The Nobel Prize Summit

In January of 2021, I was contacted by people from the Nobel Prize Organization. They wanted to know if I was interested in participating in a summit to be held in April of that year. I was about to delete the email and attribute it to the pile of spam emails I get. I mentioned the email to a couple work colleagues of mine who said that I should do it. I was still very skeptical. So, I went to the website of the Nobel Prize Organization (click here) and sure enough it seemed legitimate.

I still wasn’t convinced. I replied to the email expecting them to ask me for a credit card number. They said that they were still trying to complete the roster but one name of an economist who would be participating was William Nordhaus of Yale University. I didn’t know him personally but I knew that in 2018 he had won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. I told the organizers that if this were legitimate to have Bill email me. About a week later, I got an email from him. It seemed to be a real email address. I was more convinced but not entirely. Still, I wasn’t sure why these people would want me. I clearly had never won a Nobel Prize and was never going to win one. They said that they wanted me to talk about the economics of inequality which was one of my main areas of study. I know it sounds strange but I still wasn’t convinced that they wanted me although it seems for sure that the event was real.

I reached out to another colleague who I knew had done some nominating for names of people to be considered for the Nobel Prize. He said that this was all very real and that these people don’t make mistakes and don’t randomly pick people. If they had contacted me, they wanted me and only me. They had a very thorough vetting process and probably knew more about me and my work than I knew myself. Wow.

So, I officially signed on. Over the next several months, I had to send them various documents like a headshot and a biography. They also would have technical checks to ensure that I had sufficient bandwidth to broadcast. At the time, I was working for Tulane University but still living in Oklahoma City since I had not sold my old house from when I worked at the University of Oklahoma. They suggested that I’d need to get down to campus at Tulane if that was where I’d be broadcasting on the day of the panel. I decided that I’d go down to New Orleans a few weeks early just to broadcast from my new office.

Things started making me nervous as the hype about the event started getting out. Here is an advertisement from Tulane University announcing what I’d be doing. (Click here) This thing went to media outlets all over the country and I’d get random emails from people that I didn’t know or requests to connect on Linkedin. I was too busy preparing.

Here you can see what the format was to be (Click here). The format was that the speaker would talk for only 7 minutes. As I said, my topic was the economics of inequality. Then the provocateurs (discussants) would quiz the speaker for another 7 minutes. On the spot! No notes were allowed for the speakers or discussants. No PowerPoints. No reading of speeches. Then we were shuttled to a discussion room where anyone signed in from around the globe could ask questions.

I was scheduled to go on the first day of the summit. That morning, former Vice President Al Gore had already spoken. He won a Nobel Peace Prize. My session would have a guy who had won a Nobel Prize in Biology and a guy who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The latter won because of his work in creating the Lithium battery which is used in all cell phones. He was a rather nice guy. The guy moderating our session was Ahmed Best. I didn’t know it at first, but he was rather famous too. He had been the voice of the character Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars movies.

On the day that the event went live, I was ready. I had practiced my remarks over 200 times to ensure that I said everything that I wanted to say and that I didn’t go over time. I also worked to ensure that I wouldn’t be distracted by all of the things going on behind the scenes. They weren’t using Zoom or Skype. This system was much more sophisticated. In fact, it was closer to being live TV broadcast over the internet. There was a lot of movement going on that the audience never saw so they had told us to practice not being distracted by control room chatter or movement. I did just that. I’d set up my 7 minute timer with the TV blaring or with the computer screen showing news footage just so I could get through without stopping or being distracted.

We had gotten signed in on time and were waiting in the control room. Marty, the guy who had won the Nobel Prize in Biology had just finished his 7 minute talk. He and his provocateurs were in their 7 minutes of Q&A when the system began to flicker. No one could figure out what was happening at first. I thought my internet connection was bad. They had trained us on what to do if we lost connection so I followed steps to get back. It happened again. Then the entire system went down.

We all got reconnected and Marty and his discussants tried again. By now it had been about 20 minutes and we were off schedule. Behind the scenes we found out that the system was being hacked. That was interesting and worrying. The audience had no idea what going on and the people in the control room decided not to tell them for fear of giving information to the hackers. It was clear that they (the hackers) weren’t really after this session. They were probing for the big fish coming later in the summit like Dr. Anthony Fauci or the Dalai Lama. Like I said, this thing was huge and I couldn’t understand why they wanted me.

Eventually, the control room people had to move the program to a new platform. They put up a link that people could follow to leave the hacked platform to find the new one. By this point we were a good 45 minutes behind schedule. When we got on the new platform, they didn’t mention the hack. Ahmed simply said we had some technical problems and let Marty have his 4 minutes remaining of the 7 for his Q&A. It was then on to me.

I started with my talk just as I had practiced. I’m not kidding when I said I had gone over my talk 200 times. It helped because as I’m talking the hackers had found their way to the new platform. I could hear in one ear the hackers talking in a foreign language and in the other ear the control room guys trying to counter them. Me? I’m just doing my thing. They were all amazed that I was not at all disturbed by the noise in my ears. This chance comes once in a lifetime. I was not going to make a fool of myself. The hackers never did bring the system down again. They had probed too early.

A lot of people never made it to the new platform after the hack so people would email me to ask how it went. You can click here to watch. An interesting side note is that you can hear someone talking during my piece. This person is neither a hacker or an IT person. It appears to be some random individual picked up on the mic. This person I did not hear during the talk.

What an amazing opportunity.