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She showed up late and confused to her first silent retreat, but Caverly Morgan eventually trained for eight years in silence at a Zen monastery. Now her mindfulness-education program Peace in Schools is part of the high-school curriculum in Portland, Ore. Steve Levitt finds out what daily life is like in a silent monastery, why teens find it easier than adults to learn meditation, and what happy children can teach their parents.

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The modern world overwhelms us with sounds we didn’t ask for, like car alarms and cell-phone “halfalogues.” What does all this noise cost us in terms of productivity, health, and basic sanity?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Peter TYACK: Humans and animals have evolved in environments that have a lot of noise. We have noise from rain. We have noise from thunder. We have noise from other animals like birdsong or crickets chirping. But human industrial activities also have introduced a lot of noise that are quite different from the sounds that we and other animals have evolved to live with. 

Peter Tyack — T-Y-A-C-K — is a behavioral ecologist, at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland.

TYACK: And I’ve studied the sounds of mainly marine mammals, and that’s given me an entry point to understanding how sound travels in the ocean, which is quite different from what we’re used to on land. 

Different how?

TYACK: We as terrestrial mammals are used to vision being the great distance sense. We can see things from very far away, much further than we can hear. But if you’ve snorkeled in the ocean, you know you can only see about 10 meters, something like that, but you can hear much further away. So, the key difference between life on land and life underwater is that for a mammal that wants to understand what’s far away, they really need to rely on sound in the ocean.

Sound in the ocean therefore exerts a lot of leverage. Sometimes this is good news. Consider a recent experiment by scientists working at the Great Barrier Reef off of Australia. When a coral reef is healthy, it’s quite noisy with the sound of marine activity, and that noise attracts more activity. But a patch of coral reef that’s dead or dying is quiet. So, the scientists went to these quiet patches and placed speakers underwater to play the sounds of a noisy reef.

It seems to have worked, attracting lots of fish, who stayed on. Here’s how the researchers put it: “Acoustic enrichment shows promise as a novel tool for the active management of degraded coral reefs.” So, there are beneficial ocean sounds and the opposite. Peter Tyack was once studying whales in the Bay of Fundy, off the Canadian coast. It was generally a good place for whales to be, with lots of appetizing food:

TYACK: But there also are shipping channels near there.

As part of his research, Tyack recorded the calls that whales make:

TYACK: But always in the background was the sound of shipping noise. 

Researchers like Tyack had never really thought much about this background noise. It was just there. But then all of a sudden it wasn’t. The change came with the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

TYACK: All of a sudden, the ships that were plying the ocean in that area stopped. 

This drop in ship traffic was only temporary. But it happened to coincide with some other whale research that was happening in the Bay of Fundy:

TYACK: Researchers from the New England Aquarium had been sampling feces from whales to look at stress hormones. It wasn’t part of a noise experiment at all. 

It was just your standard whale-feces research.

TYACK: But what they found was that if you compared the stress hormones in whales before 9/11 and after 9/11, their stress hormones actually went down after 9/11. 

I’m guessing you didn’t wake up this morning thinking you’d be hearing about whale feces and stress hormones. But noise? You probably think about noise all the time. I know I do. Especially as the pandemic has rearranged our world, our routines, our soundscapes. Think how hard it can be to control the background noise in these new settings, especially when someone else is generating the noise. If whales are stressed out by noise, how about you? Before we answer that question: let’s gather some more whale evidence. Peter Tyack told us about another type of whale:

TYACK: A very poorly known set of toothed whales called beaked whales.

When U.S. Navy ships in the Bahamas ran exercises using sonar — that’s “sound navigation and ranging,” which emits bursts of underwater sound — these beaked whales had trouble.

TYACK: Over a period of a few hours, whales would strand by ones and twos over tens of kilometers of beach. 

Tyack and his colleagues wanted to learn just how sensitive the whales were to these sounds. So, they developed tags to track the whales’ behavior and then dropped speakers in the water to play their own sonar noise, first at very low levels.

TYACK: What we found was that at quite low levels of exposure, much lower than the levels that actually cause hearing damage, the animals would stop making their echolocation clicks, then stop foraging, and they would then do a very long, slow ascent to the surface. 

This surfacing is unhealthy for the whales.

TYACK: It may cause an explosive decompression syndrome in which they get gas bubbles in their body, like a diver with the bends, that could even cause animals to die at sea. Or they may panic and strand on shore. 

Why would the whales have such a drastic reaction to such low levels of sound?

TYACK: This is something that’s seen in a lot of wildlife, that if they interpret a sound as a threat, they’ve evolved anti-predator responses. And these may cause them to show pretty strong responses at relatively low levels of sound.

The science shows that most humans are not nearly as sensitive to sound as whales. Still, you have to consider what kind of responses we are having — knowingly or unknowingly — to all the noise around us. Even if it doesn’t seem particularly “noisy.”

TYACK: We’re just used to the baseline of the ambient noise around us. So, if you grow up in New York, your baseline is the sounds of planes flying overhead and fire engines going by. And that’s something that you don’t really pay attention to.  

Most guidelines say that sounds above 85 decibels are physically harmful. But think of all the baseline sounds we barely notice. Normal breathing is around 10 decibels; a computer fan, 20. The hum of a refrigerator is around 40 decibels. A dishwasher, 75; a window air-conditioner: more than 80. Then there’s the drive-by D.J.’s, the renegade fireworks that punctuated New York City during the pandemic this summer, usually late at night. And of course the quintessential 21^st-century sound: the one-sided cell-phone call. Today on Freakonomics Radio: the economics of noise.

Josh DEAN: One very economics-y thing that I worry about is that noise is very susceptible to a race to the bottom. 

How people suffer from noise:

Margaret JASTREBOFF: He said, “I’m not afraid of sound. Sound is making me upset.” 

And what can be done about it:

Arline BRONZAFT: One word and that’s the word called “respect.”

*      *      *

Here’s a question to start with: what is particular about sound?

HAGOOD: Sound doesn’t respect barriers very well. As many people have pointed out, there are no ear lids.

That’s Mack Hagood. He is a scholar of sound at Miami University in Ohio, and the author of a book called Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control.

HAGOOD: Sound has always been a challenge to our sense of autonomy. 

Emphasis on the “always.”  

HAGOOD: We can look back at the famous stoic Seneca, back in ancient Rome, who wrote that if you were truly in control of your own consciousness and emotions, then you should be able to withstand any sort of sound. And yet eventually Seneca moved out of Rome to the Roman suburbs because he couldn’t stand the noise anymore.  

Noise like carpenters at work and musicians in the public square.

HAGOOD: So, I kind of picture he’s moved out by IKEA.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in 19^th century Germany, complained that the cracking of horse whips “paralyzes the brain … and murders thought.” I submit that if people like Schopenhauer and Seneca considered noise worthy of their attention (and disdain), we may follow suit.

HAGOOD: Absolutely. And sound has changed a lot in modernity and the world has gotten noisier. So, we have new kinds of factory noise. We have new kinds of noise from transportation — railways, automobiles, airplanes. And then we have new kinds of ways of consuming sound itself: through the radio—. 

Pegeen FITZGERALD: We kept you awake, but now, pleasant dreams, and be with us again tomorrow night, will you?  

HAGOOD: —through the television.   

Oprah WINFREY: I’m Oprah Winfrey, and welcome to the very first national Oprah Winfrey Show! 

And through podcasts, of course.

HAGOOD: On the other hand, we are also becoming more finicky when it comes to sound.  

Some people, for instance, seek out sounds that trigger what’s called A.S.M.R., or “autonomous sensory meridian response.” That’s a tingly, relaxing feeling some people get when listening to the sound of, say, a bar of soap being carved or typing on a keyboard. Plainly the modern menu of sound is a vast, all-you-can-eat buffet. But just as plainly, many sounds are thrust upon us, which has had significant consequences.

HAGOOD: We’ve gotten new diagnoses that have popped up that just never existed before. 

Hyperacusis, for instance, a rare but debilitating sensitivity to certain frequencies and ranges of sound. Or phonophobia, a fear of sound. And then there’s misophonia, a condition that was identified relatively recently. The name means hatred of sound. Although the man who named misophonia admits the name is imperfect.

Pawel JASTREBOFF: Misophonia, God forbid, should not be translated literally as a hate to sound. 

That is Pawel Jastreboff.

Margaret JASTREBOFF: I would say like this:

And that’s his wife Margaret Jastreboff.

M. JASTREBOFF: Misophonic reaction is negative reaction to specific sounds, or sounds in very particular situation, produced by one or two specific people or in specific situation. 

Okay, that’s a little bit helpful. So, misophonia is a negative reaction that certain people have to certain sounds in certain situations?

M. JASTREBOFF: Oh, it’s a long story.

The Jastreboffs run the Jastreboff Hearing Disorders Foundation Clinic in Maryland. Before that, they were medical-school professors at Emory University.

P. JASTREBOFF: Yes. Still professor emeritus, which actually gives me a great privilege of having free parking.

It was at their clinic that Margaret Jastreboff first noticed this interesting new condition. Some patients reported an extreme sensitivity to certain sounds. Typically, this would be diagnosed as phonophobia — a fear of sound. But that label was upsetting to these patients. Margaret recalls how one of them stormed out of the examination room:

M. JASTREBOFF: He screamed at me, and he said, “I’m not afraid of sound, I’m not fearful. Sound is making me upset. I cannot control my reaction.”  

The Jastreboffs found there were a range of specific sounds that upset different patients.

P. JASTREBOFF: For example, a sound of a door closing or airplane flying or sound of eating or sound of kissing, for example — interesting case. 

Why would someone have no problem with most sounds but become distraught over the sound of eating or kissing?

M. JASTREBOFF: So, we start thinking about this and we realized that it’s not only fear. It is something definitely more complex. 

One of the most common misophonia triggers is the sound of chewing. You may dislike the sound of someone chewing their food. But for someone with misophonia, the sound is excruciating. Where does this come from?

P. JASTREBOFF: What I believe, what I’m proposing, misophonia reflects subconscious connection. 

A subconscious connection with, in all likelihood, an unhappy event. Imagine you’re a little kid at Sunday dinner with your whole family and your grandfather’s dentures fall out onto the table. The feeling you had then — an icky feeling — could become subconsciously associated with the sound of anyone chewing. And it could subsequently generate an automatic, physiological reaction. To treat patients with misophonia, the Jastreboffs have drawn on a method used to treat people with tinnitus. That’s a disorder most of us think of as a “ringing in the ears.”

P. JASTREBOFF: But is not necessarily ringing. It can be any kind of a sound — can be hissing, can be sound of insects. There’s some people who are hearing Christmas carols.

Just to be clear: people with tinnitus hear these sounds when there are no actual Christmas carols, or insects.

P. JASTREBOFF: Basically, it’s a perceiving of a sound. It is not created by hearing. So, tinnitus is phantom auditory perception. 

Some people with tinnitus aren’t particularly bothered by it; for others, it generates an intense emotional response. One treatment is called Tinnitus Retraining Therapy, or T.R.T., which was developed by Pawel Jastreboff and a colleague, Jonathan Hazell. It is  a combination of psychotherapy — including stress management and relaxation exercises — and sound therapy, like using white noise to mask the tinnitus sound.

P. JASTREBOFF: So, even if you’re hearing the sound, this signal is not spreading to the emotional system, and it’s not causing an emotion, and it’s not causing any reaction. 

And this is the therapy the Jastreboffs have been trying with patients suffering from misophonia. They’ve had at least some success with about 80 percent of their patients, and early clinical studies have shown promise. Even for the majority of us who don’t suffer from something like misophonia or phonophobia, it’s still easy — at least I’d argue it’s easy — to appreciate that noise can generate strong emotions. Though not always in predictable ways.

Just as one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, the scale of noise appreciation is a sliding scale. The very same chewing sound that may torment someone with misophonia can delight someone who experiences A.S.M.R. Your favorite song in the world might be my least favorite. You can tell a lot about how someone feels based on whether they describe something as “sound” or as “noise.”

HAGOOD: So, the definitions of noise and sound are often debated in the field of sound studies. 

That, again, is Mack Hagood, the sound scholar (or maybe the noise scholar).

HAGOOD: When most people talk about noise, the argument is, the world has gotten noisier and we need to do something about it, right? And it’s true. Some of these sounds are objectively damaging to our health. But history doesn’t just change the sounds around us. It also reshapes how we define what’s noise. History also reshapes the senses themselves. What actually sounds pleasing and displeasing to us, how we listen, how we learn to listen, how we engage with sound. We’ve been trained by technologies like the telephone and headphones to listen closely and evaluate sounds in a particular way that’s different from in the past. And so we have this new pressure to survive through our ability to concentrate. And that’s when noise starts to seem like a real big problem. 

Here’s one very reductive definition of sound versus noise. Sound is something I make, or choose to hear; noise is something you make, or choose to hear. This isn’t a real definition; I just made it up. But I don’t think it’s all that wrong. If you look at surveys where people are asked what sounds they hate the most, the answers aren’t very surprising: loud interruptions like garbage trucks and sirens and car alarms. Also snoring. And: loud phone conversations — other people’s loud conversations, of course, not our own. Our own noise rarely bothers us.

This is good evidence that when a noise does bother us, it’s not necessarily the sound waves themselves. It’s what they represent — or maybe fail to represent. Consider the one-sided cell-phone call — or, as it’s been named, the halfalogue. Why is that so much more annoying than hearing two people talking? Some academic researchers asked that very question and came up with a plausible answer: when we hear just one side of a conversation, our brains are compelled to fill in the missing information. Imagine reading a book with every other page torn out. The cell-phone halfalogue is noise we can’t ignore. And because we can’t ignore it — or control it — we find, as Seneca wrote a couple thousand years ago, that our very autonomy has been challenged.

*      *      *

When you think about sound and noise, it’s easy to point out all the detriments. But as with anything that exacts a cost, there are benefits as well, often massive ones. Consider all the music you love, the conversations you have, the pre-pandemic thrill of being in a big crowd during a celebration. We should also appreciate the strategic application of sound for the benefit of our species, and other species. We already mentioned how scientists at the Great Barrier Reef drew fish back to dying reefs by playing audio of a healthy reef. And hear this: scientists at the University of Washington recently began using ultrasound “acoustic tweezers,” that can manipulate a kidney stone and help clear it through the urinary tract. That said, it is wise to be aware of the downsides of noise, especially noise that we can’t control.

TYACK: People have studied children, for example, in Munich, both in a place where there was an airport and where an airport was going to be built. 

That, again, is the behavioral ecologist Peter Tyack.

TYACK: And when they closed the old airport and moved to the new airport, the children in the new area all of a sudden had cognitive problems related to learning with language tasks. It wasn’t loud enough to affect their hearing. It didn’t affect their immediate health. But there were problems with, say, in school, being able to understand complicated linguistic problems. 

Other research has found that airport noise has negative effects on various cognitive and physical dimensions, even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors and pollution. Other studies have looked at the noise generated by highways and subways.

BRONZAFT: Let me talk about my work on subway noise. 

That is Arline Bronzaft.

BRONZAFT: Professor emerita of the City University of New York. And I do research and write on the effects of noise on people’s mental and physical health. 

She’s also on the board of a nonprofit called GrowNYC, which runs environmental programs in the city.

BRONZAFT: And we also have a section on noise, in which we give advice to people on how to lessen the noise levels in their lives. But if you go to our noise site and you are seeking assistance with a noise problem, you can contact me directly. 

Stephen DUBNER: Now, you’re not saying that you go down to 311 and take the calls. You’re saying this is a separate channel. 

BRONZAFT: Actually, the people who contact us at GrowNYC have not been able to get the assistance through 311, through their public officials, with their managers of their buildings or their landlords. And I get the most difficult cases. Do people contact me? The answer is yes. 

The board members of GrowNYC are appointed by the mayor, and to date, Bronzaft has made it through five of them. She is a legend in the world of noise research. But that was not her original plan.

BRONZAFT: Noise found me. 

In the 1970s, Bronzaft was teaching environmental psychology at Lehman College, in the Bronx.

BRONZAFT: A student asked to speak to me after class and said, “My child goes to a school next to an elevated train. And the noise from that train disrupts the classroom every four, four-and-a-half minutes. And we intend to sue the City of New York in order to improve the education of our children, because we believe the train noise is disrupting their learning.” To which I said, as the wife of an attorney, “You need data to prove that the children aren’t doing as well in that class.” And she said, “Will you help us?” 

This turned into Bronzaft’s first study on the effects of noise, at P.S. 98 in Upper Manhattan. One side of the school building faced a nearby elevated subway; the other side faced away. Bronzaft matched second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade classrooms on the quiet side and on the noisy side, where a passing train would push the sound readings from 59 decibels to 89 decibels. Then she compared the average reading scores from the two sets of classrooms.

BRONZAFT: And the children exposed to the transit noise were nearly a year behind in reading by the sixth grade, and the teacher had difficulty teaching.

The published paper got a lot of attention.

BRONZAFT: But I had not really responded to the mother’s request. She asked me to help the children. And so, I went back to the school, and with the aid of the principal, we went to the Board of Education and we asked for acoustical ceilings in the classroom, and I was able to persuade the transit authority to choose the site adjacent to that school to test out a new procedure to quiet the noise on the tracks. And they agreed. And when I looked at the reading scores in the now-quieter classroom and compared it to the reading scores of the children on the quiet side of the building, it turned out they now were the same. 

It’s worth noting that Bronzaft’s subway research, as with similar studies at airports and elsewhere, have some limitations. For one thing, Bronzaft couldn’t randomly assign students to the noisy versus quieter classrooms. There were also relatively few classrooms to choose from, so there might have been some natural variation. In any case, this kind of research led to Bronzaft becoming a scholar of both the physical and psychological aspects of this issue.

BRONZAFT: Sound is a physical phenomenon. Noise is a psychological one. Sound comes into the ear. It travels to the brain and it registers in the temporal lobe. And then we further identify what the sound is. But noise lets you know whether that sound is disturbing, is bothersome, is hurting you, and that’s a psychological phenomenon. 

DUBNER: Which part disturbs us more about noise — the intrusion itself, or the fact that in most cases, we don’t have an ability to control it? 

BRONZAFT: So, I would say both. The actual sounds that you’re hearing is disturbing your sleep. And there’s a phenomenon in psychology called learned helplessness. It means no matter how I try, I can’t stop it. And that is also costly to one’s health. 

DUBNER: Can you talk a bit more about any trade-offs you can think of in noise reduction? For instance, New York City subways are still, as far as I know, steel-wheeled, which are noisier than rubber. So, then I get to thinking, well maybe steel wheels are safer or they’re more durable or whatnot. But there is no such thing as a free lunch.

BRONZAFT: I understand that companies are in business of making money. But what about the medical costs for people who live near noisy airports? And the data have demonstrated increased cardiovascular disorders for people who live near airports. Doesn’t that cost money? So, if you asked me, do the companies that produce the noise through their products, through their activities, are they holding the upper hand? Yes. But we’re paying for it, because medical costs in this country are high. So, are educational costs. Remember, if the children were a year behind in reading, how much would it have cost to remediate their learning deficits?

In Bronzaft’s work as an advocate for New York citizens, she’s dealt with all sorts of noise complaints. Among the most common are pervasive bass sounds.

BRONZAFT: Yes. 

DUBNER: Are you in the mood to imitate a pervasive bass sound?

BRONZAFT: You can do that better than I. I could speak to bass sounds. 

DUBNER: Would you please?

BRONZAFT: Yes. If you live above a bar or a music establishment, you not only hear the bass, but if you’re lying in bed, you will feel it. The bass sounds are low-frequency sounds. Usually we talk about noise in the mid-range of the frequencies, but when you talk about bass music, you’re talking low. Bass sounds have taken up more of a center stage today with wind-turbine introduction. Because wind turbines are now seen as an alternate source of energy.

However, the wind turbines generate the low bass sounds. And the laws that have been passed to regulate the sound levels of wind turbines have been on the A-scale, the mid-range, where we commonly measure the levels of sound. And they’ve sort of ignored the low bass. And so you find a great uproar from citizens living with turbines saying they don’t want them.

So, let’s pull back and get a sense of the overall societal costs of noise pollution. What does the economics literature have to say about that?

Josh DEAN: It really doesn’t exist. 

That’s Josh Dean.

DEAN: I’m an assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. 

So, economists really haven’t calculated the costs of noise pollution?

DEAN: There’s a very large history of psychologists using noise in laboratory experiments, both to understand the impacts of noise per se, but then also using noise as a kind of tool in order to understand other things, like how our working memory works and how our attention works. But there’s really nothing in economics and there’s really not much in terms of how this affects economic outcomes. I think I, in scouring the literature, managed to find three other papers that have looked at this question, including one from 1935 with 20 subjects. 

Dean scoured the literature because he had become personally interested in the topic, while working on a different project, in India.

DEAN: I was living in Delhi and I was in a cafe trying to work, as lots of grad students do. And I kept getting distracted by all of the horns honking and the people selling things. And I had a light bulb moment where I realized if I’m having trouble doing this, inside of this nice cafe, what is this like for people who have to live and work in this kind of noise without even the minimal escape that I’d been able to find? 

DUBNER: And when you think about noise as a research subject, what made you go to productivity versus, let’s say, the health outcomes, physical or mental-health outcomes, or other potential downstream effects of noise? 

DEAN: Some of it is just that you want something that is relatively easily measurable and quantifiable. And productivity is nice in that way. And it’s particularly nice in that you can put a dollar value on it. If you tell someone, “The noise in your factory is causing a 5 percent decrease in productivity,” that means something to them in terms of making the decision of whether to abate noise. If you tell people something like, “Twenty-five percent of your metal workers have disabling hearing loss,” you have to take another step of trying to convince people that that means that you should care about this, right? And so productivity is an easier outcome both to study and to then use to persuade people to care about the problem. 

DUBNER: Wow. That was a very compelling, if depressing, answer.  

DEAN: Isn’t that what economists are supposed to be good at? 

So, Josh Dean set out to personally expand the scant economics literature on noise and productivity.

DEAN: There were three research questions that I was interested in answering. The first is kind of, is there an effect of noise on productivity? Full stop. And if so, how big is that? 

DUBNER: In other words, you were not believing the 1935 paper. 

DEAN: Well — I would like some more robust evidence. And so, that’s the first goal. And then the second goal is to understand what is the underlying mechanism by which noise affects productivity. So, there’s this psychology literature that suggests possibly something like inhibiting attention or working memory, but it could also be something like reducing the effort of workers because they don’t enjoy being put in noisy working conditions. And depending on what the mechanism is, that is going to lead to different conclusions about where we should expect this to matter and what the right policy response should be. And then the last question is to understand how much scope there is for workers to adapt to noise by doing things like purchasing hearing protection or avoiding noisy working conditions. 

How workers adapt to noise — that is something most of us struggle with at some point, especially if your work involves any cognitive tasks. Some of us struggle more than others — and I am raising my hand here. I’ve always been badly distracted by noise, even the casual background conversation that most people seem to power right through. When I first started working in newsrooms, I wore foam earplugs all day every day (and yes, I was ridiculed for it).

Later came noise-cancelling headphones, a total godsend with the additional benefit of signaling to co-workers that you don’t want to be interrupted. Noise-canceling headphones have since increased in popularity, as is evident when you walk through any public space these days. A team of scientists in Singapore has even invented what’s being called “noise-canceling headphones for your apartment.” It’s an array of speakers that emit sound waves calculated to cancel out the incoming noise. So, the appetite to mitigate the noise of modern civilization is plainly strong; as for the exact cost of all that noise? That is what Josh Dean wanted to figure out. So, he set up a study with two main experiments.

DEAN: So, the first experiment is really designed to answer this question of, what is the impact of noise on productivity? And to do so, I recruit a group of manual laborers who are used to working in noisy factory conditions, and bring them to a textile training facility.

This facility was just outside of Nairobi, Kenya. There were around 100 workers in the study, and they were being trained to sew pockets for clothing.

DEAN: And then while they’re performing a standard sewing task, I randomly expose them to engine noise, which we think is representative of some of the major types of noise you might worry about — thinking loud industrial machines, think cars on the street. 

Significantly, engine noise also doesn’t have any informational content. It’s not like that one-sided cell-phone call you’re subconsciously trying to participate in; it’s not even like overhearing a T.V. or coworkers chatting. Now, you may be wondering how Dean was able to randomly expose these workers to engine noise.

DEAN: So, what’s nice about this training facility is that they also train automotive mechanics, and for that reason, they have car engines mounted on wheels. So, I’m able to both randomly assign workers to rooms and then randomly assign which room is noisy. 

DUBNER: And what do you do about the exhaust? I assume you want to isolate the noise and not the air pollution. 

DEAN: Right. So, we have the car engine out in an open courtyard with the exhaust pointing away from any access points to the room, and then to double-check that none of the exhaust accidentally bleeds in, we measure the CO2 levels of the room. 

DUBNER: How many decibels louder is the room with the engine than the quiet, quieter room? 

DEAN: So, it’s seven decibels louder. 

DUBNER: Oh, that’s not very much. 

DEAN: Well, decibels are tricky to interpret because they’re on a proportional scale. So, three decibels is the detection threshold of human hearing, and a 10-decibel change is perceived as twice as loud by humans. So, it’s not very intuitive. I think the more intuitive way to think about it is, if you go from having a kind of normal dishwasher going in the background in the control condition to having a vacuum cleaner right next to you. 

So, these textile workers would spend a few days in training and then get randomly assigned to rotate through noisy and less-noisy rooms. They were paid for each pocket they sewed as long as it was deemed acceptable by an impartial judge. After two weeks, Dean had enough data to see how the noise affected productivity.

DEAN: So, what we find is that if we double how loud the room feels, the workers are about 5 percent less productive on this task. And just to put that number in perspective, we also randomly assigned how much we were paying participants based on their production. And there, if we double their payment from five shillings per pocket to 10 shillings per pocket, that only increases productivity by around 3 percent. 

DUBNER: So, if you had to describe the magnitude of this effect in lay terms — and since we’re talking about clothing, let’s put it in small, medium, large or extra-large — how would you describe the change in productivity, then? 

DEAN: I would say a medium-sized effect relative to the other means we know of affecting productivity. There’s another great paper that looks at the effects of an intensive, months-long management intervention in a textile factory in India. And what they find is that that increases output by 9 percent. And so, this 5 percent effect is about in line with the other means that we have of affecting the productivity of workers, which suggests that it’s an economically meaningful environmental input. 

There was another tangential finding from this experiment that was of interest to Dean: when it came to being distracted by noise, it didn’t seem to matter how good a given worker was at sewing pockets. In other words, a high level of skill didn’t lessen the noise distraction.

DEAN: Right, exactly. If you have a distractor, you’ve got to slow down a bit to focus on what you’re doing to make sure that you’re doing it right. And that slowdown factor just appears to be constant. 

And then there was the second experiment within Dean’s study. This one was meant to understand why productivity falls in noisy conditions. Was it about the cognitive strain, or perhaps due to decreased motivation or physical weariness? In this case, Dean ran a condensed version of the first experiment but rather than sewing pockets, the workers performed tasks that tested skills like attention and working memory — as measured against a placebo task that didn’t involve any cognitive input at all. The result? Workers did slightly worse on the cognitive tests and slightly better on the placebo task.

DEAN: So, what I think we learned from the two experiments is that noise can impact productivity and that this seems to come through this cognitive channel.

DUBNER: So, how much can you generalize, or would you want to generalize, these findings to productivity in other areas where noise is a factor? Let’s say an open office with conversations going on in the background, or a hospital with dinging alarms and so on.

DEAN: There’s two questions you have to ask yourself. The first is, how similar is the noise? And in particular, along those two dimensions, of informational content and how constant the noise is. So, if you are extrapolating to a setting like an open office, you could imagine that the effect would actually be much worse because the noise that you’re being exposed to has informational content associated with it, right? So, I’m working on selling a product or a spreadsheet and I hear the person in the cubicle right next to me talking about basically the same thing. That’s much harder for our attention to filter.

And then the other is the task. This is why it’s important to know that the mechanism really does appear to be impairing things like attention and working memory, because that lets us think about the fact that the places we should expect this effect to show up are tasks that have demands on attention. 

DUBNER: I just want you to talk for a moment about noise or noise pollution, as what an economist would, I assume, call a negative externality, yes? This is something that I have to put up with that I am not causing. And yet, the person that’s producing it is not paying a price. So, can you just draw that, scenario for me and how you think about it as an economist in the modern world that’s producing a lot of noise? 

DEAN: Sure. I think actually we don’t have to just even think about the modern world. There’s this great book on the history of noise by Goldsmith, and he talks about the first noise-pollution ordinance to manage this externality where I’m creating noises that are beneficial to me but bother all of the people around me. It dates back to the 6th century B.C.E. 

DUBNER: Wow, no joke. 

DEAN: It was a Greek colony, and they had such a problem with their potters and tinsmiths and tradesmen making noise and bothering people that they banned them from working in the city. Another example that I really like is, in 1787 when the founding fathers were working in the Pennsylvania State House on the Constitution, they apparently spread dirt on the cobblestone streets outside in order to prevent themselves from being distracted.

I think noise is one of the oldest externalities that we’ve had to deal with, and it is a natural byproduct of a lot of things that you want to do. It’s a byproduct of getting around. It’s a byproduct of making things, it’s a byproduct of entertainment. And just by its very physical nature affects everyone who is around you. And it’s something that you don’t really think about or you don’t fully appreciate the impact that it has on other people. And it’s a problem for governments and those who try to manage externalities have been dealing with literally since ancient times.  

The U.S. used to have a federal Office of Noise Abatement and Control, as part of the E.P.A. But it was defunded in the early 1980’s, which shifted responsibilities to state and local governments. So, there are rules on the books in most places that limit, for instance, when construction can happen and how loud it can be. Same for garbage trucks, and bars, and even personal lawn-mowers. There are even prohibitions against ice-cream trucks playing their jingle once they’re parked at the curb. But, of course, there’s a big difference between having a noise code and enforcing it. In New York City, between 2010 and 2015, there were about 1.6 million noise calls via the 311 complaint line. Only 1 percent of the cases where the NYPD confirmed noise resulted in a summons. Josh Dean again:

DEAN: So, one very economics-y thing that I worry about is that noise is very susceptible to a race to the bottom. You get louder, which means that in order to compensate, I have to get louder, which then makes you get louder. Some car manufacturers in India have recently started advertising that they can make their car horns extra loud for you. There’s no intrinsic reason you need a really loud car horn, right? You have a really loud car horn because everybody else has loud car horns. And this kind of strategic interplay means that you can get noise levels that really quickly spiral out of control.

HAGOOD: Fighting sound with sound is what I see people doing with these different kinds of technologies, sort of pacifying the space around them in order to maintain their own control of their own attention and their own state of mind.

That, again, is the sound-and-noise scholar Mack Hagood. His concern about a race to the bottom isn’t so much that the world will get unbearably loud. It’s that we will focus on individual, behavioral problems at the expense of wider, structural solutions.

HAGOOD: I mean, is it your jerk coworker who slurps ramen noodles? Are they the problem or is it the open plan office that someone decided was a lot cheaper and more efficient to design? Have we fallen into certain patterns where we’re so used to controlling the sounds around us that we don’t think to take off the headphones? And this is the real problem, is there can never be enough control. The more control we get, the more sensitive we become to noise. And if we could magically wipe out all the sound in the world, then we would hear the sound of our own tinnitus, because tinnitus gets louder in a vacuum. So, I think we just need to think about this path, because I do not think happiness lies in that direction.

In which direction does happiness lie?

BRONZAFT: You will find that one word would really cut back on noise intrusion, and that’s the word “respect.”

And that again is the noise whisperer Arline Bronzaft.

BRONZAFT: I think if respect came back and people understood that their sounds can intrude on the lives of others, I think the 311 calls would drop drastically.

To be clear, Bronzaft is not advocating for silence or anything close to it.

BRONZAFT: Even though I write a great deal about noise and speak about it, I am trying to say to people, “Listen, there are such good sounds out there.”

Although many of these good sounds can’t fully return until the pandemic subsides. Especially in such a naturally noisy and crowded place as New York.

BRONZAFT: I do not want the children cheering on the Macy’s Day Parade to stop cheering them on. When the ball falls on New Year’s Eve, I want the people to shout out and enjoy the moment. I’m not asking for the music venues to shut down. I’m not. I think the vibrancy of the city, the parade, the ball falling, the music that we hear in our city, these are all positive things. So, let’s not lose sight of the various wonderful sounds the city does have. Just tune down the ones that are intrusive and harmful to our health.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Mary Diduch, Corinne Wallace, Zack Lapinski, and Matt Hickey. Our intern is Emma Tyrrell, we had help this week from James Foster. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The post Please Get Your Noise Out of My Ears (Ep. 439) appeared first on Freakonomics.

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Also: what’s so great about New York City anyway?

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Relevant Research & References

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John Mackey, the C.E.O. of Whole Foods, has learned the perils of speaking his mind. But he still says what he thinks about everything from “conscious leadership” to the behavioral roots of the obesity epidemic. He also argues for a style of capitalism and politics that at this moment seems like a fantasy. What does he know that we don’t?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Stephen DUBNER: So, you are, as I understand, a staunch vegetarian who’s also a staunch libertarian. I don’t think that’s a big club, that crossover.

John MACKEY: I did meet somebody a few years ago that said they were both. I’m not totally alone.

John Mackey, the co-founder and C.E.O. of the Whole Foods supermarket chain, seems to be comfortable with contradiction — or at least what may look like contradiction to the rest of us. He is a 67-year-old vegan and daily meditator who also lionizes free-market icons like Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. He speaks out against factory farming; he’s also called climate change “perfectly natural and not necessarily bad.” A New Yorker profile of Mackey once declared that he, “can’t help but speak his mind, out of which spring confounding ideas and conventionally irreconcilable contradictions.”

MACKEY: Look, I just show up in an authentic way everywhere I am. I think that’s the best strategy in life.

DUBNER: Did it take you a while to show up always as your authentic self? 

MACKEY: Of course. It’s a skill. You have to practice authenticity. It’s sort of natural to tell lies, even little lies. We learn to dissemble at a very young age. We are also very much afraid of disapproval from others. It’s really obvious today because there’s a fear of being canceled. If you say the wrong thing, you get a Twitter mob after you, and the next thing you know, you might lose your job. So, people begin to pretend to be something they’re not, because people are scared.

So, being authentic is not necessarily an easy thing to do. And I just try to be authentic and careful. Meaning — context, who am I talking to? So, I’m still being authentic. I’m not dissembling or misrepresenting myself. But then again, I’m not saying absolutely everything I’m thinking every second.

DUBNER: So, “authentic but careful” sounds to me like a razor’s edge. 

MACKEY: It is a razor’s edge. You have to be really conscious.

“Conscious” is John Mackey’s watchword these days. Some years back, he wrote a book called Conscious Capitalism, which argues that profits and purpose should be fully compatible. Mackey’s follow-up book, published this fall, is called Conscious Leadership. Today on Freakonomics Radio, we see that the razor’s edge can get very sharp very fast.

MACKEY: Stephen, I really don’t like where this interview is now going.

And, when it comes to leadership today, Mackey sees a glaring paradox:

MACKEY: America desperately needs heroes to show the way, but the heroes that show up are attacked.

Mackey himself has been on the receiving end of several attacks.

MACKEY: Every time you get a scar, you try not to do the same stupid thing again.

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In 1978, John Mackey borrowed $45,000 from family and friends to open a health-food store with his then-girlfriend in a Victorian house in Austin, Texas. He was a college dropout with no real business experience but he did have access to $45,000 and an evangelical zeal for natural foods. This coincided nicely with a rising trend in healthier eating. Fast forward about four decades: and Whole Foods was a publicly owned corporation with about 500 stores in North America and the U.K. But its stock price was falling. Big, mainstream grocers like Kroger were cutting in on their organic and natural turf. Stores like Trader Joe’s and Sprouts were appealing to similar demographics, but with lower prices.

In 2017, an activist hedge fund called Jana Partners bought a big chunk of Whole Foods stock and pushed it to generate more profit. John Mackey, in a burst of typical authenticity, called the hedge fund “greedy bastards.” They plainly weren’t the kind of people Mackey had in mind when he talked about “conscious capitalism.” Soon after came an even more surprising state of consciousness, when Whole Foods was bought by Amazon.com for more than $13 billion. It was the largest acquisition to date for the so-called “everything store.” When I interviewed John Mackey in early October, I began by asking how his job had changed since the Amazon purchase.

MACKEY: Covid has changed everything, but I am still pretty involved. I mean, I’m still C.E.O., I’m still paying a lot of attention. Whole Foods is still my life. 

DUBNER: Where are you, by the way? Are you still in Austin? 

MACKEY: I am in Austin, Texas, in our corporate headquarters with about 50 people total out of 1,000 that could be here. 

DUBNER: What’s that like?

MACKEY: I get a good parking space every day.

DUBNER: I’d like to think you had pretty good parking before? 

MACKEY: Whole Foods, first-come, first-served. No special privileges. 

DUBNER: Get out of here — really?

MACKEY: Of course. Why would you do it any other way? If you want to create solidarity — people get there early, they get the good parking spaces. Fair is fair. 

If the pandemic had happened a few years earlier, or if the Amazon sale had not already gone through, Whole Foods might have taken a bigger hit than they have. But the Amazon partnership meant that Whole Foods was already geared up for online ordering and delivery. This has protected it better than many other businesses that are suffering.

MACKEY: Just to be clear, 2020 has been a terrible year. And make no mistake about it, Whole Foods has not been hit the same way those businesses have been hit, but it’s still been very difficult for us. We closed down our fresh food bars, our salad bars, our hot bars shut down. Our prepared foods, which is a big part of our sales, fell 75 percent initially.  

Trying to balance productivity and safety, Whole Foods also had some friction with their workforce. In March, some employees held a one-day sickout, pushing for better sick pay and health-care coverage, especially for part-time workers. Whole Foods responded by temporarily raising wages.

MACKEY: So, it’s been very challenging. And we have had people get sick — team members get sick — and we’ve had a few people die. So, it’s a tragedy. It’s a terrible thing. It’s slowly coming back, but it’ll be a while, long time before we get back to where it was pre-Covid. We saw our perishable foods like meat, seafood, produce, dairy — those all went up a lot, a tremendous amount, because restaurants mostly were closed down.

DUBNER: And did you have supply-chain problems or were you able to repurpose from the restaurant-supply chain? 

MACKEY: We had supply chain problems, because the stuff that goes into restaurant supply chains are usually not usable by consumers.

DUBNER: Because of packaging, or because of size?

MACKEY: Yeah, size. Take toilet paper. Toilet paper is such an interesting thing, because studies show that, on average, Americans do about half of their bathroom work not at home. And then all of a sudden it was about 100 percent at home.  

DUBNER: The history of corporate acquisitions is not necessarily a history of parallel joy between the acquirer and acquiree. And often people who have founded firms, that’s not an easy fit necessarily once there’s an absorption. I’m curious how that’s been for you. 

MACKEY: One way to think about it is Whole Foods had done 23 acquisitions ourselves. So, I understand well what you’re looking for with the company that’s coming in. And mostly you’re looking for the acquired company to be excited to be part of the larger firm, to start talking in the “we” language instead of the “us/them” language, to figure out what the acquiring company wants and then try to make sure that you help give it to them.

I also know what it’s like to be on the other side. I know what the acquired company wants. They mostly want to be respected. They want to feel that they’re valuable and that they’re not inferior. There’s a strong sense of inferiority. There’s almost an attitude that can happen of, the acquiring company is like, “Well, we’re better than you because we acquired you.” And the acquired company is thinking like, “We must not be as good as them, because they acquired us.” You have to be sensitive to that, both when you’re the acquirer and when you’re the acquiree.  

In this case, the acquirer was one of the best-known companies on the planet. And Mackey’s new boss, Jeff Bezos, was known for being at least as particular and driven as Mackey.

MACKEY: It hasn’t been as big a switch as you’d think. People always ask me, “How is it like to have a boss?” And that completely misunderstands the way most corporations operate. I mean, I’ve always had a boss. I always reported to the board of directors at Whole Foods. People had this wrong stereotype that the C.E.O. is like a god or something. The media makes a big deal out of abuse of power and acting like the big shot. And that’s just never been my style. I always try to be a servant leader. I’m serving the higher purpose of the company and the stakeholders. And these are the things I had to get clear with Amazon before we merged.

I had to get clear about our purpose and our core values and our mission. Are we going to try to integrate those, or are you going to leave that alone? No, they weren’t going to try to change that. What about our culture? Are you going to try to assimilate us into Amazon and we will lose our identity? No, we don’t want to do that. So, Whole Foods has changed and evolved, to be sure, but in a respectful way. I always use this analogy, when you get married, do you change? 

DUBNER: Hopefully. 

MACKEY: And the answer is, “duh.” If you don’t change, you’re going to get a divorce. So, Whole Foods is changing, not because Amazon’s cramming a bunch of things down our throat, but because they do a lot of things that we want to take in.

DUBNER: You’ve said in the past that Whole Foods ran more by intuition and gut, and Amazon more by empiricism and data. Obviously there are elements of both which are very, very good. And there can be a case where if you over-rely on either, that can be bad. I’m curious if there’s anything significant that you learned from Amazon operations that you maybe wish you had known or believed in 20 or 30 years ago? 

MACKEY: Absolutely. I’ll give you a trivial example. Every retail food business has what’s called shrink, and shrink can mean spoilage. Maybe it’s employee theft. Maybe it’s shoplifting. Maybe you’re getting cheated by your suppliers in some way. But there’s always unexpected losses that you can’t fully account for. And one of the things Amazon early on did is they said, “We need to track all of the shrink and we need to compare stores so that we can get the data that we need to see where the problems are, so we can get better at it.” Now, that seems kind of obvious, doesn’t it? But we didn’t do that. We kind of tracked our spoilage, but not in a systematic way. And we didn’t do comparisons between stores. 

DUBNER: And why didn’t you do it?

MACKEY: Well, we just figured that you’re always going to have some spoilage and it’s the cost of doing business. And the idea that you could reduce this cost seems rather obvious, but we didn’t work at it in a systematic fashion. So, now we are. Not surprising, now that we paid more attention to it, we’re reducing our shrink pretty much in all those areas.

Reducing shrink is of course one way to drive down costs, and driving down costs is a basic tenet of the Amazon business model. And now the Whole Foods model too. This has meant lower prices at Whole Foods, which has been well-received by customers — especially those who used to be scared off by the “Whole Paycheck” nickname. Other changes have been less well-received. A new dress code, for instance, which forbids Whole Foods employees from wearing clothing with any sort of slogan or flag. Whole Foods used to be the kind of place where employees let their freak flag fly; it’s based in Austin, for goodness’ sake. And John Mackey himself had always seemed to champion individuality, and the self-awareness that comes with it.

DUBNER: So, there was a passage from Conscious Leadership I was particularly taken with. You write “When I look at Whole Foods Market, I see my strengths well-represented. But the organization also mirrors back to me my weaknesses. For example, I tend to be a very creative person who’s good at coming up with innovative solutions and new ideas. The shadow side of that strength, however, is that I frequently don’t pay enough attention to the details.” So, I’m curious whether you have advice for the average person who sees that they have a set of things they do really well and another set of pretty important things that they don’t do well. Do you not worry about those things you don’t do well and find other people to do them? Do you really work on those weaker parts of yourself?

MACKEY: I think the answer is both, not either/or. However, part of self-awareness is just being conscious of the things that you’re really good at and things that you’re not good at. And building a team doesn’t mean hiring people or promoting people who are like yourself, because a team needs to have a diverse portfolio of skills. I mean, we talk a lot about the importance of diversity, but we’re putting that in the context of diversity of ethnicity or gender or sexual preferences, or whatever. But from a team standpoint, what you’re really looking for is diversity of skill sets. And because I am more self-aware than many leaders, I recognized that I’m not good at some things. I need to make sure the people that have those skills and talents are on the team, because they compensate for my weaknesses.

DUBNER: Can we talk a little bit more about that notion of diversity? Because what you said strikes me as something that I think a lot of people understand but never talk about, which is, most of the moves that people make toward diversity these days are based on diversity of what economists call “the observables,” the characteristics that are easily seen. And as you said, you can kind of sort people, whether it’s ethnicity, gender, etc. But the unobservables are, I think, hugely important and harder to cast for. So, that’s the diversity of political, or religious, or philosophical ways of thinking. So, assuming that you do want to build an organization that has full diversity, not just people don’t all look alike and so on, but people actually think differently, how do you do that? 

MACKEY: You know, Stephen, that’s such a great question. And first, I want to say how tricky it is to do that, you’ve got to think of diversity in terms of being a polarity. You need diversity, but you also need continuity. You need similarities, because let’s say you had nothing but diversity in language, well you couldn’t communicate with each other, right? If you have too much solidarity, though, you have a groupthink. The team needs diversity in the right ways. And it’s not, as you say, the superficial ways people are diverse. It’s about diversity in thinking in emotional intelligence, spiritual insights, creativity.

DUBNER: I would think that the opportunity cost of not casting for that holistic diversity is pretty huge. And yet I don’t hear a lot of firms or institutions talk much at least about pursuing it. 

MACKEY: I agree with that, and what many people tend to do is hire people that they are most comfortable with, people like themselves. Because they’re insecure, they lack confidence. They’re afraid to promote somebody that’s smarter than them, because maybe they’ll take their job. So, they tend to promote to feel safe. But then, if you do that, you’re going to sub-optimize, and eventually you’ll probably be pushed out as the team leader. 

DUBNER: So, Whole Foods practices wage transparency, which, as I understand it — pretty much everybody within the firm can know what everybody else is making. Assuming it works well, why don’t more firms do that?

MACKEY: I think there’s two reasons firms don’t do it. The first one is that they have something to hide. The second reason is simple envy. They believe that this is going to stoke envy so it’s better to try to keep it hidden. I believe envy can be a problem, but I think about it differently. When you reveal a pay structure very transparently — first of all, sometimes things aren’t just. And people will complain about it. And that gives you an opportunity to correct it.

At other times, though, it is correct, and you can defend it. And then you’re pointing out to people what the organization most values and rewards. And it gives people something to strive for. “Wow, I had no idea that a coordinator could get paid that much. I want to be a coordinator.” Or, “I really want to be a store team leader, because I had no idea that including their R.S.U.s — the restricted stock units they get from Amazon.” I mean, they may be making well over $100,000. And if you don’t have a college degree, that’s something to aspire to. 

John Mackey speaks from some degree of experience here, in that he didn’t complete college. He’s now worth more than $75 million. It likely could have been a lot more: since 2007, he’s taken a $1 salary and no bonus or stock grants. We should note that Mackey came from a family that knew how to make money. His father, Bill, was an accounting professor who, when John was a teenager, became C.E.O. of a health-care company that in the 1980s was bought for nearly a billion dollars. Bill Mackey was also one of the original investors in Whole Foods.

When John Mackey opened that first health-food store in the Victorian house, he chose to not sell the kind of foods that he doesn’t eat: sugary or processed foods; meat, poultry, or seafood; even coffee. But that didn’t work out so well. After a couple years, he gave in and expanded his offerings. It was a tradeoff he was willing to accept. By widening the options, he could make natural and organic food available to more people. It’s the kind of tradeoff every business has to consider at some point. But Mackey thinks that modern capitalism accepts far too many tradeoffs; he likes to embrace a different model:

MACKEY: Good for you. Good for me. Good for all of us. 

It’s called the win-win-win model.

MACKEY: That is a philosophy that can transform our world. Think about win-win-win and ask yourself how is that not a complete ethical system?

But most businesses, Mackey says, don’t think win-win-win.

MACKEY: The metaphors that we use to think about business are hyper-competitive models. And in general, people in America think in terms of win-lose. They think in terms of somebody’s gain is somebody’s lost.

 And why is this the default model?

MACKEY: I think a likely explanation is that we evolved as tribal animals and we identify with our tribe, and what’s not our tribe, we should kill. And so, part of the human journey has been expanding our tribe and making it bigger. A lot of the polarization we’re seeing in the United States is tribal, group differences. We can be very socialistic in our families and in our tribe. But when we get outside of that, we’re not quite as generous and as compassionate and caring.

In his books, Mackey discusses managing personnel from a win-win-win perspective. This isn’t easy. As he writes, “People do far better with positive feedback, praise and appreciation. So, that should be the emphasis. But if we’re not also giving the necessary tough but constructive feedback, then we’ll be doing a disservice to our team and to the team members.”

DUBNER: So, John, I think just about everyone struggles with this, whether you’re an employer, or a parent, or a teacher. What’s your best advice for delivering the useful criticism without breaking a spirit or discouraging people? 

MACKEY: In my experience, criticism will only be received by people if there’s a high degree of trust. If there’s trust, and people know that you care about them, then their self-esteem is less threatened. Because self-esteem is not usually very high with most people, you have to be very sensitive to the criticisms. When I tour our stores, because I am the founder, the C.E.O., I have a larger-than-life impact on the team members. They want “Daddy” to really love the store, and they don’t want criticism. I know this. So, what I do is I give nothing but praise when I’m in the store. And if I see some problems, I might tell the store team leader, kind of one-on-one. But I try to not offer criticisms when I’m there, because they’re just too powerful.

I can give 10 compliments, but the one criticism devastates the morale. And that’s because they don’t know me well enough to know they can trust me. If you’re a parent — so many parents, mostly they correct their children all the time, “Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” And even though the child may feel it’s loved, the child experiences the parent usually criticizing them. That’s very unfortunate, because that makes the child less secure, afraid to interact with the parent. I mean, I remember when I was growing up, for example, bringing in a report card one time, all A’s and one B, and I was really proud of it. And my father said, “What are you going to do about that B?” And that was devastating, because I thought he’d be proud of me.

DUBNER: So, how’d you respond to that in the, let’s say, short run? 

MACKEY: In the short run, I was first hurt, and then I was angry. It’s like, I can never make him happy. 

DUBNER: And not inspired to say, “Gosh darn it, Dad’s right, I gotta get rid of that B.” 

MACKEY: No, and I think that’s because I experienced him mostly criticizing me. Here was a time I thought maybe would be different, I’d get praise. If my dad always praised me, and I felt that unconditional love all the time, and if he came in and said, “What are we gonna do about that B?” I would have responded very differently. I would have responded, “You know what, Dad? I’m going to take care of that B. Believe me.”

DUBNER: So, no offense, you haven’t really given me any actionable advice for delivering the criticism better, other than—. 

MACKEY: I’m building up to it. 

DUBNER: All right. Okay. 

MACKEY: I’ve given you the most important thing. 

DUBNER: Gain trust, which is a long process. 

MACKEY: It is a long process. So, we should be very judicious in our criticism. An idea I took away from Ken Blanchard’s One-Minute Manager, which, I guess, dates me, because that book may not be in the print anymore. He just said you should catch people doing something right. So, I definitely believe in positive reinforcement. And then if you do enough positive reinforcement, people are going to be in a place where they can receive the critical feedback. And that gives you permission to give negative feedback. That’s actionable. So, we just need to be careful about it. And if you can’t do it, you’re going to be the type of leader that people avoid. 

*      *      *

DUBNER: So, there’s a question I wanted to ask you for a long time, and it has to do with a phenomenon known as the tall-poppy syndrome. You ever heard that phrase? 

MACKEY: Of course, absolutely.

DUBNER: The first time I heard the phrase, it was something along the lines of, “It’s the tall poppy in the field that gets cut down. Don’t get above your raising.” But anybody who accomplishes becomes a target, obviously. It strikes me that you might get praise for the million things you do well or right but you get a lot more attention for things that are perceived as mistakes. And people are much more likely to come after you when you’ve acquired a status, or stature, as you have.

So, I wanted to ask you about that in the context of founding and running Whole Foods and some of the things that you have done and said that do irritate people. And I’m really curious to know how that tall-poppy syndrome has affected the way you move through life. Has it made you wary? Is that what drove you to work on your own consciousness and so on — to deal with that?

MACKEY: I have a lot of younger entrepreneurs ask me this type of question, because what happens is, you begin to first succeed in pretty much anything is you stoke envy. And the tall-poppy syndrome, you’re really talking about envy. And the people that achieve the most actually help humanity the most. One of the paradoxes about the United States is we idolize celebrity. And yet, at the same time, we love to see those celebrities fall from grace. We love to see, as you say, the tall poppy get chopped down. It kind of reassures people that even striving for that type of success isn’t worth it, because look what happens. It helps people feel better about themselves.

I mean, at an early age, to be honest, I felt a lot of envy towards myself. I would be a teacher’s pet in school, and I’d get beat up after school, because people were envious of me. So, I would start to be kind of a smartass. And that’s actually carried over into my adult life, where I’m a bit of a smartass. So, you have to learn to deal with envy. But I feel like I’m in this sweet spot in life. I have a little bit of celebrity, but I’m seldom recognized. I don’t have to have bodyguards. I don’t have to hide out. It’s perfect.

DUBNER: All right. Well, let me let me take you out of your sweet spot for a minute. In your career, over the last, let’s say, 15 or 20 years, there have been a series of incidents or proclamations that get some people really upset. In one case, you engaged in some online sock-puppetry, right? You were praising Whole Foods. — No? Is that not the case? 

MACKEY: A completely incorrect narrative. 

DUBNER: All right, tell me the correct version. 

MACKEY: The correct version was that I posted on a screen name on Yahoo! for about eight years. Everybody took a screen name. So, I wasn’t trying to hide my actual identity. And if you read all of those postings, which were about 1,400, I mostly was defending Whole Foods. It was something I did for fun. You have all these shorts on there, and I would defend Whole Foods against their criticisms. 

DUBNER: We should just say “shorts” are people who were betting against the company. 

MACKEY: Betting against stock. And remember, I’m not doing that as John Mackey, C.E.O. of Whole Foods Market. I’m doing it under a screen name called Rahodeb. 

Rahodeb is an anagram of “Deborah,” the name of Mackey’s longtime wife. Under this screen name, he championed Whole Foods stock, sometimes at the expense of a rival health-food chain called Wild Oats.

MACKEY: That’s right. I did criticize Wild Oats about six times in an eight-year period.

Whole Foods went on to buy Wild Oats. The details of Mackey’s online activity emerged in a court document filed by lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission, which was trying to prevent Whole Foods from buying Wild Oats, out of concern the natural-food market was becoming anti-competitive.

MACKEY: It’s a ridiculous story because nobody named Rahodeb could move the stock of anybody. And the criticisms I offered were so few and far between. And I’d say they were accurate criticisms. But this idea that John Mackey ran down the stock price so Whole Foods could buy it cheaper is completely a false narrative. 

DUBNER: I guess the component that struck me as disingenuous is if I’m, let’s say, the board of Whole Foods and my C.E.O. is going to go defend us, I want him to do it under his name. 

MACKEY: I just saw it as play. It’s something I did for fun. I like to debate. I’m a debater. I debate actually several times a year in a formal way. It’s hard for people to see, because they think of C.E.O.’s as these super-serious people. It’s all about play. I was just playing like a little boy and doing it in an innocent way, nobody was getting hurt.

DUBNER: But it stuck to you, to your reputation. 

MACKEY: It did. I learned a valuable lesson. 

DUBNER: Does that bother you to this day that it stuck to you? Not that you did it necessarily, but that it put a mark against you?

MACKEY: Does it bother me? I can’t do anything about it. So, it’s kind of like as you get older, I have scars on my body. I got them. I can’t get rid of them. But you know what? Every time you get a scar, you try not to do the same stupid thing again. So, I learned a valuable lesson from that, which is, I can’t escape who I am, even when I’m just pretending to be somebody else. Because there’s a risk of it being found out. So, that brought more integrity pretty much in everything I do. I just assume everything I do and say is going to be public. So, that’s made me more careful. So, no, I’ve never posted on another bulletin board since then.  

DUBNER: Now, a couple things that you said in subsequent years, talking about labor unions, you compared them to herpes. You said “it doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient.” And then talking about Obamacare, you equated it in some degrees to fascism, as a kind of top-down requirement that’s not for the greater good. 

MACKEY: Stephen, I really don’t like where this interview is now going. I don’t want to defend all the things that I said 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. Because that’s a very small part of my life. And these, are scars. If you want to talk about the lessons I might have learned from those things, I’ve just learned to not be quite as outspoken in the world. That’s the biggest thing I’ve learned. 

DUBNER: So, I appreciate that. Actually, what I did want to ask was — and this is still in the context of this tall-poppy question — how disturbing or upsetting is it when people get so upset about your expressing an opinion that if you weren’t the tall poppy, would pass unnoticed? However, when you’re the C.E.O. of something like Whole Foods, they become the headline. And everything else that you’ve done to build the firm seems to take a back seat.

MACKEY: Well, it’s like — I’ve been doing this for 42 years. The herpes comment was made 30 years ago.  

DUBNER: Wow. That stuck. 

MACKEY: It only stuck because it kept getting repeated. And again, I know this is going to sound weird, but it was play. I was making a joke. When I think back on it, that was an unfortunate thing I said. It was meant to be funny. We now live in a time where we’re judged by every little mistake we might have made in our lives. Hey, listen, I have made plenty of mistakes. That was a mistake. I regret that. I wish I could un-say that. I didn’t mean to harm anyone. I meant to amuse people. And now it’s a scar. 

DUBNER: But in terms of the fact that the mistakes stick so hard, and this goes back to what you were referring to earlier about the number of compliments you need to give in order to help cushion the blow from one critique, there’s this line of research called “the power of bad” that measures just how influential bad news is for most people, and how good news will often go unappreciated. Having experienced your success, which is massive, with these scars, as you put it, to kind of count against you on the other side of the ledger, what does that say to you about just the way that we think about our society, and success, and so on? Because it seems that we often make it really hard for people to build things and to prosper, because we like to pay attention to the occasional mistakes that they make and amplify them. 

MACKEY: So, very good question. I kind of see where you’re going. And I think it’s a good path to take. I think I’m a particularly interesting target for people, because Whole Foods and myself have proclaimed we should be eating a healthier way. Seventy-one percent of Americans are overweight and 42.5 percent are obese. Clearly, we’re making bad choices in the way we eat.

It’s not a sustainable path. And so, I’m calling it out. But because I’m a tall poppy and some people take it as a personal attack, they want to attack back. It comes with the territory. If you’re going to be the tall poppy, then people are going to look for how you’re not perfect, and they’re going to want to tear you down. A lot of wealthy people just basically, they just hide out. They’re not coming onto podcast shows. They’re not in the newspaper. They’re not doing interviews. They are enjoying their wealth in anonymity.

DUBNER: What do you think is the opportunity cost of this fervor we seem to have for cutting down the tall poppies? I would have to think that there are a lot of people who would be more public — whether it’s in politics, in policy, running firms, whatnot — but the first thing they think about is, “Oh, well, they’re going to say bad things about me that are mostly irrelevant,” but it still hurts. 

MACKEY: I’m a student of American history, and we generally held up and admired our heroes, those who contributed a lot. And increasingly today, there’s nobody that gets held up that’s not attacked. I just can’t think of almost anybody that’s been a president, or has been a celebrity for very long, that doesn’t become hated. 

DUBNER: At least by half the country.

MACKEY: Yes. The ironical thing is America desperately needs heroes to show the way, but the heroes that show up are attacked. And it’s a particularly interesting thing going on right now in the country. So, I’m glad we’re having this conversation. I’m just sorry my scars are being revisited. My P.R. team is going to say, “Don’t ever talk about that stuff John, we told you not to talk about it.” 

DUBNER: Well, I hear where you’re coming from, and I think I empathize. I try to empathize. I mean, look, they are out there. But I also wanted to hear about them as a scar, and how that kind of thing will discourage other people from behaviors that might be prosocial behaviors. You think about the kind of person who’s going to get involved in politics today, it seems you have to either be nuts or so egotistical that you don’t care that people say things about you.  

MACKEY: Or both. 

DUBNER: Yeah. Or both. And that’s not good for a country. 

MACKEY: No. I mean, it honestly takes a lot of moral courage today. And maybe that’s one of the arguments that we’re making in the book for conscious leadership. America needs conscious leaders who lead with love, that have integrity, and are seeking to find the higher ground and help America move past this very challenging historical time we’re in. I don’t want to go into politics. But I’m out here speaking to you, and I’m willing to let my scars come back in the public realm a little bit. And there you go. I’m paying a price for it already. I’m being attacked a lot. But you know, I want to make a difference. I want to help people. 

DUBNER: Let me ask you a question about one of the biggest and most intractable public policy and economic problems in our country is health-care coverage, the cost of health care, access, etc. We are one of the few, if not the only, wealthy country in the world that ties health-care coverage to employment. I’m sure you know that history and have thought about the shortcomings. Can you talk about that? If you could turn back the clock to pre-World War II and arrive at a solution like other countries, I don’t know, maybe you’d like to, but I’m just curious what that original arrangement produced that you think is deleterious to the country. 

MACKEY: Of course, you are back on a scar for me since I got blasted back when I wrote that op-ed.

The op-ed Mackey’s talking about was published in the Wall Street Journal in 2009. It was headlined “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare.” Mackey called for “less government control and more individual empowerment,” and he argued that “equal access to doctors, medicines, and hospitals” should not be considered an “intrinsic ethical right.” Moreover, Mackey wrote that many of our health problems are “self-inflicted,” and could be prevented with better lifestyle choices. The piece enraged some readers and there were boycotts of Whole Foods.

MACKEY: What we should do in the United States is find a win-win-win solution. The win-win-win solution, to me, has to be one that keeps the efficiencies of the marketplace. People that think we have a capitalistic health-care system right now don’t understand free markets. Health care is the most regulated industry in the United States. We do not have free-market health care, and yet we know we need to have universal coverage, that we need to take care of our poorest, oldest, and weakest people. What I would do if I was president, I’d set up a commission to study the most successful health-care systems that are out there. And the two that stand out to me are Singapore and Switzerland. 

Singapore’s universal coverage is based on the idea that patients should pay for routine care, and reserve insurance coverage for large and unexpected costs. One reason this system works well is that obesity, smoking, and alcohol and drug abuse are much less common in Singapore than in the U.S. The Swiss system, meanwhile, is highly decentralized, with a requirement to buy insurance from private nonprofits and the option to upgrade with supplemental private insurance.

MACKEY: In some ways, Obamacare tried to take some of the elements of Switzerland’s health care, but they did not go far enough. I do think there are good models that work, that are out there. But we’re stuck in this intractable conflict between different political worldviews. We’re not looking for the win-win-win solutions. We’re looking for win-lose solutions — my way or the highway. And it’s created a lot of anger, a lot of disappointment, a lot of frustration.

DUBNER: There are those who argue that our political system is essentially a duopoly that, like the Yankees and the Red Sox, they thrive on being enemies but without each other, they’re nothing. And so, we’ve arrived at this moment where when you say win-win-win solution, that sounds great in theory. But can you see any way in the next five to 10 years where that’s a reality in something like health-care legislation?  

MACKEY: It’s possible if we have conscious leaders. We’ve done it before. The big social programs that we have, they were bipartisan. Think about some of the biggest changes. The Civil Rights Act was bipartisan. Social Security was bipartisan. Medicare, Medicaid were bipartisan.

DUBNER: I mean, you’re talking 40, 45, 50 years ago. Have you seen anything in the past 20 years that suggests that in the next 20 we might get back to that politically? 

MACKEY: It’s my opportunity to say that, “Yes, we can.” I mean, I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. I’m just telling you what needs to happen. The knowledge is in the culture to do it. It’s in our cultural D.N.A. already in America. We just have to find enough leaders, in both Democratic and Republican parties, that will work together for the greater good of all. 

DUBNER: Can you see, however, a way to go down that path without relying on the Democrats and the Republicans to collaborate?

MACKEY: I mean, honestly, we talk about health care. The best solution is not to need health care. The best solution is to change the way people eat, the way they live, the lifestyle, and diet. There’s no reason why people shouldn’t be healthy and have a longer health span. A bunch of drugs is not going to solve the problem. And I think there will be innovations. I’ll give you a trivial example.

So, I have an Apple Watch on, and one of the apps I have on the Apple Watch is Auto Sleep. So, I get to monitor my sleep every single day. And it gives me feedback. I see how long I slept. I see the quality of my sleep. I see what my pulse rate was for the whole night. So, it’s very interesting. Any time I drink any alcohol at all, my deep sleep almost completely disappears, I don’t sleep as long, my pulse rate goes up. So, my body is trying to metabolize this alcohol. And I had no idea. And so, now I consistently make the choice, “Yeah. I don’t think I’m going to have a glass of wine tonight. I actually think I’d rather sleep well.” 

DUBNER: So, a few years back, you told The Wall Street Journal that you have one regret, or maybe one big regret — that you and your wife didn’t have kids. I’m curious why that’s your big regret. 

MACKEY: I just love children.  

DUBNER: What kind of dad do you think you’d be? You mentioned your dad with the expectations of the straight A’s in the report card. Do you think if you had had kids, you would have been a different type? 

MACKEY: I guess it depends upon how old I was when I had the kids, right? Because I’m a lot more conscious as I’ve gotten older than I was when I was younger. I’m sure if I started at age 20 or 21, I’d have had more energy, but I’d lacked the wisdom that I would have had when I got older. So, here’s the thing, if I could do it all over again when I make a different choice? And the answer is no, because I married the most amazing woman. And she has helped me so much. She’s made me so happy. It’s been such a great partnership, 30 years together. And so, if I could go back into the past, I wouldn’t change that.

There are a lot of other things I regret that if I could go back, I’d change them. For example, if I could go back and never have posted anything on the Yahoo! bulletin board, trust me, I would do that now. Or what I said about unions, I’d go back and remove that from history, but I would not go back and replace my wife with a woman who wanted to have kids, because I have really scored well on that one. 

DUBNER: Tell me something that you believed for a long time to be true until you found out you were wrong.  

MACKEY: So, you said I’m a staunch libertarian, I’m a staunch vegan, and “staunch” in that context is sort of pejorative, I think. And although I myself identify as a libertarian, increasingly, I identify as a “conscious capitalist.” I identify as a classical liberal. When you’re younger, you tend to be more puritanical in your political beliefs and your religious beliefs. You think you found “the truth.” And as I’ve gotten older, I just see that life’s complicated. And there’s not one set of values that are right and everybody else’s values are wrong.

So, I tend to be a lot more tolerant, a little more accepting. So, I think the biggest thing that’s changed is my sense that I’m right. I actually change my mind all the time. You know, one of the things that I changed my mind about as I got older, I realized most people aren’t rational. I got into my 50s before I figured out, just because you have the facts, and the evidence, and the logic, doesn’t mean anybody is going to change their mind. Confirmation bias is rampant. I don’t think changing your beliefs is any big deal. So, I’ve changed my mind a ton of times in life. And I’ll continue to do that, because I think it’s the best way to live. 

DUBNER: So, I don’t mean to sound just like a fellow oldish guy who generally agrees with you but since I do, my question is, wouldn’t it be great if you and I, when we were younger — or even better, young people today, could appreciate the value of not taking a puritanical stance on so many things? But maybe that’s just a feature of youth. If it’s not, can you think of a way to dispense that message so that it trickles down a bit more? 

MACKEY: Well, that’s why we write books, right? We try to pass our wisdom on to a younger generation, who mostly ignores us, because they tend to take advice from their own generation, just as we did when we were younger. But one of the things, Stephen, I’ve realized is that every stage in our life has a certain wisdom to it. Youth has a wisdom to it that old forgets about. Youth knows about play, and adventures, and having this fresh openness towards what life offers. There’s lots of other things they don’t know, but they do know that. And we tend to forget that as we get older. So, every cycle in life, every stage along the way, has its own unique wisdom to it. And we should honor that and not be so quick to judge other people because they don’t see what we see.

To John Mackey, C.E.O. of Whole Foods, I say thanks for this conversation. It went in directions I hadn’t planned, and which I found fruitful. To Mackey’s P.R. team — I guess this is what happens when you are dealing with an authentic person. And Mackey is that. He’s also the author of Conscious Capitalism, which was co-written by Raj Sisodia; and Conscious Leadership, with co-authors Steve McIntosh and Carter Phipps.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Mary Diduch, Corinne Wallace, Daphne Chen, Zack Lapinski, and Matt Hickey. Our intern is Emma Tyrrell, we had help this week from James Foster. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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