Freakonomics Radio Live: “Where Does Fear Live in the Brain?”

Our co-host is comedian Christian Finnegan, and we learn: the difference between danger and fear; the role of clouds in climate change; and why (and when) politicians are bad at math. Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri is our real-time fact-checker.

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

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. There's no hiding how convenient Southern New Hampshire University makes college. They offer over 80 career-focused graduate programs online. Classes have no set meeting times, so you can balance life and learning, and online tuition rates are some of the lowest in the country, making it all a little more manageable. A school this willing to work with you is worth the investment. Visit snhu.edu/freakonomics to learn more. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must haves, like gym access or breakfast,

• 0:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at hotels.com. Visit hotels.com for details. 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. So go with Amica and get coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers, one that looks after what's important to you together. Auto, home, life, and more, coverage that fits your unique needs. Amica helps you protect what matters most.

• 1:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Visit amica.com and get a quote today. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work is a new way to work in ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work can pull info from across your apps and connect to your tools to help you create finished work. You can even automate work in ChatGPT with the Scheduled Tasks feature, and the whole time, you stay in control. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 2:26Stephen 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.

• 3:12Stephen 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 the comedian, writer, and actor, Christian Finnegan.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hello there, sir. Nice to have you here.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.

• 3:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Christian, here's what we know about you so far. We know that you grew up in Massachusetts.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yes, I did.

• 3:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  That you became a comedian because you had no, quote, "marketable skills."

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Still true.

• 3:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  We know you've performed all over TV and the world.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Yes, TV and the world, in that order.

• 3:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we know that you once lost 70 pounds in nine months, which is a person.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, uh, yeah, you know, it's, you learn how to hate life and accept that, and I've slowly gained it back, so.

• 4:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're such a liar. You can lie on the radio, but usually people lie in the skinny direction, not in the fat direction.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  No, you're right. I mean, there's picture. There's, for a long time, when you would Google me, literally, if you just started typing Christian Finnegan, it'd be Christian Finnegan fat. That would be the first Google search result.

• 4:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's sweet, yeah. So, Christian, that's what we know about you. Why don't you tell us something we don't yet know about you, please?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Well, I am a man of many talents, Stephen. Thank you for asking. And I am capable of playing either the William Tell Overture or shaving a haircut by banging on my own human skull.

• 4:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow, really?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Yep, very talented.

• 4:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's, can we take an audience request for which song they want to hear, and you'll play it?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. William Tell Overture.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Shaving a haircut. Okay, William, okay, here we go.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 5:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  No idea we were gonna milk you for this much entertainment so early.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  I'm slightly concussed.

• 5:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, Christian, thank you for being here tonight to play Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Let me tell you how it works. Guests will come onstage to tell us some interesting fact, or idea, or story. You and I can then ask them anything we want, and at the end of the show, our live audience will pick a winner. The vote will be based 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, is it demonstrably true? And to help with that demonstrably true part, please welcome our real-time fact-checker Alexandra Petry.

• 5:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Alexandra is a Washington Post columnist and author of the book A Field Guide to Awkward Silences. Furthermore, in order to take her Post job, she turned down an offer to study Renaissance poetry at Oxford. So Alexandra, what have you been up to lately?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Well, if you're my agent listening, I'm definitely working on a book. But if you're anyone else, my husband and I have been watching all of Star Trek because he claims it raised him. And so I'm like, all right, like, let's learn about this. And I loved the original series because it's just entirely ridiculous space camp. And everyone's like, no, it's logic and ideas, and it's not. It's mostly just like William and Shatner yelling about things. At one point, Kirk's body gets taken by a lady because they don't have lady spaceship captains. And within seconds of like his body being taken, this apparent Kirk gets court-martialed for being hysterical. And it's just like, you can't win. Anyway, watch it, Turn About Intruder, it's a great, great classic.

• 6:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, I'm so glad you could take time out of your busy schedule to be with us tonight because I know you have a bit more to watch. All right, then, it is time to play Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Would you please welcome our first guest, Joseph Ledoux.

• 7:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Joseph, I understand you are a professor of neuroscience.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 7:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  At NYU, which makes me think you're pretty bright. On the other hand, NYU is about 12 steps away from Joe's pub here, so I'm assuming you're also quite lazy.

• 7:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  In any case, I'm ready, so are Christian Finnegan and Alexandra Petry. So what do you know that's worth knowing that you think we don't know?

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Where does fear live in the brain?

• 7:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  "Where does fear live in the brain?" asks the neuroscientist. In the back?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Is this like a Zen koan?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, it seems like it would be like at the base of the spine, like it'd feel like it would be like a central nerve kind of thing.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  You've seen the old Tingler movies.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  No?

• 7:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Should we just name brain parts? Cerebrum, cerebellum, antebellum. The back.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Keep going.

• 7:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hippocampus. Amygdala.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 8:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Amygdala?

• 8:01Speaker 03

  That's wrong. But that's the right answer.

• 8:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's the right answer, but I'm wrong. You're right, it was a Zen koan, yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  I bet it's a trick question. I bet it doesn't actually live in the brain. I bet that's what he's trying to do. Am I right?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  That's too tricky, no.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  All right, sorry.

• 8:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so we're intrigued, we're confused. Tell us what you're all about, then.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Well, the amygdala is famously known to be the brain's fear center.

• 8:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Famously, except among all of us.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  And unfortunately, I'm partly responsible for that, because of misinterpretations of my research. That idea has been sort of put out into the public quite a bit. And so I'm kind of here to correct it tonight.

• 8:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So where does fear reside?

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Well, it depends, you have to define what fear is, first of all. So... Fear, as usually talked about in terms of the amygdala, is simply the ability to detect and respond to danger. As people, and we go around in the world and we have fearful experiences all the time, but that's not the same as simply detecting and responding to danger. So the amygdala is detecting and responding to danger, but higher centers in the neocortex, in my opinion, my theory, are responsible for the actual experience of fear.

• 9:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So the amygdala in the brain is kind of an early warning system? Or it's what detects the danger?

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 9:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  But it doesn't generate the sensation of fear, you're saying?

• 9:27Speaker 03

  I wouldn't call it a sensation, but the experience of fear. So, one way to think about it is no self, no fear. In other words, if you aren't personally involved in a situation, then you can't be afraid of it. You can respond to it, but you can't be afraid. So, if you start asking how far back in evolution does the ability to detect and respond to danger go, you never stop until you get to the beginning of life. Bacteria detect and respond to danger, but...

• 9:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  They don't experience fear.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Well, how do we know? But I don't think so.

• 10:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  I was just talking today to a bacterial friend. And he said, "You know what, Dubner? It's funny, I detect danger almost daily. It doesn't bother me." So, that's my research. Joseph Ledoux from NYU.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Can I ask, does all fear reside in like, all kinds of fear reside in the same place? Like, the kind of fear when a bear is chasing you, is that the same fear as like when your girlfriend starts scrolling through your phone? Like, are those the same kinds of fear?

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Well, actually, there are lots of different kinds of fears. So there's social fear, predatory fear, there's fear of an immediately-present stimulus, there's fear about a future stimulus, there are existential fears about eventuality of death or the meaningless of life. So fear is a very complicated thing.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  What I call being alive.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  That's right. So there are 37 words in English alone for different sort of variations and twists on fear.

• 10:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what's the mechanism by which the perception of danger is turned into fear in the brain?

• 11:01Speaker 03

  So the amygdala generates a response in the body. For example, you might be freezing in front of a snake. Your heart is beating fast. Your brain is now aroused, releasing chemicals, so you start to attend to the environment to see what's there. So I think there are a number of components that come as a result of all this that come into the actual experience. One is all this body feedback. Another is brain arousal. Another is the retrieval of memories about past dangers. And another is your awareness that you, as an individual, you as a person, are in that situation and are about to be harmed.

• 11:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm really curious about something you said about if the danger is not toward you, you don't experience...

• 11:46Speaker 03

  If it's not about you.

• 11:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. And it's funny, it sounds so obvious in retrospect, but I never thought about it. A terrible thing could be happening to someone else right next to you.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  A lot of my colleagues don't like this idea either.

• 11:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  I actually like the idea. It's just a very powerful and kind of alienating idea because it makes you ask, well, where's empathy in the brain?

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Well, so I think all emotions are made pretty much the same way. That you have to integrate a variety of different sources of information, what's called working memory, which is a product of the more frontal areas of the neocortex, where you can do that kind of integration in real time. And it's a matter of what information working memory is working with as to what you experience. So if you're looking at a bottle of Poland Spring water...

• 12:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's gin, actually.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Okay, well, see, my experience is water. So my experience is mine. I can't ever be wrong about being afraid or angry. You can tell me, no, you weren't afraid or angry, you're something else. But my experience is my experience. It's incorrigible in the moment.

• 12:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just out of curiosity, like, the kind of fear you might fear when you're watching a horror movie is not the same chemical experience of actually being afraid if something's happening to you in real life?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  So we have these things called schema in our brain that are sort of catalogs of all of the kinds of things we know about danger and experiences of threat and harm that we've acquired as we go through life in the earliest days. And that information kind of is brought into mind by the presence of a threat. It's called pattern completion in the mind. So the presence of a snake at your feet and that your heart is beating fast is enough to pattern complete this whole concept of fear. And you also know in that concept that, you know, what your responses to fear are. And that bias is how you interpret and respond in that situation.

• 13:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, let me ask you a big concern of mine. You're saying all this stuff that sounds real and smart.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 13:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wait for it.

• 13:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  And it might be, and we're all way too dumb to know if what you're saying is demonstrably true. What's your degree of confidence that it really is? Because it's really a remarkable little engine up there.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  This is a theory. So it's based on a lot of facts that I've assembled over the years and been putting together and trying to conceptualize as I assemble it all. So you won't necessarily find this in the textbooks.

• 14:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Alexandra, Joseph Ledoux is telling us about a really interesting construct, the relationship between the detection of danger in the brain and the experience of fear, which happened in different places. Is it true?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  As far as I can tell, definitely.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  All right.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  But it also sent me down a rabbit hole of fears. What are people afraid of that they are subjectively experiencing? And apparently, our top 10 fears are flying, heights, clowns, death, as you mentioned, rejection, people, snakes, and something illegible that I've written in handwriting that I cannot see. But it might be failure or driving. And it also, a study found in 2014, that Democrats are nearly twice as likely as Republicans to have a fear of clowns. Which, I'm just gonna let that joke make itself.

• 15:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alexandra, thank you. And Joseph Ledoux, thank you so much for coming to tell us something you didn't know.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  I just want to put it out there, I don't believe that anybody is truly afraid of clowns. I think that is what I refer to as a public domain personality quirk. That's the kind of thing that people say they think it makes them sound interesting, but nobody's actually afraid of clowns. Just stop it.

• 15:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I just ask, are you now, or have you ever been, a clown?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  I, you know, there was a time.

• 15:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just what I thought you were gonna say.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  I'm leaving. Squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak.

• 15:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's bring up our next guest. Her name is Kate Marvel. Come on up, Kate.

• 16:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Kate Marvel, it says here you're a climate scientist at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Kate, what can you tell us tonight that we don't know?

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Okay, so, other than human behavior, which is a big other, what is the biggest wildcard in climate change?

• 16:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  I would have said, had you not qualified it with other than human behavior, I would have said that the biggest wildcard in climate change would almost surely be Kanye.

• 16:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  But I will guess cows.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Cows?

• 16:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cow. I know cows, like, you know, they produce a lot of methane and meat production is super environmentally needy, resource-intensive, blah blah.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  It's a good guess, but I feel like we know about cows. I feel like they're not really a wildcard.

• 16:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, this is an unknown, an unknown known.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're good with cows, I think.

• 16:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you say wildcard, you mean could be good, could be bad?

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Could be less bad. Could be really bad.

• 17:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  So the choices are bad or really bad?

• 17:04Speaker 04

  I know, like, I'm not gonna win this, am I? When you're a climate scientist, those are your choices.

• 17:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's awesome about the climate? Nothing.

• 17:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it an actual, like, animal that we're talking about?

• 17:26Speaker 04

  No.

• 17:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, boy. Vegetable?

• 17:29Speaker 04

  No.

• 17:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mineral?

• 17:31Speaker 04

  Kind of.

• 17:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Kind of a mineral.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  How about volcanoes, maybe?

• 17:36Speaker 04

  Oh, that's a good guess.

• 17:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  We do know that volcanoes, they can, if there's a big one, like Pinatubo cooled the Earth, right, for a while? Okay, why don't you tell us?

• 17:44Speaker 04

  Okay, it's clouds.

• 17:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, clouds.

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Clouds.

• 17:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  So clouds are terrible?

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Well, clouds might be good, they might be friendly. So we don't know exactly how hot it's gonna get. And a lot of that is because of human behavior. We don't know what humans are gonna do. But even if you take out all the uncertainties surrounding humans, there's still uncertainties in the physical climate system. And this is really embarrassing, because people are like, "Come on, climate scientists, like, you had one job." And we're working on it, right? But the wildcard is really clouds. Because when we talk about global warming, we mean climate change. And a lot of stuff is gonna change when it warms up. And one of those things that's gonna change is clouds. And clouds are really important in the climate system. Because they both warm the planet and they cool the planet at the same time.

• 18:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  The same clouds?

• 18:35Speaker 04

  Not the same clouds.

• 18:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  At different levels?

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Different clouds do different things. So basically, like, those low, thick clouds, they're really good at blocking the sun. They're what you think of when you think of a cloudy day, right? And so if you block the sun, it gets cooler. But there's also, clouds are made of water vapor. And water vapor itself is a really powerful greenhouse gas. So clouds, especially those sort of like high, thin clouds, like cirrus clouds, are really effective at trapping the heat coming up from the earth.

• 19:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  So why is it such a wild card? What will be the variables that change the behavior or the proliferation, whatever, of clouds that might dictate temperature?

• 19:12Speaker 04

  So clouds are so hard to understand. They're really hard to shove in a climate model because they're both really small, right? They're nucleated by tiny, tiny grains of sand or dust. But at the same time, they're really, really big. They cover a giant, giant portion of the earth. And it's really hard, within a computer model of the climate system, to simulate something that's both really small and really big. So basically, we suck at it. We are really, really bad at modeling clouds.

• 19:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it possible that a series or whatever of clouds, a family of clouds that are in a low position and therefore potentially cooling, that that same family or generation or whatever of clouds could eventually migrate higher? And would, in other words, good clouds could become bad clouds?

• 20:01Speaker 04

  So, we know, actually, for sure.

• 20:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  I didn't say clowns.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  It's a good question.

• 20:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can these clouds be rehabilitated? That's what he was trying to...

• 20:11Speaker 04

  No, that's a great question. We're actually...

• 20:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which, his or mine?

• 20:15Speaker 04

  All of them, all of them. They're all great questions. That's really interesting because we actually are becoming more and more sure that bad clouds are actually gonna become worse clouds. And this is why, like, this is such a terrible...

• 20:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  You just lost the crowd.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  Right? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. So we're actually pretty sure that those bad clouds are gonna get worse as the planet heats up.

• 20:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because why?

• 20:37Speaker 04

  Because they're gonna trap more heat. Because the planet itself is heating up. That planet is just chucking more heat out into the universe.

• 20:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that makes the clouds literally escape to a higher altitude?

• 20:49Speaker 04

  So the clouds are going to a higher altitude. So the clouds themselves are not getting warmer or cooler. They're staying at exactly the same temperature. So they're not losing more heat to space themselves. But they're continuing to trap the heat that comes up from the planet below.

• 21:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, let me ask you this. Since low hanging clouds, at least some, can generate cooling, right? By blocking sun. Is it not possible to generate on purpose

• 21:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  a certain kind of low hanging cloud? I'm guessing you know a lot more about this than I do. But I know some mad scientists who want to do some sort of cloud seeding with saltwater vapor or with dust to kind of create a nice little sunscreen around the planet. You like that idea?

• 21:32Speaker 04

  No, I hate that idea. But it's not a stupid idea. It would work.

• 21:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  You are such a lovely bundle of contradictions.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  So it would probably cool down the planet, right? If you block sunlight, it cools down. But I don't like that idea because I like sunlight. And plants like sunlight. You know, if you look at the tracks of ships crossing the Atlantic, you can actually see that they're cloudier because those ships are spewing out gas and dust. Those particles are nucleating clouds. And it's actually cooler where a ship's been than it is where a ship hasn't been. So this is an idea that people have kind of seized upon. They're like, what if we just make a lot of clouds? Could we actually cool down the planet? And we could. But I don't just care about the temperature of the planet. And maybe we'll get to a place where we're like, oh, my God, this is our only option. We have to do this.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  But that doesn't fix rainfall patterns. That doesn't do anything about ocean acidification. So it's kind of like not altering your diet or not getting more exercise and just trying to take a magical diet pill. Maybe it'll work, but there could be really, really bad side effects.

• 22:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  And in the meantime, we've made the world Scotland, essentially. So what are you doing about it? Are you figuring out?

• 22:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was that rude? She's a climate scientist. That's what we pay her for. Two-part question. Number one, of all the known things to be known about clouds, how much do you, meaning you and your peers, know? In other words, is it still a pretty big research question? And number two, assuming you get to know as much as you need to know, is there any kind of behavior, mitigation, et cetera, et cetera, that could take advantage of that cloud knowledge to help?

• 23:25Speaker 04

  So, we're getting close to sort of nailing down the role of clouds in a warming climate. And it turns out to be bad news. It looks like we're actually going to lose a lot of those low clouds, especially over the Southern Ocean, near Antarctica. And we're pretty, pretty sure that those high clouds, those warming clouds, are going to get worse in the future. So, basically, we shouldn't count on clouds to save us from climate change. Like, I think we're actually going to have to do that ourselves.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Can I ask, when you say "it's going to get worse", over what timeframe?

• 24:00Speaker 04

  In, basically, right now, and in the future, and in the future, and in the future.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  I believe that the title of the show is "Tell Me Something I'd Rather Not Know".

• 24:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, Alexandra Petry, Kate Marvel, has come in here from Columbia University with a seemingly scalding indictment of clouds, and us, and a seemingly despairing prognosis, even with the best cloud scientists on the job. Can you help?

• 24:33Speaker 02

  I cannot help, but it does seem to be factual. And I was, in fact, so depressed by this information that I just started looking at Joni Mitchell's clouds entire discography, and how did that originate? Because, like you, she's looked at clouds from both sides, both good and bad.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  She said in a 1967 interview, quote, "I dreamed down at the clouds and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them. And having dreamed at the clouds from both sides, as no generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily."

• 25:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you, Alexandra, and thank you, Kate Marvel, for coming to tell us something we did not know. Appreciate it.

• 25:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's welcome, if you would, our next guest. Her name is Alison Schreger, coming up.

• 25:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nice to see you. Alison is an economist, it says here, and self-professed pension geek, who writes for Quartz and is the author of the forthcoming book, "An Economist Walks Into a Brothel and Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk."

• 25:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alison, that sounds fun. Tell us something we don't know, please, and thank you.

• 25:52Speaker 05

  Well, you probably already know a lot of thoroughbred horses are inbred, but they've become a lot more inbred in the last 30 years. In fact, almost every horse now that's sold is related to one horse, Northern Dancer, who died in 1990. Do you know why they've become more inbred?

• 26:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  How many horses are related to Northern Dancer? What share of?

• 26:13Speaker 05

  95%.

• 26:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  I think I know, because Northern Dancer was the MAC.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Apparently not.

• 26:21Speaker 05

  That is true.

• 26:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  What does that mean?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  It means that he was very active sexually. Very desirable as a...

• 26:31Speaker 02

  I thought it was a horse-specific term, and I was gonna start Googling.

• 26:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  I, too, would have said in different language, I would have thought maybe because he, in particular, had a very big winning record.

• 26:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was he very good?

• 26:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, he was.

• 26:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So he was MAC-ish?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. They played Chardonnay in the stable.

• 26:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can we ask you a question to help us answer your question? Have horses gotten faster?

• 27:03Speaker 05

  No.

• 27:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  So they're more inbred and slower, like some royal families we know.

• 27:13Speaker 05

  The Habsburgs, the Habsburgs.

• 27:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, yeah. Was it cheaper? Did the breeding?

• 27:19Speaker 05

  No, it's more expensive.

• 27:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's more expensive to inbreed?

• 27:21Speaker 05

  Yes, because the inbreeding is coming from a small pool of desirable sires, who everyone wants to breed with. So it drove up the price.

• 27:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was there a genetic problem with other big horses at the time? Where it was like, he was the sort of safe tree?

• 27:38Speaker 05

  No.

• 27:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Such a good question, though. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you.

• 27:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how many times did he do it?

• 27:47Speaker 05

  I have no idea. I mean, he had about a 20-year breeding career, maybe a 30-year.

• 27:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how good was Northern Dancer?

• 27:54Speaker 05

  As a sire?

• 27:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  As a horse, as a racehorse.

• 28:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  I wouldn't have asked you that, because I wouldn't have expected you to know.

• 28:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  And now, we're doing a whole different show, which is not the show we intended. Was he a fast-running horse?

• 28:16Speaker 05

  Yes, he won big races.

• 28:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did he win a triple crown?

• 28:19Speaker 05

  He didn't win the triple crown.

• 28:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did he win parts of it? He won a Derby or something?

• 28:22Speaker 05

  I can't remember, but I think so.

• 28:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it something to do with who the owner is? Does the owner, like, has he or she financially cornered that market in some way? That has nothing to do with the horse specifically?

• 28:32Speaker 05

  Sort of.

• 28:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, I think you should put us out of our misery. Why are so many horses inbred now dating back to Northern Dancer?

• 28:42Speaker 05

  1986 tax reform.

• 28:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  I was about...

• 28:46Speaker 05

  That was my next guess.

• 28:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was mine, too. So you're saying that Ronald Reagan is responsible for the inbreeding of all the horses?

• 28:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are you interested in taxes as well?

• 28:58Speaker 05

  I have a background in public finance.

• 28:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. So how did the tax reform of 1986 affect the horse breeding industry?

• 29:06Speaker 05

  Before, you could write off a lot of your capital gains, your long-term capital gains, which is an investment you held for more than six months or a year. But 1986 tax reform wiped that out. So there really wasn't an incentive to hold investments for so long. And breeding a horse and training it to race takes three years before you realize your investment, and it's really risky. So once they changed the tax structure, the benefit of holding a horse for three years went down. So the breeding industry changed. Instead of... Breeding a horse to race, people would breed horses to sell them after one year.

• 29:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  And after one year, you don't know, you don't know how good a horse is going to be.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, you only have two data points. You have who its parents are. And so there's only so many desirable sires, the pool shrank and the prices went up. And you also can sort of start to see muscle tone. And sprinters have better muscle tone. And if you breed two sprinters together, you get a sprinter. And they actually can trace back the concentration of sprinters to Northern Dancer's sprint gene.

• 30:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  So here's my question, if it's gotten more expensive and they've gotten less fast, why isn't there competition to that inbreeding model?

• 30:16Speaker 05

  Well, this is because everyone sells out one year. But there's a hope that this might change because now with genetic tests, they just sequenced the horse genome a couple of years ago. You can maybe at the one-year mark now see how good a racer it actually will be. And the hope is that that will align incentives. So what they say, a horse that can sell and a horse that can race will be the same thing.

• 30:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't, I'm sorry, I still don't understand because obviously tax reform affected, you know, everyone. And obviously, you know, the ultra-rich, there wasn't just one of them. Why would it all come down to this one horse, you know, when probably 30 or 40 people were, you know, major horse people at the time?

• 30:55Speaker 05

  Well, it was just timing. Northern Dancer died in 1990.

• 30:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  He was the guy at that point.

• 30:58Speaker 05

  So he was a pretty popular sire. And so then you had his offspring and everyone wanted to inbreed.

• 31:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alexandra Petry, Alison Schreger has talked to us about tax reform and a change in horse breeding. Anything further you can tell us?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Well, I can tell you that when I Googled Ronald Reagan and horses, I got Mike Pence's tweet that I've often said, "There's nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse."

• 31:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  You do not want to invert that.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  And I also did a little looking into horse names because apparently there's a long list of restrictions for what you can and cannot name a thoroughbred horse. And there is a horse named Allison's Pal, just for you, and apparently a horse named Freakonomics. But they also have a thing that says there's a restricted list where you're not supposed to have suggestive or vulgar or obscene meaning names. But some owners do try to get around that. Like, there's a horse named Hoofhearted, which if you say that wrong, you get a fart joke.

• 32:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, I think we should stop now. Allison, thanks for playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Time now for a quick break. When we return, more guests will make Christian Finnegan tell us some things we don't know, and our live audience will pick a winner. If you'd like to be a guest on a future show or attend a future show, please visit Freakonomics.com. We will be right back.

• 32:31Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 33:16Stephen 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.

• 33:34Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 34:19Stephen 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. Welcome back to Freakonomics Radio Live. Tonight, we are playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know.

• 35:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  My name is Stephen Dubner. Our fact checker is Alexandra Petry, and my co-host is the comedian and actor Christian Finnegan. Before we get back to the game, we've got some freak-windly-ass questions, written especially for you, Christian. You ready to go?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  I see what you did there.

• 35:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, Christian, what percentage of your fellow Massachusetts natives would you say are certified Massholes? Now, wait. It's actually multiple choice. 90%? 95 or 99.5?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  You know, I've never been a big fan of my hometown. I moved here mostly because when I was growing up, everybody was like, "We hate New York City." I was like, "Well, I hate you, so I guess I'm going to New York." So, I... Most of that. If I'd grown up in Cleveland, it would've been the same thing. That's more about me than Massachusetts. Anyway, so I'm going to say 99.5.

• 35:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is the correct answer.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  I have a cousin who's pretty cool.

• 36:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 36:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm glad we won you. I'm glad we got you here. If you were not doing what you're doing now, what do you think you would have done instead?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  I want... I wish I could be a background singer. Like, I don't want to be like a dude on the stage. I just want to be one of the dudes with his finger in his ear in the background, like, "Ooh wee ooh." Like, that's what I want to do.

• 36:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you collect and why?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  I used to collect record store T-shirts. That was sort of my hobby. You know, I do stand-up and I travel around this great nation bringing laughter to dozens.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  And I wouldn't want to buy like vinyl and stuff like that to bring back to New York because it seemed like a waste of space and all that. But I'd want to spend money. And generally, I think if you go to a new city and you find out where a cool record store is, that's going to put you into a cool neighborhood. So I used to, just every time I go to a new city, I'd buy a record store T-shirt. And then I realized that I'm a 45-year-old dude wearing a record store T-shirt. And that's, huh, enough of that.

• 37:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  I was going to ask you to tell us something that you once quit and why. So tell us something you once quit other than buying record store T-shirts, and why, and how it worked out.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Well, I want to say, you know, people... quitting gets a bad rap. Without quitters, stampedes would never end.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  So I'm all for quitting occasionally. Every six months, I pick up my bass guitar and I'm like, "I'm going to get really serious about this." And that lasts about 10 days. And every time my wife comes home and I'm like awkwardly noodling through an old Jane's Addiction song or something like that. And then I'm like, "Oh yeah, this is clearly a waste of everyone's time." So yeah, I quit bass guitar at least 10 times and I'll quit probably five more times.

• 37:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  And finally, if you had a time machine, when would you travel to and what would you do there?

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Maybe to my parents' first date. And I would have been like, "Really, guys? Think about this." "Oh yeah, and the whole kill Hitler thing." Yeah, yeah.

• 38:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh yeah, the whole kill Hitler thing. Ladies and gentlemen, Christian Finnegan. Well done. Thank you.

• 38:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, let's get back to the game. Would you please welcome our next guest, Michael Halsworth.

• 38:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Michael, I understand you are the director of the American Arm of the Behavioral Insights Team, a quasi-governmental outfit in Britain that we all know as the Nudge Unit. So, welcome to America and tell us what you have for us tonight.

• 38:32Speaker 06

  Thanks. So, my question is, generally speaking, how good do you think politicians are at math?

• 38:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, I'm gonna go with the idea that this is a trick question and say that they are fantastic at math.

• 38:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  I bet that they know a lot of mathematical, quick tabulations because, you know, they're looking at poll numbers and they're looking at, you know, demographic numbers and stuff like that. So, yeah, I'm gonna say that they're good at math because so much of their life involves numbers.

• 39:01Speaker 06

  So, I'll give you a bit more to go on. It depends on a few things. What might it depend on?

• 39:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does it depend on their brain? Does it depend on the level of office, like, national versus local? I like that. Thanks. Does it depend on, uh, gender? Okay, Larry Summers.

• 39:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does it have to do with some kind of prior experience?

• 39:31Speaker 06

  I think that's getting closer.

• 39:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are successful politicians better at math than unsuccessful? Like, you know, candidates who win, are they better at math than candidates who lose?

• 39:43Speaker 06

  The prior bit is the, is the more interesting bit here.

• 39:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, I get it. Stephen's more interesting, I get it.

• 39:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  I feel like, uh, every second that goes by, we're getting further from the answer.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  How good they are depends on their political beliefs. It depends on whether the answer is something they want to hear.

• 40:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, so it's basically their priors are strong enough to make them good or bad at math?

• 40:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, so let me give you an example. Take a problem like, say you have some simple figures about two schools, School A, School B, and all these figures do is show you for each school, how many parents were satisfied and how many were dissatisfied. The schools are of different sizes, so you have to do a bit of, like, rough percentages in your head to work it out. But it's, it's pretty simple, like, one is clearly better. Now, when you do this with, in this case, Danish politicians, about seventy-five percent get this right. Which is not too bad, actually. But here's the interesting part. If you then introduce political beliefs, the results are transformed. So, say you call the schools publicly funded and privately funded. If you're on the right politically

• 40:55Speaker 06

  and the numbers are showing that the privately funded school is doing better, then actually you get it right ninety percent of the time. It goes up from seventy-five percent to ninety. If it's not in line with your beliefs, if it's telling you something you probably don't want to hear, you go down to fifty. It's actually the same chance.

• 41:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let me make sure I understand this. You're saying that people who participate in our political system, if they tend to disagree with something, they kind of act stupid? That is so amazing. I've never heard of a phenomenon like that.

• 41:33Speaker 06

  I think what's interesting about this is recently we've got empirical evidence, because we've actually started doing experiments, actually with politicians, that this is the case. But also, here are some other interesting things here. If you give more information, it gets worse. Right? So it's not that people come and change their minds after getting, "Oh, I'm convinced now." Actually, it has a negative effect on the ability to solve the problem. Also, it's not about intelligence. In fact, more intelligent people are actually better at actually not telling the right answer because they work ways of...

• 42:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Finding confirmatory evidence for their argument.

• 42:08Speaker 06

  Exactly. And I've talked about politicians, but it's also officials. So lots of large-scale experiments done with the World Bank and the UK government. Same thing happens with officials. It's not just a political thing.

• 42:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you this. You guys are the nudge people and you want to provide evidence for policymakers to help them do what you think is a pro-social or whatever, good solution. But you're finding that, I guess, partisanship or your set of priors will make that evidence just not be received. Given what you're trying to accomplish, then, how do you nudge the supposed nudgers when they're not capable of figuring things out for themselves?

• 42:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we've recently tried to think through this and we have a few solutions in it. One is like collaborative red teaming, pre-mortems. Pre-mortems, actually...

• 42:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was the name of my band in high school.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  The pre-mortems?

• 43:03Speaker 06

  Premortem is all about the idea that you have post-mortems when something's gone, someone's died or something's gone wrong, and you work out why it happened. The idea of a pre-mortem is you do it before it goes wrong and try and stop it. So you ask a team to sort of imagine the future when your policy has been a disaster, it's been a failure. Why did it happen? You work back from that failure to come up with the reasons why it might have happened.

• 43:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're saying if you sit down a bunch of policymakers, some of whom may like or not like something you're trying to accomplish, and you do a pre-mortem with them collectively, and you say, imagine this project has failed, why do you think it would have failed? That makes them more likely to accept or to figure out the math properly or look at the evidence properly?

• 43:44Speaker 06

  Actually, we have a few solutions for that. One of them is consider the opposite, which is where you take a piece of evidence, it goes along with what you're thinking, and the idea is you say, well, what if the same thing, the same study, had given the opposite answer? And that allows you to understand better, like, the quality of it and put it aside the conclusion. This pre-mortem idea is just basically, we're over-optimistic, we make plans, and how do we adjust for that? So it's like a different solution for a different problem.

• 44:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I ask, how much of the bad calculations are bad faith arguments and how much of it is just sort of lizard brain, this is not confirming what I already believe, so my brain is just going haywire?

• 44:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, really, really good question. So I think there are a few different reasons for it. One is just that it's easier for me to sort of deny that because I don't like it and find reasons why it's not true. And I think also, part of it is, though, the fact that you just, if you get more information, you get worse at it. I think that implies that there is a real denial factor going on here. Because, you know, in some ways, you should respond to more information by getting better at it, but it's just a retrenchment, you know? So it's really inconvenient, I've got to find a way of getting out of this situation.

• 45:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alexandra Petry, Michael Halsworth is telling us that strong political beliefs make us bad at math. Factually, do you find concordance?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  I find so much concordance.

• 45:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  How much concordance do you find?

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Well, I agreed with you, and so I assumed that the math backed up that you were right. So that's the math that I did.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  But I actually, I feel like I know optimism by as well as a chronically late person, which leads me to believe that I can somehow arrive at the same time that I depart. Which I know is not math, but they do say optimism helps you live longer.

• 45:44Speaker 06

  Actually, one thing that I should say about me being on this podcast, it may backfire a bit, because there's evidence that if you go and tell people about these biases, it actually makes it worse. Because what happens is, people are actually quite bad about recognizing their own biases, so they kind of think about their own behavior and say, "Well, actually, I didn't see any evidence of bias there, so I'm fine." And that makes them more biased later. So, I don't know if I should have said all that, really.

• 46:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a good wrinkle. I feel our show is going great tonight, so, Michael Holthwaite, thank you for playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Would you please welcome our final guest tonight, Sidney Dupree. Hi Sidney, it says here you are an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale. You have got our final slot tonight, so make it good. What do you have for us?

• 46:45Speaker 07

  Okay, let's say that two white people walk into a bar.

• 46:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  You mean like Stephen and me?

• 46:51Speaker 07

  Much like this one. But they have very different perspectives about race. One is a bigot.

• 47:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's from Massachusetts, come on, that's not a stretch, people. Okay, for our radio listeners, I'm pointing at Christian.

• 47:10Speaker 07

  So this person thinks that some racial groups are worse than others, and he doesn't think that racial equality is needed. The other isn't the bigot. In fact, he considers himself an ally. He thinks that racial groups should be on equal footing, and he wants to help our society get there. Then, a black person walks into the bar, sits next to them both, and strikes up a conversation. Which white person is more likely to talk down to the newcomer by using words or phrases that signal low status?

• 47:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hmm, interesting. Signal low status about oneself or about the other person?

• 47:50Speaker 07

  Well, that can mean a couple of things, like using fewer words related to agency, or power, or dominance, or just describing yourself in a less competent way.

• 47:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, presenting oneself as less competent.

• 48:01Speaker 07

  Yes, presenting yourself as less competent.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely feel like we're being led. Like, my first impulse would be that the "liberal" would do more talking down. And my guess would be maybe because that person is projecting a racial hierarchy onto this one individual human being. That they're bringing a bunch of political theories and social theories into bear, talking to this one person, as opposed to the bigot, who might just be like, "You're Bill," or whoever. I don't know.

• 48:33Speaker 07

  Okay, maybe.

• 48:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Question. Are either of these white gentlemen a politician?

• 48:42Speaker 07

  They could be. They could be politicians, or they could be everyday people.

• 48:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I liked Christian's hunch of like, a patronizing liberal. I think that's a stereotype that's fairly familiar. I don't know how true it is, I know it's familiar.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Well, I think that part of being a liberal is sort of asking yourself constantly, "Am I being patronizing? Am I being patronizing by asking if I'm patronizing? Am I being patronizing if I'm asking?" Like, it's to go down that wormhole. That's part of being a good liberal, I think.

• 49:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was such a persuasive argument that I'm gonna say it's the liberal. It's the ally and not the bigot.

• 49:17Speaker 07

  All right, well, your instinct is right. My research shows that white liberals are actually more likely to talk down to black people in this way. This is a phenomenon that I call the competence downshift, in which white liberals, presumably trying to get along with racial minorities, actually end up being patronizing towards them by presenting themselves as less competent to black people relative to other white people.

• 49:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Question. Is it intentional?

• 49:44Speaker 07

  I suspect that it is unintentional. If you ask white liberals whether they wanted to come across as less competent with black people than they did with white people, they generally deny it. But I don't have data to speak to whether it's truly unintentional. I do see it as a bit of a strategy, like you said, trying to get along with these people by essentially dumbing yourself down.

• 50:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how do you do this research? I mean, this is hard in the real-world research. So is this something that happens in a Yale undergrad lab with a bunch of Yale undergrads who are...

• 50:16Speaker 07

  I have found this effect in a couple of different and multiple populations. I found the effect among undergraduate students, not necessarily at Yale, among everyday adults from around the country. And I've also done some archival work that does content coding of the speeches delivered by white Democratic and white Republican presidential candidates, and I tend to find the same effect there. The Democrats, but not Republicans, significantly downshift their competence when responding to minority audiences like the NAACP or HBCUs, but not so when they respond to mostly white audiences.

• 50:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  And who would you say, can you just identify someone in the public sphere, whether in politics or not, that you feel sort of embodies this issue? I mean, is it more pronounced among the political class, though, since the stakes are different there?

• 51:06Speaker 07

  That's a good question.

• 51:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, you know, I'm just thinking, like, let's just take a, you know, a fictional candidate, like Schmilleri Schminton, let's just say. I'm just wondering.

• 51:23Speaker 07

  Oh, I see what you did there. I'm not finding a Schmilleri Schminton. I will say, though, I think it's important to consider, okay, why is this something that's happening? And there are really two pieces to this story. It's ultimately an unfortunate story about stereotypes. So white Americans are sometimes stereotyped as being racist, or as being cold, or close-minded. And so going into interracial interactions, they tend to have the goal to be really likeable, friendly. But we also know that black Americans are still stereotyped as being incompetent

• 52:08Speaker 07

  or lower in status relative to whites. So in trying to reject the negative stereotype that describes their own group, they seem to be drawing on negative stereotypes that describe blacks.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Can I add a question? Is this something that can be consciously addressed by a white person? Or if merely by being aware of it, you are then guilty of doing it? Do you know what I mean? Because if I'm thinking, "All right, don't be condescending." It's like, "Don't think of the white elephant." Do you know what I mean? How do you address this without just reinforcing it?

• 52:38Speaker 07

  Well, if it is really a story about stereotypical concerns, the idea that I don't want to look racist, so I'm going to talk down to this person in this way, educating people about it might actually ramp up those concerns in a real dynamic, face-to-face, interracial context, in which case that might actually exacerbate the problem. I have done some pilot studies, look at how we can reverse the effect, but those have basically tried to change the way we think about the black person in interaction. So by characterizing a black interaction partner as being highly competent, you reverse the negative stereotype that depicts black Americans in this negative way.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  I don't know if there's an actual tidy answer to this, but I'm assuming that if I, as a white liberal person, am interacting with a black person for the first time, some of that unconscious condescension might seep through. But theoretically, if I were to then meet that person and see that person like a coworker and I knew them every day, that that would dissipate over time. If so, is there any sort of gauge on how long it takes somebody to stop doing that?

• 53:39Speaker 07

  I don't know that yet. I don't know the endurance of this phenomenon. I would suspect that, again, thinking about the mechanisms that explain this effect, that the need to prove yourself might dissipate. The more someone who's not a member of your own race, the more that person gets to know you, in which case, ideally, the need to...

• 54:04Speaker 07

  Prove goodwill by engaging in this competence downshift wouldn't be a straw.

• 54:09Speaker 07

  That's what I would predict, but I haven't run that study yet.

• 54:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I find the idea of competence downshifting, as you call it, so interesting just because it's a couple of really interesting things at the same time. It's a kind of idea that you are consciously controlling or presenting your competence for one and then also altering it. And I'm just really curious if you've seen it or if it's been seen in contexts that have nothing to do with race. So let's say it's in a work situation and let's say everybody's the same race, let's say everybody considers himself all part of the same in-group, whatever that is. Do you see that still when there's different levels and so on? And if so, does it seem to signify the same thing there as in the situation that you've been describing?

• 54:53Speaker 07

  Well, the initial answer is yes, there is some evidence that suggests that we're really talking about kind of a status differential there. So your idea about there existing this hierarchy and trying to kind of cross these status divides in ways that encourage collaboration and connection and affiliation. I think that's true. There's actually work by Gillian Swensones that suggests that managers talking to workers, for example, they may engage in a similar strategy, essentially trying to dumb themselves down to appear more likeable.

• 55:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  But it sounds like you're thinking that the racial stereotypes are stronger.

• 55:28Speaker 07

  I think that they could be, yes. And in interracial contexts, that's absolutely true.

• 55:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Such an interesting idea. Alexandra Petri, can you look up are liberals actually patronizing, please?

• 55:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  My aunt sent me a great email forward about that.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  I'm going to try to look it up with like extreme competence, though. I find fascinating the whole warmth versus competence scale as a way of interactions, which I feel like does explain every female rom-com protagonist ever.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Thinking more about warmth versus competence, I started thinking about invading Russia in winter because that's the exact opposite of being warm and competent.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  So don't do it. But a fun fact is that Napoleon didn't actually invade in winter, he just forgot to leave "by winter." So that's a somewhat relevant fact.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 56:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is there a polite way to ask people to intentionally downshift their confidence when talking to me? You have no idea the burden of people assuming you know what they're talking about all the time. Sidney, thank you so much for coming to play Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Great job.

• 56:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  And could we give one more hand tonight to all our guests who I thought were just fantastic?

• 56:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  It is time now for our live audience to pick a winner. So, who will it be? Joseph Ledoux from NYU with Everything You Know About Fear Is Wrong. Kate Marvel from Columbia with Good Clouds and Bad Clouds. Alison Schreger, our economist-writer friend with The Tax Policy Behind Inbred Thoroughbreds. Michael Halsworth from the Behavioral Insights team, talking about How to Nudge the Nudgers. Or Sidney Dupree from Yale with Patronizing Liberals. While our live audience is voting, let me ask you a favor. 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, or Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for that.

• 57:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, the audience vote is in. Once again, thank you so much to all our guest presenters. And our grand prize winner tonight, thank you so much for telling us about Wicked Wicked Clouds, Kate Marvel. Congratulations.

• 58:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  And Kate, Kate, to commemorate your victory, we'd like to present you with this certificate of impressive knowledge. It reads in part, "I, Stephen Dubner, in consultation with Christian Finnegan and Alexandra Petry, do hereby vow that Kate Marvel told us something we did not know, for which we are eternally grateful." Thank you so very much.

• 58:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's our show for tonight. I hope we told you something you didn't know. Huge thanks to Christian and Alexandra, to our guests, and thanks especially to you for coming to play Tell Me Something.

• 58:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you so much.

• 58:51Stephen 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 Lepinski, 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.

• 59:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, oh, right. You're right, because I'm the radio professional. Yes, sorry.

• 59:55Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 1:00:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 1:01:04Speaker 08

  Hey listeners, I'm Ash.

• 1:01:05Speaker 09

  And I'm Elena.

• 1:01:06Speaker 08

  And we are so excited to have joined the SiriusXM family.

• 1:01:13Speaker 09

  And you know what? If you want to keep hearing new episodes of Morbid ad-free, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com/podcastsplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. Let's go!

• 1:01:33Speaker 10

  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.