Understanding the World Through Economics: Insights from Freakonomics' Stephen Dubner

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I'm excited to share with you all an interview with my friend, author and podcast host Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics Radio on storytelling and his journey. This interview was moderated by Carly Riley and was recorded at the Hudson Valley Ideas Festival earlier this year. Hope you enjoy it. This week on Forward.

I'd say probably 20% of the feedback, maybe 50 when you do something a little bit political, is that's not what Freakonomics is. And I think that's so cute because what I want to say to people, but I know I would sound like a jerk, but I'll say it here because I don't mean it is. Actually what Freakonomics is, is kind of what I decide I want to do that week. That's all it.

A warm welcome to Stephen Dubner.

Thank you.

Author of Freakonomics, which has spawned what I would certainly consider an empire, like a media empire. Off of Freakonomics. You have the podcast, which I'm a die hard listener to, and also now a series of other shows. I mean Freakonomics is a network.

It is a network.

And so I'm really excited to talk about how this all has come to be. We've referenced at a couple of the morning sessions here about the importance of media. If you're an entrepreneur in other ways. And so you are the perfect person to have this conversation with.

Very glad to be here. I do love the Hudson Valley. I love this part of the world. So thanks for having me. Good.

And I was gonna say, don't let Steven ask you guys all the questions. He's already admitted he hates talking about himself.

I do.

And he's gonna start spinning this and Just asking you guys questions. We're never gonna get to the.

I was a guest once on the Joe Rogan show, and I didn't really know. I mean, I didn't really know that much what to expect. I mean, I know who he was and he likes to just do. I don't know if this is still the case, but he likes to just do interviews in person.

Yes.

Not so I don't know if that's still the case.

It is still the case.

Moved to Austin, but he lived, like, north of la. So I was going to be out there and I was, you know, it was arranged. And so it was just a trip because he and his whole team who were all like, you know, very big muscle guys and really fun and super nice, and he was just so stoned, like, right before. And I think he would often tape maybe a couple times a day. I mean, he's a very hard worker.

A couple.

Those are like three hour podcasts.

I know, I know, but like, I came in the afternoon. My sense is that they'd been like recording and then maybe working out and then smoking a bunch of weed. And I was a little worried because I didn't know how, how. I didn't, I didn't know. I didn't know what he was going to be asking me or whatnot. So apparently I didn't do this on purpose. But then I heard about it later when people listened to it, and it's like three hours. But apparently I just started interviewing him and it was. And it was a blast. And it was really interesting as far as I recall. And I was not stoned, so I should recall it better than he. But, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't. You know, I had a life a long time ago where I was a musician. That was my first career. I was in a rock band. I loved, loved, loved it. And then I quit ultimately, after we got a record deal, which sounds really stupid, but what happened is I realized I did not want a life where, like, adoration of you is your main fuel. As fun as it is, like, it's kind of intoxicating. So ever since, it's been nice to. I'd always been a writer, so I love writing, I love interviewing other people and. But I'm not super comfortable talking about myself. But I'll fake it for the next little bit.

I appreciate that. And now I'm going to counter that with a kind of personal question, like, was it. And it. Was it when you, you didn't want the adoration Was it because you were. You said, it's intoxicating. Were you concerned, like, oh, what this will do to my head?

Almost, yes. Oh, yeah.

It's like the Dumbledore line, like, those who want power are the least qualified to have it.

Exactly. No offense to Andrew and all his political compatriots, but, like, you know, it seems like the primary characteristics of someone who wants to run for national office, especially line up with the characteristics of someone you do not want governing a country. I hate to say. Now, I realize that's a very broad brush and mostly not true, but, like, the adoration and being the center of attention is very attractive. I understand why every. Everybody likes to be adored. You know, who doesn't? Everybody likes to be liked. But to do it in a kind of public way where you're the center of it. And it's tricky because there are all these professions. Like, you know, if you're an act or an actress and you love doing that. But then fame, you may think about it, you may not. But then if you become famous, the fame itself is a horrible cost to your life, not a benefit. So these are things that I think about.

You know, it's interesting. And this is obviously not the direction this conversation was initially going to go. And we will. We will get it on track, but I will say I work.

I feel like I've diverted it pretty successful.

You've done an exceptional job at doing exactly what you intended to do. I worked on Andrew Yang's presidential campaign. That's. That's essentially why I'm here. Yeah. Big fan of Andrew. But one of the things that I observed was the test to becoming president does not really test the things you want in a president. To your point, like what you need to do to run for president is to be a bit of a, pardon my language, but like, kind of a media whore. And you need to go and get yourself in front of cameras and work the press in the right way, totally independent of whatever substance is happening behind the scene. Scenes or whatever's happening. Like, frankly, the better you are at just painting a particular picture is sort of the test you're running. And the person you want, as the president is somebody who just wants to be kind of, I would imagine, head down, thinking about policy, like doing the work less than the media side. So it's a pointing and fingers.

Yeah, I generally agree with that, although I think there are many exceptions to the rule, certainly. And just to be fair, and Andrew.

Was not that way, by the way. This was the thing with Andrew was. He struggled with that because he was like, wait, now I have to go basically be a personality. And what I am is like a nerd who wants to get in the weeds.

And just to be fair, full disclosure, the reason I think I'm here is because I got to know Andrew, because years ago, apparently I met you that day. I. I ended up. I did a show, a Freakonomics Radio episode with Andrew, whatever that was 2019 or so. And I don't typically interview politicians. I don't really do much about politics per se because it's a really hard thing to do empirically and, you know, whatnot. But, yeah, I was really impressed with him. And in terms of the characteristics that you say seem to be at counterpoint, one of them is that the world, the real world, is about nuance. It's not about black. Like, the problems that are obvious have been solved. Everything that's left over is gonna be hard. And no matter what you do, there's gonna be an opposition. That's just the way the world is. But if you come out with a gospel proclamation about, no, I'm right, you're wrong, which is now kind of what our politics has become. It's plainly not a very fruitful way of doing it. But also the thing, and this is what I love about economics, even though I'm not an economist, but I've spent a lot of years now with economists and learning a fair amount about it, is that economists are one of the relatively few groups of people who really look at the world in terms of a cost benefit analysis. Like, if there's a thing that you want to do or a program or a policy or something you want to buy, it really is like the old. Like, I've come to think that so much. Like what they used to call old wives tales, like, they were right. All our. Like, so much of our ancient wisdom that we've tried to overturn. Oh, like, you know, like your grandmother would tell you, you know, sit down with a list of pros and cons, like what. Whether it's a person or a thing. And then you literally have to use a little basic math to figure out what's going to be. But almost every old wives tale you could name, if someone has like a.

List of older old wives tale.

In fact, I've been thinking about doing an episode where I would take like three or four, whatever, whatever you want to call them. There are a lot of different names for them. But, like, read Aesop, read the Greeks. You know, the Bible is kind of Hit and miss. There's a lot of like, you know, if you do this, we have to stone you to death. And we're kind of. That feels a little bit unmodern, but, yeah, so. And a lot of economists I know who are very, very brilliant, if you really corner them and say, you know, what did you prove exactly with that six months worth of math, they'll basically say, we used math to prove, to give empirical argument, theoretical and empirical argument, that this thing that we all knew to be true actually is true. Now there's value in that. But, you know, maybe not as much as we think. But I think that I really like what Neil was saying before about the more. Not just technology, but the more automation, whether it's in the form of AI or whatnot, the more automation I think there is, especially in our lives, the more valuable actual trust and interpersonal relationships become. And I do think we're in a bit of a rebound period now now where more and more people are recognizing that. And I think along with that comes a recognition that a lot of, like, what our parents and grandparents and elders and elder generations taught is extraordinarily applicable. But we like to think that we're the ones that are reinventing the wheel to hop on a cliche and a wives tale.

Excellent. Well, I want to talk about one of the most, I would assume, like, you know, a very important relationship in your life, because we're going to talk about. Okay, well, it's actually not going to be you, but I'm sure you are also very important in Stephen's life. I was going to talk about Levitt. So folks are, I'm sure, familiar that probably with the book Freakonomics, and it was, of course written by Dubner and Levitt. And I want to. Because I want to take us through sort of the Freakonomics empire that has been built, you know, and maybe I'll just even frame this up by just saying I think it is really impressive when you think about it. You had this book that came out that was very in the zeitgeist, kind of changed the culture for that moment in time, but has continued to do so. Like, you have created a sustained. Sustained. I keep using the word because I do think it applies like Empire off of that. And that's not an inevitability. You know, it's easy to kind of look at that now and go, oh, well, of course, you know, it's Freakonomics. But it didn't have to go that way. It could have been a book that came out 20 years ago and then, you know, whatever was a book that came out 20 years ago. So I think that's really interesting that you've done this, but I want to start because I listened to, I think, an interview with you and Levitt in which he told a version of events where you met each other and you hated each other and you didn't want to work together at all and you were forced to have a bunch.

He's an exaggerator, but that's okay.

Let's have his version. You said that was Levitt's version of Yalls first meeting. And I think you said even in the interview, that's not how I would describe it.

Well, he hated. He didn't hate me, but I was a journalist and he's an economist who didn't like. He also. Really. He doesn't like being the center of attention either. I mean, so. But anyway, I'm sorry. No, no.

So I just wanted. I wanted to start with the book Freakonomics and how it came to be and you're meeting Levitt and how that partnership happened and the birth of the book.

Yeah. So it was. It was awesome. It was an amazingly lucky and fun thing that happened to me. So. I'm a writer. I've been a writer for. Since I was a kid. We had a family newspaper, high school, the whole thing. I just always. I loved writing of all of all kinds, and I tried a lot of different things. When I went to grad school, I thought I'd write novels and teach college. I decided I didn't really like teaching very much, I think. Are there any teachers here by any chance? Yeah, hi. Couple. So I have to say, I think to be a teacher, especially to be a good teacher, you have to be really selfless. I think it's a remarkably. I think it's a remarkably gratifying thing to do, but a hard thing to do well, and you really have to. It's like being a parent. This is not. You don't have your kids do things because it makes you feel good. It's about them. And so I realized I was not selfless enough. I was too selfish as a writer to want to teach writing or in university or whatnot. So I stopped that and I can't remember what I was talking about.

Oh, the first meeting one and I guess getting us to first.

So I'd written. I quit playing music, moved to New York City, went to grad school. Then I started working in. In journalism. I was at New York Magazine for a while. Then I Got to the New York Times Magazine, which was amazing. I really liked it. It was. I felt I was very grateful to have gotten to the New York Times. But then I started. I wrote a book in Phoenicia, Shandaken. I lived up there to write the book. It was kind of a family memoir, a story about my strange family and their religious peregrinations, which we don't need to go into. But anyway, I really liked writing books. I liked being by myself for a long time. I liked having an idea in your head that you could really let germinate and not be interrupted by anything or anybody. And so I left the New York Times knowing I was gonna just write books instead. And I was working on what would have been my third book. It was going to be called Money Makes Me Happy Parenthesis, Except when it doesn't. And it was about this notion of. It was about the idea of what now people widely know as behavioral economics, which is a field I liked a lot. I'd read the work of Danny Kahneman, who died recently. Amos Tversky, who died earlier. Then there's a guy named Dick Thaler, Richard Thaler at the University of Chicago, who I really like and admire. And these were really interesting. The first two were psychologists, Thalers, and economists. And they had a way of looking at the world differently. I've always liked thought systems. You know, like, I learned a lot about different religions for a while. I'd written a lot about sports and some about government. I really am attracted to smart people who think they have a way to engage with the real world, but have a system for being analytical about it in a way that's not ideological. That's kind of what I like. And economists, one could argue, do that. So, anyway, sorry, this is getting too long. I was working on this book, Money Makes Me Happy, except when it. I was a couple chapters into it already. I was into it, and I got a call from my former editor at the New York Times Magazine who said, hey, do you want to write a. I know you're working on this book. It's about economists. Do you want to write a piece for us, a magazine piece about this guy Steve Levitt, who just won a big award called the John Bates Clark Medal? It's kind of like the Junior Nobel in economics. And I knew Levitt's work because he had famously written a paper connecting the legalization of abortion in the US with the decline in crime, which is what.

You know, that's like, one of the key things I remember from Freakonomics. I feel like that became such an interesting take.

And I'm so stupid. I was thinking, well, that theory is already so famous, maybe we don't put it in the book. Which was, you know, you make a lot of decisions in your own bubble. You think. Exactly. So anyway, I decided I said no to this assignment like three or four times because Levitt was teaching at the University of Chicago and I'm in New York. And then finally I needed to be in Chicago for something else. I thought, you know what? Let me read his papers and look them up. And I downloaded and read like 30 of his papers. Like, holy cow. He was just such an interesting weird. Like he did. He was doing in economics what I like to think I was doing in journalism and writing, which is find my own thing, don't care what other people think, and do it with your whole heart. And that's what Lev was doing. So I went out to Chicago. He this is where he says, you know, Dubner said he was going to come for two hours. He stayed for three days. Whatever. It is true. I stayed for three days. It was just really fun. And he was like, too polite to say, like, get lost. And I remember calling Ellen my wife after the first day, telling her, like, I don't know if anybody's going to care about this article I'm going to write. It may not even be published, I don't know, but it is going to be so much fun. And I was just really attracted to his way of thinking and so on. So anyway, I wrote this article, came out, people liked it, blah, blah. Some people wanted him to write a book. He said, I'm not a writer. People want me to write a book about him. I said, I'm not going to write a book about a guy I just wrote an article about. Then my agent, actually, who's very smart, name is Suzanne Gluck, she said, what if you guys wrote it together? And I said, that'd be crazy. I'm a journalist. He was my subject. We're not partners. But then we thought about it and we got together. And then turns out he didn't hate me in retrospect. And then we good to get that cleared up. And then we decided the only reason to write a book would be if it was fun and if we thought we could do something good work, you know, we didn't think about it being successful. And then it was. And then that just success just makes things easier. I mean, we shouldn't lie.

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Yeah, well, so I'm curious, like, when you finished the book, did you expect. You know, it was 2004, so I was a little young then, but like, it feels like it was pretty immediately a bit of a cultural phenomenon within its own class. You know, it's not Taylor Swift, but.

Yeah, it didn't feel at all inevitable. I think it was published. Was it four? I thought it was five.

I'm sorry.

It didn't feel inevitable at all because first of all, like, our publisher, I don't know if they really liked it. It was to them it was a very weird book. Because it's a weird book. I mean, I like weird, but you know, the world, like the suits, as I still call them, like, they only like weird after it's successful.

That's interesting.

All they want to do is copy the thing that was successful. That's all the suits know how to do, let's be honest.

And what was the audience like?

Who.

I'm sure it became kind of everyone, but like that the core thing that exploded it. Do you have a sense of who that those people were? Like, was it academics or. It was very much the layperson, I'm sure. Right.

Yeah. So it was a weird. It was a weird publication thing. So first of all, the publisher hated not only they probably liked the book fine, but they didn't really know what it was. They hated the title and they kept saying no. Steve Levitt's sister came up with the title when Neil was talking about coming up with Casper. Like, it's hard to come up and our book is like, it's not about any one thing at all.

Raise your hand if you've read Freakonomics. Yeah, A lot of people.

Yeah. Thank you. My children's tuition, college fund. Thank you. But, yeah, it's hard to come up with a name. Linda Gines. Unfortunately, she died not a few years after she died of cancer. Linda did. She had worked in publishing and advertising, and we gave her the manuscript, Levitt. And he said, come up with his name. She came up with a couple hundred names, like Neil said, this firm did. And when Levitt and I both saw Freakonomics, we just laughed and said, this is so terrible that it might be really great. And we go to the publisher and like, absolutely not. Absolutely not. We're William Morrow. We're part of Harper Collins. We're not going to publish a book called Freakonomics. And then you gotta get a little bit strategic. And then they said. Then we said, okay, well, we'll keep coming up with titles. So the next, like, 10 titles, I fed them the terrible titles. Yeah, yeah. And then finally they just gave in. Then later, of course, they take credit, which I'm happy for them to take credit. That's fine. But when it first came out, it still wasn't apparent that it was going to succeed at all. But then there were a couple early good reviews. Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the good ones. The publisher wants you to get on TV as a writer. TV's kind of. It's like, you know, it's big, but it's not a good medium for ideas.

Podcasting wasn't a thing yet.

Podcasting was not a thing yet. Podcasting would have been perfect anyway. We finally cracked that barrier. Even the way we cracked that was a little bit weird. You know, TV producers read USA Today and things like that. So I said, what if we take a piece from the book we'd been excerpting in classy places like the New York Times, you know. But I said, what if we put. And we wrote a piece for the. For USA Today that was a decent piece. And then all of a sudden, we got on one, you know, morning show. Then it kind of began to cascade. And then, like I said, people like success. They like to, you know, they like to promote things that are already successful because it makes. They're invested in it. Yeah. And then it was like. It was unbelievably lucky and exciting to be in the middle of that.

And so then what happened? You know, you started getting deals coming your way. Like, when did the podcast start?

That was in 2010. So that was. So the podcast. Wait. I think. So the first book was out. It became really big. And that led to a lot of interesting things, opportunities, most of which are terrible. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, when you have a brand that people like, most of what they come to you with is good for them, maybe good for you, but quite possibly idiotic. And it's also very time consuming to sort through. So mostly we did almost nothing. And I wanted to do another book, and our publisher said, can you have it by, like, next week? And it took us five years for the second book, Super Freakonomics, we call it, because we wanted it to be good. And that meant a lot of original research and so on. So we had all kinds of people kind of mad at us, actually, because they wanted us to be a brand. And I just wanted to keep being a writer with a good book.

But interestingly, in that you were actually being an incredible brand manager, but you didn't think of it like that. Like, by saying, no, you're actually doing brand management.

That's nice of you to say. I tell you, the experience I drew on, which I didn't know at the time, was being in a band where I was, like, not only a writer and a musician and singer in the band, but I was also the manager of the band. And when you take a little punky rock band in North Carolina and you want to get a record deal, you have to build that kind of a brand. And so I had done that, and it was really fun. Like, I was the promoter. I was the guy that found an agent. The agent gets the label, you know, all that stuff. And it never felt, like, whorish because I loved the band, I loved making the music. I felt like what we wanted to get out in front of the world wasn't some product that I was embarrassed about. It was, like, us. I loved it. So I actually did, I guess, draw on that for the book. So when the book published and nobody knew what it was and so on, so one of the first things I did is, like, blogging was. That was kind of like the heyday of blogging, like, early heyday. And so, you know, found a list, just, you know, what I read and what other people read. Found a list of 20, 50, 100 bloggers. Those were the first people we sent galleys of Freakonomics to. And our publisher was like, what are these? These aren't like, newspapers or whatever. But, you know, that was a good, fun way to manage a brand. So I guess I'm slightly less bad at brand management than I think, according to you.

Think of yourself as Being bad at brand management.

I just think of myself as not doing it in the way that people with MBAs think about doing it.

Okay, can I monetize? You haven't, like, squeezed every penny out of it.

True. But also, it's really different when the brand is your work, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, every brand is different, but, like, I really care.

It's your face in a lot of ways. Yeah, well, but. But here's what I was going to say. I think one of the reasons I think it's been such. Such successful brand management is, again, you've had a sustain. You've been able to. You've sustained it for 20 years. Most brands don't have that kind of life. And it stands for something very clear. Like Freakonomics has become somewhat synonymous with this particular kind of pop econ behavioral economics. To me, that's, like, pretty impeccable brand management to know what it stands for. And you've had this. What from an outsider looks like a somewhat slow, deliberate. You've gone into a new territory sort of slowly and deliberately, as opposed to anything too quickly. Like, you went into podcasting, which in hindsight, of course, feels like a very natural place to do something like this.

Although it was. That was also just lucky, I'll be honest with you.

Okay, so talk about that.

Yeah, So I. Again, I appreciate all the false credit you're giving me, but so. But no, I mean, I agree that a lot of having good taste is saying no.

Yes. Like, I don't want the toilet bowl cover. Freakonomics.

Yeah, exactly. I don't want Freakonomics for the chicken soup. So, I mean, there were so many. There were so many products and services that. And they would have made money, but neither Levitt nor. We just didn't care. Like, first of all, as a writer, I'd already hit the jackpot. As a writer, I never thought I'd be able to afford having a family and stay in New York City. That was bar one to clear. So I already felt like everything on top would be kind of gravy. My mom. I grew up further upstate outside of Schenectady, and my mom had a say. And we were like a large, rural, poor family. And my mom had this saying that she'd gotten from a real place, but I didn't know that it was enough is as good as a feast. And I. I think about that, like, five times a day. It's also an interesting psychological phenomenon because it's like diminishing returns and habituation and all that stuff. Yes. So podcast. Yes. So we finished writing the second book, Super Freak. It wasn't out yet. And even though Levitt and I work together, as a writer, you're mostly in your room by yourself, and it's kind of lonely for a long time. And I don't love people, no offense. I really. I mean, you're all fine, I'm sure, but I really like being by myself, and my wife, who's a photographer, really likes being by herself. So when we get together for those fantastic 45 minutes a day, it's great. But we're both very happy to spend a lot of time alone doing our thing. And it's more than many days or hours, but anyway, so when I finished writing. When we finished writing the second book. I really like audio. I've always liked audio. Tv, film and TV and documentaries. I had done a lot with Freakonomics, and I realized it's not a good medium for ideas, like I said, because you don't control it, you know, you don't control the way the story is told and so on. So I knew I wanted to control what I did. I didn't want to start a TV production or film production company. It's really expensive and complicated. But I loved audio from the time I was a kid. And I thought, what if I wanted to have a public radio show? But I thought if I start a podcast as a kind of pilot version of that, I could do it. And that's essentially what I did. Just kind of. It cost almost nothing to do it. I just started making the show I wanted to make with a couple people from WNYC who were really good and knew how to do it. But podcasting wasn't a big deal. And then I had no. It wasn't meant to be a moneymaker at all. It was a money loser. But then it got better. The market changed. Cereal came out. All of a sudden, a lot of people started paying attention to podcasting. We published another book called Think Like a Freak, which is our third and last book. And then when that got a lot of attention in the media, I think people just, like, Google Freakonomics, like, oh, there's a podcast. What's a podcast? And so now it's grown to the point where it's a big property and, like, the bigger the audience got, like, in the beginning, I was just like, oh, shit. A lot of people are listening. Like, I should try to make it good, because I was. I mean, I wasn't not trying to be good, but we. I take it really seriously now. Like, having worked at the New York Times, I know what it's like to be around people whose standards are here and you don't always reach them. You often fail. But that's the way we now treat Freakonomics Radio. We treat it like journalism, storytelling, whatever, of the highest order. And that is really fun to be involved in as a writer. And it's really fun to own the means of production, like Mark said, because that puts you in a position of leverage.

So how many folks are on the team at this point for freaking entrepreneur?

Well, you mentioned before, we do have three other shows in our little network and.

Which launched one.

Let's see. People I mostly admire is Levitt's show, which launched about two years ago. No Stupid Questions is a show that we launched with me as co host with Angela Duckworth, who's awesome, who wrote the book called Grit. And then I did that for three years, and I was like, I didn't have time to do Freak radio the way I wanted to. So I stepped down. We replaced me successfully, which is nice because that doesn't always happen. That one was launched three, three and a half years ago. Then our newest one is called the Economics of Everyday Things, which is actually gonna. It's doing really well. It's a kid. I love this kid. His name is Zachary Crockett. He's a writer. He was not an audio guy. And I would say all our produce, none of them were audio radio, public radio, or podcast people. They're all weird, smart young people who come in. And then we kind of have a work system that's very different from most other shops. And so we have now all in about 20 people. But freak Radio is really about a core, like seven or eight. So it's relatively small for a show of its, like, labor intensivity.

And it's lean when you compare to historical forms of media. Like, you know. And it, I'm sure, has a much bigger audience than the cable networks, for example, which have much higher production costs and are much more labor intensive.

And also, I mean, like, I don't know how much anybody cares about the economics of podcasting per se. Probably zero.

I care a lot, but I don't know if anybody else.

I'll talk to you alone for a moment then. Here's the thing that people don't really, I think, appreciate and real. I mentioned earlier, just like in passing, this notion of habituation. This is the human impulse to, like, the minute you have something that you like or that you dislike, you get accustomed to it. And then you kind of want to level up, and it's very natural. But it explains why we live in this unbelievably rich, privileged culture. And we still complain about the fact that our latte is 2 degrees not hot.

The WI fi is not working on the airplane. Like you're 2,000ft in the air.

Although I do hate that.

I know we do. But it's also like, come on.

But here's the thing. Okay? So I'm a writer. In the old days, whether I was writing for the New York Times Magazine or a publisher, I was relying on them to have a whole infrastructure of stuff, editorial stuff, which is good and important. But then think about the production and distribution. The New York Times had printing and does have printing facilities. Massive buildings with massive equipment staffed by hundreds of union employees. They also had to have newsprint, the big rolls of paper. How did they get that? They actually owned the newsprint companies in Canada. They basically were forest managers. Then to deliver the paper every day when it was pre digital, they had to own a fleet of trucks. Think about the cost of all that versus a podcast. Steve Jobs really was the one who did it because he decided that, you know what, on this iPhone that I love, I kind of like this thing called podcast, which you just see this little RSS file. And so he made an app and he really created an instantaneous, free digital global distribution system for creators, writers, whoever, to use. So that's a way in which whenever you hear people complain about, oh, technology or AI or blah, blah, blah, is ruining the job cycle that we know it. It's true, jobs have always changed throughout history, but look what one little switch has also created and afforded. And so it's to be grateful for.

Let me ask you, this is, I guess, still on the brand management side maybe, because I find it so interesting. Like, have you ever felt caged by Freakonomics? Or like, I have to be the steward of this brand that stands for this particular thing or does this particular thing, like, wherever. Like, I want to go do a topic that totally doesn't fit Freakonomics at all. And I'm stuck hearing what this brand means.

So that is a very good question. And the answer is no, I've not felt caged because I have totally ignored what people think Freakonomics is and stands for. But it's interesting you say that, because once in a while, like, if we do a political piece like we had on the show this week, we had Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, which is not what I usually do, and I don't really enjoy talking to politicians that much for the kind of obvious reasons. But there were a variety of reasons why we felt compelled to do this. And it was interesting and I learned a good bit and it was not a bad experience. But whenever you do anything that's a little bit political or a little bit anything, you do get whatever. We get a lot of feedback. And I would say that like feeling, yeah, I'd say probably 20% of the feedback, maybe 50 when you do something a little bit political is that's not what Freakonomics is. And I think that's so cute because what I want to say to people, but I know I would sound like a jerk, but I'll say it here because I don't mean it is actually what Freakonomics is, is kind of what I decide I want to do that week. That's all it is. Like I'm a writer guy. Like Levitt doesn't. It's just me being a writer. But I happen to have a brand name now. But like a few months ago we did a three part, four part series on Richard Feynman, the physicist who's always been just kind of an intellectual hero of mine. Had nothing to do with economics, with free economics, whatever. But we approached it with full heart and open mind and people loved it for the most part, you know, at least, you know, the feedback was extremely positive. The numbers kind of don't really vary that much because it's a weekly show. That's another thing that Steve Jobs did. Think about it. If you write a book, every time you write a new book or make a new mattress or whatever, you have to like in a very expensive way, tell the world, hey, there's this new thing, you should go buy it. Podcasts, just by nature of the technology via which it's distributed your phone. And it's a push technology, not a pull. Once you opt into it, it keeps coming to you.

But you know what's so interesting? That's such a first mover advantage piece. Because the challenge with podcasts, if you're starting one later, is there's not actually a lot of. There's not as much organic discoverability. So on YouTube, I'll put. I was throwing stuff up on YouTube and I'm a bit of a podcaster as well and bit of a pod. Well, no, I mean truly it is a bit. I mean you were talking about freakin nomics, but. But the point is I got a lot of suddenly organic traction at times on YouTube in a way that with Podcasts, you have to actually go out other podcasts and pitch your podcast to get people to come. Once they're locked in, it's stickier.

Yeah.

But finding new podcasts can actually be more challenging.

It's the discovery system, as they call it in podcasting, is still not good. Apple is about. Our Downloads are about 70% Apple, so they're easily our biggest distributor. And they've done a lot of things over the years. They've gotten more aggressive and more interested in it. But it's just, you know, I think discovery is mostly this goes back to the kind of digital versus analog idea. Like most. Discovery is word of mouth, and that's a great thing. It's, you know, marketers will tell you a different story. Marketers don't always tell you the truth, by the way. They're trying to sell you a marketing. Can I tell you something? This is an episode we've got coming up soon. This is just a cool story. You remember Jared Fogle, the Subway guy who lost like £200, used to hold up his own gym?

Didn't he have a bad scandal?

He had a very bad scandal. Turned out he was not only possessing, but I think generating child pornography. He was arrested, he's in prison, et cetera. But we're doing an episode about the notion of celebrity endorsers, because when Jared was at his peak, the chief marketing officer of Subway, Subway was booming. And they said, this boom is happening because I found Jared and we made this campaign around Jared. And this campaign is so successful that Subway's profits are climbing, you know, double digits every quarter. And then Jared got busted for child pornography, and Subway sales did not fall at all. Which is an indication, among all other things, that chief marketing officers pets are not always telling you the truth.

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I think you're mostly right, but because my early partners were wnyc, especially one guy, Colin Campbell, who's gone to a bunch of places, but now he's back at npr, is the head of their podcast, which I think is a good thing. He's very talented. We were always looking for. Yeah, I mean, yes and no. Like, I remember one of the first pieces we did was. Was called the Dangers of Safety, and it was just like a concept. So it wasn't economic, but it was about the idea that when you give someone a safeguard of some kind, you create what's called moral hazard, which means that they're more likely economic concept. You're right. It is. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the way I look at it is, like, what I like about economics is it's actually a very robust social science, and there's a lot in it that has nothing to do with the things that most people think about as economic demand, supply. That's right.

But I think the bigger point I'm making is I guess you had this brand, it sort of stood for something. People found the product, liked the product, and now you're at a point it would never occur to me to be like, well, that wasn't freakonomics of you to interview Justin Trudeau. Because at this point, it is what you're interested in and what you know you're getting when you come to the show is quality journalism. Interesting. A good story cut together well. Like, you're getting a quality product. And now you'll all listen to whatever you put out.

Once again, all very nice of you to say, and I think for you that's true. But you have to realize, like a lot of people, like, you know, we have whatever. There are millions of people listening. So in a given week, even there are tens of thousands of people who are probably hearing this for the first time, and they have no good feelings, bad whatever.

So there.

They just see the name. They maybe have some level, who knows of association with what the book was.

Somebody may have posted a Link on their LinkedIn or Facebook. We don't know. I mean, that's one of the reasons Discovery is so bad is because the data, data is in all these silos. It's not really well understood, et cetera, et cetera. But we don't know. So you have to kind of assume that every episode may be someone hearing it for the first time. But as a writer, I like that. I think it's important to write for an audience that way. Yeah.

So, okay, I want to ask about very specific. You mentioned the abortion study, I'll call it. And if people don't know this, this came out for economics. And I think for a lot of people it was something that really stuck out, which was that this decline in crime that happened in the 90s could be correlated or, you know, connected to about 20 years after Roe v. Wade and that. And really that that's maybe causational. Right. That the ability to have an abortion affects crime. Feels like there has been then scandal around that idea and controversy around that idea in the decades since then, which I'd be interested in hearing you talk about, but also this moment in time where you almost have. And I know this is a really sensitive topic for a lot of people, but kind of an interesting moment in terms of different states now having very different abortion laws that could potentially make for an effective study 10 or 20 years from now, as you look back and can directly compare states.

That's exactly right. Yeah. So right. So the premise is, as you stated really well, is the concept is that no one knows better than a mother or would be mother, whether it's a good time to have a child than the mother. And if she's not able to make that decision fully, then what the previous decades of social science research showed is that children who are born into what you might call an unwanted situation or where it was a difficult or unwanted birth, then those kids are. There's a reason that a mom may not want to be a mom at that moment. And often this wasn't a first child. This is often a second or third child. And so what it really comes down to is like children need a lot of resources and love and attention. And if you don't have that, then you're putting them at a bit of a handicap. Can the handicap be overcome? Of course it can. But on average, it's a greater risk. And so what Levitt and John Donahue, a legal scholar who's now at Stanford, argued in a paper before free economics, which is why I thought it was old news, was that after Roe v. Wade, if you look at like 16, 17, 18 years after, when that cohort was Being born when there had been more legal abortions. More abortions, period, more legal. Then the crime wave, which had also been very accelerated due to a number of factors, began to fall. And so their argument that there was a strong, A pretty strong causal component to that, although there were a lot of other things going on too, which these scholars interrogated. They interrogated many other contributors to the drop in crime, some of which they deemed valuable and some of which not. The controversy was mostly over measurement. One measurement error in the original paper, which was a stupid coding error that Leva and o' Donoghue made, and they corrected for that. They did, they corrected and then they published a new paper. And again, they're publishing these in peer reviewed journals. So as much as we trust peer reviewed journals, we have to say, you know, it was a legitimate reinterpretation. And there'd been other research that corroborated. So look, it's a complicated, It's a complicated and controversial thing. So it's not surprising that people are going to argue about it. The point is not whether we're 100% right, 50% right, 10% right. The point is that it shows how incentives determine human behavior to some degree. You're right about states now making abortion inaccessible. Will that have ramifications down the road? It'd be surprising if it didn't. I would say I'll offer, just if you want to think in the kind of same frame. Another topic that I actually talked a little bit about with Justin Trudeau the other day is what happens in a place where the cost of childcare is very high or it's inaccessible. Turns out fertility rates drop quite a lot. At least that's argued by some scholars. This is new research. You can see the logic there. Like, if I am a family wanting to have a kid, and I know, like, it's 30 bucks an hour, that's like, that's like $2 more than I'm making to go to work. This makes no sense whatsoever. And therefore that may be a driver to that. So, you know, like, like we were talking about earlier, it's a way of using a set of tools. They're very basic tools. It's like empirical analysis, like data, real data, analyzing it, logic, and then also like understanding how history and people work. Like, you can't just look at this snapshot in time. You have to see what was leading up to a thing. And so honestly, this work is. It's just incredibly fun. It's like, you know, they always like to say that journalism is the first draft of history. But that's frustrating because when you're writing beat journalism especially, or news journalism, you are writing so fast that you know you're not getting the whole thing when you're doing something. What we're trying to do is do pieces that are set now, but we have all of history to draw on. It feels like you can try to go a little bit deeper. But that's not to say we also have fun. We also do, you know, fun. I don't mean to make it sound so heavy.

Oh, no. I think if anybody's listened to the podcast, I think, you know, there's a wide range. It's so fun. Guys.

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Okay, well, thank you so much, Stephen. We're going to open up to audience questions.

Just think about the guy I would think of as The Freakonomics of 1879 is a guy called Henry George. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he was a journalist.

He's not the. Not a toilet guy, is he?

No, not a journalist who ended up writing the book Progress in Poverty, which is kind of the freakonomics of I think, the 19th century and went on to be run for mayor and all these other things. But I think it'd be really fascinating to look at because his idea was it was kind of a mix between communist, wasn't capitalist, but it was saying what really belongs to mankind and what belongs to the personal, the individual, which was the capital of things they produced and what belonged to society, which was the natural resource of the land. And that's how it came to the whole, the single tax. And it was actually the basis of the Monopoly game. It was endorsed by Einstein. All the great intellectual class really drove the progressive movement of that period. So just.

That sounds. I'm really glad to know that. Thanks. Yeah, there is a movement, I mean, there's always been a movement to kind of get at this idea of, like, what belongs to whom and why. Like, you know, Milton Friedman, believe it or not, who's usually thought of as a pretty. Whatever. He's hard to label because he did a lot of things that are very popular with liberals and a lot of things that are popular with conservatives. But he made an argument, in fact, this ties back to Andrew Yang. You know, one of Andrew's primary arguments was about the need for ubi, some kind of universal basic income. Milton Friedman actually was the most prominent person in the 20th century to promote something like that. He promoted it in the form of what he called a negative income tax, which is really the same. But one of the things that was being argued at that time, I'm not sure by Friedman, but others who were doing it, was that, like, wait a minute, wait a minute. We know that European settlers came in and just stole the land. We know that, and we kind of ignore it. So that's one issue. Let's put that issue aside for a minute. I'm not saying you should put it aside, but we do put it aside after that. When you look at the resources of a place like this, they belong to whom and why do they belong to them? And does it make any sense? And so there was an argument that at the very least, you should put a number on natural resources and divide it by everybody in the country and give them a share. So it's really interesting to see how this argument. But. But I have to say, that argument never gets very far because it only takes, like 3 people, 10 people, 100 people to get in power and say, nah, let's not do it that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's also, you know, there's this movement now. There's an economist named Derek Hamilton who just moved to the New School a year or two ago from maybe Ohio State, who's been a big promoter of what's called baby bonds. The baby bond being the idea that every baby is born gets. That's literally a savings bond, that this is drawn from our collective natural resources. So I think that's an incredibly. I mean, I think economics of all the social sciences needs to interrogate itself really hard. And, well, I will say on Steve Levitt's podcast in our network, which is called People I mostly Admire, his guest this week is Joe Stiglitz, the economist, who's really very much in line with the Zingy and it's a very good conversation. Stiglitz has a new book out on this as well, which I would recommend, but thank you for telling me about this. Appreciate it. Hi. My question more on you personally. I know you don't want to talk about it, but do you have podcasts that you listen to regularly or do you have a question? Do you listen to audio stuff and then what? Maybe earlier on, like, is there any radio influence or things that draw you to the audio version of information? Yeah, so that's a good question. I could talk forever about it and you don't want me to, so. Okay, I'll do a short answer. So, do I listen to many podcasts regularly? Definitely not. I just don't have time because, you know, I probably put in, I don't know, between 60 and 80 hours a week on the show. And so that means when I have what most people think of as, like, leisure listening time, if I'm listening to a podcast, I'm listening to an interview with a guest. I've got upcoming to try to find out some other stuff about them. However, I do sample a lot of podcasts that I hear about, some big, some obscure, and I like many of them a great deal. But I find that for me, I mean, don't tell the world, because this is goes, this is contra my interest, but I find that most podcasts are not an efficient deliverer of information. So, like, when I write our show, I'm trying, not always succeeding. I'm trying to have it be really efficient. Like, every minute or two, you're learning something interesting and worthwhile as opposed to, like, let's just talk about my feelings about this, which I don't care about. I don't, no offense to you, I don't really care about your feelings about that unless you can tell me why, like, tell me some interesting facts, ideas, et cetera. And most podcasts, I feel, aren't that great at doing that. The other thing is, I like to read. I find reading is a much more efficient way of getting information. I happen to be a slow reader ever since I got a concussion when I was, like, 13. I used to be such a fast reader, and now I'm, like, kind of sludgy, but I like. So I stick with it. But that takes a lot of time. But what I really listen to, I love music. I mean, like, when I stopped playing music, I kind of went cold turkey on listening to rock and roll and everything. But now, and I still don't listen to a lot of you know regular music, but I listen to a lot of. A fair amount of classical and a lot of jazz. And, like, sometimes I'll just listen to Charles Mingus all day while I'm writing. And to me, he's like a writing partner. It's a little hard to describe, but, like, I just feel it. And it says a lot to me about tone, about exuberance, about call and repeat, about unexpected noises, about gear shifts and tone shifts and stuff. So I would say my. The show that I. Freakonomics Radio, even though this sounds idiotic and nonsensical, I actually think of it as a kind of a piece of music. And I'm one instrument when I'm a narrator. I'm a different instrument when I'm interviewing someone. And then all the people being interviewed are other instruments. And then we have scoring. We actually have a composer that scores our show, and he's knitting it together. Then the engineers are mixing in a way. And so that's the way I think about it, which I realize sounds idiotic, but that's my story.

Hi, I was wondering if you have any insight in if inflation will stop at some point and maybe if we're.

Already at peak inflation. You have mistaken me for someone who knows things that no one knows. No, I mean, look, okay, I have no idea that's the true answer, but here's the better answer. Anyone who tells you they know, they don't know either. Because this is what I mean about the difference. Like, there are many different kinds of economists who do many different kinds of things. The people who do macro, the things that actually try to control, the ones who actually try to control the economy, they're very, very smart people. They are extremely numerate. They know history pretty well. Jay Powell, who's coming from a different angle than most guys do because he was a. He was a. I think a hedge fund guy. He was. You know, he's coming from the finance side. Ben Bernanke, I don't know if you ever had a chance to listen to him. Dog. Ben Bernanke is a brilliant, brilliant man. If he were a theologian or a literature professor, a scientist in any field, if you heard him talk, he's a brilliant man. It's a very, very, very hard thing to know. And the reason is, as much as you can make a perfect and elegant theoretical and mathematical argument about why inflation should rise, fall, or stay the same, it is not in a vacuum. It's responding to all of us irrational creatures running around and getting ideas about things that then affect the theory. And so it's really, really hard to say what I think we should be thinking about. I don't know if anybody read the Wall Street Journal this morning, but it's a very interesting piece about how there is a group of people, I'm not sure if their advisors quite aligned with Donald Trump. There may be many Trump fans in here. If there are, I'm going to say something that it's not even actually, you'll probably like it. But for anyone who's not a Trump fan, this is something I think one should be aware of. There is a group of people right now who are trying to strategize for how a second Trump term could successfully grab back power and basically run the Fed. And if that doesn't make you a little bit nervous about the future of democracy, it really should. And so that's the kind of thing that I tend to pay a bit more attention to. And that's, I would argue, a pretty bad thing. Because one of the things that's made the US Economy so much more dynamic than any other economy in the history of the world, in the modern world at least, is because having an independent Fed is a really valuable thing, it turns out. And so I for one, I'm revealing my personal preferences here, but I for one am in favor of that. And I think it would be an absolutely horrible idea to do away with it.

Well, on that pause, that was a really cheery note to end on a great ending note.

Can I just say, though, I really loved your questions and I, I really appreciate your coming out today. So thank you. Thank you.

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