That’s a Great Question! | Freakonomics Radio | Episode 192

Verbal tic or strategic rejoinder? Whatever the case: it’s rare to come across an interview these days where at least one question isn’t a “great” one. This episode was originally published September 29, 2021. For a full transcript, resources, and more, visit: https://freak.ws/3XkqVrr Photo credit: Audrey Bernstein 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: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

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

• 0:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. Some of the Freakonomics Radio episodes we make have an agenda. That's the case with the one you are about to hear. We made it back in 2015 because I had noticed a disturbing trend in the interviews we do for this show, but also throughout the media, academia, politics, you name it. I was hoping this episode would not only call attention to the problem, but help solve it. Well, dear listener, we failed. We did not solve this problem at all, at least as evidenced by how often I still encounter it. So maybe this time around, it'll work. Hope, they say,

• 0:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  springs eternal. And if there's anything I have in abundance, it's hope. This is a nice, short episode, by the way. Thanks for listening and let us know what you think. We are at [email protected].

• 1:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  We've been doing the show for a while now, and I've noticed a trend. Yeah, that's a great question. So that's a good question. That's a very good question. So it's a great question. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. Most of the questions we ask, they aren't really all that great. But it's like there's a verbal tic going around. Well, you know, that's another good question.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  That's a really good question.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Good question. Great question.

• 1:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Great question. Good question. So those are good questions. Good way to sort it out. And you know who has this tic really bad?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  You know, that's a great question.

• 1:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, Steve Levitt. You know who Steve Levitt is, don't you?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  So that's a great question.

• 1:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt's my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. Levitt, you've been at Chicago for quite a while now, haven't you?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  That's a good question.

• 1:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you seem to think that when it comes to what makes a good question, absolutely no topic is off limits, wouldn't you say?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, it is true. People like their cows to have gotten to walk around a lot and eat fresh grass.

• 2:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Levitt, do you have any recollection of saying that same phrase about 150 times? Is this something you know you're doing?

• 2:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a good question.

• 2:37Speaker 03

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

• 2:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, that's a great question. I've heard this over and over and over the last several years, not just on our show. You hear it in all kinds of media interviews, during the Q and A portion of tech conferences, academic conferences. But just because I've heard it a lot, that doesn't mean much. We needed professional help.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  My name is Erica Okrent. I'm a linguist.

• 3:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okrent knows several languages.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  I speak about six at a faking it level. So I can go for a while and have you convinced until you bring up something I've never talked about before, and then it all falls apart.

• 3:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  For the purpose of this discussion, we're sticking to English and the phrase we're discussing today, "that's a great question."

• 3:44Speaker 04

  I started looking into it. Has it really been on the rise?

• 3:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, so how do you figure this out?

• 3:50Speaker 04

  It's kind of hard to measure that because it's hard to find a corpus of data that will show spoken language over time that way. You can't look for it in Google Books or something because people don't normally write this phrase.

• 4:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Okrent was able to find a couple of big collections of spoken language data.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  One of them is the British National Corpus.

• 4:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a 100 million word database, which includes transcripts of everyday conversation, as well as government meetings, media interviews, and so on.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  And I did a search on the phrase there and it only showed up 35 times in, you know, a corpus of like 100 million words. And a lot of those instances were fiction, so it wasn't too common over there. And then I took a look at the corpus of contemporary American English and there it was over 1,000 times. And most of the instances were interviews on CNN or NPR or different one-on-one interview situations where there was an expert being interviewed about something. So it definitely seems to be more of an American thing.

• 4:58Speaker 05

  We're hearing from leaders in the House and the Senate. They both say they want to pass a bill by next week. The big question, what happens if they don't?

• 5:06Speaker 06

  Well, that's a good question.

• 5:08Speaker 05

  Does this bump hold up, do you think? That's a good question.

• 5:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a good question. That's a very good question. That's a very good question. Well, you know, it's a good question.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Why has that not been enough to get him off death row in Texas? This is a really good question.

• 5:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. And where does Erica Okrent think this habit has come from?

• 5:29Speaker 04

  In looking around for it, I found that it's actually an explicit part of media and PR training.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  I think it's still on the run.

• 5:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Bill McGowan. He does media and PR training for CEOs, athletes, artists, even the best men at weddings. His company is called Clarity Media Group and he wrote a book called Pitch Perfect: How to Say It Right the First Time, Every Time. McGowan says, when some people say, "That's a great question," to serve as what's called a bridge.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  The bridge is what happens when the person interviewing you or asking you questions wants to go down one conversational road.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  You use it as a way to go from a potentially dangerous question back to your talking points, back to the point you want to make.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  You don't know anything about what lies on that road or you don't want to talk about that subject. You have a different conversational road you want to go down, so you need a bridge to get from one road to the other.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  "That's a good question" is one of the phrases that allow you to do that. You get the question. You say that's a good question. It buys you a little time. And then you just jump right in with the point you wanted to make. And often, people don't notice that you haven't dealt with the question or responded to the question.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a really good question. Is the most elementary bridge possible?

• 6:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, when Bill McGowan says it's elementary, he means really elementary.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  I did a training for a nonprofit organization, and I had to role play as the interviewer with five or six of them. And there was one gentleman who sat in the chair, and he started every single answer with, "That's a really good question," even when I asked him, "So, how long you been with this organization?" "You know, Bill, that's a really good question." And I had to stop him and say, "No, it's actually not a good question. That's a really terrible question. It's just a conversation starter." And he saw the absurdity of starting his answer with that.

• 7:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was absurd because it had become such a habit that it lost its meaning. Nearly all of us have some kind of linguistic tic, some go-to phrase we probably don't even know we use. I, for instance, begin way too many sentences with "so," as in, "So, what have we learned so far?" Or, "So, what McGowan is really saying here?" Or, "So, even President Obama uses a verbal bridge."

• 8:04Speaker 02

  He has two words he uses that accomplish the same thing. One of them is "look."

• 8:10Speaker 07

  Well, look, you know, I think, Bill, that the nature of being president is that you're always...

• 8:18Speaker 02

  And the "look" means he's trying to convey it as, "Let me be frank with you." Or the other word he uses is...

• 8:25Speaker 07

  Listen, as I think some of you saw when I was out...

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Listen. And whenever you hear "look" or "listen" come out of the president's mouth, that means he is no longer answering your question. He is answering his question.

• 8:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  But "look" and "listen" are not the only bridges used by President Obama.

• 8:42Speaker 07

  Well, Catherine, this is a great question. And, you know, I was raised by...

• 8:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what exactly is saying "that's a great question" meant to accomplish?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  I think people do it because they think it accomplishes two things simultaneously. It allows them to stall for time and it flatters the interviewer.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  It's for keeping the good vibes going. We're friends here. You're asking good questions. I'm giving good answers. You keep the good feeling going. And things like "that's a good question." Look, the point is, what I'm saying is, all of these phrases are, they're meta-discourse phrases. They don't have to do with the content of the discussion or the things that you're talking about. They're about the discussion itself. And what they do is lay out a map or a path for the people listening to the discussion or the people involved in the discussion. So you say, ah, yes, the argument is, the point is. And you can do that, lay out these little pebbles,

• 9:45Speaker 04

  when the discussion actually isn't going that way, but you give the illusion that this is what's happening. And when you're actually in the discussion, you get the feeling that points are being made and important things are being brought up and good questions are being asked, even if they might not be.

• 10:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, as Erica Okrent sees things, it's linguistic BS.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Any phrase like that, they start somewhere and then people pick up on it. People start using it sincerely. And if it works well, it starts to become a crutch or a tick. And then people start to notice it and they start to hate it and complain about it.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  I believe that saying "that's a really good question" is about as outdated a tick or a strategy as telling people to envision the audience in their underwear.

• 10:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  But not everyone has soured on the phrase. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, Steve Levitt reveals another purpose it serves.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  I think that's one very strong piece of saying "it's a great question" is really just acknowledgement that someone who's sort of in the background is actually doing something that's cool or interesting or challenging.

• 11:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  And here's a question for you. If you do not follow Freakonomics Radio, don't you think you should? It's free. It's easy on the Stitcher app, on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or Amazon Music, wherever you get your podcasts. Also, four out of five economists surveyed recommend the Freakonomics Radio podcast for people who listen to podcasts. We'll be right back.

• 11:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  The media coach Bill McGowan thinks that people should just stop saying, "That's a great question." He thinks it's nothing more than cheap flattery or a stall for time. But some people do use the phrase strategically. Andy Kessler is a former hedge fund manager who now writes about technology and markets. In a 2015 Wall Street Journal column, Kessler wrote about a trick he admires, used by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at board meetings. "When an investor or outside board member asks a stupid question," Kessler writes, "the CEO says, 'That's a great question,' and then gives the questioner an action item, something like, 'Okay, can you survey the competition and report back on their capital

• 12:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  plans and hiring ratios? Great, let's keep going.'" "Eventually," Kessler writes, "the stupid questions dry up, and people who ask them may stop coming to the meetings." Okay, so you can use the phrase as a form of retribution, but Steve Levitt sees another use.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  I like to try to, in everything in life, try to reward the people around me and acknowledge when they say funny things, or smart things, or they look good, or act kind, or things like that. So, as a general rule, I've adopted, especially as I've gotten older, to try to do really nice things to people as much as I can, especially if they're very low cost to me. I like to do nice things that don't cost me anything but are good to other people. And so, I think that's one very strong piece of saying it's a great question, is really just acknowledgement that someone who's sort of in the background is actually doing something that's cool, or interesting, or challenging.

• 13:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me be clear on one thing. When it comes to saying, "That's a great question," perhaps saying it disingenuously, I myself am not innocent. When I'm on the other side of the microphone than I am now, I am a menace. Yeah, that's a great question. So, that's a good question. So, that's one of the... Yeah, that's a great question. That's a really, really good and really hard question. I like it a lot. That's the kind of question that I would like to have thought to ask someone much smarter than me to see what they said.

• 14:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I know where I caught it. I caught it from Steve Levitt.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Maybe I invented it. Maybe I'm the inventor of "That's a Great Question."

• 14:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  I remember when I first heard you say you were giving an academic talk, I think, at University of Chicago. You were discussing research of yours. And in an academic setting, especially when someone challenges either methodology, or finding, or data, or whatever... I guess I expected that the first response would always be to just shout it down immediately and show why, no, I've already thought this through and here's why you're wrong and here's why I'm right, because that's what you see so much in politics, right? Nobody ever acknowledges that the opponent has a valid point. But I remember you just saying, you know, that's a really good question and something to the effect of like, I wish I'd thought of that while doing my research because, you

• 15:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  know, it might be right, it might be wrong, but it certainly would have broadened my thinking on this. So that I remember is where I first heard it from you.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  I don't, I'm sure I stole it from somebody, but I can't, I can't pin my finger on who that particular genius would have been.

• 15:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, well, Lev, I feel indebted to you because I feel it's, you know, if not valuable, then at least useful. And I use it now and again. And so I kind of would like to return the favor to give you something that you can use in certain circumstances. So here's the thing, do you ever, you ever have a circumstance where you're interacting with someone, maybe kind of in passing, and they say something to you and you don't quite catch it, or they say something to you that you don't want to have heard, but you kind of need to say something? Do you ever have that at all?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the time.

• 16:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. So here's what you say. You ready? You might want to write it down. You say, "rebus acasifram." Let me hear you say that.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Say it one more time.

• 16:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  "Rebus acasifram."

• 16:15Speaker 01

  "Rebus acasifram"?

• 16:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  More like one word. "Rebus acasifram."

• 16:18Speaker 01

  "Rebus acasifram."

• 16:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Good, right. So that is a phrase that was invented by some genius, I don't know who. I do know where I learned to say this was from the former dean of students at Dartmouth. And he was always getting in these conversations in passing where you had to have the response, but you had no idea what the person was talking about. They might've been talking about a relative of yours or a former encounter. Like, I can see you using this a lot. And you want to say something on your way out. You don't want to be rude, but you have no idea what the response is. If you say, "rebus acasifram," the human ear will interpret that in one of 100 different ways and they will almost certainly think that you actually said something real when you didn't. So.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  That's great. I love that.

• 17:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're welcome.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  I love that. "Rebus acasifram."

• 17:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's it for today's episode, which, again, first aired in 2015. It's episode number 192, and it's called "That's a Great Question." You can get the entire archive of Freakonomics Radio on any podcast app, along with the other shows in the Freakonomics Radio network, including the aptly-named No Stupid Questions, along with Freakonomics MD and People I Mostly Admire. Steve Levitt is the host of that show, and he asks all sorts of legitimately interesting questions to legitimately interesting people, like the Nobel laureate Danny Kahneman, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and not just one, but both of the new hosts of Jeopardy, Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings.

• 17:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's People I Mostly Admire, available on any podcast app. Meanwhile, coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 17:59Speaker 06

  Well, that's what happens when you take an economist and lock him in front of CNN for three months, make him more and more angry.

• 18:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is the news making you angry? Why? Is it more negative than it needs to be? It's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself, and, if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. We can be reached at [email protected]. This episode was produced by Susie Lechtenberg. Our staff includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rippon, Joel Meyer, Trisha Bobita, Zach Lipinski, Mary Duke, Ryan Kelley, Brent Katz, Emma Terrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmine Klinger, Eleanor Osborne, and Jacob Clemente. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers.

• 18:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Once again, thanks for listening.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  I'm tired today. I might not be so good.

• 19:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're at your best when you're exhausted, I find, when you have no, like, conscious cognitive acuity, and we go straight to the subconscious. That's what I like.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

• 19:22Speaker 07

  Stitcher.