mean, this isn’t going to go over well.
VEDANTAM: No, it will not. Right.
Thaler: So you have to get out there and drive around for three more hours, burning gas, not earning any money.
VEDANTAM: Right. But the interesting thing, of course, is that standard economics would predict that people would actually act rationally — that they would actually work more when demand was higher, and they would work less when demand was lower. And what we naturally find is exactly the opposite.
Thaler: Exactly.
VEDANTAM: One of the interesting implications of mental accounting is that the source of people’s money ultimately changes how they spend it. So there was a study by Viviana Zelizer, I think at Princeton University, looking at prostitutes in Oslo. And she found that sex workers were willing to spend money they received in the form of welfare checks or other types of grants on things like rent and essentials. But they spent the money they made from sex work — they were much more likely to spend it on drugs and alcohol. The source of the money determines how you actually spend the money.
I saw a clip from a video. It’s called Welcome To Me, starring comedian Kristen Wiig and about a woman who suddenly wins a huge amount of money. And I’ll play the clip for you. And I want you to talk about this idea. So if we could, please play the video.
(SOUND BITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNKNOWN ACTOR #1: (as character) Fourteen. There are 57, 15 and 54 and 39.
UNKNOWN ACTOR #2: (as character) Thanks for calling the California Lottery. If you’re calling to report a win, just say I’m a winner, anytime.
KRISTEN WIIG: (As Alice Klieg) I’m a winner every time.
WES BENTLEY: (as Gabe Ruskin) What’s your name?
WIIG: (As Alice Klieg) My name is Alice Klieg. I won $86 million.
JOAN CUSACK: (as Dawn Hurley) Do you think she actually won the lottery? Seriously, can someone google this?
JAMES MARSDEN: (as Rich Ruskin) You have to be the big winner. Hi. I’m rich.
WIIG: (As Alice Klieg) Me too.
I want a talk show with me as the host.
JENNIFER JASON LEIGH: (As Deb Mosely) You want to talk about current events?
WIIG: (As Alice Klieg) No.
BENTLEY: (as Gabe Ruskin) What kind of things do you want to talk about?
WIIG: (As Alice Klieg) Me. How much will that cost?
MARSDEN: (as Rich Ruskin) Fifteen million dollars.
WIIG: (As Alice Klieg) Oh, and I want to come in on a swan boat.
TIM ROBBINS: (as Dr. Daryl Moffet) You’re off your meds. You live in a reservation casino. And you host your own talk show.
WIIG: (As Alice Klieg) It’s a new era – $86 million Alice.
UNKNOWN ACTOR #3: (as a character) We’re going live in five, four, three…
MARSDEN: (as Rich Ruskin) What is she doing?
CUSACK: (as Dawn Hurley) I think she froze a bit.
BENTLEY: (as Gabe Ruskin, whispering) You’re on TV now.
WIIG: (As Alice Klieg) Hello. I’m Alice Klieg and welcome to my place.
VEDANTAM: So, Richard, why is that? Why does the way we think about spending that money change dramatically when we receive money from certain sources?
Thaler: You know, one of my colleagues — my fellow disruptors — is David Laibson, who just became chair of Harvard’s business school. He used to be one of my protégés. Well, you know – anyway.
(LAUGH)
Thaler: Some of my friends made me a roast a few weeks ago because it was a milestone birthday. And he told the following story. A bunch of us got invited to Washington – must have been 15 years ago when David was a struggling young assistant professor – and did something for the National Institutes of Health. And they give us a daily fee of $200. So I said, you know, that’s ridiculous. We don’t work for $200 a day. We need to go out and spend this money on dinner. And so we went out and had a good dinner – 15 years ago you could get a pretty good dinner for $200. Well, David wasn’t happy about spending $200 on dinner. And he now claims it was closer to 300 by the time I finished the wine.
(LAUGH)
Thaler: But you know, that was my line of thinking, I’m not going to work for $200, but I’m happy for a good dinner because I’ve been helping out at the NIH.
VEDANTAM: Yes. For example, studies have also found that when you want to reward employees at the end of the year it is very different than giving them vacation time, that even though you are giving them the same amount of money – you are giving them, say, 500 Dollars as a bonus versus $500 as a vacation – people report that they are significantly happier when you give them the vacation than when you give them the money.
Thaler: Yes.
VEDANTAM: Why is that?
Thaler: Well, because if you give them vacation time, they get away with it guilt-free. I rediscovered this with my daughter last week and made a mistake. And it’s a mistake I shouldn’t have made of all people, but I had good reasons. And I had good intentions. So my daughter is a Mets fan, and one of the Mets’ pitchers happens to be a neighbor. So she was an avid Mets fan and I thought it would be nice to buy her two tickets to one of the first round games when her neighbor was fielding. But it was – this idea came to me late.
So I went online and found I could get tickets for around $400. And – but I didn’t have time to buy the tickets and send them to her so I emailed her with a link to this website that said look. It looks like you can get tickets for 400 each. I’ll send you $1,000. Buy two tickets on this website. And she had already expressed her great excitement at being able to go to this game. So I sent her this email. I get a text back – LOL. This is exactly like one of the examples in your book.
(LAUGH)
Thaler: If you send me $1,000, I’m not going to spend it on baseball tickets.
(LAUGH)
Thaler: Well – now she would have been happy if I had sent her the cards. Surely they would have gone to the game. But I send her the $1,000, nothing. So I didn’t send her the thousand.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: In the 1970s, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel conducted a series of experiments that became known as the marshmallow test. Young children were placed in a room and told they could either have a marshmallow right away, but if they stayed in the room and didn’t eat the marshmallow they would get a second one. Kids who tried not to eat the first marshmallow found ways to distract themselves. Watching these kids on video is hilarious.
(SOUND BITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: All right, here’s the deal – marshmallow for you. You can either wait and I’ll give you another if you wait. Or you can eat it now. When I come back I’ll give another one so you have two. But stay here and stay in the chair until I get back, okay?
VEDANTAM: I played a video to Richard Thaler of a marshmallow test in progress, with a young boy desperately trying not to eat the marshmallow placed in front of him. At one point he lovingly leans into the marshmallow and takes a big, big sniff and then sadly looks away.
(SOUND BITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: How have you been? did you do well You did?
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: You wanted to eat it, didn’t you? Yes. Did I tell you I’ll give you another one?
VEDANTAM: Excited boy stuffs both marshmallows into his mouth Chipmunk style.
(LAUGH)
VEDANTAM: So talk about self-control, Richard. Why has classical economics ignored the idea that people have problems with self-control?
Thaler: So economic theory says that we optimize and that we always choose what’s best for us, so that includes self-control. And so you know that with these experiments, if you’d rather have two marshmallows than one, be prepared to wait 10 minutes. But as you know, kids obviously have less self-control than adults. So this experiment kind of exaggerates that. But what you get from these videos, these valuable videos, is the really important idea, which is that self-control is work. Resisting temptation is work. This is important.
You know, 30% of Americans are obese. Half of Americans aren’t saving enough for retirement. So these are enormous problems that we face as a society. And they essentially are, because self-control is difficult to exercise. In some of these marshmallow experiments, they used Oreos. And my favorite of these – in one condition there was a child and he had three Oreos in front of him. And he might have one now. But he looked at the three. And what he does is, as soon as the person leaves the room, he opens the Oreos, licks out the center, and then puts them back together.
(LAUGH)
Thaler: And I have a deep suspicion – these were made at Stanford many years ago. I’m pretty sure that guy is Bernie Madoff.
(LAUGH)
VEDANTAM: Thank you all so much. And thanks to Richard Thaler.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: That was behavioral economist Richard Thaler speaking at a live event that we recorded together in 2015. Coming back, what do we lose by letting the notion that human beings are rational and selfish by nature inform economic and public policy, and what we can gain by focusing on the good in people.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: I am Shankar Vedantam. And you listen to HIDDEN BRAIN. This is NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: This is HIDDEN BRAIN. I am Shankar Vedantam. In both times of crisis and normal times, public policy often focuses on stopping bad people from doing bad things. This makes sense if you assume that people are fundamentally motivated by selfishness. In this worldview, the job of government is to be a bad cop, a force to go against rogues and rogues.
Behavioral economist Sam Bowles thinks this is a mistake. He worries that such policies not only underestimate most people’s ability to do the right thing, but may inadvertently impair our ability to do the right thing through others. He explores this idea in his book The Moral Economy.
SAM BOWLES: I think one of the really remarkable things is that in policy making circles you are considered highly intelligent and realistic when you say listen; everyone is selfish. We have to treat the citizen, the taxpayer, the employee and so on as if he or she is totally selfish, otherwise we might be an idiot. Or maybe we’re being taken advantage of and so on. So people who don’t really believe it think that you should go ahead with this homo oeconomicus assumption because it’s smart.
There may be people who are really like that. And if so, we better watch out. And that’s why we’re going to draft policies and stuff like that, as if everyone were like that. David Hume, an 18th-century economic philosopher – just before Adam Smith – said that in designing government one should assume that everyone is a scoundrel – he used that old word, a scoundrel – and has nothing in mind other than to pursue his own interests.
VEDANTAM: We will talk a lot about how values, norms and beliefs shape our economic, professional and social life. But I would like to add a caveat. It’s one thing to say that feelings, values, and preferences matter. It’s another thing to imagine that feelings and values can explain everything.
This is how self-interest motivates me on a regular basis. There are two gas stations across the street in my neighborhood, and one is consistently more expensive than the other. Why? I do not know. When I first moved into the neighborhood, Sam, I stopped by the more expensive station. But once I noticed the price difference I never went back. It is therefore possible to go too far with the homo oeconomicus model. But you can probably push your reflection too far, right?
BOWLES: Absolutely. And the task that must be done is to find ways to organize our economy and our public policies so that we don’t rely solely on self-interest, and certainly not so that we rely solely on our esteem for others , but that we can rely on both . And we should design policies so that these two aspects of who we are work together in a synergistic or complementary way.
That’s what Adam Smith spoke of. As is well known, his two major books were “The Wealth Of Nations”, but also “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”. But what economists took from Smith was the competitive prosperity part, and they set aside the idea that there is a culture required for this system to work. He thought that we should combine material interests with moral feelings, and he thought there was a way to do this.
So I think, yes, the idea that you can replace the self-interested system of competing in profit markets and so on with a whole different system, essentially based on consideration for others — I mean, it’s obviously wrong. I mean, you can’t organize the whole world like we’re just on a little camping trip.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: At the same time, if we go too far in the other direction and imagine a world filled only with free riders, delinquents and selfishness, there are also consequences. The actions we take to curb selfishness can have perverse consequences for the rest of us.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: About two decades ago, the Boston Fire Department had a problem. Administrators were concerned that workers would abuse the sick leave policy. And at that time, workers could get sick indefinitely, so the administrators changed the policy.
BOWLES: They noticed that the calls for sick leave came on Fridays and Mondays, and that just didn’t seem reasonable to them. So they told the firefighters that they would have a limited number of sick days, and if they came more often their wages would be reduced. And the firefighters felt distrusted. Most of them certainly didn’t actually call in sick, even though they weren’t. They were quite angry with the fire commissioner.
This happened just before Christmas and what happened on Christmas Day was masses of them were called up. The same happened on New Year’s Day. Meanwhile, those who called in sick in large numbers over Christmas and New Year’s had their bonuses removed. And the conflict lasted for over a year. The number of visits to the sick doubled over the next year, until the inspector finally realized he had made a big mistake and canceled the policy.
VEDANTAM: I understand that after implementing these strict guidelines, almost 7,000 more sick days have been taken than last year.
BOWLES: Yes, that’s right – from about six to over 13. And the interviews with the firefighters were really poignant. I mean, they said, look. You know, we come to work when we’re sick. We risk injuries and so on. And this person is saying that when we’re not sick, we’re essentially calling selfishly. Well, surely some of them were. It looks like some of them were. The problem, however, was that the application of this directive backfired across the board. Well, why did it backfire? Well, presumably such a policy would be necessary for those who were truly selfish and called in sick when they weren’t. But what about the other 95%? Well, it just had a terrible impact on their morale and their sense of obligation to the fire commander and the fire department.
So that’s a problem we’re facing in society now, because when we think about trying to motivate people to do things, incentives are often suggested as a way to do it. That means if you do this – whatever it is – you’ll get paid more. And we hear about encouraging children to read books and lose weight, even encouraging them to vote. And recently someone in Germany suggested that we should have incentives – monetary incentives that have to do with social distancing because of the COVID-19 pandemic and whatnot.
So there’s almost nothing that hasn’t been an example of this, well we can actually design some incentives to fix this. Well, that’s a view that has dominated policy making and also the jurisprudence. And the whole field of law, economics, and public policy is committed to the idea that we can create incentives to bring about the right behavior.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: I’m also struck by the fact that the guidelines implemented by the Boston Fire Department have changed the framework by which people think about what it means to feel sick. So when sick leave was unlimited, you thought, OK. Ich würde mich krankschreiben lassen, wenn ich krank oder verletzt war, und ich würde mir so viel Zeit nehmen, wie ich brauchte. Wenn mir gesagt wird, dass du jetzt nur noch 15 Tage hast, und wenn du darüber hinausgehst, werden sie dich bestrafen, jetzt fange ich an zu denken, OK. Diese 15 Tage nutze ich besser. Wenn ich nicht wirklich krank bin, aber das Jahr fast um ist, werde ich diese Zeit verlieren. Ich melde mich besser krank. Natürlich unbeabsichtigt, aber der Rahmen verändert die Art und Weise, wie ich beginne, darüber nachzudenken, was es bedeutet, krank zu sein und was es bedeutet, sich Zeit für die Krankheit zu nehmen.
BOWLES: Genau das ist passiert, oder zumindest ist das die beste Erklärung, die ich dafür haben könnte. Aber hier ist eine andere, bei der ich denke, dass die Art und Weise, wie Sie es als Framing-Problem ausdrücken, genau richtig ist. In Haifa, Israel, gab es eine Reihe von Kindertagesstätten – ungefähr ein Dutzend an der Zahl. Und die Kinder kamen morgens und die Eltern holten sie abends ab. Und wie es so ist, kamen manche Eltern zu spät. Und sie beschlossen, den Eltern, die zu spät kamen, eine Geldstrafe aufzuerlegen.
Nun, zum Glück für die Wirtschaftswissenschaften wussten einige Verhaltensökonomen davon. Und so sagten sie, jetzt warte. Wait. Wait. Machen wir es einfach auf der Hälfte der Kitas und nicht auf der anderen Hälfte, also haben wir ein schönes Experiment. Und tatsächlich kamen eines Tages die Eltern und brachten ihre Kinder ab. Und es gab einen Hinweis. Darin stand, dass ab morgen jeder, der sein Kind mehr als 10 Minuten zu spät abholt, mit 10 israelischen Schekel bestraft wird. Und dann haben sie aufgenommen. Sie hatten aufgezeichnet, was in der Woche zuvor passiert war, und dann haben sie aufgezeichnet, wie viele Menschen zu spät in die Kitas kamen, die das Bußgeld hatten, und die, in denen es kein Bußgeld gab.
Es war erstaunlich, was passiert ist. An den Stellen, an denen es kein Bußgeld gab, geschah nichts. Sie machten weiter – es war tatsächlich eine kleine Anzahl. In den Fällen, in denen das Bußgeld gegen die Eltern verhängt wurde, die zu spät kamen, verdoppelte sich der Betrag der Verspätung. What now? Wie können Sie sich das erklären? Das Bußgeld sollte sie dazu bringen, pünktlich zu kommen, um ihre Kinder abzuholen.
Nun, wenn Sie darüber nachdenken – ich meine, es gibt viele mögliche Interpretationen dessen, was passiert ist. Aber was Sie gerade über das Framing gesagt haben, Shankar, scheint die wahrscheinlichste Erklärung zu sein, nämlich – dass die Eltern das Kommen der Führung oder das frühe Kommen, um ihre Kinder abzuholen, als im Wesentlichen eine moralische Frage eingerahmt haben – ich meine, vielleicht keine hohe Moral. Aber Sie sollten Ihr Kind rechtzeitig abholen, weil Ihr Kind vielleicht Angst hat, weil die Lehrer vielleicht nach Hause wollen und bei ihren Kindern sein wollen oder – so etwas gibt es. OK. Manchmal gibt es zusätzlichen Verkehr und Sie kommen zu spät. Aber es war eine moralische Frage.
Sobald man einen Preis darauf setzt, ist es wie eine Ware. Es ist ein Hemd oder ein Bier. Steigen Sie richtig ein. Du willst etwas Verspätung bekommen? Hier ist, wo Sie es bekommen können. Es kostet nur 10 israelische Schekel. Ich denke also, sie haben diese Sache von einem ethischen Problem in mehr oder weniger ein Eigeninteressenproblem verwandelt. Und anscheinend waren 10 israelische Schekel nicht hoch genug, um sie wirklich dazu zu bringen, irgendetwas anders zu machen.
(SOUNDBITE DER MUSIK)
VEDANTAM: Forscher haben herausgefunden, dass verschiedene Teile des Gehirns an der Abwägung dieser Probleme beteiligt sein könnten. Ethische Urteile werden nicht wie Kosten-Nutzen-Gleichungen verarbeitet.
(SOUNDBITE DER MUSIK)
BOWLES: Unser Gehirn hat offensichtlich diese Regionen, die bestimmte Dinge tun. Das Verarbeiten von Nutzen und Kosten ist etwas, worin wir ziemlich gut sind, und das geschieht in einem Teil des Gehirns. Und es gibt andere Dinge, die mit Gefühlen, Verpflichtungen und so weiter zu tun haben. Aber die Tatsache, dass nur etwas Geld auf den Tisch gelegt wird, die Aktivität des Gehirns in den präfrontalen Kortex verlagert, wo Sie Nutzen und Kosten verarbeiten und so weiter, ist wirklich eine bemerkenswerte Erkenntnis. Das deutet also darauf hin, dass wir so sind. Und wir werden uns wahrscheinlich nicht ändern, also sollten wir das besser berücksichtigen.
(SOUNDBITE DER MUSIK)
VEDANTAM: Eines der traurigen Dinge, die Sie an der Geschichte der Tagespflege in Haifa bemerken, ist, was passiert ist, als die Tagespflege die Politik in Bezug auf die Geldbuße umkehrte. Es ging also offensichtlich nach hinten los. Und dann haben die Administratoren die Richtlinie rückgängig gemacht und gesagt: OK, wir nehmen die Strafen weg. What happened afterwards, Sam?
BOWLES: That’s an amazing thing. When they took away the fine, the lateness persisted in the schools – in the day care centers which had had the fine. The control schools – the control centers didn’t – it had no effect. But – now, just to get this – I say it again because it’s so unusual. When they imposed the fine on being late, the parents came later. And when they took away the fine, they continued coming later. Well, why is that?
Well, I think the story about framing is exactly what happened. It used to be an ethical question. You should come on time. They tried to. Sometimes they didn’t. Once it became just a matter of step right up and purchase a little lateness if you want, that didn’t change after they took the fine away. It still seemed to them – they had already been told, oh, this is something I can buy. And only now I can buy it for free because for some reason, they took away the price.
VEDANTAM: (Laughter) I’m wondering whether you might have friends in the economics department who might say the problem with Haifa was not that they introduced fines but that the fines were not big enough; that in some ways, the incentive was not strong enough. If you’d actually made it – instead of 10 shekels, if you’d made it 200, you know, everyone would have come on time because at that point, no one thinks 15 minutes is worth 200 shekels.
BOWLES: I think that’s right. But I think that objection is perfectly sound, that there is some level of monetary incentive which will lead people to conform to the rules. It just means that because you start out by crowding out the ethical motivation, which was the reason why they were coming on time – most of them – in the first place.
VEDANTAM: Right.
BOWLES: So you start, basically, in the hole by having destroyed what Adam Smith calls moral sentiments. Now, the fact that you can make up for it by a large fine or, you know, severe penalties – of course you can do that. It’s not clear that we want to live in a society which has fines of enormous amounts and so on or other kinds of penalties, particularly when we can find ways of mobilizing people’s desire to be a good citizen, to be good to their neighbors, to be considerate of their teachers and so on.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: When we come back, what we can do to create policies that appeal to our better angels instead of our devilish impulses.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: You’re listening to HIDDEN BRAIN. I’m Shankar Vedantam. This is NPR.
This is HIDDEN BRAIN. I’m Shankar Vedantam. Sam Bowles is a behavioral economist at the Santa Fe Institute. He argues that policies designed to discourage bad behavior might actually work better if they’re framed instead to encourage good behavior. One idea that Sam has explored has to do with the concepts of crowding out and crowding in. To explain these concepts, he tells a story about his own kids. He wanted to incentivize them to do household chores, and he turned to mainstream economics for a solution.
BOWLES: My kids were very helpful around the house, and they did a lot. I was a single dad, and they were great. And as they became teenagers, they began to want to buy clothes and a lot of things like that. And I thought, well, you know, a good way to accommodate this is that – instead of them just doing stuff around the house, cleaning dishes and helping me in lots of ways, I would issue a price list. And then they could get paid for the stuff that they used to do for free.
VEDANTAM: (Laughter).
BOWLES: Of course, I thought it was a brilliant idea. And we agreed on the price list. It seemed reasonable. I posted it on the fridge. And what happened? Nichts. They stopped work entirely. They didn’t do a thing. And they were not selfish because as I say, they’d been helping me a lot, doing a lot of work. But once it was for pay, it didn’t seem to be the same thing. Now, it’s true that, you know, when a particular item they wanted to buy – well, then they might do the lawn. But they ended up doing much less than before. And I had to bring the thing to a halt and say, let’s go back to just doing stuff together. Now, I wonder if your listeners are thinking, oh, my God – those poor kids, having an economist for a dad.
VEDANTAM: (Laughter).
BOWLES: And I think there probably are – there’s a lot wrong with having an economist for a dad. And I talked to the kids about it. They didn’t really have a good explanation of what happened, but looking back on it now, I think that what happened was this. They actually enjoyed doing stuff together around the house, and they kind of thought they should help me out. They didn’t want to see me doing all this stuff by myself.
And so it was something that they both enjoyed intrinsically and felt some obligation to do. But when I offered to pay them for it, it made them think differently about it, and it made it a matter of choice. So I think I made the mistake that Adam Smith never made, which is to treat the moral sentiments – that is, the ideas of value in contributing to others and so on – to treat them as if they’re somehow separate from or just additive to the incentives that come from material interests and money.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: Sam’s incentives demotivated his daughters, but it didn’t have to be this way. You can design incentives to work with the intrinsic pride and satisfaction that people take in doing the right thing. Designed effectively, Sam says incentives can amplify, or crowd in, such motives. In Ireland in 2002, for example, the government wanted to reduce the number of plastic bags that people were using. They came up with an incentive but first made an appeal to national pride.
BOWLES: It was preceded by a big campaign about how these bags were so ugly and Ireland is beautiful. And there was an advertising campaign – don’t trash the Emerald Isle and things like that. And then this thing was introduced. It was a very small additional cost. And within two weeks, the use of plastic bags for shopping was almost completely eliminated. Now, think about it. That case was very much like the parents who, when fined, came later instead of shaping up and coming earlier. In Ireland, when you had to pay for using a plastic grocery bag, they stopped using them.
And so we have something to learn from that case. Why is that different from the day care case? Because the results were the opposite. Let’s just think about it. If you pick up your kid at the day care late, you’re one of the very few people who’s late. The only other people who see you there being late are other parents picking up their kids late…
VEDANTAM: (Laughter).
BOWLES: …Other than the teacher and your kids, so OK – no problem there. They didn’t explain why they were doing the fine. They didn’t provide any explanation for why they actually should try to discourage lateness. In Ireland, it was quite the opposite. You’re waiting in line, and the person says, do you want some plastic bags? And you have to say yes or no. And there’s three or four or five, six other people there standing there, and they’re looking on and, presumably from what happened, with disapproval. So it’s a very public thing, and you have to choose to do it. Arriving late at the day care – you didn’t even know that it was your choice because, I mean, maybe it really was traffic rather than deciding to have an extra cup of coffee with a friend. But the other thing…
VEDANTAM: Yeah.
BOWLES: …Which I’m sure was important, was in Ireland – they said, look. This is a serious problem for us. We’re trashing our country, and let’s stop doing it. Let us stop doing it. And so I’d like us to learn from the cases where we have crowding in, crowding in meaning where the monetary side of the incentive or the side of the package enforces and increases the salience of the moral part.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: In recent weeks, we’ve all seen millions of people do things that are profoundly unselfish. Even if they weren’t particularly concerned for their own health, millions of people around the world have followed public health guidelines and maintain physical distance from others. For many people, this has cost them their livelihoods. I’m wondering; do you think the COVID-19 pandemic gives us a way to think afresh about incentives and about the human capacity to do the right thing even when it’s difficult to do?
BOWLES: Oh, yes. I think COVID-19 is going to change the way we think about economics and the way we talk about it. I think, for example, individualism and self-interest have definitely gotten a bad name over the past – over the duration of the pandemic. And I think we’re going to be rethinking the value of values – that is, the value of ethical values as an important part of how you organize a society. So we need to have governments that are trusted by their people, we need people who trust the scientific advice of governments, and we need people willing to help each other.
So I think we’re going to learn some good lessons, which is simply relying on self-interest in markets and in relations with government isn’t going to be a good way to organize the future. COVID tells us that we have to rely on other things – communities, neighborhoods, obligations we have to each other which are not self-interested. That’s what we’re seeing is fundamentally getting people through this.
Now, of course, the market is very important. For example, the market is very important in providing incentives, which will be very essential to the distribution of production and distribution of a vaccine and of other treatments, including masks and so on. Governments are essential. I’m not suggesting that the government and the market are irrelevant. What I’m suggesting is that there should be a third dimension of thinking, talking and policymaking, and that’s what I would call community or civil society – the things which are not governmental but they’re not markets, either. For example, think about social distancing. Is that a market phenomenon? No. Well, is it a government phenomenon? Well, the government requires it in some places, but it could never enforce it.
So what I hope we’re going to learn from this is that you have to rely on people’s values such as they are, taking a realistic view of that. That’s the first point. The second point is, oh, guess what? People aren’t entirely selfish. Economists have to learn that lesson, too. People are not entirely selfish. We actually care a lot about others. And the third is a little bit frightening. Yes, we care about others, and sometimes we care negatively.
So for example, there have been reported increases in attacks on people of Asian descent in the course of the pandemic. And the rise of xenophobia in public statements and so on is just another reminder that one of the ways that we care about each other is that we care about their well-being. We love them, and we’re willing to sacrifice for them. We also sometimes despise them and are willing to treat them badly. So then I think we have to face up to the fact that a lot of these values that we have – our susceptibility to kindness and cooperation – comes along in the same package with a susceptibility to zealotry and hatred of outsiders.
That’s a real challenge for us in terms of thinking about how we can essentially have the better part of that without having the worse. I’m thinking that COVID-19, along with climate change, could be the driver of a new change, a change in both the economics – the content and what we teach our students and also how we talk about the economy and how we talk about our futures. And if I’m right, it’ll involve words like community, solidarity and not just self-interest in markets and obedience to governments.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: Sam Bowles is a behavioral economist at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of “The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute For Good Citizens.” Sam, thank you for joining me today on HIDDEN BRAIN.
BOWLES: Thanks a lot. I enjoyed the program.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: This episode was produced by Maggie Penman, Kara McGuirk-Allison, Max Nesterak, Cat Schuknecht and Rhaina Cohen. It was edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Parth Shah, Thomas Lu, Laura Kwerel and Lushik Wahba.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: For more HIDDEN BRAIN, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. If you like today’s episode, please share it with someone in your life who represents the positive aspects of human behavior that Sam described today.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: I’m Shankar Vedantam. See you next week.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Related searches to Fact Check Is Wes Bentley Sick Weight Loss Explained -Meet Him On Instagram
Information related to the topic Fact Check Is Wes Bentley Sick Weight Loss Explained -Meet Him On Instagram
Here are the search results of the thread Fact Check Is Wes Bentley Sick Weight Loss Explained -Meet Him On Instagram from Bing. You can read more if you want.
You have just come across an article on the topic Fact Check Is Wes Bentley Sick Weight Loss Explained -Meet Him On Instagram. If you found this article useful, please share it. Thank you very much.
Articles compiled by Bangkokbikethailandchallenge.com. See more articles in category: DIGITAL MARKETING