190. Time to Take Back the Toilet

Public bathrooms are noisy, poorly designed, and often nonexistent. What to do?

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

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:12Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. Before today's show begins, I want to ask you to think about some of the other stories we've brought you in the past year, like how failure can be your friend. I failed for the first five or seven years. Now I look back and I say, why did I keep going that long? Because of the shame. I didn't want to admit failure. We also talked about how great it is to admit what you don't know.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know. I know. I don't know.

• 2:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't know. We told you why Japanese houses often get torn down, even when they're not very old. The structure fully depreciates after 30 years for detached houses and after 40 years for condominiums. We even launched a Freakonomics Radio game show.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Say it with me. Tell me something I don't know.

• 3:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  And the mayor of London stopped by and took off his shoes. Yeah, I'm gonna take it one hundred percent.

• 3:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bringing you these stories costs money for producers, producers' healthcare insurance, studio space, bandwidth, music licensing, and so on. Your donation helps our producing partner, WNYC, pay for all this. So, please, go to Freakonomics.com and click on the Donate button and make a donation today. What's that? What's in it for you, you want to know? I don't blame you for asking that. Well, if you go to Freakonomics.com and click on the Donate button, you will automatically be entered into a lottery to come to New York, have some lunch with me and the Freakonomics Radio team, even spend the day with us if you want, watching us make the podcast. We'll fly you to New York, put you up in a hotel, and give you more Freakonomics swag than you can possibly carry home. Last year, Jody

• 4:12Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 4:15Speaker 03

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• 4:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  You don't have to make a donation to enter the lottery, but of course, we hope you will. So thanks to all of you for listening, as always, and a special thanks to anyone who goes to Freakonomics.com to make a donation. And I look forward to meeting one of you very soon.

• 5:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Lev, here's a question for you today. Would you agree that you and I are fundamentally pretty different people?

• 5:24Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 5:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, I would too. But of all the ways in which we're different, what would you say is maybe the biggest difference?

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Probably you like people and I don't.

• 5:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, that's not what I was thinking of.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  OK.

• 5:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's the one I'm thinking. You seem to be almost entirely unaffected by your physical surroundings.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  That's true. That's completely true.

• 5:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Whereas you ridicule me for being too sensitive. Like, if the lights go out or something, you're like, hey, Dubner, just keep working. What's the problem? But like, when you're working or even, you know, filling out your horse bedding stuff, you could be in the desert. You could be in a room with 150 decibels. You could, and you're just a machine. You just, it doesn't matter to you. Would you agree that that's a pretty fundamental difference between us?

• 6:16Speaker 04

  I think so, yeah. But there's a downside to it, too, which is that when I get dragged to nice places, I never appreciate them.

• 6:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, you don't know how to behave.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  I don't know how, you know, if I don't care whether I'm in a dingy pit or in a, you know, standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, then I get the feeling that other people appreciate things that I don't appreciate.

• 6:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Maybe so. You make up for it in other ways.

• 6:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  But here's a scenario that really bothers me that I want to talk to you about today. But you may be the wrong guy to talk about it, too, because I have a feeling it doesn't bother you at all. So you and I both travel a lot, fly a lot, and here's my thing. In airport restrooms particularly, but in public restrooms of all types, they are usually totally devoid of any music or other masking sounds. So it's like you walk in and it's like a library punctuated by the sound of traveling men using toilets.

• 7:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  And it drives me batty. Does that bother-- do you even know what I'm talking about?

• 7:20Speaker 04

  No, it doesn't upset me the way I'm sure it upsets you.

• 7:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Have you noticed it? Have you ever noticed, like, let's say, we don't need to get too graphic here, although with radio, it's probably easier to get graphic. But, you know, you walk into a men's room and there's, let's say, there's three zones, right? There's the sink zone, the urinal zone, and the stall zone. And it's the stall zone that I'm talking about.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I try to stay away from the stall zone. I'm pretty good at staying away from the stall zone.

• 7:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Believe me, I do, too. I do, too. But, you know, audio waves travel into the sink zone and the urinal zone and the in-and-out zone. And so in that, I feel like when I hear what's going on in that stall zone, I think, how can I invest more heavily in gastroenterology? Because the needs of American men are plainly huge. It just sounds like a mash unit of people in gastric distress. And I hate it. You've never been bothered by this?

• 8:21Speaker 04

  Oh, it's disgusting. But honestly, I really try to avoid restrooms where there are lots of men doing fireworks, you know? So maybe we're not so different in that particular regard. It's just that maybe my own abilities to avoid these places are stronger than yours.

• 8:49Speaker 05

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

• 9:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's what confuses me. Just about every public space you go to these days, you'll hear music being played or some kind of a soundscape. Stores, restaurants, the doctor's office, the gym, the airport, the rental car counter at the airport, the gas pump outside the rental car counter at the airport. So that's a lot of sound to deal with. And the one place you want to hear music, at least the one place I want to hear music, the public restroom. It, for some reason, features only the sounds of nature, which are, to some ears, unsettling. And why is that? And how does all that music in other places affect us? Does it really make us buy more in stores, eat more in restaurants? If you want to know the answer to questions like that,

• 9:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  you have to start with Ronald Milliman. He spoke to us from his cabin on Lake Barclay, Kentucky.

• 10:05Speaker 06

  I'm actually in the western part of Kentucky.

• 10:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Milliman is retired. He spends a lot of his time here fishing.

• 10:13Speaker 06

  Mostly blue gale and red eared and bass and catfish. I like to fish for and catch catfish. So, pretty much, I just like to fish. So I just like being out in the lake. You go out in the early morning and it's just so quiet and peaceful and you hear the birds and hear the waves splashing against the side of the boat. And it's just, I mean, it's just really, really nice.

• 10:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Milliman was a professor of marketing at Western Kentucky University. Before that, when he was getting his PhD in Arizona, he worked at a radio station.

• 10:49Speaker 06

  One of the assets that we had at the radio station was a FM subcarrier where we could transmit like background music into stores and doctor and dentist offices and that sort of thing.

• 11:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  This got Milliman to wondering.

• 11:04Speaker 06

  I wanted some idea of what kind of music affected, you know, what kind of music to provide. And there wasn't much of any research out there at all on it.

• 11:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Muzak, the company that got famous for making background music or elevator music, did make some research claims, but Milliman found it completely unscientific. He says they claimed their music did amazing things.

• 11:28Speaker 06

  Reducing turnover, increasing productivity, helping in terms of job contentment, dumber things like that. And as I recall, they had some research that showed that it could increase the milk productivity of cows, egg productivity of chickens, which later when I got into it, it wasn't very scientific. But at any rate, because there was no research particularly done in that area, it's something that I made note of and thought, well gee, this is something that I could pursue.

• 12:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, there's one more reason why Ronald Milliman might have been a little bit more interested in the average person in measuring the effects of sound.

• 12:18Speaker 06

  I had perfect vision until I was eight and through a very rare illness that I contracted when I was eight, I lost most of my vision. I had partial vision from about eight to 17. Then I lost my eyesight at 17, the rest of what I had through a very freak wrestling accident. I was a varsity wrestler in my high school wrestling team. I was totally blind through undergraduate and graduate school. Then there was a doctor in Houston that felt he could restore my vision.

• 12:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  By now, Milliman was in his first academic job at the University of Texas at Arlington. He went in for surgery.

• 12:57Speaker 06

  And sure enough, it did restore my vision. As a matter of fact, I had incredible vision. I had like 2015 vision or 2010 vision or something like that. 2020 is normal vision and I had much better than that for a while. But it was a real challenge to keep it because there was lots and lots of complications that I really wasn't hardly prepared for.

• 13:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  With these complications came many more surgeries, more than 50.

• 13:24Speaker 06

  I had vision for about four years or thereabouts. I was actually driving a car and everything. And then again through complications, I just, I lost it all. I lost it totally permanently. So I've actually lost my eyesight twice.

• 13:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Blind again, he turned back to sound for his research.

• 13:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  There was a grocery store in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

• 13:55Speaker 06

  It just happened that I knew the manager of the store some.

• 13:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  This manager agreed to let Milliman set up an experiment.

• 14:02Speaker 06

  Well, we wanted to know whether the background music affected behavior in any way.

• 14:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's how they set it up. They'd play fast music, slow music, and no music, and see if it changed how people shopped.

• 14:17Speaker 06

  So then comes the question, all right, then, how do you define slow and how do you define fast?

• 14:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Milliman and the other researchers played music for a group of people who shopped at the grocery store. They asked them, do you think this is slow music? Is this fast?

• 14:31Speaker 06

  So as I recall, the slow music was something like 72 or 74 beats per minute, or slower, I think.

• 14:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that would be something like this.

• 14:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or this.

• 14:54Speaker 06

  And the fast music was something like 94, 96 beats per minute and faster.

• 14:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Like this.

• 15:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or this.

• 15:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, the actual music they used in the experiment, slow or fast, would have no lyrics.

• 15:14Speaker 06

  And then we positioned graduate students that appeared to be like ordinary customers, like they were looking at a can of peas or whatever it might be.

• 15:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  The grad students had stopwatches and notepads. They watched people and timed them as they shopped. One day, they'd play fast music, another day, slow music, another day, no music at all. This went on for roughly two months, so they'd have plenty of observations. They also stopped shoppers as they came out of the store and asked them, do you remember if there was music playing in the store when you were shopping? Here's what Milliman wanted to know.

• 15:51Speaker 06

  If how fast people traversed the store, if it made any difference, for instance, how much they purchased or whatever, or what they purchased. But the other part of the study was... How aware of the music were they when they were in the store? Were they real aware of the music playing? Or were they unaware of the music playing? Or whatever?

• 16:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, what'd they learn?

• 16:14Speaker 06

  And so what we found is that with the fast music, they did traverse the store more quickly. And it was significantly more quickly.

• 16:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you think happens when people move through a store more quickly? Yep, they don't buy as much stuff. But what happens when you play the slow music?

• 16:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, now that's a really interesting one because sales were significantly greater. And I say significant, I mean literally in the scientific statistical sense. Significantly greater sales with a slower music playing than with a fast background music playing.

• 16:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  With fast music playing, the Dallas grocery store did about $12,000 in sales each day. With slow music, $16,000. Interestingly, most of the shoppers, when asked upon leaving the store about hearing music, couldn't recall whether or not they heard music. Furthermore, there wasn't a statistically significant difference between no music and slow music, or no music and fast music. But between slow music and fast music? A difference. How did Milliman explain this?

• 17:23Speaker 06

  The theory was, and we have reason to believe this is pretty accurate, is that people simply, as you slowed them down, they saw more that they remembered that they needed, or they saw more that they wanted. Sometimes, you know, if you glance down an aisle, you probably don't know when you shop, you're at the end of the aisle, and you sort of glance down the aisle, see if there's anything down there that you want or need.

• 17:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  For Milliman, the takeaway from this one study was pretty obvious.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  Well, it's clear that music does affect people's behavior a lot of different ways.

• 18:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  This study was one of the first in a field that would come to be known as atmospherics. How sound and smell and other factors influence our behavior. Milliman did a ton of work in this area. One study was similar to the grocery store study, but this time he did it in a restaurant. There, too, he found that slow music makes people linger, which is great news if you're trying to sell more alcohol or maybe dessert. And if you need to turn over tables faster, yep, bring on the fast music. By now, there's been enough research that we know a good bit about how we're affected by different types of music and other sounds. The right music can reduce stress for a patient waiting for surgery, can help a kid do better on math tests.

• 18:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Classical music leads people to buy more wine than top 40 music. But the wrong music, or the wrong sounds, can be bad for you, too. If you work in an open office, for instance, also known as a cubicle farm, you're more likely to be stressed out, less productive, less satisfied. That's in large part because you're getting a lot of stimuli that you don't ask for, like other people's conversations and phone calls. And you can't simply shut these out, no matter how good you think you are at concentrating. We all have a limited amount of auditory bandwidth. And as the sound expert Julian Treasure likes to say, "We don't have any ear lids." This becomes more of a problem when you're hearing someone else's noise, someone else's

• 19:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  music, everywhere you go. Everywhere except the one place where you want some music. The louder and faster the better, please. The bathroom. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, it's time to take back the toilet.

• 19:49Speaker 07

  Anything, literally anything, would be better than nothing.

• 19:53Speaker 08

  There used to be an Italian restaurant in California that I would go to, and they piped in Italian lessons. And so while you're in the bathroom, you're hearing, can you tell me where is the train station?

• 20:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  One more thing. If you're traveling a lot during the holidays and you need some noise to drown out whatever it is you don't want to hear, there are nearly 200 back episodes of Freakonomics Radio just waiting to be downloaded. You can find our complete free archive at Freakonomics.com/radio, also at iTunes. And if you subscribe at iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, we will send you another episode every week.

• 20:44Speaker 05

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 20:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So there's a lot of music in public places, in part because researchers have found that music has a strong influence on how people behave in public places. So you can see why they play music in stores and restaurants and airports, even surgical suites. But why don't they play music in public restrooms? That is the question we are asking today. I know it may strike you as juvenile, kind of thing no one in his right mind would ask, but we are not the only people who've ever thought about this.

• 21:20Speaker 08

  The toilets in Abu Dhabi are fine. They're good.

• 21:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Harvey Malich. He is a professor of sociology and metropolitan studies at NYU, recently posted at NYU's Abu Dhabi campus.

• 21:34Speaker 08

  The toilet really, in a way, is my landing spot because it's where all of these issues of city and of artifact and design all come together, particularly in the public restroom.

• 21:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Malich's broad mandate is urban design, but he is more narrowly a toilet scholar. One of his books is called Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing.

• 21:59Speaker 08

  Our knowledge of the history of public restrooms is very scattered, but one of the things that we do learn is the extraordinary variation there has been in the history of the world. In the Roman Empire, they had quite marvelous plumbing for their time and the aqueducts and so forth. And one of the things they applied that to was public restrooms, the baths. And the baths were, in general, a very social place. People went together, they met up together, and some of the rooms held as many as 60 people.

• 22:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  The setting, Malich says, is quite beautiful, with mosaics on the floor and the walls.

• 22:39Speaker 08

  The toilets are arranged in a sort of semicircle. They're built of stone, a single slab of stone with a series of holes. And the people are sitting as close together as we sit when we sit on toilets in public restrooms.

• 22:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So there were no stalls, at least not what we think of as stalls today.

• 22:57Speaker 08

  One of the interesting things is that they wore togas. So the toga was their stall. By wearing the toga, you have a way of keeping your private parts private, even as you're sitting on the toilet.

• 23:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Malich agrees that modern public restrooms can be pretty unpleasant, and we shouldn't really expect them to get better anytime soon.

• 23:19Speaker 08

  One reason it doesn't change is that toilets in general in public restrooms, there's a taboo around them. And where there's a taboo and you can't speak freely about something, it becomes a place where there's not accountability. So whereas the iPhone, we can question, how come it's like this? How come it's like that? Wouldn't it be better to this? Or that? Or a sofa for the living room? You can't really talk through a toilet.

• 23:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, it's one thing for someone like me, a resident of the richest country in the history of the world, to complain about the setup of public restrooms. But let's be real, the bathroom taboo that Malich is talking about has much, much, much bigger implications.

• 24:05Speaker 08

  So the distribution of toilets of any kind is very skewed. And in some countries, India being a prime example, Pakistan, there is an absence of facilities. And what that means is that people go in the open. They use whatever trench they can find, whatever hole there might be. This is a problem with sanitation, and it means that the mixing of human feces with water supplies happens, and babies die. So children under five, that's the second largest cause of death. Almost 50% of the population of India is defecating under those circumstances.

• 24:48Speaker 08

  One of the other aspects, it means that women are put at a huge disadvantage and subjected to security worries because they've got to make their way in the night, very often in darkness, to go to the common place where this is done because of other problems, cultural problems, which is that the very idea that women are going to the toilet itself is a kind of taboo and can't be faced front on.

• 25:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  This taboo, Malich argues, extends to high places, very high places, and that's a problem.

• 25:27Speaker 08

  Because children under five dying unnaturally is due, number one, to malnutrition, but very close to it is being poisoned by human waste because these are unsanitary places. And for the President of the United States to go to bat for public restrooms in, say, India would be humiliation for him. So we've got to get the topic on the agenda locally, nationally, and globally.

• 25:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are also practical issues, issues of priority, cost. Harvey Malich has served on many building committees.

• 26:03Speaker 08

  Even working with the most prominent architects of the world, never is there discussion about the substance of the toilet stalls. And as a result, you get the lowest person typically on the totem pole of the architectural firm is given that job, and then they sort of call up the mass supplier and they just order the same stuff.

• 26:26Speaker 09

  One of the things that is kind of interesting is thinking about public restrooms.

• 26:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Joel Beckerman. He's a composer and sound designer.

• 26:33Speaker 09

  Think about all the architects and energy that gets put into designing the physical locations that we go to, whether it's bus stations, or restaurants, or hotels. The vast majority of these instances, they're not putting nearly the same amount of thought into the sound of those spaces, which includes what materials are being used because that determines the amount of reverberation of sound.

• 26:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Beckerman's company, Manmade Music, creates soundscapes for all kinds of spaces, from small to very large, like the Dallas Cowboys stadium. He's written a book called Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy. He has a lot of examples of how sound functions in ways that we might not necessarily think about.

• 27:18Speaker 09

  In Moscow, actually, their subway is a circle. It is basically a big loop. And one of the ways they give you information in an instant is that one direction, I'm not sure whether it's clockwise or counterclockwise, all the announcements are made by a male voice.

• 27:36Speaker 09

  And then the opposite direction in the loop is made by a female voice.

• 27:42Speaker 09

  So that even if you can't understand exactly what's being said, you know which direction that train is going.

• 27:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Beckerman agrees with Harvey Malich that the sound of the average American public restroom is suboptimal. Why is that? They point out one obvious problem. The walls of the stalls aren't really walls. They don't go all the way up to the ceiling or all the way down to the floor.

• 28:10Speaker 08

  I mean, I lived in Britain, I've lived in Germany. They have walls. Italy has walls. Stall walls, that's, you know, step one. Then if you want to get really groovy like the Japanese...

• 28:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  It may not surprise you to learn that bathroom design in Japan is rather advanced. What you're hearing is called the "sound princess." As the story goes, Japanese women were so put off by the silence in public restrooms that they'd flush the toilet over and over again to mask the noise, which worked, but also used a lot of water. The solution? A device that mimics the sound of an ever-flushing toilet.

• 29:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Japanese use sound in all sorts of interesting ways.

• 29:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Many towns have intercoms mounted on public buildings throughout the city. This one plays a daily message around sunset.

• 29:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's in Matsudo, about an hour outside of Tokyo. The woman's voice is basically telling kids, "Hey, it's time to go home now." The intercoms are networked around cities. They serve as an emergency broadcast system in case of earthquakes, for instance.

• 29:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here in the US, we too have a history of sound design in public places. Joel Beckerman again.

• 29:44Speaker 09

  The story is that elevator music began when elevator manufacturers realized that people were very uncomfortable being in close quarters in a closed room, essentially.

• 29:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you have to ask yourself, if we feel the need to mask uncomfortable silence in an elevator, wouldn't you think we'd feel the need to mask uncomfortable noise in a public restroom? We stopped in to a ladies' room, well, outside of a ladies' room, to ask people what they'd like to hear inside.

• 30:17Speaker 05

  What do you think would be the best kind of music in a bathroom? What would you like to listen to?

• 30:21Speaker 07

  Anything, literally anything would be better than nothing. Maybe classical music? The Beatles.

• 30:26Speaker 05

  Always, or different kinds?

• 30:28Speaker 07

  I'd pretty much, early Beatles in the public bathroom, I think, would always be appropriate. I would probably choose to hear Hall & Oates.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  Beyonce, 24/7.

• 30:36Speaker 07

  I feel bad relegating them to the bathroom because I love them so much. But I love them so much that I would want to hear them that frequently.

• 30:44Speaker 10

  Depends on the type of music, I guess. I mean, like elevator music, everyone complains about that. So I feel like bathroom music would turn into elevator music, where everyone's like, "Hey, this sounds like bathroom music."

• 31:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  The sociologist Harvey Malich, in his tireless pursuit of toilet improvement, once came across something he loved.

• 31:10Speaker 08

  There was, used to be an Italian restaurant in California that I would go to, and they piped in Italian lessons. And so while you're in the bathroom, you're hearing, "Can you tell me where is the train station?"

• 31:23Speaker 11

  "Can you tell me where the train station is?"

• 31:25Speaker 08

  And then you hear it in Italian.

• 31:26Speaker 11

  "Mi sa dire dov'è la stazione ferroviaria?"

• 31:30Speaker 08

  So there are many ways to do it, in ways that are amusing, charming, and you can try out, have new groups audition and create new acts.

• 31:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  And Joel Beckerman would like to improve the sonic design of airport restrooms.

• 31:47Speaker 09

  In a plane terminal, you'd want to be relaxed a little bit. People generally are a little bit nervous when they go flying. So what could we do in terms of putting quiet ambiances in that would mask out the unwanted sound and actually kind of relax people before they got on a plane?

• 32:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  I went back to Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author, to see where he landed on this.

• 32:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so here's the paradox to me. Even you agree that it's not a great thing to listen to, especially if you're an innocent bystander. And here's the paradox. It's not great to listen to, and yet there's very rarely music or other masking noise in public restrooms. Whereas in other public areas, like every other public area, hotel lobbies, airports, stores, restaurants, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, there's a lot of music in public these days, which can be great or horrible, depending on your preference. Don't you think it's a little bit strange that the one place that I at least want a lot of music doesn't exist? And all the other places where we might not want it, it does?

• 32:56Speaker 04

  Given your description, how loud would the music have to be to actually protect you from the sounds you're afraid of? Pretty loud, right?

• 33:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm thinking it would sound like the loudest rave you've ever been to, yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  I think that's part of the problem, is that I think if there was subtle music, which was then interfered with by the sounds that distribute so much, I think it would only enhance your rage, wouldn't it?

• 33:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  If it were subtle music, you're saying it would somehow highlight or punctuate the bad sounds?

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, that you'd be listening to this. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think it would be hard. I think, from what you're describing, I think that the sounds are so loud that... I mean, they're louder than conversation, right?

• 33:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, but there's something about them as pieces of punctuation in the midst of a vast silence, of this pronounced silence, that to me draws that much more attention to them. I'll tell you, the restroom at WNYC, the radio station in New York where I do this show, you walk in there and it really is like a funeral home. And you just hear little, like little bitter patter. And then there's a couple stalls back there. And even if you're just standing washing your hands, even if you're just going to wash your hands, you get with blam, blam. And then, and then the sounds of human distress. And I'm thinking, this doesn't need to happen. This could be taken care of. Some, I mean,

• 34:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  we've put men on the moon. We've done a lot of amazing things. And so maybe this is a problem that no one cares about but me, and it's not worth thinking about. But if you were to, we were to put your brain on it, any thoughts? Do you think it's worth thinking about? Do you think the public restroom is a place that deserves a little bit of our curatorial attention?

• 34:40Speaker 04

  No, I think this is like the penny. It's something only you care about. And no one else cares about it, getting rid of the penny. But I don't know. No, I don't lose any sleep over it. Now, maybe I will now. Maybe now every time I go in a bathroom, I'll be primed to be upset by it. But hey, I just thought, I just thought the answer.

• 34:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tell me.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Well, do you own a set of headphones?

• 35:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, no, I believe me, I wear the noise cancelers.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  Why don't you just put your headphones in the bathroom and just turn up your music really loud. It'll be done. So you don't mind the smell, though?

• 35:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't want to even get into the smell.

• 35:14Speaker 04

  See, because for me, the smell would be at the top of the list, and the sound would be quite secondary. I would trade smell or sight for sound, myself.

• 35:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sight? Who's bringing sight? Now you're, you're taking this already bad idea to a much darker place.

• 35:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. One more thing before we go. We need your help for a future episode. We recently put out a two-parter on education reform, and now we want to hear from you on this topic. So here's a question. If you had to pick one thing to change about the education system where you live, what would it be and why? One thing. We want you to record your answer on your phone and email us the file to [email protected]. Tell us your name, where you live, what you do. Maybe you're a student, parent, teacher, school administrator, taxpayer, concerned citizen. So again, send your audio file to [email protected]. Tell us your name, where you live, what you do, and answer the following question. If you had to pick one thing to change about the education

• 36:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  system where you live, what would it be and why? And soon, that will be the next episode you hear on Freakonomics Radio.

• 36:43Speaker 05

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalsky, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon. 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.

• 37:13Stephen 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.

• 37:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 38:31Stephen 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.

• 38:54Speaker 12

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