Freakonomics Radio - 166. How to Think Like a Freak -- and Other FREAK-quently Asked Questions

Episode Date: May 8, 2014

Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt talk about their new book and field questions about prestige, university life, and (yum yum) bacon.

Hey, podcast listeners. We have a new book out next week called Think Like a Freak. You can read an excerpt in this weekend's Wall Street Journal. And then on Sunday at midnight, also known as Monday, the book goes on sale. All stores, all formats. If you want to keep up with what we're doing in the coming weeks, TV, radio, live talks, go to Freakonomics.com slash events. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook. And if you want a free autographed book plate to stick in your new copy of Think Like a Freak, you can sign up for one of those at Freakonomics.com. Thanks. So, Levitt, how are you feeling today?

Oh, I'm so tired. We had an tiring run of golf yesterday. When you got home late last night to Chicago, did you find a package there waiting from the publisher? Yes. I'll do that one again. So, Levitt, when you got home late last night, did you find a package waiting for you from the publisher? I did. Did you open it?

No, I didn't actually because my daughter Amanda got to it before I could get to it. Did she really? She did. She opened it up. And? And she found a bunch of books. And they were called Think Like a Freak. And she immediately put it onto Instagram.

And one of her 13-year-old friends said, I never knew your dad wrote Freakonomics. That's so cool. Wow. Did Amanda read any of it yet? I don't think she has. She's read Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics, which she has not yet tackled Think Like a Freak. I think 13-year-olds are pretty much the perfect audience for this book, don't you? I think it is. I think ingraining the ideas of thinking the way we do.

I mean, we've always said it was our goal to take over the world, and starting with the 13-year-olds is the right way to do it, don't you think? Right. Their minds are much more plastic. We can shape them before. Yeah, I mean, look at Twilight and Divergent and Harry Potter. You can get the 13-year-olds who own everything. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dupner. Steve Levitt is my friend and co-author. He teaches economics at the University of Chicago. In 2005, we wrote Freakonomics.

In 2009, Superfreakonomics. We started this podcast in 2010, and now we're about to publish our third book, Think Like a Freak. Hey, so Levitt, so Think Like a Freak is about to come out next week. If there's a lesson to be gleaned from the writing of this book, what would it be? I would have to say that we did something very painful but very good in writing that book, in that twice we wrote an entire first chapter, thought it was great when we wrote it, and ended up throwing it in the garbage completely and starting over from scratch. And I think that's, it's so hard to do, right? So one of the messages of the book is about how people fall prey to what economists

call sunk costs, that once you've invested a lot in something, you hang on to it, even though it's not worth anything. And that was good. I was proud of us for doing that, because it would have been so easy to say, okay, it's not exactly perfect. Let's just keep on going. But we literally threw it in the garbage and started over. And that was good. You know, it's like what Michelangelo talked about with sculpture. You just take a big hunk of marble and get rid of all the pieces you don't want and what's left will be pretty good. Except the problem was that we actually had to not just take a hunk of marble. We actually built from scratch a hunk of marble, and then we had to hack away at it. So you're saying that what we do is harder than what Michelangelo did?

And far more brilliant as well. And we'll certainly, I think we'll last. Stand the test of time. Test of time, exactly right. Much better than his fly-by-night things. So is Think Like a Freak more David or more Sistine Chapel ceiling, you think? There is a lot of anatomy in it. I'll say that. Probably David. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too. All right. And Levitt,

let's say someone gets this book and it's a different book for us because it's kind of laying out the rules of thinking, particularly about solving problems and so on, if there was one rule that you thought it was important for someone to take to heart out of all the things we write about in the book, I'm curious what your one takeaway would be. Yeah, it's almost something we didn't write in the book, but it's something that is pervasive in the ethos of the book, which is that even though it is completely and totally obvious that you should think, most people don't do it. I mean, we never even really, I think, got around to saying that in the book. We do say that a little bit. In fact, in the first chapter, and then we talk a little bit

about George Bernard Shaw noting the same thing almost 100 years ago. Yeah, you're exactly right. Yeah, I think in some ways that is, we have a lot of specific advice and we have a lot of hints at how we solve problems, but it's really just the basic idea that most people walk around on autopilot and being reminded, and even we need to be reminded of that all the time. It's amazing how hard it is to remember the really simple things when you live in a complex world that pulls you in a hundred directions at once. So, Levitt, some readers and listeners of this podcast have been writing in with questions, some of which are related to the new book, some of which are just regular old frequently asked questions. Do you feel like answering some?

Are you up for it today? Yeah, I'm in the mood for that today, actually. You are? Okay, great. Yeah, I am. So, Alicia Robison writes to say, this is a pretty long one, settle back, love it. Her email is titled Bacon Fetish, which, how can you not like that email? She writes to say, I am sure you have noticed the new society fetish with bacon.

Now, I'm not sure where or how this happened, but I imagine it spawned from a Reddit-like website. I like the early hints of conspiracy paranoia in the first couple sentences there. My question is, what are the social slash economic slash health benefits of all this bacon weirdness? I am personally a vegetarian, but I think even to a normal carnivore,

some of the hip new bacon infusions and food creations are going a bit over the top. How long until we can gather data about early onset heart disease and heart attacks? She really turned it there. Do you notice that? First, it was kind of about like bacon taking over as a style. And then immediately, how long until we can gather data about early onset heart disease and heart attacks? What kind of numbers, she writes, can we get from the meat processing industries in terms of pork production? Are they feeling the surge?

What is the cost on the environment? It takes a lot of water and resources to raise a pig. And most of all, she writes, why for the bacon fetish? I have my theories mainly in the wake of kale smoothies, hipster homesteading, and state-mandated soda size reduction. I don't know if that actually happened, the state-mandated soda size reduction. Is this simply a grassroots uprising of those who refuse to relinquish their bacon and supersized Pepsi? Regardless where it started, it seemed to infiltrate people from every walk of life. Even here in my crunchy Colorado mountain town, it's impossible to walk into a bar and not be faced with bacon-infused Bloody Marys or bacon-covered waffles at the local breakfast joint. Let's face it, many trends like

tramp stamps and mullets only result in wistful regret of the good old days and photos that are good for a laugh. However, this trend has the potential to do some serious damage. Thanks, Alicia. All right. So that's a great question. I like it. Alicia has a lot of spunk and that's a good thing in these questions. So here's what I have to say as a caveat before I respond to Alicia, because we always say you should put away your moral compass before you start to think about a problem. But I have an incredible personal attachment to bacon, and I have had for a long time. One of my first phrases, actually, when I was a child was, yum, yum, bacon. That was pretty much my watchwords when I was a child, because I was mostly denied bacon. But whenever I had the opportunity, I would exclaim, yum, yum, bacon, and have as much as possible. So that being said, let me try to put aside my personal adoration for bacon and answer this question.

And it's interesting. On the health front, as we write in Think Like a Freak, there's so much confusion in the world about what's healthy and what is not healthy. And I can imagine bacon is unhealthy because it's loaded with all sorts of nitrates and things. But, you know, we write about how fat has been demonized and how the cutting edge, many cutting edge nutritionists now would not deem fat to be bad. Indeed, I mean, there are only three ways really to get calories. It's from fat, it's from protein, it's from carbohydrates. And many, many people, at least the smart people that I know, have turned against carbohydrates

and said that carbohydrates are the enemy, not fat. So in that sense, bacon is a wonderful food because bacon is loaded with fat and doesn't have carbohydrates. From a social economic perspective, my hunch is that whatever little dribs and drabs of bacon that are being dumped into Bloody Marys compared to the enormous amount of pork, which is used for a million things, you know, from bacon at McDonald's to the incredibly high per capita consumption of pork in China that nobody's even noticing any impact whatsoever from a production perspective of this bacon fetish that Alicia

talks about. But let me ask you this. What's interesting about her question is that it's a series of objections to one thing, right? So it's an anti-bacon question, but it has all these different components, each of which operates on a different dimension. So the one is like, it's like the bacon weirdness. She doesn't like the fact that bacon has kind of taken over as a thing of desire, right, on many fronts. And then she gets into the health thing and then some other things. But I'm curious, you know, she writes, she admits that she's a vegetarian and then goes on to kind of express concern that all these people are going to regret their bacon intake, that it'll be the equivalent of a tramp stamp. Although I don't know how that is. It's not like you're marked for life by the bacon you consume when you're young.

But like, I don't want to rag on Alicia. I'm sure she's a great person and I do like her question. But when you hear a question like this, pretend it's not about bacon, pretend it's a comment on, you know, some new technology, like a driverless car, or pretend it's about something else that people consume, maybe, you know, marijuana versus alcohol, like we did this episode on recently, where do you try to read into the person's position and their biases and their priors that they're coming from? And if you want to have a conversation with them and try to persuade them towards something, which is something we've tried to work on these last couple years, how to persuade people who don't want to be persuaded, where do you kind of look for an in in something like this? You know, it's interesting because what Alicia has done in this question is told a really entertaining story, which almost none of our questions that we answer are entertaining

stories. They're always usually to the point or maybe they wander around, but they're not so interesting. But I think Alicia actually has a real gift to the storyteller, don't you? Because she takes us on this ride where you start thinking that maybe she's kind of a friend of Bacon. And in the end, she brings you in, she relaxes you, and then she turns it into the Bacon being the enemy of all mankind. So I think with someone like Alicia and Bacon, I think there would be no point in trying to persuade her. I think this is, all I would try to do with Alicia is have some fun and poke a little fun at her and tell her

how much I love bacon and try to bribe her and see how much it would cost to get her to eat a piece of bacon herself. And from that, maybe have an interesting discussion about why she's a vegetarian. But I don't know. You and I know that in general, trying to persuade people who don't want to be persuaded is a big mistake. And I think we even write in the book that a lot of times when you have this urge to try to persuade people of things, that the best thing to do is just to take a deep breath and say, why do I need to persuade them? What's my real reason for wanting to persuade them? So I think we should let Alicia lead her...

Bacon-hating life. Bacon-victimized, but otherwise happy life. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we take some more listener questions. I like the way he's thinking. What do you think? And Steve Levitt's worst nightmare. There's something about book tours which undo me. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Hey, Levitt, here's a question from Adil Kamani, who is writing, it's kind of a long question. I won't read a big chunk of it, but he's interested in the idea of prestige and the price of prestige on a number of different fronts,

including the fact that he went to a college that he kind of regrets wasn't a little bit more prestigious. And he's curious to see how that's going to work out. But then he has an idea for us. He basically is giving us an idea to think about. And he says this, what if you guys had a section on your website to get hold of you and had perhaps three levels of priority? I'm sure you both field loads of questions on Freakonomics Radio and often skip over some. So with three levels of priority, you can institute a cost. VIP questions can be guaranteed to be answered on air unless extremely inappropriate, but also carry a $10 charge to submit. A second tier of questions that may get answered can cost $5. And lastly, you can have the good old free model that received the least of your attention. I know this will turn some people away from the podcast, I would add,

if not all, and a desire to ask questions. But ultimately, you guys keep it interesting enough and provide great answers. I would challenge that as well. So I think that with the right pricing scheme, you'll win out. Levitt, what do you, I have my thoughts on this one. What's this guy's name? Adeel. A-D-I-L. Adeel. Okay, so the first thing I would say to Adeel is he, like many other people in this world, needs a quick lesson in pricing.

So I think the idea of offering this tiered set of services is really smart. And it is very much the way as we move into a society where there's a lot of information and there's an ability to personalize what consumers get, that it is absolutely the way that society is going. Now, in our particular case, I think there are two problems with the plan. First of all, the prices we would want to charge to make it worth our while to distinguish between questions. So to us, the value of having a good question and making the readers and entertaining the readers and teaching the readers is a thousand times greater than the amount of money that any reasonable person would ask us to read their question on the air. So we actually have a conflict here in that putting out a good show is much more important to us than getting 10 bucks in a deal's case or, you know,

a thousand dollars or $5,000, whatever the number might really be if we wanted to have this kind of deal. But I like the way he's thinking. What do you think? Yeah, so I agree. I like the way he's thinking in that tiered pricing makes a lot of sense. And I think we're actually going to have an episode coming soon on price discrimination and the many versions thereof, which I think will be really interesting. I think, though, that the conflict is broader than that,

which is not only is the pricing wrong in this case, but I think that having any VIP pricing access in a format like this and a radio show that we put out would really end up being net negative because it is too exclusionary. Because, you know, here's what it boils down to. It's a form of payola in this case. So I can see where there are some services or industries where this works perfectly, but I feel like what we're delivering is not concrete enough or maybe valuable enough to charge anything for. And then if you start to, then it would diminish the whole feel of the thing. That would be my fear. I wouldn't want to listen to any show

that would have hosts who would do something like that on their show. Yeah, I mean, you make a good point that we talk about changing the frame that any interaction between humans are defined by the relationship that they have. And our podcast is defined by a relationship in which we give it away.

And we don't really do this for money. I'm not sure why we do it, but I don't think it's for money. I mean, it can't be for money. And so to then change the frame that this is about money. So a more extreme example would be, well, what if we did podcasts, but you only got to hear the first six minutes for free and the last minute of the punchline, you had to pay $3. Right. Or maybe a slightly less punitive version, like you put out a free version and then a premium version,

which obviously that happens in a lot of industries. We could put out a 20-minute version every week that's free and a 45-minute version that costs money. Although I would argue that maybe I would pay more for the shorter version if it was better than the longer version. Yeah, and I think this is a good case where, honestly, I don't know why we do these podcasts, but it's definitely not for money. I think I know why we do them. We do them because I want to do them, and then you're nice enough to do it along with me.

Yeah, and I think so. I think for us, I mean, I think that's really true. I think given that you just do this because you'd like millions of people to hear your ideas, the concept of polluting that with a monetary motive, I think, is bad. That's why I was so completely against the fund drive. I thought that was such a terrible idea. A horrible idea. But anyway, you run the show.

Well, that was a—but we also have a partner here, which is a public radio station, and that's the way they raise money for the production. And honestly, it worked. And you were very wrong, by the way, Levitt. Because people actually gave money? Yeah. But that makes me feel bad. We shouldn't have taken their money.

Why would we take their money? We're just doing this for fun. Yeah, but it costs money to do it. Oh, that's true. But still, I think it's horrible. Hey, Levitt, here's a question from Meredith Summers. Hello. I wonder if it would be at all possible to quantify in financial terms Stephen Levitt's contribution to the University of Chicago. For example, does his fame bring in more students who hope to work with him and learn from him? And is this contribution commensurate with his salary?

Thank you for your time, Meredith. I love that she assumes that your financial contribution is positive, first of all. I like people like Meredith. That's nice. I like the way she thinks. I mean, that's actually a really interesting question, a hard question, a good question. I will say that I get paid quite nicely by the University of Chicago, and anytime I want anything, they give it to me. And so the relationship that I have with the University of Chicago is in some ways almost not really defined as a financial relationship. It's kind of like a symbiotic thing in which they're nice enough to let me be here and do whatever I want. And well, let me give you an example of the craziest thing. At the university, so I happen to be on the intellectual property committee of the university,

which is not something that anyone wants to do, but it's something that occasionally you get tapped on to do if you're at the university. If you have an invention at the university, while employed at the university, even if it doesn't have that much to do with your job, the university owns the patent. And they share relatively generously with you the rewards, but the intellectual property belongs to the university. So I'm sitting on this committee and I'm thinking about Freakonomics and I suddenly had this feeling, why doesn't the university own the intellectual property to Freakonomics? Just because it's a book and not an invention, and some by historical

accident, it turns out that if you write a book at a university, you own it. But if you do any other intellectual property, you don't own it. It reminded me a lot of the podcast about alcohol versus marijuana, because it seems to me completely path dependent that the university owns the intellectual property to things that you create unless they're in the form of a book. And I remember sitting in that meeting saying, God, am I glad I write books instead of doing inventions because it would be a disaster. It reminds you of alcohol versus marijuana in that if you were starting over from scratch, there's no way these two would be so different. Yes.

Yeah. That you wonder why the two like things are treated so differently. And it really, I think, it had to be by chance. It couldn't be that someone really sat down and thought about it and said, we really want books to belong to academics, but everything other than books belongs to the university. Right. So we argue regularly that there are so many accidents of history that are kind of later interpreted to be more logical than they really are. But in this case, maybe it could argue that, you know, 100 years ago or 80 years ago, when a university professor was writing a book, most books in the academic sphere weren't meant to be popular books, weren't going to be popular books. And therefore, they were great promotion for the stature and the status of the university and the professor, and therefore served it well, whereas a patent is almost necessarily meant to be a commercial exploitation.

So to that, I would say you can argue it, but from the university's perspective, you would still say if you just happen to have Charles Darwin at your university, and he happens to write The Origin of Species and sell a zillion copies, why wouldn't the university try to capitalize on it? It's very strange to me. It's true that most of what academics do has no value, but that doesn't, to me, justify the idea that on a rare occasion where you do something with value, you don't try to profit from it. So, Levitt, you have any big plans for next week? I think I'm going to be hanging out with one of my favorite authors, Stephen Dubner, doing a book tour. So Think Like a Freak comes out on May 12th. And Levitt, talk to me about your frame of mind of those days,

let's say the 10 or 14 days that begin from May 12th and how excited you are about being on book tour and talking endlessly about this thing. I don't know how I hate book tours. When you told me that we were going to do a 12-day book tour, I said, no, you must be confused. That can't be right. And you said, yeah, it's in our contract. And I said to myself, my God, I never read contracts because I signed up to write this book? I never would have agreed to the 12-day book tour. Because, you know, I don't know why, but there's something about book tours which undo me. I just become dark.

Suicidal. Something about traveling around and being the center of attention. You know how I hate to be the center of attention? You say you do. I hate it. I like to be in the shadows. I like to be minding my own business and to have to be on and to smile and to pretend like I like people for that long is so taxing on me. So let me ask you a correlation causality question here. You say it's all that

stuff that makes you miserable. You sure it's not just the fact that you have to be with me for 12 straight days? Well, that's bad, too. But I think it's, yeah, that's probably it. No, you're right. That's probably it. It's probably being with you. You think if you could go do it on your own, you didn't have Dubner to cloud your mood, and you could just go do 12 days across the U.S. and the U.K., that you'd be happy as a clam?

No, actually, no doubt that would be worse. Because one of the great things that we've worked out, because you love people and I love data, so it works out great because when we're at these book signings that we do, I don't know if any of you have been to them, but what you'll see is that Dubner carries on these incredibly witty, fun conversations with person after person after person. And all I have to do is smile and sign the book. And it works out great. I love that. So if you want to come visit us at one of these signings, check out our schedule at Freakonomics.com slash events.

You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We will be in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and are the three hardest words in the English language? I love you. You were right. Or how about this? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. Why learning to say I don't know is one of the best things you can do. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalski, Greta Cohn, Beret Lam, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon, with engineering help from Jim Briggs. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com,

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