Freakonomics Radio - That’s a Great Question! (Ep. 192 Rebroadcast)

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

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.  

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, springs eternal. And if there's anything I have in abundance, it's work. Hope, they say, 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 radio at Freakonomics.com. 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 tick going around. Well, you know, that's another good question.

That's a really good question. Good question. Great question. Great question. Good question. So those are good questions. Good way to sort it out. And you know who has this tick really bad?

You know, that's a great question. Yeah, Steve Levitt. You know who Steve Levitt is, don't you? So that's a great question. 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? That's a good question. 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? Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, it is true that people like their cows to have gotten to walk around a lot and eat fresh grass.

So, Levitt, do you have any recollection of saying that same phrase about 150 times? Is it something you know you're doing? Um, that's a good question. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen 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&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. My name is Erica Okrent. I'm a linguist. Okrent knows several languages. 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. For the purpose of this discussion, we're sticking to English? And the phrase we're discussing today, that's a great question.

I started looking into it. Has it really been on the rise? Okay, so how do you figure this out? 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. But Okrent was able to find a couple big collections of spoken language data. One of them is the British National Corpus. That's a 100 million word database, which includes transcripts of everyday conversation, as well as government meetings, media interviews, and so on. And I did a search on the phrase there, and it only showed up 35 times in 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 a thousand 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. 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? Well, that's a good question. Does this bump hold up, do you think?

That's a good question. 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. Why has that not been enough to get him off death row in Texas? This is a really good question. Okay, and where does Erica Okren think this habit has come from?

In looking around for it, I found that it's actually an explicit part of media and PR training. I think it's still on the rise. 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 that some people say that's a great question to serve as what's called a bridge. The bridge is what happens when the person interviewing you or asking you questions wants to go down one conversational road.

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. You don't know anything about what lies in 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. 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. Yeah, that's a really good question. Is the most elementary bridge possible? Now, when Bill McGowan says it's elementary, he means really elementary. 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, that'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. It was absurd because it becomes such a habit that it lost its meaning. Nearly all of us have some kind of linguistic tick, 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. He has two words he uses that accomplish the same thing. One of them is look. Well, look, you know, I think the nature of being president is that you're always look. And the look means he's trying to convey it as let me be frank with you. Or the other word he uses is... Listen, as I think some of you saw when I was out...

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. But look and listen are not the only bridges used by President Obama. Okay, there's a great question. And, you know, I was raised by... So what exactly is saying that's a great question

meant to accomplish? 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. 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 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. In other words, as Erica Okrent sees things, it's linguistic BS. 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.

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. But not everyone has soured on the phrase. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, Steve Levitt reveals another purpose it serves. 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. 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. 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 plans and hiring ratios? Great, let's keep going. Eventually, Kessler writes, the stupid questions dry up 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. 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

you know 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 the acknowledgement that someone who's sort of in the background is actually doing something that's cool or interesting or challenging. 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. Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, that's a great question. So, yeah, 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. And I know where I caught it. I caught it from Steve Levitt. Maybe I invented it. Maybe I'm the inventor of it. That's a great question.

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. 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. Something to the effect of like, I wish I'd thought of that while doing my research.

Because, you 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. 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. All right. Well, 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 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? Yeah, all the time. All right. So, here's what you say. You ready? You might want to write it down you say rebus acasafram let me hear you say that say it one more time rebus acasafram rebus acasafram like more like one word rebus acasafram rebus acasafram 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 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 acasafram, the human ear will interpret that in one of a hundred different ways and they will almost certainly think that you actually said something real when you didn't. So-

That's great. I love that. You're welcome. I love that. Rebus acasafram. 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. That's people I mostly admire, available on any podcast app. Meanwhile, coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio. Well, that's what happens when you take an economist and lock them in front of CNN for three months, make it more and more angry. Is the news making you angry?

Why? Is it more negative than it needs to be? That'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. Thank you. Zach Lipinski, Mary Duke, Ryan Kelly, Brent Katz, Emma Terrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmine Klinger, Eleanor Osborne, and Jacob Clemente. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers. Once again, thanks for listening.

I'm tired today. I might not be so good. 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. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.