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Sendhil Mullainathan

Sendhil Mullainathan

American professor

Sep 5, 2026

28:33
Savoring, that's a good
28:34
word.
28:34
That's right.
28:34
The second thing I do is I always tell people ideas I've heard, whether they're my own or something else.
28:42
If you're not sharing ideas, they're not running through your system.
28:46
Creating new ideas is largely reassembling stuff you've seen or putting things together.
28:51
So part of what you want to do is just, Enjoy having this wealth of stuff inside of you that you love and cherish sharing and do it.

6 MINS LATER

35:01
Is there any research you've done, ideas you've had, that you think are really important but just got ignored for some reason? This is
43:50
So you think that school should be more like life, or the point of school should be to teach people to be learners?
43:57
That's the idea I'm throwing around in my head these days.
44:00
Y- you said it perfectly, Steve.
44:01
Could school teach us to be learners, but learners in environments? And in psychology, there's this notion of a wicked environment.
44:09
A wicked learning environment is one where there's very little feedback.
44:13
And how would you arm people to be learners in a wicked environment? I don't have an answer to it, but that's the kind of question that I'm throwing around in my head, because that seems like it would have very high return.
44:23
If we could even make a little bit of progress on that, given that everyone is about to be thrown out into this world.

5 MINS LATER

49:39
Do you have advice for young people who are trying to figure out their place in the world?
15:12
And so that, I worry that we may face that as well.
15:17
So I love the chess example because it so clarifies many things.
15:21
There's this term, though a bit technical, I think is very helpful, called closed world versus open world problems.
15:29
Closed world problems are ones where everything is specified.
15:32
Let's say chess satisfies that, but I'm going to come back on how even chess may not satisfy that in a second.
15:37
But let's say chess satisfies that.
15:38
All the rules are known, all the objectives are known, everything is there.

20 MINS LATER

36:07
Can you explain supervised learning and how your fandom of sports has led you to see sports through that lens?
17:09
And so that, I worry that we may face that as well.
17:14
So I love the chess example because it so clarifies many things.
17:18
There's this term, though a bit technical, I think is very helpful, called closed world versus open world problems.
17:26
Closed world problems are ones where everything is specified.
17:29
Let's say chess satisfies that.
17:31
But I'm going to come back on how even chess may not satisfy that in a second.
17:35
But let's say chess satisfies that.

27 MINS LATER

44:08
Can you explain supervised learning and how your fandom of sports has led you to see sports through that lens?
6:49
But actually, how do we know that they're not doing something worse in opening eyes? I think the nuclear reaction thing is a perfect example.
6:56
It's an unbelievable, powerful technology, and I think it's a good starting point.
6:59
So let me articulate two things that I think are very different, which actually make it an even harder problem.
7:05
One is...
7:06
Enriching uranium or plutonium to be able to get a sustained reaction is a lot of money.
7:13
On the other hand, building a large language model is not, and it's getting easier and easier.
7:18
And while it's in the benefit of companies to tout that they're light years ahead of everybody else, the open source models are getting really good.

7 MINS LATER

14:48
So paradoxically, but this – Freedom creates

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