Pod Insights Freakonomics Radio 339. The Future of Freakonomics Radio About this episode After 8 years and more than 300 episodes, it was time to either 1) quit, or 2) make the show bigger and better. We voted for number 2. Here’s a peek behind the curtain and a preview of what you’ll be hearing next.
Transcript 6,717 words · 67 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:09 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Mint Mobile. With Mint Mobile's summer sale, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. Free yourself from big wireless and switch to Mint for high-speed data and coverage on the T-Mobile 5G network. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com/freak. That's mintmobile.com/freak. Upfront payment, $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.
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2:38 Speaker 01 I'm Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, and you're listening to Freakonomics Radio.
2:43 Speaker 02 What's up, guys? I'm Jimmy Garoppolo, and you're listening to Freakonomics Radio. I'm Richard Taylor, and you're listening to Freakonomics Radio. I'm Roger Bennett. You're listening to the Acid Jazz Hour on Freakonomics Radio.
2:54 Stephen J. Dubner? And I'm Stephen Dubner. Freakonomics Radio began as a little homemade show in early 2010. The first episode was called The Dangers of Safety. We looked at how football helmets, originally designed to prevent skull fractures, had done that job so well that NFL players now use them as weapons, which, if you are a football player, can feel like this.
3:17 Speaker 03 The first thing you get is, everything starts to vibrate, like vroom, like if you laid your head on your cellphone and put it on vibrate, and someone called you, and your legs are like jello, you're trying to stand up, and your mind is trying to tell your body to do it, but your body and everything is disconnected.
3:36 Stephen J. Dubner? The early episodes were an offshoot of the Freakonomics books I was writing with this guy.
3:40 Speaker 04 Hi, this is Steve Levitt.
3:42 Stephen J. Dubner? Levitt, what is your favorite thing about doing this podcast?
3:46 Speaker 04 That you do all the work.
3:48 Stephen J. Dubner? In the beginning, we used the podcast to expand on stuff we'd already written about. What comes to mind risk-wise when I say the following things? Shark attacks.
4:00 Speaker 04 The biggest joke of all time.
4:03 Stephen J. Dubner? All right. Terrorist attacks.
4:07 Speaker 04 The biggest waste of time ever.
4:11 Stephen J. Dubner? How about the risk of just something almost everybody does every day, driving your car?
4:16 Speaker 04 Incredibly low. That if nothing were to kill you, except driving your car, and all you did was drive your car day and night, day and night, day and night, you'd expect to live for 250 years.
4:27 Stephen J. Dubner? Then we started taking questions from listeners. Is college education no longer a factor, or even a disadvantage, when it comes to employment?
4:37 Speaker 04 I think that never has anyone made a statement more false. So of all the topics that economists have studied, I would say one we are most certain about are the returns to education.
4:52 Stephen J. Dubner? What about the problem of, you know, 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?
5:13 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah, that's what we're doing right now. 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.
5:30 Stephen J. Dubner? Steve Levitt is a very bright guy, so I took his words to heart. I figured the podcast would be more useful, and importantly, more fun, if rather than talking about stuff we already knew, or worse, not knowing what we were talking about, it'd be better to reach higher, to make the show a real thing, exploratory, data-driven, surprising, things you always thought you knew but didn't, things you never thought you wanted to know about but do. For instance, does more expensive wine actually taste better?
6:01 Speaker 05 We did a tasting, a brown bag, and we had the exact same wine in both bags. And we told them that one bottle was a $50 bottle and to write their reviews. And we said another one was a $10 bottle to write their reviews.
6:16 Stephen J. Dubner? It turned out that if you think a wine is expensive, you also think it tastes better. Otherwise, most people are just as happy, if not more so, drinking cheap wine. In another early episode, we wondered why so many low-income people play the lottery, which has dreadful odds, and whether anyone had a better idea.
6:37 Speaker 06 So, you know, a lot of Americans think the lottery is their only chance at winning big sums of money. Why don't we take that appetite for gambling and attach it to a savings vehicle that offers some positive return? It's a win-win situation.
6:52 Stephen J. Dubner? One listener who heard that episode set out to create a win-win lottery at the state level. Just last year, he finally succeeded in Texas.
7:02 Speaker 07 Knowing that this had been a podcast that turned into an idea that ended up becoming a constitutional amendment and that I had a piece of that thing that had happened, it was just super exciting.
7:13 Stephen J. Dubner? One of my favorite early episodes was about something called the Cobra Effect.
7:17 Speaker 08 This is where you have a well-intended scheme, but instead of solving the problem, it makes the problem actually worse.
7:25 Stephen J. Dubner? For example, when a government puts a bounty on pests like cobras.
7:31 Speaker 08 But the population responded by farming cobras.
7:36 Stephen J. Dubner? Or rats.
7:37 Speaker 09 The French think they're really making a dent into the rat population. Then, a few months later, one of the health officials is checking out one of these villages on the edge of Hanoi and discovered a rat farm. And the Vietnamese were growing rats, cutting off their tails, and bringing them into the city to collect the bounty.
8:06 Stephen J. Dubner? Over time, our little homemade podcast turned into a going concern. It came to occupy most of my working hours, sometimes most of my waking hours. And now, it's been eight years. More than 330 episodes, roughly 10 million downloads a month. And for me, a bottomless supply of fun and delight and discovery. I've gotten to speak with more than 1,000 bright and interesting people.
8:33 Speaker 10 My name's Ben Bernanke, and up till February of 2014, I was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
8:39 Speaker 11 Okay, my name is Christine Lagarde, and I'm currently the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.
8:46 Speaker 12 The new job that I found was I was a high-end escort. I paid somewhere between $350 to $500 an hour.
8:57 Speaker 13 Hi, my name is Trevor Noah, and I'm a comedian and host of The Daily Show. My name is Nate Silver. I'm the editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight.
9:04 Stephen J. Dubner? Can you give your full name?
9:05 Speaker 14 E. Harper Nora Chirimajenko Connolly.
9:08 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, so E is your first name.
9:10 Speaker 14 The capitalized E.
9:11 Stephen J. Dubner? Yo, can you give us your full name?
9:13 Speaker 15 Yeah, sure. Yo, Xing, Hano, Augustus Eisner, Alexander Weiser, Knuckles, Chirimajenko Connolly.
9:20 Stephen J. Dubner? So, yes, lots of interesting people and ideas. But again, eight years, 330 episodes. I began to ask myself, what comes next? The way I saw it, there were three options. Number one, keep doing pretty much what we've been doing. This wasn't all that appealing. I am in constant fear of being bored. Option number two, do less of it, or maybe stop entirely. No way. I love doing this podcast, and I love you guys, our listeners, truly. So, that left option number three, turn up the volume.
10:02 Stephen J. Dubner? What if we tried to make Freakonomics Radio bigger, better, with more new ideas, new formats, new ways to explore the hidden side of everything? We knew we'd need some help to pull this off, so we went out and got it. Please give a warm welcome to our new production partner, Stitcher, one of the finest podcast purveyors in the land. Today on Freakonomics Radio, a preview of what we've got in store for you for the next few years.
10:40 Speaker 16 From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
10:54 Stephen J. Dubner? To figure out where we're going with this show, we first took a long look at where we've been, especially the mistakes we've made, like the episode about the carpal tunnel epidemic, which, for reasons I can no longer recall, featured a talking pigeon.
11:11 Stephen J. Dubner? A lot of our early episodes centered around the sort of question that most people have the good sense to not ask.
11:17 Speaker 13 How much does the President of the United States really matter?
11:20 Stephen J. Dubner? It's Chris Bannon. He is chief content officer at our new home, Stitcher. This is a reunion for us and Bannon. We worked with him way back when at our old producing partner, WNYC.
11:32 Speaker 13 That's from November of 2010.
11:36 Speaker 17 Well, the President is by far and away the most important person from a governance point of view in the country.
11:44 Speaker 18 No, the President of the United States is not the most powerful person.
11:48 Speaker 19 I think the President is really just someone who's sitting in the co-pilot seat in a plane that's already on autopilot.
11:54 Speaker 13 And that's one of the episodes that I think was really a turning point for the relevance of the show to the broadest possible audience, right? These aren't just narrow economics questions that we're debating in some ivory tower. They're really the questions that everyday people ask themselves and that get very smart and well-researched answers.
12:16 Stephen J. Dubner? We did find that whenever we talked to politicians per se, or people directly associated with politics, some listeners were bound to get agitated. We interviewed some Democrats, like US Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey.
12:30 Speaker 20 First of all, how nice would it be to say, there's no black, there's no white. We're all just shades of the rainbow, all equal. And that sounds really nice. But we live in a society in which you experience institutions in this country very differently based upon your race.
12:46 Stephen J. Dubner? And Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo.
12:49 Speaker 21 Since I've been governor, we've had the money to triple the number of public pre-K classrooms in Rhode Island. We are, for the first time in a long time, fixing our roads and rebuilding our bridges. So, yeah, we took the medicine. But now we're investing like crazy.
13:07 Stephen J. Dubner? After interviews like that, we'd get a bunch of emails calling us libtards. We've also interviewed plenty of conservatives from this country and elsewhere.
13:16 Speaker 22 Yeah, I'm Boris Johnson, the mayor of London. And that means I'm responsible for planning the strategic direction of the greatest city on earth. We have now in London 72 billionaires, which is more than New York. New York has only 43 billionaires. And how about that? Paris has only 18 billionaires. And Moscow has, I think, 40. So, you know, London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan.
13:48 Speaker 23 My name is Charles Koch, and I'm chairman and CEO of Koch Industries.
13:53 Stephen J. Dubner? After these interviews, we'd get emails calling us, well, mostly things I probably shouldn't repeat. In fact, usually pornographic things. Anyway, we try to not let it bother you. Personally, I think it's a good idea to speak with people outside the circles you usually travel in, or even better, to expand your circles. That's always been a mission of this show, to entertain ideas that may have value, even if they seem repugnant at first. Anyway, all that political feedback was an early indicator of the sharp discord that's been building over the years in the US and elsewhere. Discord that politicians, ironically, are really good at exploiting, which led us to make episodes like this one, called 10 Ideas to Make Politics Less Rotten.
14:37 Speaker 24 I'd like to get rid of winner-take-all elections to elect Congress, state legislatures, and city councils.
14:43 Speaker 25 The idea that I would like to die unmourned, buried as quickly as possible, no funeral, is the notion that we have to have a live, cheering, jeering audience at presidential debates.
14:54 Speaker 26 Well, you assume that political tribalism doesn't exist outside of a two-party system. There's even more tribalism outside of a two-party system, and it is of a more destructive nature, because it is oftentimes based upon one simple issue or one personality.
15:10 Stephen J. Dubner? Political tribalism was the inspiration for one of the episodes we're working on now, which you'll hear sometime in the next few months. It's about a whole new way of looking at our political system.
15:22 Speaker 27 The US political system is a full-fledged industry. Importantly, it's thriving, even as the customers of that industry, consumers, are actually enormously dissatisfied.
15:36 Stephen J. Dubner? But this show's bread and butter is economics, not politics. Economics in all its glorious permutations. Big macro questions, like whether the American dream is still alive.
15:49 Speaker 28 You're twice as likely to realize the American dream if you're growing up in Canada rather than the US.
15:56 Stephen J. Dubner? Whether China really ate America's jobs. I think if we had realized how traumatic the pace of change would have been, we would have, at a minimum, had much better policies in place. And whether the US should perhaps copy the German economic model.
16:15 Speaker 29 Germany is a stakeholder economy in that sense. Yeah, it's not a shareholder economy. It's a stakeholder economy.
16:22 Stephen J. Dubner? In Germany, the unions have representatives on the board of the company. We learned about the strange ecosystem of organ donations with the economist Al Roth, who won a Nobel Prize for helping design a system to match potential kidney donors.
16:39 Speaker 10 If you're healthy enough, you can remain healthy with just one, and that means if someone you love is dying of kidney disease, you could give him a kidney and save his life.
16:47 Stephen J. Dubner? If you happen to be a match.
16:48 Speaker 10 If you happen to be a match. And that's where kidney exchange comes in.
16:51 Stephen J. Dubner? That episode inspired a number of people to become kidney donors, not for anyone they even knew, but for complete strangers who happened to be a match, like Ned Brooks, a semi-retiree from Connecticut. We put him on our show, too, along with the woman who received his kidney.
17:09 Speaker 28 Oh, my God. I've not spoken to her yet. This would be great.
17:14 Stephen J. Dubner? Danielle, can you hear us? This is Stephen Dubner.
17:17 Speaker 30 Hi, I can hear you guys.
17:18 Speaker 28 It's Ned.
17:19 Speaker 30 Hi, Ned.
17:20 Speaker 28 Hi.
17:22 Speaker 30 How are you doing?
17:25 Speaker 28 I'm doing great.
17:28 Speaker 30 Good, good. This is exciting.
17:30 Speaker 28 This is very exciting. Great to hear your voice. How are you feeling?
17:34 Speaker 30 I'm feeling good, feeling real good. Lately, it's been a struggle since the surgery, but I'm doing good, a lot better than I was.
17:41 Speaker 28 Are you on lots of meds?
17:44 Speaker 30 Yeah, unfortunately, I'll have to be on a ton of meds for probably the rest of my life.
17:51 Stephen J. Dubner? We've also talked a lot on this show about behavioral economics, which you, it seems, cannot get enough of, ideas like temptation bundling.
18:01 Speaker 31 What I realized is that if I only allowed myself to watch my favorite TV shows while exercising at the gym, then I'd stop wasting time at home on useless television, and I'd start craving trips to the gym at the end of a long day because I'd want to find out what happens next in my show.
18:18 Speaker 32 My temptation bundle is to listen to Freakonomics podcasts while I'm running, doing it right now.
18:23 Speaker 33 What I like to do is skip an afternoon of work and go to the movies after my annual pap smear.
18:30 Speaker 34 I really wish my temptation bundle was acceptable, but it would be drinking at work.
18:35 Stephen J. Dubner? We've also looked at the economics of sleep.
18:38 Speaker 35 There's a wide perception that people in the US are sleeping less than they used to, and the evidence for that is very weak.
18:46 Stephen J. Dubner? We looked at the economics of Hollywood's visual effects industry. I said, wow, that's great. We're making a lot of money. And she said, actually, we're not making any money at all. And how the economics of Chuck E. Cheese might lead to violence.
19:02 Speaker 36 Well, I'm not the type of guy to hit somebody, and certainly not a child. But it did seem plausible that somebody might start talking to the kids, and the kids maybe go get their parents, and an altercation would start that way.
19:17 Speaker 04 I can proudly say I have never become violent at Chuck E. Cheese's, never been tempted towards violence at Chuck E. Cheese's.
19:24 Stephen J. Dubner? Coming up after the break, I want you to hear from some of the people who've helped make this show.
19:29 Speaker 37 I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying.
19:32 Stephen J. Dubner? And a preview of what you'll be hearing over the coming weeks and months.
19:37 Speaker 38 First of all, if your heart wasn't beating, to some extent, you'd be dead, right?
19:41 Speaker 39 That could be the reason you're telling your second grade daughter that she's moving next week.
19:45 Speaker 40 A burst of enthusiasm, complete despair, kind of talking your way through, well, it's gonna be okay, don't get so crazy.
19:53 Stephen J. Dubner? That's coming up right after this.
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21:06 Stephen J. Dubner? 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. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life, like banking, for example? Well, PNC- 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.
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22:27 Stephen J. Dubner? You hear a lot of my voice on Freakonomics Radio, but the show is very much a team effort. So I'd like you to hear from some of the people who've been making the show over the years.
22:38 Speaker 41 One of the things Freakonomics does well is taking an issue and looking at it from unusual perspectives.
22:46 Stephen J. Dubner? That's Stephanie Tam, who's produced a bunch of really great episodes, including a three-part series called Bad Medicine.
22:52 Speaker 42 Medical practice was based on bits and scraps of evidence, anecdotes, bias, preconceived notions, and probably a lot of psychological traps.
23:02 Speaker 43 Something like eight out of the last 10 drugs pulled from market by the FDA were because of this profound sex difference.
23:10 Stephen J. Dubner? Stephanie also produced an episode about why we Earthlings still speak so many different languages, and if perhaps there should be a universal one.
23:20 Speaker 41 I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying.
23:23 Speaker 37 Ich verstehe nicht.
23:27 Speaker 41 I had never really thought about the economics of language before.
23:31 Speaker 44 The truth is that if we could start again, I don't think anybody would wish that the situation was the way it came out.
23:38 Speaker 41 And then also, you know, obviously, the actual translation costs of having so many different languages in a particularly global world.
23:55 Speaker 07 You're talking about Freakonomics episodes that are dealing with pretty big, complex, sometimes sort of esoteric ideas and trying to make them manageable for people.
24:04 Stephen J. Dubner? And that's David Herman, who was our technical director for four years and still pitches in on various projects.
24:10 Speaker 07 It might have been the poop episode where I feel like we really cracked it.
24:14 Stephen J. Dubner? The power of poop.
24:18 Speaker 45 Poop is just what we see. It's a little more complex than that inside, but we can detect or measure most of the constituents of this microbial organ in poop. And it's easy to get. That's what we study.
24:35 Speaker 46 A professor of medicine named me on television as being a charlatan for doing fecal transplants, and he had no idea of the science behind it.
24:44 Speaker 47 It wasn't an overnight occurrence where, you know, I got better like within 15 seconds. But all I know now is I'm 47 years old, I ride a custom chopper, I travel the world, I have a great time, and I'm not in a bloody wheelchair, right? That's all I know.
25:04 Stephen J. Dubner? So can't you call it flora therapy? That just sounds like some rose petals being sprinkled about.
25:09 Speaker 46 I mean, one patient came back six weeks after, and she, with a straight face, said, "Doctor, when I had my transpusion..."
25:19 Speaker 48 I like that we approach subjects sort of without the baggage of dogma, and we try to find answers to questions that go to the heart of what it means to be human beings.
25:28 Stephen J. Dubner? That's Greg Rosalsky. He's been a producer on our show for a few years now. He is a hardcore economics guy, very knowledgeable and very into it. Greg's produced a ton of great episodes, including one that we called...
25:44 Speaker 48 Should We Really Behave Like Economists Say We Do?, which was sort of a primer on behavioral economics. But what was fun about that episode is I tried to sort of bring behavioral econ to life.
25:58 Speaker 48 How much would I have to pay you for that seat? I'm sorry? How much would it cost for you to move from your seat? How much would somebody have to pay you? To move from my seat?
26:13 Speaker 48 Excuse me, can I ask you a question? How much would they have to pay me what?
26:16 Speaker 49 Eighty dollars.
26:18 Speaker 48 Eighty dollars? That seems pretty steep. Well, it depends on who the somebody was. What about me? Limitless.
26:26 Stephen J. Dubner? Greg also produced a pair of the most popular episodes we've ever made. Everything you always wanted to know about money but were afraid to ask. And the stupidest thing you can do with your money.
26:37 Speaker 50 It's a tax on smart people who don't realize their propensity for doing stupid things.
26:43 Speaker 51 These are people which are very talented, very competent, but they have no knowledge of how to manage this money.
26:52 Speaker 49 I said, no, we're not gonna, we're not gonna drop it. We have the world's first index fund.
26:57 Speaker 50 We are now in the middle of the Copernican revolution about the proper way to invest, or at least the rational way to invest.
27:08 Stephen J. Dubner? Another really popular series we made was called Self Improvement Month.
27:12 Speaker 23 So, we were surprised that these things that everybody kind of says matter, ended up not mattering.
27:18 Speaker 52 What specifically are gritty people like? What beliefs do gritty people walk around with in their head?
27:25 Speaker 53 With the right kind of training, any individual will be able to acquire abilities.
27:31 Speaker 54 I started using this karaoke program and I started singing. You told me how proud you were, but I walked away. And then I started listening and it was, it was really horrible.
27:48 Stephen J. Dubner? Before we embark on an episode, we rarely think about whether it'll be popular or not. We're more focused on learning stuff, figuring stuff out, looking for new ideas. One great thing about the Freakonomics Radio audience is that you guys are too. When we're curious about something, you tend to be as well. So, over the next few years, we will still ask plenty of classic Freakonomics-style questions, like, why is Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia so damn happy?
28:20 Speaker 55 It's, you know, to Danes, hygge is what freedom perhaps is to the Americans. It's about togetherness. It's about pleasure. It's about warmth.
28:30 Speaker 56 And there's no stigma to leaving at four because you've got to go and pick up your kids from daycare, you've got to go and make supper, or you just need to get on with your hobbies.
28:38 Stephen J. Dubner? But we'll also do more of the self-improvement episodes that listeners love, like, how not to choke under pressure.
28:45 Speaker 38 First of all, I will just say that I like placebo effects and, you know, I have no problem with that, but I think it's a real truth, because, you know, if your heart wasn't beating, to some extent, you'd be dead, right? And those sweaty palms can be an indication that you're alert and aroused and ready to go. And arousal doesn't have to be a bad thing, right? It's bad when we start thinking it's bad, and then we start changing our performance.
29:09 Stephen J. Dubner? I love how your counterfactual is always, "Or you could be dead."
29:14 Speaker 38 Yeah, it's a good opposition.
29:17 Stephen J. Dubner? We'll even learn how to make the perfect pizza at home.
29:20 Speaker 57 You know, there's people say, "Oh, it's gotta be San Marzano tomatoes, grown in the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, crushed by hand."
29:29 Stephen J. Dubner? We've also got a couple special series in the works. This was inspired by a series we did earlier this year called The Secret Life of a CEO. Ten years ago, you know, I was just trying to help connect people at colleges and a few schools.
29:43 Speaker 58 The day you become CEO, you have to think about grooming a successor.
29:46 Speaker 59 So I think too many young entrepreneurs, you know, just want to cling on to everything, and they're not good delegators.
29:53 Speaker 60 Well, I was in a limo driving into New York City when I got a call from the chairman of the board and told me I was fired. He didn't have the nerve to see me face to face. Now, I like to think he didn't have the nerve because he knew I would have probably punched him out.
30:13 Stephen J. Dubner? And was he right?
30:14 Speaker 60 Might be right. I don't know.
30:16 Stephen J. Dubner? The series we're working on now, one is about creativity, who's got it, how to get it, where it comes from, and doesn't. Stephanie Tam again.
30:25 Speaker 41 Creativity is one of those subjects that there are probably a million and one books about and another million mushy platitudes about, but it's pretty hard to sort out what is actually empirical versus what is anecdotal.
30:42 Stephen J. Dubner? You'll hear all about the latest research on creativity, but you'll also hear directly from a lot of creatives, like the movie producer Brian Grazer. I mean, nobody knows why a success really works because there's no exact formula. The illustrator and writer Myra Kalman.
30:58 Speaker 40 A burst of enthusiasm, complete despair, kind of talking your way through, well, it's going to be okay. Don't get so crazy.
31:06 Stephen J. Dubner? The museum director Anne Pasternak.
31:09 Speaker 12 And the next morning, I woke up and I think there were over 60 different proposals that she had sent to me.
31:15 Stephen J. Dubner? And we visit Berlin to speak with one of the most prominent and provocative artists in modern history.
31:22 Speaker 61 My name is Iweiwei. I'm 61 years old. I was born 1957 in Beijing, China.
31:31 Speaker 61 But the year I was born, my father was exiled.
31:34 Stephen J. Dubner? The other series we're working on is sports. Such a big topic, such a fascinating topic. We'll talk economics, labor relations, winning and losing and cheating and everything in between. Like, does it really make sense for a basketball coach to bench his star player if he's in foul trouble? If you actually calculate the numbers, it just doesn't make sense. How about the idea of a hot streak? That's the theory, but the evidence is that it just doesn't show up. And how to tell if your team is unlucky or just bad. They were just bad, bad year after year, statistically bad year after year, wins and losses. We'll hear from the people who own sports teams. I'm Mark Cuban, and I'm an entrepreneur.
32:18 Speaker 62 My name's Jed York. I'm the CEO of the San Francisco 49ers.
32:21 Stephen J. Dubner? The San Francisco 49ers, that's the team where Colin Kaepernick was playing when he kicked off the anthem protests.
32:27 Speaker 62 Colin probably took a different approach than I would have taken, but he certainly brought attention to the matter.
32:34 Stephen J. Dubner? You'll hear why coaches work such ridiculously long hours.
32:37 Speaker 39 As a head coach, I need to watch the game for myself, which is offense aside, defense aside, special teams. And it's infinite how many different things you can do. And if one guy is off, the play doesn't work on either side of the ball. And if that play doesn't work, it could be a hurt quarterback, it could be a touchdown. That could be the reason you're telling your second grade daughter that she's moving next week.
32:59 Stephen J. Dubner? You'll hear from the people who run the athletes' unions. In the 10 years I've been here, we've probably had somewhere between 10 and 15 state legislature fights with bills supported by team owners to take workers' comp away from professional athletes, which is terrible.
33:22 Stephen J. Dubner? And their argument then is what? That it shouldn't be? Their argument is that they are cheap. And of course, you hear from the athletes, including what makes them do what they do?
33:35 Speaker 10 I was eight when I decided I wanted to be a professional football player. And I told my father and he told me, all right, well, you set a goal, you should do something to get you closer to that goal every day. So I did a bunch of pushups and situps that night until I was throwing up. I was in love with the game in part because of how violent it was, honestly, like whatever warped sense of masculinity I had at that age that probably has not fully left me was like basketball is for the soft kids, football is for the men and I want to play football.
34:11 Stephen J. Dubner? You'll also hear what athletes do to blow off steam.
34:14 Speaker 63 It means no worries for the rest of your days.
34:20 Stephen J. Dubner? And we'll get into the afterlife of the athlete.
34:23 Speaker 10 Now I'm at this point where it's like, I don't really know how to have fun. I don't really have like super close friends and I don't really know what to do with my life.
34:33 Stephen J. Dubner? Another thing we'll be doing more of in this new phase of Freakonomics Radio, releasing more bonus episodes that feature full interviews. Most of our episodes, as you may have noticed, include a variety of speakers and we feature the most relevant portions of their interviews to create the episode. That means we might leave as much as 90% of our interviews on the cutting room floor. But in some cases, it's worth publishing the full, barely edited interview. We did this with our Secret Life of a CEO series and it turned out that listeners loved those full interviews with Mark Zuckerberg and Indra Newy and Satya Nadella, Ray Dalio, Richard Branson. So we'll be doing more of that, too. The best way to get all this extra material is to sign up for Stitcher Premium. Our regular weekly Freakonomics Radio podcast
35:18 Stephen J. Dubner? will still be available on all the regular podcast platforms, and you'll still be hearing it on NPR stations across the US, as well as on Sirius XM, Spotify, and elsewhere. But our new partnership with Stitcher gives us some more options. If you want the entire archive of Freakonomics Radio episodes from the very beginning, just use the Stitcher app. You can also go to Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes for every episode. And if you sign up for Stitcher Premium, you'll get our entire archive ad-free, as well as lots of bonus episodes, like the full interviews I just mentioned. Just go to StitcherPremium.com/Freakonomics. Use the code FREAKONOMICS to get one month free. There'll be a lot of these bonus episodes
36:02 Stephen J. Dubner? from our sports series and creativity series. In fact, we've already posted a few from our recent World Cup episode. Interviews with the soccer savants Roger Bennett, Simon Cooper, and a kid named Solomon Dubner.
36:16 Speaker 64 I am a co-host of 40 for 2, and I'm the biggest and youngest benefactor of nepotism in the podcasting world.
36:23 Speaker 55 Yeah, Argentina doesn't really have a system. You know what? We should teach more of our footballers to do root canal.
36:33 Stephen J. Dubner? All this extra material we're producing is in the service of two goals. Number one, to make you, our listeners, happy. Number two, here again is Chris Bannon from Stitcher.
36:46 Speaker 13 I find that a not bored Stephen Dubner is a happy Stephen Dubner. So my job is really, don't let him get bored.
36:55 Stephen J. Dubner? Ah, Bannon, you know me too well. In the interest of non-boredom, we will also be doing some live shows. You can keep an eye out for those details on Freakonomics.com, or you can also sign up for our newsletter. We'll be bringing back our nonfiction game show called Tell Me Something.
37:16 Speaker 07 I mean, it was an informational, a teaching show, for sure. It's David Herman again. But it was also kind of like a cool talent show for the audience. It was a chance to sort of turn the microphone around and hear things that other people had to bring to the table.
37:31 Speaker 24 So, the next time you're in a museum and you see a painting where the hand is, you know, placed just so behind a bowl of fruit on the table, it's probably because whoever commissioned that painting was too cheap to spring for both hands.
37:46 Speaker 65 So there are about 3,000 different types of bacteria that live in our paper money. And the flu virus, when accompanied by mucus, can last for up to 17 days.
37:57 Speaker 07 Thanks for adding that, because, you know. I think what was so much fun about it was that, you know, Freakonomics is such a tightly scripted, edited, revised, re-edited, re-revised show, to just have something that was like free-form, like you'd go in there and you'd record it.
38:17 Stephen J. Dubner? Free-form, tightly scripted and edited, special series, how-to episodes, extra full interviews, there's nothing we won't try to keep things lively, to keep learning together, to keep your ears engaged and your brain, too. Thank you so much for spending time with us this past eight years, and here's to the next few. Meanwhile, coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, Richard Thaler, the founder of behavioral economics, recently won a Nobel Prize. He thinks we almost kept him from doing so.
38:50 Speaker 02 I think the show owes me an apology, like, on the air.
38:56 Stephen J. Dubner? We do not apologize to Richard Thaler. We do ask him about going to Stockholm.
39:02 Speaker 02 I found the whole thing to be pretty emotional, partly because, you know, of where I came from intellectually.
39:14 Stephen J. Dubner? We get the bumper sticker version of behavioral economics.
39:18 Speaker 02 We don't think people are dumb. We think the world is hard.
39:23 Stephen J. Dubner? And what's Thaler got to say about past and future economic meltdowns?
39:28 Speaker 02 Well, we seem to learn one lesson and then are not able to extrapolate it to the next one. I don't know what the next bubble will be, or whether we're already in one.
39:43 Stephen J. Dubner? That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.
39:48 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode is produced by Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Greg Rosalsky, Greg Rippon, and Andy Meisenheimer. Thanks also to Chris Bannon, Stephanie Tam, David Herman, Dan DeZula, Matt Fraschka, Anders Kelto, Merritt Jacob, and the dozens of other folks who helped produce the episodes you heard clips from today. The music you heard throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. Remember, you can get Freakonomics Radio wherever you get your podcasts. Our entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com. And if you subscribe to Stitcher Premium, you'll get every episode of Freakonomics Radio ad-free, plus lots of bonus episodes. So go do that. Go to StitcherPremium.com/freakonomics,
40:33 Stephen J. Dubner? use the promo code FREAKONOMICS to get one month free. We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected] . Thanks, as always, for listening.
40:59 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the promise? The problem is probably your data, not your AI models. When it's scattered across different systems, getting your data AI-ready is a challenge. You keep your AI waiting, and everything slows down. EverPure unifies your data, so you can see it, understand it, and control it all from one simple place. And get it AI-ready fast. Unlock the true value of your AI at EverPureData.com.
41:31 Stephen 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. 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.
42:16 Stephen J. Dubner? 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.
42:40 Speaker 66 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.
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