361. Freakonomics Radio Live: “Jesus Could Have Been a Pigeon.”

Our co-host is Grit author Angela Duckworth, and we learn fascinating, Freakonomical facts from a parade of guests. For instance: what we all get wrong about Darwin; what an iPod has in common with the “hell ant”; and how a “memory athlete” memorizes a deck of cards. Mike Maughan is our real-time fact-checker.

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

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:33Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Mint Mobile. With Mint Mobile's summer sale, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. Free yourself from big wireless and switch to Mint for high speed data and coverage on the T-Mobile 5G network. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com/freak. That's mintmobile.com/freak. Upfront payment, $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required, $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra, initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabytes hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 1:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 2:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there, Stephen Dubner. As you know, Freakonomics Radio is primarily an interview show based on extensive research in which we explore various issues, often quite complicated ones, in some depth. But we need a break from that now and again. Don't you need a break from that now and again? Of course you do. And so, may we present the following episode of Freakonomics Radio Live, not recorded in some somber radio studio, but in a pub in front of a live audience. It's a little game show we like to play called Tell Me Something I Don't Know. It's got the same DNA as Freakonomics Radio, but in reverse. If you'd like to attend a future show or be on a future show, visit Freakonomics.com/live.

• 3:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll be in New York on March 8th and 9th at City Winery, and in May, we're coming to California, in San Francisco on May 16th at the Norse Theater in partnership with KQED, and in Los Angeles on May 18th at the Ace Hotel Theater in partnership with KCRW. Again, for tickets, go to Freakonomics.com/live. And now, on with the show.

• 3:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Good evening. I'm Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio Live. Tonight, we are at Joe's Pub in New York City. And joining me as co-host is the University of Pennsylvania psychologist and author of grit, our good friend Angela Duckworth.

• 4:10Angela Duckworth?

  Hi, Stephen.

• 4:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hi, Angela.

• 4:16Angela Duckworth?

  Hi, everyone.

• 4:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So happy to have you back. Angela, here's what we know about you so far. We know that you are founder and CEO of The Character Lab.

• 4:26Angela Duckworth?

  Correct.

• 4:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  That you are a MacArthur Genius Fellow, who's advised the White House, the World Bank, NFL teams, and more.

• 4:33Angela Duckworth?

  Previous White House.

• 4:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Previous White House. That was the... (laughter) Was Truman?

• 4:38Angela Duckworth?

  After Truman, before Trump.

• 4:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Anyway, great to have you back on the show. Please tell us something we don't yet know about you.

• 4:47Angela Duckworth?

  I was born in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, home to the very first real mall in America.

• 4:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were you a mall kid?

• 4:55Angela Duckworth?

  I was a total mall kid. Every time I go to a mall with like a food court, I feel like I'm home again.

• 5:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  You know, I have always had a theory, I've never been able to substantiate it, that the secret to success in life is massive consumption of Orange Julius during teenage years.

• 5:13Angela Duckworth?

  That is correct.

• 5:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  What did you do at the mall?

• 5:15Angela Duckworth?

  Wandered around and around and around until my parents picked me up.

• 5:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because you had grit.

• 5:21Angela Duckworth?

  I guess. Maybe that was the, you know, that was the seed of the idea.

• 5:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Angela, it is so nice to have you here to play Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Here's how it's going to work. Guests will come onstage to tell us some interesting fact or idea, or maybe just a story. You and I can then ask them anything we want. And at the end of the show, our live audience will pick a winner. The vote will be based on three simple criteria. Number one, did the guest tell us something we truly did not know? Number two, was it worth knowing? And number three, was it demonstrably true? To help with that demonstrably true part, would you please welcome our real-time fact-checker, Mike Maughan.

• 6:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mike is head of global insights at Qualtrics and he's a co-founder of Five for the Fight, a campaign to eradicate cancer. Mike, we know Qualtrics calls itself an experience management company and that you're always doing interesting research there. What have you learned lately?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  So we've done a series of pain indexes, looking at different industries and the experiences that people want. I think the most interesting one is a hotel pain index where we found that a third of guests who frequently stay at five-star hotels have cried because of a bad hotel experience.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  I think that probably says a lot more about the demanding, fragile, unresilient, non-gritty state of spoiled people than it does about anything else.

• 6:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, then, Mike, it is time to play Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Would you please welcome our first guest, Colin Jaramack?

• 6:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Colin, I understand you are a professor of sociology and environmental studies at NYU, which sounds like an interesting combination. I'm ready, as are Angela Duckworth and Mike Maun. What do you know, sir, that's worth knowing that you think we don't know?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  I would like to ask you, what animal is most responsible for inspiring Darwin's theory of evolution?

• 7:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Whoa.

• 7:22Angela Duckworth?

  Finches.

• 7:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  We're supposed to say the finches and you're gonna tell us the finches were not?

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Everybody thinks it's the finches. And the thing is, is the finches, of course, were, they have these different beaks. Some are short, some are long, some are curled, some are straight, depending on which island they were on. And they evolved these different beaks to be able to eat the seeds and the fruits that varied by islands. But Darwin didn't figure that out when he was on the HMS Beagle. He didn't figure that out till decades later. He thought that these were different birds that were somehow related, but he didn't think that they were the same species.

• 7:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're here to tell us that Darwin wasn't so bright?

• 7:54Speaker 03

  Well, it took him a couple decades to figure it out.

• 7:57Angela Duckworth?

  There is an animal that did inspire him, right?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:00Angela Duckworth?

  And it is not the big turtle-like things that are not turtles, but they look like turtles?

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Uh, no, we've gotten further away.

• 8:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it a fast animal?

• 8:08Speaker 03

  I'd say medium.

• 8:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it a delicious animal?

• 8:11Speaker 03

  I'm vegan, so I'd say no.

• 8:15Angela Duckworth?

  Is it a, you know, bigger than a breadbox animal?

• 8:18Speaker 03

  No.

• 8:19Angela Duckworth?

  Smaller than a breadbox?

• 8:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Good.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Is it, is it a breadbox?

• 8:24Speaker 03

  No.

• 8:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, tell us about the animals.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  The pigeon. The humble, lowly rock pigeon that we see outside this very studio. So Darwin kept pigeons for 12 years or more. And he was fascinated by them because you could breed them. You could, and there were so many different breeds. In Victorian England, there was hundreds of different breeds of pigeon. But the idea at the time was that all these different breeds came from multiple species. So he bred them and wanted to figure out how plastic they were. And over generations, he discovered that if you mix them all together, you get the same pigeon that was walking around on the street. And so he thought, these must have all come from the same species, not multiple species. And so, if some of you may remember, if you actually read The Origin of Species, this is why he spends the first 70-plus pages on pigeons.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  And he gently guides you through all the variation, all the different breeds, how tall you can make them, how fat or small you can make them. And then he hits you with the bombshell and he says, "If I can do this breeding pigeons in just a couple of years, imagine what Mother Nature could do over millions or hundreds of millions of years." And he says, "Mother Nature is the selecting hand." Right? So first he says, "I'm the artificial hand of breeding, but Mother Nature is the selecting hand."

• 9:34Angela Duckworth?

  So why is this amazing fact so unknown? Like, what, finches are just too, you know, like they're sexier than pigeons?

• 9:45Speaker 03

  You know, pigeons got a bad rap. Pigeons are, I think if I were to ask people what they think of pigeons, many people say, "I think they're rats with wings." Or I call them rats with wings as if they thought of that themselves. But to be honest, I'm not totally sure because if you, I ask people, so I ask my class, "Who's read The Origin of Species?" And they all put their hands up. And I say, "So what are the first 50, 70 pages about?" And nobody, you know, nobody knows.

• 10:09Angela Duckworth?

  That's because they didn't read it.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  So I was trying to say, I think the answer, I think the real answer to your question is nobody's actually read The Origin of Species.

• 10:15Angela Duckworth?

  I think that's probably the answer.

• 10:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  So can you tell us more about how popular pigeons were in Darwin's day? And to what end? They were used in, obviously, messengering, but were they used in warfare and all this kind of stuff?

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Definitely. Now, so yeah, during the time that Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, there was something of a pigeon craze in Victorian England. People were breeding hundreds of varieties. They had shows like the Westminster Dog Show. And they still have these today, actually. They're just not as popular. The Queen of England kept pigeons, still has a racing pigeon loft today. So everybody had pigeons and was breeding pigeons and making fancy pigeons as ridiculous as the clothes that people were wearing. And actually, when Darwin wrote The Origin of Species and gave it to his editor, the editor said, "Man, this stuff about pigeons is amazing." And people love pigeons so much.

• 10:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's just make a pigeon book.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what he said. "Just get rid of speculative stuff about evolution. And if you make this just about pigeons, it'll be a coffee table book. Everybody in England will buy it and it will be a bestseller."

• 11:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what you're really here to tell us is that the publishing industry is exactly the same today as it was then?

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it hasn't changed much. That's right, that's right.

• 11:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  When was peak pigeon?

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Probably around that time, late 1800s, early 1900s. So what happened after that is, we used to, um, we sexually loved pigeon crap. We domesticated pigeons 5,000 years ago because their feces was such valuable fertilizer. And then we also realized you can eat them, so squab, if you've ever eaten squab, that's pigeon.

• 11:37Angela Duckworth?

  That's pigeon.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  But, uh, and then, and then as Stephen alluded to, they served as messengers. And so Genghis Khan, you know, sent pigeons throughout his empire to send messages. Uh, also Reuters was launched on the back of pigeons, on messenger pigeons. But then, after the turn of the century, nitrogen fertilizer replaced pigeon feces. Chickens replaced pigeons, you could breed them much fatter, much quicker. And, uh, obviously, we don't need them for messages anymore either. So they've kind of become, from society's terms, useless.

• 12:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  If they can do all that stuff, carry messages by having a homing instinct, if nothing else, um, are we to assume that they're relatively smart, especially for birds?

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Yep, they're not bird-brained, you'd be surprised. Pigeons, pigeons pass the mirror test. There's very few animals that pass the mirror test.

• 12:23Angela Duckworth?

  What's the mirror test?

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Looking at oneself in a mirror and understanding that they're looking at themselves.

• 12:27Angela Duckworth?

  So walk me through, a pigeon is in front of a mirror.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:30Angela Duckworth?

  How do you know that the pigeon knows that it is itself?

• 12:33Speaker 03

  You put the animal to sleep, and you put a red dot on its forehead, and then you notice if it does things to try to get rid of the red dot. Like pecking at, pecking at it. So the pigeon will peck at the mirror and kind of shuffle about and do things that indicate- To get the red dot off of its mirrored image. I could tell you some other things that make them rather intelligent. So they can be trained to tell the difference not only between cubist and impressionist paintings, but between a Monet and a Picasso, or if you're giving them some other cubist or impressionist painting, but that is not a Monet or a Picasso.

• 13:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you plainly, would you call yourself a pigeon advocate?

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Yes. They got me tenure.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  It's not bad.

• 13:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so I don't expect an honest answer from you on the following question, but how do you know that the pigeon is actually so smart as opposed to being the bird that was popular and therefore was trained a lot? Could I take a seagull, could I take a dove, et cetera?

• 13:34Speaker 03

  And do what?

• 13:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Train it to carry messages.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  No, gosh, no, come on. Are you serious? No way. Wait, a dove? Isn't a dove, it's like a pigeon? So I'm glad you brought that up, because this actually gets to Stephen's question about the bad rap that pigeons have.

• 13:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  So a dove is all peace and purity and a pigeon is a garbage eater.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  That's right, and there's many, there's many languages that don't even have a different word for pigeon and dove. And a lot of, have you ever gone to a wedding or to the Olympics and they release doves? These are white-homing pigeons that will leave and fly away and go back to the owner who's bred them and trained them to fly. And so I argue that, you know, a lot of religious iconography of, of Jesus as, you know, the spirit descending, Jesus could have been a pigeon. We don't actually know whether that was a pigeon or a dove.

• 14:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mike Mon, fire up your Google.

• 14:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  We're gonna need to know if Jesus was indeed a pigeon.

• 14:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, let me ask you this. Why are they the one bird that I know of at least that walk among us in cities?

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Yes. So first of all, in terms of literally walking, they're ground feeders. That's why they walk and they don't hop. Birds that hop mean they feed in bushes or flowers or trees. Pigeons are ground feeders. So pigeons were the first bird to be domesticated over 5,000 years ago. And as I mentioned, we domesticated them for agriculture, for the fertilizer and to eat them. But they've actually co-evolved with humans. When we moved to cities, we brought pigeons with us. And so they, at this point, have been living in cities since cities were around. Today, unfortunately with climate change and urbanization, species basically have two routes. They go extinct, or they survive. And the survival route usually means adapting to living amongst people and actually changing your evolutionary trajectory. And pigeons have done that.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  They're generalist eaters, so that we leave a lot of garbage around, tons of garbage around for them to eat, and they can pretty much eat almost all of it. And we feed them as well. And because their natural habitat is actually cliffs and rocky ledges, even in terms of walking amongst us, I like to call them pedestrian animals. They literally walk on the sidewalks and sit on benches and ledges because they prefer them to grass, shrubs, or trees. It's more like their native habitat.

• 15:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Has anyone ever seen a baby pigeon?

• 15:48Angela Duckworth?

  Yes, I have. I saw one growing up on a window ledge in a hotel a few months ago. Why do you ask that question?

• 15:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because I've never seen a baby pigeon.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tell us a little bit about pigeon family life.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 16:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Like, are they monogamous-ish? Because honestly, here's what I thought. When I first moved to New York years ago, I would see pigeons all over, but never babies or even adolescents, right? But I somehow imagined that pigeons would like be a couple, I don't know if they are, and that they would, when they were with child, they would like go to the burbs and have the kids there, and then the adults would come back when they wanted to go to the theater.

• 16:24Angela Duckworth?

  They'd ride their bike.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  That's an interesting hypothesis. You're not entirely wrong in terms of, you know, they actually do what I think at least many humans aspire to. They mate for life, and they're monogamous. And they're also pretty good on gender equality. They both sit on the eggs, and they both feed the young. If you've ever seen pigeons that appear to be kissing, the male is actually throwing up into the female's mouth to demonstrate that he can produce the crop milk to feed the babies.

• 16:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is sweet.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  And that's the final, that seals the deal. She's like, "Oh, yeah."

• 16:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what about from birth to adulthood? Where are, why don't we see the young?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Because it's kind of hilarious if you get to see it. The mother and the father will sit on the baby until it's fully grown. And so, so they don't fledge the nest.

• 17:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  They are like people, actually.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, they don't, right, they don't, yeah, they don't fledge the nest until they've, you know, gone to college and come back home. I'll give you a tip if you would really like to find baby pigeons. Anytime you're walking, pretty much anywhere, but say particularly under an awning, listen for these really high pitched squeaks. And that's a baby pigeon. And if you listen, look around, you'll find them.

• 17:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mike Mon, Colin Gromick, has been telling us much more about pigeons than I ever thought any of us would want to know. And I personally found much of it fascinating. I believe him because he...

• 17:41Angela Duckworth?

  He's a tenured professor at NYU. He's like a professor of pigeons.

• 17:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  And also, he's got khakis and a braided belt. And I think there's something about that that just says verity, you know?

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I gotta thank my wife for that one.

• 17:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, yeah. So I find no reason to distrust anything he said, but you're the man with the Google over there.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so a few things. You don't have your wife to thank for a braided belt. You should be mad at her.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Number two, you said that pigeons were like humans because they're monogamous and mate for life. That's not true. Humans don't do that.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Oh, I said, I said humans aspire to that.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, okay. Next, you and Angela were debating which animals are the sexiest. Just a quick warning, don't Google that on your work computer.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  So, a few things. It's not very helpful, but a publication called City Lab New York City said that this city is believed to have between 1 and 7 million pigeons. Really great range there, so thank you. It's interesting to know that in the past 20 years in China, there's been an amazing boom in young money, and this self-made billionaire crowd has chosen pigeon racing as their sport of choice. The most expensive champion racing pigeon sold for almost half a million dollars. Lastly, I just want to say, you all know Crocs, the little rubber shoe? So I think it's important to recognize that pigeons are a lot like Crocs. They're more functional than they appear, but still super weird to have with you in any situation.

• 19:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you, Mike, and thank you, Colin Dromich.

• 19:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Would you please welcome our next guest, Ben Orland.

• 19:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hi there, Ben.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 19:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  It says here that you are a math teacher and author of the new book Math with Bad Drawings, so I'll assume you've got something a little mathy to tell us tonight. The floor is yours.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. My question for you is, who's likeliest to buy lottery tickets?

• 19:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is this another Finch pigeon? We're supposed to say low-income people who squander too much money on this ridiculous state-supported racket where they skim 40% off the top and then leave you with your shallow winnings to weep in your latte that you're also buying and shouldn't be.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Stephen, how do you really feel?

• 20:13Angela Duckworth?

  I think the lotteries are evil. Don't they prey upon people's, you know, lack of numeracy effectively, right?

• 20:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  The other thing that I don't like about lotteries, just since we're getting it out there.

• 20:22Angela Duckworth?

  Yeah, do it. Go for it.

• 20:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that if you play the slots, what's the rake on a slot machine? You're a math guy.

• 20:28Angela Duckworth?

  It's very small, I think that...

• 20:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Like 7% maybe?

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's in that range.

• 20:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  A paramutual, you go to a horse track, the track is maybe taking 12, 14%?

• 20:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe closer to 20, but yeah, in that range.

• 20:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  But the state, what's the average for state lotteries across the...

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Close to 50%, yeah, 40% or so.

• 20:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're here to tell us something, however, within this...

• 20:48Angela Duckworth?

  Diabolical system.

• 20:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yes.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'm a math teacher, so it's not my place to decide how the state should cheat people out of their money.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  But who are they cheating out of their money? It turns out, actually, so the, you know, the state where the most lottery tickets are bought is Massachusetts, my home state. Lot of very educated, wealthy people in Massachusetts. And it turns out Gallup did a poll, 2016, so not that long ago, and people making more than $90,000 a year are actually likelier to buy lottery tickets than people making below $36,000 a year.

• 21:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hmm. So, do we call 90 and above high income? Or we call that middle high? What do you want to call that?

• 21:20Speaker 04

  I'm impressed. I think 90 is pretty good.

• 21:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. You are a math teacher.

• 21:24Angela Duckworth?

  He's a math teacher.

• 21:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  But you would call 36 pretty good, too, as a math teacher, would you not?

• 21:29Speaker 04

  I'd say 36 is below, I'd say it's below national median, so we'll call that.

• 21:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're saying more people in that bracket?

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People who are higher income are actually likelier to pay than people who are low income. And similarly, people with bachelor's degrees are actually likelier to play lottery than people with no college education.

• 21:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. So you're saying that this general idea that the lottery is disproportionately popular among lower income is not quite right?

• 21:53Angela Duckworth?

  So how many lottery tickets are they buying?

• 21:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good question, right. So Gallup doesn't have data on that. In the same sense also that, you know, if someone making $36,000 a year buys a lottery ticket, and someone making $100,000 a year buys a lottery ticket, the person making less has just spent a much larger percentage of their income on lottery tickets. So even if they're buying the same number, we can still call it a regressive tax.

• 22:12Angela Duckworth?

  So, wait, let me just make sure I'm understanding. You're saying that people who make a lot of money buy more tickets per person? Like, on average, they're more likely to buy?

• 22:21Speaker 04

  More likely to participate, yeah. So I don't, per person, I'm not sure, but more likely to buy a ticket, at least.

• 22:25Angela Duckworth?

  More likely to buy a ticket?

• 22:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what share is that? Let's say 90, 90 and above, are we talking like 30, 60%?

• 22:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, what comes, it's basically about 50% across pretty much every income group.

• 22:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then $36,000 and below, we're talking?

• 22:37Speaker 04

  So, yeah, we're looking at like 46% or so. So it's not, it's not a huge difference. What it comes down to is about half of people play the lottery.

• 22:43Angela Duckworth?

  Wait, that itself is, half of people play the lottery?

• 22:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  But play the lottery means what? One ticket in the past 12 months? You don't know anything about frequency, do you?

• 22:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it means have played in the last year. Although, if you look at Massachusetts, so that's the state where we have sort of the highest spending, it's about $800 per person per year. So the average person's buying two lottery tickets a day. That's probably not evenly distributed. I don't think, I mean, I don't know, unless my wife has been sneaking off and buying way more lottery tickets than I think.

• 23:06Angela Duckworth?

  Wait, the, the average Massachusetts citizen is buying $800 of tickets per year? Or the average person who is buying a ticket?

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Right, so the, the total amount spent, if you divide by the number of people in Massachusetts, you get $800.

• 23:21Angela Duckworth?

  $800 per year?

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Per, per year, yeah.

• 23:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let me ask you this. Let's just pretend that Angela and I have decided that we think that playing the lottery is a bad idea.

• 23:30Angela Duckworth?

  Let's pretend.

• 23:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's just pretend that, okay? But then, let me introduce, um, let me just say, well, let's say the expected value is very low, right, relative to what I can do with a dollar, $10 elsewhere. But what about the entertainment utility? Has anyone ever measured that? Do we have any idea?

• 23:47Speaker 04

  I mean, the measure of entertainment utility is that people keep doing it and they seem to do it very gladly and in great quantity.

• 23:53Angela Duckworth?

  Well, it could be, like, people could be buying tickets because it's fun. Or they could be buying tickets because they are legit thinking that they are going to win the lottery and that, you know, they're gonna, at this time, they're gonna be lucky.

• 24:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, well, let's say this, Mr. Math Teacher. Let's say that Angela and I change our mind. We think, hey, we're gonna play the lottery because we think we can win because we know a smart guy named Ben Orland, who's a math teacher who's interested in the lottery. And he can help us not cheat, but cheat. So what are some things that we could do to increase our chances of winning? For instance, I've read that, let's say you have a pick of numbers that go from 0 to 100, that if you pick numbers above 31, let's say, that at least if you do win, that you'll have a bigger payout because so many people play their birth dates, for instance. Does that work?

• 24:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is true. So if you pick, there are certain numbers, numbers that show up on fortune cookies or numbers that are birth dates. It's not a good idea to pick those because if you win on that number, you're gonna be sharing with all the other people who have that fortune cookie. Stephen, you mentioned, uh, you mentioned expected value, which I think that's sort of the, you know, someone who's taken a probability class or a math class. I think the assumption is expected value is sort of what you should be looking at. So right now, for example, there's, uh, the Mega Millions just went up to, uh, the highest I think it's ever been. It's $1.6 billion right now. Expected value is basically just the long-run average. If you were to buy tons and tons and tons of tickets, how much would the average one be worth? So for Mega Millions, there's only about 300 million possible tickets. It's worth $1.6 billion. So the average ticket should be worth more than $5, and they only cost $2. So in theory, it sounds like a good idea.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  The problem is, if you go out and buy a ticket, you're gonna just lose your $2.

• 25:25Angela Duckworth?

  Why don't you just buy every possible combination?

• 25:28Speaker 04

  Right, so this is very hard to do with Mega Millions. This actually happened, so in 1993, sort of early days of state lotteries. Uh, Virginia had, uh, so the prize went up all the way to $28 million because no one had won it for a while. And there were only 7 million tickets for $1 each. And so, there was actually a syndicate, sort of a group of people in Australia, who said, "Okay, we'll just buy them all. That's easy money right there." Which sounds like easy money, but it's not that easy to go and buy 7 million lottery tickets.

• 25:54Angela Duckworth?

  Oh, you mean, oh, that's right, because you have to go to, like, so many delis. Right? And, like, each one...

• 26:00Speaker 04

  So what they did, this team in 1983, what they did is they placed a lot of big orders with grocery store chains and convenience store chains. But even that didn't work out that well for them. There was actually one chain that had to return $600,000 to them for tickets they weren't able to print. And so, by the time of the drawing, you know, 7 million tickets out there, they'd actually only purchased 5 million of them, so there was a 2-in-7 chance they were going to wind up losing all that money.

• 26:20Angela Duckworth?

  Okay, well, then what happened?

• 26:21Speaker 04

  Well, what happened is two weeks went by, and the state knew that they'd sold the winning ticket, but no one could find it because they had 5 million tickets they needed to look through.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  And then about two weeks later, they surfaced it, and they did win the money. The state lottery commissioner was furious and issued this sort of like a villain at the end of a heist movie, as though he knew he'd been beat, but he swore he would never get beat that way again. And actually, since then, it's become much harder to do those kind of bulk purchases. You know, most states have passed laws against that. And if you wanted to try it on mega millions right now, if you could do it, it'd be great to get all 300 million tickets, but there's just no feasible way to do it.

• 26:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mike Mon, Ben Orland is telling us that pretty much a lot of people love to play the lottery, and it's not what we expect in terms of income. What more can you tell us about that?

• 27:04Speaker 02

  So, here are a few things that are more likely to happen to you than winning the lottery: giving birth to identical quadruplets, getting killed by a falling coconut, or having a vending machine fall on you.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  And the kicker: you're more likely to be elected president of the United States, but we've already shown that anyone, anyone can do that.

• 27:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you, Mike and Ben Orland. Thank you so much for playing.

• 27:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Would you please welcome to the stage Kate Sicchio.

• 27:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Kate is an assistant professor of dance and kinetic imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University. Kate, why don't you tell us something we don't know, please?

• 27:50Speaker 05

  Sure. I can tell someone's emotional state when they're using their smartphone just by looking at them without seeing what's on their screen or what they're reading. How?

• 27:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  By how hard they're weeping?

• 28:03Speaker 05

  No.

• 28:04Angela Duckworth?

  Without looking at their face and without seeing what's on their phone.

• 28:08Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 28:09Angela Duckworth?

  And like from their body posture? Is it from that?

• 28:13Speaker 05

  Getting there, yeah.

• 28:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does this have to do with what you do professionally?

• 28:19Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 28:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  You are a professor of dance and kinetic imaging. What is kinetic imaging? We'll start there.

• 28:24Speaker 05

  So kinetic imaging is like media arts.

• 28:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is a way more impressive word for it.

• 28:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because I've always thought media arts and, ah, but kinetic imaging, wow.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  Right. It's exciting.

• 28:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Absolutely. So you observe their movements and because you're a dance professor, you can tell how they're feeling?

• 28:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh. Okay.

• 28:43Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 28:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. Bingo.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  So in choreography, we have different tools of analysis. And in particular, there's this thing called the Laban effort graph. And what it does is it allows you to look at movement in sort of like three different categories. One is time. So like, is the movement sudden or sustained? One is space. Is the movement direct or indirect? And another is the force. Is it strong or light? And when you combine these three things, you start to get gestures. So like, a strong, sudden, direct movement is a punch, right?

• 29:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So when I punch my phone, you know I'm feeling...

• 29:20Speaker 05

  I know you're angry.

• 29:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, good. Okay. I wouldn't have figured that out without my kinetic imaging degree.

• 29:26Angela Duckworth?

  Well, but that's the thing, like with a phone, I mean, how much range is there when people are on their phone?

• 29:32Speaker 05

  Right. So one of the things we do a lot on our phone is we do things like mindless surfing. Well, that gesture is what we call a flick. So it's indirect and light and sudden, right? And that means that, yeah, you're not really being conscientious, you're not paying that much attention, you might be bored.

• 29:50Angela Duckworth?

  So what does sadness look like on, you know, an iPhone in terms of my using it?

• 29:56Speaker 05

  Usually sadness is like light, but it's usually more sustained, right? And it's usually indirect.

• 30:02Angela Duckworth?

  So not quite a flick?

• 30:03Speaker 05

  Right, not quite a flick. One of my favorite ones is Tinder. So when we're using Tinder, we're doing this really careless gesture. And of course, that's where you meet people to hook up, not someone you're gonna care about in the future.

• 30:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So do that gesture again, because that's good for radio. Yeah.

• 30:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  And give me something that's the opposite of that.

• 30:26Speaker 05

  Right, so another app that I use is one called Hotel Tonight. And in order to book your hotel-

• 30:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  That sounds not that unlike Tinder to me.

• 30:35Angela Duckworth?

  They go together.

• 30:37Speaker 05

  But to book your hotel, you have to do a very direct, sustained movement. It's much more of a commitment to get your hotel room than to find a date. And so you have to actually trace the shape of a bed on the phone. So it's this really direct movement that you have to do in order to purchase.

• 30:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are there practical applications of this observation?

• 31:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think that you could make things more direct and more sustained, so people would think about it more. Like, maybe we want news apps to be more like that, so people are actually careful about what they're reading and thinking about, what they're digesting in terms of, yeah, content.

• 31:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mike Mon, Kate Sicchio is saying that you can tell how people are feeling by looking at how they interact with their phones, true?

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we hear that Tinder is this hookup app, right? Because it takes so little effort, and you're just swiping left and right. Now, that may be true at the beginning of a relationship, but it doesn't tell us a ton about what it takes to get into a relationship. Because by the time people are able to actually meet and hook up, they will have had to have engaged in some more committed behavior, like texting, phone calls, et cetera. And so what appears is that it's not necessarily the results of how much effort someone takes throughout the time to get together, physical or otherwise, but rather, it's how the relationship starts. And so something that may indicate what that means for us, The Atlantic has reported that couples who cohabitate before marriage tend to be less satisfied with their marriages and are more likely to divorce.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  So the issue with Tinder may not be the human movement overall, but rather, what the human movement says about the desire for commitment from the very beginning of the relationship.

• 32:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Angela, does that make sense to you?

• 32:23Angela Duckworth?

  I mean, I think that when you say that people who live-- maybe I'm taking this personally. But anyway, why would someone who lives together with another person be more likely to-- is it divorce? Is that the fact?

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so as a certified non-marriage counselor, I think the idea is that if things start out without a deep level of commitment, then the research shows that we're less likely to stick to it. Now, you're the person that studies grit, passion, and perseverance, so I'm not going to fact-check you on whether people stick with things or not.

• 32:57Angela Duckworth?

  Well, OK. So I'll just say this. Whenever you find a correlation, like people who drink Diet Coke, live, whatever, you'd have to worry, as a scientist, that lots of things are correlated with the decision to live together, and those may be the things that are driving the marriage statistics also. So what we really need is an experiment where half the people get assigned to live together before they get married.

• 33:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's do this half of the room.

• 33:26Angela Duckworth?

  Like to the left, right? And then half the people-- then we'll know.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  Speaking of spurious correlation, though, I do think it's important to know that the number of people who die becoming tangled in bed sheets almost perfectly correlates with per capita cheese consumption.

• 33:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mike, thank you so much for that. And Kate, thank you for playing Tell Me Something. Now, we're going to take a quick break. When we return, more guests will make Angela Duckworth tell us some things we don't know, and our live audience will pick a winner. If you would like to be a guest on a future show or attend a future show, please visit Freakonomics.com. We will be right back.

• 34:10Stephen 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 back-- 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.

• 34:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 35:14Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 35:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely not YOLO type. PNC Bank. Brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 36:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Welcome back to Freakonomics Radio Live.

• 36:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tonight, we are playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know. My name is Stephen Dubner. Our fact checker is the great Mike Mon, and my co-host is the psychology professor and author Angela Duckworth. Before we get back to the game, we have got some frequently asked questions for Angela Duckworth. You ready to go?

• 36:59Angela Duckworth?

  I'm ready to go.

• 37:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  You are best known for having written the book Grit. The Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League have a new mascot called Gritty. Was that your doing?

• 37:07Angela Duckworth?

  Okay, that was 100% not my idea. It's awful. Have you seen it?

• 37:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's like an orange alien.

• 37:17Angela Duckworth?

  No, I had nothing to do with it.

• 37:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you know if the people who invented and named Gritty are fans of yours?

• 37:23Angela Duckworth?

  I do not. They have not been in touch.

• 37:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think it's a dereliction of royalty issue for which they've not been in touch?

• 37:30Angela Duckworth?

  I am not suing the Philadelphia Flyers for their use of the word Gritty, because I don't think I... Can you own a word? I don't think you can own a word, can you? Do you own Freakonomics?

• 37:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  I do own Freakonomics.

• 37:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Angela, I know you're working on a new podcast about the work of the Character Lab, which advances the science and practice of character development. Why a podcast?

• 37:53Angela Duckworth?

  So, I think it's the case that people like these things, that they're listening to, where they get to actually talk to people like Stephen Dubner. And I thought, maybe there are a lot of parents out there and teachers who would like to talk to me about the science of how kids grow up to thrive.

• 38:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  And lastly, family grit question. Can you give an example of something particularly un-gritty that someone in your family has done?

• 38:16Angela Duckworth?

  Well, okay, a certain person would throw themselves into various projects like metal detecting, and then like stamp collecting, and then vending machines, and weightlifting, and like one thing after the other. And when you do that, then you're not being gritty.

• 38:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  I didn't know vending machine was a hobby.

• 38:35Angela Duckworth?

  It can be. It can be. Short-lived, it turns out, in this case.

• 38:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Angela Duckworth, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. It is time now to get back to our game. Would you please welcome our next guest, Philip Barden.

• 38:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Philip is a professor of evolutionary biology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, as well as a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. So that sounds very promising. What do you have for us, Philip?

• 39:05Speaker 06

  So what does a hell ant and an iPod have in common?

• 39:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  May we in turn ask you, what the hell is a hell ant?

• 39:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, that's a whole... Yeah, okay. So that's a decent question. So I work on fossil ants. That's my niche. That's about as myopic as you might think you could get. Turns out there's as many fossil ant species as there are fossil dinosaur species.

• 39:27Angela Duckworth?

  If that helps.

• 39:30Speaker 06

  And among the oldest fossils that we know about, about 100 million years old, trapped in amber, are these ants called hell ants. And they have all these bizarre adaptations that we don't see in any modern ants, and in fact, in no modern insects. So what we see is these big side-like mandibles that jut out of the face and come up towards the forehead.

• 39:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  A mandible is a jaw?

• 39:46Speaker 06

  The jaws, yeah, exactly. A jaw, the mouthparts. And so, modern ants have mouthparts that articulate horizontally. So if you take your arms and you kind of go to hug somebody, it's sort of like that. This would be if you took and put your elbows together and you kind of went to jut yourself in the forehead with the tips of your fingers. Those are hell ants, right? And so, hell ants, it turns out, Deluski, who's this Russian paleoentomologist, named the genus for the first time in the 90s, Hadomermex, hado meaning Hades, and mermex, which is Greek for ant. And the common name is hell ants.

• 40:18Angela Duckworth?

  Why hell ants, other than it was, you know, good branding?

• 40:22Speaker 06

  It's just a real spooky, cool, just badass thing to name an ant.

• 40:25Angela Duckworth?

  Oh, it was branding. It was just branding. Oh, it was just a badass name for a species of ant.

• 40:28Speaker 06

  Exactly, yeah. Hadomermex, it just sounds really... And really, truly, I mean, there are 13,000 species of modern ants, and this is the... It sort of breaks the mold.

• 40:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  And your question was, what do a hell ant and an iPod have in common?

• 40:40Speaker 06

  And an iPod have in common. I should say one other thing, which is that there are some hell ants that also have horns that come out of their forehead. We named one last year. We named it after Vlad the Impaler. And the reason is this: we CT-scanned it, we looked through x-ray imaging, and found that these ants actually look like they sequester metals into the middle of this paddle. And so what we think is happening is to prevent themselves from running themselves through their own forehead, they're actually capturing prey and puncturing them and drinking their hemolymph, which is insect blood. So that's why we named it after Vlad the Impaler.

• 41:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were they the size roughly of modern ants?

• 41:10Speaker 06

  They were about a centimeter, yeah, so like the, your, you know, your pinky.

• 41:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how is it possible that an ant that tough didn't make it?

• 41:19Speaker 06

  Well, this gets into the thing, I'll just give it to you.

• 41:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Give it to me.

• 41:21Speaker 06

  One of the reasons why we think that hell ants went extinct is potentially because, and they are extinct, and all of their close relatives are extinct, because they were too specialized. They effectively painted themselves into a corner. Some of the evidence that we have strongly suggests that they specialized on prey that also went extinct. And so this is an interesting thing in evolution, right? Where we get into these scenarios where your adaptations work really, really well, until all of a sudden the bottom drops out and they don't. And they actually persisted for about 21 million years. We know about them from Amber in Myanmar, France, and Canada.

• 41:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what they have in common with the iPod is they were too specialized and we don't need them anymore?

• 41:57Speaker 06

  Perfect, nobody buys iPods anymore.

• 41:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so they're a species that went extinct because you're arguing of overspecialization.

• 42:05Speaker 06

  Right.

• 42:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Like they were tough. There were certain prey that they could beat up, but otherwise they weren't good enough to go on.

• 42:10Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 42:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what about, aren't there like, like what, what good is a platypus for? Like, is that not a specialized thing and why is it still around?

• 42:17Speaker 06

  Well, so anything that is around today, it's working, right? And so we always think about evolution as being this, this sort of game of winners and being the best or whatever. And it's really just the best in that moment in time, in that particular slice, right? So everything, including humans today, right? If you put humans 2 billion years ago, there's no oxygen in the atmosphere, sort of game over, it's hard. And in fact, something like oxygen turns out to be another thing that sort of changed the game. So the earliest life on our planet, oxygen was catastrophic for it. There was no oxygen in the atmosphere. And then when we start to get photosynthesis, all of a sudden having that adaptation of being anaerobic that is surviving without oxygen becomes really terrible. And now we have this big massive extinction event because of something like oxygen. And so now, of course, we all love oxygen, but it turns out that wasn't really the case in the beginning.

• 43:01Angela Duckworth?

  So let me ask you a human-centric question.

• 43:04Speaker 06

  I don't think about humans.

• 43:06Angela Duckworth?

  So are we overspecialized or are humans the opposite of, because we can learn anything?

• 43:11Speaker 06

  Humans are incredible generalists. This is one of the reasons why we are highly, highly successful. And in fact, I'm just bringing it back to ants, some of the most...

• 43:21Speaker 06

  And the reason why I bring it back to ants is because, you know, they are- Because you study ants. Yeah, because I study ants, it's my comfort zone. But really, they are tremendously successful, and in many places, they outweigh the biomass of all vertebrates, including humans, in some environments. And the most successful ants are also generalists, right? So they can capitalize on all kinds of resources, they don't rely just on one particular food source, right? And humans are very much the same way, although we have some other kind of funny things going on, you know, this culture thing, it's a little bit funky. Culture, yeah. Yeah, and the ability to rapidly pivot.

• 43:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Aren't modern ants said to be quite social?

• 43:55Speaker 06

  They are, they're all used social, exactly, yeah.

• 43:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  And do you think that part of the hell ants problem was a lack of some kind of socialization?

• 44:03Speaker 06

  This is a great question. So we thought about this, we really thought that maybe it was that the earliest ants really weren't social, weren't social to a degree, and they were actually outcompeted by their highly, you know, communistic sort of counterparts who are alive today. And in fact, what we found is that that's not the case. The earliest ants, including hell ants, are highly social, there's no such thing as a solitary ant, all 13,000 species today, and all 700 fossil species, so far as we know, all were social. So for example, if you look at all the different amber deposits in Earth history, starting at 100 million years ago, ants never make up more than 1% of all insects in amber, and yet we find many aggregations of them together, we calculate it on the back of a napkin, we're not mathematicians, but we figure that it's something like 1 in a trillion, the idea of finding 20 worker ants in one piece when you have less than 1% abundance.

• 44:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are high or low-income ants more likely to buy lottery tickets?

• 44:50Speaker 06

  High-income. There should be an ant lotto.

• 44:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you this, will science and technology allow you to bring back the hell ant? And if so, whose picnic would you send it to?

• 45:03Speaker 06

  Oh, this is a great question. So, not biologically, no, but in fact, where I am now, we have some great industrial design students who are, we've CT-scanned these, and we're now modeling them, we're digitally bringing them back to life to figure out how the mechanics of these would have worked. That is cool. Yeah, this is a great tee-up, by the way, for NGIT, where I work now, and I do not have tenure, and I'd like to have tenure.

• 45:24Speaker 06

  And we're also printing and constructing giant molds that are motorized. So we can use these for outreach. We're taking them to schools and museums, potentially for museum exhibits also, because we really don't think about insects as part of the fossil record, but they are, today, 75% of all species that exist are insects.

• 45:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mike Mon, Philip Barden's been telling us about the extinct hell ant. What do you have to add?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  So I think a lot of people here misunderstood. When you say hell ant, we all think about our ant from hell, who's always trying to set us up.

• 45:53Angela Duckworth?

  That's just your ant from hell.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  So ants have lost a lot of things over the years. They lost the impaler. They don't have lungs. They don't have ears. They can't swim. They do have two stomachs. It's interesting to see, though, that like ants have lost a number of things, we, as a culture, have lost many things, some good, some bad. We've lost answering machines, pagers, Velcro wallets. We no longer have decent politicians. We've lost MySpace, which was a terrible tragedy. And if you haven't yet lost Nickelback, do yourself a favor.

• 46:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you, Mike and Philip Barden. Thank you so much for telling me something on it now. Great job.

• 46:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Would you please welcome our final guest of the evening, Levon Graham.

• 46:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levon works in data analytics here in New York. He is a memory athlete and currently holds the title of fifth-best memory in the United States. I'd like to apologize to our audience that we can only get the fifth-best memory athlete in America.

• 46:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Levon, that sounds awesome, and I can't wait to hear what you have to tell us. So the floor is yours.

• 47:03Speaker 07

  All right. So have you ever been sitting in your living room on the couch, and you remember that you need to get something from the kitchen? You get up, you walk to the kitchen, and as soon as you get there, you just completely forget what it is. So my question is, why does walking from one room to another cause you to forget?

• 47:20Angela Duckworth?

  Because you are, like, place memory, right? Like, you are activating the memory representation in one place, and that has all these cues. And then you go to another place, and those cues are absent?

• 47:33Speaker 07

  That's basically it. It's something called the doorway effect.

• 47:35Angela Duckworth?

  Sorry, I'm a psychology professor.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  That's really good.

• 47:38Speaker 07

  What happens is, when you're sitting on your couch, you are thinking of something and you inadvertently kind of, maybe you're looking at the TV or you're looking at the shelf, and that idea somehow gets tethered to that location. So as soon as you walk to the next room, when you're no longer looking at that, you seem to have forgotten what that is. And what happens is, as soon as you sit back down on your couch, it just comes right back to you. Which is actually what memory athletes do, in a way. We use a technique called the memory palace, where we place information that we want to memorize in specific locations in different rooms. And then we're able to recall them later on, like that.

• 48:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you said it's called the doorway effect?

• 48:13Speaker 07

  The doorway effect, yes.

• 48:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Meaning you pass through and you lose it?

• 48:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, can I just ask you, my thought before Angela figured it right out,

• 48:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  was, I thought of something, I think it was Arthur Conan Doyle once said about how the memory is like an attic. And if you fill it up with junk, then when you have something valuable to put in it, you don't have room. And what it made me think of is, if you walk into another room, you're just hit with all the new stimuli there, and they somehow hurt your being able to summon the memory because there's like, only so much RAM that we all have going on. That's not an issue?

• 48:49Speaker 07

  Actually, I love Sherlock Holmes, so I know that quote really well. And what I thought was really interesting was that he's saying that your brain has a limited amount of space, which, believe it or not, I mean, as far as these memory athletes are concerned, we can pretty much memorize like, large and large amounts of information. I don't think anybody, if there's any scientific studies that show that there is a like, limit, like this person has hit the limit of all they can memorize. So while it's sort of true, I don't know if that's exactly it.

• 49:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just a side observation, you say the phrase "memory athlete" as if we think that is athletic.

• 49:24Angela Duckworth?

  It takes training, right?

• 49:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, no, hey. I'm not saying it's not, but I'm curious, was that said originally in jest and it got real, or?

• 49:35Speaker 07

  No, it's a very good question. I mean, numonist is another nickname for it. But I guess, yeah, we could just call ourselves memory athletes or mental athletes.

• 49:43Angela Duckworth?

  So I want to know more about this, like, thing that you do. So can you give me some examples of things that you've memorized or competitions that you've been in?

• 49:52Speaker 07

  Sure. So there's lots of competitions all over the world every year. And basically, people like myself get together and they try to memorize as much information in the shortest amount of time as possible. So some of the events are, let's say, memorizing hundreds of random digits, binary digits, names and faces, abstract images, lines of poetry. And one of my particularly favorite events is basically memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards in under five minutes if possible. So it's basically after all these events, scores are tallied up, and then you get, you know, a champion. So you're obviously very good at this. I'm curious, do your fellow competitors, do you all pretty much use the same methods? They pretty much do. As I was mentioning before, the memory palace is the main technique

• 50:35Speaker 07

  that we use, which is an ancient Greek technique where you basically construct places in your mind. So like, at a smaller level, you might imagine your apartment as a memory palace. You might imagine your front door as a location number one. And you walk through, and your living room would be location number two. Your kitchen could be location number three, the bathroom number four, and finally, your bedroom number five. So what you've done is you've created a mini journey that you can close your eyes and walk through it. So on a much larger scale, this is what memory athletes do. We just have hundreds and hundreds of palaces and like, and different ones, yeah.

• 51:08Angela Duckworth?

  Are they, are they real or are they imagined palaces?

• 51:11Speaker 07

  So it, they can be either one. Like, I tend to like to use real locations, like, I just came back from Ecuador. So on my trip, I tried to stop in a few different museums and stuff like that and try to build memory palaces along the way. But I also used to play a lot of video games, first-person shooters. So I would actually take the environments in the game and also turn those into memory palaces. Basically, anything that you can imagine yourself in. It's so much easier, though, if it's real places. Like, humans are really good at navigation. So it's pretty easy to build palaces wherever you go.

• 51:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you actually go to new places in order to create memory palaces from them afterwards, yes?

• 51:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, and usually like I will take notes or I take photographs of different places. It makes it so much fun too, because you could actually close your eyes and be in these places. Like a lot of times when I'm memorizing in competitions, it's so strange but also really relaxing to be able to walk through all these places in your mind.

• 52:06Angela Duckworth?

  So why, why do you do this? I actually admire this, very gritty, but what, uh, what do you get out of it? And do you think you'll still be doing this, you know, 10 or 20 years from now?

• 52:16Speaker 07

  So I originally was a magician, so I would do a lot of stuff with cards. And obviously as magicians, we pretend to memorize a deck of cards to do tricks. But then I found out people were actually memorizing them. And I thought to myself, well, as a magician, as somebody who loves cards, I have to be able to do this. So I started training myself to just do that. But it turned out it was so much fun to actually be able to do this. Like just being able to achieve faster speeds. Like the first time I ever memorized a deck of cards for a magic trick, it took me three hours. Now it takes me 32 seconds. I mean, the sheer like amount that you can cut down is just so interesting. And even like yeah, four years into competing, I'm still finding that there's things about the brain and how memory works that I didn't know before.

• 52:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you just give us an example of, let's say, a deck of cards memorizing? And obviously you don't have them with, or do you have a deck of cards on you by chance?

• 53:05Speaker 07

  I, I do.

• 53:10Speaker 07

  So I can give an example because unfortunately, seeing a memory competition is not that exciting. It's just a bunch of people sitting there with headphones and dead silence as they run through.

• 53:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  So just imagine how exciting it will be to listen to people seeing a memory competition.

• 53:26Speaker 07

  So basically what it is, is the technique is, I already mentioned the memory palace. In my mind, I have a location that I'm set to go when I want to memorize. Cards are abstract. It's hard for you to remember them because they have no real meaning. So what we do is we turn every card into somebody or into something that's more meaningful. So in the technique that I use, I've turned every card into a person and an action associated with it. So let's say the 10 of hearts is Homer Simpson.

• 53:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because why?

• 53:54Speaker 07

  So originally, this is the hard part. Building the system requires things that, you know, you just have to sort of make it up. Like, here's an easy one. So, the six of hearts is Michael Jordan. And that one makes sense because Michael Jordan won six championships, and I say he's got a lot of heart. So it's very easy for me to memorize that. The ace of spades is James Bond. And I think of the highest card in the deck as being James Bond when he plays poker. So, some of them are easy to associate.

• 54:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so each memory athlete creates their own mnemonic for each card, correct?

• 54:24Speaker 07

  Yes, so basically, it's slight variation. So my system, like I was saying, uses two cards. So let's imagine that, so I mentioned that the ace of spades is James Bond, and the ten of hearts is Homer Simpson. So, if I was memorizing, in the first, if the cards were in that sequence, let's say ace of spades, ten of hearts, I would take my first location, let's imagine the front door. And I would take the first card, the ace of spades, and imagine James Bond standing at the front door. But the second card is the ten of hearts, Homer Simpson. But it also gets confusing, because later on, when I'm remembering it, I'm like, wait a minute, was it James Bond and Homer Simpson? Or Homer Simpson and James Bond? So what we do is we modify the technique to create a hierarchy. So the first card is the person, the second card would be an action.

• 55:05Speaker 07

  So it would be James Bond drooling, which is an action that Homer Simpson does. So if it was the other way around, if it was ten of hearts, ace of spades, it'd be Homer Simpson drinking a martini.

• 55:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you do all that for 52 cards in how many seconds?

• 55:20Speaker 07

  So, my current competition best is 34 seconds. My personal best is 32 seconds.

• 55:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you think you can do right now?

• 55:28Speaker 07

  Um, I'm not sure, I'm a little bit out of practice, but, um...

• 55:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alright, let's, um, so what, do you shuffle them? Or do we shuffle them?

• 55:33Speaker 07

  We, yeah, you can.

• 55:34Angela Duckworth?

  I feel like, I feel like we should shuffle them.

• 55:36Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 55:41Speaker 07

  So we'll do about half the deck only, because regurgitating 52 cards might be a little boring.

• 55:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alright.

• 55:47Speaker 07

  Alright, let's see. I'm gonna try to go through a few of them, and see what we get, right?

• 55:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Angela, should we narrate a little bit? Because it's very dramatic. There's a man on stage, looking at cards. You're making this so hard for him.

• 55:59Angela Duckworth?

  I know.

• 56:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, great.

• 56:07Angela Duckworth?

  Okay, great.

• 56:07Speaker 07

  So you can verify that I got them right. So first, I'll say the cards and I'll say what I'm looking at. So the first card should be the Nine of Spades, which would be a girl that I know named Lily. The second card should be the Seven of Spades, which would be a Samurai sword. Then it's the Ace of Hearts, which is Johann Sebastian Bach, with the Nine of Diamonds drinking tea. The next card would be the Six of Diamonds, which is a friend of mine called Six, who is freezing, so it should be the Five of Hearts. Then it's Old Boy from the film Old Boy, so it should be the Seven of Diamonds, followed by the Ace of Clubs, which is hanging upside down. Then it should be the Four of Diamonds, followed by the Six of Spades, I believe. Then the Queen of Spades, Six of Clubs, Nine of Hearts,

• 56:52Speaker 07

  Five of Clubs, Eight of Hearts, Two of Hearts, Homer Simpson, so it should be the Ten of Hearts, doing yoga, which is Queen of Diamonds, followed by Clint Eastwood spray painting, so it should be Ace of Diamonds, Four of Hearts, followed by Sharon with Sheep, so it's Three of Spades, Jack of Hearts, followed by, ooh, what's... This is Reggie Miller doing... So it's the King of Spades. Is he eating spinach, Five of Spades? No, no, Jack of Spades, Five of Spades. That's what I'm saying.

• 57:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's it.

• 57:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, Jack of Spades, Five of Spades. Is that all right?

• 57:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, that was remarkable. You know, I've read about people who do exactly this, and somehow, and it's impressive, obviously, when you read it, but that was absolutely remarkable.

• 57:46Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 57:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thanks for doing it for us.

• 57:49Angela Duckworth?

  Can I ask you this?

• 57:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 57:50Angela Duckworth?

  Which is more important to you? Beating the four memory athletes who are ranked higher than you, or beating yourself?

• 57:57Speaker 07

  I've actually, when I first started, I didn't know any of the memory athletes. So I thought to myself, I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna try to beat everybody. Because at the time, the US wasn't very well ranked among the world. Like, the top countries were, I think, China and Germany. But by coincidence, the same time that I started competing, two other friends of mine, well, now they're friends, but two other athletes started competing as well. And they were so, so great that right now, the number one guy in the US is also the number one guy in the world. So the US now holds the record for being the best country with a memory athlete, as it were.

• 58:32Angela Duckworth?

  America's great again.

• 58:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  I have a question for you, Levon. What does this phenomenon, the original phenomenon you were talking about, the doorway effect, or just the way you've learned to control memory or to build memory, what does this suggest for people with memory loss? Is there anything clinical-ish, therapeutic-ish that it suggests?

• 58:57Speaker 07

  Well, that's kind of interesting, because at the same time, like, people make the joke a lot of times that I should never forget anything. And if anybody who knows me knows that I have a pretty average memory when I don't pay attention to things. The reality of it is that these techniques are so specialized that this, what I use for a deck of cards, right? I could practice this for hours and be really, really fast at deck of cards. It won't translate to being fast at numbers. I would have to specialize and train just at numbers. I try, I teach a class. And what I try to tell people is basically, you practice these things, and when you understand them, you're able to use them in your day-to-day life. So it's a really great way to kind of stay in shape. But unfortunately, these techniques are very, very specialized for what it is that you want to use. There's no magic key that if you practice this,

• 59:42Speaker 07

  it'll improve your general memory.

• 59:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mike Mon, Levon Griehavva has not only showed us how to memorize part of a deck of cards, but told us a lot about memory and memory athletes. Care to tell us if everything checks out? So for years, golfers and cheerleaders have been mocked mercilessly for calling themselves athletes. You've just handed them an amazing gift.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  A couple of substantive things. We learned from call and camera on this podcast a while back that one of the keys to memory is curiosity, because it enhances the encoding process, which is one of the three stages of memory, which are encoding, storage, and recall. So this idea that we've talked about of the doorway effect happens when we change locations and therefore remove triggers that help us in the recall stage. So it's encouraging to know that we're not crazy when we walk out of a room and forget what we were doing. Interestingly, like all things in life, it turns out that to increase your memory function, you're supposed to get sleep, exercise, and eat a healthy diet. So in other words, it's probably not worth doing what it takes to improve your memory.

• 1:00:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mike, thank you. And Levon, thank you so much for playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know.

• 1:01:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  And can we give one more hand to all our guests tonight? I thought they were fantastic. Thank you.

• 1:01:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  It is time now for our live audience to pick a winner. A tough one, so good tonight. Would you please take out your phones and follow the texting instructions on the screen? So who will it be? Colin Jermomek with "In Praise of Pigeons", Ben Orland, who told us about lottery misperceptions, Kate Sicchio, using choreography training to spy on people, Philip Bardin, the unfortunately over-specialized hell aunt, or Levon Grahalva with memory and the doorway effect. While our live audience is voting, let me ask you a favor. If you enjoy Freakonomics Radio, including this live version of Tell Me Something I Don't Know, please spread the word and give it a nice rating

• 1:01:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much.

• 1:02:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, the audience vote is in. Once again, thank you so much to all our guest presenters tonight, who I thought were just awesome. Each of you will receive this brand-new, limited-edition Freakonomics Radio lapel pin. Lapel not included. And our grand prize winner tonight, thank you so much for telling us all about pigeons, Colin Jeralmick. To commemorate your victory, we'd like to present you with this certificate of impressive knowledge. It reads, "I, Stephen Dubner, in consultation with Angela Duckworth and Mike Mon, do hereby

• 1:02:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  vow that Colin Jeralmick told us something that we did not know, for which we are eternally grateful." That's our show for tonight. I hope we told you something you didn't know. Huge thanks to Mike and Angela, to our guests, and thanks especially to you for coming to play "Tell Me Something." I don't know. Thank you so much. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, we revisit our conversation with Richard Thaler, who helped create the field of behavioral economics and, for his trouble, won a Nobel Prize.

• 1:03:30Speaker 08

  I will say that I found the whole thing to be pretty emotional, partly because, you know, of where I came from intellectually.

• 1:03:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was the original thinking behind behavioral economics?

• 1:03:44Speaker 08

  We don't think people are dumb. We think the world is hard.

• 1:03:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. And before then, we'll be slipping a few bonus episodes of Freakonomics Radio Live into your feed, with co-hosts Alex Guarnaschelli, Christian Finnegan, Manoush Zomorodi, and featuring enough useful facts to get you through a whole holiday season of family gatherings. Hope you enjoy.

• 1:04:13Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 1:05:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was appropriately awkward. Nicely done.

• 1:05:14Speaker 09

  Stitcher.

• 1:05:20Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:05:50Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:06:28Speaker 10

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