192. That’s a Great Question!

Verbal tic or strategic rejoinder? Whatever the case: it’s rare to come across an interview these days where at least one question isn’t a “great” one.

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?

  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?

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• 2:12Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  We've been doing the show for a while now, and I've noticed a trend.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. So, so that's a good question.

• 2:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a very good question. So, it's a good, it's a great question.

• 2:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Look, I'm going to be honest with you. Most of the questions we ask, they aren't really all that great. But it's like there's a verbal tic going around.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that's another good question.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  That's a really good question.

• 2:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Good question. Great question. Great question. Good question. So, those are good questions. Good way to sort it out.

• 3:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you know who has this tic really bad?

• 3:04Speaker 03

  You know, that's a great question.

• 3:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, Steve Levitt. You know who Steve Levitt is, don't you?

• 3:09Speaker 03

  So, that's a great question.

• 3:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt's my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. Levitt, you've been at Chicago for quite a while now, haven't you?

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Uh, that's a good question.

• 3:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you seem to think that when it comes to what makes a good question, absolutely no topic is off limits, wouldn't you say?

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, it is true that people like their cows to have gotten to walk around a lot and eat fresh grass.

• 3:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, Levitt, do you have any recollection of saying that same phrase about 150 times? Is this something you know you're doing?

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Um, that's a good question.

• 4:04Speaker 04

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

• 4:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, that's a great question. I've heard this over and over and over the last several years, not just on our show. You hear it in all kinds of media interviews, during the Q and A portion of tech conferences, academic conferences. But just because I've heard it a lot, that doesn't mean much. We needed professional help.

• 4:45Speaker 05

  My name is Erica Okrent. I'm a linguist and I write for Mental Floss and The Week.

• 4:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okrent knows several languages.

• 4:53Speaker 05

  I speak about six at a faking it level. So I can go for a while and have you convinced until you bring up something I've never talked about before, and then it all falls apart.

• 5:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  For the purpose of this discussion, we're sticking to English and the phrase we're discussing today, that's a great question.

• 5:14Speaker 05

  I started looking into it. Has it really been on the rise?

• 5:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. So how do you figure this out?

• 5:20Speaker 05

  It's kind of hard to measure that because it's hard to find a corpus of data that will show spoken language over time that way. You can't look for it in Google Books or something because people don't normally write this phrase.

• 5:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Okrent was able to find a couple of big collections of spoken language data.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  One of them is the British National Corpus.

• 5:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a 100 million word database, which includes transcripts of everyday conversation, as well as government meetings, media interviews, and so on.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  And I did a search on the phrase there, and it only showed up 35 times in a corpus of like 100 million words. And a lot of those instances were fiction, so it wasn't too common over there. And then I took a look at the corpus of contemporary American English, and there it was over 1,000 times. And most of the instances were interviews on CNN, or NPR, or different one-on-one interview situations where there was an expert being interviewed about something.

• 6:26Speaker 05

  So it definitely seems to be more of an American thing.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  We're hearing from leaders in the House and the Senate. They both say they want to pass a bill by next week. The big question, what happens if they don't?

• 6:37Speaker 06

  Well, that's a good question.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Does this bump hold up, do you think? That's a good question.

• 6:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a good question. That's a very good question. That's a very good question.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's a good question. Why has that not been enough to get him off death row in Texas?

• 6:52Speaker 04

  This is a really good question.

• 6:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, and where does Erica Okrent think this habit has come from?

• 7:00Speaker 05

  In looking around for it, I found that it's actually an explicit part of media and PR training.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  I think it's still on the rise.

• 7:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Bill McGowan. He does media and PR training for CEOs, athletes, artists, even the best men at weddings. His company is called Clarity Media Group, and he wrote a book called Pitch Perfect: How to Say It Right the First Time Every Time. McGowan says, as some people say, "That's a great question," to serve as what's called a bridge.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  The bridge is what happens when the person interviewing you or asking you questions wants to go down one conversational road.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  You use it as a way to go from a potentially dangerous question back to your talking points, back to the point you want to make.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  You don't know anything about what lies on that road, or you don't want to talk about that subject. You have a different conversational road you want to go down, so you need a bridge to get from one road to the other.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  "That's a good question" is one of the phrases that allow you to do that. You get the question, you say "that's a good question," it buys you a little time, and then you just jump right in with the point you wanted to make. And often, people don't notice that you haven't dealt with the question or responded to the question.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  "That's a really good question" is the most elementary bridge possible.

• 8:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, when Bill McGowan says it's elementary, he means really elementary.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  I did a training for a nonprofit organization, and I had to role-play as the interviewer with five or six of them. And there was one gentleman who sat in the chair, and he started every single answer with, "That's a really good question," even when I asked him, "So, how long you been with this organization?" "You know, Bill, that's a really good question." And I had to stop him and say, "No, it's actually not a good question. That's a really terrible question. It's just a conversation starter." And he saw the absurdity of starting his answer with that.

• 9:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was absurd because it had become such a habit that it lost its meaning. Nearly all of us have some kind of linguistic tic, some go-to phrase we probably don't even know we use. I, for instance, begin way too many sentences with "so," as in, "So, what have we learned so far?" Or, "So, what McGowan is really saying here?" Or, "So, even President Obama uses a verbal bridge."

• 9:35Speaker 02

  He has two words he uses that accomplish the same thing. One of them is "look."

• 9:41Speaker 07

  Well, look, you know, I think the, uh,

• 9:46Speaker 07

  the nature of being president is that you always...

• 9:48Speaker 02

  And the "look" means he's trying to convey it as, "Let me be frank with you." Or, the other word he uses is...

• 9:56Speaker 07

  Listen, I, uh, as I think some of you saw when I was out...

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Listen. And whenever you hear "look" or "listen" come out of the president's mouth, that means he is no longer answering your question. He is answering his question.

• 10:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  But "look" and "listen" are not the only bridges used by President Obama.

• 10:12Speaker 07

  Well, Catherine, this is a great question. And, you know, I was raised by...

• 10:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what exactly is saying "that's a great question" meant to accomplish?

• 10:24Speaker 02

  I think people do it because they think it accomplishes two things simultaneously. It allows them to stall for time and it flatters the interviewer.

• 10:33Speaker 05

  It's for keeping the good vibes going. We're friends here. You're asking good questions. I'm giving good answers. You keep the good feeling going. And things like "that's a good question." Look, the point is, what I'm saying is, all of these phrases are, they're meta-discourse phrases. They don't have to do with the content of the discussion or the things that you're talking about. They're about the discussion itself. And what they do is lay out a map or a path for the people listening to the discussion or the people involved in the discussion. So you say, ah, yes, the argument is, the point is, and you can do that, lay out these

• 11:14Speaker 05

  little pebbles, when the discussion actually isn't going that way, but you give the illusion that this is what's happening. And when you're actually in the discussion, you get the feeling that points are being made and important things are being brought up and good questions are being asked, even if they might not be.

• 11:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, as Erica Okrent sees things, it's linguistic BS.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  Any phrase like that, they start somewhere and then people pick up on it, people start using it sincerely, and if it works well, it starts to become a crutch or a tick, and then people start to notice it and they start to hate it and complain about it.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  I believe that saying "that's a really good question" is about as outdated a tick or a strategy as telling people to envision the audience in their underwear.

• 12:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  But not everyone has soured on the phrase. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, Steve Levitt reveals another purpose it serves.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  I think that's one very strong piece of saying "it's a great question" is really just acknowledgement that someone who's sort of in the background is actually doing something that's cool or interesting or challenging.

• 12:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we'll hear from someone who really does try to ask great questions.

• 12:38Speaker 06

  It would be clearly naive of me to say that I don't think about the craft of the question. I think about that a lot.

• 12:47Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 13:18Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 14:03Stephen 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. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. The best investments are the ones you make in yourself, and no one knows that better than Southern New Hampshire University. With more than 200 online degree programs, no set class times, and low online tuition, Southern New Hampshire University is built to fit your life today and set you up for success tomorrow. Education is an investment. Why not make it a smart one? Apply for free at snhu.edu/freakonomics.

• 14:53Stephen 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 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.

• 15:42Speaker 04

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

• 15:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  The media coach Bill McGowan thinks that people should just stop saying, "That's a great question." He thinks it's nothing more than cheap flattery or stall for time. But some people do use the phrase strategically. Andy Kessler is a former hedge fund manager. He now writes about entrepreneurship. In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Kessler wrote about a trick he admires, used by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at board meetings. "When an investor or outside board member asks a stupid question," Kessler writes, "the CEO says, 'That's a great question,' and then gives the questioner an action item, something like, 'Okay, can you survey the competition and report back on their capital plans and hiring ratios? Great, let's keep going.'" Eventually, Kessler writes, "The

• 16:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  stupid questions dry up, and people who ask them may stop coming to the meetings." Okay, so you can use the phrase as a form of retribution, but Steve Levitt sees another use.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  I like to try to, in everything in life, try to reward the people around me and acknowledge when they say funny things, or smart things, or they look good, or, you know, act kind, or things like that. So, as a general rule, I've adopted, especially as I've gotten older, to try to do really nice things to people as much as I can, especially if they're very low cost to me. I like to do nice things that don't cost me anything but are good to other people. And so, I think that's one very strong piece of saying it's a great question, is really just acknowledgement that someone who's sort of in the background is actually doing something that's cool, or interesting, or challenging.

• 17:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Last May, when Levitt and I published Think Like a Freak, we went on a long book tour, first in the US and the UK. The whole time, it was back-to-back-to-back-to-back interviews and Q&A sessions.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  We get interviewed so much, that when we hear something new, something we haven't thought about, it's just, it's fun. I mean, because it's actually somewhat fun to be interviewed and to answer questions. Being interviewed can range from incredibly dull and boring, to really, really fun. And I think of just our own experiences, so somehow, the times when we've gone on the Charlie Rowe Show.

• 18:09Speaker 06

  Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner are here. Their 2005 book, Freakonomics, used economic theory to offer surprising insights.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  I have been completely stunned, because the way he asks questions and what he says end up being super interesting and fun, and getting me to say things I never would have said to anyone else.

• 18:28Speaker 06

  People sitting at home, saying, "This is so basic, fundamental, common sense."

• 18:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Totally.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  I think for us even, it was embarrassing, because we thought maybe there was some magic to what we did, because people tell us it's magic. The more we thought about it, there's no magic at all. And then finally, at the end, we said, "Wait, we better really make it clear to people, right on page one, there's no magic here, because there really isn't." And it's an incredible gift, and you have a little bit of it. ...of that yourself. I've watched you do that to people that you're really good at getting people to say and answer questions they wouldn't. And if you think about when we did our book tour, you know, some of the people who interviewed us were amazingly clever and well-prepared. So I think that it's almost, for me, saying, "Great question", is just a way of saying to the interviewer, "Hey, this is actually fun." And in a world in which this can be so little fun, you're making this fun.

• 19:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, Charlie.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  Hey, Stephen. How are you?

• 19:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm great. How are you doing?

• 19:25Speaker 06

  Good.

• 19:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, of course, is Charlie Rose. I'm curious, who have you interviewed so far today, Charlie?

• 19:30Speaker 06

  I interviewed John McCain and John Dickerson. And then last night, I interviewed Devon Furstenberg, who's going to be on the show at 11 o'clock tonight.

• 19:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Charlie Rose is the dean of the television interview. In the AM, he can be found at CBS This Morning, along with Gayle King and Nora O'Donnell. At night, the show is simply called Charlie Rose. He has interviewed more people, especially more smart people, than anyone I know of. How do you take it when someone says, let's say, you're sitting down with, you know, maybe it was Steve Jobs, maybe it was President Clinton, and you ask a question, and they look at you across the table and say, "Charlie, no, that's a great question." Does it feel like they're trying to flatter you? How do you take that?

• 20:16Speaker 06

  I think they're trying to flatter me most of the time, or they believe it. I mean, whether it's egotistical, and I think it was a good question, and I agree with them, because I thought about it and structured it and gave some consideration to it, or B, it's spontaneous and flattering. And less so, it's simply buying time as they crystallize their thought.

• 20:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  It strikes me that you're someone who works hard to ask the kind of questions that people think are really good questions, that are really good questions.

• 20:50Speaker 06

  I do. I mean, it would be clearly naive of me to say that I don't think about the craft of the question. I think about that a lot, how to ask the question, what I expect to get from the question. And so how the question is perceived makes a difference to me. I structure the question hoping to get the best possible response. I used to make longer questions with some assumption that I had to explain the question. I spend more time now simplifying the question.

• 21:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Take us a little further into that. When you say that you structure the question hoping to get the best possible response, I guess what I want to know from you is, how do you know what the best possible response is? In other words, are you trying to like a prosecutor, get the answer to a question that you sort of know already?

• 21:38Speaker 06

  Well, let me do something first. I would be tempted to say that's a very good question that you just asked me. But because of this conversation, I'm not going to say that.

• 21:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. Cheers.

• 21:49Speaker 06

  But I would say that because that is the right question. It's not for me that I want them to say something that I think they've said before and I want them to repeat it. So I'm not asking questions to have someone tell me what I want them to say or to tell me something that they've already said before. What I want them to do is surprise me with an answer, to go deeper, wider, more interesting than they have before. And there is a kind of moment in which you try to say something that is, that just captures

• 22:27Speaker 06

  the moment and makes the person be caught up in the question rather than simply, you know, repeating something that they've said a thousand times before.

• 22:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  You know, it strikes me, hearing you talk, I care a lot because I do interviews. I'm, you know.

• 22:47Speaker 06

  Right.

• 22:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  I do sort of what you do, but for most people listening to this, you know, there are going to be a million people or so who hear you talking about this and they don't do interviews typically. But I wonder, Charlie, if you think what you're describing in how you think about a question can be generalizable for any person in not doing an interview per se, but just having a conversation with another person, whether it's a friend, family member, stranger...

• 23:14Speaker 06

  Oh, I do think that and I encourage that. I encourage it at a couple of levels. One, just in normal conversation. I mean, be genuinely curious. You don't have to make a conversation serious, but make it in the moment, but let your curiosity...

• 23:30Speaker 06

  Inspire you and that will help. The other thing that happens to me is that, you know, there's an interesting thing. People come to my table expecting to talk about themselves, their work, their relationships, their hopes for the future, their experience. They come expecting that. Most of the time, you know, in regular conversation, that's not what happens. So sometimes people will come to me and say, gee, you know, you ask my friend questions that I could never ask them, you know, because they expect you to ask them. That's who you are. And my point to them is no, you should ask them.

• 24:11Speaker 06

  You should engage in conversations that have to do with something, not all the time. It should often be simply, you know, reacting to the moment of the moment that we all do, whether it's sports or entertainment or relationships. But, but there are those profound questions that I think all of us would be better off if, if we occasionally dived into.

• 24:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. Last question for you, Charlie, and I'll let you go. If we had been in the opposite seats today, if this lame idea that I had was your lame idea and you were interviewing me about it, what would have been your first question to me about the topic of the rise of, hey, that's a great question?

• 24:57Speaker 06

  Why do you think people frequently say, that's a great question?

• 25:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  I've been schooled by the master. That was the question. I never asked that one, but I learned and now I will do better. Charlie, thank you so much.

• 25:17Speaker 06

  My pleasure.

• 25:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me be clear on one thing. When it comes to saying, "That's a great question," perhaps saying it disingenuously, I myself am not innocent. When I'm on the other side of the microphone than I am now, I am a menace. Yeah, that's a great question. So, yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, that's a great question. That's a really, really good and really hard question. I like it a lot. That's the kind of question that I would like to have thought to ask someone much smarter than me to see what they said.

• 26:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I know where I caught it. I caught it from Steve Levitt.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Maybe I invented it. Maybe I'm the inventor of "That's a Great Question."

• 26:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  I remember when I first heard you say it, you were giving an academic talk, I think, at University of Chicago. You were discussing research of yours. And in an academic setting, especially when someone challenges either methodology, or finding, or data, or whatever, I guess I expected that the first response would always be to just shout it down immediately and show why, no, I've already thought this through, and here's why you're wrong, and here's why I'm right. Because that's what you see so much in politics, right? Nobody ever acknowledges that the opponent has a valid point. But I remember you just saying, you know, "That's a really good question," and something to the effect of like, "I wish I'd thought of that while doing my research, because, you know, it might be right, it might be wrong, but it certainly would have broadened

• 26:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  my thinking on this." So, that I remember is where I first heard it, from you.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  I don't, I'm sure I stole it from somebody, but I can't, I can't pin my finger on who that particular genius would have been.

• 27:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, well, Levitt, I feel indebted to you, because I feel it's, you know, if not valuable, then at least useful. And I use it now and again. And so I kind of would like to return the favor to give you something that you can use in certain circumstances. So, here's the thing. Do you ever, you ever have a circumstance where you're interacting with someone, maybe kind of in passing, and they say something to you, and you don't quite catch it, or they say something to you that you don't want to have heard, but you kind of need to say something? Do you ever have that at all?

• 27:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, all the time.

• 27:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. So, here's what you say. You ready? You might want to write it down. You say, "Rebus cassifram." Let me hear you say that.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Say it one more time.

• 27:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Rebus acasaphram.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Rebus acasaphram?

• 27:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  More like one word, rebus acasaphram.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Rebus acasaphram.

• 28:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Good, right. So that is a phrase that was invented by some genius, I don't know who. I do know where I learned to say this was from the former dean of students at Dartmouth, and he was always getting in these conversations in passing where you had to have the response, but you had no idea what the person was talking about. They might have been talking about a relative of yours, or a former encounter. Like, I can see you using this a lot, and you want to say something on your way out. You don't want to be rude, but you have no idea what the response is. If you say rebus acasaphram, the human ear will interpret that in one of 100 different ways, and they will almost certainly think that you actually said something real when you didn't. So.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  That's great. I love that.

• 28:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're welcome.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  I love that. Rebus acasaphram.

• 28:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners, on the next Freakonomics Radio. In the late 1970s, the state of California passed legislation that required new houses to be way more energy efficient.

• 29:08Speaker 08

  The California Energy Commission projected at the time that homes built after the standards were enacted would use 80% less energy.

• 29:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  So did new homes in California really use 80% less energy? And do you think I'd be asking this question? If the answer were yes, that's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 29:37Speaker 04

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

• 30:14Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:44Speaker 09

  Hey, podcast listeners. Mr. Ballin here to let you know we are now publishing four times a week on my podcast, Mr. Ballin Podcast: Strange, Dark and Mysterious Stories. That's right, you'll be getting four new episodes a week covering unbelievable mysteries, chilling true crime, and stories so strange, they sound made up. But they aren't, they're all true. Don't miss an episode. Listen to and follow Mr. Ballin Podcast: Strange, Dark and Mysterious Stories wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube.

• 31:13Speaker 10

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• 31:30Speaker 11

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• 31:38Speaker 12

  This is according to Oplu Speed Intelligence, dated second half of 2025. All rights reserved. Reddy Moneyback guarantee within 30 days of cancellation. 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.