Freakonomics Radio Live: “We Thought of a Way to Manipulate Your Perception of Time.”

We learn how to be less impatient, how to tell fake news from real, and the simple trick that nurses used to make better predictions than doctors. Journalist Manoush Zomorodi co-hosts; our real-time fact-checker is the author and humorist A. J. Jacobs.

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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• 0:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:28Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is a bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio Live. It's the nonfiction game show we call Tell Me Something I Don't Know. This was recently recorded in New York. If you'd like to attend a future show or be on a future show, visit freakonomics.com/live. We'll be back in New York on March 8th and 9th at City Winery, and in May, we are coming to California, in San Francisco on May 16th at the Norse Theater in partnership with KQED, and in Los Angeles on May 18th at the Ace Hotel Theater in partnership with KCRW. Again, for tickets, go to freakonomics.com/live. And now, on with our show.

• 3:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Good evening. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio Live. Tonight, we're at Joe's Pub in New York City, and joining me as co-host is Manoush Zomorodi. Manoush is the host and creator of the podcasts Zig Zag and Note to Self. She's the author of the book Board and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. Manoush, we know you grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, the child of not one but two psychiatrists.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 3:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  We know that-

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Everybody just went like this, "Oh."

• 3:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, afterwards, they'll come to you with their problems, presumably. We know that before getting into the cutting-edge world of podcasting, that you reported for legacy media companies, including Thomson Reuters and the BBC. So tell us something we don't yet know about you, Manoush.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  My big break was I was a breaking news producer for the BBC, and I was sent to, with a correspondent, a real grown-up reporter person, to report from Mount Etna, which was erupting. And so, volcano's going off, that was pretty cool, we're on TV. And then he's like, "Right, see you later. I'm going back to Rome for my child's birthday party." And I was like, "All right, bye." I couldn't get a flight out till the next day.

• 4:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was that a Roman accent?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  No, that was Brian Ba- Actually, so I went to sleep at my lovely hotel. So they wake me up at four in the morning and they're like, "The volcano's erupting again." And I was like, "Yeah, but Brian left." And they're like, "You, go to the volcano and report." So I was on the morning news, reporting from a erupting volcano. And never looked back. 2001, been a reporter ever since.

• 4:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Congratulations. I say way to go. We're so excited that like, there was danger happening and Manoush got to be like, where people-

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Have you ever seen lava flow, like really? It goes like this.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  I'm not joking.

• 5:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a, just so you know, this is radio.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Sorry, it was really slow.

• 5:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'd like to describe what Manoush was doing. She was holding up her hand and moving it very slowly.

• 5:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did it change your life in any way other than career-wise?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, because I thought of my own capabilities completely differently. So that changed everything.

• 5:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, Manoush, very, very happy to have you here tonight.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 5:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you for coming to play Tell Me Something I Don't Know with us. Here's how it works. Guests will come on stage to tell us some interesting fact, or idea, or story, maybe a historical wrinkle we don't know. You and I can then ask them anything we want, and at the end of the show, our live audience will pick a winner. They will vote on three simple criteria. Number one, did the guest tell us something we truly did not know? Number two, was it worth knowing? And number three, was it demonstrably true? And to help with that demonstrably true part, would you please welcome our real-time fact checker, the author of four New York Times bestsellers and counting, including The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you, Stephen.

• 6:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, A.J., it's been a while since we did one of these shows together. I assume you've just been sitting at home waiting for us to call. Have you been working on anything at all?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Well, that, and I was able to squeeze in. I have a new book. It's called Thanks A Thousand. And the idea is I went around the world and thanked a thousand people who had even the smallest role in making my morning cup of coffee possible. So I thanked the farmer who grew the coffee beans, and the trucker, and the logo designer, and the man who made the Zarf.

• 6:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's a Zarf?

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Bless you.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Well, thank you. A zarf is, I learned, the official name for that little cardboard sleeve that goes around.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  No way. Come on, that's not the word for it. Zarf?

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Z-A-R-F. Yeah, there is. And, just so you know, it has a long and glorious history. There were zarfs in ancient China, made of gold and tortoise shells, so.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Wait, A.J. Wins, I'm sorry. That was amazing. That's so cool.

• 7:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do we know where the word, is it, is it the sound the first person made when they grabbed a cup of hot coffee without a zarf?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  That is a good question. If you give me 30 seconds, I can give you an answer.

• 7:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll get back to you. By the end of the show, you can tell us the etymology of zarf. All right, well, A.J., I'm delighted that you are joining us as well. It's time now to play Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Would you please welcome our first guest, Julie Arselenolu. Julie, welcome. I understand you are a research scientist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I'm guessing that's pretty fascinating work and very promising for our purposes tonight. So I'm ready, as are Manoush Dohmarodi and A.J. Jacobs. What do you know that's worth knowing that you think we don't know?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  I have a simple question. What do antibodies have to do with art and art conservation?

• 8:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Antibodies being the protein in blood that attacks the bad guys?

• 8:10Speaker 03

  It's the protein that your body produces to recognize an other. So every living organism has these.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Is it something that you apply?

• 8:19Speaker 03

  We apply antibodies to art, yes.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, you apply antibodies. You're not looking for antibodies in the art?

• 8:27Speaker 03

  No, we're not.

• 8:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's ask about you. Is your background purely art and/or art conservation, or do you have some kind of biochem background?

• 8:36Speaker 03

  I have organic chemistry graduate degree.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Oh. So are you potentially part of the preservation staff at the Met?

• 8:45Speaker 03

  I'm a research scientist within the conservation department.

• 8:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does the Met have a lot of you, or are you flying solo?

• 8:51Speaker 03

  No, there's 12 of us.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  There's 12 of you?

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  You apply, where do the antibodies come from that you apply?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  We purchase them from commercial sources right now.

• 9:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do they belong to? Where do they come from?

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Well. The way an antibody is created is you take something that you want to study, some protein from an organism. It can even be a small molecule. You inject it into an animal that's called the host. The host creates antibodies against the other. You harvest those, and then you inject those into a second animal and create antibodies to that first antibody, and you use that as your reporting system. So the whole idea is that when you have one thing that you want to recognize, you create an antibody to that.

• 9:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is super fascinating. So this is some version of like antibody dating? Or, I don't mean like smooching dating, I mean like carbon dating dating?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  It's not so much, it could be time theoretically, but that's, it's really complex because you have a couple of problems. One is that normally antibodies are made against what are called native proteins. So these are the proteins that come off freshly from an organism. So let's talk about collagen. If you extract collagen from, let's say, bovine skin, you can create an antibody for collagen, you can create an antibody specifically for bovine skin, but these are going to be in their native state, meaning it's the way the protein is extracted from the tissue or the organism. My issue is that the proteins that are extracted are extracted to be prepared to use for artwork. So if it's going to be a glue.

• 10:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Again. So if it's going to be a glue, or if it's going to be a binder for a paint, meaning the, a paint is usually ground up minerals and you have some sort of adhesive that holds the whole thing together. So if you prepare this material, you're going to heat it to extract it, you're going to do something to it to prepare it for an artistic way of using it. Then, you're going to mix it with these inorganic mineral pigments, which have cat ions that react with proteins.

• 10:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cat ions?

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Cat ions.

• 10:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, ions from cats?

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Cat ions means positive charged.

• 10:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  And then you're going to let this stuff dry. So a protein normally lives in an innocuous environment. Now you're going to remove the water, and then you're going to let it age for 500 years, 1,000 years. So... Stuff happens to those proteins. Art is made up of materials, materials continue to react. The way they react is really complex because we don't have a really clear knowledge of the conditions that art was exposed to. And art continues to be treated over time. So if it enters a museum, for example, it might be consolidated with additional animal products like sturgeon glue or animal glue. It might have a synthetic polymer added to it to create a more cohesive surface.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  So when you have all these things mixed together, they continue to react.

• 11:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're doing this kind of proactive-ish, historical-ish detective work for what purpose? For restoration, for proving the provenance or history of something?

• 11:59Speaker 03

  So at the most basic level, what we're trying to identify is what materials are used to create the artwork. And why this is important is a few things. One is, when you have a sort of a lexicon of how art was created, so for example, egg tempura being used in the Italian Renaissance, well, was every painting in the Italian Renaissance made with egg tempura? Or did they use other protein-based binders? So you can inform that lexicon, you can create a timeline that informs the art historians about what the materials actually were being used. But more than that, when you look at a piece of artwork, it's a combination of all the chemistry that's going on.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  So when you mix a binder, like a protein, with a mineral pigment, as the light passes through it, you're going to get a certain amount of saturation of color, you're going to get some certain amount of gloss, and it all depends on that combination of which pigment and which binder. And if you add an oil to it, it changes everything. So looking at an artwork, understanding what you see, why does it look the way that it does right now? And did it look that way originally, or has it changed? So that's one of the most basic reasons for doing this.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Oh my god, if you had been around in high school, I would have actually liked biochemistry. I was like the artsy kid who was like, "I don't understand it. I got a C minus in chemistry, you guys." It was my worst grade. But if you had like-

• 13:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  You got no sympathy for that.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  I know, no, everyone was like-

• 13:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  I think what that means is that most of them got worse than C minus.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Alright, maybe. I found it really difficult, but also because there was no applicable usage. Like what you just described just like lit up my brain and like explained to me why I like certain paintings and others, and that's amazing. That's so cool.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  There is a really strong connection between art and science. So the way it looks, why it changes, the mechanics of the film, like as it changes and gets older, you actually can increase it in stiffness and you can get cracking. And you can explain all this with chemistry and engineering. And so this is a really strong connection with STEM and STEAM. And so there are universities-

• 14:05Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  -that really pull us in to their chemistry classes to teach folks who aren't quite so keen on chemistry.

• 14:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are there applications of this method or something similar beyond artwork? Is it used in archaeology, et cetera, et cetera?

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Absolutely. One of the earliest uses of antibodies was actually paleontology. They used it to identify collagen in dinosaur bones.

• 14:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  This was how long ago?

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Uh, this is like the late 70s, early 80s.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Is this process used in order to not only understand the ingredients that have been used to make the art, but potentially to preserve it in some way? Or clean it, I guess?

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Well, we're trying to use a combination of the antibodies and something called mass spectrometry to look at the molecular structure of the protein. So what we found out is that when you mix different protein binders, like collagen, or a whole egg, or milk products, casein, with different pigments, you actually will change the conformation of the protein. These combinations change the conformation of the protein. So you're getting some sort of structural change in the protein. And we're trying to look to see how that affects the longevity of the paint.

• 15:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  AJ Jacobs, Julie Arselenolu from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been telling us about antibodies and the use thereof in restoration and learning more about art and for many applications. I'm sure you know an awful lot about this.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Of course, of course, even before I came.

• 15:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it all checks out. Julie gets an A+ for accuracy, not a C+, no offense. Minus. Cheap shot. But it actually, it led me to this list of the strangest ingredients contained in paint. There was Indian yellow. Apologies to those eating right now. But according to legend, this was made from cow urine. And not just regular cow urine. This was cows who were fed only mango leaves, which makes for a gorgeous pee, apparently. And Shields green, which was also lovely, but poisonous. It was made from arsenic. And according to legend, it's what killed Napoleon Bonaparte. He had green walls in his room.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  So there you go, cow urine and arsenic. That's art.

• 16:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, AJ, thank you. And Julie, thanks so much for coming to play. Tell me something I don't know.

• 16:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Would you please welcome our next guest, David Reiter.

• 16:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  So David Reiter, it says here you're a professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State and that your research has been particularly focused on what makes us intelligent, those of us who may or may not be, and why we make mistakes. So that sounds like great turf for us. David, tell us something we don't know, please.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  So I live in this college town. And I guess it's a bit divided, which you see when you drive around there. There's the people that live there all their lives. And these townies have all the time in the world. And then there's people like me, who are a little impatient. And we'd like to drive our fast cars into where we need to go, right? How can you make me a little more patient?

• 17:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  We could start by not calling them townies, because I don't think they like that. But that's just a hunch.

• 17:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're saying that you and your uber-educated class of people, you got a lot to do. You're rushing to do research and to give aid to floundering students like Manoush, who are getting C minuses.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. So are you doing research into ways to get people to not be like you?

• 17:45Speaker 04

  Yup, I think there's a lot of work that's been done in behavioral economics that has found out that we all are a little impatient, right? So I'll give you an example. Do you like chocolate?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  I love chocolate. Could you please just tell me what you're gonna... I'm sorry, just kidding. That was my... demonstrating my impatience.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  We'll run a little experiment into you, okay? Would you like two pieces of chocolate or one?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Well, of course, two.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  All right. Now, I'll attach a little bit of time to that. Would you like two pieces of chocolate in a week from now?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Are you giving the marshmallow test on me? Is that what you're doing on me?

• 18:15Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  I'm a tech reporter, so I know about this stuff, let me tell you, all right? We can't wait for anything anymore, because we have instant gratification.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  So in a way, we all know that we're impatient, right? The question is, can you do something about it?

• 18:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I have to say, even though the way you presented your dilemma, you sounded a little... I don't want to say arrogant, but like, "I have a problem with the slow people," right? That's the way you said it. But it's interesting... But it's interesting that now, when you're searching for a solution, your solution is not to make the slow people faster. You do want to ameliorate your impatience.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Ooh, that's a good point.

• 18:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  You are identifying that. So you want to know how you could become more patient while driving? Have you tried listening to a fine podcast?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  I think that's a really good idea. Or smoking weed. Have you ever been behind someone who's like,

• 19:04Speaker 01

  "Whoa, we are going so fast, dude." And it's like 20 miles an hour. That was also high school. Could explain the C minus, just going there.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  All of these would work.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Okay, but you're trying to look at more of a cognitive behavioral, sort of talk yourself into being more patient thing? Because that's what you do?

• 19:24Speaker 04

  It's not talk therapy.

• 19:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it a technological intervention of some sort? Oh, I once learned that the best way to make people on a train feel that the trip is shorter is just by putting in really good, fast Wi-Fi. So if you do that in your car, then you can watch Netflix while driving.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  What if it's autonomous vehicles and therefore no one's driving?

• 19:49Speaker 04

  How boring.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  I mean, the vehicles are all just driving themselves and they're all at the same speed.

• 19:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Then you can smoke dope and watch Netflix.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Exactly, it'd be amazing.

• 19:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, why don't you tell us what you did? And I'm curious to know, is this an experiment that you did in the field or in a lab? Because we care about those distinctions.

• 20:06Speaker 04

  Neither. We run experiments on thousands of people that are somewhere in the world. So our research is not based on American undergraduate psychology students, but, you know, people from all over the planet of, you know, different ages that like to do our experiments.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Who live in towns where there are half the people who are really snooty and think that they're really busy and have to get somewhere really fast and the rest of the people are like, "You, we just are trying to get to the grocery store." Like that?

• 20:31Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:32Speaker 04

  We thought of a way to manipulate your perception of time by giving you something that you might already know. A countdown, like the countdown you see in all-time movies before the movie actually starts. Or like a progress bar when something's really, really slow on a computer. So we show people a countdown and then we give people a test of their impatience. Now, we manipulate the countdown. We were interested in what happens when that countdown is fast versus when that countdown is really slow. The countdowns always take the same amount of time, 15 seconds. But I can count down 15, 14, 13, 12. Or I can count down like this. Five, four, three.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  Are you impatient yet?

• 21:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yes, very. So you're saying that if the numbers are going faster, even if the duration of time is identical, we experience it faster?

• 21:28Speaker 04

  That is correct. We're happier with the whole game. But most importantly, we make better decisions during the impatience test that follows.

• 21:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is the decision-making test that you use in this experiment?

• 21:42Speaker 04

  Well, so this is kind of fun. My collaborator, Moussa Ngafourian, came up with this beautiful experiment where we bring in Cookie Monster. Now Cookie Monster is probably the most impatient guy we know.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Now you have my attention.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  And your job is to host your friend, the Cookie Monster. You've got a jar of cookies sitting in your living room and Cookie Monster. Now, the question is for you, how often do you check on Cookie Monster to make sure he hasn't started eating cookies yet? Or you catch him the right moment when he starts eating cookies? So if you do it right, you only check once, right after he starts eating cookies. Now, that's really, really hard. And we found that the people that saw the slow countdown checked earlier and more often. The people that were more impatient made worse decisions. And that was in the time that followed watching the countdown, not during the countdown.

• 22:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let me just see if I understand. If you were to make a prescription, would you say that, for instance, traffic lights should have attached to them a countdown clock from whatever it is, 30 going fast? Is that the idea?

• 22:49Speaker 04

  They should be going fast, and they should even be speeding up. But we found that...

• 22:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  But you're talking about literally mounting a countdown clock where it's visible at a traffic light or an intersection or whatnot? Is that the idea?

• 23:00Speaker 04

  And for pedestrians, that's already being done.

• 23:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, we have that in New York fairly recently. Is your research connected in any way to that? Now, our "walk and don't walk" signs, they used to be the hand. Now, you get a countdown clock, and I think it starts at like 30 and goes really fast. And I see old people running. Which to me seems potentially counterproductive, I don't know. But do you know anything about that and whether it's working, safer, etc.?

• 23:28Speaker 04

  My guess it will be safer. I don't think it's meant to manage people's impatience in that sense. It manages people's timing and so they don't get on, you know, block the intersection, anything like that.

• 23:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is impatience necessarily, however, a trait to be lessened or dampened? Because I would consider myself a fairly impatient person, which I know has its downsides in some cases. But I think there are also upsides. You quit things faster when they're not working out, which, you know, that may not suit everyone, but there are those who argue that that can be a good thing. And I'm curious whether impatience is actually the thing that you are fighting? Or was that just a viable mechanism to try to figure out how to manipulate people's perception of the events?

• 24:12Speaker 04

  When Edna's breaking out, do you really want to be patient?

• 24:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  You played the volcano card.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  We're virtually interested in how we can change people's perception of time and how we can affect people's decision making. And you can use these countdowns in both directions. You can make somebody more patient, or you can make them more impatient.

• 24:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, that could be handy, yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  So when you're doing this research, you couched it in the fact that this is happening in your town. But are there better use case scenarios? Were you trying to fix that problem in particular? Or were there other problems that you were actually trying to sort out?

• 24:46Speaker 04

  So our experiment that we designed is meant to be very much like many decisions that we take in real life. And these are decisions such as how often do I inspect a crumbling bridge? Or when do I decide to renovate it? Because every week I don't renovate the bridge, I get more use out of it, right? Or similarly, a police precinct deciding how often to patrol an area.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  Or simply, again, you're driving and you have to make quick decisions on how to gather information about the things around you. Has that cyclist moved or is he still in my blind spot? So making all of these decisions, you know, is really something that's very, very commonplace. Timing decisions are very, very important to managing risk, managing our safety. So of course, you know, this is applicable in the context of driving as well. And if you can't put up countdowns on your traffic lights, perhaps you could listen to some fast music before you get in the car and you'd listen to some slow music while you're going, or a slow podcast.

• 25:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are no slow podcasts, only slow podcast listeners. A.J. Jacobs, David Reiter has been telling us about how to essentially manipulate away our impatience, which is fascinating. What more can you tell us on that?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Well, I'll just get right to it. It does check out. And actually, I was losing the train of thought a little, so I

• 26:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Smoked some dope?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  No, my kids are in the audience. But I did research, what is the longest traffic light in America? According to the New York Times, it's in New Jersey. An impressive five minutes and 28 seconds.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Where? Where in New Jersey?

• 26:31Speaker 02

  West Milford, New Jersey.

• 26:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is anyone surprised the longest traffic light is in New Jersey? Let's be honest. But wait a minute.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Five minutes.

• 26:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  That can't be right.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  That's what it says. That's what, listen to the paper record. You can listen to the Gettysburg Address almost three times in five minutes. So that's a good use of your time.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  So what I want to do is I want to apply what you're saying to Twitter. Like, instead of people reflexively retweeting or responding with outrage, what if they're like, "Countdown, here we go. I need 15 seconds before I can respond." Do you think that would like work to make people stop tweeting stupid [BLEEP], basically?

• 27:10Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 27:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, David Reiter, thank you so much for coming to play. Tell me something I don't know.

• 27:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  And would you please welcome our next guest, Jeff Nosinoff.

• 27:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jeff is a consultant for NASA. He formerly worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, the coolest spot in the NASA universe. He's also got a law degree. Yeah, no clapping for that. But check this out. He's also got a very rare master's degree in space and telecommunications law.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  Yep, that's right.

• 27:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which is odd and nifty.

• 27:50Speaker 05

  It is, it is. It's been a strange journey.

• 27:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Jeff, welcome to our stage. Thank you so much for coming. What do you have for us tonight?

• 27:57Speaker 05

  Well, my question to you is, what is the most useful mission that NASA has done?

• 28:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, I would say if the moon landing had not been fake, that would have been it.

• 28:05Speaker 05

  You got us, you got us.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Okay, are there humans involved in this mission?

• 28:10Speaker 05

  Uh, no. Great way to narrow it down. So there's the human side and the robotic side. So I'm asking about the robotic side.

• 28:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  The most useful mission?

• 28:18Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 28:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Um, it's gonna be something about gathering information with a big telescope.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 28:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it a flyby? Is it, you fly by Mars?

• 28:29Speaker 05

  Uh, no, it's in Earth orbit.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  So it's not the cute Mars lander, that guy?

• 28:33Speaker 05

  Uh, no, no.

• 28:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does it have to do with the location of space minerals?

• 28:40Speaker 05

  In a sense.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Gases?

• 28:41Speaker 05

  Sort of, sort of.

• 28:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Minerals and gases, antibodies?

• 28:46Speaker 05

  No, no, that would be, if that had ever happened, that would be the answer.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  That would be amazing, yeah. Is the mission ongoing?

• 28:55Speaker 05

  Sort of.

• 28:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is gonna be very hard to fact check. Have you ever said either yes or no in your life?

• 29:04Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, I have.

• 29:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why don't you tell us?

• 29:07Speaker 05

  Sure, so the mission that I think is the most important and most useful is the Kepler Space Telescope. Do you have a penny up here by any chance? A penny in your pocket?

• 29:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't have a penny in my pocket.

• 29:18Speaker 05

  Okay, so hold up your finger and look at the ceiling, kind of in the shape of a penny. If you make a telescope that looks through that...

• 29:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  If I had a penny, I couldn't see the ceiling. So why did you want us to use a penny?

• 29:30Speaker 05

  If you imagine a cone that goes from your eye through that penny and out in space, and you look through that telescope, you will find thousands and thousands of planets that are similar in a lot of ways to the ones we have here in the solar system. And that's just in a penny-sized... Slice or section of the sky. And that's not even looking that far. That's just staying within our own galaxy. So since we were all kids, the number of planets has gone from nine to eight to about 3,000. And to me, that I think is the most important and useful mission because it truly places into an unimaginable perspective, everything else that NASA does and that really humans do.

• 30:13Speaker 05

  And every other field of science, including minerals and.

• 30:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, I believe Kepler was recently retired, but it was a massive success, wasn't it? Like, it was up there something like three times as long as originally planned?

• 30:25Speaker 05

  It's really very much accomplished its mission, which is showing us that the galaxy, at least, and the universe by extension, is full of planets, more than there are stars. And that, to me, the philosophical conclusion there is that it's almost impossible that the conditions that make Earth unique are unique here.

• 30:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that is fascinating. It resonates, and I think it's an interesting answer, that Kepler is the most useful mission. Do you have a larger point about NASA and usefulness, though? Because it's a big point of contention.

• 30:59Speaker 05

  Well, what initially drew me to the podcast was the idea of hidden economies. And the idea that for every mission that you read about in the paper or that you see photos from, there's hundreds of other missions that are designed, evaluated, and rejected.

• 31:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is the actual rejection ratio, would you say?

• 31:17Speaker 05

  Oh, 100 to 1, if not more.

• 31:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow.

• 31:20Speaker 05

  And that's because it's that much harder to actually build and fly something to another planet.

• 31:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are the rejections primarily for lack of technical or engineering ability?

• 31:28Speaker 05

  Well, that's where the hidden economies come in. There's really four factors that really matter. There's risk, cost, science return, and technology development. And that has changed over time. The weighting of those has changed over time. So in Apollo. Everything was off the charts, but they did it anyway. Now, there's a larger focus on minimizing risk and maximizing science return, which makes sense. But if you tell them you're going to discover life somewhere and your technology needs another 10 years, you're going to get rejected for multiple reasons. Science, we're not ready to make that conclusion yet. Too risky and too much technology work.

• 32:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  You said the four dimensions on which a proposal is assessed, and you talked about risk. What is meant in that context?

• 32:10Speaker 05

  Sure. Well, there's a number of components. There's actual technical risk, like can we look for life somewhere? Does the scientific evidence support a look for life, a search for life? And I believe that there is a sort of a larger philosophical debate that goes around in the top floor of NASA headquarters about, do we really want to support a mission that if it's successful, we have to declare for all time that we have discovered life somewhere else?

• 32:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why would that be a burden?

• 32:42Speaker 05

  Announcing you've discovered life somewhere else will permanently change human history. It will throw, in my opinion, countless ideologies into internal conflict. I hope I see it, but I can see that it will be hard for someone to sign off on.

• 32:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Overall, what share of the collective missions, would you say, are driven by scientific concerns and not political or economic concerns?

• 33:07Speaker 05

  Well, formally, the answer is about 10%, which is the Science Mission Directorate of NASA that sends out these robotic spacecraft. If a human spaceflight expert were here, they would probably point out the tremendous advancements that come from sending humans into space, and those are all true. But the human side of NASA has from the beginning been associated with political gamesmanship, and that doesn't take away anything from it. But the pure science, the what are the rocks on Mars made of? That's only about 10%.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  So, but does that change now that it may not be up to you to decide? Because Elon Musk might do it for you with SpaceX?

• 33:48Speaker 05

  Well, so Elon Musk is actually doing a great service for those of us who try to get missions off the ground because he's building the delivery truck. And we haven't had a really good delivery truck at a cost that's sustainable for a while.

• 34:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you talked about risk being a barrier, is working with a private firm like SpaceX, Elon Musk, is that essentially a way of kind of offshoring some of the risk for NASA?

• 34:11Speaker 05

  So, and this is, this is worth noting in its own right. So, space launch is no longer really considered a risk. It's a cost. But you don't really have to say, "Well, it might blow up." And I think that's worth noting as a species. We've reached a point where we can say, "Yeah, putting stuff into space is no longer the hard part." So, it's not really a risk. It can help with the cost, though. But it's still, the SpaceX rockets are still a little, they have a slightly shorter history of success than some others. But we certainly propose to use them whenever we can because they save us money on other stuff.

• 34:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, I hate to ask you to reduce an extraordinarily complex and fascinating set of ideas into essentially a headline, but, but I am curious to know, like, what's your problem? Like, what is the thing that, what is the thing that you want to happen? Do you want NASA to take more of a different kind of risk?

• 35:09Speaker 05

  So, I have a naive answer and a realistic one. The naive one is that I would like people to march on Washington demanding more funding for space science missions. More realistically, I would like-

• 35:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you hear those deafening cheers from the people?

• 35:22Speaker 05

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We can send them this, this recording. More realistically, I think I would like to see the reemergence of a scientifically confident, literate, encouraging society across the board.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Wait, which one is naive, did you say?

• 35:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I ask you one last thing before we turn it over to AJ? Kepler, the Kepler Observatory, I believe, was built by Ball Aerospace, which is a subsidiary of Ball Corporation, which until 1993, I believe, used to make Ball Mason jars. So I'm curious if that's the root of the NASA problem somehow.

• 36:05Speaker 05

  Ball did build part of it, and that's part of what we do to reduce costs.

• 36:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  They built the jams and jellies for the mission?

• 36:11Speaker 05

  Well, I think they built the main spacecraft part, and the telescope came from somewhere else. So NASA doesn't build all of all the spacecraft anymore. When possible, we use contractors and vendors.

• 36:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  AJ Jacobs, Jeff Nosonoff, a NASA consultant, has been telling us a lot of interesting things about what he feels are the slightly wrong-headed philosophies behind NASA. Keeping in mind, he has a little bit of a horse in the race as a consultant who wants to get his projects going. How much of what he said was totally false, AJ?

• 36:40Speaker 02

  About 40%.

• 36:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  What?

• 36:42Speaker 02

  No. In my extensive research, it did check out. And I'm a big fan of the Kepler telescope. It found over 1,000 planets. And I actually looked up what the planets were called. They've got some wonderful names. There's Kepler 560b and Kepler 438b. There's a crowd favorite of Kepler 841b.

• 37:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  So you guys are, you need some creativity, I think.

• 37:12Speaker 05

  Once we know a little bit more about them, other than there's one there, it'll be easier to name them, I think.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  There are a lot of Roman gods and goddesses.

• 37:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's true.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  And I also looked up the original Kepler that it's named for. He's the Johannes Kepler, a 17th-century astronomer. And it turns out, appropriately enough, he had money problems. So like NASA, he had money problems. And he had to supplement his astronomy work with astrology. He was the astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor, which I think is just super sad, because it's like Stephen Hawking, like, reading tarot cards.

• 37:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  I did not know that.

• 37:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jeff, thank you so much for playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know. It's time now for a quick break. When we return, more guests. We will make Manoush Zomorodi tell us some things we don't know, and our live audience will pick a winner. If you would like to be a guest on a future show or attend a future show, please visit Freakonomics.com. We will be right back.

• 38:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 38:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on the things you love, like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So, switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 39:21Stephen 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.

• 40:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Welcome back to Freakonomics Radio Live.

• 40:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tonight, we are playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know. My name is Stephen Dubner. Our fact checker is A.J. Jacobs, and my co-host is the podcasting veteran Manoush Zomorodi. Before we get back to the game, we have got some frequently asked questions written just for you, Manoush. You ready for them?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Okay, yep.

• 40:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Manoush, we know that your latest podcast, Zig Zag, spends a lot of time talking about the blockchain. So for those who still don't get it, can you explain the blockchain in 30 seconds or less, please?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  30 seconds. Okay. Think of it as Google Docs, right? Like, if you have a document in Google Docs, if you change it, everyone sees the change, right? And when you go back in, if somebody else changed it, you see it as well. Think of that, but with no Google being in charge. Pretty cool, right?

• 41:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was phenomenal, and it was 17 seconds.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  I could keep—do you want to keep going?

• 41:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Give me 13 seconds more on it.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Okay, great. So also, blockchain, it really, truly is like a necklace of computers across the world, all linked together. And so when the change gets made, it goes across the entire necklace. You can have private ones, like a bank can have its own blockchain, or you can have more public ones, like Ethereum, which anyone can join the Ethereum blockchain, as it were, and you can layer—keep going?

• 41:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're way over your 13 seconds.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Okay, sorry.

• 41:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  So no, well, let me ask you one more question on blockchain. Most people who know a little bit about blockchain are alternately kind of enamored and petrified, especially when it's attached to a currency, which tends to be very volatile. Tell us your one very favorite, totally non-currency potential application of blockchain.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Uh, saving journalism. That's the weirdo experiment that I've been part of. Anybody heard of Civil here? Great.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Okay, so Civil is the blockchain startup that my former executive producer at WNYC, we quit our jobs to join this weirdo startup. And we are documenting the entire process of trying to get our heads around what blockchain is, how it could potentially save journalism. The idea with Civil is that there would be a network of trusted, verified, little media publications, and people would be able to sort of pay for them as they go, or tip, or vote if somebody is putting nonsense on there, fake news could get voted off by staking their tokens. Spoiler, the token sale failed this week. All documented on our podcast, Zig Zag.

• 42:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that sounds like a great project. Let me ask you this, since you have an interesting relationship with technology, sometimes very pro, sometimes much less pro, what is your personal strategy for creating and managing computer passwords?

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Okay, I've never told anyone this.

• 42:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's just me here.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  I write messages to the tech platforms about how I really feel about them. So you know how you're supposed to be like, random strings of words is a better way to write a password? So I will write like, "F you, Facebook," and then like...

• 43:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  So your, your whole string of passwords is just a litany of your feelings towards the tech companies that you engage with?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Yes, correct. Or if I like the tech company, it's a, it's a message to myself reminding me of why I like it.

• 43:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Give me a, for instance, in other words, just tell us like your Amazon password.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  I'll give you another one. One is like a running app, and it was like, words of encouragement to myself.

• 43:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, that's so cute.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  It's kind of sweet, right? Anyway, I also use a password manager, which you all should do so that, you know, that you're, you're not keeping your passwords in places that are not...

• 43:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does it run on blockchain?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  No, it does not run on blockchain.

• 43:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  And finally, Manoush Amrodi, you've worked in many media forums, radio, TV, books. Why, in your view, is podcasting superior to all of them?

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Because of the listeners, right? No, I'm serious. It's the truth. I have never, I've been a journalist for a long time now, and only when I started doing podcasts would people write me the most personal incredible emails, hug me when I met them at events. It's a relationship that I have never had before with people I don't know, based on sharing of stories and information.

• 44:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you're comfortable with this level of forced intimacy?

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Have you listened to my shows? Stephen, I'm pretty comfortable with a lot of things, yes.

• 44:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Manoush Zomorodi.

• 44:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  All righty then, let's get back to our game. Would you please welcome our next guest, Scott Highhouse.

• 44:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hi, Scott. It says here that you are a professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and I understand you have a riddle for us of some sort, yes?

• 44:56Speaker 06

  There was a study in 1959 that showed that psychiatric nurses in a mental hospital were just as good at predicting a patient readmission as were the expert psychiatrists. So what were the nurses doing?

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Listening to the patients.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  I feel bad, my mom and dad are gonna listen to this. Were they actually, because there's new technology out there that is analyzing voice and can predict when someone is going to have a psychotic break, were they actually listening to the way that they spoke?

• 45:29Speaker 06

  No.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is a real, you just love to stomp on her enthusiasm there, didn't you? Why don't you tell us? Because I have a feeling that the story behind the answer is interesting.

• 45:41Speaker 06

  They took each patient's folder and placed it on a kitchen scale, and the heavier folders predicted readmission more than the lighter folders.

• 45:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So is this what people talk about when they talk about Occam's razor? The simplest theory is more likely to be correct? Or is it something different than that?

• 46:03Speaker 06

  I don't disagree with that. I think the general principle is that expert intuition is not very good when it comes to making predictions, particularly about people's behaviors and their performance.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  So are you also saying that this could not be replicated in this day and age due to digital?

• 46:25Speaker 06

  You'd have to be more creative, I think. Maybe the length of the file or something.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Gigabytes.

• 46:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let me ask you this. You're a psychology researcher.

• 46:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is this story that you just told us related particularly to the work you do? Or does this expert intuition idea travel across domains?

• 46:41Speaker 06

  Yes, my area is industrial organizational psychology, and I'm interested specifically in hiring and interviewing. We know that intuition is a derailleur. We knew way back that admissions officers for universities who knew the GPA and the SAT score screwed things up when they added their holistic judgment about the student. And we find the same thing with job interviews. Expert interviewers, experienced interviewers in HR are actually worse than a layperson who uses structured questions that are job-related and behavioral in nature.

• 47:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  So can you give an example of a good interview question and a poor one that's more fishing for intuition?

• 47:32Speaker 06

  Yes, a traditional interview question would be, why do you want to work here? Tell me about yourself.

• 47:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  And those are boring sounding, but you're saying they work?

• 47:40Speaker 06

  No, those are more intuitive. So what is the drives you and things like that? A more structured question would be job-related and behavioral. So tell me about a time when you encountered conflict at work and what did you do about it? Or what would you do in a situation where someone tried to undermine you at work? So those very behavioral questions are very specific and they ask about, what would you do or what did you do?

• 48:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Of all the domains in which all of us engage all the time, so workplace, dating and mating, an example like you gave in a medical field where you're trying to assess someone's prospects or assessing anyone's prospects, where do you find intuition is most heavily relied on and therefore most damaging?

• 48:28Speaker 06

  Oh goodness. I do know that, maybe it doesn't answer your question directly, but intuition is good in some areas like wine tasting and art appreciation.

• 48:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  But when you say it's good...

• 48:42Speaker 06

  Well, those are studies based on agreement with experts, so...

• 48:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, but the experts you just told us are full of, you know...

• 48:50Speaker 06

  My area is prediction, remember? We're trying to predict future performance on the job. So in areas where they look at agreement with experts on aesthetic judgments, intuition seems to work well. And the more you think about, is this de Kooning a good painting, the farther away you get from expert judgment.

• 49:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  I find really interesting the idea that in a job interview, but I'm guessing in any context, if you ask for a specific behavioral response, whether it's theoretical or real from history, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. A.J., Scott's telling us that intuition is to be leery of, at least in some cases, and that experts tend to have a lot of it and make some bad decisions. What more can you tell us about that?

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, both my intuition and the data support that intuition is terrible. It's a terrible predictor of future. I actually kind of got sidetracked because I'm a fan of the old-fashioned ways of predicting the future. And maybe you can tell me how successful they are. There's bonetroscopy, which is predicting the future by the sound of thunder.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Haruspecs, which is predicting the future from the livers of sacrificed sheep. And myomancy predicting the future by the movement of rats and mice.

• 50:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you use a lot of sheep livers at Bowling Green?

• 50:08Speaker 06

  No, but there are areas of employee hiring where they look at handwriting or, and many years ago, bumps on the head. None of those were very useful.

• 50:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  But if you got your bump in a very dramatic way, it could tell you something about the person.

• 50:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  And, just so you know, zarf, the coffee cup sleeve. I know you've been waiting. From the Arabic, zarf for vessel.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 50:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  A.J. Jacobs, as always, going way above and beyond the call of duty. A.J., thank you. And Scott Highhouse, thank you so much for playing. It's time for our final guest of the evening, so would you please welcome her, Rada Mihalcha. Rada is the director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Michigan. Rada, the floor is yours.

• 51:01Speaker 07

  I have a timely topic. How can you increase your odds of finding out if a news article is true or fake?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Does it involve A.J.?

• 51:16Speaker 02

  I am available, yes.

• 51:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  You know, I wonder if what we just heard from Scott Highhouse should weigh into it in some way, which is distrusting intuition. Does that have anything to do with it, or no?

• 51:27Speaker 07

  To some extent.

• 51:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cagey answer. Let's say, more than just discounting intuition, seeking out firm behavioral or structural elements like punctuation or typography.

• 51:43Speaker 07

  Getting closer.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so the second season of Zig Zag is, trust and information is our theme. And we did something with the Knight Foundation, looking at how misinformation and fake news essentially spread on Twitter before the 2016 election and post. And it actually, the crazy surprising finding was that it, all that fake information, the millions of tweets, went back to just a few Few dozen sites. So it was far more centralized than people thought before. The other fact that was really interesting was that ninety-five to ninety-seven percent of the information coming from those news sites was true. It was a very small amount. It was that three to five percent that was nonsense that really got pumped out across Twitter.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  So, counterintuitively, one might say, is the genesis with somewhat reputable sites or sites that are well-established.

• 52:37Speaker 07

  And I think that would add to the challenge, in fact, because you cannot really rely on the source.

• 52:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  You work in language and IT, so your answer has something to do with technology, computing, yes?

• 52:49Speaker 07

  That's true.

• 52:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are you in possession of a pretty good method or algorithm to determine fake news? Is that what you're saying? You have in your pocket something useful?

• 52:58Speaker 07

  Right, so your best bet would be to bring along a computer. It turns out that computers are better than people at detecting deception. What we found with our algorithms, for instance, in courtrooms, we can spot witnesses who are lying about seventy-five percent of the time, which is quite a bit better than what people would do at the same task. So people do a little bit better than random at fifty-five percent. In fake news, people are better. They get fake news about seventy percent of the time.

• 53:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  And computers do what?

• 53:30Speaker 07

  And computers would do seventy-six. So people are still beyond the computers.

• 53:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so what is, so what are the computers actually doing, though? Is it a text analysis? Is it finding inconsistencies in mood or language? What's happening?

• 53:42Speaker 07

  So computers are basically learning from data. They are learning from collections of lies and truths. What are the attributes of those? So basically, we program the system to look for certain features or attributes, like sequences of words or relations between words or the semantic type of the words.

• 54:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you give an example of a phrase or sentence or even a word that would indicate fakeness?

• 54:11Speaker 07

  So one of the aspects of language that computers would pick on is the use of personal pronouns. Liars would tend to use less often first-person pronouns like "I", "me", "myself", "we", and instead they would use more often "he", "she", "they". Psychologists would explain that by saying that liars would want to detach themselves from the lie. Another one, which I think is somehow counterintuitive, is the use of words that reflect certainty. Liars would tend to more often use words such as "always", "absolutely", or using exaggeration. The best! The best, there we go. Unlike the true tellers, true tellers would more often use "hudging", like "maybe", "perhaps", "probably", things like that.

• 54:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Interesting. So cynical question. By publicly discussing this research, both in general and specifically, aren't you just making it easier for the purveyors of fake news to get better?

• 55:03Speaker 07

  Not necessarily. I think the clues that computers tend to pick on are not intuitive for humans. So if I were to ask you how many times I said "I", you probably have no idea, because you don't look for those little words that actually make a difference in deception detection. So it is still hard. Even if you want to prevent others or a computer to detect deception, it's actually hard.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Are you using deep learning, I'm assuming, with processing all this information?

• 55:30Speaker 07

  We do use deep learning in other projects, but not in this particular one.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Oh, not in this one. What are you using?

• 55:34Speaker 07

  We are using machine learning. The reason being that deep learning works very well when it has a lot of data.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:41Speaker 07

  So you need a lot of lies, a lot of truths.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  We know some places.

• 55:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I just ask, how surprised should we be that this is the kind of task that computers are better at? I mean, isn't the list of things that humans are better at computers than getting really short? I don't mean to degrade the value of this kind of identification, but I guess it's just not so surprising that a computer, an algorithm, would be better than an intuitive, emotional, impatient human being? Because we know that we're bad at those things, right?

• 56:18Speaker 07

  Well, yes and no. I think there are certain tasks where we are still better. Like, for instance, writing. If you were to write a novel, people are still much better. So there is still a fair number of applications or ways in which we are much better.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  So I think the question is, could you use the technology to parse Brett Kavanaugh's testimony?

• 56:38Speaker 07

  We could, and we are planning to. So we are working on it.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  You heard it here first!

• 56:46Speaker 01

  And Dr. Ford, of course. I mean, right? Of course. The whole dialogue.

• 56:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  A.J. Jacobs, Radha Mihalcha from the University of Michigan is telling us that computers are getting pretty good at detecting deception. What more to add?

• 56:59Speaker 02

  It is looking good. These are early days for this technology, but, I mean, we desperately need it. And I looked into a little of the history of truth detection devices because the polygraph tests that measure, you know, your pulse and your skin, they're not that reliable. You know, the American Psychological Association says to be very skeptical. Though, in their defense, polygraphs do have a very cool backstory. Because one of the inventors of the polygraphs was William Marston, the man who created Wonder Woman, the superhero. And Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth. That is 100% scientific and reliable. So, that's the secret.

• 57:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  A.J., thank you, and Radha Mihalcha, thank you so much for playing. Can we give one more hand to all our guests tonight? It is time now for our live audience to pick a winner. So who's it going to be? Julie Arselenolu with Using Antibodies to Answer Art Questions. David Reiter with How to Manipulate Away Our Impatience. Jeff Nosonoff with Rethinking Risk in NASA and Space. Scott Highhouse with How Intuition is Often Wrong. Or Radha Mihalcha with Detecting Deception with Computers. While our live audience is voting, let me ask you a favor.

• 58:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you enjoy Freakonomics Radio, including this live version of Tell Me Something I Don't Know, please spread the word. Give it a nice rating on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much.

• 58:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, the audience vote is in. Once again, thanks so much to all our guest presenters and our grand prize winner tonight. You could chalk this up to a little recency bias, but I don't think so, for telling us about detecting deception with computers. Rada Mihalcha, congratulations. And Rada, to commemorate your victory, we'd like to present you with this certificate of impressive knowledge. It reads in full, "I, Stephen Dubner, in consultation with Manoush Zomorodi and A.J. Jacobs, do hereby vow that Rada Mihalcha told us something we did not know, for which we are eternally grateful."

• 59:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's our show for tonight. I hope we told you something you didn't know. Huge thanks to Manoush and A.J., to our guests, and thanks especially to you for coming to play "Tell Me Something." Thank you so much.

• 59:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  "Tell Me Something I Don't Know" and Freakonomics Radio are produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Alison Kreglo, Harry Huggins, Zach Lipinski, Morgan Levy, Emma Morgenstern, Dan Zula, and David Herman, who also composed our theme music. The Freakonomics Radio staff also includes Greg Rippon and Alvin Melathe. Thanks to our good friends at Qualtrics, whose online survey software is so helpful in putting on this show, and thanks to Joe's Pub at the Public Theater for hosting us. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or on Freakonomics.com. If you'd like our entire archive ad-free, along with lots of bonus episodes and sneak peeks, please sign up for Stitcher Premium. Use the promo code FREAKONOMICS for one month free. Thanks and good night.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Oh, it's when you stepped over me, Stephen Dubner. I'll say it again.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Stitcher.

• 1:00:47Stephen J. Dubner?

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