127. Can You Be Too Smart for Your Own Good? And Other FREAK-quently Asked Questions

Dubner and Levitt talk about circadian rhythms, gay marriage, autism, and whether "pay what you want" is everything it's cracked up to be.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. There's no hiding how convenient Southern New Hampshire University makes college. They offer over 80 career-focused graduate programs online. Classes have no set meeting times, so you can balance life and learning, and online tuition rates are some of the lowest in the country, making it all a little more manageable. A school this willing to work with you is worth the investment. Visit SNHU.edu/freakonomics to learn more. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it.

• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-YOLO type. PNC Bank: Brilliantly Boring Since 1865. Brilliantly Boring Since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association Member FDIC. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Amica. You know what they say, if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, go with Amica and get coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers, one that looks after what's important to you together. Auto, home, life, and more, coverage that fits your unique needs. Amica helps you protect what matters most. Visit amica.com and get a quote today. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work is a new way to work in ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work can pull info from across your apps and connect to your tools to help you create finished work. You can even automate work in ChatGPT with the Scheduled Tasks feature, and the whole time, you stay in control.

• 2:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 2:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey Levitt, of all the things that are in your power to do at this very moment in time, what would be your very most favorite thing to do?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  If I could be doing anything right now, what would I be doing?

• 2:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Probably playing golf.

• 2:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, if, let's say you can't play golf, what comes next?

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Probably sleeping.

• 2:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you can't be playing golf or sleeping, what's third?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Probably being here talking to you.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 3:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Every now and then, Steve Levitt and I ask you, our listeners and readers, to send us your questions. Then, we try to answer them on this podcast. We call it Frequently Asked Questions. I like this question. It'll be interesting to know if we can be of any help, from David Rossetti. He says, "Is modern life, more specifically the fact that we no longer follow our circadian rhythm, killing us? There are all these rises in diseases, cancer, autoimmune, et cetera, in developed countries that do not exist in numbers anywhere close to what they have elsewhere in the world, and no one really knows what's going on. So could simply going to bed when it gets dark and waking up when there's light reduce billions of dollars in health care costs, increase productivity, reduce addictions to alcohol and drugs and depression, et cetera?"

• 4:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt, circadian rhythms having to do with rise in diseases and more broadly than tied to cost and productivity. You know anything about that?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  We're probably not the right people to answer David's exact question, which is more of a medical question about is there a link between staying up all night and dying of things like cancer? And I do want to challenge his first premise, which is that cancer and heart disease and all those things are way higher in the developed world than in other places. And in part, it's because in the developed world, we've done such a good job at getting rid of the other things that kill you, that you gotta die of something. So that's the sorts of things that now kill us are the diseases of senescence, old age, heart disease, cancer, things like that. But I think being realistic and not knowing any of the facts, but just guessing, I cannot imagine that working the night shift in terms of life expectancy could take more than a year off your life.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe two years, but that it would be amazing to me if the kinds of things we're talking about could matter that much. And my guess is actually that accidents, accidental death, is the greatest thing that gets elevated when you work the night shift because you're just so darn tired all the time that you end up getting into car crashes and falling down the stairs and things like that.

• 5:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if you're saying maybe a year less of life expectancy, compare that for a minute to, let's say, an unhealthy habit, whether it's very poor diet or, let's say, smoking. You think that working the night shift continuously throughout your adult life would have less of a physiological detriment than the others?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  That's just my conjecture. I don't really know. But whatever it is, what I want to compare it to is the gains that we've had in the modern world that in some ways necessitate a bunch of people staying up all night to make it possible for the rest of us to have a great life. And the gains we've had in life expectancy over the last 100 years are probably, I don't know, 35 or 40 years increased from maybe 50 years.

• 6:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, just about doubled in the US for a US-born male. It about doubled the last, so roughly 38 to 76. But again, a lot of that is also hidden in childbirth, death in childbirth, which is still higher in the US than in some countries, but almost went away. And once you get rid of those deaths, it used to be that once you got to middle age, Did have a relatively good chance of living longer.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. But so I just think it's part of modern life that we get tremendous consumption value from being able to, you know, go drive late to Taco Bell and get whatever we want to eat. And if we get sick, the hospitals are open and that the capital in the factories can be used productively by doing three chefs instead of two. So it's not perfect. Look, all of us would rather be sleeping when it's dark and be waking up to the sun and the roosters and stuff like that. But I think that it's a cost of modernity. And, you know, maybe the answer is how do you lower that cost? What can science and technology do to reduce the costs of that kind of thing? And one thing

• 7:27Speaker 01

  I think that we know is that it's very difficult to be switching from daytime to nighttime to daytime to nighttime, which is what sometimes they do in police departments and in hospitals. I believe there's a body of evidence that says you just kind of get used to the night shift if you do the night shift for years and years and years in a way that moving back and forth is very hard.

• 8:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, let me ask you this. Here's a question that came in, actually, kind of two versions of the same question. One from Steve Adama Adema and one from Miguel Sandoval. One asks, is there a hidden cost to intelligence? I feel a lot of people assume wrongly, question mark, there's a trade off between intellectual and social ability. And the other fellow asks, can you be too smart for your own good? I've heard this used often. However, I tend to disagree that you can be too smart for your own good. Levitt, you're a relatively smart guy. Have there been instances in your life where you've been too smart for your own good? And do you know anything about this more generally?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  I can't say I ever remember being too smart for my own good. I've seen other people. And I'll tell you, the biggest thing that happens in academics is that really smart people become convinced that they can trick, not just a single other person, but they can trick everyone at once. I've seen it a number of times where the smarter you are, the more you think you can get away with, and it ends up being your undoing. The people who are really, really smart. Actually can run circles around people, but it's the people who are one notch below the very smartest who I've seen get into a lot of trouble by thinking they're too smart.

• 9:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  What about the related problem of domain transfer? People thinking that because they're very good or very smart in one arena, they kind of develop an attitude, a confidence that they think, you know, people talk about this with doctors sometimes called the god complex. You think that if you can figure out something like the human body, you can figure out just about anything. Do you see that?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's what we're doing right now. Isn't that where our FAQs are? You and I are good at one thing, you know, you're good at writing. I'm good at taking a pile of data and making sense of it. And we sit here and talk like we're good at answering questions about whether we're smart. I mean, it's exactly what we're doing right now. And it's something that you and I relegate all the time and we have some fun with it just because we know we're among friends on the podcast. But the people listening understand that we're just kind of screwing around when we answer these questions. We're not really giving the truth. Now, if you go back to that first question about the trade-off.

• 10:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Social trade-off?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the social trade-off. I think there are at least two really good reasons to believe that people who are intelligent will not possess particularly good social skills. And one of those is that if I take just the example of math ability, there's a lot of evidence that autism is a sort of extreme form of mathiness and thinking like a mathematician or like a scientist. And that that interferes with the way that you think about people and interact with people. And so I think there's definitely some genetic reasons why being smart in a math way might get in the way of being good with people. I think we've all seen some of that. I think the other thing is just what you invest in, right?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  So when you're a kid, if you're smart, you invest in the things that smart kids invest in, doing well in school, impressing people, trying to get in college. And if you're not smart, you make a lot of investment in being social and being the cheerleader type or the homecoming king. And those investments are really important.

• 11:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's interesting. That's a good point. So let me ask you this, though, about, I'm curious, hearing you talk, I think, about gender. So I think two things about gender. One, and smartness. So one is, you know, why is the autism spectrum so much more? Why are there so many more males in it than females? I have a friend, Mehmet Oz, Dr. Oz, who I've known for a long time, before he was famous, and he's always been brilliant and kind of great. And he was telling me not long ago that with boys, he puts it the way only a scientist would, there's a lot less quality control with boys, he said, right? So for girls, who are going to be carrying the next generation, their wiring needs to be kind

• 11:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  of further along than boys, who can survive in a different way. But it makes me think, when you're talking about the relation between smartness and either success or social ability, you're answering from the perspective of a male. What about for women? Do you think women are penalized more for being smart or smarter than their peers than men are? And if so, on what dimensions?

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Well, certainly in the marriage market, right, in the dating market, smart women don't get rewarded in any way like smart men get rewarded. I think we wrote about it a little bit in Freakonomics, didn't we, about the dating? And smart men, men who had a lot of education, did quite well, but women who had a lot of education did poorly.

• 12:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was hard to tease out the education for women and the income, because both of them were turnoffs for the other men.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  If you go back to the 1960s, and you look at the marriage rate of highly educated women, it was really low. It was shockingly low, that they were, of all the people in society, least likely to be married. It was women who went and got PhDs. So I think women really do pay the price for, at least historically have paid the price, for being too smart and too successful. Although I think that's, certainly the data suggests that that's changing. And that's my feeling as well, is that there's a lot more room for smart women in society today than there was.

• 13:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it that there's more room for smart women in society, or is it the matching markets are better? There are better, easier ways for smart women to find the men that they want to find than there used to be?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Well, it's certainly true that places like Silicon Valley, where it used to be that men who would be, say, computer programs would marry women they met in college, I think now they're more likely to marry other women who are computer programmers. So to the extent that men and women are more and more doing the same jobs, I think that that does help very much successful women to meet the kind of men who are equally successful. But that's also, according to some people, including a student of mine, Hayes Golden, is one of the reasons why autism is going up, because the men who are good at math are now much more likely to have babies with the women who are good at math, and that seems to be triggering an increase in autism.

• 14:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, since fighting cancer is big business, what's the incentive to find a cure?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  So I would say the incentive for a cancer cure is not really a market incentive, it's a being a hero kind of incentive.

• 14:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Granola. You know that moment when a meeting ends and someone says, let's circle back on this next week, and everyone nods but no one writes it down? Then next week rolls around and it's radio silence? That's why Granola exists. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. And the best part? Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots. It's just your normal meeting with superpowers. If meetings are eating up your day, granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free.

• 15:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just head to granola.ai/freakonomics. That's granola.ai/freakonomics to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai/freakonomics.

• 15:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. There's no hiding how convenient Southern New Hampshire University makes college. They offer over 80 career-focused graduate programs online. Classes have no set meeting times, so you can balance life and learning, and online tuition rates are some of the lowest in the country, making it all a little more manageable. A school this willing to work with you is worth the investment. Visit snhu.edu/freakonomics to learn more.

• 16:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must-haves, like gym access or breakfast, just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at hotels.com. Visit hotels.com for details.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 17:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's a question from someone named Dallas. Would making marriage legal for the LGBT community improve the economy? If so, how much?

• 17:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well?

• 17:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pass?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  No, let's see. I would say, I don't think that would have a big impact on the economy for a couple of reasons. First, I think that when you talk about marriage versus not marriage, if all you're talking about is just everyone has the same relationship, you just changed the title of the relationship, then maybe you're talking about having some big weddings. But that, to me, feels like Keynesian economics and the idea that if there's more demand for things, that will make the economy better. But I think, I think the modern view of the world, or at least my modern view of the world, is that for the economy to be better, you need to be better at making things, right? So that the, the supply side of the economy, productivity, is everything, right?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  If we can make workers more productive, then we end up being richer. But consumption is, you know, if people just consume more stuff, I, I very much am of the view that things like stimulus, government stimulus, whatnot, just aren't very successful because what you need to do is figure out how to make everybody more productive and produce, you know?

• 18:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, but let's talk about, let's say, a couple that's not married, that wants to be married and is not able to, versus a couple that wants to be married and is able to legally, and some of the economic changes that might take place around that. Let's say, healthcare, consumption, or at least paying for healthcare, how much they're actually paying. Let's say, taxation, a married couple actually is going to pay more than two individuals not. Can you imagine any way around those avenues in which it has any kind of real impact? Or is it still not much of a, an issue in your view?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sounds to me a lot like a bunch of transfers. You know, I don't think that people are gonna, they'll have to make different choices, maybe distort their choices less if they're married. Let's take the healthcare market. Now, maybe it's true that because of SPALSO coverage, people will make a different set of choices, but that seems to me like a crazy way to think about the problem. We have a terrible healthcare system in which employment and healthcare should not be linked. We should fix that problem first, not try to backdoor it through-

• 19:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right, but until we fix that problem, at least having it linked to one person in a couple's employment rather than two, is that an improvement or a disimprovement?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  I think that's a triviality on issues like this, whether it's this, or abortion, or capital punishment. I mean, these are issues that economically are just not very important. I mean, just doesn't, you know, capital punishment isn't very important to crime. And abortion and dollars and cents is not important at all. But they stand for something much, much greater. They represent, you know, what America means, or ideology, or personal rights, or whatever. And the relative importance of the issues of liberty and fairness and things are, have got to be 100 times bigger than the direct economic impact. So I think it's just confusing, the issue, to even talk about economics when

• 20:16Speaker 01

  these are, these are moral issues, not economic issues. That would be my, my good answer to that question. So skip all that other junk I said.

• 20:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is interesting. A question from Damon Bevan, or Bevan. What would be the economic impact of a cheap, readily available cure for cancer? Here's the basic scenario, he writes. Imagine that somehow we find a cure for cancer that involves something cheap and simple, like drinking a spinach smoothie with every meal for five days. We have entire industries and charities that are geared toward finding cancer cures and treatments. What would be the economic impact if those industries and charities were suddenly out of the business overnight? One reason I ask is because I often argue that there is no clear market incentive to find a cure for cancer. Treatments are expensive, and there are repeat customers. It's a nice profit model. A cure would slowly eliminate the

• 21:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  customer base for treatment. So, other than altruism, where is the incentive for a cancer cure?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  So I would say the incentive for a cancer cure is not really a market incentive. It's a being a hero kind of incentive, that there are so many doctors out there, researchers, medical researchers, who if they could be the one who is forever remembered as the one who prevented cancer, who got rid of cancer, and they would do anything to do that. So I think there are really strong incentives out there, and they aren't exactly market incentives, although I think that person would be quite rich anyway, but incentives are even more powerful than markets. But on the flip side, this is a really important point in economics that many people don't understand. It is always better to be able to get something for nothing than to have to put real resources into doing it.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  So any time that we can find a way to get rid of a problem for nothing, we want to do it. So we, right now, invest enormous resources in trying to fight cancer. But if we didn't have to spend those resources fighting cancer, we would spend them on something else that people liked, and the world would be a much better place. It's a good example, this is labor. Like, let's say that instead of it taking eight hours for a person to produce, you know, a hundred wallets, or whatever their job is, let's say they could do that in four hours, they could produce a hundred wallets. Well, then they just bought four free hours of leisure, okay? And that would be a great thing. The less labor you need, the less capital you need to make something, the better. And so there's this crazy Keynesian argument about, oh, you need people to be busy, you need demand and whatnot, okay?

• 22:52Speaker 01

  But absolutely for certain, no doubt about it, if you can suddenly make things for free that used to cost you money, the world is a much better place, because you just reallocate all the resources you were, quote, "wasting" on solving cancer before, and put them to do something else.

• 23:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  It also makes me think of, on a smaller scale, but not insignificant, what happened in this country and elsewhere with polio, right? Which is, at one point, even though polio was never that massive a disease, it was crippling for those who had it, if it didn't kill them, it crippled them. And most of the money was put into treatment, and then there came, and for a long time, there was not much thinking about the idea of a vaccine. It wasn't really the main line of thought. Then that came to be, and then vaccine mentality took, and vaccine, two vaccines were actually... Created. So Damon's question is a little bit like saying, you know, the incentives of the people who make the iron lung are so strong that they will prevent anybody else from actually pursuing a vaccine. But as we've seen over and over again, those aren't the same people and they pursue different paths.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. If you compare that, though, to something more like car seats, I think it is true that right now, the people who make car seats are the same kind of people who might push for other ways to keep kids safe in cars. And there, I think there are more obstacles. It's just that in the world of medicine, the particular pharma companies who make a particular cancer drug have zero control over the thousands of medical researchers who are scattered across the globe trying to solve these problems. And so I think you're exactly right, that there's no cartel which is blocking the production of a cancer vaccine. It's just a really hard problem that people are trying to make headway on and not yet succeeding.

• 24:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lev, here's a question from Marie. She writes, "Since people are genuinely fair and pay for bagels on the honor system," okay, that's referring to our bagel study in Freakonomics, we can explain that a little bit more, "why does this not apply to song downloads? Or do most people pay for music? I do, but my students don't if they can get it for free from their friends or online. Is the payment on the honor system only for smaller businesses where people feel a personal attachment?"

• 25:10Speaker 01

  I think that's a great point. I think that on these issues of honor, it's very predictable, the kinds of factors which make people be honest. One is scrutiny. If you know you're being watched, you're much more likely to be honest. I think if you believe that the recipient of the money is deserving, you very much tend to be honest. And I also think that if you are in settings which in general evoke honesty, like it happens to be inside of a church or a hospital, I think, again, you're more likely to be honest. Okay, so how do we? Compared from the bagels, which have a lot of these features of scrutiny and the

• 25:51Speaker 01

  bagel man, it was a sort of sympathetic character who didn't have a lot of money, to big business and the downloading of songs. And I think here, it's my impression that there's an amazing generational break where people who grew up having to pay for music when they were young, people of our generation, Dubner, understand the idea that you should pay for music and it doesn't seem strange. Whereas, I do think with young people, the natural instinct is that the internet is a place for free things and that they deserve to get their music for free.

• 26:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, let me just explain for people the bagel business a little bit. So, this was a guy, a former economist in the DC area, who distributed bagels and in some places, donuts. The American Diabetes Association office, for some reason, consumed like half of his donuts. Everybody else mostly wanted bagels. But he would deliver them and put a box out for money and he would post the price and he would then come back later to collect the money. And it worked. It was an honor system scheme that worked. But I think the key differences in it, so a ton of people, so there are all these pay what you wish schemes and honor system schemes that have floated up in the last many years. And I think that there are a couple of huge differences between them and the bagel story that people

• 27:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  don't get. One is, it wasn't a pay what you wish, the bagel thing. There were prices posted. The bagel costs whatever, a buck and with cream cheese, a buck and a half. So, what's interesting to me about this is not only do a lot of people pay something, but they pay exactly the right price, in part because it seems, and we've written about this a good bit, that you can really herd people into doing what you want them to do simply by telling them that everybody else is doing it and by kind of setting the parameters, right, Levitt? It seems that people are much more willing than they might think to kind of go along with the herd.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's absolutely true. But this is also a case of technology where you and I don't actually know how to steal music.

• 27:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, I do.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Right? Do you know how to steal music?

• 27:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  I do. Oh, I don't know how to steal music. I could teach you. Okay.

• 27:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  I think the other thing about the bagel story that people miss and they try to apply it to other instances is that he, Paul Feldman, the bagel guy, had some real leverage, which was this: if the payment rate from the whole group in a given office fell below a certain amount, he would stop bringing them bagels. And that's what all these other schemes almost never have. Well, they may have it, and it may be a bright line, but you don't know when you're getting to it. So if you know that this thing that you want and it's being offered at a price that you have to contribute a certain amount toward will no longer be delivered to you, a nice, warm bagel to your office, then that's not really as altruistic as people seem to think. And so therefore, it doesn't surprise me that when there's no

• 28:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  leverage exerted, that people would steal as much as they can get away with.

• 28:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. Thank you very much. All right. Sorry, that was terrible. No, that was fine. That was one of my worst performances in ages. No, you did. There were really good spots. Do you still have 10 minutes or no? You know, I should probably go in a couple, actually. All right. I think we're good. Okay. Good job, Levitt. Okay. Great.

• 29:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. Next time on Freakonomics Radio, put down that steering wheel. That's right. The driverless car is coming.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  So the throttle, the brake, the steering wheel, the turn signals, everything is being controlled by a computer right now. I'm just sitting here.

• 29:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  A few weeks ago, I went for a ride in a driverless car, and I'll tell you all about it next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Susie Lechtenberg. Our staff includes Catherine Wells, David Herman, Borey Lam, and Chris Bannon. Colin Campbell is our executive producer. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 30:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible, and when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic Pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9mg, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic Pill.

• 31:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility, it's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to SouthernCompany.com to learn more. Southern Company, building the future of energy.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  Hey, it's Kelly Ripa, and if you don't know, I have a podcast where I get to say whatever I want. Hold on, let me get a shovel and a body bag. I envision doing a podcast with the conversations that happen in my dressing room, off camera, where people feel free to talk. No hair, no makeup. This is my kind of job. Only Kelly Ripa can ask me these questions. I'm flipping the script and saying what's really on my mind.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  We're seeing a different side of you. It's a little bit more honest.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  When the cameras go off, the real fun begins. Get my hair done over here. Hey. This is an off-camera podcast, so it doesn't even matter. It's unfiltered conversations and unexpected confessions.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  My mom says, Woody, I knew your dad.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  Stop the press. I would like to volunteer to administer any and all DNA tests.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Maybe that should be part of the show.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  Let's talk off-camera with me, Kelly Ripa. You just put that in the universe. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

• 33:04Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Is there a right time to sell a stock? Are you taking the right risks with your portfolio? Financial decisions can be tricky, and often your own cognitive and emotional biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Join host Mark Reapy as he offers practical solutions to help overcome the cognitive and emotional biases that may affect your investing decisions. Listen at schwab.com/financialdecoder.