42. The Upside of Quitting

You know the saying: a winner never quits and a quitter never wins. To which Freakonomics Radio says … Are you sure?

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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• 0:42Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'd like you to stop whatever you're doing right now.

• 2:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  No, no, I don't mean like stop so you can give your full attention to this radio show. I mean, honestly, radio is the perfect medium for multitasking, unless maybe you're using a chainsaw or something. What I mean is stop whatever you're doing, as in doing with your life. Maybe it's your job. Maybe it's a relationship that's curdled. Maybe there's some dream project you've been working on so long you can't even remember what got you all heated up about it in the first place. I want to encourage you to just quit.

• 3:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or at least think about quitting. Why? Well, because everybody else is always saying the opposite. Nothing is over until we decide it is. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Sherman, forget it, he's rolling. It's become so ingrained, we don't even think about it anymore. You know, a quitter never wins and a winner never quits. You know what I think when I hear people say that? I think, are you sure?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, the upside of quitting. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 4:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I hang out with a lot of economists. Yeah, I know, you're envious. But there are two things they love to talk about that will help us understand quitting. One is called sunk costs, and the other is opportunity cost. Sunk cost is about the past. It's the time, or money, or sweat equity that you've put into something which makes it hard to abandon. Opportunity cost is about the future. It means that for every hour or dollar you spend on one thing, you're giving up the opportunity to spend that hour or dollar on something else, something that might make your life better, if only you weren't so worried about the sunk cost.

• 4:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  If only you could quit. Let's start with a story of a woman we'll call Ally. Back in 1999, when she was about 25, Ally's life was already what most people would consider pretty successful.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  I was working for a Fortune 500 large company.

• 5:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  What kind of work were you doing?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Industrial computer programming.

• 5:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  What kind of money were you making, then?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  You know, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year.

• 5:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you were living where?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  I was living in Texas.

• 5:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so sixty or seventy thousand dollars as a 25-year-old living in Texas goes a pretty long way.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure.

• 5:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  That sounds pretty good. And how did you like to spend your money, generally?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  I think, like most 25-year-old women, you know, shoes. And, you know, I had a nice place to live and a decent car to drive, so...

• 5:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how did you like the job?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  I never loved it. I am more of a social person, and it required a long, long period of sitting at a computer desk, talking to nobody.

• 5:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  I understand that you ended up quitting this job in your new pursuit. Did you have to take a big pay cut?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  The new job paid way better.

• 6:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Way better, like 50% more, twice as much?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, more.

• 6:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Three times as much, four times as much?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, somewhere around there.

• 6:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Somewhere around four times as much?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe even more.

• 6:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  That means, well, you must have, that means you must have had to work way more hours than you'd worked as a computer programmer then, right?

• 6:22Speaker 02

  This is what was so great about it. I had to work a lot less.

• 6:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  It must have been very, very, very difficult or unpleasant work then?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Oh, no. I, I enjoyed my work and, and I enjoyed my free time and of course the extra money allowed me to do a lot of the things that I wasn't able to do before.

• 6:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, tell me, what was this new work that you found?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  The new job that I, uh, found was I, um, was a high-end escort. They paid somewhere between three hundred fifty to five hundred dollars an hour.

• 6:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Um, i- in retrospect, how do you feel about that decision back then to quit? That solid, steady, fairly good-paying job for the life of a high-end escort?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  You know, of course, it's always scary to leave behind something that's, um, legit and, and go with something that maybe isn't considered that, you know? I really enjoyed it and I know that it was the right decision for me. For me, um, I don't have, uh, I don't have a problem with having sex with strangers, but it wasn't something that I felt was demoralizing and, um, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed my customers. I enjoyed the kindness and I enjoyed every part of it.

• 7:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so we're probably starting off on the wrong foot here. I encourage you to think about quitting and the first person we hear from quit a perfectly good job to become a hooker, but hear me out. My thesis is simple. In our zeal to tough things out, to keep our nose to the grindstone, in our zeal to win, we underestimate the upside of quitting. Now, full disclosure here, I am a serial quitter. I've quit a dream job with the New York Times. I quit my childhood dream of being a rock star. I even quit a religion. We'll get to my quits later. First, here's someone who made headlines when he quit.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Well, I decided, I mean, this was long in coming. I was feeling more and more miserable about not seeing my kids. It was weighing on me to a greater and greater extent. I made the decision that shortly after the election, I would leave. And then, one day, I went into the Oval Office and explained to the President that I just, I just felt that I had no choice. He was very understanding about it.

• 8:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Robert Reich. He was the U.S. Secretary of Labor during President Clinton's first term. He helped put in place the Family and Medical Leave Act. He raised the minimum wage. On his watch, unemployment fell below 5%, the lowest it had been in 20 years. Now, it's hard to say how effective any one person in Washington really is, but Time Magazine named Reich one of the 10 best Cabinet members of the 20th century. And then, Reich quit.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  But then, the question for me was, well, how do I alert my employees and the segment of the public that felt that they were relying on me in some way? How did I handle it publicly? It's a delicate matter. I decided that I would write an op-ed for the New York Times, my personal family leave act. I had been responsible for implementing the Family and Medical Leave Act that actually was passed years before, and it seemed to me important to say to men as well as women that it is okay to leave your job.

• 10:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here, as Reich wrote it, was his dilemma. Quote, "You love your job, and you love your family, and you desperately want more of both." His wife and two teenage sons were back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was, well, he could have been anywhere.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  You know, the other Cabinet officers go to wonderful locations around the world, Paris, and London, and Shanghai, and elsewhere. Secretary of Labor goes to Toledo, Ohio, or maybe St. Louis, if it's really a great day.

• 10:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  The funny thing is, no one believed Reich quit because he actually wanted to spend more time with his family. That's what CEOs say when they're booted. But people, especially male people, don't quit White House jobs to do that. But Reich really meant it. As he saw it, there was a big upside to quitting.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  It was exactly the right move. I think if I had not done it, I would have regretted it all my life. I wouldn't have spent any time. I mean, the boys then would have gone off to college, off to their careers. You know, I just wouldn't have those years. At the same time, I think I was fooling myself a little bit in thinking that young teenage boys would drop everything when their father came home and say, "Oh, Dad, it's great to have you, let's play." No, they were very happy to have me there, but then they said, "But Dad, we're going off with our friends." So I kind of would trail around after them a little bit with my metaphoric tail between my legs and try to say, "Well, wouldn't you like to play? Wouldn't you like, how about going to a baseball game?"

• 11:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Robert Reich quit what was, for him, a dream job: running the Department of Labor of the United States. But tell me the truth, when you were a kid, did you dream of running the Department of Labor? Or maybe you had a dream that sounded more like this.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  You get a phone call that says, "How's it feel to be the next member of the Houston Astros?" And you just get, it's a dream come true. So I ended up signing, got some money to pay for school, and went straight to Martinsville at 18.

• 12:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Justin Humphries. Not long ago, he was considered one of the best young baseball players in the country, a big power hitter from a suburb of Houston. Getting drafted by the hometown Astros was especially sweet, and they threw in some money for education for later. But Humphries wasn't thinking about that. He had one goal. To make the majors. So he went off to the Astros minor league team in Martinsville, Virginia, and then more teams in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Florida, New Jersey, but not, you may have noticed, Houston.

• 12:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  He hit pretty well, but he hurt his wrist and then his knee. And in 2009, at the ripe age of 27, Humphries quit baseball. Now, only 11% of the kids who get drafted each year make the majors, but probably close to 100% of them think they will. Humphries, even before he quit for good, started back in school at a junior college in Texas. He wound up transferring to Columbia University, where he took a sociology course with a professor named Sudhir Venkatesh. You may recognize that name. We wrote about his exploits in Freakonomics. As a grad student in Chicago, Venkatesh embedded himself with a crack gang and got access to their financial records. We wrote about him in Super Freakonomics, too.

• 13:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  He did an extensive survey of street prostitutes. Guess what Venkatesh is studying these days?

• 13:37Speaker 05

  I'm interested in quitting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it's hard for me to do it. But I also think it's just really, really hard the older you get, especially when you start identifying yourself with a job.

• 13:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so you actually looked in a fairly systematic empirical way at baseball players.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  So I actually never thought I would be interested in looking at baseball from the standpoint of a job. And one of my students, Justin Humphries, used to play baseball for the Houston Astros organization, and he was in my class.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  So I was sitting there in this classroom. I started thinking about all the issues that I had seen in independent baseball and affiliated baseball. Guys living check to check, struggling with whether they should go back to school, family life, issues at home. And I thought if I could use some of the things that we were learning in class, talk to some of these guys and find out whether the stories and things that I was seeing and hearing will be reflected in the numbers.

• 14:29Speaker 05

  We followed a sample of the draft class of 2001. And so that's about, you know, it's 10 years. And so we thought that would help us to understand what happens to these folks. Now, this doesn't include the immigrants because they came into the country and they didn't go through the draft to play ball. These are just the people who were out of high school or who were in college, and they were drafted by a major league team. I think one of the most curious things that we find is how much 10 years matter. So if you take two people who grew up in the same circumstances, let's say one played baseball and one didn't, the person who plays baseball is making about 40% less on average 10 years after they enter the game than the person who decides not to play baseball and who just wanted a regular career.

• 15:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so what kind of background is typical for these American-born players that you're tracking?

• 15:18Speaker 05

  The average player probably looks like an upper-middle-class kid who comes out of college or comes out of high school. And when you follow an upper-middle-class kid for about seven to 10 years, they're probably going to make higher than the median average income, they're probably going to live in a neighborhood that's relatively safe, they're going to have a career. Now, when you take the counterpart among the pool that was drafted, that median kid, that kid looks like he's making about $20,000 to $24,000 a year, which is not a lot of money. He's working probably five to seven months playing baseball and then struggling to find part-time work in the offseason. Might be coaching, might be doing some training, might be working on a construction site, might be working in fast food.

• 16:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, Sidhir, you went down to Camden not long ago, right, to talk to some of these ballplayers?

• 16:07Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 16:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, Camden, I believe, is in the Atlantic League, which is an independent league, meaning there's no direct path to a big-league team. A lot of guys on a team like this, they've already been through the minor leagues and either topped out in talent or aged out, right?

• 16:21Speaker 05

  Most of the guys in the Camden River Sharks are probably in their late 20s, and so they've actually had careers in the minor-league system, and it didn't happen for them. And so they come into the Atlantic League thinking that they're still going to be able to make it. You sort of want to be able to tell them, hey, do you know that it's really unlikely that you're going to make it? And the fact is that we learned that very few people, if any, around them are telling them this. So they're not really prepared to talk about it, except some. Particularly, this guy Noah Hall was a really, really interesting person because he actually was thinking that this may be the end.

• 17:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's probably not happening.

• 17:02Speaker 06

  Trying to happen, but I'm still gonna, you know, prepare and everything the same way I would regardless, you know, and because you never know, you still never know. And I mean, the back, way back of the mind, it's still there, you know, I know, I feel like, trust me, I feel like sometimes, hey, if I have a good start to this year, or whatever happens, um, you never know, I could get picked up, and if I went off wherever I went, uh, it could happen.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  Noah is 34, and Noah has been playing 16 seasons, including this one. When you look at him, you probably don't think that he is a baseball player. Um, he looks like a running back. This is a guy who really looks like he's never, ever going to stop playing.

• 17:45Speaker 06

  Some guys just see the writing on the wall, and I just try to ignore the writing on the wall, you know, that's weird. I don't know, I just, I don't want to look back and say that I didn't give it everything I could, and, you know, and, and I think I still could, I could still play another five, 10 years, I think.

• 18:02Speaker 05

  So Noah's from Northern California, and he was raised by his mom, a nurse, and Noah has a wife, Kelly, and they have a lovely son, Isaiah. And Kelly and Isaiah follow Noah around to whatever team he ends up playing for that season. And let me tell you, he's played for a lot of teams over the years. After Noah's practice, I had a chance to go out to dinner with the Hall family and get to know them a little bit.

• 18:25Speaker 07

  I'm the one who's there, like, when he gets out and he has a good game, and/or when he has a bad game. Like, I'm the one who, I go through that kind of emotional roller coaster with him.

• 18:34Speaker 05

  So one of the strange things we found out when we spoke to baseball players is that they have their own language for quitting. They actually quit, they just don't call it that. They don't call it quitting, they don't call it giving up, but they say, you know what, I'm just gonna shut it down for a while.

• 18:49Speaker 06

  Okay, so what does it mean to be a quitter as opposed to, I'm gonna shut her down? Probably the same thing. It just sounds better when you do it. I'm just shutting it down. You know, just like, you're not really doing it, but you, you know, you are. Have you ever wanted to tell him, but you had to hold yourself back?

• 19:06Speaker 07

  To shut it down? All the time?

• 19:09Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. All the time. Especially in the last

• 19:13Speaker 06

  I didn't tell him that.

• 19:15Speaker 07

  Couple of years. Yeah. Especially in the last couple of years. We've really talked. We've actually fought over it. Because it is. It's so hard. Like, I understand his style. Like, being his wife and trying to be supportive. I understand that. It's gotta be really hard, because I do know how much he loves the game.

• 19:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, that's particularly poignant, in my view, because, you know, baseball's one of those rare sports that, because it doesn't have a clock, no game is ever out of reach. I mean, you could be behind 1,000 runs in the bottom of the ninth, and theoretically, you can still come back and win. So that's part of the ethic of baseball is never, never, never quit. Quitting is not an option.

• 19:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, quitting is usually not an option, but, you know, Justin is trying to make it easier for the players to quit and to make that transition. He's been working on building an organization that could help baseball players to get out of baseball when the time is right, and to join that world that the rest of us live in.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  Well, when you're 25, playing an independent ball, making less than $2,000 a month, living off your parents, because you can't financially sustain yourself like that, at some point, you have to say, "Look, I've got, with no degree, I had less than an associate's degree at that point. So, at some point, you have to tell yourself, "I can't do this to myself. I can't do this to my parents. And I can't continue, when I know there's untapped potential, to do other things."

• 20:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Justin Humphries stared right into the dark heart of his sunk costs. All those years he spent pursuing his dream. And then, he made the big quit. We'll hear more from Sudhir Venkatesh later in the show. In a moment, we'll tell you what my number-crunching Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt has in common with a bunch of abs-crunching Navy SEALs.

• 21:23Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 22:07Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 22:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 23:30Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:04Speaker 08

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 24:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So for ballplayers like Justin Humphries and Noah Hall, quitting their athletic dream is a long, painful process. Steve Levitt, he's my Freakonomics friend and co-author, an economist at the University of Chicago, he advocates quitting fast.

• 24:28Speaker 09

  I try to talk my grad students into quitting all the time.

• 24:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Quitting grad school?

• 24:33Speaker 09

  Quitting grad school, yeah. Then, a lot of people, you make choices without a lot of information, and then you get new information. And quitting is often the right thing to do. I try to talk my kids into quitting soccer or baseball if they're not good at it. I mean, I've never had any shame in quitting. I quit economic theory, quit macroeconomics. I've pretty much quit everything that I'm bad at.

• 24:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  You do have this mantra, fail fast.

• 24:58Speaker 09

  Fail quickly, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, if I were to say one of the single most important explanations for how I managed to succeed against all odds in the field of economics, it was by being a quitter. That, ever since the beginning, my mantra has been fail quickly. If I started with 100 ideas, I'm lucky if...

• 25:21Speaker 09

  Two or three of those ideas will ever turn into academic papers. One of my great skills as an economist has been to recognize the need to fail quickly and the willingness to jettison a project as soon as I realize that it's likely to fail.

• 25:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Getting talked into quitting grad school by your 155-pound professor is one thing. How about a Navy SEAL instructor?

• 25:45Speaker 10

  So Hell Week is considered to be the hardest week of the hardest military training in the world.

• 25:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Eric Greitens. He got a PhD in politics from Oxford and then joined the Navy SEALs. He fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. He's now written a book called The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL. Here's how Greitens remembers Hell Week.

• 26:11Speaker 10

  It is a week of continuous military training during which most classes sleep for a total of two to five hours over the course of the entire week. During Hell Week, they have you running four miles in soft sand on the beach, doing two-mile ocean swims, running the obstacle course. They put you in small teams and ask you to land small rubber boats on jagged rocks in the middle of the night. There are all of these tests which are designed to push people to their physical, mental, and emotional limits.

• 26:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hell Week is a useful way for the Navy to determine who's fit to be a SEAL, the kind of person you'd want to send to get Osama bin Laden. Greitens says the instructors hover over you, taunting you, practically begging you to quit, and the vast majority would quit before it was over. That's the point.

• 27:00Speaker 10

  You'd hear the instructors come out on their bullhorns and they'd say, "That's right, gentlemen. This is only the beginning of the second night." And what they did then was the instructors took us out and they lined us up on the beach and they had us watch as the sun was setting. And as the sun was setting, the instructors started to get inside people's minds and they'd say, Tonight's gonna be the hardest and the coldest and the toughest night of your lives. And they'd come over the bullhorns and they'd say, The week it just gets colder and harder and worse and you're only at the beginning. And they really started to get inside people's minds. And I can remember the instructor saying at one point, "If anybody quits right now, we'll give you a hot coffee and donuts."

• 27:43Speaker 10

  Right. And so everybody was freezing. So they set up this little incentive over there. If you wanna go over and ring the bell, you can quit and they'll give you a hot coffee and donuts. And the whole idea is that the instructors really encourage, they want everyone to succeed. But if people are going to quit, they want to encourage them to quit.

• 28:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you quit by the bell, you ring it three times. This tells everyone in earshot that you're done. Grayton says there are two kinds of quitters. The ones who make excuses and the ones who are honest with themselves.

• 28:18Speaker 10

  Yeah, I don't think many people want to say to themselves that they quit. At the same time, we've all failed in our lives. We've all failed at different things in different ways. And I think there's a lot to be said for facing that failure squarely. And the people who I know who were able to admit, you know, "It wasn't the right thing for me at that time." And I went over and I decided to quit. I decided to ring the bell. They're really able to move on from their experience. And I do find that, you know, there's only shame in it if you feel shame.

• 28:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what would you say if I told you there's evidence that quitting is good for you?

• 29:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Physiologically and psychologically good for you?

• 29:07Speaker 11

  People who are better able to let go when they experience unattainable goals, they have, they experience, for example, less depressive symptoms, less negative affect over time. They also have lower cortisol levels and they have lower levels of systemic inflammation, which is a marker of immune functioning, and they develop fewer physical health problems over time.

• 29:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Karsten Roche, no relation to Robert Reich. Roche is a psychology professor at Concordia University in Montreal. In a study of 90 adolescents, he and a colleague found that being able to abandon goals that are essentially unattainable is good for your health. Now, you have to ask yourself, what's unattainable and what's not? When Justin Humphries was 18 years old, the major leagues seemed pretty attainable. By 25, not so much. If I were put through Hell Week, unattainable. According to Roche, each of us encounters an unattainable goal about once a year.

• 30:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Unfortunately, nobody's walking around with a big neon sign urging us to quit. So, this is a puzzle, and we need your help in solving it. If persistence is a virtue, generally, how is a person to know when he or she, under which circumstances, he or she should quit or disengage?

• 30:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's, I would say, the $1 million question. When to struggle and when to quit? And I don't think that there is a general answer to this question. However, people can make two different mistakes in the regulation of their life. They can quit too early, when they should have persisted, or they can quit too late.

• 31:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. No offense, Professor Roche, but it's not very helpful. Sometimes you quit too early, when you should have persisted, and sometimes you persist too long, when you should have quit. Really? That's all you've got? Really? That's all he's got? Which shows, if nothing else, what a true dilemma this is: to quit or not to quit. Let me ask you this, are you much of a quitter?

• 31:26Speaker 11

  Oh, I am bad at quitting. I really have a difficult time. I try to persist as much as possible. Maybe that's why this phenomenon is so interesting to me.

• 31:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, maybe I can help you. Why don't you tell me something that you're involved in, that you think is a goal that may be unattainable? And I'll try to talk you into quitting.

• 31:51Speaker 11

  Well, at this point, I can't think about something that is unattainable right now. But these things, they pop up over time. So...

• 32:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you smoke? Do you smoke by chance?

• 32:07Speaker 11

  Yeah, actually, I'm a smoker, yeah.

• 32:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you want to quit smoking?

• 32:12Speaker 11

  Well, yeah, on some level, but on a different level, I enjoy it very much.

• 32:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  This conversation went on for a while. I'll spare you the details. Let me just say this: either I am incredibly unpersuasive, or Karsten Roche really, really doesn't want to quit smoking, maybe both. He says he wants to quit, but he really doesn't sound like it. It's like a bad Oh Henry story: the professor of quitting who can't quit smoking. You can empathize, can't you? I can empathize.

• 32:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's something you really want to quit. You know you'll be healthier for it, but you can't. You try, and you try, and you try, but you just can't. Until one day, finally, you wake up and you have this vision of what your life would be like without that thing in it, and it's not so terrible. That's how my first quit happened.

• 33:20Speaker 12

  Yep, that's my old band. We were called The Right Profile. Started in college, down in North Carolina. There were four of us. We were pretty bad at first, but we took it seriously, kept at it.

• 33:37Speaker 12

  And that's how I sound when I sing. We worked hard at it because it was incredibly fun, but also because it was our dream. I mean, come on, who doesn't dream at some point of being a rock star?

• 33:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so John, when you hear that song, which you didn't play on this recording, but you played this song, I don't know, how many times do you think you ended up playing this song in your life?

• 33:59Speaker 12

  God, probably, I feel like I'm sure I played it at least 50 times.

• 34:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's John Worster. We called him Chester, but his actual name is John. He was our drummer, awesome drummer. You might know his name. He went on to play with Superchunk for years. He still plays with them and with the Mountain Goats, too. The other guys in the band were Jeff Foster and Tim Fleming. We played all over the place. We made demo tapes. We released a single. And we got a management team in New York City, the same guys who managed The Replacements and The Del Fuegos, which were bands that we loved. And the managers brought us up to New York to play for the major record labels.

• 34:36Speaker 12

  Two months later, I remember playing, going up to CBGB's in New York to play their showcase show for some labels, one of which was Arista. And I remember just in this total dive, CBGB's, there was a table, and on the table was just a card that said, "Reserve for Clive Davis."

• 34:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you remember going up to their office on that trip? And do you remember when he put Aretha on the phone briefly to tell us to sign with Arista?

• 35:04Speaker 12

  Yes. And I remember when everybody kind of walked away, we would go and look through people's Rolodexes to find the personal numbers of Carly Simon and somebody else. I just remember, like, we never used them, but we just thought that was hilarious just to, like, thumb through this Rolodex and find her number.

• 35:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, it's true. Clive Davis, the music industry giant, signed us to Arista Records. It was incredibly exciting, but also weird. We were this little indie, half punky, half-country band, used to doing things the way we did them, and now, we moved to New York.

• 35:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was hard. Maybe we were just a bad fit with Arista. They wanted pop hits, and we didn't seem to have them. And the other thing is, I wasn't really sure I wanted to be a rock star anymore. As bands go, we were pretty straight-laced, no drugs, not much drinking, but the whole lifestyle, especially as we got a little bit more successful and started hanging around with bigger bands, it became less attractive to me. The idea of wanting to be famous, which seemed really fun at first, began to feel unsavory, unhealthy. For six years, this was all I wanted. But one night, I was sitting in my hotel room in Memphis, working on some lyrics in my notebook, and I found myself writing the words, "What do I want?" I thought about it.

• 36:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  I didn't really know anymore. And then, I wrote, "Not this." A couple of weeks later, I quit the band.

• 36:50Speaker 12

  We were playing some songs, and we could just tell you weren't... you were kind of moody, and maybe something was wrong, but we knew what was wrong. We knew that this might be where it parts soon. I think we just, we just kind of felt that. And we played something, and, and I remember Jeff saying to you, like, "What's, what's wrong? Or what's your problem?" And, and I don't know exactly what you said, but I remember something to the effect of... I don't know if I want to do this anymore.

• 37:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  The hardest part was that being in the band wasn't just what I did, it was what I was. Like, Justin Humphries and the other ballplayers, baseball isn't just a thing you do, it's your identity. I'll be honest with you, it was tough. I grieved, I mourned, and I had to start over as a writer. At that point, I didn't know much about economics. I'd never heard of the sunk cost fallacy. But by quitting something I'd put years of work into, that's what I was fighting against.

• 37:48Speaker 13

  One of the most common examples is the Vietnam War, because it was often said that we've invested too much to quit. Well, it's not a good idea to continue to invest if you feel it's a losing course of action.

• 37:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Hal Arcus. He's a psychology professor at Ohio State University. A sunk cost is just what it sounds like: time or money that you've already spent. The sunk cost fallacy is when you tell yourself that you can't quit something because of all that time or money that you already spent. We shouldn't fall for this fallacy, but we do it all the time. Arcus and a colleague learned something that makes falling for the sunk cost fallacy even more embarrassing. It turns out that children don't fall for it, or even animals.

• 38:35Speaker 13

  Your dog's not going to have any rules like, "Oh, I spent a lot of time at that location waiting for him to feed me, and wouldn't want to waste all that time, so I'll go back there and wait," even though it wasn't very successful. Now, humans have these other things that get in the way.

• 38:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  What gets in the way? Apparently, we take a rule we learned growing up, to not be wasteful, and we over-apply it.

• 38:59Speaker 13

  Well, there's that chance that what we're working on actually can be rescued, can be resuscitated. Making the distinction and trying to decide whether this is a truly lost cause or not, I recognize is a difficult decision sometimes, because it's not one of these things where it's clearly one or the other. But after enough negative feedback, it should be more clear then.

• 39:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  I guess with my band, I'd finally had enough negative feedback to quit. I'll tell you the truth, some of the feedback, I still miss.

• 39:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was insanely fun, and a part of me still wishes I'd stuck it out, at least to finish that first record with Arista. But the bottom line, I'm so glad I quit. For me, it was the right move. Much as I miss music sometimes, the upside of quitting for me meant that I got to lead a life more like the one that I envisioned. Coming up, you remember Ally, the high-end escort from the start of the show? Well, she's back and quitting again.

• 40:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is 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.

• 41:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just head to granola.ai/freakonomics. That's granola.ai/freakonomics to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai/freakonomics. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by 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,

• 41:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 42:09Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 42:42Speaker 08

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 42:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  You remember Ally, the Texas woman who quit computer programming to become a high-end escort? Sure you do. At her peak, she was earning about $300,000 a year. Now, Ally, are you still working as an escort?

• 43:06Speaker 02

  No, I decided to get out of the escort business. You know, it was wonderful to me. I enjoyed it. I made a lot of money. But I don't regret quitting either, again. You know, you talk about opportunity cost. And when I went into the escort business, I wasn't dating anybody. I just really wanted to enjoy life and be free. And that's what I did. But, you know, I met somebody and we decided together that, you know, that we wanted a lifestyle that didn't include prostitution. So I let it go.

• 43:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  And besides enjoying life and traveling and spending time with your companion, what else have you been doing?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Well, I went to school and studied economics. But, you know, mostly, I'm enjoying enjoying life, you know?

• 44:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so I realize that Ally isn't your typical prostitute. I mean, first of all, she made a lot of money. And on top of that, she went back to school to study economics. So she really gets opportunity cost. So much so that when the time was right, she quit being a prostitute. Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociologist who talked to fading baseball players for us, he's also been asking prostitutes about quitting. But first, I asked him about something that he recently quit.

• 44:37Speaker 05

  I quit an administrative job that I had at my university for a couple of years. And I probably should have quit after a couple of days.

• 44:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why'd you quit, finally?

• 44:50Speaker 05

  Well, I think I quit because I realized that I was no good at the job. You know, luckily, I have a job as a professor, and so I'm not in the ranks of the unemployed like so many people who sometimes quit jobs that they don't like. So I'm back to doing research, which I love.

• 45:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  You heard me talking to Ally, who kind of falls into that rare category. She's someone who did very, very well and decided to, if not cash out necessarily, at least to stop. But I understand you talked to some people, sex workers, one named Maxine, I believe, who doesn't see that as the way to go. So talk to me a little bit about Maxine and her attitude toward quitting.

• 45:28Speaker 05

  I should say that we're not using the real names of the women that we're interviewed here, but Maxine, as we're calling her, is a really curious person because she really goes against a lot of the stereotypes that we have about the women in sex work. She's been working as a sex worker for 22 years. She laughs as she says, you know, "I don't know if I'm ever going to quit."

• 45:49Speaker 14

  Yeah, no, I never think about retiring. I know many workers who are in their 50s, 60s. I met one in her early 70s who is still working. And in our current society, with the tearing down of our infrastructures and our social security nets... All of us are going to be working for a long time.

• 46:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, Sue, dear, so there are those prostitutes who do quit. And I just wonder, you know, how does that happen? How do you, if you want to go from sex work into the legitimate labor market, how do you go about, for instance, putting together a resume?

• 46:28Speaker 05

  Right. Imagine you've been a sex worker for a year, two years, three years, five years, and you have to account for that time. You have to account for what you've done. Crystal Dubois is the co-director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York City. And actually, one of the services the center provides that Crystal helps sex workers with is getting their resumes ready.

• 46:49Speaker 15

  So it becomes a creative endeavor. So we dig deep, and I say, what have you done? Somebody might say, well, I used to wash cars with my uncle on the weekends. They'll say, oh, no, that wasn't a job. That was just a thing that I did. And I was like, no, we're going to make this sound like you worked, you know, that it's a job. It was a job. You were working. You were showing up. You were doing a good job. And nine times out of 10, the person says, oh, that's lying, and I can't do that. And I have to orient them to saying, look, everybody is beefing up their resume.

• 47:18Speaker 05

  So dealing with the resume is one thing. But when you leave sex work, you also face this issue about taking a huge pay cut. They will probably never make that kind of money again. We spoke to someone, Maya, who is a former prostitute, who now works as a booker, as a manager. She schedules and screens appointments for other sex workers in Tucson, Arizona.

• 47:43Speaker 16

  A lot of women find themselves going back to sex work when they don't really want to. You know, myself included. You know, even booking, I don't really want to book anymore. But it's very, very hard to go from making $300 an hour to making $25 an hour, which would be decent pay in the real world.

• 48:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Sidir, you've talked to baseball players who were reluctant to quit even though they're not going to make the major leagues. You've talked to sex workers, some of whom are reluctant to quit, but some of whom do a really, really good job of it. For those who do a good job, talk to me about how they prepare for it and maybe how what they do, we could all learn from a little bit.

• 48:29Speaker 05

  The first is that, you know, you've got to pull that Band-Aid off and do it quickly. And the ones that are really successful in leaving a trade in which they thought that they were going to be doing for a long time, or that they had prepared for, put a lot of hours in, you know, when they make that decision quickly, they do, they do pretty well. I think this idea of not looking back, I know it's a cliched expression, but so many of the people that are able to move on, just go forward. And the next time I take a job, I'm going to, I'm going to see if the second day, I shouldn't be figuring out how to get the heck out of there.

• 49:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm sure some of you, as you listen to people talk about quitting prostitution, your mind jumps the timeline and you go back and stop these women from becoming prostitutes in the first place. It's like watching a horror movie where you're saying, "No, no, no, don't open the door." But these women did open that door. There are, however, some places that try to get people to quit before they've even started. We sent Stacy Vanek Smith, the reporter for Marketplace, to get the details.

• 49:38Speaker 17

  How much do you like your job? If somebody offered you money to quit, how much would it take for you to do it?

• 49:45Speaker 18

  This job is worth more than a million, definitely. It's just, I love it here. It's very hard to get in, but once you're in, it's just, it's kind of like the Wizard of Oz, we're in the Emerald City, that's what I feel like.

• 50:00Speaker 17

  That's Christina Gomez, and would you believe she's talking about a job that pays just a few bucks above minimum wage? The job is at Zappos, an online shoe store that Amazon paid almost $1 billion for in 2009. At an employee training session in Las Vegas, everybody talked like that. Most of the 35 people in my session were headed to the company's call center, where they'll earn about $11 an hour, dealing with customer questions and complaints. But as it trains these new hires, Zappos also throws them a curveball. Here's Marcela Gutierrez, a trainer with Zappos.

• 50:35Speaker 19

  Remember how we said that we want this to be more than a job for you guys? We want it to be a career. We want it to be a calling for everybody. I'm here to offer you $3,000 if you decide that this is not the right place for you.

• 50:51Speaker 17

  It's known around Zappos as "The Offer." During training, when these new employees are already being paid, Zappos offers $3,000 to any new hire who wants to walk away from the job. It's been going on for a few years, and it's gotten some press, but secret or no, what is the company thinking? I put that question to company CEO Tony Shea, who masterminded the offer.

• 51:15Speaker 20

  It's really putting the employee in the position of, do you care more about money or do you care more about this culture in the company? And if they care more about the easy money, then we probably aren't the right fit for them.

• 51:32Speaker 17

  Zappos talks about its culture a lot, and Shea says that culture is enough to keep people from taking an offer anywhere else or Zappos' offer to leave. And when I say "culture," I am not just talking about free soda in the break room and casual Fridays, as I discovered on the company tour with Zappos supervisor Lauren Becker.

• 51:51Speaker 21

  So we've entered the main building. We can officially kick off our real tour.

• 51:58Speaker 17

  Everybody's wearing sneakers and t-shirts. There are sign-up sheets for picnics and poker groups. Conference rooms are decorated in "Outer Space" and "Under the Sea" themes. It looks like the convergence of, like, seven different holidays.

• 52:14Speaker 21

  It definitely does. You'll see that everybody's desk is decorated different. Their knickknacks are rubber ducky, streamers. It's pretty crazy.

• 52:24Speaker 17

  People are so excited to join the crazy, they turn down the free money. Out of the nearly 2,000 people Zappos has trained, the company says only about 30 have ever taken the offer. Christina Gomez is one of those people. Remember her?

• 52:39Speaker 22

  It's kind of like the Wizard of Oz, where in the Emerald City, that's what I feel like.

• 52:43Speaker 17

  Turns out, a week after I talked with her, Gomez took the offer. I called her up to ask her what pulled the curtain back.

• 52:49Speaker 22

  It was very cool, like, you know, it was the honeymoon period and then, you know, I started getting comfortable with Zappos and then I started seeing maybe some of the things that I didn't really like about it. And so we broke up.

• 53:03Speaker 17

  Gomez says the offer wasn't the main reason she quit. She says the schedule Zappos gave her didn't work with her childcare and another job she has at Apple. But how big of an incentive is the offer? $3,000 equals two months of busting your hump in a call center. The fact almost no one takes it just doesn't make sense. It does, however, make sense to Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke who studies decision-making. He says that easy money is actually not so easy.

• 53:33Speaker 23

  The reason that this trick works is that people spend 10 days, they become a part of the family.

• 53:39Speaker 17

  Zappos is all about making trainees feel like family. There are happy hours and scavenger hunts and team projects, and after all that, and before you've actually started working, you get the offer. It's a limited time thing, and when it expires, that's when its real power kicks in, says Ariely.

• 53:56Speaker 23

  There's something called cognitive dissonance, that says that if you've acted in a certain way, over time, you're going to overly justify your behavior. So the next morning after you rejected the $3,000, you're going to wake up and say, my goodness, I really must love this company if I rejected this amount.

• 54:12Speaker 17

  Translation: We like suffering for things we love. We like it so much that if we suffer for something, we will actually decide we must love it. Ariely says fraternities and sororities work like this, when they make rushers stand in the rain or run naked across campus, turning indignity into allegiance. Militaries, sports teams, religious cults, all use this tactic too, combining our intense desire to belong with our intense desire to justify our actions. The result? A group of employees who won't even quit if you pay them.

• 54:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Marketplace reporter Stacy Vanek Smith. Zappos does sound a bit like a religion, and quitting a religion is never simple. My parents were a pair of Brooklyn-born Jews who, before they met each other, both converted to Roman Catholicism. This was in the mid-1940s. My parents were in their 20s. As you can imagine, this conversion didn't go over so well with their families. My dad's father declared him dead, sat shiva for him, never spoke to my father again. So I grew up in a very devout Catholic family, the eighth and youngest kid. And then, when I was in my 20s, I quit Catholicism, went back to Judaism.

• 55:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  My mother took it hard, but not nearly as hard as my dad's father took it when he converted. Anyway, I've always been pretty interested in religious quits.

• 55:43Speaker 24

  My name is Saloma Miller-Furlong. I am the author of a new memoir called Why I Left the Amish.

• 55:51Speaker 25

  I am Emma Gingrich, and I go to college at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. And right now, I'm also working on finishing up my book and getting it published.

• 56:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what is your book called, Emma?

• 56:05Speaker 25

  Runaway Amish Girl.

• 56:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  I wanted to speak to Emma Gingrich and Saloma Furlong because quitting a religion like the Amish seems especially traumatic, with the religion, family, and community all mixed up. When you look back at the decision you made, which was a big one, to quit your religious lifestyle and religious community, talk to me about the price that you feel you paid or the benefit that you gained.

• 56:38Speaker 24

  When I think of costs, I think of the things I miss. And definitely, the community atmosphere of knowing your place in the community is part of the costs. You know, the church gatherings where they sing the Amish chants, and feeling like there's a sense of legacy almost in that.

• 57:19Speaker 24

  But the upside of it is, there have been so many times, so many moments in my life, when I knew that quitting the Amish was the right thing to do. One example was on May 29th of 1982, when I walked into the church sanctuary at Christ Church Presbyterian on the Redstone campus, and saw my husband-to-be standing there in a blue tuxedo, waiting for me to come up to the altar. That moment encapsulated just how I was doing the right thing.

• 58:03Speaker 24

  That was literally the happiest day of my life.

• 58:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Emma, if you could just describe as briefly as you want, kind of your childhood, you know, your family, growing up, and then getting to the point where you decided to leave, and why and how that happened?

• 58:19Speaker 25

  My family used to make baskets, and we would take them every Friday and sell them at a little town, close to a busy highway, and sometimes it would be me and my sister. We did a lot of things that we weren't supposed to do, but that was, around 15 was the time when I started thinking about how it would be if I would leave the Amish. You know, sitting there selling baskets, you see a lot of people coming, and we used to look at cars, and look at all the different colors, and try and pick which one we would want, if we would ever leave the Amish.

• 58:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did it feel like you became a different person? Are you the same person who just needed a change of scenery? And I guess what I really want to know is, what was the cost to you of quitting the Amish? What were the downsides, and what were the upsides?

• 59:15Speaker 25

  Well, the downsides would be leaving the family, and knowing that nothing's going to be the same again when you go back home to visit. And the upside is, yes, you are a different person. You become... To me, I became somebody else, which was good for me.

• 59:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  How old are you now?

• 59:36Speaker 25

  Twenty-three.

• 59:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  And do you have regrets about leaving?

• 59:40Speaker 25

  No.

• 59:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Zero?

• 59:42Speaker 25

  Not at all.

• 59:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Saloma Furlong is in her 50s. She now lives in Massachusetts. Not long ago, she did an informal survey of the Amish community where she grew up, in Geoga County, Ohio. Out of about 2,500 households, she estimates that some 170 individuals left the community. So quitting isn't common, but it's not like it never happens either. Furlong says that her father was mentally ill and violent, and that ultimately is what led her to leave.

• 1:00:13Speaker 24

  My life was so unbearable that the fear of the known was greater than my fear of the unknown. So for me, it's a matter of, are you happy the way you are? And if not, then quit what you're doing. It's that simple for me.

• 1:00:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  You make it sound so easy. I'm wondering if you quit other things in life besides the Amish?

• 1:00:36Speaker 24

  Oh, yes. Do you want me to get started?

• 1:00:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yes, please.

• 1:00:40Speaker 24

  I've quit jobs that were not satisfactory. I quit my bakery business when I realized after 10 years of punching bread dough that it was never going to talk back to me and it was intellectually a desert. Let's see, what else have I quit? I quit a church community one time. So, yes, I'm a serial quitter. And it's worked for me. What can I say?

• 1:01:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're a gold medal quitter. You're not just a serial quitter. You're a champion. So, but let me ask you this. In retrospect, were all of these quits good?

• 1:01:15Speaker 24

  Yes.

• 1:01:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  They were. All right. So you really need to be like a quitting coach, don't you? You need to travel around the world and tell people, look at this situation. Why are you still in this? Why are you stuck in this? Do you think that's a future calling of yours, perhaps?

• 1:01:29Speaker 24

  Somebody just asked me that the other day about, you know, being a counselor. And I said, no, it's not something I want to do.

• 1:01:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because you just quit, anyway.

• 1:01:41Speaker 24

  You might be right.

• 1:01:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  A quitter never wins and a winner never quits. In 1937, a self-help pundit named Napoleon Hill included that phrase in his very popular book, Think and Grow Rich. Hill was inspired in part by the rags-to-riches industrialist Andrew Carnegie. These days, the phrase is often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the legendarily tough football coach. What a lineage. And it does make sense, doesn't it? Of course, it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort and, for lack of a more scientific word, stick-to-it-iveness to make any real progress in the world.

• 1:02:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  But time and effort and even stick-to-it-iveness are not in infinite supply. Remember the opportunity cost. Every hour, every ounce of effort you spend here cannot be spent there. So let me counter Napoleon Hill's phrase with another one, certainly not as well-known, something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say. "Your choice is your talent." So choosing the right path, the right project, the right job, or passion, or religion, that's where the treasure lies. That's where the value lies. So if you realize that you've made a wrong choice, even if you've already sunk way too

• 1:03:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  much cost into it, well, I've got just one word to say to you, my friend. Quit!

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. Our show is produced by Chris Neary with help from Diana Wynn, Susie Lechtenberg, Ellen Horn, and Peter Clowney. Colin Campbell is our executive producer. This episode was mixed by Dylan Keith with help from Michael Rayfield. Special thanks to Sudhir Venkatesh, Justin Humphreys, and Donald Cravill. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast at iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 1:04:29Stephen 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 in 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.

• 1:05:00Stephen 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.

• 1:05:37Speaker 26

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• 1:05:50Speaker 27

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