681. How to Host a Talk Show, with Dick Cavett | Freakonomics Radio

Stephen Dubner had an idea for a new project. So he drove to Connecticut and knocked on the door of the master. Dubner’s new TV talk show Better in Person launches July 14 on the Freakonomics YouTube channel. You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-host-a-talk-show-with-dick-cavett/ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: https://stephendubner.substack.com/subscribe

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

• 0:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  I have a confession to make. Back in 2020, when COVID hit and the world shut down, I saw a silver lining. The death and illness and uncertainty, those were all horrible. Early on, we had a bad COVID case in my family and things were touch and go for a while. But, once we got through that, I was excited about spending every day in solitude. That's just the way I'm built. I've been a writer since I was a kid, and writing requires you to be comfortable with long hours all by yourself. So, I just focused on making the best Freakonomics episodes we could, and I did all my recording from a makeshift home studio. And for a while, this isolation did make me happy. There was no obligation

• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  to go anywhere or see anyone. But the happiness faded. And I thought of something the economist Gary Becker once said. Becker had studied the economics of addiction, and when he was asked to name the most addictive thing on the planet, Becker's answer was "people." I never would have thought of that, but it makes sense. We are a social animal. We need other people the way we need food and water. So, when the COVID restrictions lifted, I decided to get out of my home studio and take Freakonomics Radio on the road for some live shows. Those shows were fun, but I didn't find the connection I was looking for. When you're having a conversation on a big stage with 1,000 people in the audience, the tendency

• 1:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  is to scale up. Conversations get broader, but not deeper. There's more performance and less intimacy. But then, one night in San Francisco, just before curtain time, I was looking through a big overstuffed bookshelf in the green room, and I found an old biography of the talk show host Dick Cavett. I'd seen bits and pieces of The Dick Cavett Show over the years, and these days, you can find it on YouTube. He is smart, funny, and just the right amount of weird. So, I decided to steal the Cavett book. I finished it on the plane home, and I fell in love. Not with Dick Cavett, per se, but with the idea of making some kind of a TV talk show myself, with a different kind of conversation than

• 2:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  we have on Freakonomics Radio, and a wider set of guests. And rather than filming it in a big theater, we would make it in my living room. Because I was looking for connection, not spectacle. It wasn't long before this show had a name: Better in Person. If Freakonomics is about how things work, Better in Person would be about how people work. I didn't want celebrities necessarily, or people promoting their latest projects. I just wanted people who have done remarkable things and are willing to think out loud. I wanted to let the conversation be steered by curiosity, mine and theirs. We would talk, we'd eat and drink, we'd get out and play, maybe make some trouble together. And now that YouTube has become the world's

• 2:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  TV, that's where we would put this show. So, yeah, all of that actually happened. Took us about a year and a half. Next week, Better in Person will launch on the Freakonomics YouTube channel. Trailer is already up. Go check it out and subscribe. And today, on this episode of Freakonomics Radio, I pay a visit to the man who accidentally inspired the whole thing.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  My name is Dick Cavett, and I'm known as a talk show host.

• 3:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dick Cavett is 89 years old, and he lives with his wife in an old mansion on a hilltop in southwestern Connecticut. I told him my plan for Better in Person.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Well, I hope you do it.

• 3:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're just saying that, aren't you?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I just wanted to make your friends laugh.

• 3:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dick Cavett was certainly better in person. I've come to think that most of us are. My conversation with Cavett starts now.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 4:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Dick Cavett Show ran on ABC from 1968 to 1975. Later, there were other versions on other networks, but it was the ABC period that made his reputation. He spoke with musicians, athletes, artists, political figures, public intellectuals. Having attended Yale, Cavett was sometimes called an intellectual himself.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Which shows that people don't know what an intellectual really looks like.

• 4:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here is how Cavett is described in a 1972 New Yorker profile. Off-camera and in repose, Cavett so remarkably resembles his on-air self: cool, self-contained, poised, judging, that he may be the first show business character who is always off, always himself, in public or in private. He now spends most of his time in private. His wife, Martha Rogers, earned a PhD in marketing and worked for years in consumer strategy. Their Connecticut mansion was built in 1912. It's got acres of wood paneling and a ballroom.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Houdini's brother owned it. May have been other owners, but he's the known one. And Houdini came here, and kids would sneak in the bushes and watch him working on his underwater escapes in the swimming pool.

• 5:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  They got kicked out a couple of times, I've heard. By the way, my wife, who is a brilliant finder of things, found this house. Apparently, nobody wanted it. It's a great place. She's, um, is it corny to say the best thing that ever happened to me? It might make her blush, so you better keep it from her. It's nice when that happens. Better not to marry someone who's the worst thing that ever happened to you, as some of my friends have.

• 6:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  The reason I'm here, if you don't mind me saying, is twofold. One is, I've always been a fan, simple as that.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Listen, don't be ashamed of that.

• 6:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  It's my advice.

• 6:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  I appreciate it. And the other reason is, it's a little embarrassing to say, but I'm gonna just tell you, which is that I've done a few things in my career. I've done music, but I've been a writer for a long time, then I started making radio. And I never liked TV.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  You mean, as a kid, as a viewer, or ever?

• 6:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  No, no, I mean, I liked it, like, making it.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see.

• 6:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  When Freakonomics came out, I was invited to do a lot of TV as a guest. And I didn't enjoy it so much, because when you don't control it...

• 7:04Speaker 01

  I can understand that.

• 7:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're just there like a circus animal. Just show up for eight minutes and talk about this.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I see that.

• 7:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I certainly would never would have wanted to have a TV show. But then, I started watching your show again, thanks to YouTube, really. And your channel on YouTube is so well-positioned.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know how much I'm on YouTube.

• 7:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can't go on YouTube without finding Dick Cavett.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Really? Let's do it now. It's weird for me to see stuff that way, because often, I have no memory of ever doing that. Or, I think, why the hell didn't I say this? Or, I hope I'm about to say, and I do. So, it's a hodgepodge of emotions for me.

• 7:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  That must be a good feeling when you now are thinking, I wish or hope he will say X, and you do.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And I do. That's a good feeling. The opposite is a bad feeling.

• 7:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, here's the thing I really like.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're interviewing people plainly. You're asking questions. That's what an interview is.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  I don't think of it as an interview in the sense that you interview to elicit facts. Somebody said, "It's a mistake to call what Cavett does 'interview' because, gratefully for us, it's conversation."

• 8:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  It feels to me like we're at the fun end of the table at a great dinner party.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  I like that. Remind me of that.

• 8:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  One problem is that I come from journalism, not comedy. And I'm not opposed to being funny, but I'm not professionally funny.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  You don't try to be funny?

• 8:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do I try to be funny? Doesn't everybody try to be funny?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're right. People hope there are. People trying to be funny can be one of the worst things, except murder or somebody stepping on a mine.

• 8:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  How much did you care about the response to a particular show? If you thought a show was great and people didn't respond, or vice versa, did you care?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  That never was really an issue.

• 9:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  They were all fantastic, you're saying?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Well, one wasn't, but I don't want to talk about it. I'm the only person I know of who had a guest die on the show.

• 9:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cabot is referring here to a 1971 taping with Jerome I. Rodale, a publisher and entrepreneur who championed organic food. The episode never aired, but Rodale's onset death became late night legend.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale? Is one of my immortal remarks.

• 9:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wait, you said that?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, because he did what guests often do. We'll go, oh, sorry, Dick. What? They find it funny. And sometimes it is to snore. And he snored in reality, I realized right after having said, are we boring you, Mr. Rodale? And I remember thinking, I wish I weren't the one in charge here. What do I do now? And what did I do?

• 10:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  You wrote that you took his pulse, you acted as if you were taking his pulse, but you didn't actually know how to do that.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  I didn't know where the pulse was supposed to be or even where it was for sure. Yeah.

• 10:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  But he was dead.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  And then I said, is there a doctor in the audience? Later, when I met Catherine Hepburn, she said, I want to know everything about the man who died on your show. And I said, why do you suppose I hesitated on the word? And said, is there a doctor in the audience? When the well-known phrase, is there a doctor in the house? Is there a doctor in the house?

• 10:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  I wondered that, too. What was that about?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  She said, well, you knew that is there a doctor in the house? Was such a cliched line and often used in humorous settings. You knew that would get a laugh.

• 10:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  The actress Catherine Hepburn refused interviews for most of her life, but she once came on Cabot's show for a two-hour conversation. There's a nice bit of tape from before the interview when Hepburn is checking out the set and finds it lacking.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  And is, can we have a stationary table? Can we have a table that's, nobody answers in this business?

• 11:17Speaker 04

  Can we get a table with, that doesn't wobble here? Sure. Right now, you want it?

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, nail it down. That carpet, if anybody can survive that carpet.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  You can.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  We're doing well.

• 11:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Someone once wrote that the reason you're so good at this is because you weren't insecure. The way that my mind took that is if a person is secure in themselves, you don't need to tear down other people. You can really try to draw out what makes them excited or.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  I can identify with that.

• 12:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think of yourself as performing when you're doing your show? Or mostly natural?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  I guess, no, I don't think I think of it as performing. That would be odd to think. No, it just got easy to do the show.

• 12:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were you able to be yourself?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  How long did it take you to get there? Because coming up as a writer and then a stand-up, when you started hosting, did it take you a long time to feel like, I know how to do this?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  It took a while because various things like my friend Porterfield would say, you're sticking too close to your notes. Sometimes you don't seem to have heard what the other person said.

• 12:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  You think he was right?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I could see it. There was times when I really wasn't listening. And someone would say, you know, I just got over a very serious illness. And I would say, do you have any hobbies? I mean.

• 12:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  How would you prepare for a taping?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Well, I had four talent coordinators, a title somebody thought up for bookers. And they would get with the guest if the guest would agree to it, or they'd talk on the phone with them or something.

• 13:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you'd get notes?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  She's in town for such and such. She's worried about not having the right clothes for an opening night. Or he's, there'd be maybe 10 things that you can talk to them about. Often I used all of them. Often I used some of them and sometimes none of them. The minute you start with some people, you know, there's going to go great. And it does. And you don't need your notes.

• 13:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  How much do you just try to let your brain be present in the moment versus draw on your preparation?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  That's a good question.

• 13:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  I would think that it's better when you're just ziggy zag, snap, be snapping. Yeah?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first time I did a show, looked at the notes afterwards of three pages of maybe six things or eight each per page. And I hadn't used any of them. I thought, that is important. And it was, I could have used them and they'd have been fine. But I didn't need them for whatever lucky reason.

• 14:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, once you realized that you were good at it like that.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a big thing.

• 14:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did that change how you prepared then?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Knowing that I could do a show without them was a nice thing. People mentioned one particular show recently by chance that some columnist, somebody sent this to me, said, if in your life, you only are able to watch one full talk show, just the one episode, be sure it's Cabot's Mailer Vidal show. There's nothing like it.

• 14:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  I would agree.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  I'm gonna have to watch it again. I have to see it a couple of years ago, and I just thought it was great.

• 14:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  And there was that gal in the middle.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Janet Flanner, the great Janet Flanner.

• 15:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Janet Flanner was a legendary Paris correspondent for The New Yorker. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal were two of America's biggest novelists at the time, with egos to match. The night began with Mailer refusing to shake hands with Vidal. Mailer had recently published a provocative book on the women's liberation movement called The Prisoner of Sex, and Vidal had given it a negative review. Here is some tape from that show. You will hear Cabot first, and then Mailer, and later Janet Flanner and Gore Vidal.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  You will admit that you were accused of being a chauvinist of the worst kind.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  Well, I know, but that's what's wrong, that's what's wrong with women's liberation, which is it's a new and it's a young movement.

• 15:45Speaker 06

  Oh, for goodness sake, now let's not go back on to that.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  I'd love to talk about it for two minutes every day.

• 15:49Speaker 06

  Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. We've heard it all.

• 15:53Speaker 05

  It's just nonsense. It's just ridiculous. You know, if I have anything at all, I have a complicated mind. In fact, I have a mind so complicated that Gore has said with some justice that my style is getting unreadable. You know, it's one thing in his critique that I agree with. My style's getting difficult. You know, it's hard when you have a lot in your head to write something. It's true. Gore has never encountered this problem.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  What did you say? I wasn't listening, Norman.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  What was that? Small mind, no matter.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  No, don't be autobiographical all the time.

• 16:26Speaker 06

  Well, well, well.

• 16:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, how are you feeling when the two of them? I mean, it was mostly Mailer going at Vidal. Vidal gave back once he was getting punched in the nose. What are you thinking during that?

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I don't know. I just, I remember thinking, this is gonna be good viewing. I don't think I thought during it.

• 16:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Cabot picked a side. He, too, thought that Norman Mailer was being an ass.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Let me turn my chair and join these three.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Perhaps you'd like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  I loved it when Mailer, what was his straight line? Dick, why don't you just read the next question off the question sheet?

• 17:24Speaker 05

  Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask a question?

• 17:28Speaker 01

  And that, for whatever reason, caused me to say, why don't you fold it five ways?

• 17:34Speaker 04

  And put it where the moon don't shine.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  This has been much quoted, almost always wrong. People say the sun, which is no good at all.

• 17:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Where did that phrase come from? Did you make it up on the spot?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  I don't know where I ever heard that.

• 17:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I saw it, I assumed it must have been some old saying, but I couldn't find anybody else saying it.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  I can't imagine. I know it had occurred in my life before that, possibly years earlier. And it just came to the surface involuntarily. But that was a wonderful moment that I'm very grateful he caused.

• 18:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, I asked Dick Cabot why he was so beloved.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  It must be my lovability. Is that a good guess?

• 18:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We will be right back.

• 18:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dick Cavett grew up in Nebraska, the only child of two schoolteachers. His mother died of breast cancer when she was 36 and he was 10. "Her death made me feel betrayed by life," he later wrote, "and embarrassed." When I read that line, I stopped. My father had died when I was 10, and I too felt embarrassment. So there is at least one thing that I have in common with Dick Cavett. His father remarried another schoolteacher and Dick got on with his life. He was good at many things. School, for sure, but he also played music, did magic. He competed in gymnastics, where his specialty was the pommel horse.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  You can't put the pommel horse aside lightly. Not only was I the state champion in the pommel horse, which is, and this is a fact, not an opinion, the hardest piece of gymnastics apparatus. I didn't pick it because it was the hardest. It was the only thing we had. We had some mats and a pommel horse. Everybody hated it and I rather liked it and kept going with it.

• 19:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cavett studied English and drama at Yale and then got a job at Time Magazine as a copy boy. He read that the Tonight Show host, Jack Parr, was unhappy with the material his writers were feeding him. So Cavett wrote some fresh jokes, snuck backstage at the Tonight Show and gave his jokes to Parr. That is a very Cavett move. From an early age, he was good at getting backstage. Parr used some of Cavett's material and then he hired him. Once Cavett got into television, he stayed with Jack Parr for a while and then Merv Griffin, Jerry Lewis and Johnny Carson. He did some stand-up comedy on his own. He started to develop a voice and a reputation. In 1968, ABC gave him a morning show.

• 20:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  He moved to prime time and then late night. At its peak, The Cavett Show had millions of nightly viewers and Cavett became a celebrity himself. If TV hadn't worked out for you, what do you think you would have done?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  I have no idea. What would I have done?

• 20:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you have many skills?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  I wouldn't have taught school, although I might have enjoyed that. It never occurred to me that television wouldn't work. Something just seemed to happen. I mean, it isn't that I didn't fear of. I had no confidence that it was going to go big. Go big. When a master uses the English language, it's a thrill, isn't it? Go big.

• 21:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Correct me if I'm wrong, but you were, are kind of a unicorn, good at a lot of different things. You were smart. You were funny. You were a good athlete. And I'm curious if you ever felt you needed to hide your light under a bushel.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  What would that consist of?

• 21:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were you ever afraid of being your truest self because you thought that would make you a little less popular? He's too good at these things. Did you ever?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  That was never a concern, no.

• 21:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  I know that Groucho encouraged you to go the Yale-Nebraska.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yes, he did. Groucho had sent me a letter and he said, "I saw you on Merv the other night, and I think you've hit a goldmine with the idea of a kid from Nebraska, the rustic coming to glamour in the big city and all that stuff. Keep with that."

• 22:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you play it up more after that?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I certainly was glad to hear it.

• 22:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cavett had first met Groucho Marx at the funeral for the playwright and humorist George Kaufman. Cavett supposedly told Groucho, "I'm a big fan," to which Groucho supposedly said, "If it gets any hotter in here, I could use a big fan." Cavett did take Groucho's advice to cultivate the persona of a small-town kid doing his best in the big city. Groucho became a regular on Cavett's show and they had a great rapport. You can hear it in this clip from 1969.

• 23:01Speaker 07

  How have you been? Good. I've been fine. It's nice to see you in New York. Glad you're back on the air and the proper time, too. Yeah. Not at 4 o'clock in the night.

• 23:14Speaker 07

  Whenever I saw your show last year, I was eating oatmeal.

• 23:22Speaker 07

  That's what they called prime time in California.

• 23:27Speaker 07

  That isn't all they called it either.

• 23:31Speaker 07

  You look fine and this show's going to be a big hit because you're on at 10 o'clock at night. Right. A lot of people are going to watch it. I'm on at 9:00 Central time. Well, I wouldn't go that far.

• 23:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  How much did you absorb Groucho? Or was this you before Groucho?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  He's a big influence. Isn't that something? Imagine in the Grand Theater in Grand Island, Nebraska, seeing my first Marx Brothers movie. If anyone had said that one guy and you were going to spend part of your life together, I would have said, "You're full of crap."

• 24:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  You had good mentors, good rabbis, people who really loved you and wanted you to succeed.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  For example?

• 24:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, Jack Parr.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Groucho. It seems to me, at least, and--

• 24:25Speaker 01

  It's a good point.

• 24:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm curious why you were so likable. Usually the incumbents want to keep the young people down. Everybody seemed to love you.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  It must be my loveability. Is that a good guess?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  I can't answer that.

• 24:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you look at the categories of guests you had, a lot of writers, amazing interviews with musicians and performances and athletes.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, isn't that interesting? I didn't have any interest in rock, but Janis Joplin was such a good guest. And the fact that she came on, and she was so good, that other rock people thought, "Well, maybe Cavett could handle us. He seems like such a square, but maybe..."

• 25:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were you as square as you seemed, or was that an act?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  No. Can you come back to me with that question in a week?

• 25:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  There must have been guests that you wanted on the show that you couldn't get, yes?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Mike Nichols almost did it. I asked him a second time and he said, "I'm on my way to London for a couple of weeks, but when I come back, maybe I'll be in the mood to share and share."

• 25:48Speaker 01

  But it never happened. I think it's my fault. I didn't follow it up. I always got along with Sinatra whenever we were thrown together at something. And I think, again, I didn't dress hard enough. I think we would have had such fun.

• 26:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Could you always make the show you wanted to make? Or did you have the suits telling you some things?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  I could, but what happened the very first show, I had Gore Vidal, Muhammad Ali, and somebody else taped it for a week later when it was going to be debut. And I learned in that week that they wanted me to tape a different first show. And I thought, "Well, that show seemed pretty good. Everybody liked it." And I said, "Well, I don't see any reason to change it. What's wrong with it?" And they said, "Well, nobody gives a damn what Muhammad Ali and Gore Vidal think about Vietnam."

• 26:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I said, "Nobody? I bet I could come up with two or three people at least who would be interested. What are you talking about?"

• 26:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did they mean that nobody cared? Or they mean that that's something we want to stay away from?

• 27:01Speaker 01

  They were afraid of the subject. Chicken shit afraid of anything having to do with that disastrous war. "When are you going to stop being chicken shit?" I said to a guy in a nice suit.

• 27:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what happened?

• 27:17Speaker 01

  And I said, "I don't agree to that." And they said, "Well, you're going to have to do it." So they ran a different show because I had already done five before the first one. And then somewhere semi-buried by being in the second week, they ran that one. People sent me critics' comments from around saying, "Cavett really came to life on this show. This is what the show ought to be." And I made sure that all the assholes at ABC saw that.

• 27:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Not many episodes survive from that 1968 season and we couldn't track down the one that Cavett was talking about with Muhammad Ali. But Cavett did become friendly with Ali and he was a guest on Cavett's show 14 times. Here is Ali in 1970, talking to Cavett about the possibility of going to jail for draft evasion.

• 28:14Speaker 08

  White America right now is spending $30 million a day in Asia. Black and white boys are dying unjustly for nothing, just to free somebody else. So why should I worry about going to a little old jail to free my poor people who's been catching hell here for 400 years?

• 28:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you were making your show now with the political moment that we're in, what would you do?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  I don't know. I never think of that now. The political stuff was often very problematical. Problematic was a problem. Shaved that down.

• 28:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sounds like you didn't love the network people.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  There are some. They're all right.

• 29:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  He said unenthusiastically.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  They aren't qualified to do what they feel they're qualified to do, which is tell you how to do the show.

• 29:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  That makes me wonder if one were going to start a show today, that you'd want to start a show without having any suits around. Fund it yourself, do it yourself. Would you endorse that?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Definitely. Yeah. You know what you're doing and they don't. And they don't know why it works when it works and when it doesn't. They don't have any idea. They don't know anything about what it feels like to be sitting there doing it. And their advice is without worth. And not only that worthless.

• 29:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Say what you really mean. But my sense is that whether it's TV, music, publishing, it seems that the executives are very good at looking at what's already succeeded and saying, hey, let's do something like that. As opposed to let's try something new and interesting. Now, you were pretty new and interesting.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  When they say, or you're thinking, why don't you as good as so and so? Violence can happen almost.

• 30:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what's it feel like when a given network says, Dick, we thank you for your service, but we're putting on, you know, a dog show in your slot?

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Well, that's happened. Yeah. How many times have I been canceled? Four?

• 30:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  The list of networks you've worked for is not short.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  I'm always astonished. A few years ago, when I for the first time saw somebody write, he did this and then he did it there and then he was on CNBC. Is that true? That startled me.

• 30:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Over time, Cavett did some version of The Dick Cavett Show for ABC, CBS, PBS, USA, ABC again, CNBC, and TCM. Roughly 2,000 hours of his work are archived at the Library of Congress. And again, there is a lot on YouTube. When you watch, you can feel not only how good Cavett could be at his best, you could also feel how central he was to the cultural conversation at the time. That brought an enormous amount of pressure and ultimately a deep depression.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  It's the worst agony designed for man.

• 31:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll hear about that after the break. I am Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio with Dick Cavett.

• 31:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked Dick Cavett what it felt like when he was at the top of his game, but then every night had to do it again.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  I just remember thinking, you've got to put last night's show away forever. You already should be home looking at your notes about tomorrow. And thinking, does this go on forever?

• 32:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you want it to go on forever?

• 32:01Speaker 01

  I'm not sure. I just thought I'm in this. People like it. It's going okay. But can you do this very long without mental damage?

• 32:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did it damage you mentally in the long run?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's for you to say.

• 32:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  It sounded like later on you had some real depressive periods, right?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I'm an expert on depression. I was just reading some stuff I wrote about it. Seems like every few, let's say, weeks, if not days, somebody thanks me for having helped them by talking in the press and in person or on the air even about depression. And a good thing that comes from it, but I hadn't expected it, was people saying, you saved my father's life. And it jolted me further. They'd say, when he heard you talking about depression and he realized that if Dick Cavett can get this, maybe I shouldn't be so ashamed. It's logical. I mean, it's understandable, isn't it?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  I might have had that feeling if I weren't known and somebody known talked about it, I would probably thought, oh, God, thank God, they have it too. But that it prevented suicides in some cases. I just found some old letters telling me that.

• 33:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  How much did you share it at the time? You'd talk about it in interviews?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  First was in a magazine. And I never had any particular desire to talk about it publicly, but it came up. And it did a lot of good. I don't know. That's odd, isn't it? That if a celebrity has something bad, people who also have it are at least comforted in some way.

• 33:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you don't mind me asking, what did it feel like for you when you were in the middle of a depressive period?

• 33:53Speaker 01

  It's the worst agony designed for man. There's nothing like it. Being sad is nothing like it. Having your heart broken for romance or anything. It's just, everything is dark and heavy and hurts. And there's no feeling you're ever, ever, ever going to get out of it because anything that has hit you that deeply, there's no way you're ever going to escape it. Stephen Fry had him on and we both came up with the notion that whatever you do, don't ever say to somebody in depression,

• 34:37Speaker 01

  what do you have to be depressed about? I used to get that. What are you talking about? You're on television. You've made money. You're popular. What in hell have you got to be depressed about? And we agreed that that's like saying, what have you got to have asthma about? Or tuberculosis?

• 34:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how did you deal with it?

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Waited until the curtain goes up again. Oh, I also had ECT. And that was a public service without my knowing it because people who had been afraid of it, some prominent writer, one of our big writers' wives, asked me to call him and tell him that I had had ECT.

• 35:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's electric shock therapy.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  She was desperate. Who was it?

• 35:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Styrene, maybe?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  I believe you're right. And if it wasn't in his case, but in another one just like it, I later said, how did it go for him? He said it failed completely. I said, that's possible because he was shitfaced drunk every time he went to the sessions.

• 35:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was it like for you to be in a depressive period and doing your show where you're an entertainer?

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Real hard. I was in the bedroom of Mr. Marlon Brando. Now, it's not going to be a story that that would seem to suggest. But I remember he was in bed, this is his house. And we talked about depression. And I said, I did a show once that shocked me so because it was just the two minor guests, Laurence Olivier and his wife Joan Plowright, the wonderful actress. I had to do it in their hotel room for some reason. And I was getting ready in another room in the hotel. And I thought, two doors down, Laurence Olivier.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  And I don't give a shit. I just want to go home and get into bed. How am I going to do this show? Did the show. It was difficult. It was with Brando then later that I said, you know, I just couldn't bring myself to watch that show because in doing it, I thought, these people know that I'm nuts or that I'm struggling, that I don't know what. And in fact, they did not.

• 36:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's a clip from that episode with Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  By the way, it's always difficult to work with titles. So I would like the people at home to know that I have been asked and instructed to say Larry and Joan. Yes, please. Is that, will you verify that? Yes.

• 37:10Speaker 09

  Thank you, Dick. Yes.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Yes, Dick is fine. So Laurence, Larry, I gather that we owe it to you to have brought your wife back to the stage, to have insisted that she go back on. Is that true?

• 37:26Speaker 09

  Well, I.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  How do you know when it's time?

• 37:29Speaker 09

  I, well, I thought it was well time. She came back to New York and I thought this was a wonderful part for her. And she's, I think, extremely beautiful in the part.

• 37:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you ever watch that show?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  No, well, I wouldn't watch it. And I said to Brando, I can't ever bring myself to watch that show. I really know what it will look like, what I'll see. I'll see what they unfortunately saw as struggling and taking pauses are infinite. And Brando said, do me a favor, watch it. And I said, okay, I will. And so later I called Marlon and I said, I saw that show. I was fine. Why? And he said, don't you know? And I said, no. And he said, well, every performer has to have what I call automatic pilot. You were sitting there doing what you do and you were able to do it, maybe acting it, but whatever it was,

• 38:28Speaker 01

  automatic pilot will take over for you. And it didn't that case.

• 38:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  How about these days, the last 10, 20 years? How's your?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  I never had it after the time I had ECT for it. I got it again, got another dose of ECT for it and it went like, just like that.

• 38:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you think that really fixed it?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It cured it.

• 38:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  No question in your mind that that was what?

• 38:49Speaker 01

  No, that's what did it. However, it works. You lie there and they attach something to your, and you don't feel anything. My late wife was there and said, when you came out of that room, you were a different person. So pass that on to somebody if they're locked in depression.

• 39:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you would look back at a show that went where you were really good versus a show where you didn't feel you were as good, what were the other factors that you think contributed?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  I wish I knew. I really don't know.

• 39:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you ever try to connect your performance to what you ate? Or whether you had sex, you know, the night before?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Or during the show? Those were the best.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  No, I just don't know.

• 39:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's just who you are. You're just a cool character.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Hope that what you do and say isn't appalling and keep going. But I never had any technique ready for when that happened. Would have been good if I had.

• 39:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So when I come here for advice on how to Cavett, it sounds like it's impossible because you just are who you are. Sounds like there wasn't a lot of strategy.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Not strategy, no.

• 40:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you'd like to?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Hmm. The Peloponnesian War. I was so hoping that would come up.

• 40:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  I thank you so much. I really, I just, I admire your work. I admire you as a human and I'm really grateful.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  I love doing this with you. I don't know what it is. You've got something great.

• 40:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's good of you to say.

• 40:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  As you can hear, Dick Cavett is a one of one. I'm not Cavett and on my new show, I'm not going to try to be him. But I did learn from him. Don't lean too hard on your prep. Make it a conversation, a collaboration, not just an interview. And most of all, in order to make the show you want, you might want to make it yourself. No suits, no focus groups, no BS. So that's what we did. Our guests on Better in Person include architects, writers, CEOs, musicians, comedians, athletes. And the first season launches July 14th on the Freakonomics YouTube channel. The trailer is already up if you want to check it out. I hope you like the show and I hope you will spread the word.

• 41:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Better in Person on the Freakonomics YouTube channel. I'd like to thank Dick Cavett for inviting us into his home and Martha Rogers for making it happen. This interview took place last year. When we started filming Better in Person in my apartment in New York, we hung a portrait of Cavett on the wall for inspiration. I think you can spot it in some episodes. Let us know if you do. Our email is [email protected]. And by the way, Freakonomics Radio is not going anywhere. Coming up soon, we've got episodes on prediction markets, on putting data centers in space. And next week, an episode about a false positive in medicine that costs billions of dollars and is easy to fix.

• 42:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at freakonomics.com where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Augusta Chapman with field recording in Connecticut by Nick Nevis. It was edited by Ellen Frankman and mixed by Jake Loomis with help from Eleanor Osborne. Archival material is from Chris Robertson and Global Image Works. Copyright is with Daphne Productions. Thanks also to Leo Adambeaga at the Flatwater Free Press for research help. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Dalvin Abawaji, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Alaria Montenacort, Jeremy Johnston, Mandy Gorstein, Pete Madden, and Tayo Jacobs.

• 42:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

• 42:58Speaker 10

  Yeah, why don't you, Dick, what did you have for breakfast this morning?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  It's a new business. I eat what I eat. I don't tell anybody. Are you checking this now?

• 43:11Speaker 10

  I'm checking your levels, yes.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  You're doing serious business. Okay, I'll stop being an idiot.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.